Man-Kzin Wars XIV

by Larry Niven

  The Johnson—apparently The Johnson—nodded and said, “That’s to produce an effect that’s necessary for the thing to work.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kershner said, looking surprised.

  “What’s the effect?”

  Kershner gave a faint sigh and began explaining hyperwave physics in baby talk, as if he were describing it to a journalist.

  The old man stopped him after no more than fifteen seconds and said, “It sounds like you’re setting up a standing wave to maintain a constant peak pulse, because keeping the whole system at that power level will burn it out.”

  Kershner stopped dead, blinked about nine times, and said, “Yes.”

  “How big is it?”

  Kershner held up his thumb and forefinger a little ways apart.

  “The Blacker?” said The Johnson.

  An old woman said, “Yes?”

  “What’s the stuff for alloys in constant friction, very rare?”

  “Rhenium?”

  “That’s it, thanks—Why can’t you run the wave at full strength through a cubic foot or so of rhenium? There’s plenty of asteroids.”

  What Persoff knew about this subject he had mostly learned from journalists’ work, but it must have been a good idea, because Kershner got all excited. “That could work! People still think of rhenium as too rare to be used for most things, but you’re right, there’s lots of asteroids! How did you think of it?”

  “Captain Persoff described hyperdrive, and we spent yesterday discussing possible causes for the Blind Spot effect and working out implications. It seemed to us that in hyperspace, normal matter must be the local equivalent of a massless particle, which accounts for the standard speed.”

  “That’s right! Captain, permission to—”

  “Denied. It’ll wait until after we’ve attended the ceremony.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We don’t mind,” said The Johnson.

  “Yes, we do,” said someone who must have been The Hale. “Captain Persoff, there’s been some discussion, and the general opinion is that the ship’s organics will have to be replaced. Since the trees have to be cut anyway, it’ll be best all around if they’re used for that. And we’d appreciate it if you could use everything from the first row there. Roots and all.”

  “Thank you, that’ll help a lot.” They were taking it a lot better than he’d dared hope.

  The Blacker stepped forward. In the moment before she spoke, Persoff had a chance to notice and realize a lot of things that he hadn’t fitted together before. To begin with, she was wearing something that actually looked sort of Polynesian: a necklace of long, sharp teeth. Old teeth. Kzinti teeth. He’d been assuming the Galaxias had merely fired, survived, and gotten thrown this way, but that had to be wrong: they knew what the kzinti called themselves, which meant they’d had prisoners, and they’d forced them to learn English, because they didn’t use kzin loan words. Near the Blacker there were other women, in hearing range but not close enough to interrupt, who were dressed in clinging outfits of orange fur, extremely worn in spots.

  He was suddenly very glad he hadn’t been able to bring any Wunderkzin. Something had happened back then, and these people made damned sure they remembered it.

  “Captain,” said The Blacker, “are you certain you wish to be part of this? It can be a strain even for us, and we grow up with it.”

  “You’re helping us, and we couldn’t do without you. It seems to me we have to show our respect.”

  “Then you do understand,” she said, and turned and led the other Blackers west, toward the trees.

  Eden came to his side and said, “She jumps to conclusions sometimes. Do you have recording devices?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Use them. You’ll see.” The Foote walked after the Blackers.

  “Recorders on, everyone,” Persoff said.

  At the trees, the procession halted, and all the adults moved to let the children through. The only grownups near the front were carrying babies. The Blacker waited until the Yorktown’s officers were near, then said, “Pay attention. We can never do this again. People have come to take us home. You must say goodbye to your family.” She put her hand on the nearest tree.

  “This is James Foote, who gave up everything he had to build the Galaxias. It was he who extended the field around the ship after the enemy boat rammed us, so that the drive would destroy its mothership and leave them dependent on us no matter if we won or lost. When he was dying he asked to be frozen, so that he could be buried on the planet he always hoped to reach. This was a tiny island then, but the Pilot crushed rock, buried James Foote, planted this tree over him, making the first true soil in the world, and brought rocks from other islands to protect it from the tide, and so we have done ever since when we bring our dead here.” As she moved to the next tree, all the children came up and touched the first, one by one. Last of all, mothers took their infants to the tree and guided a hand to touch it, so that each baby could be told later that this had been done.

  Persoff was in something like clinical shock. This was their cemetery, and their museum.

  And to beat the kzinti they were willing to cut it all down and grind it to pulp.

  “This is Captain Jonas Hale, who was blinded fighting the officer of the kzin attack boat. He advised the Pilot through as much of the trip as he could, and was the best friend the Pilot could have wished for.” One by one, they all touched the tree.

  “This is Olga Blacker, who kept us all from going mad, by listening to everything we needed to say, and reminding us of the good things.” The procession continued.

  “This is Russelle Wells, who sneaked aboard to be with her boyfriend, who had lied and wasn’t actually part of the crew. She raised thirty-one infants with adult bodies into people who could raise children of their own, and never once had to hurt any of them.” The Blacker bowed to the tree before moving on.

  “This is Lavinia Schafer, who taught kzin prisoners English, and then taught them to answer questions. And outlived them all.” The Blacker clenched a fist and raised it overhead in salute.

  “This is Academician Marion Johnson, who made so many ruined things work that we could spend two days and a night naming them all, and who got aboard the Galaxias in a crate because he was judged too ill for space travel. He showed us how to cool the planet we needed, and died while we were waiting.”

  The seventh tree was touched with special care. “This is Stuart William Denver, who brought us here in a damaged ship through uncharted wilderness, who gave us all hope when we despaired, and who landed all of us and all we needed to live on this world, and died of his burns after getting the last passengers out of the lander as it sank.” She kissed the tree. One by one, the rest did too. After the children had moved on, the adults moved in to do the same.

  As she moved on to introduce the next rank of trees, Persoff, who was blind with tears, heard Kershner say softly, “And the kzinti call themselves Heroes?”

  “I THINK I’VE SOLVED the Marmalade problem,” General Leonie Rykermann told her husband, Nils Rykermann. “The monastery.”

  The Marmalade problem had been preoccupying her thoughts for some time. Had Marmalade been reared on Kzin or on any kzin-ruled world, it is very unlikely that he would have survived childhood. However, he was reared on Wunderland, after Liberation, and had lived to be a problem.

  What the circumstances of his birth were, no one knew. After the cease-fire there had been many orphans, kzin and human, wandering the scarred surface of the planet. Some formed savage feral gangs. Marmalade had been found, very near death, not far from Circle Bay Monastery. He had been clutching a locket, engraved with a sigil such as were issued by Conservers of the Ancestral Past.

  Instead of killing him the farmers had obeyed the abbott’s instructions and handed him over to the monastery’s care. It appeared he had previously been selected for telepath training—so much he could tell them, and the telepath syndrome generally produced smaller and
weaker creatures than the huge fighting kzin—but he remembered very little beyond that. He fetched up at length in the orphanage where Leonie Rykermann was trying, in the face of considerable opposition, to turn parentless kittens into Wunderkzin—kzin who might cooperate with the humans on Wunderland.

  Leonie was a patient, dedicated woman, and had established understandings—friendships even—with some kzin, not least Rarrgh, the Senechal of Vaemar-Riit, prince of the kzin on liberated Wunderland, while Orlando, Vaemar’s eldest son, regarded her with fierce possessiveness.

  Very few humans knew more of kzin psychology (if that was the term for it), and she and Rarrgh had saved one another’s lives—indeed, that was how they had met. But though she was relatively used to dealing with kzin, including young kzin, she found Marmalade a handful.

  The problem was not the usual one among young male kzin of wild, reckless bravery and aggression. Marmalade was a coward. Not merely cautious as Vaemar-Riit sometimes was (and as he had tried to teach Orlando to be), but obsessively, unreasoningly fearful. It was probably something to do with his aborted telepath conditioning, allowing him to feel empathy for other creatures’ minds, but not how to control or use this faculty. His mind had been opened for telepath training but not trained further, and fear had run wild in it. It might also be because he had the typical telepath’s physical weakness, which marked him out in the rough-and-tumble of the other kittens’ play and hunts. Some cowardly kzin compensated for their condition with cunning, but Marmalade had no particularly large ration of that.

  When he had been taken sailing on Wunderland’s seas, in the boisterous low-gravity waves, he had clung to the boat’s mast with all four limbs, shivering with fear. When the orphanage kits were taken for a brief excursion into sub-orbital space, he had been found trying to hide from the rollcall, and during the flight he had disappeared, to be found crouched under a bunk, flooding the cabin with fear-pheromones.

  He was not only afraid of real dangers, like lightning storms and flash floods, or animals like the poison-fanged Beam’s Beasts or tigrepards, or the crocodilians and other carnivores of nearby Grossgeister Swamp such fears would have been more than bad enough in the eyes of a real kzin, even a humble noncombatant, but Marmalade was frightened also of innocuous things like noise, crowds and strangers.

  Leonie had soon realized that Marmalade was a problem. He had to be kept separate from the other kittens, who would have made short work of him if they had been given the chance. To turn him out to make his own way on Wunderland would have been an equally certain death sentence. His very “name,” ridiculous and meaningless, would be taken as a deadly insult to a kzin of real Name should he encounter one. Not only were there kzin at large, there were also fanatically anti-kzin humans, survivors of the Occupation, who, peace treaty or not, would attack any kzin they found alone and vulnerable-looking. In the orphanage he was kept in a sort of protective custody, in one of the isolation units, but plainly this state could not go on for ever.

  There was no point in Leonie even asking the kzinti she knew well, like Rarrgh or Vaemar, for advice. They, she knew, would simply consider him a disgrace to the Heroes’ species. Vaemar might live as a modern, Wunderkzin prince, but he was not as advanced as all that. Rarrgh and she had an odd bond and a strong one between them, dating back to the day he had received his Name, but he was an old senior sergeant of the Patriarch’s armed forces, and the motto of senior sergeants of all races tended to be: “There are no excuses for anything!”

  They might give him a chance to prove his worth in a death-duel, but she would not bet on it, and anyway, weak and slow as he was, he would be bound to lose. Leonie herself could beat him in the practice arena, wearing heavily padded protective clothing, for he did not know how to even try to fight. And it was a rough rule of thumb that in hand-to-hand combat, a real kzin was the equal of about forty humans. That was not a guess. That kill-ratio had actually been achieved many a time, though of course guns tended to equalize things. (Specially trained Jinxians, the heaviest bipeds in known space after the full-grown male kzinti, might do better with long-practiced scientific kicks and blows, but only, it was understood, at the cost of their own lives. They would get in one strike and no more.)

  Anyway, Marmalade was neither fighting kzin nor telepath. He had no other special gifts that would justify his continued existence, even in Wunderkzin society, even as a mere noncombatant. His stooped gait, hunched shoulders and scuffling feet proclaimed “weakling” and “victim.” Fortunately for him, “coward” was less easy to recognize, simply because among kzinti of all classes it was so rare. And yet, there was something about him that touched Leonie. Perhaps it was the fact that she had seen him trying to be brave.

  “You’re not thinking of making a monk out of a kzin, are you?” Nils asked her. “Even a kzin like Marmalade. The abbot is a kind old man, but I can’t see that he’d stand for it.”

  “No,” said Leonie, “not a monk.”

  It was reading the old classic Brideshead Revisited that gave her a clue to the solution. “Listen to this,” she told Nils: “Monasteries, it says here, often had a few odd hangers-on who don’t fit into either the monastic order or the world.”

  “Yes, I know there are a couple like that at Circle Bay. Old men the Occupation drove crazy, most of them. Drunk half the time.”

  “Why not Marmalade? He could be useful without having to take any vows or anything. I know he’s weak for a kzin, but he’s still stronger than any human except maybe a male Jinxian. And he speaks Wunderlander.”

  “What could he do?

  “Plenty. In the book, the man who can’t do anything else becomes a sort of under-porter. He could do odd jobs.”

  Kzin intelligence is baffling to humans. They could solve problems brilliantly, and most of them, if put to it, could be quite inventive mechanically, but they had strange blind spots. It was because of those blind spots that the wars lasted long enough for humans to get the hyperdrive. Having a kzin about the place, especially a kzin as docile as Marmalade, might be quite useful, not to mention the fact that his mere presence would be an effective deterrent to human thieves or outlaws, of which post-war Wunderland had more than its share.

  The abbot, when the suggestion was put to him, was happy enough to take him in, providing the government supplied him with kzin infantry rations and other upkeep and he left the monastery’s animals alone, except for herding them if necessary.

  One of the monastery’s main efforts was to build human-kzin cooperation, and this looked like a good opportunity to advance it. The abbot, turning the matter over in his mind, foresaw generations of monks going out all over the planet, and beyond, remembering the kzin as a quaint, harmless character who had been part of their novice days. It was perhaps overly optimistic of him, but the abbot was by nature an optimist. Anyway, he was pleased to do a favor to the Rykermanns, two of the greatest heroes of the Resistance, and with a degree of official power. A hut was found for Marmalade and he settled down to an undemanding life: fetching and carrying, placing and changing flowers in the monastery chapel and the Abbot’s study, moving furniture and farming implements, and, when he had overcome his timidity over them, tending the infant Jotok in their breeding ponds. There were even a few lines about it in the news.

  Nils Rykermann, as a member of the Legislature, held a weekly “surgery” to hear constituents’ problems. A few days after they had left Marmalade at the monastery, he had two unusual visitors.

  There was nothing unusual about their being unusual. There were plenty of odd types on Wunderland, but these were something new to him: a human and a kzin, both old, small and withered-looking, the human with a long white beard, and a wise, kindly face, the kzin with white fur on his muzzle and about his ragged ears. Nils found himself warming to the old man. There was something intrinsically good projected even in the deep, thoughtful timbre of his voice. Otherwise, the white hair at least gave them a curiously similar look. Wunderland had had a long p
eriod under the Occupation when geriatric drugs had been available only to high-ranking collaborationists and Resistance leaders like Nils and Leonie, and it was plain that the old man had not been one who had qualified to receive them. They carried a bundle.

  The human introduced himself as Pieter von Pelt; the kzin was nameless, and apparently spoke neither English nor the Angdeutsch-like Wunderlander.

  They had, von Pelt explained, been prospecting in the Jotun Mountains and had come across a wrecked kzin ship, shot down in the war. The wreckage was much scattered and there was little worth keeping, but they had found the ship’s logbook and, intact, the elaborately sealed metal container of the Patriarch’s urine which every kzin capital ship carried. Like any packages the Rykermannns received, it was X-rayed and found to contain liquid, with a thick, solid top and bottom. It was sealed with an elaborate seal. Leonie pointed to a design on its side. She took it and examined it closely.

  “Like Marmalade’s locket.”

  “Ask him if he knows what it is?”

  The old prospector and the old kzin spoke together in the slaves’ patois. The Rykermanns, who often had to deal with kzin who still considered monkeys’ attempts to use the Heroes’ Tongue a deathly insult, the surrender notwithstanding, could follow it, though there was no reason to betray the fact. It was, they gathered, the sigil of the captain of the ship, scion of an ancient aristocratic kzin family, which had been attracted to Wunderland from a distant planet by rumors of the easy pickings to be had there.

  How did the old kzin know this?

  He had been one of the ship’s officers and had escaped in a boat, carrying the jar with him, von Pelt explained. He had attached himself to one of the local magnates. He had buried the jar on landing and had retrieved it only lately.

  The war had ended shortly afterwards. He had followed the progress of the peace negotiations from a distance, and though it had taken him some time to adjust to the idea of kzin and humans living together in peace, he had adjusted. They had met when prospecting and had joined up. Such alliances were becoming less uncommon and the human authorities welcomed them.