The Houses of the Kzinti

by Larry Niven

  A line of lifebubbles went by, shepherded by medics. Casualties, injuries beyond the capacities of outstation autodocs. Some of them were quite small; he looked in the transparent surface of one, and then away quickly, swallowing.

  Shut up, he told his mind. Collateral damage can't be helped. And there had been a trio of kzinti battle-wagons in dock too, huge tapering daggers with tau-cross bows and magnetic launchers like openwork gunbarrels; Slasher-class fighters clung to the flanks, swarms of metallic lice. Repair and installation crews swarmed around them; Tiamat's factories were pouring out warheads and sensor-effector systems.

  The mass of humanity jammed solid in front of the exits. Jonah waited like a floating particle of cork, watching the others passed through the scanners one by one. Last time, with Ingrid—forget that, he thought—there had been a cursory retina scan, and four goldskin cops floating like a daisy around each exit. Now they were doing blood samples as well, presumably for DNA analysis; besides the human police, he could see waldo-guns, floating ovoids with clusters of barrels and lenses and antennae. A kzin to control them, bulking even huger in fibroid armor and helmet.

  And all for little old me, he thought, kicking himself forward and letting the goldskin stick his hand into the tester. There was a sharp prickle on his thumb, and he waited for the verdict. Either the false ident holds, or it doesn't. The four police with stunners and riot-armor, the kzin in full infantry fig, six waldos with ten-megawatt lasers . . . If it came to a fight, the odds were not good. Since all I have is a charming smile and a rejiggered light-pen.

  "Pass through, pass through," the goldskin said, in a tone that combined nervousness and boredom.

  Jonah decided he couldn't blame her; the kzinti security apparatus must have gone winging paranoid-crazy when Chuut-Riit was assassinated, and then the killers escaped with human-police connivance. On second thought, these klongs all volunteered to work for the pussies. Bleep them.

  He passed through the mechanical airlock and into one of the main transverse corridors. It was ten meters by twenty, and sixty kilometers long; three sides were small businesses and shops, spinward fourth a slideway. The last time he had been here, a month ago, there had been murals on the walls of the concourse area. Prewar, faded and stained, but still gracious and marked with the springlike optimism of the settlement of the Alpha Centauri system. Outdoor scenes from Wunderland in its pristine condition, before the settlers had modified the ecology to suit the immigrants from Earth. Scenes of slowships, half-disassembled after their decades-long flight from the Solar system.

  The murals had been replaced by holograms. Atrocity holograms, of survivors and near-survivors of the UN raid. Mostly from dirtside, since with an atmosphere to transmit blast and shock effects you had a greater transition between dead and safe. Humans crushed, burned, flayed by glass-fragments, mutilated; heavy emphasis on children. There was a babble of voices with the holos, weeping and screaming and moaning with pain, and a strobing title: Sol-System Killers! Their liberation is death! And an idealized kzin standing in front of a group of cowering mothers and infants, raising a shield to ward off the attack of a repulsive flatlander-demon.

  Interesting, Jonah thought. Whoever had designed that had managed to play on about every prejudice a human resident of the Alpha Centauri system could have. It had to be a human psychist doing the selection; kzinti didn't understand Homo sapiens well enough. A display of killing power like this would make a kzin respectful. Human propagandists needed to whip their populations into a war-frenzy, and anger was a good tool. Make a kzin angry? You didn't need to make them angry. An enemy would try to make kzin angry, because that reduced their efficiency. Let this remind you that a collaborationist is not necessarily an incompetent. A traitor, a Murphy's-asshole inconvenience, but not necessarily an idiot. Nor even amoral; he supposed it was possible to convince yourself that you were serving the greater good by giving in. Smoothing over the inevitable, since it did look like the kzin were winning.

  A local newsscreen was broadcasting as well; this time a denial that kzinti ships were attacking refugee and rescue vessels. Odd. Wonder how that rumor got started; even kzin aren't that kill-crazy.

  Jonah shook himself out of the trance and flipped himself over. I've got to watch this tendency to depression, he thought sourly. Finagle, I ought to be bouncing for joy.

  Instead, he felt a gray lethargy. His feet drifted into contact with the edge of the slideway, and he began moving slowly forward; more rapidly as he edged toward the center. The air became more quiet. There was always a subliminal rumble near the ends of Tiamat's cylinder, powdered metals and chemicals pumping into the fabricators. Now he would have to contact the Nipponese underworlder who had smuggled them from Tiamat to Wunderland in the first place; what had been his name? Shigehero Hirose, that was it. An oyabun, whatever that meant. There was the data they had downloaded from Chuut-Riit's computers, priceless stuff. He would need a message-maser to send it to Catskinner; the ship had been modified with an interstellar-capacity sender. And—

  "Hello, Captain."

  Jonah turned his head, very slowly. A man had touched his elbow; there was another at his other side. Stocky, even by flatlander standards, with a considerable paunch. Coal-black with tightly curled wiry hair: pure Afroid, not uncommon in some ethnic enclaves on Wunderland but very rare on Earth, where gene-flow had been nearly random for going on four hundred years.

  General Buford Early, UN Space Navy; late ARM. Jonah gasped and sagged sideways, a gray before his eyes like high-G blackout. The flatlander slipped a hand under his arm and bore him up with thick-boned strength. Archaic, like the man; he was . . . at least two centuries old. Impossible to tell, these days. The only limiting factor was being born after medicine started progressing fast enough to compensate for advancing age. . . .

  "Take it easy," Early said.

  Eyes warred with mind. Early was here; Early was sitting in his office on Gibraltar base back in the Solar system.

  Jonah struggled for breath, then fell into the rhythm taught by the Zen adepts who had trained him for war. Calm flowed back. Much knowledge had fallen out of human culture in three hundred years of peace, before the kzinti came, but the monks had preserved a great deal. What UN bureaucrat would suspect an old man sitting quietly beneath a tree of dangerous technique?

  Jonah spoke to himself: Reality is change. Shock and fear result from imposing concepts on reality. Abandon concepts. Being is time, and time is Being. Birth and death is the life of the Buddha. Then: Thank you, roshi.

  The men at either elbow guided him to the slower edge-strip of the slideway and onto the sidewalk. Jonah looked "ahead," performed the mental trick that turned the cylinder into a hollow tower above his head, then back to horizontal. He freed his arms with a quiet flick and sank down on the chipped and stained poured-rock bench. That was notional in this gravity, but it gave you a place to hitch your feet.

  "Well?" he said, looking at the second man.

  This one was different. Younger, Jonah would say; eyes do not age or hold expression, but the small muscles around them do. Oriental eyes, more common than not, like Jonah's own. Both of them were in Swarm-Belter clothing, gaudy and somehow sleazy at the same time, with various mysterious pieces of equipment at their belts. Perfect cover, if you were pretending to be a modestly prosperous entrepreneur of the Serpent Swarm. The kzinti allowed a good deal of freedom to the Belters in this system; it was more efficient and required less supervision than running everything themselves. That would change as their numbers built up, of course.

  "Well?" he said again.

  Early grinned, showing strong and slightly yellowed teeth, and pulled a cheroot from a pocket. Actually less uncommon here than in the Solar system, Jonah thought, gagging slightly. Maybe Wunderlanders smoke because the kzinti don't like it.

  "You didn't seriously think that we'd let an opportunity like the Yamamoto raid go by and only put one arrow on the string, do you, Captain? By the way, this is my
associate, Watsuji Hajime." The man smiled and bowed. "A member of the team I brought in."

  "Another stasis field?" Jonah said.

  "We did have one ready," Early said. "We like to have a little extra tucked away."

  "Trust the ARM," Jonah said sourly.

  For a long time they had managed to make Solar humanity forget that there had even been such things as war or weapons or murder. That was looked back upon as a Golden Age, now, after two generations of war with the kzinti; privately, Matthieson thought of it as the Years of Stagnation. The ARM had not wanted to believe in the kzinti, not even when the crew of the Angel's Pencil had reported their own first near-fatal contact with the felinoids. And when the war started, the ARM had still dealt out its hoarded secrets with the grudging reluctance of a miser.

  "It's for the greater good," Early replied.

  "Sure." That you slowed down research and the kzinti hit us with technological superiority? For that matter, why had it taken a century and a half to develop regeneration techniques? And millions of petty criminals—jay walkers and the like—had been sliced, diced, and sent to the organ banks before then. Ancient history, he told himself. The Belters had always hated the ARM. . . .

  "Certainly for the greater good that you've got backup, now," Early continued. "We came in disguised as a slug aimed at a weapons fabrication asteroid. The impact was quite genuine . . . God's my witness—" he continued.

  He's old all right.

  "—the intelligence we've gathered and beamed back is already worth the entire cost of the Yamamoto. And you and Lieutenant Raines succeeded beyond our hopes."

  Meaning you had no hope we'd survive, Jonah added to himself. Early caught his eye and nodded with an ironic turn of his full lips. The younger man felt a slight chill; how good at reading body language would you get, with two centuries of practice? How human would you remain?

  "Speaking of which," the general continued, "where is Lieutenant Raines, Matthieson?"

  Jonah shrugged, looking away slightly and probing at his own feelings. "She . . . decided to stay. To come out later, actually, with Yarthkin-Schotmann and Montferrat-Palme. I've got all the data."

  Early's eyebrows rose. "Not entirely unexpected." His eyes narrowed again. "No personal animosities, here, I trust? We won't be heading out for some time"—if ever, went unspoken—"and we may need to work with them again."

  The young Sol-Belter looked out at the passing crowd on the slideway, at thousands swarming over the hand-nets in front of the shopfronts on the other three sides of the cylinder.

  "My ego's a little bruised," he said finally. "But . . . no."

  Early nodded. "Didn't have the leisure to become all that attached, I suppose," he said. "Good professional attitude."

  Jonah began to laugh softly, shoulders shaking. "Finagle, General, you are a long time from being a young man, aren't you? No offense."

  "None taken," the Intelligence officer said dryly.

  "Actually, we just weren't compatible." What was that phrase in the history tape? Miscegenation abyss? Birth cohort gap? No . . . "Generation gap," he said.

  "She was only a few years younger than you," Early said suspiciously.

  "Biologically, sir. But she was born before the War. During the Long Peace. Wunderland wasn't sewn nearly as tight as Earth, or even the Solar Belt . . . but they still didn't have a single deadly weapon in the whole system, saving hunting tools. I've been in the navy or training for it since I was six! We just didn't have anything in common except software, sex, and the mission." He shrugged again, and felt the lingering depression leave him. "It was like being involved with a younger version of my mother."

  Early shook his head, chuckling himself, a deep rich sound. "Temporal displacement. Doesn't need relativity, boy; wait till you're my age. And now," he continued, "we are going to have a little talk."

  "What've we been doing?"

  "Oh, not a debriefing. That first. But then . . ." He grinned brilliantly. "A . . . job interview, of sorts."

  * * *

  "Why should we trust you?" the man said. He was carefully nondescript in his worker's overalls and cloth cap; the roughened hands with dirt ground into the knuckles and half-moons of grease under the nails showed it was genuine. The accent was incongruously elegant, pure Wunderlander so pedantic it was almost Plattdeutsch, and the lined gray-stubbled face might have been anywhere between sixty and twice that, depending on how much medical care he could afford. "We've watched you growing fat on human scraps your masters threw you, ever since the War."

  "Don't trust me," Claude Montferrat-Palme said evenly. "Trust the guns I deliver. Trust this."

  He pushed a data chip across the table. "This is a record of the informants the Munchen Polezi has in the various underground organizations . . . with the Intelligence Branch appraisals of the reliability of each. I'd advise you to use it cautiously."

  The meeting place was a run-down working-class bar on the Donau's banks. Noise and smells filtered up through the planks from the taproom below, where dockers and fisherfolk spent what they had on cheap gin and pseudo-verguuz and someone played a very bad musicomp. This upper chamber was a dosshouse now, smelling of old sweat from the pallets on the floor, cheap tobacco, less namable things. From the faded murals it had probably been something else back before the War; he racked his memory . . . yes, a clubhouse. The Munchen Turnverein. Through a window the broad surface of the river glistened in the evening sun, and a barge went by silently with a man in a thick sweater and billed cap standing at the tiller smoking a pipe.

  For an instant Claude was painfully conscious of how beautiful this world was, and how much he would be losing when they caught him. Not that he was much afraid of death, and he had means to ensure there would be little pain. No, it was the thought of all that he would never do or see that was almost intolerable. The silence stretched as the man clicked the chip into a wrist-comp and scrolled. His graying blond eyebrows rose.

  "Very useful indeed, if it checks out. And if we don't use it cautiously . . ."

  Claude nodded. "If you don't, I'm very dead and no more use to you at all for catching the next set of traitors . . ."

  Cold blue eyes met his, infinitely weary and determined in a way that had nothing at all to do with hope.

  "Why?" the man said.

  "Would you believe I've spent forty-odd years infiltrating until I was in a position to do some good?"

  "No."

  Claude sighed. "Funny, I haven't been able to convince myself of that, either. Let's say that I've come to believe we can make some small difference in the outcome of the War."

  At that the man nodded, mouth twisting in a thin smile. "More believable, but not very comforting. We've been getting a good many recruits on those grounds since the UN raid. How many of them will stick with it, when the hope goes?" An unpleasant laugh. "Therefore it behooves us to see that they commit themselves with acts beyond forgiveness before their initial enthusiasm runs out."

  Not to mention the permanently useful, Claude thought. There had been a new wave of suicide bombings, mostly of kzinti wandering through human neighborhoods. The reprisals had been fairly ghastly but not indiscriminate . . . yet. He repressed an impulse to dabble at his forehead.

  "That data . . . not to mention those strakakers and antitank weapons and nightvision goggles . . . all constitute more than enough to qualify me as monkeymeat," he said. "The kzinti are much harder on their immediate servants, you know."

  "I weep for you," the other man said.

  Perhaps if I hadn't been so cursed efficient, Claude thought.

  "In fact," the Resistance fighter went on, "I'd break a personal rule and watch the video while they hunted you down. But you're too valuable to lose, if this"—he tapped his wrist—"is genuine. Don't move for a half hour."

  He left, and Claude lit a cigarette with hands that shook quietly.

  How long can I last? he wondered clinically as he stared out at the blue Donau. A month at least. Possi
bly six months to a year. I might even be able to spot it coming and go bush when they get on to me. A short life.

  "Still better than a long and comfortable death," he whispered.

  * * *

  "Well. So."

  The oyabun nodded and folded his hands.

  Jonah looked around. They were in the three-twelve shell of Tiamat, where spin gave an equivalent of .72-G weight. Expensive, even now when gravity polarizers were beginning to spread beyond kzinti and military-manufacturing use. Microgravity is marvelous for most industrial use. There are other things that need weight, bearing children to term is among them. This room was equally expensive. Most of the furnishings were wood: the low tables at which they all sat, knees crossed; the black-lacquered carved screens with rampant tigers as well, and he strongly suspected that those were even older than General Buford Early. A set of Japanese swords rested in a niche, long katana and the short "sword of apology," on their ebony stand.

  Sandalwood incense was burning somewhere, and the floor was covered in neat mats of plaited straw. Against all this the plain good clothes of the man who called himself Shigehero Hirose were something of a shock. The thin ancient porcelain of his sake cup gleamed as he set it down on the table, and spoke to the Oriental who had come with the general. Jonah kept his face elaborately blank; it was unlikely that either of them suspected his knowledge of Japanese . . . enough to understand most of a conversation, if not to speak it. Nippon's tongue had never been as popular as her goods, being too difficult for outsiders to learn easily.