by Larry Niven
“Chorth-Captain,” replied the other kzin. “Of the Patriarch’s Navy and the Patriarch’s Claws.”
The Patriarch’s Armed forces had been disbanded on this planet when the kzinti accepted the human cease-fire, the day when Raargh, who had been Raargh-Sergeant, had fled with Vaemar in a stolen air-car to the backwoods country beyond the Hohe Kalkstein.
“There are no other Patriarch’s Claws on Wunderland,” said Vaemar, deliberately using the human name for Ka’ashi. Let Chorth-Captain make what he would of the qualifier “other.” He added, “I have not met you before.”
Chorth-Captain was plainly much older than Vaemar, and he looked a great deal more experienced, strong, tough and battle-scarred. But Vaemar was Riit.
That put him in an anomalous position on Wunderland. Some humans, he knew, wished to groom him to lead the kzin who had remained on post-Liberation Wunderland to take a place as partners with humanity. The reasons had been put to him openly, and, as he had told Dimity truthfully, he had agreed with them. He had felt no—well, little—conflict of loyalties once he concluded that what he was doing was for the long-term good of the kzin species. Indeed it was a project he had firmly committed himself to. Some humans he had dismembered in battle in the great caves. Some he had eaten. Regarding some like Rykermann, Cumpston, Leonie, the abbot, Dimity, or Anne von Lufft who had been one of his companions on a hazardous biological excursion, honor and companionship alike demanded that he die protecting them if necessary, as much as if they had been his Honored Step-Sire Raargh Hero or Karan.
And yet with this he was Riit. The Riit had ruled the kzinti since before the Heroic Race first leapt into the stars. A large number of the kzinti of Wunderland respected him and, when necessary, obeyed him. It was left to other, older kzintosh, including some of the few surviving professional officers like Hroth and Hroarh and the old warriors on Tiamat to link with the human authorities and guide relations between the kzin and human communities in detail, but it was he who performed many ceremonial duties like opening Veterans’ Hospitals and other projects and presenting the State of the Wunderkzin Address to the human Parliament. He knew he was being groomed even in his academic courses. It did no harm that he was tall, strong and fast even by kzin standards, as one would expect of Riit, and had been trained and was backed by Raargh-Hero, one of the toughest old kzintoshi on the planet. At the moment he could afford to find out more about this Chorth-Captain and not put his dominance to the test.
“I still do not see how you got through the defenses,” he said.
“I landed here recently,” said Chorth-Captain.
Vaemar found it hard to believe him. Wunderland, and the whole Alpha Centauri system, was ceaselessly monitored by live and electronic sentinels against another kzinti raid or invasion. Kzin ships had come, certainly, in the last few years—from kzin worlds that had no knowledge of the human hyperdrive or the human victory, freebooters whose livers had been maddened by old rumors, hungry for loot and glory, or regular Naval vessels returning from distant missions. Part of his duties was to help negotiate with them. Those that had not surrendered when informed of the true situation had not lasted long.
“I hid long on the Hollow Moon,” said Chorth-Captain, as though detecting his thoughts. “Since the battle between the fleets of Traat-Admiral and Ktrodni-Stkaa, and the human invasion I have lain in wait. I had help. There is much traffic. I left my fighter there and came back to Ka’ashi in a gig. It was small and undetected.”
Of course, Vaemar knew, not all the kzinti on Wunderland were entirely sane. Defeat had unhinged many, especially fighting kzin to whom defeat at the hands of weed-eating apes was unthinkable. Delusions among them that they were officers of the victorious Patriarchy, generally complete with Patriarchy-bestowed Names, were not uncommon, with pathetic and tragic consequences. There were also the crazed kdaptists, already splitting into murderously-quarrelling sects. Chorth-Captain, at least in this poor light, did not look insane or deluded, but not all of them did. He smelt a little strange, but that was not surprising. Also, it was a point of honor for kzinti not to lie outright, but many had developed great ingenuity in bending the truth. Association with humans had done nothing to diminish that skill. Vaemar wondered whose side Chorth-Captain had fought on in the final civil war of kzin that had killed his own first protector, old Traat-Admiral, and which had made the human hyperdrive Armada’s reconquest so much easier.
“What are you doing here? What do you want?” Vaemar asked. His mind framed the question: “Do you know who I am?” but he decided it was better not to force that issue at present. He did not particularly want to get into a fight in this situation.
“I know what you seek. Come with me, and I will show you.”
Vaemar and Dimity paused. Similar thoughts raced through both their minds. “I know what you seek.” A statement like that contained a challenge. How did Chorth-Captain know? What exactly did Chorth-Captain know? That someone—or something—had made a covert landing here? And why should he show them? He had not acknowledged himself as being under Vaemar’s dominance, indeed calling himself a member of the Patriarch’s Claws might be taken as defying that dominance. He had offered no hostility, and had voluntarily revealed himself to them, so he did not appear to be intending an attack. He seemed to accept the presence of Dimity at Vaemar’s side without comment. Chorth-Captain turned away—which might be a gesture of trust—and started along the tunnel. Vaemar hesitated a moment, then moved to follow him.
He saw the Protector too late. Its leap carried it outside the swing of his flashing claws. It landed behind him and before he could turn it had seized and secured his arms.
Vaemar kicked backwards with his hind legs, steel-hard, razor-edged claws extended. Kicks, again too fast for a human eye, that would have disembowelled a Man or a Kzin. The Protector avoided them effortlessly and caught his feet in its free hand. Vaemar’s claws could not reach the hand’s leathery skin, but the Protector pressed with a fingertip on Vaemar’s feet so his hind-claws involuntarily retracted. From the corner of his eye he saw Chorth-Captain leap in the same instant, run up a wall on his hind legs and somersault to land beside Dimity, seizing her weapons and tucking her under one arm. Vaemar twisted his head violently, dagger fangs in bolt-cutter jaws crashing together where the Protector’s head had been an instant before. The Protector shifted its grip to hold him paralyzed and taped his hands and feet securely. Though it stood little more than half Vaemar’s height, it lifted him onto its shoulders.
Chapter 7
“I called Dimity,” Patrick Quickenden told Nils Rykermann. “She wasn’t answering. Then I called Vaemar’s household. It took me a while to get put through to a human but the kittens’ nurse was there. Apparently Dimity and Vaemar flew south. But they’ve stopped reporting.”
“As far as I know,” said Rykermann, “there was a trip to Little Southland due. Routine check of some automated experiments.” He did not speak particularly warmly to Quickenden, his coolness not all due to security considerations. He knew the Crashlander’s protectiveness of Dimity stemmed from a love similar to that which he was trying to kill in himself.
“Their car is down,” said Quickenden. “It was sending out a normal carrier wave. No answer when we interrogated it. Then that cut off.”
Rykermann tried to keep his face impassive. He knew and disliked his own jealousy and possessiveness towards Dimity, and knew its irrationality, but could do nothing about it except try to switch his thoughts in other directions, and keep Dimity at a distance. He guessed now that he was always to be torn in two.
Is Dimity in danger? Yes, stupid! We are all in danger! Tree-of-life? Protectors? Dimity doesn’t merely look younger than her years like us, thanks to geriatric treatments. Because of those years in Coldsleep she is young. She could survive the change to Protector if she got a whiff of tree-of-life. And she is with Vaemar, who would tend to think it disgraceful to notice danger because he’s not a human in a fur coat but a youn
g male kzin. And Dimity, just because she is a super-genius, isn’t assured of common sense. The reverse if anything. I don’t want her to go chasing after hidden tree-of-life, and possibly finding it.
He looked at Leonie. A sudden thought of her exposed to tree-of-life gave rise to a peculiarly horrible image: her lower body was much younger than her upper. Mad and impossible. Still, Leonie’s presence gave the situation between him and Quickenden at least a superficial feeling of normalcy.
“What happened then?” he asked after an awkward silence.
“I told Guthlac and Cumpston. They’ve gone to find them. Karan went with them.”
“Karan?”
“Would you like to try and stop her, when she’s made her mind up? They suggested she go back to Vaemar’s palace and wait. She thought Vaemar might need her.”
“So what do we do now? Go after them?”
Rykermann touched his desk. A hologram globe of Wunderland sprang into existence above it. He touched an icon and the scattering of human settlements on Little Southland was displayed.
“If those three can’t take care of any problems our presence may not make much difference,” Rykermann said at length, reluctantly. It’s no business of his that I can’t let myself see Dimity again.
“Vaemar only spent a short time at the caves,” he went on. “He only looked at a few of the nearest passages. I’m worried about what may be happening there. We’ve left no one on guard.”
“I’ll take a look, if you like.”
“You’re not a Wunderlander. I’d rather go myself or, no offence, send someone who knew the ground better. That isn’t Procyon in the sky, you know.”
“Someone should be here to coordinate the others or call for help if we need it. That seems to be you or Leonie. She says she’ll go with me.”
“I’ll organize a car for you,” said Rykermann. No point in protesting. When Leonie’s made her mind up, I think I’d rather try to stop Karan. Anyway, I’d like to let you see the caliber of my mate. “Go well-armed, keep your com-link open to me, and wear pressure-suits with the helmets on and the faceplates closed at all, I mean all, times you’re on the ground. Don’t land at all if you can help it. Just use the car’s deep-radar to monitor movement in the caves. If it’s bipedal and within certain size parameters, we’ve got a pattern-recognition program that can tell you if it’s human or Morlock. Or kzinti, for that matter. If it’s none of those things, well…”
“What chances of other humans there?”
“I hope there won’t be any. But even this long after the war, there are too many Ferals about. Leonie and some others have been trying to bring them in, particularly the children, but it’s a slow process. They’re cunning and wild, and, incidentally, can be very dangerous. There are still weapons lying about for anyone to pick up. I don’t know if you understand danger sufficiently, Patrick. Obey Leonie’s instructions at all, all times.”
“We Made It isn’t exactly a garden world, you know,” Patrick said. “And I was a spacer before I got involved in hyperdrive engineering. My life hasn’t been completely sheltered.”
“Those are natural dangers. Not like thinking beings, highly-intelligent beings, consciously out to get you…A spacer, yes, of course you were…
“I never asked you…” Rykermann went on after a pause. “But were you—”
“Yes. I was flying the first ship that helped stop the derelict, and the first to board it. I found Dimity.”
“And without you?”
“It was heading straight for one of the gas-giants. We had quite a race to catch it and deploy the grapnels before it went too deep into the gravity-well. We kept signalling, and there was no answer…”
“You found Dimity…”
“I’ll not forget going aboard, pushing through those floating eyeless corpses with their lungs going before them, those monks with their shaven heads, and my light falling on that black medical coffin, with the last lights of its emergency power blinking red. There was a translucent panel. When I saw her face I thought at first that she was dead, too, of course, but she looked so…”
“So we owe you Dimity’s life.”
“There were several ships and crews involved. They were all needed before we saved the ship. It wasn’t just me. Others actually got her out.”
“But without you she’d be dead.”
“That’s true.”
“And without Dimity, no working hyperdrive. Not for decades at least. Not until too late.”
“No. We were making slow progress translating the manual. Dimity was still in rehabilitation therapy when we got it—they were wondering what to do with her, in fact. Then she got word of what was happening somehow and forced her way onto the project. How she broke out of the hospital, evaded the medics, got into the project headquarters—all underground on a strange planet—and forced the team-leaders to give her a hearing and authority was an epic in itself. As you say, she saved us decades. Without her, we might easily be working on it still.”
“And without the hyperdrive, Leonie and I would surely be dead by now, and unless we’d made Protectors Wunderland and probably Earth would be kzin hunting-grounds.”
“Not to mention my own world. I was wrong to say we might be working on it still. They’d have got to We Made it, sooner or later. Probably sooner. We were behind kzin lines though we didn’t know it.”
“If we need to land and search for tree-of-life,” said Leonie, “Or do any fighting, it might be handy to have a kzin with us.”
“Apart from Vaemar there aren’t that many kzinti available who we know well enough to use, not at short notice,” said Rykermann. “And even on this planet, most of them still have no love for monkeys. Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking the handful of Wunderkzin like Vaemar and Raargh are typical, Patrick. I know we’re civilizing them, but it’s a slow business…”
“I was thinking of Raargh. He knows the caves, too, and that eye of his could be useful,” said Leonie. “I think the alte Teufel’s bored with peace, anyway. Promise him the chance of battle, and he’d be with us. I’ll call him and brief him now.”
“Take care, Lion-cub.” He kissed her.
“It’s all so…” Patrick Quickenden waved his hands at the landscape below them, another part of the great limestone plateau which Vaemar had flown over a few days before. The sight of a herd of gagrumphers that Leonie pointed out filled him with excitement.
He’s like a kid, Leonie thought. Hard to feel objectively about him. I know he loves Dimity, which makes him a sort of ally of mine—“The lover of my rival is my friend?” That’s a new one. Does she love him? Dimity, who I’ve competed against hopelessly since I was 18, who saved my life, apart from saving our species. Paddy, if she could love you, and you could take her back to Procyon, it would make things…And I know someone else who’s in love with her, too. I wonder if he knows he is…One other, at least. That’s if you don’t count…Well, let’s not get too complicated…Paddy, sparkle-eyed at the streams running under the sky and the gagrumphers plunging away through the trees, there’s a lot riding on you…
The great problem, once you’ve been any sort of leader, which means once you’ve been any sort of manipulator: Can you again come to value people for what they are, rather than for how they might be able to serve your own ends? We forget that between men and women sexual exploitation isn’t the only kind of exploitation there is. At least we do as soon as a war’s over…Now if you and Dimity…What am I thinking about? Dimity may well be dead. Patrick, you seem a happy, decent man, the product of a world less tortured than this one. Can I leave you an innocent man, not try to make you my catspaw? She caught his eyes. In love with Dimity he might be, but Leonie saw he was admiring her at least as much as the landscape. I wonder if it would turn him sick to know what’s under my trousers? she thought. And then: Let me get all that boiling black stuff out of my head, anyway. Nils and I are lucky, compared to so many.
“I can never get used to it,” h
e said. “I don’t mean agoraphobia—I’ve had treatment for that—but still it all takes my breath away. Living on the surface like this…And”—he pointed to the horizon—“And those mountains—like needles.”
“We’ve had to live in some odd places,” said Leonie. “Sometimes during the war it seemed we were underground more often than on the surface. There were children born in the caves who knew stalactites better than stars or mountains.”
“Your children?”
“None of my own. Others had their own lives and priorities, but for us, then, it seemed children were not exactly a good idea,” Leonie said. “Pregnancy would have kept me out of action for a long time, with medical care the state it was in, and…what sort of a world would it have been to bring a child into? Of course, it was fortunate not everyone on Wunderland had the same policy—the population was dropping fast as it was.
“I was going to broach the subject with Nils after the war. I’d been important enough to have geriatric drugs throughout and I still had an apparently young body, as he did. I would have run out of natural ova sooner or later, but that didn’t worry me—stimulating stem cells to produce new ova is an elementary procedure. Then, you know, I lost the lot.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Patrick said. “I know that on Earth creating ova from other tissue isn’t unusual. I think it’s been done since the twenty-first century, at least.”
“I don’t think I could do that. We’ve been very cautious about biotech for humans here. Quite a deep cultural inhibition. The first colonists got a bit carried away and there were some—unfortunate incidents. We’re lucky the only inheritance was mobile ears for some of us, which are harmless and sometimes useful even if it does encourage snobbery. But I haven’t told you all the details of what I am. Perhaps I’m a bit mixed up. In my emotions as well as”—a bitter laugh—“literally. The lower body I have now is ovulating all right…whoever she was, she was young. But you’ll understand I don’t exactly consider it a problem solved…”