by Larry Niven
The game had rules. Each eye-image had an ear-sound that only Mellow-Yellow knew and Long-Reach had to guess. Since the kinds and varieties of image were endless, it was a never ending quest to find the voice that fitted the image. What was exciting was that if his selves were clever he could use words to provoke the new sounds out of Mellow-Yellow, or even better, use the words themselves as an aid to discovering the new words. His selves carried on an internal race. Which lungs would first utter the true sequence of sounds? Sometimes they all spoke at once. Short(arm) was best at such races and tended to dominate the role of talker. When short(arm) was asleep, Long-Reach was less glib.
In this world beyond the trees, there were many new images, many new words.
“Leaves,” said short(arm). “Leaves, leaves,” repeated skinny(arm) because there weren’t any.
“Ah, you’re hungry.” Mellow-Yellow left the cave through … an elevator? Door, door, corrected short(arm). When Long-Reach tried to follow there was no door. Anxiety.
But Mellow-Yellow came back with leaves in a container of grass. Big(arm) thought about the right words for the sight and made suggestions while feeling the weave of the grass blades that were entwined in a very regular way. His eye had never seen anything like it. “Leaves sit on grass-floor,” said short(arm) while communicating the thought that flat-“floor” could not be a good word for hollow-container.
“It’s a basket, not a floor. I got it from the slave quarters. Say ‘basket.’ ”
“Basket, basket. Basket of grass. Grass basket.”
“And don’t take it apart! Don’t you ever stop being curious?”
Long-Reach picked up the basket with two arms and dumped the leaves on the floor. He sat on them, elbows in the air, and began to masticate. “Good,” exclaimed all the arms in unison.
“My ears ripple when I watch you sitting down to eat.”
“My ears ripple when I watch you sitting down to excrete. One-mouth better than two.”
“Long-Reach, your ears don’t ripple. Your ears are in your wrists.”
“Ripple? Ripple?” Big(arm) rose so that its eye could look at the resonance cups on its wrist which analyzed sound.
Trainer-of-Slaves rippled his ears to demonstrate. He was genuinely amused. “That’s what I do when I tell a joke. How do I know when you are telling a joke?”
“Joke?”
“Some other day!”
Trainer-of-Slaves needed to sleep—so Long-Reach hooked himself to a wall rack and slept himself, with only freckled(arm) awake and watching the door. Freckled(arm) had things to mull over but that was difficult with sleep-silence on four channels.
Thinking did not go rapidly without question-answers from other-arms. But questions were themselves interesting. What had happened to the forest? Why did the absence of trees make floors flat? What was glass? How could something invisible resist the push of a hand? How was R’hshssira attached to its ceiling? Did all worlds have different colored lamps?
There were more questions in the morning when Mellow-Yellow led Long-Reach to a cavern full of weird shapes and vines that swallowed eyes and arms. The giant carnivore was there with the smell of leaf-eater flesh on his breath. Frightening.
“You won’t be able to put him in the machine—they panic when their arms are constrained—and his vocabulary isn’t big enough so that an explanation will register. We’ll have to shoot him up with trazine. First, we’ll let him watch a Jotok come out of the trainer unharmed.”
Long-Reach stayed as near his yellow companion as he could get. They put him too close to a big leaf-eater like himself who was suspended in mid-air, his arms in thick sleeves, with vines coming out of the caps over his eyes. His limbs convulsed as if he were running and flying among the trees—but he wasn’t going anywhere. Terrifying.
The big kzin unhooked the eyes. The sleeves came off. While the beast was being liberated, three of Long-Reach’s brains came to the simultaneous conclusion that he was going to become the replacement. Three arms started to back off—and couldn’t move.
“The trazine won’t harm you. Be gone within heartbeats.” They were putting him into the sleeves and he couldn’t resist. His eyes had retracted to their armored state in a reflex at the shock of paralysis, but he could not keep them closed while the giant popped out each eye in turn and stuck them into caps. He was blind and paralyzed. Was this the death he had been avoiding all his life?
All of his minds went into escape mode. But before he could even think of escape … suddenly … he was transported to a forest. There was a precision smoothness to each detail and no smell. He had not passed through any walls or doors. Did one die and go to an odorless forest? He still couldn’t move, but his thumbs were wrapped around branches and he wasn’t falling. He saw no kzinti. When the paralysis wore off, he took the chance and ran; he zipped through the trees like flying, barely touching a branch before he was reaching for another.
The landmarks were unfamiliar and there were no odor clues. The trees were too tall. When he climbed as high as he could go there were no ceiling lamps. White moss floated overhead where the roof should have been. Nothing he did seemed to orient him, even his acceleration senses were subtly contradicting his eyes and the feel of his skin. He couldn’t backtrack because the world changed behind him as it passed out of sight—what was behind was as unknown as what was in front. It was wrong.
A lake appeared through the trees, larger than any lake he had ever seen, bluer than it had any right to be. He skittered among broad branches that had been able to reach outward along the shoreline, afraid to let the lake out of sight lest it disappear. High above the beach he paused.
His tree developed a lung-slit and spoke. “I am a tree.”
Startled, he leaped into another tree, nearly missing it. “Nice leap,” said a bird who had been watching him.
He was gaping at the tree (with three eyes) and the bird (with two eyes). How many different kinds of worlds were there? asked freckled(arm) frantically. After a while Long-Reach got used to it. The world patiently gave him lessons in speech with the same image-sound codes as Mellow-Yellow had used. Stones talked. Stumps talked. Animals talked. It was very disconcerting.
The predictables had shifted. And not to be able to predict meant danger. Hide and meditate upon the consequences. Idly fast(arm) plucked some berries in their leaf-cones and shoved them up into the undermouth to placate hunger. But there was nothing for Long-Reach to chew on. Shock. In this world food was going to be a problem. Too many problems.
“Eat me,” said a leaf.
He tried. It was only a strong taste, still nothing to chew on.
“Bitter,” said the leaf which had miraculously regrown. “Eat me again.”
He did so. It tasted like the caps of marsh-reed, or even seed-berries, but again there was nothing to chew on.
“Sweet,” said the everlasting leaf. “Eat me again.”
Right now he wanted Mellow-Yellow. “Trainer-of-Slaves!” he bellowed.
His call produced an immediate twilight, fading into a night darker than the deepest cavern.
Beside him, Mellow-Yellow appeared slowly, like a ceiling lamp at dawn, without casting any light into the darkness. The carnivore’s image was too sharp, too orange, and flickered a little. A furry hand reached out and touched the eye of big(arm). Then—weirdly with only one eye—he was back where he had started; Mellow-Yellow was the right color, the giant kzin was beside him and so was all the machinery in the cavern. His selves jumped to look through big(arm)’s eye.
Long-Reach could now feel his arms in their tight trap. Panic. Death … he began to struggle.
The giant kzin backed off but Mellow-Yellow efficiently freed the capped eyes and removed the constraints. Long-Reach walked away, miffed, with only freckled(arm) watching the big yellow trickster curiously.
“Joke,” said Trainer-of-Slaves.
“You have brains where your intestines should be!” sulked Long-Reach, who had begun to assimil
ate his anatomy lessons. “Joke,” he added, having no intention of insulting a carnivore.
But for the rest of the day he refused to speak. At night while Mellow-Yellow slept, his minds debated what they had seen. The whole event reeked of danger. Hide, said all of his instincts. And yet the curiosity was overpowering! Talking trees! Moving through walls! Seeing different worlds with each eye! The wonder of it!
At the first sign that Mellow-Yellow was awake, he herded him toward the door. “More joke,” he said.
During his second session in the confinement rig he learned numbers and image symbols for numbers. Released, he enthusiastically counted everything—still amazed that the region between three and many could be divided up endlessly into distinct parts, that no matter how high he counted, there was one more. He counted kzin, he counted lamps, and he counted the leaves he ate, one by one because freckled(arm) wanted to know how many leaves it took to stop hunger.
The virtual worlds of the confinement rig were of two kinds. The moment he tired of one, he was shifted to the other. There were the work worlds where he learned practical mathematics and the art of maintaining machines and proper ways of addressing his kzin masters. There were the play worlds of forest and dungeon where natural law changed whimsically, sometimes in frightful ways, sometimes amusingly. When capricious play taxed his minds, a shift to the tuning of gravitic force fields was a relief; when tedious machining drove him to singing mental tunes in harmony, a shift to the free world of play was pleasure.
Time blurred. He saw less and less of Mellow-Yellow, yet the hours he spent with his kzin companion were rich in conversation. Trainer-of-Slaves admitted that Jotok-Tender was a hard taskmaster while Long-Reach taught his friend geometry and how to disassemble machines. Once they couldn’t reassemble a machine because the slave hadn’t got that far in his lessons. For that sin Jotok-Tender had them both scrubbing floors together.
The best days were spent hunting. Long-Reach wore a special uniform of cloth that distinguished the slaves of Mellow-Yellow, green and red stripes, ruffles. They swept through the Jotok Run searching out new slaves, leisurely, with no special command to return. To the senses of Long-Reach, the familiar woods and ponds and rock faces of his youth were better than the virtual forests of the confinement rig. There was fresh forest odor and the trees didn’t talk. The ceiling had lamps and the caves led only to the level below.
Long-Reach would flush the prey, knowing where the young gathered. Then Trainer-of-Slaves would seduce the youth while Long-Reach hid in the trees. The hunt was not always successful. The Jotok they stalked might prove large enough, yet still untouched by curiosity-hunger—he’d have to be released until he matured. Or he might be wild, past his prime, good only for the dinner table, his intelligence lost to language, metamorphosed into cunning.
Trainer-of-Slaves kept the best of the Jotok captives for himself. Three became his personal retinue: Long-Reach, Joker, and Creepy. The three had the usual training in mathematics, mechanics, and gravitic device maintenance. But they were also Mellow-Yellow’s hunting companions. They noticed that he had enemies among the kzin, and chattered about the danger to him among themselves, covertly. Inevitably they became his bodyguards, the eyes who watched his back.
CHAPTER 8
(2396 A.D.)
The armada was arriving. Like all things in the Patriarchy, there was no great hurry.
First the swift Victory at S’Rawl fell out of space into orbit around Hssin. It disgorged no warriors, and made no diplomacy, but imperiously took over the duties of the local Orbit Command by Authority of the Patriarch. Traat-Admiral was acting as point-liaison for Chuut-Riit, Warrior Ambassador Extraordinary. The Admiral was under strict orders to dominate the local kzinti from the moment of first contact—they were considered to be fierce but not reliably obeisant.
An inner-world kzin, however territorial, was used to the formalisms of hierarchical command, but out here in the wilds a less disciplined breed of kzinti were notorious for the way they fought over and defended the spoils of their adventuring; crass in their willingness to defy a messenger of the Patriarch if he gave any appearance of weakness. The Patriarch was thirty years distant by lightbeam and forty years distant by ship.
The Hssin fleet might have responded arrogantly. The Conquest Heroes of Hssin were brothers of the Conquest Heroes of Wunderland. They could have ignored, or even ordered an attack on the Victory at S’Rawl—after all, it was a mere command warcraft heavy with electronics but deficient in armaments. But would the Hssin household of Kasrriss-As have dared such disdain, knowing who was to follow Traat-Admiral?
No action was taken against the Victory at S’Rawl. Space traffic control was relinquished with grinless self-restraint.
Ships began to drift into the R’hshssira System in ones and twos, every few hours, over months, the transports with their time-suspended warriors, the warcraft, the auxiliaries—all that Chuut-Riit had been able to exhort, to tempt, to command from five systems. No ship debarked a single warrior to Hssin, taking orbit instead in a great ring around red R’hshssira. To awe Hssin at a distance, that was Traat-Admiral’s intention.
In time Chuut-Riit himself arrived, his flagship a spherical dreadnought of the Imperial Ripper class larger than anything that the barbarians of Hssin had ever seen, the first new battle design from Kzin in centuries, ominous, weapons-laden. These out-world adventurers of the borderlands would fawn all over him for its specifications—and he would sell those details for a price.
During the six days it took for the gravitic drive field of the Throat Ripper to collapse from a cruising speed of six-eighths light down to the velocity of R’hshssira, Chuut-Riit had been in post-hibernation training—massage, fight simulation, strenuous amusements with a favorite kzinrret. Hibernation was good for neither muscle tone nor quick reflex. Swift repairs to the physique, he never neglected.
Most confrontations Chuut-Riit handled with a logic that cowed his foes, but if that failed he used wit before falling back on an awesome rage that could subdue opposition with the sheer stench of his anger. Still, he liked to be in prime physical shape for those times when it was necessary to bloody an irrational enemy with fang or claw.
The work den adjacent to his stateroom was small, paneled along one wall by holographic savanna mismatched to the ceiling pipes. Above his data-link hung a modern pulse-laser and an antique crossbow. The floor beside the data-link provided place for but a single kdatlyno-hide rug—this one bare along an edge, old, a trophy of his first hunt as a servitor of the Prime Household. In those days, having more strength than sense, he had aligned himself with a Patriarch who was too young to have remained alive long, but live he did, to grow old and perish while Chuut-Riit served him as military trouble-slasher, first on Kzin, and then among the stars where the endless years of hibernation had slowed his aging.
He was not old but (having outlived his regal pride-mate) he felt his age. He remembered things vividly that his subordinates knew of only through the distortion of imaging and writing. These kits thought of the Asanti Wars as one battle and knew nothing of the treason of Grrowme-Kowr. They purred of the Long Peace, as if there had been no battles before they were weaned. Unshared memories made a kzin feel old, old, old.
Ah, though perhaps not as old as the Riit crossbow. Chuut-Riit had on his electronic spectacles and was staring at it—Jotok light-alloy, forged by kzin ironmongers, inlaid with blueshell by a semi-professional kzin artist. The leather strapping had been replaced but all else was original.
It was said by his grandfather that this crossbow was the weapon of choice carried into space by the first Riit ancestor hired to battle off-planet. The family genealogy traced him back through to the household of one of the almost mythical Riit Patriarchies, but the truth was probably less romantic—perhaps he was a game-keeper at some distant hunting reserve who scandalized his household (even endangered their lives) by vowing fealty to the Jotok infidels.
Those spider-armed monste
rs arrived with wealth and magic. They had swords of fire and gravitic machinery and dreams of hiring mercenaries to conquer them a stellar empire, preferring someone else to do their dying for them. In the aftermath of the siege of the Patriarch’s castle and his ignoble defeat, Jotok wealth could have bought these spacefaring animals any number of wretched kzinti.
This crossbow and a letter (written in what competent historians had charitably called an “illiterate” hand) were all that remained of the ancestor. The letter was a wonderful attempt at trying to describe stars to a kzin father who was convinced that the stars were the souls of Great Heroes embedded in the Fanged God’s Dome.
The Riit medallion engraved into the crossbow was supposed to have been the family mark since prehistorical time. Popular notion held that it was a stylized carnivore’s grin, but Chuut-Riit’s careful historical research had shown that it was really the shoulder patch assigned by the Jotoki to their elite kzin warriors. It represented a dentate leaf. The dots and comma motto that surrounded the medallion was, however, a later addition “From Mercenary to Master.”
The most invidious sentiment that Chuut-Riit had ever heard was voiced while he was recruiting support for his armada at Ch’Aakin. “If these monkeys put up such a fanatical fight, we should hire them to do battle for us, to be killed in our place. It is time we enjoyed the Long Peace we have created. If a master is truly a master, he can buy life for himself and death for his servants.” Said by a fop who had never challenged his father to combat, a fop who owned his share of Jotok slaves yet had never seen the forest-buried ruins of the Jotok worlds, looted by trusted orange mercenaries.
Chuut-Riit was both a mathematician and a historian. He was a student of the rise of the Jotok Empire. It had attained less than an eighth the size of the modern Kzin Patriarchy, yet could still teach important contemporary lessons. How had their purely commercial fleets developed, to such a fine art, logistic battle support over interstellar distances?