Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XIII

by Hal Colebatch, Jessica Q Fox, Jane Lindskold, Charles E Gannon, Alex Hernandez, David Bartell

  First, he established that he was not a pilot. These humans apparently had some idea that kzinti society was structured around hierarchies and specializations. He gave out that he was nothing more than an infantry solider, what he heard Miffy refer to as a “grunt.” However, he admitted to some second-hand familiarity with how space-capable vessels were operated. After that, matters went smoothly enough.

  “So,” Miffy asked, “how many are needed to operate this craft?”

  The kzin considered. The actual answer was “one,” for no kzin would wish to be left operating a machine when he could be fighting. However, the cockpit was furnished with three chairs, so that during slow times duties could be shared.

  He decided to lie. “Two.”

  “But there are three chairs,” Miffy called up holographic representations. “What do these do?”

  The kzin took refuge in his presumably limited vocabulary. “Operator,” he said, pointing to the pilot’s chair. He pointed to the next. “Operator assistant.” The third chair, “Operator assistant assistant.”

  This led to a heated discussion between Miffy and a couple of his own assistants. In the end, they decided—or rather Miffy did—that what the kzin meant was pilot, co-pilot (possibly a navigator), and back-up. Such redundancy was apparently common among humans. Their discussion explained to the kzin, who had once been a Human Weapon’s Technology expert, the high degree of back-up systems and safeguards in human machinery.

  So it went. “What does this button do?” “What does this one do?” “How do you operate this lever?”

  Mostly, the kzin answered truthfully, for his goal was to be taken to the actual scout ship. The minute some device operated other than he had said it would, that opportunity would be lost.

  The hologram was useful, but only to a point. Since the handgrips and levers had been designed for kzinti hands, which were much larger than those of humans, the kzin could only mime how the grips and levers were pulled or pushed or shoved into position. (Kzinti liked to handle their equipment. The smooth pressure pads humans usually employed were not for them.) Moreover, kzinti equipment had been designed to be operated using a manual attribute humans did not possess—claws. Overall, human fingers were more delicate and dexterous than those of kzinti, but claws changed that equation. They could be extended to make fine manipulations, to extend reach.

  The humans, accustomed as they were to having fingers that stayed one length, conditioned by experience and comparison with Terran species (such as the frequently mentioned “cat”) to thinking of claws merely as biological weapons, had a great deal of trouble adapting to this view.

  Only after they had gone to the trouble of dismounting a control panel and bringing it to where the kzin could demonstrate how the various shifters and buttons worked when one had claws, not merely fingers, did they believe he was not misleading them.

  “Fascinating,” said the man called Roscoe, a man who the kzin had first met as one of Dr. Anixter’s assistants and who he now realized answered first to Miffy. “Where we would put in a spring or some other sort of release, they simply employ a claw-tip to pull the key back into position. For many years, it has been speculated that body form would influence how problems are approached and solved, but this is an elegant demonstration of the proof of that theory.”

  “Write your paper later,” Miffy grunted. “Right now I want to know how much more the ratcat can teach us from holograms.”

  “There should be more,” Roscoe assured him. “We haven’t even touched on the weapons systems—of course, those were pretty badly slagged. I must say, however, if you’re interested in their piloting and navigation, eventually, we’re going to need to take the ratcat to the ship.”

  “I wonder if he can tell us anything,” Miffy said. He seemed to have forgotten the kzin was there. “He says he was just a grunt.”

  “Still,” Roscoe said, “I would think the effort would be worth it, even if we only learned a little, especially with the computers down…”

  He trailed off. Miffy nodded. The kzin struggled to hide his fierce joy. He had not invited torture for nothing. He was going to see the ship.

  The captured scout ship was being kept in a hanger scooped from the asteroid’s outer surface and fitted with sliding doors that were smooth and shiny on the inside, but did a remarkable job of mimicking the exterior of the asteroid when they were closed.

  When the kzin saw the ship—most especially when the doors into the interior of the craft were opened and odors, stale but still present, wafted out—the kzin found himself overwhelmed with the last sensation he had expected: homesickness.

  Through all of his long captivity, the kzin had been so acutely aware of the shame of having been captured by humans that his main emotion when he thought of those he had left behind had been apprehension. He had dreaded the scorn and reproach he would certainly meet if other kzinti learned that not only had he been captured, but that these weak, furless, fangless primates had kept him captive. Nor had he thought that scorn would be undeserved.

  Now, however, as familiar shapes and smells assailed him, he had to fight against the contradictory urges to rush forward or to shrink back. He longed for the feeling of furniture designed not only for his size, but for a backside equipped with a tail. His gaze feasted on color schemes and shapes designed around the aesthetic values of his people, his culture.

  But most of all he drank in the scent of his own kind. Some of these were not pleasant—old blood, least of all—but even the rankest and most foul odors belonged to his own kind.

  He had forgotten the humans, so when Miffy spoke, only the restraints the kzin wore kept him from wheeling around and taking off the man’s head. The kzin found himself grateful for the restraints. Killing Miffy—at least now—would not suit him at all.

  “We’ve patched the holes in the hull,” Miffy said, “but other than that, we’ve not tampered with anything. Time to earn your kibble, kzin.”

  Eager to stay in this place, the kzin did his best. He demonstrated how various hooks and levers operated—using this as an opportunity to check that they still functioned. The humans had disabled power to the systems, so nothing actually did anything, but as far as he could judge, if power was restored, they would work.

  The first day, they concentrated mostly on the bridge. The second day, they moved to engineering. This was not a separate deck as it would be in a larger vessel, but a compartment. Here the kzin was forced to disappoint his captors. Although he could show them which telltales indicated what readout, even translating the comma and dots of kzinti script that labeled various devices, he could not tell them anything about how the engine itself functioned.

  Miffy pressed, asking the same question in several different ways, almost certainly hoping to catch the kzin in a lie. The result was the same. He couldn’t tell them, because he really didn’t know.

  Roscoe finished making a note, then shrugged. “Really, boss, the ratcat’s done better than we expected. I mean, except for Belt miners, who knows how every part of a ship works? We already know that the kzinti go more for specialization than we do.”

  Miffy reluctantly agreed and they moved on to the next section—the badly damaged computer system. Here the kzin felt glad that they’d looked at the engines first and the humans had grown to believe he knew little or nothing about complex technical matters.

  The computer was indeed damaged, the main system completely ruined. However, he was able to ascertain that some of the back-up systems connected with engineering and navigation were untouched. They would need to be manually activated, but if he did somehow manage to steal this ship, he wouldn’t need to fly blind.

  For the first time, the kzin allowed himself to entertain the idea that not only might he steal the ship, he might manage an escape. Up to this point, the best he had dared realistically hope for was destroying the scout ship, himself, and hopefully a section of this base. Now…

  Surely his first duty was to get back to
areas held by the Patriarchy. He had learned a great deal about humans. Moreover, he had a good idea how much humans had learned about kzinti. All of this would be useful.

  Yet the desire for revenge was strong in him. He imagined the hot battle lust that would flood his veins as he aimed the nose of the scout ship directly at the asteroid. Although the base was neatly contained, still there would be equipment on the exterior. He knew the humans augmented their power with solar energy gathered from whichever star this asteroid orbited. They captured and processed comets as well. All that equipment would be on the surface, concealed, yes, but vulnerable.

  Or he might hit a thin place, near the hanger doors, perhaps, and shatter the asteroid’s integrity. He imagined atmosphere rushing out, life-support desperately struggling to replace voided air and water, spilling more of this vital material into barren space. If his crash created a large enough hole, many humans would be killed. Within the base, only the guards routinely wore pressure suits and these were not worn closed and sealed.

  Overcome by panic—for the kzin had seen that humans panicked easily—many would forget the drill. Humans were not kzinti. They were new to war. Most of the staff on this base were from Earth herself, not from the colony worlds, the Moon, or the Belt. Flatlanders were remarkably complacent, often ignoring the dangers involved in living in an artificial environment.

  He remembered hearing a story about a human woman on a tour ship who had complained to the ship’s captain because the windows in her cabin didn’t open…

  The kzin was jerked from these lovely reveries by Miffy asking more questions. Obediently, he answered. Carefully, because now there was so much to lose, he played the part of a slave, but he was a slave who scented freedom.

  Over the days that followed, the kzin regularly was taken to the scout ship. He participated in various drills meant to check to what degree the scout ship was functional.

  Miffy had what he believed was a fool-proof way of assuring the kzin’s cooperation. While he and his staff members wore pressure suits, the kzin was left naked to vacuum. This was supposed to assure that he did not do anything foolish, for if he did, he would be among the first to die.

  As if a kzin would fear death if duty or revenge called, the kzin thought.

  But he wondered if he had caught some infection of human caution. There were several times when he might have damaged the scout ship or some of its key components, but each time he held back. He told himself that this was because he did not wish to settle for half-measures. The humans had shown themselves quite good at repairing both damaged machines and damaged kzinti. If he were to act, the act must be final.

  Self-doubt crept into his dreams. Was he really trying for the final measure or was there something else? He did not believe he feared to die, but was there something he feared more?

  Did he fear going home?

  Jenni watched as the kzin grew first stronger, then, with a sudden change of mood and health, ragged and weak. His appetite was reduced so that even his favorite steak hardly seemed to tempt him.

  “You’ve been overworking him,” she said to Miffy. “I demand complete rest or I will not answer for the consequences.”

  Miffy glowered at her, but he could not disagree.

  “We have enough information that it will take us weeks to process. I wish he’d been able to explain the gravity polarizer to us! Still, the documents he translated, especially the print manual we found, give us some idea.”

  “But not enough to figure out how to make one?” Jenni asked sympathetically.

  Miffy shook his head. “No. Too much information is assumed. What we found was more like an operator’s manual. It tells you how to use the machine and even how to do basic repairs to various systems, but it doesn’t go into the theory of construction.”

  “Stick your arm in the autodoc,” Jenni agreed, “and send me the readout. Simple to use, but providing no idea how the device itself works—much less how the human body the ’doc is diagnosing works.”

  “Right.”

  “So you can do without my patient for a few days?”

  “I suppose.”

  This last was said grudgingly, even distractedly. Jenni decided to take a risk.

  “I’d like to go over the ship myself.”

  “Why?”

  “Did it occur to you that the kzin might have caught something? You had the environmental systems up and running, but if there was an infection in the scrubbers…As I recall, the original crew did not survive.”

  “No. They were pretty much squished.”

  “And that could have released something nasty. I want to take a bioscanner and see what I can gather, compare it to my patient’s bloodwork, do some other tests.”

  “Wouldn’t it take a hardy bug to survive vacuum?”

  “Microscopic life has survived in worse environments than within a ship, even a ship open to vacuum,” Jenni reminded him. “And it’s likely that some areas remained sealed.”

  For a long moment, she thought Miffy was going to refuse her, then his expression grew thoughtful.

  “That would be a hardy bug,” he said. Then his tone became casual. “Oh, why not take a look? Let me know the results?”

  “Of course,” Jenni replied, thinking why doesn’t he just write “Let me know if you find something I can use as a bioweapon” on his forehead for me to read?

  She went down to the scout ship with Roscoe. They spent enough time there that the guards got distinctly bored. However, by the time they left, she felt fairly certain the ship could function with a single pilot.

  Later, Jenni drew blood from the kzin and gave it to Ida with detailed instructions as to what she needed to look for. She asked Theophilus to do an analysis of hair, urine, and fecal samples.

  Then she went and took the kzin for a walk.

  “I have arranged some privacy for us,” she said. “Anyone monitoring us will hear me questioning you about your recent lack of appetite and the like. Innocent conversation.”

  The kzin flickered his ears in a manner that was—Jenni now suspected—an expression roughly equivalent to a human raising her eyebrows. That is, indicating surprise and perhaps a small element of doubt and incredulity.

  People with fur on their faces must employ other visual clues, she thought. I suspect there are a host of olfactory ones that I’m missing.

  She swallowed a sigh of regret. There was so much more to learn, but the time for study had ended.

  “You must take that kzinti ship and flee,” she said. A flaring of nostrils and flattening of ears caused her to amend her words. “Or if ‘flee’ is too cowardly a term for you, then say ‘escape.’ Whatever term you choose, I will help you.”

  The kzin’s ears flattened, his hackles rose, but although his body spoke of tension, his words indicated a high measure of trust. For the first time, he did not speak in the abbreviated, staccato version of Interworld he had used to this point for communication with humans.

  “Why?” asked the kzin. “Not why must I escape, but why will you help me? Strange as you are, I have never fancied you a traitor to your people.”

  Jenni smiled her gentle smile. “No. I also do not think of myself as a traitor. Rather, during these long months over which I have cared for you, I have had much time for reflection about humans, about kzinti, about those other aliens of which I have been told, although I am not likely ever to have an opportunity to study them. I have come to certain conclusions.”

  The kzin gave a brief, human-style nod of encouragement, and Jenni went on.

  “There are humans—Miffy among them—who believe that in order to defeat the kzinti, we humans must become more kzinti than the kzinti themselves. We must become more ruthless than our worst imaginings of you and your culture: more brutal, more bloodthirsty.

  “Miffy and his type would say that long ago, humanity took a wrong turn when it slowly embraced a creed of pacifism. They forget how close humanity was as a species to destroying not only ourse
lves, but our native biosphere. I suspect many of Miffy’s sort have not been cleared to learn about the horrors included in the historical record of that time, not only about wars, but about industrial accidents that occurred because humans channeled their aggressive natures towards achieving their goals, rather than trying to see the larger impact of such actions.

  “Yet, even though I personally disagree that pacifism was a wrong choice if humanity was to survive without destroying itself, there is some truth in what Miffy and those like him believe. We humans learned how not to destroy ourselves, but this was achieved at the price of creating a false history, a history full of outright lies and clever omissions.

  “When, with our meeting with the kzinti, the need to fight came again to the human race, we were shocked to discover how very easy killing was, how quickly we adapted the technologies of peace and prosperity to those of war and destruction. Then, too, rumors came to some ears that our Golden Age had in itself been a lie, created not by our own cultural and spiritual evolution, but seeded and enforced from without.”

  The kzin bent his whiskers forward in interest, but Jenni went on without further explanation. She did not know how much the kzinti had learned about Brennan and the Protectors. Not knowing this, she did not think it was her place to spread that particular bit of information.

  “So, is our pacifistic nature a lie and the warlike true?” She smiled, deliberately barring her teeth and touching first the front incisors, then the side canines. “We have two types of teeth: those designed for the eating of plants, those for the eating of flesh. No one rejects their teeth, yet we keep rejecting one or the other side of our natures: the hunter or the gatherer. One must be right, the other wrong. The truth is less easy to accept. We are both warlike and peaceful, hunters and planters, ruthless and nurturing.

  “If I let those such as Miffy have their way, then I am denying what is most real. That is why I am going to help you. Not because I am a traitor, but precisely because I am not.”