by Larry Niven
The consequences of doing the job badly would be disastrous, and it had become plain to him that to be effective he would have to learn the slaves' patois "language." He had set out to do so.
All kzinti had a rudimentary ability to feel something of their prey's state of mind, should they care to exercise it. It had evolved, presumably, as an aid in hunting in caves, tall grass, or other places where, for prey, hiding was easy. However, because in a few cases it could be developed into the despised gift of the telepaths (and also because in some cases it was reported to have led to a contemptible empathy for members of various prey and slave races), normal kzinti were ashamed of it and disdained to use it. Trooper Number Eight, who knew he needed all the advantages he could acquire to survive, had not only used it, but had exerted himself, furtively, to develop it. In his dealings with slaves it had stood him in good stead. It had also made learning the language much easier.
Indeed it had been true that the slaves apparently realized that he was not like Sergeant or the other troops. He had never killed any of them. Once when a clumsy, white-haired slave had spilled food over him just before he had been due to go on parade, he had not punished it.
A few nights after that incident, Corporal and some of the other troopers who had drawn irksome duties had decided to work off their bad temper with monkey meat following a group hunt for a few slaves. Slaves, or at least trained ones, had some value of course, and they would have to provoke an incident, even an runaway attempt, but that would not be at all difficult. Trooper Number Eight had heard their talk. It would, he had thought then, be a waste of his action in deciding to let the white-haired slave live intact if it was included among the hunted. He had sought out the white-haired slave and quietly told it to make itself scarce for a while. He had suggested it and its mate clean and check the inside cabins of the officers' cars, a duty in which they would be out of sight.
A few days later, he and Trooper Number Seven had had the job of checking the slave camp for any forbidden technology or weapons. Much technology for heating and other power for the humans of Munchen had been reduced to steam, sometimes produced by heating water with wood-fired boilers. There were old heaps of ash from some of these about the camp (the ash itself being kept for eventual use in soap making and other surviving low-tech human industries), and to make sure there was nothing hidden in them the kzinti had kicked the larger of these heaps apart. The white-haired human had been there and warned him that one of these was in fact fresh and glowing red and white-hot beneath the surface. Trooper Number Eight had appreciated the warning (which somehow did not reach his companion) and had seen to it after that that the white-haired one received lighter duties.
Later again, in the wait for assignment to combat duty, this slave had nervously presented him with a monkey musical instrument. It was called a "triangle" and this described it well. It was a piece of metal in triangular shape which gave off a musical note when struck.
Trooper Number Eight did not know what a philharmonic orchestra was, or that this slave had once been a musician in the Munchen Philharmonic, but he had kept the triangle and the small mace with which it was struck. He had known it would annoy Sergeant, so had only struck it when he was alone. Striking the triangle and hearing and meditating upon its solitary note was better than thinking about either the past, about the Sire and mother and the home on another world that he knew he would never see again, or about the future.
Eventually a movement order had come. They were going south, they were told, to a rioting jungle where feral humans hid.
It turned out that it was not quite a jungle, but not far off one. They had been added to the garrison of a small post on the edge of a large area of hilly rainforest under a single officer.
Their new assignment—disappointingly unimportant, and without the compensations of servants or amenities and generally inglorious—had increased the ill-temper of the other kzinti, who had expectations of great battles and conquests. There were rumors that the planetary governor was holding back his best troops and weapons for his own purposes. A double-star system with its mineral-rich asteroid belt and what the humans called the Proxima System not far away could add up to a fertile hunting territory in which one of high nobility might nurture ambitions and plans. Earth and its rich belt, as well as other minable planets and the satellites of its gas giants, were but little more than four light-years away—a distance that fell very far short of daunting the heroic race. The governor might plan much.
All this talk had been exciting enough for the Patriarch's army and navy in general but had brought the sidelined kzinti of Trooper Number Eight's unit little prospect of glory. It seemed that the prizes would go to others. Further, the kzin had evolved on a cooler planet than Ka'ashi and this area was hotter even than the Munchen area or the forests and mountains to the north and east. There were none of the diversions of the cities, and though it had been described to them as a combat posting, the kzinti troopers soon saw their role there, rather than a posting to the areas of real fighting, as a plain indication that their superiors did not consider them a first-class unit, an impression which was strengthened by the tired-looking, unimpressive pawful of kzinti they reinforced.
Trooper Number Eight had discovered that his role as the unit's driver-of-slaves seemed to cling about him even though, on active service, there were no slaves to drive. Somehow all had agreed that he should carry on the duties which slaves under his command had carried out previously—he would be responsible for keeping the unit's quarters clean, though at least each trooper cleaned and maintained his own weapons and equipment. He also found that he had become Sergeant's personal servant for certain tasks.
They had learned that the feral humans in the area were actually few in number, and that the campaign on both sides was mainly a matter of small-scale ambushes. To give it a little excitement—some sauce to a tasteless dish—the kzinti tended to use wtsais where possible, rather than their modern weapons. The heat and the low quality of the enemy also gave them motives not to wear the heavy and constricting battle armor. The humans themselves seemed poorly armed with an assortment of projectile weapons and from the parsimonious way they used ammunition it appeared that they were not well supplied with it. Those humans they killed appeared ill fed and in poor health.
The human strategy was, it seemed, to infuriate the kzin garrison by pinprick attacks against patrols or to launch a few bombs and missiles at the kzin base and then disperse. This meant that the kzinti, who could not let the area be turned into a privileged sanctuary for the human resistance forces, had to commit more assets to pacifying the area than it would otherwise have warranted. The heavy vegetation cover and abundance of life-forms with heat signatures meant that satellite surveillance showed little of tactical use. Further, the feral humans in space made a point of destroying kzinti satellites whenever they could, or editing their transmissions so the pictures that they sent were false—they had even caused kzinti to attack their own positions at times.
Nuclear, chemical, biological, oscillation, or a number of other weapons in the kzin armory could have made short work of the forest and everything in it, but the higher command wished to keep the place as a future hunting territory. Whether or not the feral humans knew this, they had kept their activities several rungs below the threshold where such massive retaliation would be warranted and never assembled in large concentrations. So the campaigning consisted largely of lurking in ambush or patrolling, either stalking on foot or on a gravity sled, though the thick vegetation limited the use of the latter. Though kzinti loved hunting for its own sake, this particular hunt was accompanied by a great deal of frustration. Tempers had frayed. The only compensation the posting had offered for most of the kzinti had been that there was a large amount of game, but even so solitary expeditions far into the forest were forbidden.
Trooper Number Eight had been at first less unhappy than previously. Indeed he was probably the least unhappy kzin in the garrison. He h
ad no expectation or hope of achieving the only things which, given any wishes, he would have wished for: to return to his homeworld and family and to escape from Sergeant and the others. But campaigning, even such feeble and unheroic campaigning as this, did tend to create a sense of camaraderie of some kind, and when they were so few of them, death duels between kzinti rankers were plainly and strictly forbidden.
He had got away by himself occasionally, and sometimes, when alone, enjoyed striking the triangle. Further, there was a small collection of human books on the post, taken from a ruined human dwelling nearby—actually the remnants of one attempt to put together a military library and technology base in the first days of the kzin invasion—written by a human named Braddon and others. Sometimes in the long, eventless days, he had read them and tried to understand them, and that had also helped pass the time. He had taken the precaution of first getting Officer's permission to do this, explaining that it would make him a more effective slave master when they had slaves again. Officer had not cared one way or the other, but had agreed.
However, the climate and the exotic life-forms had not made his duties lighter—cleaning barracks and equipment had been never-ending. A constant problem had been the small, white, blue-eyed things which humans at Munchen had called "Beam's Beasts." Despite their harmless appearance they had poisonous fangs and secreted a powerful acid which dissolved not only the body tissues of their prey but a variety of other things. They bred in large numbers in the forest and were constantly invading the base, giving him a great deal of work. He had kept out of Sergeant's way as much as he could. Sergeant, as time went on without the chance of glory, grew increasingly ill-tempered and Corporal followed him. One day, there had been disaster.
Trooper Number Eight had been in charge of the unit's trophy-maintenance-and-cleaning engine. The ears, kzinti and human, which successful duelists and warriors carried in rings on their belts as trophies and signs of status, could be a problem. Though freeze-dried in small units developed for the purpose, they still had a tendency to get knocked around and eventually fall apart, as well as becoming ill-smelling, unless specially preserved in clear envelopes of strong material. Further, in this warmer environment it was discovered that there were species of fungi which had a liking for the ears, causing them to turn black and eventually crumble unless they were cleaned at intervals. Several of the other troopers had a few human ears, but only Sergeant and Corporal had kzinti ears as well, and kzinti ears were what really mattered.
Sergeant had given Trooper Number Eight his earring and told him to clean the ears and renew the protective envelopes. In his nervousness, Trooper Number Eight had spoilt one of the kzinti ears—the oldest and most precious—causing it to break up into a handful of membrane and cartilage.
Trooper Number Eight tried to persuade himself that Sergeant would not punish him in such a way as to make him physically useless. Nor, he thought, would Sergeant sully his trophy ring with ears as unworthy as his own. Nor, he thought, would he scar him, since scars could be taken as a badge of honorable combat. He was correct.
He was punished with the Hot Needle of Discipline. The kzinti had refined and specialized their instruments of torture over thousands of years, and this one had been developed specially for stupid or inept soldiery. He was allowed an eight of days to recover, a time period specified in the Patriarch's Regulations, not out of mercy, but because it had been found that a lesser period left the soldiers so punished still unfit for battle.
He was noticed by no one during this period, being regarded as unfit to be noticed. No one cared when, one night late at the end of this period of "invisibility," when he could once again walk, or at least shuffle, he left the post and climbed a winding game path to a small, solitary hill. He sat and played the triangle there in the night.
Far above there were moving lights in the sky, shifting and winking stars, a soundless battle fought on the edge of space.
He was still recovering, though considered fit for duty, when Officer called them together for a briefing.
A transport vessel carrying military equipment to one of the outpost garrisons in the Serpent Swarm Asteroids had been attacked by feral human spacecraft as it climbed through the upper fringes of Ka'ashi's atmosphere, Officer told them. Its gravity motors had been badly damaged. It had been able to make a soft landing in the forest not far away but could not take off again.
The pilot was defending it, but plainly its cargo would be a great prize for the local ferals. The Heroes of Sergeant's platoon were to secure the area and assist the pilot until a heavy-lift unit arrived to retrieve it.
With the favor of the Fanged God, Officer pointed out, this unfortunate incident could be made into a positive opportunity—the downed transport could serve as a trap to draw the local ferals to their doom under the teeth and claws of Sergeant's Heroes. Sergeant, Corporal, and their eight of troopers were being given a chance for a battle of significance. They would travel on foot, stalking, because of the nature of the terrain, and they would travel fast and light. Given the puny and contemptible nature of the enemy, the question of armor was not raised. Officer suggested in his briefing that the destruction of the feral human troop might be the key to transfers to more glorious assignments for all. He did not dwell on the consequences of failure and did not need to.
They checked their weapons and gear, were inspected by Sergeant and Officer himself, drew rations and additional ammunition, and set off.
There were dark, jungle-grown ravines and gullies where humans might wait with weapons. These they avoided. Kzinti have far better night vision than humans, even when it is not artificially enhanced, but even so they would be disadvantaged coming out of bright sunlight. They lay up in ambush for several hours during the earlier part of the first night, but heard and saw no humans. The forest creatures with sensitive smell also gave them a wide berth. After a few futile hours they pressed on.
By daybreak, they had covered much of the distance to the crash site. The pilot's radio messages were unsatisfactory. He thought he had glimpsed humans and his movement sensors had detected large life-forms. He wished to leave the transport and hunt on foot. Sergeant tersely forbade him to leave his post. As the sun rose they saw the downed transport, its metal body gleaming in the sun on the next hill.
Morning inspection brought an explosion of rage from Sergeant. While they had lain in ambush his earring had picked up a swarm of small parasites which were burrowing into the tried tissue of the trophies and hastening their destruction. Of course, this could not divert him from his responsibilities to secure the area. He dispersed his Heroes, ordering them to approach the transport with stealth from different directions and lie up in the closest possible cover to it. Then he gave Trooper Number Eight the earring and told him to clean it. He also pointed out the route Trooper Number Eight should take and the place where he should lurk until further orders.
Trooper Number Eight, when he reached his position on the edge of a small clearing, found it quiet. Several hours passed while he waited motionless as he had been trained, in the light that filtered reddish through the vegetation. A few small creatures became used to his unmoving presence and returned. When the sun was high in the sky and nothing had happened, he remembered Sergeant's earring and turned his attention to it.
Two small Beam's Beasts had crept upon it as it lay on the ground beside him. They had eaten most of the trophies.
For a moment he felt merely numb, his mind too stunned and dazed to take the horror in. He had lost Sergeant's trophies. He gave a cry of despair. A good soldier would, of course, have made no unnecessary noise. But Trooper Number Eight had found that, after the Hot Needle of Discipline, being a good soldier mattered even less to him than it had done before. Anyway, no one had said anything about the fact that Trooper Number Seven, who now had partially prosthetic feet, could no longer move in perfect silence. Panic-stricken notions chased one another through his head. To desert? To flee into the forest? He had forgotten he
was lying in ambush. He rose and paced distractedly about. To desert was futile, he knew. Elsewhere on this planet it might be remotely feasible, but here there was nowhere to go. He was a city-dweller and the son of a city-dweller from another world, and knew he would not survive. He did not even know the geography of the continent they were on.
Finally he sat on a fallen tree near the edge of the clearing. To distract his mind, he took the triangle and the mallet from his belt pouch and struck it, holding it close against the ear which he knew he would not possess for much longer. Again he struck it, letting the single, silvery note drift away. Some of the local creatures resumed making their own sounds. Again. His thoughts drifted away, following the notes.
A sudden shocking, tearing pain pierced him from behind. An indescribable sensation of bursting and breaking within him. He looked down to see something protruding from his chest, his blood spurting and pumping around it in orange and purple. Then he fell forward, throwing up his hands, with an involuntary, undignified and inarticulate cry.
All feeling was suddenly gone below the wound. His lower limbs and tail disobeyed his brain's command that they should propel him upward, and then its command to at least kick and slash. But he was still able to feel and move above it. He turned his head. A human was standing over him, holding a bloody metal spear. The human was raising the spear to stab him again. Yet he detected something more than rage and bloodlust there. Something to do with the fact he had been engrossed in the notes of the triangle? Trooper Number Eight did not want to be stabbed again, and he did not think he would be quick enough any longer to slash at the human.
He remembered a useful phrase from his reading. He moved his hands in a gesture, and added words in the slaves' patois: "No need. I am dying anyway."
