Man-Kzin Wars XIV

by Larry Niven

  The aircar held Karan, her new kits, two military men and one military woman. It landed outside the village after overflying it, and the judge, two men, Ruat and two kzin deputies came out to meet her. The combination of human and kzin in amity struck Karan as it had Vaemar. She had plenty of human friends, but this grouping had arisen quite independently. She saw something that nobody except perhaps the judge was capable of seeing: that the lesslocks were not entirely a curse. The dynamics which had made a man-kzin cooperation inevitable were intensified by the threat of the lesslocks. Intelligence was coming together to defend itself against a blind rage that had the numbers. Villages that had a mixed population were stronger than those which did not, and would survive. A sort of social Darwinism.

  “Welcome to our village, my lady Karan,” the judge said, hobbling forward on his stick. “I take it that Lord Vaemar is busy and you are his deputy?”

  “Vaemar is busy in the Bundestag, but he knows of this matter, and although we had a slight difference of opinion on whether I should come in his place, and whether I should bring Orion and Arwen here, we are in complete agreement that this is urgent and needs to be handled immediately. I have come to observe for myself the massacre and confirm that the lesslocks have guns.” Karan bowed politely, and let the squirming kits down, where they went racing around. It must be safe, it was mid-morning and the lesslocks were creatures of the dark. And nearly every species was kind to infants. The kits’ big eyes triggered something protective across different species. No doubt there was a genetic recognition that the kits were too small to make a good meal, and it was better to let them grow bigger before eating them.

  “Please come into the village, my lady. I suggest sending the aircar into hover mode just in case, but if you will follow me, you—” That was when the lesslocks attacked.

  There were only a handful of them, but one jumped up out of the ground almost at the judge’s feet, with a gun raised. The aircar had nearly landed on it. It was close, and much, much too close to Arwen, who gazed at it with astonishment. The judge threw himself in front of the kit and lunged. It had been a long time since he had acquired skill in fencing, and his stick was no schläger, but the tip went into the lesslock’s eye, and the creature fell back and dropped the musket. Another lesslock stood and pointed its musket. The gun waved about uncertainly, the animal having only a vague idea of aiming. The barrel fell until it pointed at Arwen. The roar from Karan, the deeper roar from Ruat, the sound of a shot and the judge throwing himself in front of the kit happened too quickly to be distinguished, but Karan snatched Arwen back only a second before Ruat hit the lesslock and ripped its head off. The other lesslocks fled, and Ruat and the two deputies took them down within seconds. Karan looked down at Arwen. The bullet had emerged from the judge with the momentum of a thoroughly slugged baseball, and the kit had caught it in one paw, and was inspecting it to decide if it was edible. “No, dear, it’s yukky,” Karan pronounced, and took it from her and threw it in the long grass.

  “You been hurt, Judge,” one of the men said, unnecessarily. The bullet had caught him in the gut, and blood was pouring out from entry and exit wounds. Karan stooped and reached into the aircar for a first-aid kit. She bound the damage as well as she knew how, quickly and expertly. Then she placed the unconscious judge gently in the aircar. “Fly him straight to the hospital in Munchen. Fast as you can go,” she told the pilot.

  “I must go with him,” Ruat rumbled.

  “Good. And you,” Karan addressed the female aide, “make absolutely sure he gets the top priority treatment as a matter of urgency. Send another aircar back to us as soon as you are airborne. Now, go!”

  Ruat climbed in, and the aircar shot off. He didn’t know what was going to happen, but without the judge, they would all be lost.

  Karan stalked into the village. She was in a towering rage with herself. She had underestimated the enemy. So had the judge, and he might pay the ultimate price for that. But he had taken a bullet to save her kit, and that made a blood debt that would last forever. She was shown to the judge’s house, which was also where he dispensed justice. The population, alerted by the gunshot and only partially informed, gathered and looked at her with some apprehension.

  “I have sent your judge to the hospital. He has been seriously wounded by one of those sthondat-excreted lesslocks. Until he comes back, or you appoint a new judge, I am the Law East of the Ranges. I will do my best to give justice, even though I have not his wisdom.” Her green eyes flashed, and nobody doubted her for a moment.

  Vaemar needs to know, Karan thought. There was no necessity for visiting the scene of the massacre now; the basic fact of armed lesslocks was established beyond all possibility of doubt. Karan shivered with rage. The lesslocks now had an implacable enemy who would destroy every last one of them, whatever their inadvertent capacity to bring man and kzin together.

  The judge opened his eyes to see Ruat’s face framed by blue sky and the transparent upper shell of the aircar.

  “Looks like I’ve taken early retirement,” he wheezed. “I’m a goner, I guess. But it’s been good having you as a friend, Ruat. You’ve done a good job.”

  “You must live, Judge, you must. We need you more than ever now.” Later, Ruat was to treasure that friend word. Just now he had no time for thinking about it.

  “We in an aircar?” The judge’s eyes roamed.

  “Getting you to be mended, as fast as we can go,” Ruat told him. “Hang in there, judge,” he implored. The judge tried to nod, but closed his eyes.

  Ruat felt very out of place in the hospital. It was full of humans, and they were running around very fast, pushing a trolley with the frail, shrunken judge on it. They wouldn’t let him follow them, nor the female military aide, who had handled all the negotiations and filled in forms. He looked around. A small man with a camcorder came up to him.

  “ ’Scuse me, but who was that guy you just brought in?” the little man asked.

  Ruat looked at him. He seemed harmless. “That was the judge. He is a great and important man. He is the Law East of the Ranges, and I am his sheriff.” He showed the man his badge.

  “Really? A human judge and a kzin sheriff? That sounds kinda interesting. Tell me more,” the little man said.

  Ruat told him pretty nearly everything. It took some time and involved some food in a kzin restaurant, where the meat was really, really rare. In fact, still running. Although they were prepared to cook it, a little bit, for the occasional human customers.

  Karan, through Vaemar, had ordered six drones equipped with anti-personnel weaponry. They were rare, and the military had been very nervous about releasing them, and had sent as many officers along with the controlling equipment. They stood in the village, not far from where the pig farm had been before it had been decided to temporarily shift it. It was already dark.

  “We need to hunt the horde. Possibly several hordes. Can you get these things airborne without burning down the palisade?”

  “Certainly, ah, ma’am. They should have no difficulty picking up a large number of bodies, even in the dark. Infrared capacity was noted in your specification.”

  “Then get them up there and quarter the district. Circle around the village and then look east. The beasts travel in large packs.”

  The officers looked at each other, and one of them shrugged. They had been trained to kill kzin, not take orders from one, but these were new and different times. Mental flexibility was definitely part of the modern job description.

  “Very well, ah, my lady. We have six large monitors, one for each drone, and you will see what the drone sees. But please keep the newsmen well back.”

  The drones were released and went up on thin rocket flames. Karan watched the pictures they sent back. The village looked ridiculously small, but for a while she could see herself and the group inside the walls as green flickers against the darker ground. Those walls might have to be rebuilt from stone if this didn’t work. The officers worked with keyb
oards and controllers, and the drones carefully avoided each other and surveyed the region. There were occasional flashes of bright green as small bodies roamed the woods and hills. But nothing like a horde.

  “Further east,” Karan ordered. The officers obeyed, and the six drones drifted off silently. “Deputy, do you recognize the area?” Karan asked one of the native kzin.

  “Yes, my lady. That one is about a quarter of the way to the site of the massacre. And that one is flying over territory where we have seen solitary kzin who do not wish to join us.”

  It was perhaps too early for the lesslocks; the sun, Alpha A, had set only an hour earlier.

  “Where would you expect the lesslocks to be at this time?” Karan asked.

  “It is impossible to say with confidence. They seem to be moving far afield, which means starting early if they are to be back before sunrise, so it would not surprise me if they were further east and perhaps more southerly, since they have already devastated the region where the massacre took place. They are probably smart enough not to revisit the site. Although they will eat carrion, and may remember where their visit produced so many bodies. Of course, we buried them, but maybe they will dig them up again.”

  “What’s that?” one of the newsmen asked, He had been taking pictures straight off the monitors. Others had been getting background shots of Karan and the officers, not to mention the villagers and particularly the kzinti.

  “Ahh,” one of the officers made an approving noise. “Hundreds of them. Each as big as an ape, moving on all fours in the main. I’ll take us in closer.”

  “I’ve got another group,” another officer remarked. “I should say at least a thousand of them. Going down to check up.”

  The two monitors dived towards the hordes. The bodies glowed bright green against the black background. They seemed oblivious to the vehicles above them.

  “They must be lesslocks, but I need to be sure. Any way we can be certain?” Karan asked.

  “Fiat Lux. Let there be light,” an officer ordered, and a searchlight in the drone illuminated some of the horde.

  “Lesslocks,” Karan said with satisfaction. The beasts squinted up into the light, pausing. Some of them carried guns and had bandoliers slung around their squat bodies.

  The drones rose quickly. Whether the beasts had the sense to use muskets against the drones was not at all clear, but a lucky hit could lose some very expensive equipment. A very lucky hit could do worse. Several of these present remembered the grossly asymmetrical war between the kzin Occupation forces and the Resistance that had flickered and smouldered in these red-jungle-clad hills. Human casualties in the end had been something like eighty percent of their original strength, but overconfident, unwary or unlucky kzin had suffered too.

  “Destroy them. Every one of them,” Karan ordered. The last part of the order was probably unnecessary, but Karan was taking no chances. With humans you could never be quite sure. Should lesslocks with guns escape into the great cave systems . . . and there was a question of vengeance. Another thought struck her even as she gave the order: many of the caves were still littered with the debris of decades of war. Not homemade muskets, but strakakkers and plasma-cannon, lasers and beam rifles. There were even stories of nukes . . . Let the lesslocks, now they knew of the principles of modern weapons, get hold of those, and . . .

  This was what the officers had come for. The drones banked and tilted. A missile left the drone with deceptive slowness; it turned into the center of the horde and suddenly accelerated earthwards. Just before impact, it exploded into a vicious hail of slivers of steel and glass, and then detonated again into a ferocious flame of petroleum jelly. There was no microphone on the drone, but Karan had no difficulty imagining the screams of napalmed and razored bodies. She found it immensely satisfying. Something she had read once came to mind. For the female of the species is more deadly than the male. Kipling had got that right, she thought.

  Both of the hordes were wiped out and reduced to roiling black smoke. No others could be found. A few individuals vanished like giant black insects into cracks in the ground, but they were very few. You did not choose your enemies wisely, Karan thought. The drones returned to land outside the stockade after inspecting the ground to make sure it was clear of lesslocks. The villagers cheered the officers and Karan with jubilation. The judge had been avenged.

  Stan the Man had a lot of competition. One of his opposite numbers on a different television station had sneaked away from the southern continent with a less-than-convincing explanation involving a deceased relative. As if any newsman would put a relative, deceased or not, before the job. Unless the relative had been garrotted or hanged, drawn and quartered in a really grisly fashion, of course, when it would become a story, and one with a human interest angle.

  The story of the village where kzin and humans lived happily together broke like a tidal wave. There were, it was true, a few other joint settlements, but in these they kept apart, in a state of watchful, suspicious truce. The fact that a human had taken a bullet for a kzin kit (pictures of Arwen blowing bubbles, and a slightly jealous Orion) showed what brave and noble people human beings were, which the human beings really liked, and pictures of Karan delivering justice cheered the kzin. Of course, there wasn’t much justice to deliver, since asking the lady Karan to adjudicate on just which party had owned the pig and which the piglet seemed a bit, well, trivial really. So some issues had to be, if not manufactured, at least helped along a bit by kindly newsmen and newswomen. The justice Karan had delivered to the lesslocks went down well with both kzin and humans. Pictures of children and kits playing went around the planet. Pictures of dead lesslocks and of the massacre which had caused the retribution followed. People were proud of the brave pioneers who had gone out to face such things, and glad that they had kzin to help them. After the story hit, human beings went out of their way to be decent to kzin, a sort of acknowledgement that the surrender meant genuine peace. Kzin accepted that the truce was something more than a cessation of active fighting and looked as if it was going to last indefinitely. Some of the underlying tension that had outlasted the war began to dissipate. It was a slow process, but a man-kzin alliance was starting to look like something that could happen on Wunderland.

  In due time, the Patriarchy also looked and wondered. So did other things.

  The judge had also looked. Seeing his village on television had surprised him, and the enthusiasm with which telejournalists had pointed out children and kzin kits playing together and going to school together had helped his recovery. But it made him surprised when his visitor was announced.

  “My lady, I thought you were holding down my job back at the village,” he greeted Karan.

  “It is not too demanding at the moment. Problems that they troubled you with, they fear to bring to me, lest my patience be shorter than yours. As it likely is,” Karan confessed. “Mostly it is getting people to own up to being in the wrong when they are. They know inside themselves, they just don’t want to admit it. Both our species suffer from pride, but yours is better at self-deception.”

  “Yes, we’re really good at that,” admitted the judge. “And can I stroke the kits? I think I’m entitled to.”

  “Indeed you are,” Karan agreed, letting the two squirming bundles loose. “It remains a blood debt for all my family.”

  “Don’t really know why I did it. I guess they just look so cute, and that damned lesslock so damnably ugly, my instincts kicked in before I had time to think. I’m not often noble when I have time to think, I promise you.” He stroked Arwen who purred and rolled over on the bed to have her tummy tickled. Orion scratched his way up to join her.

  “At least you have survived. We got you here in time, and they say you will make a complete recovery. You got the best treatment on Ka . . .Wunderland. My mate will meet all costs; it is the very least we could do to show our gratitude. I had to put up with a severe reprimand for exposing them to danger, and I did put up with it. Vaemar sai
d I must feel very guilty indeed to be so meek, it was disturbing him. And when he gets a moment’s free time, he wants to come and thank you himself.”

  “I look forward to renewing our acquaintance.” The judge separated the two kits, which were practicing fighting with each other. “I get tired rather quickly still, and these kits are cute as buttons, but they are wearing an old man out. I hope to meet them again when I have a little more bounce to the ounce myself. Although I’ll never have as much as they do.”

  Karan took them back and held them firmly. “I must go back to holding down your job. And I am very glad I do not have to hold it down indefinitely. You can be sure that my hopes for your early recovery are very sincere. The matron has promised me, however, that she will hide your clothes until she is satisfied that you can be safely discharged, so don’t even think of leaving early. Know that I and my mate are forever in your debt. As are these little furballs.” Karan bowed to the judge as he lay back. Karan looked back at him as he lay there. His eyes were closed with exhaustion, but there was a trace of a smile on his lips.

  “It’s coming in from the senator’s own phone,” the technician told Stan Adler. Stan was leaving for the Southland soon, and having a final check on one of his sources. “It’s crazy. He can’t be blackmailing himself.” They looked at the string of e-mails. “Calls himself Deep Throat on the e-mails, and they come from a made-up email address, but I’ve traced them and they originate on the senator’s own phone, like I said.”

  “Deep Throat. Rings a faint bell. Must check on what it means,” Stan said, half to himself. “I guess it could be that the source is very close to the bastard and has access to von Höhenheim’s phone. A girlfriend maybe. But it’s a chancy business if von Höhenheim gets into the phone and finds out he’s got an account he didn’t know about. Particularly when he reads a few e-mails.”