Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - X

by Hal Colebatch

  Cumpston and the kzinti exchanged stories, speaking fairly freely. There was no point in hiding from their captors what they knew already.

  This chamber, like the one containing the hologram projector, and like others Cumpston had been led through, was electronically smart. It contained a control console and stacks of weapons and ammunition. None of these presented him with any opportunity, since he was restrained in the web and in any case the weapons were securely locked. The two kzinti had more freedom of movement, but he could see they were being closely tracked. The snouts of cameras and guns followed their movements from several corners.

  He had expected the kzinti, confined, to be in a killing frenzy, but Raargh was moving slowly, deliberately. Cumpston had undergone an intensive course in Kzinti body-language, and what he read from the big kzin was relaxation, laziness, a sort of lofty contempt for events. Even his tail, usually the giveaway with a kzin trying to conceal his emotions, was relaxed. So, as far as Cumpston could tell, were the pheromones of his body. He could detect little of the gingery smell that, when intensified, signaled kzin anger. Vaemar, he saw, was copying Raargh’s example. Maybe they’ve drugged him, Cumpston thought. Or maybe he’s the greatest actor on this planet.

  Raargh had tried to free him when the guards left, but when he approached the web an alarm had sounded and a quick, stabbing red laser beam spat into the ground at his feet. Raargh adjusted his artificial eye and told them the web, as well as the weapons cabinets, was guarded by infrared rays, too closely meshed for him to get through.

  Food for the kzinti was provided through an automatic feeder system. Officers’ field rations of bloody meat, better than Raargh had been used to as a Trooper or a Sergeant, and some small live animals. There was even that prized Kzinti delicacy, a zianya, tipped into a trough and bound with cords to heighten its flavor-enhancing terror and prevent its struggling and shrieking. There were a couple of indoor fooches and even some entertainment tapes, though neither kzin used them. It was plain great efforts were being made to keep them comfortable. Raargh recognized soothing pheromones in the air. The small animals provided for them were kzin natives, presumably bred from stock imported during the occupation. Contemplating them, and particularly the futilely kicking zianya, gave Raargh the beginnings of an idea. Though he was not yet very hungry, he killed them all, and as he ate them spilled what was in total a good deal of blood, blood whose smell was very similar to that of kzin blood. No alarms responded, and the kzinti who appeared to be on maintenance work in different parts of the large room, but who were presumably doubling as guards, did not seem to notice. Most enclosed chambers frequented by kzinti or used by them as living space had a smell of blood about them, not to mention a complex of other smells. It was bracing and taken for granted.

  Henrietta, Andre and Emma returned after a few hours, with a guard of several young Kzinti and humans.

  “Noble Heroes,” said Henrietta, “you have seen the words of Chuut-Riit. You know his spirit lives on in this fortress, as you know the fighting spirit of the Heroes of Ka’ashi is not dead. Now, in his name, I ask you: Do you acknowledge obedience to the word of Chuut-Riit?”

  “Chuut-Riit was Planetary Governor and of the blood of the Patriarch,” said Raargh. Was, not is, was his unspoken thought. I have my own hunt now—to preserve Vaemar and to rear him to be a leader of the kzin of this world. Once I thought the Patriarch’s Navy would return with swift vengeance, but five years have passed and now I do not think that they will be returning soon. I play for time and for Vaemar. “Why do you need to ask of a kzintosh who won Name in battle?”

  “Where were you going when Emma brought you here?”

  Cumpston thought quickly. The less accurate information these maniacs had the better.

  “Arhus,” he said. Arhus was the site of the biggest planetside kzin settlement. Arrangements had recently been made to grant the kzinti there a limited degree of self-government.

  “I did not ask you to speak!” said Henrietta.

  “But you insult Heroes. You interrogate them as if they were prisoners or slaves.”

  Oddly, his words seemed to give her pause.

  “These Heroes I know,” he said. “Do you think you are the only human who knows the Kzin? This young kzintosh has learned fieldcraft in the wild. Now he goes to his own kind to learn other things.”

  “With your tuition, ARM agent?”

  “I will not go with him to stay with kzinti at Arhus. How could I? But do you think you are the only human on this planet who wishes peace between Man and Kzin? If there can be peace, I do not wish the Kzinti ill. There is much about them I admire, and these two I have known long.” I hope there’s enough truth in that to confuse her, he thought. Also I hope that there’s no telepath among the kzinti here. I hope that all the telepaths on Wunderland have got nice cushy jobs with the human security forces and have been given Names and Kzinrretti of their very own and the nice gentle new telepathic drugs I heard our laboratories were working on and have no wish to help this crazy business.

  Henrietta looked at him with somewhat lessened hostility. Plainly, he did have some relationship with these two kzinti. There was an expression of doubt or conflict on her face.

  “Release him,” said Vaemar. He spoke in the Ultimate Imperative Tense, which Cumpston had never heard him use before. Henrietta moved to obey, but a celfone on Andre’s wrist bleeped. He turned to Henrietta and spoke to her urgently.

  “We’ve got your car under cover and we’re taking it apart,” Henrietta told Cumpston. “I’ll need you shortly to send a signal from its brain to say all is well. I’d advise you not to be smart and not try to do anything like sending or omitting key code-words. We have a telepath.”

  But if you put a telepath on me I’d feel it, he thought. What do they want with me? he wondered. Why have they kept me alive? I’m nothing but a threat to them, not potentially useful and venerated like Vaemar or respected like Raargh. They might be able to get a telepath, of course. Bring one from Arhus or somewhere and peel my brain. I wouldn’t like that. Or maybe they’ve got some idea of brainwashing and reprogramming me. With modern drugs that was not difficult. A fully suborned ARM officer might be very useful indeed. Cumpston had been trained to resist brain washing, and it would, he thought, be interesting in that event to see whether his training or Henrietta’s chemicals were the more effective. That a battle between them might leave him an organic waldo was something better not thought about. He had seen the results of such conflicts in others and tried to blank his memory and imagination.

  Henrietta interrogated him somewhat further, then she and Andre left, accompanied by a party of the humans and kzinti. Her questions, he thought, seemed somewhat unfocused. Both the humans and kzinti in general seemed, however, to come and go at will. One kzin was doing what looked like maintenance work under the control console, a couple of others were patrolling the upper gantries. A couple were staring at screens. One appeared to be curled up in a corner asleep. In the dim light at the corners of the large chamber it was hard to see exactly how many there were. It reminded him a little of the bridge of a warship at cruising stations. There were even, he noticed, small screened sanitary compartments. Well, that was not surprising. Cumpston, one of comparatively few humans to have been in a kzin’s lair as a guest, knew that Raargh had a similar arrangement at his cave. Kzinti, like most felines, liked their toilets private, apart from their use of urine as a marker and in social rituals. Raargh himself, who seemed to be moving about with a good deal of freedom, had previously been inspecting the sleeping kzin and had gone to use one of these compartments without question.

  Emma, some of the men, and some of the kzinti remained. Cumpston noticed an immediate change in the atmosphere with Henrietta’s departure. The men, he saw, including some manrretti, wore slightly different costumes to the ones who had departed.

  “Different prides,” remarked Vaemar. So he saw it as well. One of the men, plainly an officer or in a command
position, walked over and released Cumpston from the web. He had, Cumpston saw, the name “McGlue” on his jacket. As Cumpston stepped down, McGlue made a quick gesture, unnoticeable except to trained eyes. It was the recognition signal of a fellow ARM agent. Cumpston felt relief flooding though him. It appeared they were not without allies. McGlue also made a queer, twisted smile that seemed to run off one side of his face. Then Emma strode over. Yes, without Henrietta, the atmosphere was definitely different. Cumpston’s gestalt sense, though acquired with difficult training, was hardly even a poor imitation of kzinti ziirgah, but its signals were unmistakable. Vaemar too was wrinkling his nose and ears, and his tail was lashing now.

  “My mother has no proper plans,” Emma told them. “Her brains went loose after the events of the human invasion, after those things that happened when the disgraced coward once called Hroth-Staff-Officer surrendered. She has never fully recovered. For a long time she lost her memory of who she was. I did not lose mine.

  “What she wishes now is to make this place into a refuge for Kzinti where they can be taught to understand human ways so they—Heroes and Conquerors—may eventually creep into some lowly place in the monkey hierarchy. She seeks to teach them the slaves’ dream of proving indispensable to their masters, so they may one day rise to some kind of junior partnership, by monkey grace and favor—the mirror image of the very dream that some humans of Ka’ashi cuddled to their monkey breasts! She expects them to gradually penetrate human society, to at last take part in human plans and strategy, perhaps at last to take revenge on those who killed Chuut-Riit or their remote descendants.

  “The reality is different! Never will the Heroic Race be the slaves or the copies of apes! The Fanged God will not allow such an obscenity! I have forced the issue, as my Destiny decrees.

  “There are heavy weapons here for an army,” she went on. “Not just infantry and armor, but aircraft, small spacecraft. Most of the human fleet is at the warfront, light-years away.

  “With Chuut-Riit’s son, we will rouse and rally the kzin of Ka’ashi and Tiamat. They have had five years of subjugation and persecution by monkeys and are ready to scream and leap. We can take the humans of Ka’ashi and the Serpent Swarm by surprise.”

  “And when the Hyperdrive Armada returns?”

  “Their return will suit me perfectly. Returning, they will have to abandon their present front. The Kzin fleets and bases they engage now will have time to recover. Time also to ingest the latest lessons of the war, perhaps to rip secrets of the hyperdrive from the entrails of captured humans and human ships. And before the hyperdrive ships return we can smash the human ships and bases here.

  “And do not overestimate the Hyperdrive Armada. Do not forget: With a double star the gravitational singularity is such that there is a vast volume of space in which the hyperdrive cannot operate—the whole of the combined Alpha Centauri A and B systems, stretching far beyond their outer cometary halos. The hyperdrive would not have been enough for the successful human landings here but for other simultaneous misfortunes and the fangs of treachery ripping at loyal throats. This time the kzin will not be fighting among themselves when the humans arrive. They will be roused, united, and waiting! With Sinclair fields, which we alone possess, we can boost bomb explosions until they are as destructive as anti-matter!

  “More! There are hyperdrive ships at the spaceports and under repair and maintenance here and on Tiamat! We can seize them! Link again with the Patriarchy. We can strike Earth itself, and avenge the ramscoop raid with the one claw, present the hyperdrive to the Patriarchy with the other! We will achieve victory!”

  “What you will achieve at most,” said Cumpston, “is the deaths of many humans and the extermination of the kzinti in this system down to the last kzinrret and the last kitten, whether many of them joined you or not. As for Sinclair fields, how long do you think it would be before the other side used them? They were invented during the long peace on Earth but they must be in the ARM files.” Don’t tell her she’s insane, he thought; it will only make her worse. He hoped that phrase “long peace on Earth” might have some sort of subconsciously soothing effect, though it was badly positioned next to the phrase “ARM files.” Best he could do at present.

  “You will also turn a terrible war—the war now being fought out in space—into a war of annihilation without any possibility of eventual peace or truce. Without the option of life after surrender one species will perish utterly and quite possibly both will. We know such things have happened before in this galaxy.” He felt as he said it that to arouse such images in her mind would probably only egg her on. But he could think of nothing else to say. Was it a good idea to provoke her? Such questions had often been asked when fighting kzin, and the general answer had been that it couldn’t do any harm. If they screamed and leaped prematurely, so much the better. But this was different. “Did not Sun Tzu say: ‘Do not make an enemy fight with the courage of despair’?” he asked her. “That is what you will make both sides do. Think on what we know of the Slaver war.”

  “You cannot seduce me with words. The conspirators you worked for—the conspirators responsible for the ramscoop raid—will be brought to justice,” she replied. “It will be interesting to see how much ground they can cover when they are turned loose on a kzinti hunting preserve with ten minutes’ start!” She was shouting now, and paused to wipe traces of foam from her lips. I don’t think you had a good Liberation, Cumpston thought. I wanted vengeance as much as anyone at the time, but this is what it leads to.

  There is another thing, he thought. There are outlying parts of Wunderland and much of the Serpent Swarm where the Kzin had still not grown too oppressive. That would have changed as their numbers increased, but there are some humans who hate Sol System for the ramscoop raid worse than they hate the Kzin. Not many—most don’t expect an interstellar, interspecies war of survival to be fought with kid gloves—but some. And if my dearest had been killed by humans, how might I have jumped…? Perhaps the Kzin would have human allies. Not many, but enough to do damage. On the other hand, conflicts of loyalty could work both ways. No harm in pointing that out, perhaps.

  “Another thing you overlook,” he said: “Many kzin on Wunderland have found they may have better lives as partners with humans than as regimented cannon fodder for the Patriarchy. And for their descendants, the future may be brighter still. Many have been persecuted and humiliated. Many individual kzin died after the surrender. But they have not been murdered wholesale or enslaved, and they know it. A nonconformist kzin will not be dueled to death. There are kzin on this planet who have discovered freedom.” Futile, he knew. There was no rational argument that would reach someone so deeply insane.

  “On Wunderland we have been granted a miraculous chance.” He had to say it. He strove to put in into terms that might get through. “Perhaps some would say not merely species but Bearded God and Fanged God have made truce here. With the hyperdrive there are stars and worlds enough for all. We have a chance to show that humans and kzinti can share a planet. If they can do that, perhaps they can share a universe. Destroy that experiment here and all hope of that dies with it.” Tired and dry-mouthed, he argued back and forth with her hopelessly, and he knew, pointlessly, for some time, bringing it back to the fact that postwar Wunderland was proving some human-kzin cooperation was possible.

  “There may be a few who have been turned into imitation monkeys by the priests and the secret police, or been bought with monkey gold,” she replied. “The Kzin race can purge itself of such perversions. It is the strongest and noblest culture in the galaxy!” She turned her attention to the console and keyed up some holos of the redoubt and its weapons stores, others of rampant Heroes and Kzin space-dreadnaughts in triumphant battle.

  “As for you,” she told Cumpston, “you may be useful as a hostage in the early stages. That is just. The humans you work for intended to hold the kzinti of Wunderland hostage…Noble Hero Raargh!”

  But there was no answer. After a
few seconds it became obvious to all that Raargh was gone. Emma stared about wildly. Then she ran to the sleeping kzin. She stared down at it, then called another kzin to waken it. It seemed to have a problem doing so, and while telepaths, computer nirrds, or other lowly ones could be kicked awake by their betters, fighting kzinti were generally wary of touching another such when it was asleep. Finally the other kzin took its shoulders and lifted it. Its head flopped backwards, revealing a broken neck. As its body rolled over, long, raw, gleaming bones arced and clattered on the floor. The skin and flesh of one of its arms was missing. There was not much blood. Cord—the cord that had bound a zianya—had been wound tightly at the shoulder to prevent bleeding.

  “My Noble Mentor and Stepfather, Raargh who was Sergeant, gave his Word not to harm you humans this day,” said Vaemar. “He did not give his Word to remain here. And when his claws are sheathed his feet fall silently and swiftly.

  “It’s possible he may go to Arhus.” Vaemar added.

  And even now you win a few seconds for him, thought Cumpston. Vaemar was again speaking in the Ultimate Imperative Tense of the Heroes’ Tongue, the tense that might be used only by Royalty or, rarely, in a situation where the honor of the Kzin species was at stake, and which, when not employed for the giving of direct orders, lent itself to poetic, circumlocutious constructions. Also, he noticed, Vaemar had caught up the idea of Arhus but he did not tell a direct lie. It took Emma some time to work out what he was saying. Then her fingers stabbed at a control console. There was a sound of doors slamming shut.