Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XII

by Hal Colebatch, Paul Chafe, Matthew Joseph Harrington

  “How so?”

  “One of the adult kzinti who died was a small landowner. He had an estate that borders on Warrgh-Churrg’s and owed him money. Warrgh-Churrg will pick it up without trouble now. Plus the harem, of course, and the kits if he should happen to want them—and the deceased landowner’s eldest kit was among the other dead. A fairly easy night’s work for Warrgh-Churrg, letting the kz’zeerekti expand his estates for him.”

  “But a casualty ratio like that? There was nothing like it in the wars, even when human troops were well equipped. How do you account for it?” asked Perpetua. She had kept the car locked in Ginger’s absence and herself crouched down inside it, well out of the sight and the attention of the guard—and especially of the furious wounded kzinti as they returned.

  “The kzinti sought out the kz’zeerekti on their own ground, as usual, and the kz’zeerekti had well-prepared traps and ambushes—”

  “As usual.”

  “Tactless, Pet. These kz’zeerekti were exceptionally tough with it. And the kits, also as usual, were overexcited, overeager and inexperienced.”

  “And nobody told them?”

  “Hunt Master believes there’s no teacher like experience. Between you and me—which is a rather silly phrase in these circumstances—I think Hunt Master had directions to get a few knocked off. With modern life most affluent kzinti households grow up with too many male kits unless they are thinned out one way or another—and this helps thin out the slow and stupid, as well as the overeager who might grow up to be a nuisance by challenging their fathers. It’s a rough and ready system, though. Among the kits who survived tonight were some I’d marked down as not the brightest.”

  “It sounds a pretty unstable society.”

  “It is, once you come to see it a certain way. Why do you think you humans keep winning wars? One reason my great-grandsire and a few others threw in their lot with humans after the Liberation was because they could see kzinti technology and culture were so grossly out of sync. We’re barbarians with high technology, and we’re lucky we didn’t exterminate ourselves before space travel gave us elbow room.

  “Perhaps you understand now something of what I was trying to explain before, about me. We Wunderkzin families are called the ultimate traitors to our species by the Patriarchy, but we believe we carry the best ultimate hope of our species’ survival, because we see that hope as encompassing a society where half the male children don’t have to be killed in the process of growing up; and where there are other ends in life beyond war and hunting. But I’m getting off the point.”

  “I don’t mind, it’s all new to me still. I’m eating it up.”

  Ginger curled his ears at her briefly, then said, “You omnivores have some disturbing turns of phrase. Anyway, Hunt Master limited the technology they used—with modern weapons and detection equipment it would have been a different story and no hunt at all. The kz’zeerekti were tough for humans, and had resourcefulness and cooperation. And those Jotoki cooperating with them were very aggressive and well trained. They accounted for several of the young kzinti on their own. Also, they’re good in trees; I think it was a Jotok that acted to create a diversion in the branches, to draw the hunt away from the human withdrawal. I’ve not known them to cooperate with another species before, apart from those specially trained by kzinti slave masters.”

  “Kz’zeerekti on Kzinhome don’t speak, do they?”

  “Not really. A variety of squeals and grunts. I guess if any evolved speech or intelligence in the past they would have been jumped on pretty quickly.”

  “And yet these talk?”

  “Oh, yes, no doubt about it! Damned cheek, some of it! I heard one of them calling me a—Well, I won’t go into that.”

  “Are they truly human?”

  “That’s for you to say. They certainly seemed to have the usual number of fingers and toes and nipples and things. I kept some tissue samples when they passed out the monkey meat afterwards, as well as some old bones. Here.”

  “Thanks. How delightful.” Perpetua placed the fragments into an autodoc.

  “Somebody’s got to do the job. And this—” Ginger produced some different tissue—“is a sample of the local Jotoki. Better analyze that too.

  “And there are these.” Ginger’s clawtip stirred the metal fragments spread on the table.

  “Smelted, refined, tempered metal.”

  “Yes. Smart. I’d like to have seen the heads better, but the brain cases looked big. I did get a look at a female’s pelvis during the feast, and the birth canal looked big enough for a big-brained head to pass. As far as I know human anatomy, it didn’t look unusual. It tasted like ordinary monkey meat. It had a fetus but I couldn’t get a good look at that in time.”

  “…I see.”

  “Are you unwell?”

  “No. Excuse me; I forget sometimes…This helmet: it ought to fit a human head. More than that…there’s something about it I can’t put my finger on. Anything else?”

  “I think I’ve told you most of it, the tunnels and traps and so forth. There were only two kz’zeerekti females killed. Maybe that was just chance, but it suggests most of their fighters are male, which suggests moderate sexual dimorphism. What else…We passed a sign just after we crossed the river. I memorized it. Let me see—yes. It was like this.” He copied some marks onto an old-fashioned pad. “Hunt Master said kz’zeerekti used it for marking their territory.”

  “Hmm, it looks like writing…Why not just zap them from space, or nuke them?”

  “If they were going to do that, they should have done it right at the beginning. As a race, we don’t like admitting it when we’ve got a problem. You must have noticed. Further, if too many young males survived there would be a higher level of endemic civil war for territory, especially now without the space war to draw them off. Civil war and generational blood feuds are endemic at a fairly low level anyway, but without a high death rate from other causes—such as hunting—among the young it would escalate. It’s an acceptable loss rate, especially without the space war. But I’ll tell you something else: There’s something odd about Hunt Master. It took me a while to work out what, because it’s something you find only relatively rarely among kzinti, but now I’m sure of it: He’s a crook.”

  “As you say, rare in kzinti. Or so all my reading tells me.”

  “All successful nonviolent crime depends on the manipulation of appearances. That’s what he’s doing. I think he got a couple of kzinti killed deliberately—adults and kits. No honorable trainer, no matter how lethal and ruthless as a trainer, would do that when leading them in the face of an enemy. You see the difference between the two situations?”

  Perpetua nodded.

  “My ziirgrah sense isn’t comparable to telepathy, but it’s pretty good.”

  “Then why don’t the local kzinti see it?”

  “Maybe they don’t know what to look for. Weathered old kzintoshi like Hunt Master—tough and hard-bitten even by kzinti standards—tend to be limited in imagination, but almost icons of propriety.”

  “And another thing. Even if it’s not a question of space-based lasers, why not just push in with modern weapons and take the kz’zeerekti territory?”

  “You feel how hot it is, this far south? I imagine that’s why Warrgh-Churrg is content to let Estate Manager run this place while he lives it up in his northern palace. As a marquis he should be living on and dominating the borders personally—the responsibility of guarding them goes with the title. But we’re really past the edge of the temperature range which kzinti like. Not too much further south the trees give way to the savannah and then hot desert and mountains. With this planet’s small axial tilt seasons hardly exist and south of here it’s always hot. The slow rotation accentuates the heat during the day. Further south again and you’re in unending tropic rain and steam. Conditions as horrible for kzinti as you can get.

  “Kzinti don’t want the badlands when there’s ample land in the higher latitudes with a
cooler climate. Besides, deserts don’t breed enough game or support big-bodied prey. Who wants to eat rodents or telepath food?

  “Also, we have here a fairly plainly defined frontier. Further west the river broadens into swamps and deltas which kzinti also don’t like, and then on to the sea, which they have very little interest in. With three moons you get hypertides often enough to make building near the sea unattractive anyway, and at low tide there are vast shallows, too shallow to navigate with a sea ship, right out to the continental shelf…Odd, that. The river should have cut a very deep channel through the shallows by now…

  “Further east, where the aquifer that gives birth to the headwaters of this river rises, the frontier peters out into mountains and desert, of no use to anyone.

  “Of course, the kzin could attack anywhere if they were fighting a war of extermination, whether on foot or with mechanized forces, but that’s not their purpose. But basically, as I said, it suits them to keep the kz’zeerekti for sport and training. Hunt Master said something to the effect that life would be boring without them…Apart from the fact that he’d be out of a job—hunting and getting paid for it!—that any kzintosh would envy.

  “The kz’zeerekti tunnels puzzle me, though. Hunt Master said a nuclear strike would poison the surrounding land. But you could smash them effectively enough in other ways. Drop heavy conventional bombs on them, for example, or scatter mines at the entrances. You wouldn’t even need smart munitions, let alone advanced weapons like disintegrators or walking doomsday dolls. Holding back like that doesn’t fit in with kzinti ruthlessness toward an enemy.

  “But it does fit in with the pattern of kzinti behavior toward game species on other worlds: We’re not bad conservationists, actually, especially where good hunt-beasts are concerned. Better than you’ve been, as I read Earth history—but of course you can eat anything you find, so why would you bother?

  “And it fits with what seems to be an immutable in hunting cultures: When you’re dealing with a clever, hardy prey species in difficult hunts, a prey species capable of retaliation, a kind of empathy often develops between hunter and prey. Some of the terms Hunt Master was using for the kz’zeerekti have a color of affection about them, the kind a kzintosh in benign mood might use for his naughty kittens. You may have noticed Warrgh-Churrg had some stuffed kz’zeerekti specimens as well as heads mounted on his walls?”

  “I could hardly help noticing. I didn’t get a close look, though.”

  “Probably beasts considered noble—hard to kill, or somehow courageous Ya nar Kzinti. Further, I gather there’s occasionally something like a tacit, informal truce between kzinti and kz’zeerekti. You’d probably die if you bet your life on it, but I gather from Hunt Master there are times when both species are a little less aggressive toward each other. That’s the liver of what puzzles me: Toleration is not a kzinti trait. We conserve species, and we know dead slaves fetch no food and work no factories, but we don’t stand any nonsense.

  “The mechanics of it I don’t understand. And I may be wrong anyway. It’s hard to interpret the nuances of body language and ear twitches in a strange culture.”

  “You say the kzinti don’t want a lot of Kzrral because it’s got a lousy climate. Surely with modern engineering they could change a lot of the climate, or build large-scale habitats?”

  “At this stage it’s not worth the effort and expense, not with the present population, and land for all the nobility. Most of those on the hunt had only partial names, indicating there isn’t much difficulty in becoming at least a modest landowner. Kzinti government and administration are pretty sketchy on any planet. We don’t like paying taxes, and without a lot of slave labor we’re not much good at large-scale cooperative projects except war—and you’ve shown us we could be a lot better at that.

  “As a matter of fact,” he went on, “since we’ve begun to study what Vaemar once described as ‘those strange Human disciplines’—economics and economic history—we’ve come to realize many of our wars weren’t for hunting territory, or perhaps even glory, but to acquire slaves to pay our taxes for us. Thanks to the Jotoki giving us the gravity drive, we got into space without ever realizing little things like the fact that slavery creates unemployment—and is inefficient to boot. Once we defeated the Jotoki, we nearly exterminated each other because we saw the universe as a glorious prey we could simply drag down and feast upon. If we’d understood economics and administration better, I don’t know if you’d have beaten us, hyperdrive or not…One of history’s many ironies: None of our enemies came as close to destroying us as the Jotoki did, simply by giving us high technology and powerful weapons so we never had to develop an intellectual or scientific culture…There, how’s that for a human thought?”

  “Human thought?”

  “We Wunderkzin are taught to think like humans. We’ve had a tradition of good teachers, including Dimity Carmody herself. But there’s something else: I’m a kdaptist and a Wunderkzin whose family have been in close contact with humans—and not as conquerors—for several generations. We are the least aggressive, least xenophobic, kzinti that there are: We know we are not typical. Perpetua…?”

  “Yes?”

  “You understand, don’t you, that I am not a telepath?”

  “Of course! I would never dream of thinking of you as such a thing!”

  “It is just that, although I am no telepath, my ziirgrah sense is a little more highly developed than that of an average kzintosh.”

  “My friend, I accept that you are no telepath. I am glad of all the senses the God gave you.”

  “It is an embarrassment to me. Nonetheless, I cannot ignore its input. There was more going on at the hunt than there seemed.

  “It took me a little while to realize how these kzinti are not typical in several ways. I can see all the reasons they tolerate the presence of wild humans or kz’zeerekti or whatever they are on their planet—they all look good and sensible reasons to me, but when you remember this is a kzinti planet, with a kzinti culture, it smells odd somehow.” He knotted his ears in thought. “Small things. Even the way Warrgh-Churrg lay on the fooch.”

  “The couch?”

  “Yes. Kzintoshi normally rest on them after the hunt, when relaxing in hunting preserves, and in the company of members of their own pride, but not as a rule indoors and in front of strange kzintoshi. It makes it a little more difficult to leap up if one has to react to a sudden attack. It’s a small thing, but it’s part of that slight feeling of oddness. And another thing: The audience chamber was stone, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Red sandstone. The sort of re-creation of Old Kzin I’ve seen on a dozen kzinti worlds. The sort Sire and I have ourselves at home on Wunderland for that matter. But the floor was different somehow…I know! You should have felt it with your bare hairless feet. The temperature changed! In the audience chamber it was warm.” Ears knotted again. “But what can that mean?”

  “He doesn’t like cold feet?”

  “But is it significant? Kzinti distrust too much comfort. We like luxury when we can take it, but are hostile to anything that might soften us. But as I was dodging arrows in the night out there I realized what one of the oddities at the spaceport was. The thing I was puzzling about immediately afterwards and couldn’t quite get a fang into. We left footprints in the snow…”

  “I remember! I was worried I’d get frostbite! But a slave has to know her place.”

  “The point is, both when we went to the palace together and when I went to the banquet later, I saw human footprints without kzinti footprints beside them. Coming back to the ship after the banquet I saw one or two human slaves abroad, at night and unsupervised—and they didn’t flee at the sight of me. Warrgh-Churrg has human house-slaves. We saw that. But he said almost nothing about it, despite the fact human slaves were the very subject of our conversation, and ostensibly the very point of my visit to this planet. I saw a couple at the banquet, too—they were carrying food and so forth
, and I supposed they cleaned up afterwards—but none of the kzinti referred to them.

  “Talk about humans as prey animals and sport, yes! Have human trophies on the walls. But to talk about humans as house slaves, as waiters, perhaps as errand-runners, as the cleaners of those trophies—a sort of tacit taboo. That’s one of the oddities. Once or twice at the banquet human slaves came bearing meat to me and those near me, and what my ziirgrah picked up from my fellow guests was a faint suggestion of an emotion I’ve encountered in humans often enough but not with kzintoshi—embarrassment! That’s something I’ve never encountered on a kzinti world before. Have you ever heard of an embarrassed kzin?”

  “You’re cats. I’ve never heard of an embarrassed cat of any kind. It’s practically a contradiction in terms.”

  “It’s something to bite at. I feel there’s meat there.”

  “Uh-huh.” Perpetua was absorbed in her examination of the inscription and the helmet. “I’m certain this was writing. What’s more, these characters are derived from West European letters!”

  “So they are from Wunderland. Not a convergent native species.”

  “That’s right, but…this language isn’t English, or Wunderlander.”

  “Let me see. If these marks had been linked when new, then the characters…‘Nihil…proficiat…inimicus…’” Ginger spelled out the words carefully. Human and kzin shook head and ears in puzzlement. Perpetua turned to the helmet.

  “What’s this?” She pried at the rusted metal. A flake of something fell into her hand. “It’s…paint?”

  “Yes. And look at this piece.”

  “What about it?”

  “First of all, those are beads of glass. They have a sense of decoration. More than that, they have a technology for making glass. Glass is difficult. Oh, that’s just the beginning. Look at this! Look closely now!”