Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - VIII - Choosing Names

by Larry Niven, Hal Colebatch, Jean Lamb, Paul Chafe, Warren W. James

  Green light flashing! A missile fired from the Claw in its last seconds still alive and heading towards us.

  I had to leap again, to trigger our remaining anti-missiles. A huge, blinding explosion, too close. The stars spun, the meteor-defenses activated. There was an indescribable sound as something hit the bulk of the gravity-motor behind us. I thought that bulk had saved us but then came the dreadful howl of air escaping from a hull-puncture. I struggled with a meteor-patch. On the dials lights and wave-bands were showing engine malfunction. Power would be gone in a few heat-beats. Think quickly! From Selina’s mind I snatched what no Kzin astrogator trained on gravity-motors would have had ready enough: a knowledge of inertial forces sufficient to turn the barge with the last of its power and align its course towards the human ship.

  I had done what I could. My claws slipped on the control panel. I saw them tearing strips from it as my muscles began to convulse. Then pain…pain…

  “I think your cat is dying,” said Steve Weaver. As he saw her face he added: “I can’t be sure. I’m only a human doctor.”

  The human and Kzin seals could not interface, of course, but four of the Angel’s Pencil’s crew had crossed in suits.

  There had been embraces, greetings, some explanations between the humans. Telepath lay on the floor of the barge, not curled like a sleeping cat, but with his limbs sprawled out, violet eyes a quarter open, unseeing, breathing irregularly.

  Selina stared at the Pencil’s crew around her. Her movements were like the twitches of a cornered and desperate feline. A hunted animal, thought Steve.

  “Yes,” said Selina, “Dying with withdrawal from addiction, perhaps from burn-out. But that is not all.

  “Kzin normally have no guilt about killing each other, if requirements of honor have been met. Young males kill each other often. Death-duels are a recognized way of advancement. Telepath has been trying to convince himself that he owed nothing by way of comradeship or had any other obligation to the crew of Gutting Claw, who had treated him like dirt. He loved and feared the Admiral, but it was not by his hand that the Admiral died, even if he had set up the situation. But he is not quite convincing himself. The tragedy of all Telepaths: too complex and vulnerable to be a Kzin, psychically damaged and then forced into a life that worsens all that damage. He’s always been neurotic and now he’s going mad. He’ll die unless I can save him.”

  Let it die, then, thought Jim. Another cat less in the Universe.

  “He’s been trying to shield me from what he is going through. That is weakening him also. He feels an obligation to me. Once they accept them the Kzin take their obligations seriously.”

  “Well, what can you do?” asked Steve. “I can’t treat it. Nor can our autodoc.”

  “There’s a doc here. Put him in that. He’s beyond resisting if you lift him. If I stay in touch with him, whether I’m here on in the Pencil I feel…I don’t know…After all, we owe him something. But…”—There were tears again suddenly on the sunken skin below her eyes—“I’d rather like to get aboard a monk…a human ship again.”

  I was Telepath. I was in the medical unit of Zraar-Admiral’s barge. It was a scene of wide cold plains. The grass tall so a hunter must stand on hind legs to see above it, even a hunter used to growing on all fours. Scrabbling slopes of red sandstone, of scree, of red ironstone. There were distant mountains and somehow there were also forests, with leaping arboreal animals. Cliffs. Ironstone walls. I knew I was looking at a planet I had never seen: Old Kzin, as it had once been.

  But now tunnel after tunnel was opening to me, opening and expanding to flash away. I saw scene after scene in a lattice-work.

  Barer landscapes, stony heath. The strange landscape of dreams, clearer than I had seen it before. It was a great plain I wandered now. Alone? Or was someone with me? Zraar-Admiral? Karan? Selina? Gullied stone now, rock ridges, red under a red sky. Deeper gullies, rising about me, turning to caves, to tunnels…

  Karan? Karan? Was she here? I felt her presence surely.

  Recognition like a membrane tearing! I saw the blackness of the birthing burrow. And then a sudden light and what seemed a memory of the Harem. Karan was with me, grooming me as I played and kicked with my tiny, clumsy feet. I felt her tongue rasping at my fur. Then the grooming stopped and I lay back, full of contentment. The last contentment I would know.

  I was small, small, my fur still spotted. We were alone, with the female kit, my sister, asleep. Karan’s belly and teats swollen with her next pregnancy. Then I knew my last day with her had come, and I tried to cling to her.

  And then the scene changed to madness! The dream of an addict in withdrawal! For it was a dream of Karan speaking to me, and speaking to me not in the Female Tongue, but in the kitten’s version of the Heroes’ Tongue itself! The tongue no Kzinrett spoke!

  But did I imagine now, or remember? Karan’s eyes shone above me huge and luminous as moons.

  “Remember! Remember! Brave little spotted Kzin. I will plant a memory of words with little hope, but I must bury that memory in your mind deep, deep.

  “Telepath they may make you, if you live. Little do they guess. Certain kittens they will test for Telepath talents. Rare kittens. What if they tested the mothers of those kittens? And the mothers of those few mothers?

  “The few, the few…But the enduring. Not quite every line of female brains did the priesthood kill. Not yet. But soon. The speechless, mindless Kzinrett is the Kzinrett that lives and breeds. Each generation we, the secret, secret Others, grow rarer. Remember, though you do not understand my words.

  “Someday you may find a sapient female. If fortune lets that happen, let that trigger your memory of these words. For a Telepath and a sapient female could do great things together…”

  Karan’s tongue rough on my fur again. A purring in her throat so loud I could barely hear the words she chanted.

  “A great secret. The greatest of all. And each of we few must plant it deep at the bottom of a few poor minds, hoping against all knowledge that one day it will shoot.

  “The priesthood bred Kzinretts to be brood-animals before ever the first Jotok ship landed upon Kzin and our kind leapt into the stars, as they bred Kzintosh to be Heroes that laid worlds waste. Conquest, Empire, world upon world. And the Kzin becoming a race to smash itself at last, as it smashes all else. So small is our hope that we can save it, and the Telepaths and their war so poor and flawed a weapon. No more can I say but: Remember, when the time is right, that the way of the Eternal Hunt is not the only way. So small a word to whisper! So poor a hope! And yet, as we may, we keep alive a tiny flame, we tend a tiny seed.”

  Seed? Tend a seed of vegetable? Who spoke of tending seeds. Our herbivorous slaves and prey-animals tended seeds. And yet—why did this image not sicken me as it should? The dream-voice of Karan again, chanting as she purred to me in her rippling throat.

  “I cannot prophesy. Hunt in the glades of sleep. Remember…”

  Karan’s eyes filling my eyes with their light. And I falling into sleep, my face against her fur for the last time, for indeed they came to take me to the crèche and the training-ground that day.

  It was imagination, not memory! For no Kzinrett used that tongue. A mad dream. And yet I wondered, as the scene changed.

  Telepath alone.

  The blue-gold sky of the human world. Green vegetation and that blue above.

  Telepath within a human dwelling, and knowing it for what it was. There was a smell of charred meat and a smell of the partially-burnt eggs of some flying creature. A day fixed in Selina’s memory, the day she too had left for a training crèche, something called an Advanced Astrophysics Institute.

  A human speaking: “I know we’ll be proud of you. We’re stiff with pride for you already. I know you wanted to do biology first, but keep that as a second string for your fiddle. You’re like your brother—each has brains enough for two.”

  An old female human. Mother of Selina, I knew. And now came a single certainty in o
ne part of my mind, one doubt dissolved: as I knew that I moved not in real-time or real-Space, so at one level at least I knew the things I was experiencing to be only monster-images of wandering imagination, not memory from Selina’s mind or my own. For the presence of an impossible animal made this that I saw, even on a human world, impossible: it appeared as if, curled and asleep upon the old human’s legs, stroked by the old human, there had been a goblin-creature like a tiny Kzin.

  What tortuous symbol was this from Telepath’s sick brain? But it proved that the scene had no reality. Bridge to Selina or no, this scene could not be from her memory. And as this vision was unreal, the delusion of a poor addict’s mind lost in the tunnels, so the earlier scene must be dream and delusion too. There were no tiny goblin-creatures in the shape of Kzin, so Karan had never spoken to her kitten save in the few soft words of the Female Tongue. And Karan knew no other than those few soft words.

  Then Telepath alone once more, Telepath stumbling over a rocky landscape, the pale tunnels ghostly and transparent, and then the pale tunnels fading, a dark stalker, whose shape could not be told, appearing and disappearing. I felt my mind dissolving, and knew I had at last seen the approach of the Shadow, the End and Last Despair that First Telepath had warned me would come like this.

  I cried out for help. To First Telepath, to Karan, to Zraar-Admiral, to Selina.

  An empty space, and then arches like a high-roofed cave. Naked sky. A gigantic face. I fell into the position of supplication. It was the God. Fanged, rampant, come for Telepath’s soul, and Telepath was not the warrior to fittingly defy Him. Or was it the Fanged God. The face seemed to shimmer, and was bearded like the face of the human god? Fanged God or Bearded God, or somehow…both?

  I mewed like a kitten. Stars whirled about me, and Gutting Claw exploded.

  Angel’s Pencil

  “And those females? It’s obvious what he loaded them for.”

  “Wouldn’t you, in his position?”

  “Give you a continent to breed cats on? Selina, are you insane? A colony of Kzin to attack our colony the moment they’ve got the numbers?”

  “Hear me out.” Selina half rose, as the senior crew of the Angel’s Pencil fell silent about her. “Telepath is highly abnormal. You can see that. If he lives—and he may not—he has a chance of being the first of his kind even allowed to breed. What he breeds may be something quite new.

  “The Kzinretts are unintelligent. They can do nothing to educate their children in any real sense. I can. I know Telepath’s mind, and I know that no other human can come close to the knowledge of the Kzinti that I have. Dammit, I doubt many Kzin know as much about the Kzinti as I do! Few but the Telepaths have a multi-leveled picture of their own make-up, and the Telepaths have it only flickeringly and without proper context.

  “I think I can guide such a colony. You can keep watch on it—put a satellite above it with camera, sensors, weapons. If I fail and it becomes a threat, you’ll know in good time. You can help me guard it, guide it, trade with it, maybe. Visit it before aggression and xenophobia can take hold in the culture. Of course I can’t give guarantees. If necessary you can discipline it and if necessary you can wipe it out. Obviously with the Kzin in space the human colony must be on a war-footing always. But here we have a chance to create a Kzin society as it ought to be.”

  “A chance to play god, you mean? I don’t like that idea.”

  “What else are you going to do? Kill them here and now? Helpless prisoners? One of whom you owe? A desperately sick Telepath and two females in hibernation? Isn’t that playing god, too? I am offering the human race an asset. No-one else has it to offer.”

  “If Earth is conquered by the…Kzin, what good will having a few tame cats do?”

  “Almost certainly no good at all. But then nothing will matter anyway, unless anything from the more distant colonies can flee further into Space. And I do not think the Kzin will find Earth as easy a conquest as Zraar-Admiral imagined. Unarmed and surprised as we were, we have met them twice and beaten them twice already…” Her voice trailed off. She suddenly understood what Telepath had meant when he spoke of the wrong cave at last.

  “I think it is likely the war will be long. I suppose there will be prisoners taken, but I doubt Earth can deal with Kzin prisoners. That’s another reason Telepath and the females are precious.”

  “Your motives sound very patriotic, Selina. But is that all your agenda? It comes down to breeding Kzin?”

  “To breeding Kzin you can talk to,” she corrected him.

  “Is that really an asset?”

  “It could be a bigger asset than you can imagine. Not only for this colony…There can be interchange between the two kinds right from the start. Humans will have the advantage of numbers, and Telepath’s children will not be the Kzin of the Patriarchy.

  “When I learnt Telepaths were not allowed to breed, I wondered: when the gift is both so rare and so valuable a military asset, why is every effort not made to increase the strain, as it is among humans when even the smallest trace of such ability is found? I think I know why: Telepaths are introspective, empathetic—qualities that could be a deadly threat to the Patriarchy, if they became common among Kzin. Even if the proportion of Telepaths to the general population was only a little higher than it is now, they could be an intolerable influence for destabilization. So they cannot be allowed to breed.

  “And I think they would breed true. That is the First Secret of the Telepaths. My Telepath thinks the breeding prohibition is because they are too ‘shameful’. But I think the…Patriarchy…also prohibits them from breeding because at some level it knows what a danger they could be were they not rigidly controlled. As well as needing them and despising them, I think it also fears them.

  “Kzinretts…female Kzin…usually have one male and one female kitten in a litter. You know female Kzin are morons. But the female kittens of Telepath may be a wild card, and we are going to need all the wild cards we can pull out of our sleeves. A collection of non-Conformist Kzin could be a great threat to the Patriarchy. Some Telepaths already see themselves as at war with Kzin culture, but from what I have gathered their war is pitifully confused and disorganized, almost completely futile.

  “I get a feeling there has been some kind of intervention, something inculcated in some Telepaths, perhaps an integral part of the whole syndrome that allows them to survive as Telepaths, that makes them at odds with Kzin…rigidity, but the chance and the motivation for them to actually do anything comes rarely.

  “They’re not morally better than ordinary Kzin, whether by our standards or theirs—often they are worse. They are not necessarily more intelligent. They are not happier or more stable—quite the reverse. But they are different. The actual quality of their resistance or non-conformity has a great deal of self-delusion in it. We might change that.

  “I gather from Telepath that the worlds of their empire have a great deal of local independence—I suppose that is inevitable with the limitations of light-speed—but they all conform to a pretty basic set of common values and culture. Here we have the chance to plant something different enough to make a real change. At the same time, humans can learn an enormous amount from these Kzin—things we’ll have to learn, and learn quickly, too.

  “And I can’t come back to you. Not without Telepath. There is too much cat—neurotic cat—in my brain now, and too much of me in him. You need not look disgusted. Believe me, you have no idea what an asset the human race has in that relationship.”

  “Assuming that is true,” said Steve, “how could we make the human race aware of it…if we’ve made them aware of the Kzin at all. Even if we still dare advertise our presence by signaling?”

  “We can only think in the longest term,” said Selina. Her words hung in the air a moment as the assembled humans thought upon what the longest term might be.

  Steve Weaver stared at the map-display with an ashen face. The controller of the Angel’s Pencil’s laser was suddenly a sick man
. He swallowed, choked, then raised eyes of despair to Selina, Jim and Sue. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, “Don’t you see? Nothing matters. We are dead meat.”

  “We’ve won a battle!” Jim said, “That matters! We’ve won two battles!” He jumped to his feet and struck the table. “If we meet another Kzin ship we’ll fight that too. We’re armed with knowledge now.”

  “Meet another? Oh, we’ll do that all right. Don’t you understand? It’s obvious enough, isn’t it? These maps only confirm what we should have known—what we did know.” There was something twisted in Steve’s voice, “Only we haven’t let ourselves think about it because it’s so Tanj obvious!

  “Encountering one Kzin ship might have been chance. But we’ve encountered two, and Selina tells us they are part of a Navy and an Empire, and coming from—there!” He pointed forward, through a port and past the great Collector Head and fusion torus at the “point” of the Angel’s Pencil.

  “We are heading straight into Kzin space! We are heading towards what the ramrobots tell us is a roughly Earthlike world in order to establish a colony. There will be no colony. An Earthlike world is a world Kzin can live on. A main-sequence K2 star—of course they would seek it out! It even has handy gas-giants with their own large moon-systems for bases and mines.

  “We know they have been in Space far longer than humans. We don’t need Selina’s knowledge to tell us that apart from their aggressive instincts carnivores that size need elbow-room, territory. They will have settled all possible worlds within reach.”

  “Yes,” said Selina. “And their hibernation technology for Space-travel is at least as good as ours. Probably better.”

  “We are heading into a part of Space where Kzin ships will be more and more frequent. And even if we miss them—Space is still big enough for that, I suppose—one thing is sure: when we reach Epsilon Eridani they will be there waiting for us…We should have realized it long ago. After the first one…” He buried his face in his hands.