by Larry Niven
After Day 479, Argamentine’s day headings become incoherent, and sometimes are missing altogether. The following is one of the last journal entries.
Day is a pretty word. Night and day.
He told me I will talk 500 words. I know that is clump which kzinrret can talk. I tried remember Earth. I saw cornfields. I saw a red scarf. Cornfield cornfield cornfield cornfield ears of yellow corn, red scarf red scarf red scarf around neck, but remember only facts. Earth is 4.3 light years from Wunderland. Earth whirls in space. Whirl pretty word. Cornfield cornfield cornfield. Remember sight of Earth from space. Earth is blue with clouds. Pretty Earth.
Sin I remember. House in Sin. Death in Sin. My Hero won’t let me talk English. Write secret dictionary of Hero-English words. Mnemonic trick. Clever me. Clever Nora. Clever is pretty word. Can read English. Practice. Practice day and night. Easy talk Hero, talk in spits and snarls. Hard speak English. Write English because I practice. Practice. Nora is clever. Now I copy some of words I save.
inkwell pocket shepherd’s pie microscope ultramarine harmonize plumbing joystick windmill insect crawl cornfield tired never-never land tip-of-tongue tanj…
The Nora-beast paced through her palazzo and always when she came to the great circular rug she followed the design around in circles because that seemed to focus her thinking. She was concentrating. She wore trousers. It was something she wouldn’t give up. A narrow-faced girl, nakedly furless, followed behind her closely, sporadically complaining in the Female Tongue.
The furry woman did not forget the girl, and sometimes stroked the child’s hair, but she was busy and concentrating. What she wanted was on the tip of her tongue but it wouldn’t come. Simple Heroic words got in the way. She had to concentrate.
She gave up for a while and ate a meal. She fed the girl. She cleaned up the kitchen. She toured the palazzo to spruce up the rooms. Then she returned to her single-minded concentration.
It started with a hiss.
She knew that much. Finally a broad grin of triumph crossed her face, dimpling her cheeks. She said the word aloud, relishing the sounds, all three syllables! The word did indeed begin with a hiss! She knew it! She repeated the English word over and over again so that she might learn it faster than she forgot it.
When she was sure of her mastery she went to the little niche and took out the book from among the pretty baubles. She opened the book to a fresh page, not looking at the writing because the words no longer meant anything to her and she had a hard time pronouncing them. She knew they were words just like the hissing-staccato words of Her Hero.
She picked up the stylus and wrote her word very carefully, eighteen times, pronouncing it each time with a smile. She knew exactly what it represented. She had the picture in her head. It was important because it wasn’t a Heroic word. Then she hid the book and hid the stylus. It was the last entry she ever made in her journal.
She couldn’t stop smiling. No kzinrret ever smiled like that; it wasn’t part of the hardwiring of their brains to do so. She waited impatiently for Her Hero to arrive. He always came to lie in her bed with her, stroking her fur, making her feel cozy.
When she heard him at the entrance, heard the airlock cycling, she began to mumble to herself. This time she didn’t greet him. She waited coyly for him to come into the stone room with the round rug. She waited until he was right beside her before she turned to him and said her word straight to his face, grinning happily in her victory.
“Centipede”, she said, hissing it out. She had the image clearly in her mind, a tiny centipede furry with legs, legs, legs.
For twelve years the crew of the Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch stayed among the ruins of Hssin, living alternately on the ship and in the buildings they had refurbished. The kzin’s Jotoki slaves rebuilt the body of the Shark. The secrets of its hyperdrive motor came less quickly. Without a UNSN operations and repair manual, puzzles that should have been solved in days, took years.
Trainer-of-Slaves learned how to impregnate the Nora-female with sperm extracted from the bodies of his previous experiments. He was delighted to discover that he could always arrange to give her a normal birth of one son and one daughter. Jacin died of a brain seizure. Nora never forgot her and the memory made her fiercely protective of her own twins. She loved Her Hero but she did not trust him with children.
In that twelve years of exile the refugees from Alpha Centauri had to hide from one patrolling UNSN vessel. Two kzin ships arrived and fled, and one unsuspecting kzin flotilla coming into Hssin—probably not even aware that a superluminal war was happening—ran into a UNSN ambush while decelerating. They were wiped out to the last kzin, as a cautious Bitch later determined.
The final tests of the refurbished Shark took three months. Trainer-of-Slaves was not aware that the war was already over.
CHAPTER 28
(2435 A.D.)
On the fourth dropout from hyperspace, W’kkai-sun was the brightest star in the heavens, two light-days away. It was fifteen light-years from here to Hssin, and they had made it in a miraculous forty-four days. The Empire of the Patriarch would never be the same. They had reached mighty W’kkai!
Trainer-of-Slaves paused for a moment to consider the event. Fifty-eight years ago, bargaining among the rumor-laden bazaars of this illustrious star-system, the great Chuut-Riit had first sniffed the scent of the man-beast and laid his plans for the Patriarch’s Glory. In that same year, inside the humble Fortress Walls of Hssin, the runt of Hamarr’s new litter had been given the name Short-Son of Chiirr-Nig. Nobody had expected him to live—except his protective mother.
From W’kkai it had taken Chuut-Riit’s caravan nineteen years to reach the outpost Hssin. From Hssin it had taken Short-Son of Chiirr-Nig fifty-eight years to reach the legendary W’kkai—by means of a short cut of forty-four days at the end.
In the meantime how had the warriors of Riit and Nig fared? Chuut-Riit was dead, his sons dead, his entourage slaughtered. Chiirr-Nig, who had chosen to stay at Hssin and breed sons, was dead. His brothers were fried corpses circling Man-sun or dead at Ka’ashi. His “warrior” sons had died in the Fourth Fleet or found valiant martyrdom during that final valiant cataclysm at Ka’ashi-suns.
One son had survived. Only one. The runt, the short-son, the eater-of-grass. The coward. The lowly Trainer-of-Slaves. The survivor.
The Nora-beast beside him was suckling her third pair of twins at milk-swollen breasts, fascinated by the heavens as she always was. She didn’t like the shutters that were in place during hyperspatial travel, or the dim electric glow of the cabin. Her dimples told him that she was excited that her world had opened up again.
There was a slight hint of human urine on Nora’s fur—the boy’s soaker needed to be changed again. The baby girl suddenly opened up her eyes for a burp, then closed them and went back to her obsessive sucking. She was going to grow up to be a beauty. She ought to be very marketable as a breeder if he could manage her verbal development to peak at 500 words.
The softly furred female was thinking that she had been very patient with her Mellow-Yellow, but enough was enough! Ex-Lieutenant Argamentine wanted her big room back. With its colors and furs and its baby beds. Where were her other babies? It made her uncomfortable to see them frozen in the hold. They didn’t mover
Bad Mellow-Yellow! He’d kept them all cooped lap too long in his silly ship. Poor Long-Reach, funny Long-Reach, with no place to put his arms back there. The return of the stars was welcome but big old Mellow-Yellow had tricked her before with those. It didn’t necessarily mean they were home. “We home?” asked Nora in the elementary hiss-spits of the Female Tongue. She no longer remembered any English at all.
The kzin warrior spent a day scanning the sky. He was looking for the gravitic pulse of a UNSN ship, worried that they might have inflicted on W’kkai the same horrible fate they had delivered to Hssin. It wasn’t likely. That was why he had picked W’kkai. The UNSN ships could outflank the worlds of the Patriarchy. They could lay sieg
e to whole systems. They could disrupt trade. But siege wasn’t conquest. W’kkai-system had the resources to resist siege for a dozen generations!
His sensors detected only kzin.
He was moving in on the system using the same careful plan that he had extracted from Lieutenant Argamentine’s mind, the same maneuver she had been using to close in on a hostile Alpha Centauri.
They jumped in, one light-day closer. It took Long-Reach half an hour to phase in the motor for that jump and fifteen minutes to arc through hyperspace.
W’kkai! Trainer-of-Slaves was already dream-seeing his noble household. He saw the stone walls. There would be a vast Jotok Run out back, bigger than the whole Run on Hssin had ever been. He had some nice little bungalows in mind for the man-slaves. They’d need a common dormitory, too. Monkeys were communal animals.
And the palazzo for his kzinrretti: that would be a marvel of carved red sandstone and tall wrought iron walkways to let the light in, W’kkai style—all laid out with cool inner corridors, and mazed plazas for the chasing and leaping games. He could almost smell the perfume of kzinrret fur. To stock his harem he’d be able to walk into the most noble of households—carved woods, tapestries, trophies, ancient heirlooms—and take his pick of their favorite daughters.
Still nothing but the electromagnetic hubbub of a thriving civilization, and the characteristic gravitic signature of polarizer-driven interplanetary commerce.
Another jump, and then he knew they were near a military base.
He beamed out an identification code, so hoary in its use among the worlds of the Patriarchy that it was conjured in base twenty-five mathematics—which probably meant that it had been invented by the ancient Jotoki and learned by the kzin while they were still mercenaries. The code was a royal tail-pain to use. But changing standard regulations in a sublight empire could be impossibly complex.
The man-monkeys weren’t any different. He had often wondered why the navigation instruments in the Shark were calibrated to odd intervals of twenty-four and sixty, translated to base ten mathematics. It was a minor miracle that he’d been able to find W’kkai using them. The custom probably reflected something that the humans had inherited from their chimpanzee ancestors.
He wasn’t expecting a fast response to his signal. The Shark was eleven light-minutes from the nearest kzin military unit, well out of “leap first and ask questions later” range. He’d have to wait twenty-two minutes for a reply.
Eventually that reply arrived. “Kppukiss-Guardian speaking. Identification code incompatible with vessel type. You are putting out the neutrino profile of a UNSN ghostship. You are presently trespassing, I repeat, trespassing the defense sphere permitted to W’kkai by the MacDonald-Rishshi Peace Treaty of the 2433rd year honoring the torture of the Fanged Father, the Monkey Son, and the Unseen Grandfather.” The rest of the message was unstated but the menace was there—no truce existed inside the treaty perimeter. Good. That meant that they were within kzin controlled space.
Trainer-of-Slaves decided that now was the time to use a new name. Then he would never have to reveal his duty names—and no one could ever flaunt them to insult him. Self-promotion wasn’t unknown in the Patriarchy—if a Hero had the swinging-claw to make it stick. And this Hero’s swinging-claw moved faster than light!
“Lord Grraf-Nig acknowledging Kppukiss-Guardian. Grraf-Nig here. Grraf-Nig receiving.” In taking this name he was honoring his mentor, Grraf-Hromfi (out of affection) and his father, Chiirr-Nig (out of spite). For the rest of his life he intended to spread the wisdom of Grraf, and for the rest of his life he intended to be such a fulgent Nig that all other Nigs, especially his father, would fade from the sky.
His beamcast continued. “This servant of the Patriarch does indeed travel in a salvaged UNSN vessel, unfettered by the luminiferous bondage. We come from the wreckage of Ka’ashi-system and from the martyrdom of Hssin. Light will not yet have delivered its message of these distant woes to W’kkai, so you must only have heard the version spoken to you by the superluminal man-beasts who tell lies to suit the mood of their livers.
“Grraf-Nig’s desire is to settle upon the lush plains of W’kkai to breed a new generation of warriors for which I will need the aid of your magnificent daughters.
“I come in poverty and lamentation from our wasted worlds. I bring with me only a superluminal drive and a functioning hyperwave receiver, neither of which I can fully comprehend without the help of W’kkai scholarship and neither of which can be comprehended by W’kkai scholarship without the fifteen years of sweat and thought given to these devices by me and my slaves.
“I come in poverty without a warrior entourage, with only the memory of martyred Heroes. My pitiful wealth is reduced to ten Jotoki-slaves of mechanical bent who know gravitic and superluminal mechanics, and one female breeder of a new slave race and her litter of six child-slaves.
“The Lord Grraf-Nig requests a full military escort to W’kkai. The vessel Shark is unarmed. Your Heroes are welcome aboard for inspection. Lord Grraf-Nig out. Standing by.”
Grraf-Nig was almost shaking in his fear. After fifteen years of living a kzinless life he had forgotten what contact was like. The frightened Short-Son had been impressed by the speech but appalled that it had been coming out of his mouth. Trainer-of-Slaves was just glad that the W’kkai warriors couldn’t smell the fear in the Shark’s cabin. He was going to have to request a talcum rubdown by Nora to get the evidence of cowardice out of his fur. Then he’d replace the entire cabin air supply minutes prior to the boarding.
He expected the next contact to be visual. That gave them twenty-two minutes to dress. He pulled out the case from behind the box that had been made on We Made It and held up the best kzin finery he had been able to salvage from the ruins of Hssin.
Grraf-Nig had fresh livery for Long-Reach who was sitting on his mouth atop the hyperdrive motor, three brains asleep and two arms holding sleeping babies. That pose would have to be changed. He wanted his slaves to appear as well-groomed animals. He combed the Nora-beast’s fur on her torso and legs until the soft down glimmered. It pleased him to do things for her. She was able to perform miracles upon his pelt. Then he gave her new lace garters for her video debut. She slipped them on, her dimples in her cheeks. That meant she liked them. Of course she didn’t understand about the video.
I’ve gone crazy from loneliness, thought Grraf-Nig. I love my five-armed sons and my wonderfully feminine man-kzinrret. It was a venal sin to become attached to slaves but that was the risk a slave-master had to take.
The twenty-two minutes were up. The radio came to life. “Honored Grraf-Nig! This unworthy Kppukiss Guardian offers you a military escort of six Screamers. W’kkai welcomes its Rescuing Hero! Our wealth is your wealth! My only daughter will comfort your couch! A thousand of our sons will be your Warrior’s Guard…”
Though Long-Reach was mostly asleep, short(arm) had been keeping an eye on things. “Dominant Master, don’t let all that sthondat excrement overheat your liver.”
“Trip over?” asked Nora brightly.
Grraf-Nig banged the box from We Made It. “We Made It!” he exclaimed in English.
Nora didn’t understand a word. But she knew what to do. She snuggled up to Mellow-Yellow. “My Hero,” she purred-spat in her charming human accent.
THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KZIN
Greg Bear & S.M. Stirling
* * *
Copyright © 1991 by Greg Bear and S.M. Stirling
“I am become overlord of a fleet of transports, supply ships, and wrecks!” Kfraksha-Admiral said. “No wonder the First Fleet did not return; our Intelligence reports claimed these humans were leaf-eaters without a weapon to their name, and they have destroyed a fourth of our combat strength!”
He turned his face down to the holographic display before him; it was set for exterior-visual, and showed only bright unwinking points of light and the schematics that indicated the hundreds of vessels of the Second Fleet. Here beyond the orbit of
Neptune the humans’ sun was just another star…we will eat you yet, he vowed silently. A spacer’s eye could identify those suns whose worlds obeyed the Patriarch. More that did not, unvisited, or unconquered yet like the Pierin holdouts on Zeta Reticuli. Yes, you and all like you! So many suns, so many…
The kzin commander’s tail was not lashing, he was beyond that, and the naked pink length of that organ now stood out rigid as he paced the command deck of the Sons Contend With Bloody Fangs. The orange fur around his blunt muzzle bristled, and the reddish washcloth of his tongue kept sweeping up to moisten his black nostrils. The other kzinti on the bridge stayed prudently silent, forcing their batwing ears not to fold into the fur of their heads at the spicy scent of high-status anger. The lower-ranked bent above the consoles and readouts of their duty stations, taking refuge in work; the immediate staff prostrated themselves around the central display tank, laying their facial fur flat. Aide-to-Commanders covered his nose with his hands in an excess of servility; irritated, Kfraksha kicked him in the ribs as he went by. There was no satisfaction to the gesture, since they were all in space-combat armor save for the unhinged helmets, but the subordinate went spinning a meter or so across the deck.
“Well? Advise me,” the kzin admiral spat. “Surely something can be learned from the loss of a squadron of Gut Tearer-class cruisers?”
Reawii-Intelligence-Analyst raised tufted eyebrows and fluttered his lips against his fangs.
“Frrrr. The…rrrr, humans have devoted great resources to the defense of the gas-giant moons, whose resources are crucial.”
As Kfraksha-Admiral bared teeth, the Intelligence officer hurried on. Reawii’s Homeworld accent irritated Kfraksha-Admiral at the best of times. His birth was better than his status, and it would not do to anger the supreme commander, who had risen from the ranks and was proud of it. He hurried beyond the obvious.