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

by Larry Niven

  Ingrid ignored him, focusing on the knot in her stomach and the clammy feel of nervous sweat across her shoulders under the formal low-necked black jumpsuit. Harold’s Terran Bar was crowded tonight, and the entrance-fee had been stiff. The verguuz was excellent, however, and she sipped cautiously, welcoming the familiar mint-sweet-wham taste. The imitations in the Sol system never quite measured up. Shuddering, she noticed that two Swarm-Belter types at the next table were knocking back shot glasses of it, and then following the liqueur with beer chasers, in a mixture of extravagance and reckless disregard for their digestions. The squarebuilt Krio at the musicomp was tinkling out something old-sounding, piano with muted saxophone undertones.

  Gottdamn, but that takes me back.

  Claude had had an enormous collection of classical music, expensively enhanced stuff originally recorded on Earth, some of it on hardcopy or analog disks. His grandfather had acquired it, one of the eccentricities that had ruined the Montferrat-Palme fortunes. A silver-chased ebony box as big as a man’s head, with a marvelous projection system. All the ancient greats, Brahms and Mozart and Jagger and Armstrong…They had all spent hours up in his miserable little attic, knocking back cheap Maivin and playing Eine Kleine Nachtmusik or Sympathy for the Devil loud enough to bring hammering broomstick protests from the people below…

  Gottdamn, it is him, she thought, with a sudden flare of determination.

  “Jonah,” she said, laying a hand on his arm. “This is too public, and we can’t just wait for him. It’s…likely to be something of a shock, you know? That musician, I knew him back when too. I’ll get him to call through directly, it’ll be faster.”

  The Sol-Belter nodded tightly; she squeezed the forearm before she rose. In space or trying to penetrate an infosystem, rank and skill both made him the leader, but here the mission and his life were both dependent on her. On her contacts, decades old here, and severed in no friendly wise.

  Ingrid moistened her lips; Sam had been on the edge of their circle of friends, and confronting him would be difficult enough, much less Harold…She wiped palms down her slacks and walked over to the musicomp; it was a handsome legged model in Svarterwood with a beautiful point resonator, and a damper field to ensure that nothing came from the area around it but the product of the keyboard.

  “G’tag, Sam,” she said, standing by one side of the Instrument. “Still picking them out, I see.”

  “Fra?” he said, looking up at her with the dignified politeness of a well-raised Krio country-boy. The face was familiar, but one side of it was immobile; she recognized the signs of a rushed reconstruction job, the type they did after severe nerve-damage in the surface tissues.

  “Well, I haven’t changed that much, Sam. Remember Graduation Night, and that singalong we all had by the Founders?”

  His features changed, from the surface smoothness of a well-trained professional to a shock so profound that the living tissue went as rigid as the dead. “Fra Raines,” he whispered. The skilled hands continued over the musicomp’s surface, but the tune had changed without conscious intent. He winced and hesitated, but she put a hand on his shoulder.

  “No, keep playing, Sam.

  “Remember me and you

  And you and me

  Together forever

  I can’t see me lovin’ nobody but you—

  For all my life—”

  The musician shook his head. “The boss doesn’t like me to play that one, Fra Raines,” he said. “It reminds him, well, you’d know.”

  “I know, Sam. But this is bigger than any of us, and it means we can’t let the past sleep in its grave. Call him, tell him we’re waiting.”

  “Mr. Yarthkin?” the voice asked.

  He had been leaning a shoulder against one wall of the inner room, watching the roulette table. The smoke in here was even denser than by the front bar, and the ornamental fans made patterns and traceries through the blue mist. Walls were set for a space scene, a holo of Jupiter taken from near orbit on one side and Wunderland on the other. Beyond them the stars were hard glitters, pinpoints of colored light receding into infinity, infinitely out of reach. Yarthkin dropped his eyes to the table. The ventilation system was too good to carry the odor of the sweat that gleamed on the hungrily intent faces…

  Another escape, he thought. Like the religious revivals, and the nostalgia craze; even the feverish corruption and pursuit of wealth. A distraction.

  “Herrenmann Yarthkin-Schotmann?” the voice asked again, and a hand touched his elbow.

  He looked down, into a girl’s face framed in a black kerchief. Repurified Amish, by the long drab dress. Well-to-do, by the excellent material; many of that sect were. Wunderland had never relied much on synthetic foods, and the Herrenmen estates had used the Amish extensively as subtenants. They had flourished, particularly since the kzin came and agricultural machinery grew still scarcer…That was ending now, of course.

  “No ‘Herrenmann,’ sweetheart,” he said gently. She was obviously terrified, this would be a den of Satan by her folks’ teaching. “Just Harold, or Mr. Yarthkin if you’d rather. What can I do for you?”

  She clasped her gloved hands together, a frown on the delicately pretty features and a wisp of blond hair escaping from her scarf and bonnet. “Oh…I was wondering if you could give me some advice, please, Mr. Yarthkin. Everyone says you know what goes on in Munchen.” He heard the horror in her voice as she named the city, probably from a lifetime of hearing it from the pulpit followed by “Whore of Babylon” or some such.

  “Advice I provide free,” he said neutrally. Shut up, he added to his mind. There’s thousands more in trouble just as bad as hers. None of your business.

  “Wilhelm and I,” she began, and then halted to search for words. Yarthkin’s eyes flicked up to a dark-clad young man with a fringe of beard around his face sitting at the roulette table. Sitting slumped, placing his chits with mechanical despair.

  “Wilhelm and I, we lost the farm.” She put a hand to her eyes. “It wasn’t his fault, we both worked so hard…but the kzin, they took the estate where we were tenants and…”

  Yarthkin nodded. Kzin took a lot of feeding. And they would not willingly eat grain-fed meat; they wanted lean range beasts. More kzin estates meant less work for humans, and what there was was in menial positions, not the big tenant holdings for mixed farming that the Herrenmen had preferred. Farmholders reduced to beggary, or to an outlaw existence that ended in a kzin hunt.

  “Your church wouldn’t help?” he said. The Amish were a close-knit breed.

  “They found new positions for our workers, but the bishop, the bishop said Wilhelm…that there was no money to buy him a new tenancy, that he should humble himself and take work as a foreman and pray for forgiveness.” Repurified Amish thought that worldly failure was punishment for sin. “Wilhelm, Wilhelm is a good man, I told him to listen to the bishop, but he cursed him to his face, and now we are shunned.” She paused. “Things, things are very bad there now. It is no place to live or raise children, with food so scarce and many families crowded together.”

  “Sweetheart, this isn’t a charitable institution,” Yarthkin said warily.

  “No, Mr. Yarthkin.” She drew herself up and wrapped pride around herself like a cloak. “We had some money, we sold everything, the stock and tools. Swarm Agrobiotics offered Wilhelm and me a place—they are terraforming new farm-asteroids. With what they pay we could afford to buy a new tenancy after a few years.” He nodded. The Swarm’s population was growing by leaps and bounds, and it was cheaper to grow than synthesize, but skilled dirt-farmers were rare. “But we must be there soon, and there are so many difficulties with the papers.”

  Bribes, Yarthkin translated to himself.

  “It takes so much more than we thought, and to live while we wait! Now we have not enough for the final clearance, and…and we know nothing but farming. The policeman told Wilhelm that we must have four thousand krona more, and we had less than a thousand. Nobody would lend
more against his wages, not even the Sina moneylender, he just laughed and offered to…to sell me to…and Wilhelm hit him, and we had to pay more to the police. Now he gambles, it is the only way we might get the money, but of course he loses.”

  The house always wins, Yarthkin thought. The girl steeled herself and continued.

  “The Herrenmann policeman—”

  “Claude Montferrat-Palme?” Yarthkin inquired, nodding with his chin. The police chief was over at the baccarat tables with a glass of verguuz at his elbow, playing his usual cautiously skillful game.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “He told me that there was a way the papers could be approved.” A silence. “I said nothing to Wilhelm, he is…very young, younger than me in some ways.” The china-blue eyes turned to him. “Is this Herrenmann one who keeps his word?”

  “Claude?” Yarthkin said. “Yes. A direct promise, yes; he’ll keep the letter of it.”

  She gripped her hands tighter. “I do not know what to do,” she said softly. “I must think.”

  She nodded jerkily to herself and moved off. Yarthkin threw the butt of his cigarette down for the floor to absorb and moved over to the roulette table. A smile quirked the corner of his mouth, and he picked up a handful of hundred-krona chips from in front of the croupier. Stupid, he thought to himself. Oh, well, a man has to make a fool of himself occasionally.

  The Amishman had dropped his last chip and was waiting to lose it; he gulped at the drink at his elbow and loosened the tight collar of his jacket. Probably seeing the Welfare Office ahead of him, Yarthkin thought. These days, that meant a labor camp where the room-and-board charges were twice the theoretical wages…They would find something else for his wife to do. Yarthkin dropped his counter beside the young farmer’s.

  “I’m feeling lucky tonight, Tony,” he said to the croupier. “Let’s see it.”

  She raised one thin eyebrow, shrugged her shoulders under the sequins and spun the wheel. “Place your bets, gentlefolk, please.” Impassively, she tossed the ball into the whirring circle of metal. “Number eight. Even, in the black.”

  The Amishman blinked down in astonishment as the croupier’s ladle pushed his doubled stakes back toward him. Yarthkin reached out and gripped his wrist as the young man made an automatic motion toward the plaques. It was thick and springy with muscle, the arm of a man who had worked with his hands all his life, but Yarthkin had no difficulty stopping the motion.

  “Let it ride,” he said. “Play the black, I’ll do the same.”

  Another spin, but the croupier’s lips were compressed into a thin line; she was a professional, and hated a break in routine. “Place your bets…Black wins again, gentlefolk.”

  “Try twelve,” Yarthkin said, shifting his own chip. “No, all of it.”

  “Place your bets…twelve wins, gentlefolk.”

  Glancing up, Yarthkin caught Montferrat’s coldly furious eye, and grinned with an equal lack of warmth. At the next spin of the wheel he snapped his finger for the waiter and urged the younger man at his side to his feet, piling the chips on an emptied drink tray. “That’s five thousand,” Yarthkin said. “Why don’t you cash them in and call it a night?”

  Wilhelm paused, scrubbed his hands across his face, straightened his rumpled clothes. “Yes…Yes, thank you sir, perhaps I should.” He looked down at the pile of chips, and Yarthkin could see his lips whiten with shock as the impact hit home. “I…”

  The girl came to meet him, and gave Yarthkin a single glance through tear-starred lashes before the two left, clinging to each other. The owner of Harold’s shrugged and pushed his own counters back to the pile before the croupier.

  “How are we doing tonight, Tony?” he asked.

  “About five thousand krona less well than we could have,” she said sharply.

  “We’ll none of us starve,” Yarthkin added mildly, and strolled over to the baccarat table. Montferrat glanced up sharply, but his anger had faded.

  “You’re a sentimental idiot, Harry,” he said.

  “Probably true, Claude,” Yarthkin said, and took a plain unlogoed credit chip from the inside pocket of his jacket. “The usual.”

  Montferrat palmed it and smoothed back his mustache with a finger. “Sometimes I think you indulge in these little quixotic gestures just to annoy me,” he added, and dropped three cards from his hand. “Banco,” he continued.

  “Probably right there too, Claude,” he said. “I’m relying on the fact that you’re not an unmitigated scoundrel.”

  “Now I’m an honest man?”

  “No, a scoundrel with mitigating factors…and I’m a sentimental idiot, as you mentioned.” He stopped, listened abstractedly. “See you later; somebody wants to see me. Sam says it’s important, and he isn’t given to exaggeration.”

  The doors slid open and Yarthkin stepped into the main room, beside the north end of the long bar. The music was the first thing he heard, the jaunty remembered beat. Cold flushed over his skin, and the man he had been smiling and waving to flinched. That brought the owner of Harold’s Terran Bar back to his duties; they were self-imposed, and limited to this building, but that did not mean they could be shirked. He moved with swift grace through the throng, shouting an occasional greeting over the surf-roar of voices, slapping a shoulder, shaking a hand, smiling. The smile was still on his face as he stepped up off the dance floor and through the muting field around the musicomp, but he could taste the acid and copper of his own rage at the back of his throat.

  “I told you never to play that song again,” he said coldly. “We’ve been together a long time, Samuel Ogun, it’d be a pity to end a beautiful friendship this way.”

  The musician keyed the instrument to continue without him and swiveled to face his employer. “Boss…Mr. Yarthkin, once you’ve talked to those two over at table three, you’ll understand. Believe me.”

  Yarthkin nodded curtly and turned to the table. The two Belters were sitting close to the musicomp, with the shimmer of a privacy field around them, shrouding features as well as dulling voices. Yarthkin smoothed the lapels of his jacket and wove deftly between tables and servers as he approached, forcing his anger down into an inner cesspit where discarded emotions went. Sam was no fool, he must mean something by violating a standing order that old. He did not shake easy, either, and that had been plain to see on him. This should be interesting, at least; it was good to have a straightforward bargaining session ahead, after the embarrassing exhilaration of the incident in the gambling room. Money was a relaxing game to play; the rules were clear, victory and defeat a matter of counting the score and no embarrassing emotions. And these might be the ones with the special load that the rumors had told of. More profit and more enjoyment if they were. More danger, too, but a man had to take an occasional calculated risk. Otherwise, you might as well put a droud in your head and be done with it.

  The man looked thirty and might be anything between that and seventy; tough-looking, without the physical softness that so many rockjacks got from a life spent in cramped zero-G spaceships. A conservative dark innersuit, much less gaudy than what most successful Swarmers wore these days, and an indefinably foreign look about the eyes. Yarthkin sat, pulled out a chair and looked over to study the woman’s face. The world went black.

  “Boss, are you all right?” There was a sharp hiss against his neck, and the sudden sharp-edged alertness of a stimshot. “Are you all right?”

  “You,” Yarthkin whispered, shaking the Krio’s hand off his shoulder with a shrug. Ingrid’s face hovered before him, unchanged, no, a little thinner, more tanned. But the same, not forty years different, the same. He could feel things moving in his head, like a mountain river he had seen on a spring hunting trip once. Cracks running across black ice, and the rock beneath his feet toning with the dark water’s hidden power. “You.” His voice went guttural, and his right hand went inside the dress jacket.

  “Jonah, no!” Ingrid’s hand shot out and slapped her companion’s to the table. Yarthkin felt his
mind stagger and broach back toward reality as the danger-prickle ran over his skin; that was probably not an engineer’s light-pencil in the younger man’s hand. He struggled for self-command, dropped his gun-hand back to the table.

  “Well.” What was there to say? “Long time, no see. Glad you could make it. The last time, you seemed to have a pressing appointment elsewhere. I showed up on time, and there the ’boat was, boosting like hell a couple of million klicks Solward. Me in a single ship with half a dozen kzin Slashers sniffing around.”

  Ingrid’s face went chalk-white. “Let me explain—”

  “Don’t bother. Closed account.” He paused, lit a cigarette, astonished at the steadiness of his own hands.

  “Claude know you’re here?”

  “No, and it’s best he doesn’t.”

  “Sure. Let me guess. Now you’re back, and Mr. Quick-Draw here with you, on some sort of UN skullbuggery, and need my help.” He looked thoughtful. “Come to that, how did you get here?”

  “Jonah Matthieson,” the Sol-Belter said. “Yes. How we got here isn’t important. We do need your help. Damned little we’ve gotten in this system that hasn’t been bought and paid for, and half the time we’ve been sold out to the pussies even so.”

  “Pussies? Oh, the ratcats.” He laughed, a little wildly. “So you haven’t found legions of eager, idealistic volunteers ready to throw themselves into the jaws of the kzin to help you on your sacred mission, whatever it is. How can that be?”

  Yarthkin’s finger touched behind one ear, and the mirror behind the bar went screenmode. It showed an overgrown park, flicking between micropickups scattered wholesale through the vegetation. There had been lawns here once; now there was waist-high grass, Earth trees grown to scores of meters in the light gravity, native Wunderlander growths soaring on spidery trunks. The sound of panting breath, and a naked human came stumbling through the undergrowth. His legs and flanks were lashed and scratched by thorns and burrs. He reeled with exhaustion, feet pounding with careless heaviness; the eyes were flat and blank in the stubbled face, mouth dribbling. Behind him there was a flash of orange-red, alien among the cool greens of Earth, the tawny olives of Wunderland. A flash: two hundred kilos of sentient carnivore charging on all fours in a hunching rush that parted the long grass in an arrow of rippling wind. Not so much like a cat as a giant weasel, blurring, looming up behind the fleeing human in a wall of flesh, a wall that fell tipped with bright teeth and black claws.