Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XIII

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

  He looked at Selena. “How much longer before you inevitably run out of new tricks? Many of your commentators seemed fairly sure that a fifth fleet could not be stopped. But this—a faster-than-light drive—changes everything. It gives you the initiative. You will be able to act so quickly, recover and act again, that my people will be hard put just to fight you to a standstill. And a system such as Centauri, where there is a large human population, will almost certainly fall to you. And then all the stories of our so-called atrocities will become widely known upon Earth and you will convince yourselves, maybe accurately, that the universe is not big enough for both kzin and human. You will reconceive your war of defense into one of preemptive genocide.”

  Selena nodded. “So you are doing this to ensure the safety of your own people.”

  “Yes. And possibly yours.” His whole body rippled. “I have not decided that humans are in the right: that is a moot point. At least to me. But what I have seen is that the future of the kzinti could resemble what occurred to many of the peoples of this planet, the Zulu and the American Plains Indians, in particular. They too, were hunters like us kzinti. But they were washed away by the flood of your dominant society. Drowned and purged from existence.”

  “Yes, but those peoples were also terribly outnumbered by the nations who took their lands. They were overwhelmed.”

  “We, too, will be overwhelmed.”

  Selena shook her head. “That’s just not accurate, Hap. The kzinti have many worlds, with a total population that is much greater than—”

  “You misunderstand. I do not mean we will be overwhelmed by your numbers; I mean you shall batter us down with the quantities and powers of your innovation. I have been studying the culture of natural kzinti: they adopt pirated technologies very quickly, but they evolve and amplify them very slowly, if at all. It is the opposite with humans. And with your ARM relinquishing more and more of its control, and the UN releasing more and more of the technologies it repressed over the centuries, all constraints upon innovation and change have been lifted, and you are now making up for lost time. And the kzinti will neither be able to foresee, nor react to, all these new weapons and technologies quickly enough. But in the final analysis, it wasn’t just the sudden changes in your rate of innovation which showed me the necessity of my intended course. It was the changes in you, in your species, which ultimately decided me.”

  Selena shook her head. “I don’t understand. What changes?”

  Hap sat. “When was the first attempted invasion of Earth?”

  “2383.”

  “Correct. I came on the third fleet. A fourth was destroyed just four years ago. And the reason you defeated that one was not due to innovation, certainly not so much as was the case with your earlier victories.” He looked straight at her, almost searching for something in her face. “You humans have changed, before my very eyes. I didn’t realize it until I started thinking about what I had experienced as a cub, how the world had felt then, in comparison to now. It did not just seem to be a gentler, safer place: it was a gentler, safer place. Back then, all the sharp edges were padded: there was still a strong reflex against violence, even against displeasing people. Including me.

  “But the wars have changed you. The young of your species do not have the same gentled reflexes of your generation. They are more direct and decisive, and understand that some matters cannot be settled with conversation and ever more conversation. Sometimes, a blade or a battle cruiser is required. In short, you are warriors now. Or, I should say, ‘once again.’”

  “So, does this mean that you respect us more now? That you feel we are worthy?”

  “No. Well, yes, but your worthiness is not the reason I have decided to cooperate.”

  “Then what is?”

  “Four fleets attacked you without success, and that was during an epoch when you had forgotten the skills of war making. Now, your current generation is bred to it: I no longer see panic or dismay in the faces around me, or on the news, when a battle is imminent.” He sighed. “You may be running out of new tricks, but the dragons’ teeth your generation sowed have sprouted into myrmidons. So I wonder: how dangerous are you going to be when all the living generations of man know war, remember nothing but war, and are deeply schooled in its arts?”

  Selena stared at him. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

  Hap nodded. “I know. But I have. A great deal.”

  2419 BCE: Subject age—twenty-three years

  Accented by its hallmark conglomeration of soaring spires and low-sweeping pavilions, the Shanghai Spaceport was a jarring mixture of extreme order and absolute chaos. All its personnel were doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing, with extraordinary competence, but usually without any greater sense of how their task fit into the greater whole. Not that this was unique to Shanghai: that kind of downstream cluelessness was pretty much endemic the world over. But here, each worker’s superficial gloss of perfectly composed competence often fooled the first-time traveler there into thinking that it would be more orderly than the other great spaceports of the globe. No such luck, thought Selena, as she accepted that her outbound flight would be delayed yet another hour.

  Which meant that she would have to sit and brood over Hap’s departure far longer than she wished. That brooding would touch upon other, related losses: the loss of Dieter, the loss of Boroshinsky, the loss of her own youth and idealism. Hap had, during his later training, become something of a fan of old human fiction, and now employed a wildly anachronistic phrase to restart the flagging conversation: “Penny for your thoughts?”

  “I was thinking about how strange it will be not to have you here. End of an era. That kind of thing.” Her tone was not as airy as she had hoped.

  “Well, if my escorts do not show up soon, we might not have to part at all.”

  Selena drew in her breath, then expelled it before explaining. “Your escorts are not coming.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “Because you are free, Hap. Fully and absolutely free. No escorts, no oversight, no observers, no ‘cultural facilitators.’ You are on your own. Entirely.”

  Hap’s jaw hung slack, and Selena hoped he did not make that a habit: all those teeth were a pretty disturbing sight. He recovered his facial composure about the same moment he regained his sardonic perspective on human promises: “Yes, free to be your ambassador to the kzinti, wherever that assignment should happen to take me.”

  “Well, you’re right—and you’re wrong.”

  “You mean, I could simply be a minor liaison, or an informer, for you?”

  “No. I mean that you don’t have to represent us at all: you can declare loyalty to the kzinti, if you want. And if they’ll have you. We’re leaving that matter of conscience in your capable hands.” She smiled down at his immense paws.

  “But why—why would you do this?” Hap stammered out.

  “Because it is the right thing to do. And because you spoke the truth years ago when you observed that, all too often, we humans are without strakh. Well, this is our way of trying to make up for some of those lapses in honor.”

  Hap blinked, then nodded. “This is a high honor you do me, holding yourself to a standard of behavior you did not promise. And to a mortal foe of your race, no less.”

  “Perhaps. But I hope you will reflect upon what it really means to have this freedom conferred upon you.”

  “Is it not motivated by your sense of honor?”

  “Actually, no: this time, the motivation was kindness and justice.”

  “I suspect my kind would call that weakness and foolishness.”

  “Perhaps. But we would not do this for all kzinti. In your case, however, it is the only right thing to do. And I hope it will provide an illustration of one of the strengths of human society, in contrast to kzin society. For the kzinti, honor is the essential ingredient for cultural preservation: high oaths, and their rigid enforcement, are necessary if your state is to survive.” She shrugged. “
But we humans—we are not creatures governed so completely, so essentially, by oaths.”

  His ears expanded like the cowls of a cobra; it signaled a sharp, sudden realization: “And now I see why: you cannot be governed by oaths alone. Because you are not creatures of absolute values. We kzinti, our course is set as the course of an arrow: we seek and pursue objectives without question or regret, and without interminable reflection upon the ethics of our actions. Why should we? What we eat, how we breed, why we are kzin: these are not matters of debate or uncertainty. Our nature is direct, monofocal, and undiluted. We pursue excellence in those skills that help us attain those goals, and find little of interest in others. Anything else is, at best, a distraction from the quest to become a Hero: to conquer, to acquire a Name, a mate, offspring—and always, accrue greater strakh.”

  He pointed, smiling and understanding. “But you humans are not built this way. If we kzinti are a precisely aimed arrow in flight, you are ripples upon the surface of running water: moving outward, and in so many directions at once. To kzinti who have not grown up in your midst as I have, I suppose it must look like a pointless squandering of energy. It is the diffusion of the self, of potency, and superficially appears to be a kind of dilettantism toward the entire business of life itself. I, too, had often suspected that was what your restlessness signified: a simple inability to focus on what really matters.

  “But now I see the difference. It is in your nature to be this way, as much as it is in ours to be monodirectional and focused. And in both cases, our natures reflect, and are suited to, how we survived, and flourished, at the dawn of our respective sapience.

  “We were carnivores, hunters. We identified prey and pursued it, relentlessly and without deviation. But you were omnivores: sustenance was to be found in many places, requiring many skills to acquire it from diverse sources. So you became versatile. You used tools sooner and better than we did. Given how long it took for us to get to space in our much longer history, we kzinti should have seen this difference in you, in your space-faring history, and realized its significance sooner. But we did not, because while we are superior at keeping our oaths, we are your inferiors when it comes to facing the truth.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is it not obvious? The oligarchic control, the culling of intelligent females, the rigidity of discipline: the kzin heart finds iron rules easier to tolerate than a nuanced and constantly shifting reality.”

  Selena twisted her mouth sourly. “Oh, you mean the way we demonstrated our flexibility by imposing three centuries of self-inflicted social brainwashing that we still call our Golden Age of Peace?”

  “Nothing proves my point more than your Golden Age.”

  “What? How?”

  “Because it was only three centuries long.”

  “Only three centuries? Apparently kzinti have an intrinsically different sense of time, as well.”

  Hap shrugged. “Perhaps we do. Did you mislead yourselves when you turned your swords into ploughshares and then denied that swords had ever existed? Yes, of course you did, but that is the risk of being creatures that advance through experiment and change. You try new things. Often, they do not work. Just as often, you then over-correct in rejecting them. But somehow, a dynamic equilibrium emerges. It may not be obvious until one has a perspective of far hindsight—looking back across decades, centuries, even millennia—but it is the truth of you humans: you improve by changing, and the process does not destroy you. Quite the contrary, it is the wellspring of your vitality.”

  Selena smiled crookedly when he was finished. “I thank you, Hap. We had thought to teach you, but I suspect, when I reflect upon what you just said, that it is you who will have taught us.”

  “And that comment teaches me, in turn.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, unless I am much mistaken, making that kind of admission—that you humans can and do learn fundamental truths about yourselves from outsiders—comes relatively easily to your species. It does not come easily to the kzinti.”

  “Then perhaps that will be the greatest insight, and example, you will bring back to your species. After all, you admitted to learning from us, just now, and you did so with great ease.”

  “It is simply a sign of your bad influence upon me.” Hap’s fur rippled in waves of mirth. “So I will have to learn to be more inflexible and stubborn.” He bowed. “I will not bid you farewell, or good-bye. The Wunderlanders have a better phrase for parting: Auf Wiedersehen. Until we see each other again.”

  “Auf Wiedersehen, Hap. Success and good luck always.”

  He stood tall—tall as only a massive kzin could stand—and turned with what seemed a ruffle and flourish of his pelt. Had he been a human hero, the movement of his fur would have been accomplished by a cape, swirling to mark his long-striding exit.

  “Auf Wiedersehen,” Selena called after him again. And then, remembering one of Dieter’s intimate phrases, she whispered “—und tschüss, Liebling,” at Hap’s broad, receding back.

  TOMCAT TACTICS

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Charles E. Gannon

  2413 BCE: Wunderland, leading Trojan point asteroids

  “If you botch the insertion, the oyabun will have your left testicle,” muttered Pytor Iarngavi over the tightbeam. “Probably your right one, too.”

  Moto Yakazuki snorted defiance. “Just let him try and get them.” The wiry EVA expert shut off and detached the portable compressed air retro: it was old, reliable, zero-energy-signature tech. Perfect for this job. Yakazuki stowed the retro on the side of his life-support unit, and then shifted his grip on the small space-rock. Only four meters in length and two wide, one couldn’t seriously call it an asteroid. He fired his suit jets in quick bursts to make small side-vector corrections.

  “It’s going to be too close to the other—”

  “It’s not, Pytor,” Yakazuki snapped. “Now, shut up.” The small Serpent Swarmer pulled himself hand over hand to the other side of the probably artificial splinter of rock. Once secured, he pulsed his suit jets, counter-boosting until he had zeroed out the inertia along its insertion vector. He pushed gently away, assessed his EVA handiwork: the tiny lozenge-like object was now motionless relative to the other rocks at the trailing end of Wunderland’s leading Trojan point asteroids. “Perfect: like it’s been there since the beginning of time.”

  “Whaddya think it is?”

  “I dunno,” confessed Yakazuki as he began boosting back to the small prospecting boat they had been loaned for this task. “Way too light to be a genuine rock, that’s for sure. But the man didn’t say what it was, and I wasn’t about to ask. I’m just glad to start paying off for my, eh, overzealous lovemaking with Funikawa’s prize baishunfu.”

  “Since when has ‘beating a whore’ become ‘overzealous lovemaking’?”

  “Mind your own business and vices, Iarngavi. Just how many thousands are you in debt, now? Word has it that when you couldn’t pay last month, you offered your ass to the Yamikin’s collection goons. Who kicked it raw for you.”

  “Fuck you, Moto.”

  “I’ll bet you would, if you got the chance. Open the hatch. I’m done out here.”

  Tomoaki Kitayama sipped at the small porcelain cup: the sake was ever so slightly less than body temperature. Not really tepid, yet, but not correct. However, this was probably going to be the least of his problems, today.

  His gang’s senior accountant, or kaikei, appeared at the entrance of his office, located in the back of the restaurant that bore Kitayama’s name. The kaikei bowed. “Kobun?”

  “Proceed.”

  “We have received the signal from the debtor and the rapist. They have completed their task.”

  “Has our spy drone verified their report?”

  “Yes, kobun. Shall I inform the oyabun that the mission has been a success?”

  “No, I shall do that personally.”

  “Very well, kobun. Are there other matters which need my attention
today?”

  “No, but tell me: the men who performed the mission—is their ship still in line-of-sight, for clear transmission?”

  “Yes, kobun. Shall I raise them?”

  “No, I shall tend to that also. You may go home. My regards to your family.”

  “We hope you will honor us by coming to dinner soon again, kobun.”

  “Yes, perhaps.” Please no; his wife is as dull as a potted plant. And less comely. “However, it is uncertain when I might be free to do so. I shall inform you if my schedule becomes less taxing.” Which will never happen.

  Kitayama nodded in response to his kaikei’s bow, then studied the data tablet beside him. Two channels were already pulsing, ready to be activated: a red one that would send a narrow lascom transmission to the prospecting boat, and a green one that would open a secure line to the oyabun. Kitayama smiled, pressed the red button, and then the green one.

  Forty seconds after the red button was pressed, and at a distance of forty light-seconds, the computer in Iarngavi’s and Yakazuki’s small prospecting boat received a lascom signal that did not route through to the communications panel in the bridge. Instead, it was a coded command that was addressed for the subprocessor overseeing engine operations. Which obeyed the command immediately.

  The magnetic bottle on the plasma drive flickered out of existence. The superheated hydrogen expanded in every direction, including right through the hull of the craft. When it came into contact with the oxygenated atmosphere within, combustion occurred.