The Man-Kzin Wars 04

by Larry Niven

  Light took two and a half years to travel between the R'hshssira infrared dwarf and the Alpha Centauri binary. Kzin warships spent more than three years on the same journey.

  Chuut-Riits flagship, from the first scent of man-animal rumor, had given seventeen years to this single mission.

  The voyages were grueling. Without their hibernation coffins, touchy and argumentative warriors lacked tolerance for the time-gulf between stars. Trainer-of-Slaves would have none of that. He took ship duty for himself. All his life he had been bound to an essentially uninhabitable rock of a rapidly dying star. How could he not stay awake to relish his adventure?

  To prepare himself for Wunderland, he devoured the written sagas of Kzin. After all, his race had been born on a planet. Roaming a planet with breathable winds was a kzin's natural maskless state. Wasn't it truth that Wunderland was desirable because it was so Kzinlike?

  He followed the patricidal tragedy of Warlord Chmeee at the Pillars, almost squeezing the wetness out of his fur after the Storm at the Pillars. When the Hero blinded himself in remorse, he stopped reading he wanted to see Kzin-home, first, before he searched his soul.

  There were many sagas. He imagined himself with Riit-Pride in the Mooncatcher Mountains. He felt the drifting snow and vapor breath at warcamp in the Rungn Valley.

  And there were heroic poems. He listened to the boiling-fat sounds from the Poems of Eight Voyages as he recited them aloud, marveling at plains of waving grass, at a winter wind whose chill claws could ice a Patriarch's fur to the white of age.

  The sagas always spoke of the wind. The hunter's wind. Death's wind. The howling wind. Sweetgrass wind. The sea salt wind. The wind of many messages. Running with the wind. Wunderland had winds, too, he thought.

  Trainer-of-Slaves soon found the confined spaces of the warship intolerably full of smells that machine made winds never took away. Nor was a diet of meatbiscuit conducive to an even humor. He snarled. His temper was short. Ile had a broad comment to cover every ship deficiency.

  One warrior became irritated enough at this ire to grasp him by the vest, repeatedly shoving him against a bulkhead. "Let my ears hear more of your foul insults! I'm here to inspire your mouth!

  I demand more!" Finally Deck-Officer interfered and ordered them both to the Vault, where they were antifreezed and stacked with five hundred other suspended Heroes.

  All trips come to an end. The Vault was unloaded at the grimy Fortress Aarku orbiting Alpha Centauri B and when Trainer awoke he wondered why he had ever left Hssin. Aarku was only nine-hundred kilometers in diameter and it didn't even have amenities like a poisonous atmosphere. The Fortress itself had been started as a major installation a generation ago after the invasion, and then left unfinished. It was a "strategic position" thought up by an admiral who didn't have to live there.

  Alpha Centauri B would have been an outer planet if it had massed a thousand times less. Instead, it had grown into a healthy orange-tinged star, but with only three quarters of A's mass and a quarter of A's luminosity. The two stars orbited each other with a period of eighty years, coming as close as eighty-eight lightminutes and moving away from each other as far as 280 light-minutes.

  They had disrupted the formation of one another's outer planets, leaving nothing circling A but Wunderland and three dense inner worlds, plus the myriad rocks of the Inner Swarm. A ring of rubble surrounded B that included ten major asteroids. In between lay the bulk of the Serpent's Swarm buzzing in an intricate dance of resonance rings, pseudo-trojan orbits, high inclination orbits, and other exotic solutions to the problems posed by forced cohabitation with two major stars. There were vast gaps in the Swarm where no asteroid could survive without being pumped into another orbit.

  To view the Wunderland on which he had expected to serve, Trainer-of Slaves had to tune up the base's electronic telescope and blot out the blinding spear of Alpha Centauri A. Elis unit was stationed about as far away from its forests and grasslands and mountains as they could be sent, dashing his dreams of loping over the surface of a planet under an open sky.

  War was war. Each warrior had his own emplacement and his own fight. Trainer's fatalistic companions had a saying that even the rocks around Centauri B had their duties. His duties were to turn out slaves for the engine rooms of the Fourth Fleet. The conditions in the hastily prefabricated tunnels were appalling. He was stuck with his smelly Jotok cages, with his wire-mesh runs and masses of Jotok babies crawling all over each other without enough space and never enough wind to carry away the smell. Hssin seemed like paradise.

  A berth on the Fourth Fleet began to seem more and more desirable. He began to dream about Manhome. If he couldn't have Wunderland, then why not Earth? Earth, too, had winds and an open sky. The winds had fascinating names culled from Wunderland libraries. Nor’easter. The icy candela of the Andes Mountains. Trade winds. The dry Chinook wind that blew down the slopes of the Rocky Mountains after depositing all its moisture on the western slopes. Mediterranean sirocco. Whirlwind. Tempest.

  Trainer-of-Slaves began to take a personal interest in the fate of the Fourth Fleet. He was too busy with Jotoki, and too far away from the center, to face politics from a crouch. But he followed Chuut-Riits duels and celebrated every win. The locals were resisting the economic burden of preparing a new fleet. They made loud claims about the ferocity with which the Third Fleet would slash the Solar System, though that battle must already have been fought and won or lost.

  Chuut-Riit was adamant that the burden continue. It was, he told his Heroes, the Patriarch's policy that in any war a backup fleet was always in preparation to follow a battle-fleet, no matter how sure the battlefleet's victory. That was the only way a slow-motion interstellar crusade could be fought. Better to send expensive reinforcements to a victory won years ago than penniless faith-in-victory to a defeat. The kzin had a saying, "Don't count your fingers when your claws are sheathed."

  Alpha Centauri B was a favored space for Fourth Fleet maneuvers. As a result, Trainer-of-Slaves met many gung-ho captains who had driven their gravitic polarizers past normal specifications and needed urgent maintenance. They liked him because his crews did a good job. They also liked him because he served Jotok meat and that was a treat hard to come by.

  Ssis-Captain took a special liking to Trainer-of-Slaves. They shared an avid interest in Earth. It was he who introduced card-tricks to Trainer's slaves. The monkeys used a peculiar set of plastic symbols, five plus an octal of cards in a suit, with four suits. The Captain never ceased to flap his ears while Long-Reach did his five-handed shuffle, rotating half the deck clockwise and the other half counterclockwise while sitting on his mouth. He didn't like to play poker with Long-Reach, though, because the Jotok always took the pot.

  On one run in from the A star, Ssis-Captain brought in some Wunderland musical instruments and they put together a combo, a rather cacophonous effort. Creepy managed the twelve string banjo with three hands, Long-Reach played the drums and did harmony with all five lungs, while Joker handled the cymbals and xylophone. Trainer-of-Slaves did his imitations of Heroic Poetry on the kazoo.

  "I've got to have you animals on the Blood of Heroes! Do you want to pledge honor to my ship? I'll pledge all of you! We've got to be playing together when we march under the Arc de Triomphe in Berlin!"

  "The Arc de Triomphe is in Moscow," corrected Trainer-of-Slaves righteously.

  "You must be wrong. The red monkeys not out of that war early. I distinctly remember that the Arc de Triomphe was built by French-beasts to honor the victory of their Kaiser at Berlin. The High French Conquest Commandant Hitler marched under it with his whole army when he defeated the Huns. I've seen the daguerreotype!"

  On another trip Ssis-Captain smuggled in a Kzinrett inside an old polarizer housing. She was a beauty with a luminous red sheen to her fur and streaks of tan in her nose, but she wasn't at all pleased with the ride and studied them both from sulky, undecided eyes.

  "Jriingh, meet your new mounter."


  "My hero," she purred.

  Trainer-of-Slaves was horrified. "You stole an illustrious one's wife? Or worse, a daughter?"

  Ssis-Captain's ears flapped while he rumbled in his throat. "He gave her to me. She's a little terror. She spits and hisses at his wives and fights with them. She kept chasing his favorite off into the woods of his estate where he couldn't find her. She boxes the heads of his daughters and tries to take his sons down under the bridge."

  "An ideal mother for great fighting Heroes!"

  "It didn't work that way. All her sons got killed as kits in rage-fights. Crazy, the lot of them. Her mate backhand-cuffed her often enough, without profit, but he's too soft-clawed to kill her. I reasoned that you and I could solve his problem."

  "Do you suppose the man-beastesses give their males as much trouble as ours?"

  "Worse! A manrret is smart enough to pick the lock on her door!"

  Jriingh stepped gracefully from the polarizer housing, haughtily exploring her new abode, sniffing warily. She was half the size of a male kzin and probably twice as agile. She snapped up a baby Jotok that had escaped from its wire run, and swallowed five arms in one bite and then peered into the smelly tank, pondering ways to catch more.

  "She's being boarded on the Blood of Heroes, of course."

  "Against regs. You'll have to keep her."

  "It's against regs to keep her here, too."

  Trainer-of-Slaves was beginning to feel angry.

  "Hr-r, yet you do have the space, a corner somewhere with a lock and key."

  "But I won't be able to keep her pheromones out of the air!"

  "You won't have to. That's the whole beauty of this sally."

  "I'm supposed to give this little hissing terror the run of the place?!

  "It's not a problem. She likes males. She just doesn't like females. Fix up a room. Give her some nice things. We'll run a beneath-the-grass pride to keep her happy. Let her keep your feet warm. We need a beneath-the-grass pride out here card-tricks, music war stories, ch'rowl. Do you think a Conservor will come here and give you a lecture on the One True Way of Honor and the nature of the Furry God?"

  Trainer-of-Slaves settled into himself giving way just a little. He was not used to such camaraderie and he liked it. Yes, he wanted to conquer Earth with this warrior and own a huge hunting preserve in the Amazon next to France with hundreds of pink, tailless slaves tending to his animals. Of course, Long-Reach would always be his top slave.

  For two years High Conquest Commander Chuut-Riit had been caught in the snare of a painful power struggle. Then the first news from Man-sun burst from the Tightbeams, 4.3 years after the fact: the Kzin had dealt a great surprise victory in the first skirmish. The Third Fleet was positioning itself for battle.

  Wunderland kzinti forgot all else. Even Chuut-Riit paused. Infighting died. The Radio-Operators became the Heroes of the Moment, drifting in space at the instruments of their huge antennae pointed at Mansun.

  The good news did not last.

  By the end of the month the extent of the disaster was evident. Trainer-of-Slaves was outraged at the man-beasts. Kzinti became morose. They grinned more often, thoughts of monkeys on their minds. And Chuut-Riits situation changed dramatically. There was no longer any question that he was Governor of Alpha Centauri. There was no longer any opposition to his design for the Fourth Fleet, or to his date of launching.

  Trainer put in for a transfer to the Blood cuff Heroes.

  CHAPTER 12

  (2402 A.D.)

  Ssis-Captain arrived at Fortress Aarku with a new uniform, slightly non-standard. The padded underarmor vest was a too-rich shade of mauve with sapphire blue trimmings. The buttons on his epaulets were Wunderland jade from mines in the Jotun Range. The eight-pointed captain's star radiated from a real diamond. Pagoda style three-quarter sleeves were of the satin one might find on a kzinretti bed. The accurate leather cuffs of the undershirt, setting for his chronometer/comp, were tooled from high quality kz'eerkt the tanned hides of Wunderland criminals, selected to be without blemish or lash mark.

  "Impressive," said Trainer-of-Slaves.

  "I am determined that you shall have your fleet rating!" Ssis was flicking the tip of his tail back and forth in agitation as he paraded to show off his tailoring.

  "Hr-r. Yet I have sworn enemies who would make it difficult."

  "Harrgh! I have proper papers here for you that will make it all easy, letters of introduction and recommendation." He began to purr. "And a pass to Wunderland! I don't dance around, I just leap right in. They have to give you to me. I need you."

  "Friend, I shall be satisfied with the trip to Wunderland."

  "Not after you've served as my gunner!" The elegant captain lifted his bushy head and with a great grin emitted a spitting-yowling imitation of the sounds of battle. "We're going to carve up some asteroids on the way in. Great sport."

  Trainer-of-Slaves decided that he could leave Long-Reach in charge of polarizer repairs, and took his chief slave on a tour of the shop. One giant field-generator was suspended in the light gravity of Aarku while two of the five-armed Jotoki slaves worked to replace its laminated planers.

  Long-Reach stood proudly on four wrists while pointing with his fifth arm. "This unit will be ready for testing in two days," said skinny(arm). "I am honored by your trust in me, brave master," interrupted short(arm), checking various screens by taking control of three eyes. "Alf will go well with the polarizer repairs. We are expecting another unit for overhaul at the end of the day. And my duties among the juveniles?"

  Trainer-of-Slaves trusted Long-Reach with all but one thing the Jotok transients. "Just keep the life support functional. Change the filters again. ' It would never do to have one of those curious five-armed, five brained fledglings fixate upon a mature Jotok as parent. "Third-Teacher-of-Slaves will be in charge. Your first duty is to the shop."

  "You will be traveling to Wunderland? The crew has checked over the engines of the Blood of Heroes from finger-tip to elbow. They hum. Do tell Ssis-Captain to stay within specs."

  The gravitic polarizer was the foundation stone of the Patriarchy and of warrior military superiority. In its stationary version it made artificial gravity possible, but its most useful application was as the reactionless space drive which allowed vehicles to accelerate in "free fall": one gravity for the lumbering freighters, sixty or seventy gravities for the faster military warships.

  These kzin craft bewildered the Wunderland defenders at the time of the 2367 A.D. conquest. They darted about with incredible velocity and acceleration changes, yet ejected no reaction mass, and didn't seem to-need refueling even after maneuvers that would have exhausted the tanks of a torchship. The kzin warships could be goaded and provoked and then harassed like a bull in Old Spain, they could be burned, but they couldn't be chased. They didn't seem to obey the laws of physics.

  For years after that terrible six months, war-impoverished professors from the München Scholarium gathered in the cafes along Karl-Jorge Avenue in Old München, writing equations and speculating with preposterous assumptions while they sipped their schnapps. Research equipment can be confiscated. Equations and speculation are free. When Alpha Centauri B was in the night sky, wan but brighter than any streetlight, each new theory about kzin technology was carried like an epidemic between the sidewalk cafes until second sunset when the nightlife of München died.

  Given that a reactionless drive did exist they eventually sketched out the beginning of an understanding that had a sound theoretical footing by the time Chuut-Riit arrived as governor. The human mind, unlike the kzin mind, is obsessed with resolving the contradictions between what it observes and what it thinks it should be seeing.

  Momentum did not appear to be conserved by the reactionless kzin ships, but the gravitic field equations upon which the polarizer was based invoked negative space curvature, a necessary element of any reactionless space drive. Normal intuitions about momentum fail in the presence of negative curvature momentum then ha
s a direction opposite velocity but the equations of momentum conservation still hold.

  Trainer-of-Slaves took up his gunner's berth on the Blood of Heroes. He was outfitted with mask-goggles. They imposed diagrams upon his visual field which supplied all that he might need to know while firing. During check-down he had time to make simulation runs with his goggles feeding him the dangers of a virtual world. It gave the liver a jolt to kill monkeyships even if they were only program-generated ghosts.

  The five spherical ships of the hunter-pack drifted into position. There was ear-bulb chatter as the captains readied themselves for the three light-hour sweep from Alpha Centauri B across to Alpha Centauri A, roughly the equivalent of a run from the distance of Uranus to Man-home. The Serpent's Swarm would give the sweep realism, though it contained hundreds of times the mass and debris of the Solar Belt.

  Because of this plethora of asteroids, the Kzin Training Command was able to designate as many target asteroids as it pleased without disrupting the economy of the Swarm. Fourth Fleet attack-training stressed destruction of the kind of asteroid defensive installations which the monkeys used extensively to protect the north and south approaches to Man-home.

  At maximum acceleration the Blood of Heroes could make the three-light-hour trip from B to A in less than two days at a turn-around velocity a tenth the speed of light, but this was not common practice because of the density of maker in the Centauri System which created field energy losses.

  The gravity polarizer of the kzin high-velocity drive contained a natural mechanism to protect the ship from impact by gas and micrometeoroids. The offending particle was violently accelerated as it entered the field while, at the same time, the ship reacted to the added mass by recoiling. In the exchange, field energy was re-converted to mass. The particle size was not critical unequal masses accelerate at the same rate within any gravitic field.

  Unfortunately, atoms impacting into a polarizer's field generated a weak electromagnetic interaction which drained field energy into radiation. Inside a planetary system this could have been a serious problem if high velocities had been desirable. Between the stars, where high velocities are desirable, kzin ships weren't able to travel much above eighty percent of light speed through normal densities of interstellar gas without bleeding to death from "blue shine."