Man-Kzin Wars 25th Anniversary Edition

by Larry Niven

  The other ship began to turn away from its tormentor. Its drive end glowed red.

  “They’re trying to get away,” the Captain said, as the glowing end swung toward them. “Are you sure they can’t?”

  “Yes, sir. That light drive won’t take them anywhere.”

  The Captain purred thoughtfully. “What would happen if the light hit our ship?”

  “Just a bright light, I think. The lens is flat, so it must be emitting a very wide beam. They’d need a parabolic reflector to be dangerous. Unless—” His ears went straight up.

  “Unless what?” The Captain spoke softly, demandingly.

  “A laser. But that’s all right, sir. They don’t have any weapons.”

  The Captain sprang at the control board. “Stupid!” he spat. “They don’t know weapons from sthondat blood. Weapons Officer! How could a telepath find out what they don’t know? WEAPONS OFFICER!”

  “Here, sir.”

  “Burn—”

  An awful light shone in the control dome. The Captain burst into flame, then blew out as the air left through a glowing split in the dome.

  Steve was lying on his back. The ship was spinning again, pressing him into what felt like his own bunk.

  He opened his eyes.

  Jim Davis crossed the room and stood over him. “You awake?”

  Steve sat bolt upright, his eyes wide.

  “Easy.” Jim’s gray eyes were concerned.

  Steve blinked up at him. “What happened?” he asked, and discovered how hoarse he was.

  Jim sat down in one of the chairs. “You tell me. We tried to get to the control room when the ship started moving. Why didn’t you ring the strap-down? You turned off the drive just as Ann came through the door. Then you fainted.”

  “How about the other ship?” Steve tried to repress the urgency in his voice, and couldn’t.

  “Some of the others are over there now, examining the wreckage.” Steve felt his heart stop. “I guess I was afraid from the start that alien ship was dangerous. I’m more psychist than emdee, and I qualified for history class, so maybe I know more than is good for me about human nature. Too much to think that beings with space travel will automatically be peaceful. I tried to think so, but they aren’t. They’ve got things any self-respecting human being would be ashamed to have nightmares about. Bomb missiles, fusion bombs, lasers, that induction injector they used on us. And antimissiles. You know what that means? They’ve got enemies like themselves, Steve. Maybe nearby.”

  “So I killed them.” The room seemed to swoop around him, but his voice came out miraculously steady.

  “You saved the ship.”

  “It was an accident. I was trying to get us away.”

  “No, you weren’t.” Davis ‘ accusation was as casual as if he were describing the chemical makeup of urea. “That ship was four hundred miles away. You would have had to sight on it with a telescope to hit it. You knew what you were doing, too, because you turned off the drive as soon as you’d burned through the ship.”

  Steve’s back muscles would no longer support him. He flopped back to horizontal. “All right, you know,” he told the ceiling. “Do the others?”

  “I doubt it. Killing in self-defense is too far outside their experience. I think Sue’s guessed.”

  “Oooo.”

  “If she has, she’s taking it well,” Davis said briskly. “Better than most of them will, when they find out the universe is full of warriors. This is the end of the world, Steve.”

  “What?”

  “I’m being theatrical. But it is. Three hundred years of the peaceful life for everyone. They’ll call it the Golden Age. No starvation, no war, no physical sickness other than senescence, no permanent mental sickness at all, even by our rigid standards. When someone over fourteen tries to use his fist on someone else we say he’s sick, and we cure him. And now it’s over. Peace isn’t a stable condition, not for us. Maybe not for anything that lives.”

  “Can I see the ship from here?”

  “Yes. It’s just behind us.”

  Steve rolled out of bed, went to the window.

  Someone had steered the ships much closer together. The Kzinti ship was a huge red sphere with ugly projections scattered at seeming random over the hull. The beam had sliced it into two unequal halves, sliced it like an ax through an egg. Steve watched, unable to turn aside, as the big half rotated to show its honeycombed interior.

  “In a little while,” said Jim, “the men will be coming back. They’ll be frightened. Someone will probably insist that we arm ourselves against the next attacks, using weapons from the other ship. I’ll have to agree with him.

  “Maybe they’ll think I’m sick myself. Maybe I am. But it’s the kind of sickness we’ll need.” Jim looked desperately unhappy. “We’re going to become an armed society. And of course we’ll have to warn the Earth . . .”

  IRON

  BY

  POUL ANDERSON

  1

  The kzin screamed and leaped.

  In any true gravity field, Robert Saxtorph would have been dead half a minute later. The body has its wisdom, and his had been schooled through hard years. Before he really knew what a thunderbolt was coming at him, he had sprung aside—against the asteroid spin. As his weight dropped, he thrust a foot once more to drive himself off the deck, strike a wallfront, recover control over his mass, and bounce to a crouch.

  The kzin was clearly not trained for such tricks. He had pounced straight out of a crosslane, parallel to Tiamat’s rotation axis. Coriolis force was too slight to matter. But instead of his prey, he hit the opposite side of Ranzau Passage. Pastel plastic cracked under the impact; the metal behind it boomed. He recovered with the swiftness of his kind, whirled about, and snarled.

  For an instant, neither being moved. Ten meters from him, the kzin stood knife-sharp in Saxtorph’s awareness. It was as if he could count every red-orange hair of the pelt. Round yellow eyes glared at him out of the catlike face, above the mouthful of fangs. Bat-wing ears were folded out of sight into the fur, for combat. The naked tail was angled past a columnar thigh, stiffly held. The claws were out, jet-black, on all four digits of either hand. Except for a phone on his left wrist, the kzin was unclad. That seemed to make even greater his 250 centimeters of height, his barrel thickness.

  Before and behind the two, Ranzau Passage curved away. Windows in the wallfronts were empty, doors closed, signs turned off; workers had gone home for the nightwatch. They were always few, anyway. This industrial district had been devoted largely to the production of spaceship equipment which the hyperdrive was making as obsolete as fission power.

  There was no time to be afraid. “Hey, wait a minute, friend,” Saxtorph heard himself exclaim automatically, “I never saw you before, never did you any harm, didn’t even jostle you—”

  Of course that was useless, whether or not the kzin knew English. Saxtorph hadn’t adopted the stance which indicated peacefulness. It would have put him off balance. The kzin bounded at him.

  Saxtorph released the tension in his right knee and swayed aside. Coming upspin, his speed suddenly lessening his weight, the kzin—definitely not a veteran of space—went by too fast to change direction at once. As he passed, almost brushing the man, the gingery smell of his excitement filling the air, Saxtorph thrust fingers at an eye. That was just about the only vulnerable point when a human was unarmed. The kzin yowled; echoes rang.

  Saxtorph was shouting too, “Help, murder, help!”

  Somebody should be in earshot of that. The kzin skidded to a halt and whipped about. It would have been astounding how quick and agile his bulk was, if Saxtorph hadn’t seen action on the ground during the war.

  Again saving his breath, the man backed downspin, but slantwise, so that he added little to his weight. Charging full-out, the kzin handicapped himself much more. The extra drag on his mass meant nothing to his muscles, but confused his reflexes. Dodging about, Saxtorph concentrated first on avoiding the sweeps o
f those claws, second on keeping the velocity parameters unpredictably variable. From time to time he yelled.

  One slash connected. It ripped his tunic from collar to belt, and the undershirt beneath. Blood welled along shallow gashes. As he jumped clear, Saxtorph cracked the blade of his hand onto the flat nose before him. It did no real harm, but hurt. The kzin’s eyes widened. The pupil of the undamaged one grew narrower yet. He had seen the scars across his opponent’s chest. This human had encountered at least one kzin before, face to face.

  But Saxtorph was 15 years younger then, and equipped with a Gurkha knife. Now the wind was gusting out of him. His gullet was afire. Sluggishness crept into his motions. “Ya-a-ah, police, help! Ki-yai!”

  A whistle skirled. The kzin halted. He stared past Saxtorph. The man dared not turn his head, but he heard cries and footfalls. The kzin turned and sped in the opposite direction, upspin. He whirled into the first crosslane he came to and disappeared.

  And that wasn’t like his breed, either. Saxtorph sagged back against a wallfront and sobbed breath into his lungs. Sweat was cold and acrid on him. He felt the beginnings of the shakes and started calling calm down on himself, as the Zen master who helped train him for war had taught.

  One cop waved off a score or so of people whom the commotion had drawn after him and his companion. The other approached Saxtorph. He was stocky, clean-shaven, unremarkable except for the way he cocked his ears forward—neither aristocrat nor Belter, just a commoner from Wunderland. “Was ist hier los?” he demanded somewhat wildly.

  Saxtorph could have recalled the Danish of his childhood, before the family moved to America, and brushed the rust off what German he’d once studied, and made a stab at this language. The hell with it. “Y-y-you speak English?” he panted.

  “Ja, some,” the policeman answered. “Vat is t’is? Don’t you know not to push a kzin around?”

  “I sure do know, and did nothing of the sort.” Steadiness was returning. “He bushwhacked me, completely unprovoked. And, yes, this sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen with kzinti, and I can’t make any more sense of it than you. Aren’t you going to chase him?”

  “He’s gone,” said the policeman glumly. “He vill be back in Tigertown and t’e trail lost before ve can bring a sniffer to follow him. How you going tell vun of t’ose Teufel from anot’er? You come along to t’e station, sir. Ve vill give you first aid and take your statement.”

  Saxtorph drew a long breath, grinned lopsidedly, and replied, “Okay. I’ll want to make a couple of phone calls. My wife, and—it’d be smart to ask Commissioner Markham if I can put off my appointment with him.”

  2

  Tiamat is much less known outside its system than it deserves to be. Once hyperdrive transport has become readily available and cheap, it may well be receiving tourists from all of human space: for it is a curious object, with considerable historical significance as well.

  Circling Alpha Centauri A near the middle of those asteroids called the Serpent Swarm, it was originally a chondritic body with a sideritic component giving it more structural strength than is usual for that kind. A rough cylinder, about 50 kilometers in length and 20 in diameter, it rotated on its long axis in a bit over ten hours; and at the epoch when humans arrived, that axis happened to be almost normal to the orbital plane. Those who settled on Wunderland paid it no attention; they had a habitable planet. The Belters who came later, from the asteroids of the Solar System, realized what a treasure was theirs. Little work was needed to make the cylinder smooth, control precession, and give it a centrifugal acceleration of one g at the circumference. With its axial orientation, the velocity changes for spacecraft to dock were minimal, and magnetic anchors easily held them fast until they were ready to depart. The excavation of rooms and passages in the yielding material went rapidly. Thereafter, spaces just under the surface provided Earth-weight for such activities as required it, including the bringing of babies to term; farther inward were the levels of successively lower weight, where Belters felt comfortable and where other undertakings were possible.

  Everywhere around orbited members of the Swarm, their mineral wealth held in negligible gravity wells. Tiamat boomed. It became an industrial center, devoted especially to the production of things associated with spacefaring.

  When the kzinti invaded, they were quick to realize its importance. Their introduction of the gravity polarizer changed many of the manufacturing programs, but scarcely affected Tiamat itself; one seldom had any reason to adjust the field in a given section, since one could have whatever weight was desired simply by going to the appropriate level.

  Out of the years that followed have come countless stories of heroism, cowardice, resistance, collaboration, sabotage, salvage, ingenuity, intrigue, atrocity, mercy. Some are true. Certainly, when the human hyperdrive armada entered the Centaurian System, Tiamat might well have been destroyed, had not the Belter freedom fighters taken it over from within.

  So ended its heroic age. The rest is anticlimax. More and more, new technologies and new horizons are making it a relic.

  However, it is still populous and interesting. Not least of its attractions, though a mixed blessing, are the kzinti. Of those who stayed behind at this sun, or actually sought there, after the war—disgraced combatants, individuals who had formed ties too strong to break, Kdaptist refugees, eccentrics, and others less understandable—a goodly proportion have their colony within Tiamat. Tigertown is well worth visiting, in a properly briefed tour group with an experienced guide.

  Tiamat also contains the headquarters of the Interworld Space Commission, which likewise is not as much in the awareness of the general public as it ought to be. Now that the hyperdrive has abruptly opened a way to far more undertakings than there are ships and personnel to carry out, rivalry for those resources often gets bitter. It can become political, planet versus planet at a time when faster-than-light travel has made peace between them as necessary as peace between nations on Earth had become when humankind was starting its outward venture. Until we have created enough capability to satisfy everyone, we must allocate. Alpha Centauri—Wunderland, parts of the Serpent Swarm—alone among human dwelling places, suffered kzin occupation, almost half a century of it. Alpha Centaurian men and women endured, or waged guerrilla warfare from remote and desolate bases, until the liberation. Who would question their dedication to our species as a whole?

  At least, it was an obvious symbolism to make them the host folk of the Commission; and Tiamat, not yet into its postwar decline, was a natural choice for the seat.

  3

  “Good evening,” replied Dorcas Glengarry Saxtorph. The headwaiter had immediately identified her as being from the Solar System and greeted her in English. “I was to meet Professor Tregennis. The reservation may be in the name of Laurinda Brozik.” You didn’t just walk into the Star Well; it was small and expensive.

  Very briefly, his smoothness failed him and he let his gaze linger. Ten years after the end of the war, when outworlders had become a substantial fraction of the patronage, she was nonetheless a striking sight. A Belter, 185 centimeters in height, slender to the point of leanness, she was not in that respect different from those who had inhabited the Swarm for generations. However, you seldom met features so severely classic, fair-skinned, with large green eyes under arching brows. The molding of her head was emphasized by the Sol-Belter style, scalp depilated except for a crest of mahogany hair that in her case swept halfway down her back. A shimmery gray gown folded and refolded itself around carriage and gestures which, even for a person of spacer ancestry, were extraordinarily precise.

  The headwaiter regained professionalism. “Ah, yes, of course, madame.” Dorcas didn’t show her forty Earthyears much, but nobody would take her for a girl. “This way, please.”

  The tables were arranged around a sunken transparency, ten meters across, which gave on the surface of Tiamat and thus the sky beyond. Nonreflecting, in the dim interior light it seemed indeed a well of nig
ht which the stars crowded, slowly streaming. The table Dorcas reached was on the bottom tier, with a view directly down into infinity. A glowlamp on it cast softness over cloth, silver, ceramic, and the two people already seated.

  Arthur Tregennis rose, courtly as ever. A Plateaunian of Crew descent, the astrophysicist stood as tall as she did and still more slim, practically skeletal. He had the flared hook nose and high cheekbones of his kindred; the long nail on his left little finger proclaimed him an aristocrat of his planet, never subject to manual labor. Dorcas sometimes wondered why he kept that affectation, when he admitted to having sympathized with the democrats and their revolution, 33 years ago. Habit, perhaps. Otherwise he was an unassuming old fellow.

  “Welcome, my lady,” he said. His English was rather flat. Since the advent of hyperdrive and hyperwave, he’d been to so many scientific conferences, or in voice-to-voice contact with colleagues, that native accent seemed to have worn off—except, maybe, when he was with his own folk on top of Mount Lookitthat. “Ah, is Robert detained?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Dorcas let the waiter seat her. She’d reacquired a little sophistication since the war. “He had a nasty encounter, and the aftermath is still retro on him. He told me to come alone, give you his regrets, and bring back whatever word you have for us.”

  “Oh, dear,” Laurinda Brozik whispered. “He’s all right, isn’t he?”

  The English of Tregennis’ graduate student was harder for Dorcas to follow than his. It was from We Made It.

  The young woman was not a typical Crashlander—is there any such thing as a typical anything?—but she could not have been mistaken for a person from anywhere else. Likewise tall and finely sculptured, she seemed attenuated, arachnodactylic, somehow both awkward and eerily graceful, as if about to go into a contortion such as her race was capable of. She belonged to the large albino minority on the planet, with snowy skin, big red eyes, white hair combed straight down to the shoulders. In contrast to Tregennis’ quiet tunic and trousers, she wore a gown of golden-hued fabric—an expert would have identified it as Terrestrial silk—and an arrowhead pendant of topaz; but somehow she wore them shyly.