Man-Kzin Wars V

by Larry Niven

  The dog Fellah huddled in her arms, shivering against her chest. But occasionally it lifted its head and looked down. Then, by the tilting of its ears, she sensed the animal was following the action and weighing their chances of survival.

  When the thrashing ceased, Krater released her winder and unclenched her toes, dropping down into the open vaults beneath the canopy layer and above the forest floor far below. Off to her right, about forty meters away, she saw an orange body drop through the leaves and tumble three times head over heels before it hit the hard ground. It lay there in a bundle of matted fur. Krater thought it was dead, until it twitched and moved a paw, raised itself and began to crawl.

  Sally lifted herself into the cover of the leafy layer and watched. The kzin rose on its hind legs with painful, ungraceful jags of motion and started to walk away. Krater withdrew fully into the canopy. She consulted her sense of direction and moved back toward the place of the fight.

  At first, all she could see were torn branches and a ruck of leaves, turned over to show their lighter undersides among splashes of blood. At the side of the clearing, however, she quickly spotted the Jinxian's uniform. She set the dog down on a firm branch and moved quickly over the vines toward Gambiel.

  His coverall was curiously flat, deflated. She touched his shoulder, to rouse him and turn him over, and the torn remains slumped apart, ripping the uniform fabric across the back.

  Krater found his head, his eyes open and staring. She closed them with the edge of her hand.

  Then there was nothing more she could do, no words to say, and no way to bury him. She gathered up the dog and continued moving toward the noon rendezvous.

  * * *

  "Fellah" they had called him, these beings that lived and moved separately, apart from the Discipline. "Fellah" was the word shape that came up in their blue-green minds and arrowed at him like yellow fire. "Fellah." And they did not mean it unkindly.

  As he lurched through the rushing trees, under the arm of the "Sally," the Pruntaquilun Balladeer closed his eyes to the flying wind and the green leaves, and tightened his stomach against the surgings of sensation. He called up his latent powers of intellect and considered all that he had experienced since being packed into Guerdoth's traveling case.

  When the Master had prepared for a month's stay at the hunting estates of his uncle, the Magistrate Alcuin, he had taken along his favorite Balladeer. And his baton, of course. Fellah knew what the device did and how it worked. As a Pruntaquilun, with his limited insight into other minds and his facility with courtly language, he was instrumental in the Master's charades.

  None other than Guerdoth's favorite Balladeer could be trusted to help the Master conceal the shame of his Powerloss and so to survive. Thus, Fellah would observe and make stealthy inquiries with the edges of his mind, accumulating bits and shadings of thought from other Thrintun and from Slaves. Then he would sing of them to Guerdoth in an ancient tongue that only the Master understood. With Fellah's espionage, and with the Baton, they cemented the impression among all who cared that Guerdoth still retained the Power and wielded it as a true Thrint.

  But when the time-stranding case had been opened, Fellah was arrived not at Alcuin's estates but in a green world of wild, waving plants and among wild, unDisciplined beings. Except that the "Daff" had wielded Guerdoth's Baton. Although he had used it inexpertly, still he made the commands to love and respect, to attend and obey. And he made them on Fellah himself.

  Yet even as he made the commands, the Daff had not thought of himself as a Master. The word-image he used was "human." Strange it was, however, that the shape of this thought in the Daff's mind was not much different from the shape of "Thrint" in Guerdoth's. It contained the same overtones of capability, of mastery of the expectation to control and order the world and time as one saw fit.

  Similar thought-shapes had also been in the Sally's mind—although not so strongly, not since that Other had come and destroyed the Daff. Fellah himself had known the Daff was dead in the instant his mind sparked and went black.

  Fellah wished the Sally would use more and simpler words in her thinking about the death, so that he might absorb them and add to his picture of these new masters, the humans. He was putting together a sense of the pattern of their minds and their language with every thought he intercepted. But it was harder this way, starting without a grammar or even a coherent picture of the world into which he had emerged from the traveling case.

  The Other who had killed the Daff had used still another word-image, "kzin." It was brighter, more jaggedly lit with reddish-orange colors and blood scents, than the "human" in Daff's and Sally's minds. Yet "kzin" meant controller and shaper of destinies, too.

  And nowhere, not along any of the dimensions among which Fellah cast his mind, did he find any echo now of "Thrint." The glinting hard edges of their Power was gone from the universe, creating a black and peaceful vacuum, as if it had never been.

  Fellah contemplated a universe without Discipline, without the ever-present puppet strings. He tried to decide if this emptiness was a good thing in itself.

  He began to suspect it might be.

  * * *

  Nyawk-Captain found Weaponsmaster's discarded armor through the emergency distress tone it was generating. From its position on the forest floor, with the helmet bent back and the visor digging a furrow in the dirt, he concluded that it had fallen out of the trees.

  He studied the pattern of burn marks on the ablative surface. No blood or carbonized flesh on either, although the one at the throat smelled of burned hair. Clearly, Weaponsmaster had not been injured significantly while wearing the armor. Nor had he been wearing it when it fell.

  Nyawk-Captain tilted his head back to study the underside of the roof layer. Nothing in its leaf pattern told him anything.

  "My Captain!"

  The voice was faint and coming from his left. Nyawk-Captain rose in a crouch and his armor prepared itself for violence.

  Weaponsmaster limped forward from one of the rare patches of jungle growth on the forest floor. His gait reflected broken bones. He tended to circle to the right as he moved.

  Weaponsmaster fell. Nyawk-Captain, moving toward him, caught his crewmate and lowered his body gently to the ground. Nyawk-Captain pawed at his belt for the field medical kit and began breaking ampoules of pain-reliever.

  "Do not bother," Weaponsmaster grunted. "My head is cracked and my life is at an end."

  "Did you fall? I found your armor. How did—?"

  "One of the humans confronted me. He actually challenged me. It would have been dishonorable—to meet a naked combatant in armor. So I shed mine. . . . He fought well."

  Nyawk-Captain heard this explanation but hardly believed it. The sons of Hanuman were known to fight by deceit and trickery, not by challenge in an honorable contest. And they did not kill adult kzinti in naked combat. This was most odd!

  "Did you kill him?" Nyawk-Captain asked, feeling sure of the answer.

  "I do not know. . . . Not for certain. But too much blood covers my paws, I think, for him to live."

  "Was he alone?"

  "I saw one only."

  "That is never proof that there aren't others."

  "I know. I failed you . . . should have . . ."

  "Which way was it—were they—going?"

  ". . . East?"

  The word ended with a huge, jaw-cracking yawn. A gout of blood came up in Weaponsmaster's throat, flowed over his tongue, and dripped between his teeth. The body went limp and, by reflex, the pink ears opened wide.

  Nyawk-Captain smoothed them closed and lowered the great head to the ground.

  Then the kzin considered his options. He had time, barely, to locate the humans, recover the contents of the Thrintun box, and still make his rendezvous at Margrave. But he would accomplish all this, he decided, even if it violated his margin for error on the mission. This was no longer just a matter of the box and its treasures. It was now an affair of honor.

&nbs
p; * * *

  "How far are we from the ship, do you figure?" Jook asked.

  Cuiller looked up at his companion in surprise. "You're the navigator."

  "Astrogation only. I'm a wreck in two dimensions."

  "But I thought you were keeping track . . ."

  The Wunderlander shook his head and looked down at his hands, massaging the bubble cast around his knee.

  "Well, we were turning left all the time," Cuiller reasoned, "so we have to be somewhere south of Callisto."

  "But how far?"

  "Can't be more than two or three kilometers. We haven't traveled more than five or six altogether. And that wasn't in any kind of straight line."

  "Are we lost?"

  "Umm." Cuiller sucked his lips. "Which direction do you think the sun is?"

  "Straight up."

  "Then we're lost," the commander admitted. "But later on, when the sun moves west, we could work our way east and attempt to locate Sally and Daff."

  "In this jungle, we could pass within forty meters of them and never know it."

  "I guess it's time to try the radio." Cuiller raised the wrist unit, powered it up, and clicked the send key a couple of times.

  "Captain?" from the speaker.

  "Is that you, Sally?"

  "Yeah. Where are you?"

  "Somewhere south of the ship," he said. "I think."

  "Me too. How are we going to link up?"

  Cuiller thought for a moment. "One from each party should climb a tall tree, get above the forest canopy."

  "It's just me now. Daff is dead. . . . What happens after I climb up there?"

  "Burn some leaves or something with a rifle pulse. I'll do the same."

  "All right. I'll be watching for you. Out."

  Cuiller climbed while Jook stayed below. Daff was dead? As commanding officer, Cuiller would have pressed Krater for the details—except their messages had to be brief, to keep the kzinti from taking a radio fix. Anyway, Cuiller could well guess what had happened. One of the kzinti had caught up with them, and the Jinxian would not have run from that fight. Instead, with his lifetime of training, Daff had probably welcomed and invited it. And he had sent Krater on ahead, with the Slaver stasis-box, to safety.

  Daff Gambiel had been a good man. Sober, quiet, strong, patient—and loyal. He never seemed to have much to say, but Cuiller knew the Jinxian was always working out problems in his head, so he would have the answers ready when needed. Callisto's crew was diminished by his loss, more than they knew. . . . Cuiller could only hope Gambiel was finally at peace with his fate.

  When he at last broke through the top layer, Cuiller felt like a swimmer in a great, green ocean. The treetops swelled like rolling waves above the lower branches and netted vines. The lazy winds pushed them back and forth, like the conflicting chop around a point of land. He clung to his bole with one hand and held down the fine sprouts of greenery with the other. To look east and west, he had to climb around the tree.

  He gave Krater ten minutes to settle into her treetop, then faced east, unslung his weapon, and took aim at the nearest clump of leaves. Cuiller fired a long burst, circling it around to get a good fire going. Soon a puff of white smoke rose out of the canopy and blew raggedly away on the breeze.

  He divided his time between watching that and looking out for any fires Krater might have set.

  Nothing. "Captain," from the radio again, softly. "I think I see smoke—or haze—about half a klick away. Try again."

  He burned a fresh patch upwind of the first.

  "Got you. Be there in a bit." Then the radio went dead.

  Cuiller climbed back down to Jook's level.

  In half an hour, they heard her winder motor, coming through the trees. At the end of a long swing, Krater burst through a fan of leaves and settled on the branch next to Jook. She was strangely encumbered.

  "Daff didn't make it?" the commander asked gently.

  She shook her head. "We were followed by a kzin, who climbed up into the canopy. Daff fought a delaying action—and bought me time to get away."

  "Dead?" Jook asked.

  "If he were alive, I wouldn't have left," she said defiantly.

  "Sorry. I meant the kzin."

  "Daff hurt him badly, knocked him out of the trees. But he was still moving."

  After a pause, Cuiller asked, "Where is the stasis-box?"

  "This is it." Krater lifted the dog out of its curled-up position, snuggled in the crook of her arm, and held it out with her fingers under its chest and around its forelegs. "Daff opened the box and found this—we call him Fellah—plus a flute-thing and some dried rations."

  "I asked where the box was."

  "Back along our path. It was empty, and we couldn't carry everything."

  "Why did you open it in the first place?"

  "Daff opened it. The kzinti were tracking on the stasis field."

  "Oh . . . right." Cuiller put a hand to his chin.

  Hugh Jook had taken the animal from Krater and was examining it while Cuiller absorbed her report. The commander watched his navigator move the animal's legs, feel around its eyes, look into its ears.

  "Remarkably mammalian structure," Jook murmured.

  "I noticed that," Krater said.

  The Wunderlander felt the animal's hindquarters and lifted its tail.

  "Do not . . . touch," the creature said in a halting approximation of Interworld. The sounds were thick as they wrapped around its long, pink tongue.

  Jook dropped the dog. It landed on its feet amid the vines and glared over its shoulder at the startled navigator.

  The three humans looked down at the animal, dumbstruck.

  "You . . . you can talk?" Krater asked.

  "Yes. You-you can talk," it replied—and waited expectantly.

  Cuiller tried to decide if he was hearing a ventriloquist's trick or just some kind of mimicry, a parrot's mindless repetition. But then, he thought back, the dog's first fragmented sentence hadn't just repeated their own words. It had been wholly unprompted, arising out of nothing the humans were saying. And the words had fit the physical circumstances. So Cuiller had to accept that the "dog" was reacting to its environment, verbally, in Interworld.

  "Of course, we can talk," Sally Krater went on patiently. "I was asking about you." And she pointed at the creature.

  "You?" it asked. "Ah . . . 'You' means this—?" The animal swiveled its broad head around, including its own body in the gesture. "Fellah?"

  "That's right. You're Fellah, and I'm Sally."

  "Sal-lee. Daff. Yowryargawsh. Fellah."

  "Yowr—?" Krater began, then shook her head.

  "Other . . . that deaded the Daff. Yowryargawsh named itself."

  "Oh, the kzin warrior."

  "Yes, kzin. Dead itself now. But other still to come. Find you-Sallee." Fellah seemed to grow agitated. "Find you-human. Make dead too."

  "Excuse me," Jook interrupted. "But what the hell are you?"

  The creature paused. "You-Fellah means, is one, of-class Pruntaquilun. Named itself Coquaturia."

  "But what are you?" Jook insisted.

  "You-Fellah is . . . sing-maker?" it answered, unsatisfied with the result. "Song-maker. You-Fellah is owned-thing of Thrint named itself Guerdoth. You-Sallee, you-human, are not owned-thing? Yes. You have no . . . no Discipline?"

  "Of course we have discipline," Cuiller responded quickly. "We're a Navy survey team, after all. Without discipline we couldn't perform—"

  "Captain," Sally Krater said quietly, putting a hand on his arm. "You're going too fast. And I don't think that it's—that Fellah is questioning your authority."

  "Of course not," Cuiller said stiffly.

  The dog was staring hard at him. "You-Captain are Thrint?"

  "Thrint? Are you calling me a Slaver?"

  "You-Captain . . . you impose Discipline." The creature exhibited a rippling motion that might have been a shrug. "Thrint."

  "There are no Thrintun anymore," Krater said. "They died ou
t—oh, along, long time ago, while you were in the stasis-box that Daff opened."

  Fellah turned its head patiently and watched her speak, studied the way her mouth moved, as if trying hard to understand.

  "Many Thrintun," Fellah said gravely. "Too many to be deaded, to die soon. . . . What means 'long, long time'?"

  "That's an approximation of age," Jook interposed. "Consider it to be a large part of the age of the universe itself. About one-fifteenth of that age." Jook had to explain this using his hands. He waved his free hand all around, to indicate the universe at large. Then he flashed his spread fingers three times, curling them off each time with his other hand.

  The animal seemed to absorb this, to think about it, and then looked stunned. "No Thrintun anymore. No Pruntaquila anymore. No universe anymore." Fellah made a noise back in the throat that might have been a whimper or a moan.

  "The universe is still here," Sally said easily.

  The creature just stared at her.

  "Hey, are you hungry?" Krater suddenly asked. She pulled out of her pocket some plastic-wrapped patties, which looked to Cuiller like some kind of dried meat. "We found these in the stasis-box," she explained to the commander. "Daff tried them but he thought the taste was pretty bland." She offered part of one patty to Fellah.

  The animal backed away.

  "Tnuctipun," it growled. "Head-stuff. Made dead, made cold, dry."

  "What?" Krater dropped the fragment, and it slid between the leaves. "Why were the Tnuctipun killed?"

  "Secret." Fellah turned away. "Big secret."

  "Kill them and freeze-dry their brains?" Cuiller wondered. "Why would a Slaver want to do that? It's barbaric!"

  "Maybe the Thrint wanted to preserve them," Jook speculated. "Any sufficiently advanced technology would be able to reconstruct the brains later, rebuilding their RNA linkages through some kind of computer setup—and remember, the Tnuctipun were genetic engineers. Rendering the brain inert is like insurance. That way you could keep your pet scientist quiet, but you also keep him around in case you need him to make adjustments in whatever he built."