Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - The Houses of the Kzinti

by Larry Niven

  He saw Ruth and Minuteman emerge from one of the dozen beehive-shaped, grass-and-wattle huts. No, it wasn’t Ruth; he admitted with chagrin that they all looked very much alike. The women paused first, and then he did spot Ruth, waving at him, a few steps nearer. The men moved nearer, falling silent now, laying their new spears and stone axes down as if by prearrangement. They stopped a few paces ahead of the women.

  An older male, almost covered in curly gray hair, continued to advance using a spear—no, it was only a long walking staff—to aid him. He too stopped, with a glance over his shoulder, and then Locklear saw a bald old fellow with a withered leg hobbling past the younger men. Both of the oldsters advanced together then, full of years and dignity without a stitch of clothes. The gray man might have been sixty, with a little potbelly and knobby joints suggesting arthritis. The cripple was perhaps ten years younger but stringy and meatless, and his right thigh had been hideously smashed a long time before. His right leg was inches too short, and his left hip seemed disfigured from years of walking to compensate.

  Locklear knew he needed Ruth now, but feared to risk violating some taboo so soon. “Locklear,” he said, showing empty hands, then tapping his breast.

  The two old men cocked their heads in a parody of Ruth’s familiar gesture, then the curly one began to speak. Of course it was all gibberish, but the walking staff lay on the ground now and their hands were empty.

  Wondering how much they would understand telepathically, Locklear spoke with enough volume for Ruth to hear. “Gentles hunt meat in hills,” he said. “Locklear no like.” He was not smiling.

  The old men used brief phrases to each other, and then the crippled one turned toward the huts. Ruth began to walk forward, smiling wistfully at Locklear as she stopped next to the cripple.

  She waited to hear a few words from each man, and then faced Locklear. “All one tribe now, two leaders,” she said. “Skywater and Shortleg happy to see great shaman who save all from big fire. Ruth happy see Locklear too,” she added softly.

  He told her about the men hunting deer, and that it must stop; they must make do without meat for awhile. She translated. The old men conferred, and their gesture for “no” was the same as Ruth’s. They replied through Ruth that young men had always hunted, and always would.

  He told them that the animals were his, and they must not take what belonged to another. The old men said they could see that he felt in his head the animals were his, but no one owned the great mother land, and no one could own her children. They felt much bad for him. He was a very, very great shaman, but not so good at telling gentles how to live.

  With great care, having chosen the names Cloud and Gimp for the old fellows, he explained that if many animals were killed, soon there would be no more. One day when many little animals were born, he would let them hunt the older ones.

  The gist of their reply was this: Locklear obviously thought he was right, but they were older and therefore wiser. And because they had never run out of game no matter how much they killed, they never could run out of game. If it hadn’t already happened, it wouldn’t ever happen.

  Abruptly, Locklear motioned to Cloud and had Ruth translate: he could prove the scarcity of game if Cloud would ride the scooter as Ruth and Minuteman had ridden it.

  Much silent discussion and some out loud. Then old Cloud climbed aboard and in a moment, the scooter was above the trees.

  From a mile up, they could identify most of the game animals, especially herd beasts in open plains. There weren’t many to see. “No babies at all,” Locklear said, trying to make gestures for “small.” “Cloud, gentles must wait until babies are born.” The old fellow seemed to understand Locklear’s thoughts well enough, and spoke a bit of gibberish, but his head gesture was a Neanderthal “no.”

  Locklear, furious now, used the verniers with abandon. The scooter fled across parched arroyo and broken hill, closer to the ground and now so fast that Locklear himself began to feel nervous. Old Cloud sensed his unease, grasping handholds with gnarled knuckles and hunkering down, and Locklear knew a savage elation. Serve the old bastard right if I splattered him all over Newduvai. And then he saw the old man staring at his eyes, and knew that the thought had been received.

  “No, I won’t do it,” he said. But a part of him had wanted to; still wanted to out of sheer frustration. Cloud’s face was a rigid mask of fear, big teeth showing, and Locklear slowed the scooter as he approached the encampment again.

  Cloud did not wait for the vehicle to settle, but debarked as fast as painful old joints would permit and stood facing his followers without a sound.

  After a moment, with dozens of Neanderthals staring in stunned silence, they all turned their backs, a wave of moans rising from every throat.

  Ruth hesitated, but she too faced away from Locklear.

  “Ruth! No hurt Cloud. Locklear no like hurt gentles.”

  The moans continued as Cloud strode away. “Locklear need to talk to Ruth!” And then as the entire tribe began to walk away, he raised his voice: “No hurt gentles, Ruth!”

  She stopped, but would not look at him as she replied. “Cloud say new people hurt gentles and not know. Locklear hurt Cloud before, want kill Cloud. Locklear go soon soon,” she finished in a sob. Suddenly, then, she was running to catch the others.

  Some of the men were groping for spears now. Locklear did not wait to see what they might do with them. A half-hour later he was using the dolly in the crypt, ranking cage upon cage just inside the obscuring film. With several lion cages stacked like bricks at the entrance, no sensible Neanderthal would go a step further. Later, he could use disassembled stasis units as booby traps as he had done on Kzersatz. But it was nearly dark when he finished, and Locklear was hurrying. Now, for the first time ever on Newduvai, he felt gooseflesh when he thought of camping in the open.

  For days, he considered a return to Kzersatz in the lifeboat, meanwhile improving the cabin with Loli’s help. He got that help very simply, by refusing to let her sleep in her stasis cage unless she did help. Loli was very bright, and learned his language quickly because she could not rely on telepathy. Operating on the sour-grape theory, he told himself that Ruth had been mud-fence ugly; he hadn’t felt any real affection for a Neanderthal bimbo. Not really…

  He managed to ignore Loli’s budding charms by reminding himself that she was no more than twelve or so, and gradually she began to trust him. He wondered how much that trust would suffer if she found he was taking her from stasis only on the days he needed help.

  As the days faded into weeks, the cabin became a two-room affair with a connecting passage for firewood and storage. Loli, after endless scraping and soaking of the stiff goathide in acorn water, fashioned herself a one-piece garment. She taught Locklear how repeated boiling turned acorns into edible nuts, and wove mats of plaited grass for the cabin.

  He let her roam in search of small game once a week until the day she returned empty-handed. He was cutting hinge material of stainless steel from a stasis cage with Kzin shears at the time, and smiled. “Don’t feel bad, Loli. There’s plenty of meat in storage.” The more he used complete sentences, the more she seemed to be picking up the lingo.

  She shrugged, picking at a scab on one of her hard little feet. “Loli not hunt. Gentles hunt Loli.” She read his stare correctly. “Gentles not try to hurt Loli; this many follow and hide,” she said, holding up four fingers and making a comical pantomime of a stealthy hunter.

  He held up four fingers. “Four,” he reminded her. “Did they follow you here?”

  “Maybe want to follow Loli here,” she said, grinning. “Loli think much. Loli go far far—”

  “Very far,” he corrected.

  “Very far to dry place, gentles no follow feet there. Loli hide, run very far where gentles not see. Come back to Locklear.”

  Yes, they’d have trouble tracking her through those desert patches, he realized, and she could’ve doubled back unseen in the arroyos. Or she might have bee
n followed after all. “Loli is smart,” he said, patting her shoulder, “but gentles are smart too. Gentles maybe want to hurt Locklear.”

  “Gentles cover big holes, spears in holes, come back, maybe find kill animal. Maybe kill Locklear.”

  Yeah, they’d do it that way. Or maybe set a fire to burn him out of the cabin. “Loli, would you feel bad if the gentles killed me?”

  In her vast innocence, Loli thought about it before answering. “Little while, yes. Loli don’t like to live alone. Gentles alltime like to play,” she said, with a bump-and-grind routine so outrageous that he burst out laughing. “Locklear don’t trade food for play,” she added, making it obvious that Neanderthal men did.

  “Not until Loli is older,” he said with brutal honesty.

  “Loli is a woman,” she said, pouting as though he had slandered her.

  To shift away from this dangerous topic he said, “Yes, and you can help me make this place safe from gentles.” That was the day he began teaching the girl how to disassemble cages for their most potent parts, the grav polarizers and stasis units.

  They burned off the surrounding ground cover bit by bit during the nights to avoid telltale smoke, and Loli assured him that Neanderthals never ventured from camp on nights as dark as Newduvai’s. Sooner or later, he knew, they were bound to discover his little homestead and he intended to make it a place of terrifying magics.

  As luck would have it, he had over two months to prepare before a far more potent new magic thundered across the sky of Newduvai.

  Locklear swallowed hard the day he heard that long roll of synthetic thunder, recognizing it for what it was. He had told Loli about the kzinti, and now he warned her that they might be near, and saw her coltish legs flash into the forest as he sent the scooter scudding close to the ground toward the heights where his lifeboat was hidden. He would need only one close look to identify a kzin ship.

  Dismounting near the lifeboat, peering past an outcrop and shivering because he was so near the cold force walls, he saw a foreshortened dot hovering near Newduvai’s big lake. Winks of light streaked downward from it; he counted five shots before the ship ceased firing, and knew that its target had to be the big encampment of gentles.

  “If only I had those beam cannons I took apart,” he growled, unconsciously taking the side of the Neanderthals as tendrils of smoke fingered the sky. But he had removed the weapon pylon mounts long before. He released a long-held breath as the ship dwindled to a dot in the sky, hunching his shoulders, wondering how he could have been so naive as to forswear war altogether. Killing was a bitter draught, yet not half so bitter as dying.

  The ship disappeared. Ten minutes later he saw it again, making the kind of circular sweep used for cartography, and this time it passed only a mile distant, and he gasped—for it was not a kzin ship. The little cruiser escort bore Interworld Commission markings.

  “The goddamn tabbies must have taken one of ours,” he muttered to himself, and cursed as he saw the ship break off its sweep. No question about it: they were hovering very near his cabin.

  Locklear could not fight from the lifeboat, but at least he had plenty of spare magazines for his kzin sidearm in the lifeboat’s lockers. He crammed his pockets with spares, expecting to see smoke roiling from his homestead as he began to skulk his scooter low toward home. His little vehicle would not bulk large on radar. And the tabbies might not realize how soon it grew dark on Newduvai. Maybe he could even the odds a little by landing near enough to snipe by the light of his burning cabin. He sneaked the last two hundred meters afoot, already steeling himself for the sight of a burning cabin.

  But the cabin was not burning. And the kzinti were not pillaging because, he saw with utter disbelief, the armed crew surrounding his cabin was human. He had already stood erect when it occurred to him that humans had been known to defect in previous wars—and he was carrying a kzin weapon. He placed the sidearm and spare magazines beneath a stone overhang. Then Locklear strode out of the forest rubber-legged, too weak with relief to be angry at the firing on the village.

  The first man to see him was a rawboned, ruddy private with the height of a belter. He brought his assault rifle to bear on Locklear, then snapped it to “port arms.” Three others spun as the big belter shouted, “Gomulka! We’ve got one!”

  A big fireplug of a man, wearing sergeant’s stripes, whirled and moved away from a cabin window, motioning a smaller man beneath the other window to stay put. Striding toward the belter, he used the heavy bellow of command. “Parker, escort him in! Schmidt, watch the perimeter.”

  The belter trotted toward Locklear while an athletic specimen with a yellow crew cut moved out to watch the forest where Locklear had emerged. Locklear took the belter’s free hand and shook it repeatedly. They walked to the cabin together, and the rest of the group relaxed visibly to see Locklear all but capering in his delight. Two other armed figures appeared from across the clearing, one with curves too lush to be male, and Locklear invited them all in with, “There are no kzinti on this piece of the planet; welcome to Newduvai.”

  Leaning, sitting, they all found their ease in Locklear’s room, and their gazes were as curious as Locklear’s own. He noted the varied shoulder patches: We Made It, Jinx, Wunderland. The woman, wearing the bars of a lieutenant, was evidently a Flatlander like himself. Commander Curt Stockton wore a Canyon patch, standing wiry and erect beside the woman, with pale gray eyes that missed nothing.

  “I was captured by a kzin ship,” Locklear explained, “and marooned. But I suppose that’s all in the records; I call the planet ‘Zoo’ because I think the Outsiders designed it with that in mind.”

  “We had these coordinates, and something vague about prison compounds, from translations of kzin records,” Stockton replied. “You must know a lot about this Zoo place by now.”

  “A fair amount. Listen, I saw you firing on a village near the big lake an hour ago. You mustn’t do it again, Commander. Those people are real Earth Neanderthals, probably the only ones in the entire galaxy.”

  The blocky sergeant, David Gomulka, slid his gaze to lock on Stockton’s and shrugged big sloping shoulders. The woman, a close-cropped brunette whose cinched belt advertised her charms, gave Locklear a brilliant smile and sat down on his pallet. “I’m Grace Agostinho; Lieutenant, Manaus Intelligence Corps, Earth. Forgive our manners, Mr. Locklear, we’ve been in heavy fighting along the Rim and this isn’t exactly what we expected to find.”

  “Me neither,” Locklear smiled, then turned serious. “I hope you didn’t destroy that village.”

  “Sorry about that,” Stockton said. “We may have caused a few casualties when we opened fire on those huts. I ordered the firing stopped as soon as I saw they weren’t kzinti. But don’t look so glum, Locklear; it’s not as if they were human.”

  “Damn right they are,” Locklear insisted. “As you’ll soon find out, if we can get their trust again. I’ve even taught a few of ’em some of our language. And that’s not all. But hey, I’m dying of curiosity without any news from outside. Is the war over?”

  Commander Stockton coughed lightly for attention and the others seemed as attentive as Locklear. “It looks good around the core worlds, but in the Rim sectors it’s still anybody’s war.” He jerked a thumb toward the two-hundred-ton craft, twice the length of a kzin lifeboat, that rested on its repulsor jacks at the edge of the clearing with its own small pinnace clinging to its back. “The Anthony Wayne is the kind of cruiser escort they don’t mind turning over to small combat teams like mine. The big brass gave us this mission after we captured some kzinti files from a tabby dreadnought. Not as good as R & R back home, but we’re glad of the break.” Stockton’s grin was infectious.

  “I haven’t had time to set up a distillery,” Locklear said, “or I’d offer you drinks on the house.”

  “A man could get parched here,” said a swarthy little private.

  “Good idea, Gazho. You’re detailed to get some medicinal brandy from the med stores,”
said Stockton.

  As the private hurried out, Locklear said, “You could probably let the rest of the crew out to stretch their legs, you know. Not much to guard against on Newduvai.”

  “What you see is all there is,” said a compact private with high cheekbones and a Crashlander medic patch. Locklear had not heard him speak before. Softly accented, laconic; almost a scholar’s diction. But that’s what you might expect of a military medic.

  Stockton’s quick gaze riveted the man as if to say, “that’s enough.” To Locklear he nodded. “Meet Soichiro Lee; an intern before the war. Has a tendency to act as if a combat team is a democratic outfit but,” his glance toward Lee was amused now, “he’s a good sawbones. Anyhow, the Wayne can take care of herself. We’ve set her auto defenses for voice recognition when the hatch is closed, so don’t go wandering closer than ten meters without one of us. And if one of those hairy apes throws a rock at her, she might just burn him for his troubles.”

  Locklear nodded. “A crew of seven; that’s pretty thin.”

  Stockton, carefully: “You want to expand on that?”

  Locklear: “I mean, you’ve got your crew pretty thinly spread. The tabbies have the same problem, though. The bunch that marooned me here had only four members.”

  Sergeant Gomulka exhaled heavily, catching Stockton’s glance. “Commander, with your permission: Locklear here might have some ideas about those tabby records.”

  “Umm. Yeah, I suppose,” with some reluctance. “Locklear, apparently the kzinti felt there was some valuable secret, a weapon maybe, here on Zoo. They intended to return for it. Any idea what it was?”