by Larry Niven
Traat-Admiral shifted uneasily, chirring and letting the tip of his tongue show between his teeth. That was not part of the racial history that kzin liked to remember.
The sage made the stretching motion that was their species’s equivalent of a relaxed smile. “Remember also how that hunt ended: the Jotok taught their hired kzin so much that all Homeworld obeyed the ones who had journeyed to the stars…and they listened to the Conservors. And one nightfall, the Jotok who thought themselves masters of kzin found the flesh stripped from their bones. Are not the Jotok our slaves and foodbeasts to this very night? And a hundred hundred Patriarchs have climbed the Tree, since that good night.”
The sage nodded at Traat-Admiral’s questioning chirrup. “Yes, Chuut-Riit was another like that first Patriarch of all kzin. He understood how to use the Conservor’s knowledge; he had the warrior’s and the sage’s mind, and knew that these humans are the greatest challenge kzin have faced since the Jotok’s day.”
Traat-Admiral waited quietly while the Conservor brooded; he had followed Chuut-Riit in this training, but it was a hard scent to follow.
“This he was teaching to his sons. The humans must have either great luck, or more knowledge than is good, to have struck at us through him. The seed of something great died with Chuut-Riit.”
“I will spurt that seed afresh into the haunches of Destiny, Conservor,” Traat-Admiral said fervently.
“Witless Destiny bears strange kits,” the sage warned. He seemed to hesitate a second, then continued: “You seek to unite your warriors as Chuut-Riit did, in an attack on the human home-system that is crafty-cunning, not witless-brave. Good! But that may not be enough. I have been evaluating your latest intelligence reports, the ones from our sources among the humans of the Swarm.”
Traat-Admiral tossed his head in agreement; that always presented difficulties. The kzinti had had the gravity polarizer from the beginnings of their time in space, and so had never colonized their asteroid belt. It was unnecessary, when you could have microgravity anywhere you wished, and hauling goods out of the gravity well was cheap. Besides that, kzinti were descended from plains-hunting felinoids, and while they could endure confinement, they did so unwillingly and for as short a time as possible. Humans had taken a slower path to space, depending on reaction-drives until after their first contact with the warships of the Patriarchy. There was a whole human subspecies who lived on subplanetary bodies, and they had colonized the Alpha Centauri system along with their planet-dwelling cousins. Controlling the settlements of the Serpent Swarm had always been difficult for the kzin.
“There is nothing definite, as yet,” the Conservor said. “There is still much confusion; it is difficult to distinguish the increased activity of the feral humans from the warship the humans left, and that from the thing I hunt. Much of what I have learned is useful only as the absence of scent. Yet it is incontestable that the feral humans of the Swarm have made a discovery.”
“ttttReet?” Traat-Admiral said inquiringly.
The Conservor’s eyelids slid down, covering the round amber blanks of his eye; that left only the milky-white orb of his blind side. He beckoned with a flick of tail and ears, and the commander leaned close, signaling the guards to leave. His hands and feet were slightly damp with anxiety as they exited in a smooth, drilled rush; it was a fearsome thing, the responsibilities of high office. One must learn secrets that burdened the soul, harder by far than facing lasers or neutron-weapons. Such were the burdens of which the ordinary Hero knew nothing. Chuut-Riit had borne such secrets, and it had made him forever alone.
“Long, long ago,” he whispered, “Kzinti were not as they are now. Once females could talk.”
Traat-Admiral felt his batwing ears fold themselves away beneath the orange fur of his ruff as he shifted uneasily on the cushions. He had heard rumors, but—obscene, he thought. The thought of performing ch’rowl with something that could talk, beyond the half-dozen words a kzinti female could manage…obscene. He gagged slightly.
“Long, long ago. And Heroes were not as they are now, either.” The sage brooded for a moment. “We are an old race, and we have had time to…shape ourselves according to the dreams we had. Such is the Patriarchal Past.” The whuffling twitch of whiskers that followed did kzinti service for a grin. “Or so the encoded records of the oldest verses say. Now for another tale, Traat-Admiral. How would you react if another species sought to make slaves of kzin?”
Traat-Admiral’s own whiskers twitched.
“No, consider this seriously. A race with a power of mental command; like a telepathic drug, irresistible. Imagine kzinti enslaved, submissive and obedient as mewling kits.”
The other kzin suddenly found himself standing, in a low crouch. Sound dampened as his ears folded, but he could hear the sound of his own growl, low down in his chest. His lower jaw had dropped to his ruff, exposing the killing gape of his teeth; all eight claws were out on his hands, as they reached forward to grip an enemy and carry a throat to his fangs.
“This is a hypothetical situation!” the Conservor said quickly, and watched while Traat-Admiral fought back toward calm; the little nook behind the commander’s dais was full of the sound of his panting and the deep gingery smell of kzinti rage. “And that reaction…that would make any kzin difficult to control. That is one reason why the race of Heroes has been shaped so. And to make us better warriors, of course; in that respect, perhaps we went a little too far.”
“Perhaps,” Traat-Admiral grated. “What is the nature of this peril?” He bent his muzzle to the heated bourbon and milk and lapped thirstily.
“Hrrrru,” the Conservor said, crouching. “Traat-Admiral, the race in question—the Students have called them the Slavers—little is known about them. They perished so long ago, you see; at least two billion years.” He used the kzinti-standard measurement, and their homeworld circled its sun at a greater distance than Terra did Sol. “Even in vacuum, little remains. But they had a device, a stasis field that forms invulnerable protection and freezes time within; we have never been able to understand the principle, and copies do not work, but we have found them occasionally, and they can be deactivated. The contents of most are utterly incomprehensible. A few do incomprehensible things. One or two we have understood, and these have won us wars, Traat-Admiral. And one contained a living Slaver; the base where he was held had to be missiled from orbit.”
Traat-Admiral tossed his head again, then froze. “Stasis!” he yowled.
“Hero?”
“Stasis! How else—The monkey ship, just before Chuut-Riit was killed! It passed through the system at .90 c. We thought, how could anything decelerate? By collision! Disguised among the kinetic-energy missiles the monkeys threw at us as they passed. Chuut-Riit himself said that the ramscoop ship caused implausibly little damage, given the potential and the investment of resources it represented. It was nothing but a distraction, and a delivery system for the assassins, for that mangy-fur ghost corvette that eludes us, for…Arreeaoghg—”
His raging ceased, and his fur laid flat. “If the monkeys in the Solar system have the stasis technology—”
The sage meditated for a few moments. “hr’rrearow t’chssseee mearowet’aatrurree,” he said: this-does-not-follow. Traat-Admiral remembered that as one of Chuut-Riit’s favorite sayings, and yes, this Conservor had been among the prince’s household when he arrived from Kzin. “If they had it in quantity, consider the implications. For that matter, we believe the Slavers had a faster-than-light drive.”
Stasis fields would make nonsense of war…and a faster-than-light drive would make the monkeys invincible, if they had it. The other kzin nodded, raising his tufted eyebrows. Theory said travel faster than lightspeed was impossible, unless one cared to be ripped into subatomic particles on the edges of a spinning black hole. Still, theory could be wrong; the kzinti were a practical race, who left most science to their subject species. What counted was results.
“True. If they had such weapons,
we would not be here. If we had them—” He frowned, then proceeded cautiously. “Such might cause…troubles with discipline.”
The sage spread his hands palm up, with the claws showing slightly. With a corner of his awareness, Traat-Admiral noted how age had dried and cracked the pads on palm and stubby fingers.
“Truth. There have been revolts before, although not many.” The Patriarchy was necessarily extremely decentralized, when transport and information took years and decades to travel between stars. It would be fifty years or more before a new prince of the Patriarch’s blood could be sent to Wunderland, and more probably they would receive a confirmation of Traat-Admiral’s status by beamcast. “But with such technology…it is a slim chance, but there must be no disputes. If there is a menace, it must be destroyed. If a prize, it must fall into only the most loyal of hands. Yet the factions are balanced on a wtsai’s edge.”
“Chrrr. Balancing of factions is a function of command.” Traat-Admiral’s gaze went unfocused, and he showed teeth in a snarl that meant anticipated triumph in a kzin. “In fact, this split can be used.” He rose, raked claws through air from face to waist. “My thanks, Conservor. You have given me a scent through fresh dew to follow.”
Chapter 11
This section of the Jotun range had been a Montferrat-Palme preserve since the settlement of Wunderland, more than three centuries before; when a few thousand immigrants have an entire planet to share out, there is no sense in being niggardly. The first of that line had built the high eyrie for his own; later population and wealth moved elsewhere, and in the end it became a hunting lodge. Just before the kzin conquest, it had been the only landed possession left to the Montferrat-Palme line, which had shown an unfortunate liking for risky speculative investments and even riskier horses.
“Old Claude does himself proud,” Harold said, as he and Ingrid walked out onto the verandah that ran along the outer side of the house.
The building behind them was old weathered granite, sparkling slightly with flecks of mica; two stories, and another of half-timbering, under a strake roof. A big rambling structure, set into an artificial terrace on the steep side of the mountain; the slope tumbled down to a thread-thin stream in the valley below, then rose in gashed cliffs and dark-green forest ten kilometers away. The gardens were extensive and cunningly landscaped, an improvement of nature rather than an imposition on it. Native featherleaf, trembling iridescent lavender shapes ten meters tall, gumblossom and sheenbark and lapisvine. Oaks and pines and frangipani from Earth, they had grown into these hills as well…The air was warm and fragrant-dusty with summer flowers.
“It’s certainly been spruced up since we…since I saw it last,” she said, with a catch in her voice.
Harold looked aside at her and shivered slightly; hard to believe down in his gut she had been born two years before him. He remembered Matthieson. Young. A calm angry man, the dangerous type.
And you were no prize even as a young man, he told himself. Ears like jugs, eyes like a basset hound, and a build like a brick outhouse. Nearly middle-aged at only sixty, for Finagle’s sake. Spent five years as an unsuccessful guerrilla and the rest as a glorified barkeep. Well, Harold’s Terran Bar had been his, but…
“A lot more populous, too,” she was saying. “Why on earth would anyone want to farm here? You’d have to modify the machinery.”
There had always been a small settlement in the narrow sliver of valley floor, but it had been expanded. Terraces of vines and fruit trees wound up the slopes, and they could hear the distant tinkle of bells from the sheep and goats that grazed the rocky hills. A waterfall tumbled a thousand meters down the head of the valley, its distant toning humming through rock and air. Men and men’s doings were small in that landscape of tumbled rock and crag. A church-bell rang far below, somewhere a dog was barking, and faint and far came the hiss-scream of a downdropper, surprising this close to human habitation. The air was cool and thin, not uncomfortably so to someone born on Wunderland; .61 gravity meant that the drop-off in air pressure was less steep than it would have been on Earth.
“Machinery?” Harold moved up beside her. She leaned into his side with slow care. He winced at the thought of kzin claws raking down her leg…
Maybe I’ve been a bit uncharitable about Jonah, he thought. The two of them came through the kzin hunt alive, until Claude and I could pull her…them out. That took some doing. “They’re not using machinery, Ingie. Bare hands and hand-tools.”
Her mouth made a small gesture of distaste. “Slave labor? Not what I’d have thought of Claude, however he’s gone downhill.”
Harold laughed. “Flighters, sweetheart. Refugees. Kzin’ve been taking up more and more land, they’re settling in, not just a garrison anymore. It was this or the labor camps; those are slave labor, literally. Claude grubstaked these people, as well as he could. It’s where a lot of that graft he’s been getting as Police Chief of Munchen went.”
And the head of the capital city’s human security force was in a very good position to rake it in. “I was surprised too. Claude’s been giving a pretty good impression of having Helium II for blood, these past few years.”
A step behind them. “Slandering me in my absence, old friend?”
The servants set out brandy and fruits and withdrew. They were all middle-aged and singularly close-mouthed. Ingrid thought she had seen four parallel scars under the vest of one dark slant-eyed man who looked like he came from the Sulineasan Islands.
“There are Some Things We Were Not Meant to Know,” she said. Claude Montferrat-Palme was leaning forward to light a cheroot at a candle. He glanced up at her words, then looked aside at the door through which the servant had left the room; then caught her slight grimace of distaste and laid down the cheroot. He had been here a week, off and on, but that was scarcely time to drop a habit he must have been cultivating half his life.
“Correct on all counts, my dear,” he said.
Claude always was perceptive.
“It’s been wonderful talking over old times,” she said. With sincerity, and a slight malice aforethought. They were considerably older times for the two men than for her. “And it’s…extremely flattering that you two are still so fond of me.”
But a bit troubling, now that I think about it. Even if you can expect to live two centuries, carrying the torch for four decades is a bit much.
Claude smiled again. His classic Herrenmann features combined with untypical dark hair and eyes to give an indefinable air of elegance, even in the lounging outfit he had thrown on when he shed the Munchen Polezi uniform.
“Youth,” he said. And continued at her inquiring sound. “My dear, you were our youth. Hari and I were best friends; you were the…girl…young woman for which we conceived the first grand passion and bittersweet rivalry.” He shrugged. “Ordinarily, a man either marries her—a ghastly fate involving children and facing each other over the morning papaya—or loses her. In any case, life goes on.” His brooding gaze went to the high mullioned windows, out onto a world that had spent two generations under kzinti rule.
“You…” he said softly. “You vanished, and took the good times with you. Doesn’t every man remember his twenties as the golden age? In our case, that was literally true. Since then, we’ve spent four decades fighting a rear-guard action and losing, watching everything we cared for slowly decay…including each other.”
“Why, Claude, I didn’t know you cared,” Harold said mockingly. Ingrid saw their eyes meet.
Surpassing the love of women, she thought dryly. And there was a certain glow about them both, now that they were committed to action again. Few humans enjoy living a life that makes them feel defeated, and these were proud men.
“Don’t tell me we wasted forty years of what might have been a beautiful friendship.”
“Chronicles of Wasted Time is a title I’ve often considered for my autobiography, if I ever write it,” Claude said. “Egotism wars with sloth.”
Harold snorted. �
��Claude, if you were only a little less intelligent, you’d make a great neoromantic Byronic hero.”
“Childe Claude? At this rate she’ll have nothing of either of us, Hari.”
The other man turned to Ingrid. “I’m a little surprised you didn’t take Jonah,” he said.
Ingrid looked over to Claude, who stood by the huge rustic fireplace with a brandy snifter in his hand. The Herrenmann raised a brow, and a slight, well-bred smile curved his asymmetric beard.
“Why?” she said. “Because he’s younger, healthier, better educated, because he’s a war hero, intelligent, dashing and good looking and a fellow Belter?”
Harold blinked, and she felt a rush of affection.
“Something like that,” he said.
Claude laughed. “Women are a lot more sensible than men, ald kamerat. Also they mature faster. Correct?”
“Some of us do,” Ingrid said. “On the other hand, a lot of us actually prefer a man with a little of the boyish romantic in him. You know, the type of idealism that looks like it turns into cynicism, but cherishes it secretly?” Claude’s face fell. “On the other hand, your genuinely mature male is a different kettle of fish. Far too likely to be completely without illusions, and then how do you control him?”
She grinned and patted him on the cheek as she passed on the way to pour herself a glass of verguuz. “Don’t worry, Claude, you aren’t that way yourself, you just act like it.” She sipped, and continued: “Actually, it’s ethnic.”
Harold made an inquiring grunt, and Claude pursed his lips.
“He’s a Belter. Sol-Belter at that.”
“My dear, you are a Belter,” Claude said, genuine surprise overriding his habitual air of bored knowingness.