The Man-Kzin Wars 05

by Larry Niven

  The next shot almost brought disaster. A fragment caught his forehead, and stinging blood covered his eyes as he dropped back into the protection of the rock. With a yowl of impatience he felt at the injury, even as rounds chewed at the tumbled volcanic basalt ahead of him. It was painful enough to wake him to full fury, the area above his brow-ridges cut to the bone and a flap of skin hanging free; his ears rang, and his mouth filled. He swallowed and forced pain and dizziness back. That had almost killed him; many monkeys would die for their presumption, and he would chew their livers. In the meantime he had to get the blood out of his eyes; it was blinding him, and the rank scent of kzin blood dulled his nostrils.

  A yowl from Bigs meant that he had caught that smell too. “All’s well!” he snarled back. “Look to your front.”

  There was a length of gauze in his beltpouch. He pushed the flap of skin back into position—he would get a worthy battlescar out of this, but in the meantime it stung—and began binding the wound with an X-shaped bandage, anchored by a loop under the base of his jaw and around the rear bulge of his skull. Hurriedly he poured water from his canteen over his brows and eyelashes, snuffling and scrubbing and licking his nose to clear his senses. A sharp scent of eucalyptus almost made him sneeze; some tree damaged in the fight, he supposed.

  “Behind you!” a human voice screamed.

  It was utterly unexpected, but Spots’ reflexes wasted no time on surprise. He dropped sideways.

  A bandit lunged through the space he had occupied a moment before, with a vibroblade outstretched before him. ft whined into uselessness as the humming wire edge sliced into rock. The knifeman’s face had just enough time to begin to show surprise when the kzin’s full-armed swing ripped out his throat almost to the neckbone and threw him ten meters through the air. The instinctive full-force effort swung Spots around in a three-quarter turn, his body betraying him in a G field barely a third of the one for which it had evolved. That exposed him to fire from below for a moment—rock spalls stung his shoulders—and left him helpless as the second bandit six meters away raised a strakkaker left-handed. The forty-round clip of liquid-teflon filled bullets would rip the kzin’s body open like an internal explosion.

  The bandit’s head vanished from the shoulders up in a spray of red, gray and pink. The body stood for two seconds with blood fountaining up to where the face would have been, took two stumbling steps forward, and collapsed across Spots’ tail. He blinked surprise and looked.

  Tyra-human lay prone beside another boulder, slapping another cassette into her rifle. She gave him a brief nod before moving off to a fresh firing position; her face was gray, and she smelled of fatigue poisons and nausea, an acrid scent.

  Spots went flat again and readied his beamer, but the savor had gone out of the fight. Bigs owes a life to Jonah-human. Now I owe a life to Tyra-human. Two lives the honor of the House of Chotrz-Shaa owes to Man. It is too much. How will I know the balance of debt and obligation, unless the Fanged God tells me? Like most modem kzin, Spots had worked at rejecting religion as unfashionable. The effort wasn’t entirely successful. Intellect was one thing; but belief in the Fanged God was built deep into the kzin culture, and a desire to believe had been built into their very genes. The Conservators of the Patriarchal Past had a fertile field to sow. Now Spots wished he had listened more closely to the Conservators. It would take a God to figure out this tangle.

  Oh, well—there are monkeys down there I can kill, he thought gloomily.

  “Sssisssi!’ Bigs snarled, and forced his clawed hand down again. “We should have pursued,” he went on.

  “Shut up,” Tyra said, working the sprayskin around the depilated patch of singed flesh that ran down the barrel ribs of the big kzin’s body. “We’re not in any shape to pursue three times our number. Defending gave us an advantage.”

  Jonah sighed and sipped again at his canteen, looking around the campsite; they had moved into the outer edge of the shaft, in case the bandits tried to sneak a sniper back, and left sensors scattered about outside with Spots to oversee. The kzin seemed depressed; not so Bigs, who was a little manic by his own surly standards. He lifted his beltphone.

  “Spots, anything?”

  “No. They ran, and continued to run to the limit of the audio sensor’s ability to detect the footfalls of their riding beasts.” A sigh. “Must we really leave all those bodies?”

  “Yes!” Jonah snapped, swallowing at certain memories of his own. Every once in a while, you remember that they’re not humans in fur suits. “Last thing we want is a posse-mob of outbackers on our trail, understood?” Wunderlanders would not react well to the thought of kzin eating even dead bandits.

  “Understood.” Along, sad sigh.

  “Come on in.”

  Silence crackled between them as they waited; Jonah met Hans’s eye, and got a slight nod in return. Tyra finished with Bigs and stepped quickly away, aware that an injured kzin was unlikely to tolerate much contact with a human. Got brains, that girl, Jonah thought admiringly. Spots ducked in between the screens and stopped, turning his head inquiringly towards his brother, ears cocking forward and nostrils flaring. Then he rippled his fur in a shrug and squatted against the restraining timbers of the far wall, hands resting on the ground before him.

  “We can’t stay here,” Jonah said abruptly. “There’s something you should know: I don’t think that those bandits were acting on their own.”

  It took a few minutes to sketch in Jonah’s relations with Buford Early, and Early’s campaign of persecution. Silence followed, and he went on:

  “We can’t lug that”—he jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the tnuctipun spyship—“either. Either the bandits will come back with more men, or the real Gendarmerie will show up. The bandits will kill us, the Gendarmerie might and the government will certainly stamp everything Excruciatingly Secret and silence us, one way or another. I’m a pariah, you two are kzin, Fra Nordbo here comes from a suspect family subject to pressure—“

  “And I’m a worthless old bushcoot,” Hans said cheerfully.

  “If we were lucky, they might buy us off,” Jonah continued. “If we want to make anything of what we’ve got, we’d better get out quick and make a sale to the only one who has the resources to make something of this—to Montferrat-Palme. At least we’ll have some bargaining position with him.”

  “That...is...not...all,” a voice said behind him. Jonah shot erect, turning before he came down again. Within its sac of fluid, the tnuctipun’s eyes had opened. It stayed in its fetal position, hands wrapped about knees. The three eyes blinked vertically, and the mouth moved; the lips seemed almost prehensile, and they were not in synch with the words that he heard. The translator program, then.

  “I...will...not...be...buried...again.”

  · CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Durvash whimpered to himself, eyes squeezed tightly shut. Agony, agony to speak. Agony to think. Last. He was the last. I failed. Suicide night had succeeded. The thrint had won. Egg mother Womb mother Father Siblings. All dead. The tnuctipun race was dead, and he was the last. The last by three billion years. One-celled organisms had evolved to intelligence while belay within this planet’s crust. He was not even sure it was the planet he had lost consciousness on; there was more than enough time for his damaged craft to have drifted through several systems. Time for all the bodies of thrint and tnuctipun and shotovi and zengaborni to rot away, and the fabric of their cities to erode to dust and the dust to be ground down under moving continents, and for stars to age and—

  Rest, the faithful machines said; they had no souls, no souls that longed for the deep red velvet sleep of death. Your functions are at less than 45% of optimum and you must rest for the healing to be complete.

  He jerked. No. I must think. He was not the last tnuctipun! His race had won, not the mouth-beshitting Slavers. Joy brought Durvash tears as painful as despair. He existed; his autodoc and computer existed. They contained the knowledge to clone his cells, to modify the geneti
c structures to replicate individuals of all three sexes. Genetic records of thousands of tnuctipun; that was part of the general autodoc system. His rubbery lips peeled off his serrated teeth in aggression pleasure. Tnuctipun were pack-hunters of great sociability; group survival was sweet ecstasy.

  I will need facilities. Laboratories, tools, time. The current sentients here would be complete fools to allow a rebirth of the tnuctipun species, of tnuctipun culture—and all of that was encoded in the memory of his computer as well.

  They were not complete fools. Not very bright by tnuctipun standards, but then few races were. They were certainly more acute than thrint—by about a fifth to a third, he judged, from the hour or so of conversation, and to judge from their technology. It was fairly advanced, in a quaint sort of way—the beginnings of an industrial system, interstellar travel and fusion drives.

  They were divided, too. Species from species, as was natural: the tnuctipun word for “alien” translated roughly as “food that talks”. Also individual from individual, a common characteristic of inferior races—he quickly suppressed memory of his own rivals at home. Durvash knew what to make of that. He had been trained as a clandestine agent, and his proudest accomplishment had been an entire thrint world wiped clean of life by engineering a civil war between thrintun clan elders.

  The large carnivore, he decided. Carnivores were easiest to work with, in his opinion—as he was one himself. He is in a minority of one. It should be easy to persuade him to use the neural-connector earplug. That would make communication easy, and certain other things, if the biochemistries were similar enough.

  Durvash squeezed his eyes shut. No warrior of tnuctipun had ever been so alone as he. He had lost a universe; there was a universe to win.

  If I do not go mad, he thought; although his autodoc would probably not let him do so. He did not know if that was fortunate, or the most terrifying thing of all.

  Sleep...

  The little caravan prepared to depart in the blueish half-light of Beta dawn, with Alpha still a hint on the horizon, blocked by the peaks whose passes they would have to traverse. The mules had become inured to kzin scent—somewhat—and were loaded first, to proceed Tyra’s skittish horses who were doubly disturbed by the smell of carnivore and the dead horses from yesterday’s battle. Fading woodsmoke and coffee smells mixed with the crisp earthy scent of dew on the bushes, and the cries of birds and gliders cut a sharper undercurrent through the sound of the waterfall. That came into focus again, now that they were leaving it after so many months of labor.

  “Done right well by us, this mountain,” Hans said reflectively, strapping the packsaddle of his mule. “Wonder Wit has a name? Not likely,” he decided. “Too small.” The little eroded volcanic peak was a midget among the Jotuns, even in the comparatively low hollow.

  “Muttiberg,” Tyra said, passing by with her saddle over her shoulder. The dog Garm pressed against her leg, casting another apprehensive look back at the two kzin. He had been trying to keep himself between her and them since she rode into camp, despite the flattened ears and tucked tail of intimidation. Kzinti were nightmares to canines, of course. “The locals call it the Mother Mountain—for obvious reasons.”

  Probably a man named them. This and the bill opposite did look like a woman’s breasts, if you squinted and had the right attitude. Muttiberg.

  “Let me give you a hand with that,” Jonah said; then he was a little surprised at the weight of the saddle. Strong for a Wunderlander, he thought; but then, you could tell that from her build, almost like an Earther’s.

  Bigs lifted the life-capsule possessively. It was lighter than it should be, some application of gravity polarizer technology beyond current capacities, and opaque now as well. The whole assemblage had seemed to ooze through the wall of the spaceship, leaving no mark of its passage. For the first time in his life Bigs felt lust as a purely mental state, not just the automatic physical reaction to kzinretti pheromones. It was an oddly cerebral sensation, yet it had the same obsessive quality of excluding all other considerations. The tnuctip un-voice murmured in his ear, and he commanded them not to twitch. Only the slightest subvocalization was necessary to reply, too faint even for Spots’s ears to catch.

  He fitted the life capsule into one side of the pack saddle; the other was balanced with sacks of gold dust, worthless as dirt now. ‘We have a means of converting matter into energy along a beam,’ the voice said. Bigs’s mind blossomed with visions of monkey warships flashing into fireballs, galaxies of fire to light the triumphant passage of kzinti dreadnoughts. Planetary surfaces gouted upward, gnawing down to fortresses embedded in the crusts. ‘Matter-energy conversion is also available as a power source.’ Fleets crossed between suns in days, weeks. Once or twice, no more, in the history of the Patriarchy a warrior—a Hero—had been adopted into the Rut clan, promoted to the inmost lairs. What reward would be great enough for Chotra-Riit, savior of the kzinti? What glory great enough for the one who brought the Heroic Race domination not merely over the monkeys, but over a galaxy as well? Man was not the only enemy of the Patriarchy. None of them could stand against the secrets of the tnuctipun. The Eternal Pride would sweep the whole spiral arm in a conquering rush.

  Slaver dripped down from his thin black lips to the fur of his chest. He ignored it, raking the mule’s bridle as tenderly as he might have borne up his firstborn son.

  * * *

  “....and so after Father was forced to leave on that crazy astrological expedition with Riao-Captain, Mutti had more and more trouble with the kzin,” Tyra went on.

  Jonah leaned his head closer, interest and concern on his face. They were strung out over rocky plateau country, following a faint trail upwards toward the nearest pass through the central Jotuns. The mountains curved away northeastward, this slightly-lower hilly trough between the main ranges heading likewise; directly east and south were the headwaters of the Donau, and the long road down to the fertile lowlands where München lay. Tyra hesitated and went on; Jonah seemed to be that rare thing, a man who knew how to listen. Not to mention looking at you without salivating all the time, something that was more subtly flattering than open interest.

  “She had not his strength of body. Or;” she went on more slowly, “his strength of will—they were very close. So she must yield more to the kzinti, and the replacement for Riao-Captain was less... willing to listen, in any case. Things were growing worse all over Wunderland then; the war was going against the rat-cats, and they squeezed harder on the human population.” She scowled. “Yet Mutti did her best; more than can be said for some others, who were punished less.”

  “I agree with you,” Jonah said. “Your family seems to have gotten a raw deal. Mind you,” he went on, “I wasn’t here, dealing with the kzin occupation. That twists people’s minds, and there’s little justice in an angry man—or a frightened one.”

  She nodded, liking him better for the honesty than she would have for more fulsome support.

  “In the meantime,” he went on, lowering his voice, “I’m worried about our kzin here and now.” He dropped into English, which was a language they shared and the sons of Chotrz-Shaa did not “They’re not acting normal.”

  Tyra blinked puzzlement. They had been sullen, true, “Kzinti are not supposed to be talkative or gregarious, are they?” she said.

  “Tanj, no,” Jonah said, taking a moment to fan himself with his hat This high up the heat was dry rather than humid, but the pale volcanic dirt and scattered rocks threw it back like a molecular-film reflector,

  “Bigs is surly even by kzin standards, but now he’s downright euphoric. Not talking, but look at the way his fur ripples, and the way he holds his tail. Spots is talkative—for a kiln. Now he’s miserable.”

  Tyra looked more closely. The smaller kiln was plodding along with back arched, the tip of his tail carelessly dragging in the dirt, even though it must be sore. His nose was dry-looking and there was a grayish tinge to its black, and his fur was matted and tangled, w
ith burrs and twigs he had not bothered to comb out. Bigs’s pelt shone, and his head was up, alert, eyes bright.

  “It is a bad sign when a kzin neglects his grooming, isn’t it?” she murmured.

  “Very bad.”

  She glanced aside at him. “You know them very well. From having fought them so long?”

  He shrugged. “I know these two,” he said. “You have to be careful you don’t anthropomorphize, but offhand I’d say Spots is thoroughly depressed and worried. I don’t know if that worries me more than Bigs being so happy, or not.”

  Spots folded his ears. “Must you torture that thing?” he said to Hans, as the old man blew tentatively into his harmonica. “It screams well, but the pain to my ears is greater.”

  Off curled asleep around the canvass-wrapped tnuctipun module, Bigs’s ears twitched in harmony. His hands and feet were twitching as well, hunting in his sleep, and an occasional happy mreeowrr trilled from his lips.

  Hans shrugged and put it away, picking up his cards. “Don’t signify!,” he said mildly. “You want to bet?”

  “Sniff this group of public-transit tokens,” Spots snarled, throwing down his hand. “I fold. Count me out of the game.” He stalked off into the night, tail lashing.

  “Ratcats don’t have the patience for poker,” Hans observed. “Bids?”

  “I fold too,” Jonah said. Tyra had dropped out a round before.

  “Neither do youngsters,” Hans observed, showing his hand; three sevens. He raked in the pot happily. “Could be we’ll all be very rich, but I never turn down a krona.”

  Jonah made a wordless sound of agreement and looked over at the girl. She was sleeping, curled up against her saddle with one hand tucked beneath her cheek. He smiled and drew the blanket up around her shoulders...