Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - IV

by Larry Niven

  The Fanged God had forsaken them without warning! Hssin would have had no news from Ka’ashi—he reverted to the kzin name for Wunderland, unable to speak or think the human words. He howled! Death would have come from the heavens with superluminal surprise! His family wouldn’t have had a chance. His mother! He tore his mane with bloody claws, bellowing. Hamarr the beautiful, his beloved comforter, his youth, his earliest friend! Dead! He stormed around the Control Center, smashing his Ka’ashi relics, things he had collected from that planet with love. Hamarr would have been fascinated by the porcelain, shattered now against the bulkhead.

  The rage of a kzin knows no bounds. But it subsides, sometimes into anguished mewling. He went to his oldest friends—Long-Reach, Joker, Creepy, who stared, shocked by the blood on his vest.

  “Jotok-Tender is dead,” he wailed, and they grieved with him for grief is the universal emotion that does not even need intelligence to wrack the soul. It comes from the liver.

  They helped him clean up the Control Center. A trip to the planet showed the details of the fury of the man-monsters. In some places the destruction was total. Where the power plant had been was only slag. But it doesn’t take much to kill a space colony. Holes in the roofs.

  In the Jotok Run they found a desiccated Jotok, one of the wily ferals, clinging to his tree, the powder-dry leaves still green. They found giant Jotok-Tender in his kitchen with a dehydrated grin defiantly threatening a bowl of preserved vatach. His Jotok slave had died trying to help him, now convulsed into an emaciated heap.

  By torchlight they found Hamarr holding three tiny mummified kits; not her own, for she was too old to bear such a litter. He hunched beside his mother, taking her dried corpse in his arms, howling in his helmet. Her face still seemed to be whimpering silently, almost alive. Even the flesh-rotting bacteria had died. They found a roomful of suffocated kzinrretti and kits, the room sealed against the poisonous Hssin atmosphere.

  Somewhere there must be survivors? Without rest he searched. A shelter, a special life support unit must have withstood the attack? A city that lives in a deadly atmosphere is not one single unit, it is a collection of self-contained cells built around the assumption of disaster. The death of cells is possible—but some cells survive! Trainer searched, for days, with tireless Joker whose arms slept in rotation. Then the kzin had to sleep. All he found were signs of human infantry who had been there after the air attack in a thorough campaign of genocide.

  Exile. The crew of the Bitch was still in exile. They were still alone. Eleven Jotoki, one man-female, two orphans and a kzin.

  Back on the ship Nora asked him what had happened down there. She wanted to ask him what had become of Louis, but she didn’t dare. She felt his rage. Poor maltreated Louis who hated everybody and would only obey and smile when you were looking straight into his eyes and being stern.

  Trainer-of-Slaves had stopped talking to Nora in English, had broken off all her access to her own culture. He spoke to her now in the corrupt form of the Hero’s Tongue which he used to communicate with his Jotoki. “No one lives on Hssin,” he spat-growled. “Your Navy has murdered them, kits and all.”

  I shouldn’t have let him baby-sit Louis, she thought. She had had a theory that kzin males must have lots of paternal abilities inside somewhere, since their females were so mentally limited. I was trying to stimulate his compassion. Compassion? That was my excuse.

  Actually, Nora had needed time off from Louis. Stupid. Louis could work even “love-everybody Nora” into a murderous rage. Imagine what he could do to a kzin who had just lost his family and nation?

  I think My Hero killed Louis. “What happened to Louis?” she asked in the staccato patois because she wanted a reply.

  He wouldn’t tell her. He turned away, as contrite as a kzin who has just eaten one of his own kits.

  But later, as he was making plans to move her down to Hssin, he did talk to her about Louis, however obliquely. He told a story about his own family. He was reminiscing about Hssin and recalled for Nora the day his father murdered a youngling half-brother on a point of discipline.

  Poor doomed Louis. I saved him and then I fed him back to the lion’s den. She felt horrible that all she felt was relief. Maybe with her pelt of chimpanzee/ kzinrret fur she really was turning into a kzin.

  CHAPTER 27

  (2423–2435 A.D.)

  Selected excerpts from the journal of UNSN Lieutenant Nora Argamentine found in the ruins of a kzin border fortress.

  Day 1

  The Jotoki have cleaned out and refurbished an old kzinrret palazzo among the rubble left by the UNSN attack, admittedly in one of the least damaged areas of the city. It is, of course, only for the use of me and the two girls. His Royal Male Highness will take up appropriately masculine quarters, I think the domicile once used by the late lamented Grand Panjandrum himself. The Jotoki have sealed our unit and arranged for water and air. What about food? My Hero says this will be no problem but I expect pretty awful fare.

  I have found a hiding place for my journal! It seems the kzinrretti keep secrets from their masters! The cache is cunningly clever, crudely constructed—and invisible to curious eyes. I don’t know what to make of its contents. Found trinkets, I would call them. What kind of a mind would think such things beautiful enough to cherish? Dare I make the analogy of a dog hiding precious bones from his master?

  I was touched as I stared at the trinkets. Is that what I am to become, a mind who values such simple things and knows somewhere in her soul that her master will not let her keep such junk?

  I am living a nightmare. I can’t kill myself because of the girls, who are pathetic in their need for me, and I can’t escape. My brain is dissolving slowly and I don’t know enough about the human mind to know what parts of it he’s going to leave me. I can’t feel the difference from day to day—except for the temporary rushes and blackouts he triggers with his gizmo—but I can tell the difference from last year and I fear the future. For instance, I’m not sure I’m qualified anymore to lead a mutiny.

  Sometimes I don’t believe that My Hero is doing this to me, and then I stroke the soft auburn fur on my body and know that, yes, he is. I can’t argue with him. I’ve tried. He is like some men I know. He listens. I feel his kindness, even his love—but he doesn’t listen!

  Brunhilde is dying of some malady of perception that has grown markedly worse in the last year. Some days she can’t take care of herself or eat. Jacin is thin, chronically insecure, and epileptic. I expect neither of them to live, but I try. Louis was beyond my meager skills—poor abandoned, caged, brutalized child!

  Once, back on the ship, when I was going out of my mind with worry, I asked My Hero for help with the children’s health. He had the practical suggestion that they be destroyed. Yet he surprised me. He actually read my horror at his suggestion and came back a day later with an experimental program of damage control. Wetware revision and editing. He couldn’t promise results.

  How can I bear this life—to let my girls die, perhaps like Louis, or to ask My Hero to experiment on them again to fix what he has botched? Would anyone trust him with girls?

  Day 4

  The kzin use an octal clock and a hopelessly complicated dating system. I really have lost track of what time it is, what day it is, what month it is. Females aren’t supposed to care about such things. The year, I think, is 2423. I have periods of blankness, where whole days are missing. Of these I remember nothing. That makes keeping track of time even harder. I could put X’s on my prison wall. Would that mean anything? How do I know when it is a new day? I’m arbitrarily assigning this day the number four, counting from the day of planetfall.

  Writing is easier than talking for me now. When I write I have time to remember the words, to pause and rebuild what I’ve lost or to think my way around any mental block. Nora From-My-Future, if you are reading this over and do not understand it, I am writing it because my memory is going. The loss is subtle. But I have noticed that if I practice rememb
ering, I can hold on to things. It is when I forget to remember, that I forget how to remember what I want to remember.

  Practice. Practice. Practice. Remember that.

  THIS IS MY MEMORY. If you’ve forgotten something, Nora, maybe you’ll find it here. Maybe. My ability to learn doesn’t seem to be impaired, except during the blanks. My Hero has told me that I’ll always be able to learn as well as I do now, I just won’t be able to talk or think with words. He’s phasing out English and phasing in Heroic patois. Then he’s going to phase out the patois. Thanks a lot, buster!

  He’s also phasing out the Earth. All the early parts of my life.

  I try to remember Earth. I do not want to forget Earth. I remember my home town and the cornfields. I can see the afternoon sun on the church steeple. I know where I went to high school. I remember holding Benny’s wrist when he was trying to kiss me and fondle my breasts at the same time. It was in the gazebo behind the lilacs in the backyard of the Yankovich place. But I can’t for the life of me remember the name of my home town. How could I forget that?

  Day 5

  Sin is a wonderful moniker for this planet. That is as close as I can come to the hiss-rumblings that pass for its name in the Hero’s Tongue. It is an awful place.

  I no longer have a hope of getting to the Shark. I can only pray that the UNSN finds it like they found Sin, then blows it to hell. Maybe My Hero will never fix the hyperdrive engine, but don’t count on that. He is obsessive about his work and the hyperdrive is always on his mind. Those five-armed mechanics of his are good. I think kzin science is much better than we supposed back on…dammit, I can’t even remember the name of my base. It begins with a J, I’m sure. It has the same name as the rock at the head of the Mediterranean Sea. Tomorrow I’ll remember.

  I have no idea whether My Hero is a great scientist or only a mediocre one. I do know that the aids he has available to him terrify me. I’ve seen him tackle problems that make me chuckle. I relish the decade he’s going to spend beating his brains out—and then he just looks up the answer in that ding-bat of his, tailors the answer to his needs and zips on to the next problem. An answer might be buried in the work of some obscure kzin scholar who lived when the Romans were raping the…whoever the hell they were…and he can zero in on that answer faster than I can slurp a bowl of soup even if he starts with the wrong question. The ease with which he can search makes up for his lack of curiosity. God help us if they get the hyperdrive!

  And then again maybe it doesn’t matter about the Shark. Nobody has a monopoly on science. My grandfather used to say that you can’t build a dike with a single brick. There…I should remember the name of my grandfather and I can’t. He had a white beard and a silver handled cane. Grandmother? Should I remember a grandmother? It is gaps like that which drive me wild.

  Day 12

  I’ve been neglecting my journal. Brunhilde has been sick. My Hero surprised me and ran off a simulation on his ding-bat’s human brain model and came up with some medicine that helps. He says it won’t work for long. Brunhilde doesn’t have a normal human brain anymore (he says). Something is running amok in there and doing irreversible haywiring. A side effect of the long ago experiment.

  Day 17

  I never thought a ratcat had a sense of beauty. But when My Hero looks at me I know he is seeing beauty. He didn’t used to see me as beautiful. On Earth, I remember Earth, they have stories about what happens to sailors who spend so much time away from their women. Am I starting to think My Hero is beautiful? He’s graceful. But I go cross-eyed when I look at him. After all these years, he still scares the shit out of me. I’m living in a palazzo for kzinrretti. He put me there. That scares the shit out of me.

  Day 21

  Today My Hero took me out into the City of Sin to show me what my UNSN colleagues have done. He cobbled together an atmosphere suit for me, awkward but serviceable. I wouldn’t want to take it into space.

  General Whatzisname was right. War is hell. Parts of the city around the power station are utterly devastated. That kind of annihilation is so complete that the horror is muted and melted into a dissonant abstract sculpture.

  It is the least damaged parts of Sin that give me the heebie-jeebies. The preserved corpses make it a museum of horror.

  I flashed on Earth, vividly. I once walked over an American Civil War battlefield. It was only a pile of well-tended mounds that might once have been trenches if you exercised your imagination. The thousands of corpses spread over that field disappeared without a trace within months—five centuries before I was born. I suspect that the trenches had collapsed within a year, by then already overgrown with weeds.

  Here there are no weeds. Here the corpses remain, freeze-dried and pickled in the gases of Sin. How long will it take to banish the horror? Sin does have an active atmosphere. Eventually I suspect that drifting dust will sanitize this speck of man-kzin history.

  I can’t describe how strange it was for me to walk through the gloom of the Chiirr-Nig household with my giant Hero, trying to imagine how a kzin patriarch ran all that, trying to imagine My Hero as a kit. He showed me the very spot where his father murdered his son, the half-brother of my power-driven master. In this one walk I saw a greater range of kzin emotion than I knew existed. He introduced me to his father, quite formally, still frozen in the rictus agony of suffocation, trying to reach his oxygen mask. The evidence of a total surprise attack is everywhere.

  Long ago My Hero gave his mother the funeral rites. His father he won’t touch.

  We took a long walk in the old Jotok Run, climbing down through a hole in the roof. Why did My Hero want to show me the very spot where he met Long-Reach? He stayed there lost in contemplation and then he showed me all the trails that Long-Reach had once shown him. I can’t imagine what it was like with smells and breezes, with waving leaves and baby Jotoki crawling out of the marshes. All I saw was a petrified forest from hell. When you stand in the light of R’hshssira you know you are in hell.

  Why does he want to show me this when he is going to erase it all from my mind, and then erase my ability even to put it into poetry?

  Day 62

  Brunhilde died today. That rat-tailed Seventh Son-of-a-Ghoul wanted to eat her! God knows we are short of fresh meat. I had to pull a fit. There is a strange power in being a kzinrret. I can rage at him without triggering his anger. He just gives me what I want. We cremated her. I put the ashes in a delicate little box, carved and inlaid, once owned by a noble kzinrret of the very palazzo that is now mine. The box must have been given as a gift by some male.

  Day 63

  There is only so much power in rage. My Hero does not always give me what I want. He won’t strike me, but when I cross some line, he just becomes stubborn: kindly stubborn, amused stubborn, arrogantly stubborn, angrily stubborn, passively stubborn—implacable, in other words. (I keep words like implacable on a list so I won’t forget them. My list is hidden with the trinkets that no kzintosh must see.)

  What did we fight about? A subject dear to me: The Second Phase of his attack on my brain. He’s going to start chipping away at my ability to process language. I think I’m in for another “operation.” He can black me out with his gismo that runs the gland implants in my brain. When I start remembering again there will be a blank of unknown length. I’ll never know whether or not I’ve had an operation.

  He isn’t going to do brain surgery. He’s going to set up a disassembler and hardwire reorganizer. Neural networks resist such changes so the whole effect will be a transition rather than a discontinuity.

  He says it is safe. He says that the language processing ability was added last to the functions of the human brain and so is the easiest to disconnect. He says I don’t need language to think with. Of course, I won’t be able to communicate what I’m thinking to anyone else and won’t be able to tap into anyone else’s thoughts, but I’ll be able to think! Great! Isolated is what I’ll be. And I’ll start to hoard trinkets or something.

  My H
ero swears by the Fanged God and his mother’s nipples that he isn’t the Wild Leaper that he was in his youth when he did all those botched experiments on helpless orphans. He’s checked out what he intends to do to me on the model of the human brain that he built out of the genetic codes he took from the autodoc. He says he built that model so he wouldn’t have to risk hurting me! I’m having apoplexy! (Hurrah! Yesterday I tried all day to remember the word “apoplexy”! Is that the way to spell it?)

  Sometimes I love the bastard as a kind of strange friend of fate, but I’d kill My Hero if I could. I would! I would! He says that’s why I must change, so I won’t hate him enough to kill him, so I won’t be intelligent enough to figure out a way to kill him. He doesn’t understand that I only plot to kill him to save myself! He doesn’t understand that we could be friends. Yes, I’m some kind of possession. I’m to be a slave.

  I can’t kill him. If I did kill him, his Jotoki would kill me quick as a flash. I could kill them, too. Great. Me and epileptic Jacin up against the universe.

  My Hero actually patted me on the head, the paternalistic…Poor me, what he’s doing is working, I can’t even remember my naval vocabulary and I used to be able to curse with the best of them!

  “Now, now,” he said. “Changing our personality is very difficult. I tried for many years on myself and despaired often, but still I persevered and triumphed. You will, too.” He thinks of female intelligence as a disease that can be cured.

  I think about murder! That is, when I’m not crying.

  Jacin follows me around all the time. She won’t leave me. She crawls into my bed when I’m asleep. If she knows I want to be alone, she hides behind my back so I won’t see her. I’ve found her under my pillow. I’ve found her behind my curtains.

  Day 243

  How can I tell him?

  My intelligence is all I have. My language is my way of seeing a greater world. There must be mercy somewhere in that heart of his??????? I try to remember Earth. I no longer know if Ceres is in New York or San Francisco.