Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - VI

by Larry Niven

  Si-Kish had an easy answer for everything—the lace fins of his waistcoat gestured in emphasis and sometimes in mock parry—it had all been thrashed out long ago. The Admiral had asked the same questions of himself until the answers shone—but he let the Voice’s staff feel that they were giving him a good workout. What they didn’t understand was that the attack against the man-beasts was a feint. It was an opening gambit not meant to defeat anyone.

  Neither human nor kzin understood what Si-Kish had winnowed from his assiduous analysis. The man-beasts were artificially strong. The Patriarchy was artificially weak. The purpose of his fleet was not to conquer the humans in a bloody interstellar battle but to reestablish the Patriarchy’s nervous system and trade. Then the galaxy’s Heroes could turn to crush the monkeys and reduce them to useful slavery.

  In the middle of a particularly tail-thumping debate, the spotlights swung to the Voice’s gallery. It was time for the assembled multitude of male kzinti to rise. They rose as one. Two petite kzinrretti rushed in through the balcony curtains—his favorite dancer and another—placing a magnificent helmet upon his head. He stood—the Voice of the Patriarch for all to see. Then the lights dimmed upon him but brightened everywhere in all of the galleries, allowing the dominated kzinti standing there to be seen by their Voice as they gifted their master with the slash-across-face salute. The kzinrretti, half his size, were at his feet, and he was tickling his favorite behind the ears, contented by the accolade of his subject males.

  The mood of discussion and contest was over, as suddenly as it had begun, broken in the middle of an important argument. The Voice remained pensive under his grandiose helmet. When the entertainment resumed he watched kzinrretti stalk across a stage of fog boiling from witches’ pots. He glanced at Si-Kish. “Let me watch.” He was no longer interested in war. He brought out his seal and electronically imprinted all of the programs with his approval. He had established to his satisfaction that the conflict was in competent hands. Let the hierarchy of hierarchs vex over the details.

  That was the breakthrough for Si-Kish. The rest of the evening could be conducted as a mop-up operation. He tuned his ear/nose implant to the high command codes and asked for a status report while his eyes watched the kzinrretti stalk a brilliantly feathered beast through the fog. The online reports came in, sector status at a time. The greatest resistance was coming from the Production Hierarch. An amused warrior admiral preened his ears. The geezers in production would be balking at abandoning their standards, some of which were thousands of years old.

  Quietly he backed out of the gallery, into the corridors of the Leaping Palace, still listening to what were essentially battle reports. He left the Palace by the Northern High Entrance, feeling the need for a walk alone. It had been three Kzin days since sunset and the air was frigid. His breath steamed. The hair around his mouth frosted. Even some snowflakes were drifting. He passed through a narrow-walled street of cut stone laid out like a carryon, night-flowers blooming through the cracks. He was not yet willing to call for transportation.

  He could go anywhere in the city to reinforce his minions, but he should probably go into the catacombs of the Production Hierarch and bring his full prestige to bear. His whole plan for W’kkai’s dominance of the Patriarchy depended upon the rapid deployment of new standards throughout a Patriarchy so starved and desperate for hyperdrive technology that they would abandon their age-old commitment to Kzin technology.

  Standards never supported the most advanced technology, and standards which could only be promulgated at 80 percent of the speed of light were lifetimes behind what could be done. Kzin was crippled in that its power depended upon standards that were not good enough to fight the man-beasts. W’kkai had no such constraints. With a hyperdrive fleet it could promote its technology to Meerowsk, to Hrooshpith-Pithcha, even to Ch’Aakin or Warhead, faster than Kzin could keep up. And where the center of trade was, there would sit the new Patriarch.

  A daunting dream—with a single suck-fly in Si-Kish’s eat.

  W’kkai’s physicists had not yet built their first hypershunt motor.

  The High Admiral hated to channel all his hopes through one kzin. The failure of that one kzin was too dangerous. And it galled him in the liver where it hurt that his one kzin, Grraf-Nig, wasn’t a known W’kkaikzin but an outer barbarian who, the Fanged God help him, needed a valet to dress him properly and, worse, whose loyalty to the reigning Patriarch was set into him with the mindlessness of a berserker to whom distant Kzin was some kind of mythical warrior’s Valhalla.

  The simple-minded Grraf-Nig would never be persuaded to believe in a power shift from Kzin to W’kkai. Never. Not by wit. Not by cunning. Not by torture.

  You had to be of W’kkai—belong to a family that had been grossly tithed for a thousand years by the Patriarchs of Kzin, be master of a colorful art that balanced ferocity, be superior—to understand Si-Kish’s ambition.

  •

  Chapter 4

  (2436 A.D.)

  The lights flickered. General Lucas Fry’s eye was distracted from the tiny framed face for a moment. Why were they switching over to Gibraltar’s emergency power source? But before he had time to fret, the regular power returned. Then he had to reach out and catch the miniature, which had drifted away from him. He did so with the economical ease of a born Belter who never made unnecessary gestures in space. But there was a thoughtfulness in his reach—as if to snare all that he had ever lost. It had been her only vanity to have commissioned a tiny painting of herself as a gift to him before she shipped out for the Battle of Wunderland.

  Just another ship’s crew missing in action so long ago. It had been sixteen years since the rout of the kzinti at Alpha Centauri. Had it really been so long? He still remembered the scent of her full flatlander hair, the little auburn ringlet she pulled before asking one of her impudent questions. Missing-in-Action. He thought he had forgotten her—deaths are forgotten in a war with so many deaths. Now he had been reminded.

  An item in a report had been bothering General Fry for weeks.

  It was just a fragment from the frozen memory of a cadaverous kzin warship that had drifted aimlessly in Centauri space to be discovered only recently for intelligence analysis. Perhaps, if it had not been for his unhealed love, he would not even have noticed this trivial detail buried in a routine document. Gibraltar’s computer had long ago broken some of the old kzinti war code. The deciphered minutiae, quaint and chauvinistic, read like a commendation list given by Julius Caesar to his centurions, useless to any practical reader who found it.

  It praised kzin warriors—all Heroes had to be honored for their deeds, even in the middle of a desperate battle. That was the way of war: take a moment here and there to praise vanished warriors for their immortal deeds of courage, which would go unremembered soon enough.

  That kind of detail was all that the Gibraltar team had been able to abstract from the records of the wreck. The really sensitive information had been prudently expunged during the death-throes of the warship. Supply lists, orders, codes, command lines, strategy, contingency plans—all had been erased. But true warriors did not erase the deeds of revered warriors. Warriors sang the songs of their Heroes from skeletal mouths buried in trenches and the floating hulks of war. Heroes were immortal—so Heroes believed.

  It was heroism that had caught the attention of General Fry in one sudden adrenaline rush…an ambiguous line in the role of commendations referred to the intrepid capture of a UNSN scoutship…and the capture of a single, unnamed prisoner.

  Can a heroine rise from her grave? Hope kept jumping out of the strangest places. There was no hope, of course. A man could deal with Killed-in-Action. There was no way to deal with Missing-in-Action.

  Only one UNSN ship was unaccounted for in Centauri space—the hyperdrive scoutship Shark. General Fry had a moment of grief, a dropped tear on the report. Nora had been the Shark’s observer. He thought he had forgotten her by now. He thought it strange that he should s
till remember her so vividly. Until today, he hadn’t looked at her miniature in years, but he had known exactly where he had hidden it from his latest girlfriend.

  His emotions had their priorities all wrong, he knew. It was the capture of an operational hyperdrive vessel by kzinti warcraft sixteen years ago that was his primary intellectual concern. Had this been a brief kzinti victory, wiped out by the carnage of the battle that followed the capture? Or had the UNSN’s superluminal scout somehow made its way back to the techcenters of the Patriarchy? A missing soldier was irrelevant compared with the terrifying vision of a hyperdrive-equipped kzinti naval armada. Still, uppermost in his mind were thoughts of a charming woman and schemes to hold her again in his arms.

  “Major Yankee Clandeboye to see you, sir!” said the sergeant’s voice from the speaker tacked to the bulkhead wall.

  The appointment was for the hour—and would have been scheduled days earlier but physics permitted no hypershunt travel this close to a sun. A glance at his chronometer showed ten seconds to the hour. “Send him down. Better not take the usual route; the grunts are moving machinery.”

  Clandeboye was a find—even though the search to uncover suitable candidates for this mission placed him a distant last in a field of twelve. General Fry reordered the list to place him as first choice. Clandeboye alone was the cousin of Lieutenant Nora Argamentine. He must have known her well because it was his recommendation that had taken Nora off clerical duties on Earth and sent her out to the asteroids for combat training with Intelligence.

  The old note, resurrected from the archives, had been ambivalent—a reluctance to recommend her for dangerous duty was in it, but also an intense admiration. (Nora had probably done some of her blatant arm-twisting on that one. Fry could almost hear her voice speaking to Yankee: “I want that assignment! You’re going to do this for me.” Then coyly, while she fiddled with her ringlet, “I’ll be good at it! You’ll be proud that you recommended me!”)

  The machine expert that had done the personnel search had placed Major Clandeboye dead last for good reasons. His record was uneven. It was clear he would never make it above major in spite of his talents. But none of these faults appeared to be fatal. Lucas Fry was a master Machiavellian who never assumed that he was dealing with perfect people. Strengths were essential but weaknesses provided the pressure points from which to manipulate a man.

  His record:

  The measurements of Major Clandeboye’s administrative accomplishments gave him high marks but the officers he worked for were hostile in their appraisal.

  There was a peculiar mutiny charge against Major Clandeboye two years before the end of the war, in September 2431. It had never gone to court. The evidence in his ship’s automatic log was damning—clearly he had refused to carry out direct orders—but none of his superior officers remained alive to testify against him and the survivors of the Virgo Volunteers he brought back with him had flatly refused to do so.

  Even though Major Clandeboye had mutinied, his automatic log suggested that he had fought brilliantly after Commander Shimmel’s fleet had been destroyed and it was too late for him to carry out his support role.

  Major Clandeboye was under probation for a recent fistfight unbecoming of an officer.

  For footnotes to the official file, General Fry always tapped the gossip mills. The major was rumored to be a stiff-necked moralist. No, he would not approve of a curmudgeon general having an infatuated dalliance with a young lieutenant half his age while he abused his power to give her what she wanted. (She had wanted danger.) The trouble with moralists, who were always right, was that they weren’t always good at taking orders that disagreed with their consciences. Moralists were hotbeds of mutiny. They took their orders from a higher authority.

  The number one rule for manipulating a moralist was to use him as a channel to interview his “higher authority,” then to speak to him in the language of that authority.

  Why did this misfit even stay in the UNSN? That was the key to working with him.

  The man had written articles for the extremely conservative Belter Factnet and one ranting article for the datarag of the Isolationist Party of Wunderland. Fry could understand why his views had annoyed his fellow officers. With his temperament he might have become a flatlander media firebrand and gone far with the unpopularity of his opinions, but as a military man it was suicide to be so outspoken. However sympathetic Fry was to those who feared a kzinti resurgence, he had no use for the young major’s bluntness in deriding the patrols and the peacekeeping.

  Clandeboye belonged to the small minority officers who believed that the kzinti had not been trounced in the recent war and would return with a terrible ferocity—a preposterous belief while mankind’s hypershunt ships patrolled kzin space with impunity. The UN’s Amalgamated Regional Militia had imposed a three-hundred-year peace on a fractiously warring mankind, until mass-man hardly understood war, and the navy in alliance with ARM had no reason to believe that they couldn’t do the same with the kzinti. Everyone, except maybe Clandeboye and the Wunderlanders, assumed that this was exactly what would happen.

  The major’s viewpoint was preposterous, certainly, but his speculation about the strength and determination of a humbled Patriarchy was an alternate scenario that should be taken seriously. No harm in that. Hannibal’s march through Europe’s Alps had also been preposterous from a Roman point of view. The generals at Pearl Harbor had rejected the preposterous notion that the blips on their radar could be Japanese warcraft from a disappeared fleet.

  Fry was coming to the conclusion that the way to this miscreant’s heart was to give him help with his eccentric ideas. (With friendly guidance, of course.) Wasn’t this pariah a man in desperate need of allies? Fry would, of course, stay in the shadows of the bunker while he played his multiple games. It was prudent to cultivate officers inclined to plan for a resurgent Patriarchy. A card up the old sleeve. Cover all bets. A Clandeboye with power might even be useful in the Belter effort to take out General Buford Early, a flatlander who needed a little cement in his jets.

  What about mutiny? At first sight this disgraceful mutiny thing seemed to disqualify Clandeboye completely from a sensitive mission. But the more Fry investigated the inquest, the more fascinated he became. Men are loyal to an officer for a reason. The inquest had not found out why. Clandeboye might carry the psychological nature of a mutineer—a man who always thought he was being put upon—but none of the men who sided with him even remotely fitted that profile. There were other aberrations. It was highly irregular that the inquest had come to the conclusion of mutiny, had placed that in the major’s record—and then refused to prosecute him. Here was a rich arsenal of weapons available to Fry, stacked both against Clandeboye and his enemies. It was a situation that could be worked both ways.

  What particularly attracted Fry was his candidate’s brilliance under fire. The man could improvise against the kzinti faster than a computer. That was rare. There was no record at all of Shimmel’s brilliance.

  When all items in the major’s record were weighed against Lucas Fry’s purpose, the fisticuff fight was the blackest mark against Clandeboye. These fights had become too common of late, as if young soldiers had taken out-of-control kzinti kits as their role models. Why admire the ferocity of the enemy you had just defeated? Modern youth was becoming incomprehensible. Human males of Fry’s generation, even as children, had not settled their differences by physical combat. In space, with a vacuum on the other side of the bulkhead, such behavior was deadly. It seemed that war had been short-circuiting the morals of the young; fist makes right, it told them. So Clandeboye liked to fight, did he? Well, he could, and would, be nailed to the rack and stretched for that one.

  To Lucas Fry it was self-evident that the ability to clobber someone did not make one right. If men had destroyed the kzinti war machine, that was a matter of survival, not of rightness. Fry had gone into the war as an adult, already knowing that. But the younger men and women had seen the
war won by force and not by philosophy. They did not have the long view of history. Force seemed dominant to them; they had been born into it.

  How does one pass one’s wisdom on to the children? (To men as mature as Fry, 66, men as young as Clandeboye, 47, were still children.)

  His parents, he reflected, had been horrified when he left the goldskins for the military. They had tried to teach him that the kzin could be handled nonviolently. They had implored him to study man’s history to understand where violence led. He had ignored them. Now he had his own wisdom to teach—force must be balanced with compassion. But he had no children of his own to listen. They had been killed in the war. He had only his cadre of young officers.

  He wasn’t going to let Clandeboye’s temper disqualify him. A man’s weaknesses could be turned to advantage. Weakness was non-Medusan—if a man could look at weakness directly, he became strong; if he dared look at his failings only obliquely through a mirror, he became ossified. Fry was sure enough of his role as a martinet to believe that he could teach the sons of Zeus and Danae to face their Medusas without a mirror.

  The heavy bulkhead door swung in, enough to let the sergeant’s head through. “We found a way down past the kitchens. I didn’t let your boy get lost.”

  In person, Major Yankee Clandeboye turned out to be a rumpled flatlander who had a flatlander’s unbalanced way of giving a snappy salute in freefall. He was slightly awkward and ill-at-ease. He did not have the charisma of a commanding officer. He had too much hair; it even covered his ears. No matter—one did not judge flatlanders by their size, color of skin, grace, or cleanliness. They had other virtues.

  “You’ll be wondering why I hauled you in from Egeria. Convince me that you are the right man for my mission and I have a high enough priority rating to get your transferal processed immediately. We’re in Intelligence here; I suspect you already know that.”