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

by Larry Niven

  He smiled at her and ran a hand over his crest. “But we were told the tekkamaki here is fine, the oyabun makes the best,” he said. Ingrid could read the thought that followed: Whatever the fuck that means.

  The frozen mask of the waitress’s face could not alter, but the quick duck of her head was empty of the commonplace tension of a moment before. She returned quickly with bowls of soup and drinking straws; it was some sort of fish broth with onions and a strange musky undertaste. They drank in silence, waiting. For what, the pussies to come and get us? she thought. The Catskinner-computer had said Markham was on the level—but also that he was capable of utter treachery once he had convinced himself that Right was on his side, and that to Markham the only ultimate judge of Right was, guess who, the infallible Markham.

  Gottdamned Herrenmann, she mused: going on fifty years objective, everything else in the system had collapsed into shit, and the arrogant lop-bearded bastards hadn’t changed a bit…

  A man slid through the screen. Expensively nondescript dress, gray oversuit, and bowl-cut black hair. Hint of an expensive natural cologne. Infocomp at his waist, and the silver button of a reader-bonephone behind his ear. This was Markham’s “independent entrepreneur.” Spoken with tones of deepest contempt, more than a Herrenmann’s usual disdain for business, so probably some type of criminal like McAllistaire. She kept a calm smile on her face as she studied the man, walling off the remembered sickness as the kicking doll-figures tumbled into space, bleeding from every orifice. Oriental, definitely; there were Sina and Nipponjin enclaves down on Wunderland, ethnic separatists like many of the early settlers. Not in the Serpent Swarm Belt, not when she left, Belters did not go in for racial taboos. Things had changed.

  The quiet man smiled and produced three small drinking-bulbs. “Rice wine,” he said. “Heated. An affectation, to be sure, but we are very traditional these days.”

  Pure Belter English, no hint of an accent. She called up training, looked for clues: in the hands, the skin around the eyes, the set of the mouth. Very little, no more than polite attention; this was a very calm man. Hard to tell even the age; if he was getting good geriatric care, anything from fifty minimum up to a hundred. Teufel, he could have been from Sol system himself, one of the last bunches of immigrants, and wouldn’t that be a joke to end them all.

  Silence stretched. The oriental sat and sipped at his hot sake and smiled; the two Belters followed suit, controlling their surprise at the varnish-in-the-throat taste.

  At the last, Jonah spoke: “I’m Jonah. This is Ingrid. The man with gray eyes sent us for tekkamaki.”

  “Ah, our esteemed GVB,” the man said. A deprecatory laugh and a slight wave of the fingers; the man had almost as few hand gestures as a Belter. “Gotz von Blerichgen, a little joke. Yes, I know the one you speak of. My name is Shigehero Hirose, and as you will have guessed, I am a hardened criminal of the worst sort.” He ducked his head in a polite bow. Ingrid noticed his hands then, the left missing the little finger, and the edges of vividly-colored tattoos under the cuffs of his suit.

  “And you,” he continued to Jonah, “are sent not by our so-Aryan friend, but by the UNSN.” A slight frown. “Your charming companion is perhaps of the same provenance, but from the Serpent Swarm originally.”

  Jonah and Ingrid remained silent. Another shrug. “In any case, according to our informants, you wish transportation to Wunderland and well-documented cover identities.”

  “If you’re wondering how we can pay…” Jonah began. They had the best and most compact source of valuata the UN military had been able to provide.

  “No, please. From our own resources, we will be glad to do this.”

  “Why?” Ingrid said, curious. “Criminals seem to be doing better now than they ever did in the old days.”

  Hirose smiled again, that bland expression that revealed nothing and never touched his eyes. “The young lady is as perceptive as she is ornamental.” He took up his sake bulb and considered it. “My…association is a very old one. You might call us predators; we would prefer to think of it as a symbiotic relationship. We have endured many changes, many social and technological revolutions. But something is common to each: the desire to have something and yet to forbid it.

  “Consider drugs and alcohol…or wirehead drouds. All strictly forbidden at one time, legal another, but the demand continues. Instruction in martial arts, likewise. In our early days in dai Nippon, we performed services for feudal lords that their own code forbade. Later, the great corporations, the zaibatsu, found us convenient for dealing with recalcitrant shareholders and unions; we moved substances of various types across inconvenient national frontiers, liberated information selfishly stockpiled in closed data banks, recruited entertainers, provided banking services…invested our wealth wisely, and moved outward with humanity to the planets and the stars. Sometimes we have been so respectable that our affairs were beyond question; sometimes otherwise. A conservative faction undertook to found our branch in the Alpha Centauri system, but I assure you the…family businesses, clans if you will, still flourish in Sol system as well. Inconspicuously.”

  “That doesn’t answer Ingrid’s question,” Jonah said bluntly. “This setup looks like hog heaven for you.”

  “Only in the short term. Which is enough to satisfy mere thugs, mere bandits such as a certain rockholder known as McAllistaire…You met this person? But consider: we are doing well for the same reason bacteria flourish in a dead body. The human polity of this system is dying, its social defenses disorganized, but the carnival of the carrion-eaters will be shortlived. We speak of the free humans and those in the direct service of the kzin, but to our masters we of the ‘free’ are slaves of the Patriarchy who have not yet been assigned individual owners. We are squeezed, tighter and tighter; eventually, there will be nothing but the households of kzin nobles. My association could perhaps survive such a situation; we are making preparations. Better by far to restore a functioning human system; our pickings would be less in the short term, more secure in the longer.”

  “And by helping us, you’ll have a foot in both camps and come up smelling of roses whoever wins.”

  Hirose spread his hands. “It is true, the kzin have occasionally found themselves using our services.” His smile became more genuine, and sharklike. “Nor are all, ah, Heroes, so incorruptible, so immune to the temptations of vice and profit, as they would like to believe.

  “Enough.” He produced a sealed packet and slid it across the table to them. “The documentation and credit is perfectly genuine. It will stand even against kzin scrutiny; our influence reaches far. I have no knowledge of what it contains, nor do I wish to. You in turn have learned nothing from me that possible opponents do not already know, and know that I know, and I know that they know…but please, even if I cannot join you, do stay and enjoy this excellent restaurant’s cuisine.”

  “Well…” Jonah palmed the folder. “It might be out of character, rockjacks in a fancy live-service place like this.”

  Shigehero Hirose halted, partway through the privacy screen. “You would do well to study local conditions a little more carefully, man-from-far-away. It has been a long time since autochefs and dispensers were cheaper than humans.”

  Shigehero Hirose sat back on his heels and sighed slightly.

  “Well, my dear?” he said.

  His wife laid the bamboo strainer down on the tray and lifted the teacup in both hands. He accepted her unspoken rebuke and the teacup, raising it to his lips as he looked out the pavilion doors. Even the Association’s wealth could not buy open space on Tiamat, but this was a reasonable facsimile. The graceful structure about them was dark varnished wood, sparely ornamented, carrying nothing but the low tray that held the tea service and a single chrysanthemum. Outside was a chamber of raked gravel and a few well-chosen rocks, and a quiet recirculating fountain. The air was sterile, though; no point in a chemical mockery of garden scents.

  There are times when I regret accepting this p
ost, he thought, sipping the tea and returning the cup with a ritual gesture of thanks. It was hard, not seeing green things except ones that grew in a tank…

  Of course, this was the post of honor and profit. Humans would remain half-free longer in the Serpent Swarm than on the surface of Wunderland, and so the Association was preparing its bolt-holes. Nothing must endanger that.

  Enough, he told himself. Put aside care.

  Much later, his wife sighed herself. “Worthless though my advice is, yet all possible precautions must be taken,” she said, hands folded in her lap and eyes downcast.

  Traditional to a fault, he thought; perhaps a bit excessive, seeing that she had a degree in biomechanics. Still…

  “It would be inadvisable to endanger their mission excessively,” he pointed out.

  “Ah, very true. But maintaining our connections with the human government is still essential.”

  Essential and more difficult all the time. The kzinti pressed on their collaborationist tools more and more each year; they grew more desperate in turn. Originally many had been idealists of a sort, trying to protect the general populace as much as they could. Few of that sort were left, and the rest were beginning to eat each other like crabs in a bucket.

  “Still…a vague rumor would be best, I think. We will use the fat man as our go-between; we can claim we were playing them along for more information if they are taken.”

  “My husband is wise,” she said, bowing.

  “And if the collaborationists grow desperate enough, they might offer rewards sufficient to justify sacrificing those two.”

  “Who are, after all, only gaijin. And on a mission which will do us little good even if it succeeds.”

  “Indeed, there are limits to altruism.” They turned their faces to the garden and fell silent once more.

  ✩ ✩ ✩

  “The inefficiency of you leaf-eaters is becoming intolerable,” the kzin said.

  Claude Montferrat-Palme bowed his head. Don’t stare. Never, never stare at a ratca—at a kzin. “We do our best, Ktiir-Supervisor-of-Animals,” he said.

  The kzin superintendent of Munchen stopped its restless striding and stood close, smiling, its tail held stiffly beside one column-thick leg. Two and a half meters tall, a thickly padded cartoon-figure cat that might have looked funny in a holo, it grinned down at him with the direct gaze that was as much a threat display as the bared fangs.

  “You play your monkey games of position and money, while the enemies of the Patriarchy scurry and bite in the underbrush.” Its head swiveled toward the police chief’s desk. “Scroll!”

  Data began to move across the suddenly transparent surface, with a moving schematic of the Serpent Swarm; colors and symbols indicated feral-human attacks. Ships lost, outposts raided, automatic cargo containers hijacked…

  “Comparative!” the kzin snapped. Graphs replaced the schematic. “Distribution!

  “See,” he continued. “Raids of every description have sprouted like fungus since the sthondat-spawned Sol-monkeys made their coward’s passage through this system. With no discernible pattern. And even the lurkers in the mountains are slipping out to trouble the estates again.”

  “With respect, Ktiir-Supervisor-of-Animals, my sphere of responsibility is the human population of this city. There has been little increase in feral activity here.”

  Claws rested centimeters from his eyes. “Because this city is the locus where feral-human packs dispose of their loot, exchange information and goods, meet and coordinate—paying their percentage to you! Yes, yes, we have heard your arguments that it is better for this activity to take place where our minions may monitor it, and they are logical enough—while we lack the number of Heroes necessary to reduce this system to true order and are preoccupied with the renewed offensive against Sol.”

  He mumbled under his breath, and Montferrat caught an uncomplimentary reference to Chuut-Riit.

  The human bowed again. “Ktiir-Supervisor-of-Animals, most of the groups operating against the righteous rule of the Patriarchy are motivated by material gain; this is a characteristic of my species. They cooperate with the genuine rebels, but it is an alliance plagued by mistrust and mutual contempt; furthermore, the rebels themselves are as much a grouping of bands as a unified whole.” And were slowly dying out, until the UN demonstrated its reach so spectacularly. Now they’ll have recruits in plenty again, and the bandits will want to draw the cloak of respectable Resistance over themselves.

  His mind cautiously edged toward a consideration of whether it was time to begin hedging his bets, and he forced it back. The kzin used telepaths periodically to check the basic loyalties of their senior servants. That was one reason he had never tried to reach the upper policy levels of the collaborationist government, that and…a wash of non-thought buried the speculation.

  “Accordingly, if their activity increases, our sources of information increase likewise. Once the confusion of the, ah, passing raid dies down, we will be in a position to make further gains. Perhaps to trap some of the greater leaders, Markham or Hirose.”

  “And you will take your percentage of all these transactions,” Ktiir-Supervisor-of-Animals said with heavy irony. “Remember that a trained monkey that loses its value may always serve as monkeymeat. Remember where your loyalties ultimately lie, in this insect-web of betrayals you fashion, slave.”

  Yes, thought Montferrat, dabbing at his forehead as the kzin left. I must remember that carefully.

  “Collation,” he said to his desk. “Attack activity.” The schematic returned. “Eliminate all post Yamamoto raids that correlate with seventy-five percent MO mapping to pre-Yamamoto attacks.”

  A scattering, mostly directed toward borderline targets that had been too heavily protected for the makeshift boats of the Free Wunderland space-guerrillas, disconcertingly many of them on weapons-fabrication plants, with nearly as many seizing communications, stealthing, command-and-control components. Once those were passed along to the other asteroid lurkers, all hell was going to break lose. And gravity-polarization technology was becoming more and more widespread as well. The kzin had tried to keep it strictly for their own ships and for manufacturing use, but the principles were not too difficult, and the methods the Patriarchy introduced were heavily dependent on it.

  “Now, correlate filtered attacks with past ten-year pattern for bandits Markham, McAllistaire, Finbogesson, Cheung, Latimer, Wu. Sequencing.

  “Scheisse,” he whispered. Markham, without a doubt: the man did everything by the book, and you could rewrite the manuscript by watching him. Now equipped with something whose general capacities were equivalent to a kzin Stalker, and proceeding in a methodical amplification of the sort of thing he had been doing before…Markham was the right sort for the Protracted Struggle, all right. He’d read his Mao and Styrikawsi and Laugidis, even if he gave Clausewitz all the credit.

  “Code, Till Eulenspiegel. Lock previous analysis, non-redo, simulate other pattern if requested. Stop.”

  “Stop and locked,” the desk said.

  Montferrat relaxed. At least partly, the Eulenspiegel file was supposedly secure. Certainly none of his subordinates had it, or they would have gone to the ratcats with it long ago; there was more than enough in there to make him prime monkeymeat. He swallowed convulsively; as Police Chief of Munchen, he was obliged to screen the kzin hunts far too frequently. Straightening, he adjusted the lapels of his uniform and walked to the picture window that formed one wall of the office. Behind him stretched the sleek expanse of feathery down-dropper-pelt rugs over marble tile, the settees and loungers of pebbled but butter-soft okkaran hide. A Matisse and two Vorenagles on the walls, and a priceless Pierneef…he stopped at the long oak bar and poured himself a single glass of Maivin; that was permissible.

  Interviews with the kzin Supervisor-of-Animals were always rather stressful. Montferrat sipped, looking down on the low-pitched tile roofs of Old Munchen: carefully restored since the fighting, whatever else went short. T
he sprawling shanty-suburbs and shoddy gimcrack factories of recent years were elsewhere. This ten-story view might almost be as he had known it as a student, the curving tree-lined streets that curled through the hills beside the broad blue waters of the Donau. Banked flowers beside the pedestrian ways, cafés, the honeygold quadrangles of the University, courtyarded homes built around expanses of greenery and fountains. Softly blooming frangipani and palms and gumblossom in the parks along the river; the gothic flamboyance of the Ritterhaus, where the Landholders had met in council before the kzin came. And the bronze grouping in the great square before it, the Nineteen Founders.

  Memory rose before him, turning the hard daylight of afternoon to a soft summer’s night; he was young again, arm in arm with Ingrid and Harold and a dozen of their friends, the new students’ caps on their heads. They had come from the beercellar and hours of swaying song, the traditional graduation-night feast, and they were all a little merry. Not drunk, but happy and in love with all the world, a universe and a lifetime opening out before them. The three of them had led the scrambling mob up the granite steps of the plinth, to put their white-and-gold caps on the three highest sculpted heads, and they had ridden the bronze shoulders and waved to the sea of dancing, laughing young faces below. Fireworks had burst overhead, yellow and green…Shut up, he told himself. The present was what mattered. The UN raid had not been the simple smash-on-the wing affair it seemed, not at all.

  “I knew it,” he muttered. “It wasn’t logical, they didn’t do as much damage as they could have.” The kzin had not thought so, but then, they had a predator’s reflexes. They just did not think in terms of mass destruction; their approach to warfare was too pragmatic for that. Which was why their armament was so woefully lacking in planet-busting weapons: the thought of destroying valuable real estate did not occur to them. Montferrat had run his own projections: with weapons like that ramship, you could destabilize stars.