Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - X

by Hal Colebatch

  “We have made some progress in understanding the kzin language,” he said. “It cost my friends in the government nothing to send me the reports of its work in that direction, and several of the brothers are scholars.

  “I could not try to speak the Kzin’s language, but I have some words of their script.” He showed me a cloth on which strange marks had been made in bright colors. “I have tried to keep it short and simple,” he went on. “I was going to write: ‘Spare this place!’ However, if there is a word for ‘spare’ in that sense we haven’t found it. ‘We ask for mercy’ has the same problem—no word for ‘mercy.’ I hope that what this says is: ‘This place is sacred.’”

  “They do have a word for ‘sacred’?” I said it trying to wound.

  “Yes. I think so. There are some hopes riding on our translation being correct.”

  “You think that will deter them?”

  “Can you think of anything better?”

  I said nothing.

  “Come with me.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t think Pope Leo faced Attila alone. I’ve seen old pictures of that confrontation. They seem to respect courage. You have obviously been injured recently and if you are seen standing with me it may have some small effect.”

  I followed him. The monks cleared the way at the gate for us and we stepped out to meet the advancing kzin.

  “Are you afraid?” I asked him.

  “Yes. I have never been so afraid…Rykermann, please, don’t leave me to face them alone.”

  I hated him more than any living creature, but I stayed. I no longer cared what happened to me, and I know part of me wanted to see him die. But there was something else, too. I couldn’t leave him, white-faced, blue lips moving in prayer, as he stood there shaking and did not run.

  The kzin warcraft drew nearer, and details became plainer. It was a huge thing, now plainly the familiar combinations of wedge and ovoid, with the bulges and turrets of weapons. None of the makeshift weapons-systems that Wunderland had put together in the preceding months was even remotely comparable in size or power. How helpless and pitiful it made the fleeing humans look! It could have destroyed them, and us, like ants. But the kzin were still not firing.

  It seemed to swell in size as it drew closer yet. There was no spitting of dust and gravel beneath it as there would have been with a human ground-effect car. The machine even had a certain majesty in its power and size. The ripping-cloth sound grew. We could see armored aliens behind translucent ports.

  It stopped. Like a scene from old fictions of alien first contact, a ramp was lowered. A kzin in ornate clothing and with an injured arm descended, followed by others less ornately dressed. The abbot held up his sign. I recognized the kzin: It was the only living one I had ever seen closely in the light.

  Did it recognize me? Its huge violet eyes held mine. It thrust its sidearm into its belt and raised two objects: one was the modem from the cave-habitat that linked to the locator implant in my arm.

  So that was how it had found me among the scattering hordes of human ants. Had I drawn it here? The other object was something smaller that I could not make out.

  It ground out a distorted human word I recognized as “cave.” Then it touched the belt it wore, the one that we had dropped to it. It placed the objects it held on the ground.

  If the abbot could stand so could I. And some instinct told me it was better to stand and face this creature than either fall on my knees in supplication or turn to flee. Remembering the old game of “Tiger, Man, Gun,” I folded my arms and puffed out my chest. In the game that had indicated I was a man, and proud of it, though in the game the tiger ate the man. Also, it gave me something to do with my arms. I felt that however the kzin interpreted the gesture, it could not be seen as too subservient, but could not be taken as a threat. We were plainly weaponless.

  “Cave,” I replied.

  The kzin raised its huge sidearm and fired. But the bolt smashed into a derelict, abandoned ground-car that it evidently considered was an asset humans should not possess. Its gaze passed from me to the abbot and his sign. It opened its jaws and licked its black lips with a huge tongue.

  I remembered a line from The War of the Worlds: “I was on the verge of screaming; I bit my hand.” It seemed a good idea.

  Then it turned and reentered the vehicle, the others following.

  There was a long pause as we stood there, then the ramp retracted and the great warcraft rose and turned away, back toward the city. Its guns fired two or three times, picking off vehicles and bits of machinery. We heard a confused clamoring of voices from the monastery and the crowd of refugees.

  “We must give thanks,” said the abbot. “We have been granted a miracle.” There was puzzlement more than anything else in his expression and voice. He seemed to be trying to come to terms with a completely new and strange problem. His hand fluttered to his chest. “I have been allowed to live to see a miracle.”

  I was not so sure. It seemed to me likely that, with the war plainly all but won, the kzin must be thinking of preserving the human population for their own purposes. I did not even think then that the kzin had sought me out specially: It had merely wanted to know where all the humans were heading for, and the monastery was the last place before the swamp and sea and mountains where they could gather. But all the same, things might have gone very differently.

  “Come with me to the chapel,” said the abbot. “I must call the brothers to prayer and thanksgiving.” He clasped his chest harder and gave a sudden cry. He staggered in a circle, then fell, writhing. I bent over him.

  “Heart,” he whispered. “A fat old man’s heart…” His voice and his respiration were rising and falling in an odd way. “Yes, listen…Do you recognize it, scientist? Cheyne-Stokes breathing. Something few heard on this world when everyone had a doc. But I’ve attended the dying…You will hear a lot more of it as the docs fail, I fear…I’m not good at fear…This…this is another miracle. It will save me much fear.” His voice rallied for a moment.

  “Rykermann, you may hate me, and God knows I am a sinner. But let me give you my blessing.”

  I shrugged. Hatred seemed unimportant now.

  “My personal unworthiness does not affect the quality of it, you know,” he whispered with a shadow of his old manner. “As for Masonry, I doubt you can teach the Kzin the handclasp. They haven’t the fingers for it. But be careful of the—”

  His writhing stopped. He mumbled feebly, then his voice grew a little stronger and he muttered something in a language I did not understand and raised his hand from his chest, waving it at me as though trying to give me something invisible. I bent closer to catch his words but as I did so he died.

  I heard something else then, where the kzin had stood. Along with the locator modem it had left me Dimity’s music box. It must have found it in the module, and it must just now have wound the tiny handle with the huge claws of its undamaged arm.

  I walked slowly back to the monastery. The infirmary was still stocked, I knew. I had plenty of means of killing myself. Dimity was gone. She had, at least, I kept telling myself, died quickly and cleanly in space, and her knowledge was lost to the Kzin and their mind-readers. But she was lost to me forever. Forever? I remembered my profession of belief in a Supreme Being and turned it over in my mind to see if it helped. To opt out of this horror would be to do nothing, not even to mourn.

  I also had, I now realized, a duty to survive. I was a professor of biology and a sort of chemist, and I would be needed. If not for my degrees and papers, then for the fact that my expeditions had made me, as I thought naïvely then, one of the few modern urban Wunderlanders who had any experience of camping and surviving in genuinely primitive conditions.

  And there was another matter. Cats did not like fire. Bones and nitric acid made phosphorus. Caves with deep drifts of morlock and mynock bones would be a source of phosphorus. Guano, rich in nitrates, would be a prime source of low-tech explosives, a precious s
trategic resource if there was someone to build a factory to process them. That someone would have to know organic chemistry, and know at least a little of survival in the wild. Ceramics and armor to withstand laser-blasts, fabricated in hidden factories with improvised plant, would also need someone with chemical knowledge. There were probably no living humans, now, whose knowledge of the great caves of the Hohe Kalkstein came close to mine. Those caves would be a huge strategic resource.

  From the makeshift and growing refugee camp I could already hear the sounds of babies crying from hunger. A live Nils Rykermann might be able to help there as well.

  The abbot had shown me the reality of duty. As for that odd thing called honor, I thought I had seen a shape of that somewhere between van Roberts and von Diderachs, between the abbot and the kzin.

  The first person I recognized in the refugee camp was Leonie Hansen. She had brought away as much equipment from the laboratory as she could carry and with a couple of others had set up a sort of clinic. A lot of it was very simple stuff—test tubes, optical microscopes, filtration paper I saw, all now beyond price. She, or somebody, had seen that the ultrasophisticated equipment of modern laboratories, like autodocs, would be useless without power sources and maintenance. I thought then that many things would go on, and that she would also be needed.

  Epilogue

  First, of course they asked her name.

  “My name is Dimity Carmody.”

  That was not a We Made It name. But it was not a We Made It ship. The design, the specifications and part numbers showed it had been built on Earth, a long time before.

  “What is your position?”

  “Special…Special…Special Professor of Mathematics and Astrometaphysics.”

  “That’s not a crew mustering. And you look too young.”

  They said “look too young,” not “are too young.” She had been in Coldsleep a long time. She tried to cooperate.

  “No…I…I don’t know what it is.”

  “Were you crew?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  They let her rest, and though it obliterated some memory potential they applied stronger nerve-growth factors and other regeneration therapy to the brain and where the central nervous tissue had been destroyed. They showed her pictures of the ship as it had been when they had boarded it.

  “What do you remember?” The healers on We Made It were gentle and patient.

  “I am Dimity Carmody.”

  “You came in an Earth ship. Did you come from Earth?”

  “No.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  “Munchen. I grew up in Munchen. My father let me play with his computer.”

  “Munchen?” They looked up an old Earth atlas and found pictures of it. But when they showed her the pictures they meant nothing to her. They found New Munchen in the records and showed her that: the last pictures they had were of a small town of a few thousand people. She did not recognize the old buildings but she recognized the star patterns.

  “That’s Wunderland.” That solved part of the puzzle. And the memory pictures could be Wunderland. Someone showed her flash cards of Wunderland and general human scenes. They showed her a copy of her own memory of the man with the yellow Wunderland beard, and that brought an almost overwhelming response of love and loss and grief so that they feared for her, but she could not put a name to the man and eventually it passed. At a picture of a cat she laid her ears back. Then they examined her ears again and found the characteristic musculature of some of the aristocratic Wunderland families. They found another picture of what looked like a cat, very distorted, in her own memory and showed it to her but it meant nothing though she flinched from it.

  “Yes, Wunderland.”

  “This isn’t Wunderland.”

  “Oh.”

  “What year is it, Dimity?” They meant, of course, what year did she remember it as being. “I don’t know.”

  She never on that world remembered the Kzin or what had happened on Wunderland, though she remembered her theoretical work at length, when the Outsiders sold We Made It a manual for a faster-than-light shunt whose first operating principles she alone could recognize and understand.

  The Corporal in the Caves

  2408 A.D.

  Hroarh-Officer’s deep radar projected a hologram of the nearer caves. A three-dimensional labyrinth of interconnecting tunnels and cavities of all sizes, it looked much more like a diagram of living organs than like a stone formation.

  The resemblance was complete to the detail that there was movement going on in those tunnels and cavities. The radar could give only a blurred impression of the activity in the nearest parts, but like most of Wunderland’s caves, with hordes of flying creatures importing protein each day, the great caverns of the Hohe Kalkstein contained a massive amount of life. Some of that life was human and dangerous. Some of it was nonhuman and also dangerous.

  The long cliffs that marked the escarpment of the Hohe Kalkstein reared before them, honeycombed, honey-colored for the most part (the Kzin had discovered honey fairly recently and were still deciding what they thought of it), in places blackened by fumes or gleaming white where explosions had blasted great shards of the outer limestone away. Here and there were the black entrances of the caves, dangerous and fascinating.

  Along the dead ground at the foot of the cliffs the kzin infantry battalion were deploying from their vehicles. Not a huge force, but enough, it was thought, to sweep this cave system of the human and other vermin that infested it.

  Corporal surveyed the eight members of his section, anticipating the inspections Sergeant and Platoon Officer would make before the final deployments. They looked Heroic enough, and their equipment complete.

  He scanned the horizon about. There were flying creatures in the air about the scarp, coming and going at the cave entrances. Movements of small animals here and there on the plains. Certainly nothing for kzin regular infantry to fear.

  Company by company they moved off, each assigned to a major entrance. Vehicles were expensive, and parking them immediately below the cliffs would risk attacks on them from the still-unseen enemy. The final approach was made on foot.

  Any tame humans in the area kept well away or out of sight. With Heroes slavering to come to grips with the Enemy, any human that raised its head during a kzin military operation would have been distinctly unwise. On the other claw, Corporal thought as he looked about the quiet landscape, there was little point in professional soldiers simply massacring unarmed anthropoids which were, after all, part of Wunderland’s wealth and infrastructure. This was the Patriarch’s Army, too disciplined to kill valuable slaves and taxpayers needlessly.

  Already in these derelict farmlands—marginal when, after the first kzin landings, dispossessed humans had tried to cultivate them, and now long gone to ruin—they had rounded up a couple of very young feral humans: wild-eyed, with long tangled hair, and extremely dirty. They were either too knowing or too terrified to make trouble or flee, and Hroarh-Officer ordered them taken to the rear. If they were clever enough to be decorous, they might have a future as slaves in his household. Hroarh-Officer was a follower of Chuut-Riit’s ideas and a student of humans, which was one reason he had been assigned to this force. They had also found a couple of very young kzinti—wild orphans, who had also been sent to the rear. Once these would have been left to fend for themselves, to perish or not as the Fanged God decreed for His bravest sons, but things were a little different now, and there were more than a few kzin orphans…

  The caves were, it was thought, an important base and resource to the feral humans. Ambushes were possible even before they reached them—possible but unlikely. Humans generally lacked the spirit to attack a kzin military force in the open.

  Once a jerky, unnatural movement brought the platoon leaping to the ready. It was only an ancient human farming robot, long unmaintained and unreprogrammed,
grubbing in the dust beside a shattered irrigation canal where crops had once grown. It was small for such a machine, unpleasantly suggestive of a living being grown crippled and stupid with age. Platoon Officer raised his sidearm as if to blow it to pieces, then lowered it again. The fact that the thing still had power to function, years after human attempts at farming had ceased here, suggested it had a power-source which it would be as well to leave alone. It might accidentally harvest some unwary human or kzin—in fact there appeared to be bones in a basket it carried that might have been meant to hold vegetable crops—but that would teach those concerned to keep a better lookout.

  The limestone cliffs, crowned by the red vegetation of Ka’ashi, folded into a long canyon as the ground under their feet rose. Eagerly, kzin officers and troops broke into a trot. Detachments split off to guard the many exits.

  So far there had been no activity from the feral humans. That might mean the kzin expedition had surprised them. But that was unlikely, Corporal thought. Humans’ eyes and ears were poor, but they had many of them.

  Urrr…if the ferals did the right thing, promotion might come. It was possible to dream.

  Corporal, not uniquely among Ka’ashi-born kzin of his generation, had a more complex attitude to humans than he realized. On one claw, like all sapient non-kzin life-forms, they were slaves and prey. There were kz’eerkti—monkeys—on Homeworld. The very brightest of those made slaves, the rest reasonable sport, and their tricks and monekyshines could make good stories. Yet on the other claw, these particular kz’eerkti with guns and spaceships who had colonized Ka’ashi from Sol system were not like the other alien races the Kzin had smashed so easily.

  True, kzin conventionally regarded them in their wild state as simply vermin, and Corporal had shared the rage of all the kzin of the Alpha Centauri system when the fleets sent against Sol limped back with their dead and their shame, but some, including most importantly Chuut-Riit, the new Planetary Governor and of the Patriarch’s blood, had come to feel them worth studying, and sometimes odd similarities between kzin and humans had emerged from that study. There were some who had called to mind from the classics certain ancient verses composed by the Prophet Kdarka-Riit, one day when the Sage had been celebrating after a successful Kz’eerkti-hunt on Homeworld: