The Man-Kzin Wars 04

by Larry Niven

  All this while Trainer-of-Slaves was studying his female as an evolutionary curiosity. In a bisexual animal, the rational female was clearly an unwanted trait for domestication. If kzinti were to husband properly obedient human slaves and the Nora-beast was not properly obedient child-animal care would have to be divorced from male-child teaching. With second, third, and fourth, etc., voices from the harem subverting the patriarch's word, a household would disintegrate into chaos. Monkey society must be shifting around like the surface of a quake-world!

  He explained all this to Nora, but she was just as stubborn as Grraf-Hromfi's sons while she sat under her canopy, arguing back with inappropriate aggressiveness for a female. She didn't know how to listen. It was proof that females couldn't use the gift of language even when it was given to them.

  In idle moments, when the analysis of the hyperdrive motor had exhausted him, he toyed with hypothetical ways of using ch’rowl-some engineering to cure the man-females of male language skills. The daydreams went nowhere because such a neat answer probably wasn't practical.

  The kzin solution, which was genetic, wouldn't work.

  During Heroic reproduction the male egg combined with the female egg to form a doubled nucleus. The kzincode-groups, not unlike human chromosomes, were then distributed, leaving the super-eye to divide into two fertile male and female eggs which then migrated to the kzinretti pouch in pairs, a litter always containing an even number of kits, half kzintosh, half kzinrett.

  Reproduction wasn't all that dissimilar among monkeys but there were unfortunate differences. The nuclei of kzincells were more complicated than those of mancells, containing three distinct kinds of protein coding, sexual, major-group, and lumpy-constellation.

  The kzincode-strands that determined kzinsex were enormous, four times as large as any strand in the major kzincode-group, and several octals larger than any member of the lumpy kzincode-constellation. In male cells the kzintosh-strand appeared twice, while in female cells a dominant kzintosh-strand was lord over the single kzinrett-strand, the latter acting to edit physical size and repress language in the female who carried it.

  It would be difficult to genetically engineer male sex dominance in the man-beasts because with these animals it was the female who carried the twinned sex chromosome! A perverse reversal of the normal situation. Given their genetic makeup one might well wonder how male monkeys, balding and hemophiliac, came to be intelligent! Worse, the male and female sex-chromosomes of the man-beast were normal-sized, the male chromosome runtish, even, and unlike the kzintosh-strand or the kzinrett-strand, were not major canters of developmental switching.

  In any event, Trainer-of-Slaves wasn't in a hurry to destroy the Nora-beast's intelligence. As a younger, more reckless researcher his haste had ruined many promising experiments. Think before you leap.

  Intelligence had many facets, and it was disastrous to confuse its parts, to destroy one thing when you thought you were destroying another. It was better to be patient, to alter only small pieces of her mind at a time and then carefully observe the incremental change as a guidepost to the next change.

  Several months into their journey, the Lieutenant actually did try to destroy the ship. She used furniture parts to escape. She assembled a makeshift gas mask to keep herself conscious during the breakout, and she headed straight for the ship's vital parts through an air conditioner she'd learned about from the Jotok at the time of the mutiny. She had memorized the ship too well!

  He found her unconscious. She had been stopped by a whimsical trap he had set up more as a paranoid afterthought than as a serious line of defense. He had been reading too much Chuut-Riit who believed in covering low-probability events.

  The Nora-beast insisted on wearing clothes, to her downfall. He had tried to argue her out of it, to reach her sensibilities by creating virtual images for her eyes of elephants in sombreros and boleros, of newts in weskits, of giraffes in middies, of yaks in yoke skirts, but she had only laughed until her curls shook and told him that she had been brought up on books in which animals wore clothes. Obscene! Imagine having to unbutton a vatach's vest before devouring him!

  When Trainer lost the argument he had simply booby-trapped her trousers to release a nerve poison into her skin if she ever came too close to electromagnetic triggers in certain vital installations.

  Lying beside her was a lethal firebomb. Where had she obtained the oxidizer? From the air! Trainer-of-Slaves growled in disgust at his oversight. “What would a monkey do with a harem of these creatures" How did the males survive?

  That incident decided Trainer. Her memories had to go. She was already clamped to the operating table when she recovered consciousness.

  "We're still here. I goofed," she said sadly, near tears.

  If she'd been kzin, she would have earned a partial name as a break-out artist. "Forget it," he growled. "The Alabama was designed not to sink."

  "Are the kids all right?" Now she was crying. The three cage- and brain-damaged orphans were her responsibility. She didn't know whether she was a mother or a UNSN Lieutenant.

  "Long-Reach is in their teaching them how to play cards.

  "Louie won't be able to learn. You hurt him. He can't concentrate."

  Trainer-of-Slaves was unmoved. He had grown up in a society with a high kit mortality rate. The younglings died routinely by violence and neglect. There were always more where they came from. Suffering was the way to Heroism.

  "You're going Al hurt me now, too, aren't you? You're going to carve me up? Make a drooling idiot out of me?"

  She was afraid. He had an unnatural compassion in his liver for that combination, fear and bravery. "I'm going to sew a tail on your backside," he growl-hissed. It was his way of trying to crack a joke.

  She came out of the operation with artificial gland implants in her brain. She didn't feel any different. Her mind was clear. She was still driven to destroy the Shark. She still hated kzin.

  Trainer-of-Slaves had been spending his spare time away from the Shark completing his mathematical model of the human brain. It wasn't all that difficult. The data-link did most of the work. All he had to do was enter the special human conditions (taken from the autodoc and his experiments) into the generalized model that kzin physiologists had developed cons ago to cover diverse organic brains Jotok, Kzin, kdatlyno, Chunquen, etc. They were all different and they were all the same.

  Memory erasure was a delicate matter.

  Memories were all interrelated like a giant e-dimensional crossword puzzle. No memory could be erased without snipping out pieces of a myriad of other memories. And the erased memory could always be reconstructed by "filling in" the empty puzzle blanks. The reconstruction went on automatically by the mere act of using the remaining memories. The missing pieces were "interpolated" during recall. If the erasure had been caused by wetware destruction, the "interpolated" information was simply stored elsewhere.

  Organic brains, having evolved over hundreds of millions of years of deadly struggle, were systems designed to military specs. They could take great damage with minimal degradation of performance. No single location vital for system operation. And efficient redundancy insured that even heavy losses of data were recoverable.

  That meant that Trainer couldn't erase the whole of the Nora-beast's memory at once without killing her. What he could do was set up a steady degradation of memory that didn't overwhelm the general homeostatic balance. He could alternately shrink and accelerate the dendritic root growth of her neurons, disconnect and randomly reconnect. He could arbitrarily change the strength of the synaptic coefficients. He could switch on or off the machinery that converted short-term memory into long term memory.

  He could tuna on or off specific neural receptor sites in a way that unbalanced her brain so that it had to compensate with rapid neural learning. He could chemically accelerate learning by up to a factor of twenty, a dangerous game which if continued caused a kind of self-reference that left the mind fixated upon one event. Ra
pid learning overwrote old memories faster than they could be reconstituted.

  The brain normally learned in spurts. Neural disequilibrium induced by failure turned learning on until a new equilibrium state was reached. Success turned learning off. Constant learning degraded old memories without ever giving them time to reintegrate into a new equilibrium state.

  The Wunderland autodoc had taught Trainer-of-Slaves another neat trick. Using a carrier pseudo-virus, he could induce a neuron to suicide by budding. The bud killed its parent upon detaching but the bud then either reproduced itself (under one kind of stimulus) or began to sprout an axion (under a second stimulus). If the neural attachment sites were active, the axion would sprout dendrites and hardwire itself into the brain. That was another way of nondestructively degrading old memories.

  The fur-growing gland he had implanted was only a whim.

  He was not yet ready to tackle the disassembly and rewiring of her language processor. One leap at a time.

  When the Nora-female recuperated he had an ice cream party for her in her rebuilt palazzo. Probably it was still not "monkey-proof' but it was the best he could do. The major improvement was a removable barricade across the nursery, so that she could get some peace from the little monsters if she wanted it. Louie was indeed impulsively destructive. The girls were all right. They fought each other like two kzinti in a tournament ring, and each was jealous of the attention that the Nora-beast gave the other. Brunhilde would die in a few years of too many brain cells.

  Long-Reach played with the children while Trainer-of-Slaves was lounging on the giant pillow eating his liver-and-kidney ice cream. He spoke to Nora, unable to keep his eyes off her face.

  "Hrr-r. You are very precious to me. I want you alive. But the hyperdrive motor is even more precious. It is precious to the Patriarchy. If you try to escape again, I will kill you."

  "If I don't kill you first." She was picking out the purple berries and eating them before tasting her ice cream. She had dimples. It was the first time he noticed.

  He grinned, trying hard to imitate a human smile by forcing a curl to his lips. "Forget you ever said that."

  When they reached R'hshssira Nora's fur was coming in nicely. She wore a lustrous pelt that had changed her from an ugly pink "tail" into a stunningly handsome animal. She could still argue fluently in English, after a fashion, between the pauses, and he hadn't yet found a way to impregnate her with twins.

  CHAPTER 26

  (2423 A.D.)

  Short-Son of Chirr-Nig, alias Eater-of-Grass, alias Trainer-of-Slaves, was home and excited. Why did he love that hot stove, R'hshssira? What was Hssin to him? Why was he looking forward to wandering through the old Jotok Run and gossiping with Jotok-Tender?

  He sat in the Command Center trying to read the instruments long before they got there. He was babysitting Louis for his Nora-female because the boy's hostility was running her ragged and she needed a rest.

  "Grrough! Stay away from that!" he commanded in slave patois. He whacked the boy, not too hard, and returned to his seat. "Come over here. I'll have something to show you soon."

  He was hoping to interest Louis in the stars. Younglings brought out the father in a kzin, no matter how badly they behaved, and this one was his only male.

  The electromagnetic silence disturbed Trainer. Had his instrument gone dead?

  Louis was already back into mischief, glancing warily at the kzin to see if he dared do what he really wanted to do. He decided that he could. The kzin was busy.

  When the Bitch had maneuvered closer into the R'hshssira system, the electronic telescope confirmed the awful truth. Trainer-of-Slaves let out a wretched scream of anguish. Destruction. The man-ghouls had been here first! They had come and gone. There wasn't a glimmer of any spacefaring. He howled and clawed the walls!

  Louis dived under the astrogator's desk, terrified, leaving the fragment of plastic wall-stripping half stuffed into the computer slot.

  The wrathful kzin saw only a monkey trying to destroy his machine. A claw scooped the screaming child out from under the desk, ripping jaws beheading him to silence the shriek. Angrily Trainer shook the child apart, the bloodlust driving him to devour an arm. But he wasn't hungry. He dropped the corpse and beat his breast.

  The Fanged God had forsaken them without warning! Hssin would have had no news from Ka'ashi he reverted to the kzin name for Wunderland, unable to speak or think the human words. He howled! Death would have come from the heavens with superluminal surprise! His family wouldn't have had a chance. His mother! He tore his mane with bloody claws, bellowing. Hamarr the beautiful, his beloved comforter, his youth, his earliest friend! Dead! He stormed around the Control Center, smashing his Ka'ashi relics, things he had collected from that planet with love. Hamarr would have been fascinated by the porcelain, shattered now against the bulkhead.

  The rage of a kzin knows no bounds. But it subsides, sometimes into anguished mewling. He went to his oldest friends Long-Reach, Joker, Creepy, who stared, shocked by the blood on his vest.

  "Jotok-Tender is dead," he wailed, and they grieved with him for grief is the universal emotion that does not even need intelligence to wrack the soul. It comes from the liver.

  They helped him clean up the Control Center. A trip to the planet showed the details of the fury of the man-monsters. In some places the destruction was total. Where the power plant had been was only slag. But it doesn't take much to kill a space colony. Holes in the roofs.

  In the Jotok Run they found a desiccated Jotok, one of the wily ferals, clinging to his tree, the powder-dry leaves still green. They found giant Jotok-Tender in his kitchen with a dehydrated grin defiantly threatening a bowl of preserved vatach. His Jotok slave had died trying to help him, now convulsed into an emaciated heap.

  By torchlight they found Hamarr holding three tiny mummified kits; not her own, for she was too old to bear such a litter. He hunched beside his mother, taking her dried corpse in his arms, howling in his helmet. Her face still seemed to be whimpering silently, almost alive. Even the flesh-rotting bacteria had died. They found a roomful of suffocated kzinretti and kits, the room sealed against the poisonous Hssin atmosphere.

  Somewhere there must be survivors? Without rest he searched. A shelter, a special life support unit must have withstood the attack? A city that lives in a deadly atmosphere is not one single unit, it is a collection of self-contained cells built around the assumption of disaster. The death of cells is possible but some cells survive! Trainer searched, for days, with tireless Joker whose arms slept in rotation. Then the kzin had to sleep. All he found were signs of human infantry who had been there after the air attack in a thorough campaign of genocide.

  Exile. The crew of the Bitch was still in exile. They were still alone. Eleven Jotoki, one man-female, two orphans and a kzin.

  Back on the ship Nora asked him what had happened down there. She wanted to ask him what had become of Louis, but she didn't dare. She felt his rage. Poor maltreated Louis who hated everybody and would only obey and smile when you were looking straight into his eyes and being stern.

  Trainer-of-Slaves had stopped talking to Nora in English, had broken off all her access to her own culture. He spoke to her now in the corrupt form of the Hero's Tongue which he used to communicate with his Jotoki. "No one lives on Hssin," he spat-growled. "Your Navy has murdered them, kits and all."

  I shouldn’t have let him baby-sit Louis, she thought. She had had a theory that kzin males must have lots of paternal abilities inside somewhere, since their females were so mentally limited. I was trying to stimulate h* compassion. Compassion? That was my excuse.

  Actually, Nora had needed time off from Louis. Stupid. Louis could work even "love-everybody Nora" into a murderous rage. Imagine what he could do to a kzin who had just lost his family and nation?

  I think My Hero killed Lou*. "What happened to Louis?" she asked in the staccato patois because she wanted a reply.

  He wouldn't tell her. He turned away, as cont
rite as a kzin who has just eaten one of his own kits.

  But later, as he was making plans to move her down to Hssin, he did talk to her about Louis, however obliquely. He told a story about his own family. He was reminiscing about Hssin and recalled for Nora the day his father murdered a youngling half-brother on a point of discipline.

  Poor doomed Louis. I saved him and then I fed him back to the lion's den. She felt horrible that all she felt was relief. Maybe with her pelt of chimpanzee/ kzinrett fur she really was turning into a kzin.

  CHAPTER 27

  (2423-2435 A.D.)

  Selected excerpts from the journal of UNSN Lieutenant Nora Argamentine found in the ruins of a kzin border fortress.

  Day 1

  The Jotoki have cleaned out and refurbished an old kzinrett palazzo among the rubble left by the UNSN attack, admittedly in one of the least damaged areas of the city. It is, of course, only for the use of me and the two girls. His Royal Male Highness will take up appropriately masculine quarters, I think the domicile once used by the late lamented Grand Panjandrum himself. The Jotoki have sealed our unit and arranged for water and air. What about food? My Hero says this will be no problem but I expect pretty awful fare.

  I have found a hiding place for my journal! It seems the kzinretti keep secrets from their masters! The cache is cunningly clever, crudely constructed and invisible to curious eyes. I don't know what to make of its contents. Found trinkets, I would call them. What kind of a mind would think such things beautiful enough to cherish? Dare I make the analogy of a dog hiding precious bones from his master?

  I was touched as I stared at the trinkets. Is that what I am to become, a mind who values such simple things and knows somewhere in her soul that her master will not let her keep such junk?

  I am living a nightmare. I can't kill myself because of the girls, who are pathetic in their need for me, and I can't escape. My brain is dissolving slowly and I don't know enough about the human mind to know what parts of it he's going to leave me. I can't feel the difference from day to day except for the temporary rushes and blackouts he triggers with his gizmo but I can tell the difference from last year and I fear the future. For instance, I'm not sure I'm qualified anymore to lead a mutiny.