The Man-Kzin Wars 06

by Larry Niven

  The monkeys referred to W’kkai’s trifling K2-star by catalog numbers BD+50° 1725, or HDraper-88230, or Gliese-380. Under those names there had been neither helpful listings of less-than-giant planets nor listings of nearby interstellar hazards—the humans were woefully ignorant about kzinspace. He’d had to fly blind on his near approach to W’kkaisun. But the human system was usable. He had already deduced that they cataloged Kzinsun as 61 Ursa Majoris. Its hyperspace coordinates were in the box and would be accurate enough even if the fine details were missing.

  Then he sobered. Everything on W’kkai had been reduced to a fine art—even torture. A W’kkai dungeon was a Conundrum Puzzle that took a lifetime to solve. Its stones were sculpted by vow-sworn priests into shapes of beauty and balance and engineering. A finger might liberate you—or reshape your dungeon into a tinier cell or feed you to the fish.

  Fighting his own kzinkind was worse than fighting humans. As a barbarian from Hssin he had been brought up to believe that W’kkai was one of the great centers of learning and wisdom. In fact it was parochial. The local lords were too far away from Kzin to share directly in the awesome power of the Patriarch, and too far away from the war to have been bloodied by any other battle than their petty internal duels.

  The dangers inherent in escape came from W’kkai’s naval strength. He was a trained fighter pilot and knew what he was up against. It would be harder to evade the gravity-driven dreadnoughts of the W’kkaikzin than, after escape, to outmaneuver a lethargic superluminal ship whose monkeycrew had yet to master the tech of the gravitic polarizer. These UNSN treaty enforcers hovered outside the W’kkai system, beyond a spherical hyperbarrier generated by W’kkaisun’s mass, looking down at kzin military might from a height of three light-hours— like monkeys in a free throwing nuts at the prowling carnivores below. They had not dared come in toward W’kkaisun for a real fight.

  Their silly blockade of military trade between the kzinti worlds was no big shake of the tail. A few kzinti hyperdrives could break it. The Procyon planet, the one that named itself by some incomprehensible human pun, could build starships for a millennium and still not have enough of a net to snatch each fish from the stream. Space was bigger than ignorant treaty—makers could dream.

  Grraf-Nig did not doubt that, once beyond the hyperbarrier, he could slip past the monkeys. He was a veteran of deep space. Already, by himself, he had leapt halfway to the legendary world of Kzin. And he had done this, after the war was over, when the blockade was already in place. What was another fifteen light years? He could see Kzin from here, shining at magnitude 4, twelve degrees off galactic north, a proud hilt in the Constellation of Swords.

  The trip had to be risked. There was no way around it. By the terms of the MacDonald-Rishshi Peace Treaty the humans insisted upon retaining control of all superlurninal communications. The Patriarch, light years to the galactic north, would not yet even know that a hyperdrive ship had been captured. No human was likely to tell him.

  Escape was a matter of timing. If he stole away before the physicists of W’kkai fully understood the nature of the hyperdrive shunt, and if, by unluck, the Patriarchy’s only working model was captured or destroyed on the way to Kzin, then his premature decision would have left the kzinti in thrall to the humans forever Patience. That was the lesson Chuut-Riit had taught. That was the lesson his name donor, Grraf-Hromfi, had tried to teach, and had not quite learned himself.

  Timing. Too soon or too late. If he waited too long to carry his gift to the Patriarch, the W’kkai might become so strong as to be deluded into waging war by themselves. And that, too, would leave the kzinti in the thrall of victorious humans. There was no such thing anymore as a “local” war. W’kkai could attack human space, but the humans would simply bypass W’kkai and destroy a helpless Kzin. All kzinti worlds would have to be armed with the hyperdrive shunt. If Heroes were to undo their humiliation, as one pride they would have to hunt and kill the man-beasts and their women and their children.

  And where was the pride that could command that kind of interstellar loyalty? Only the glorious Patriarchy!

  ***

  Later, returned from the hunt, walking along the balcony of his mansion, Grraf-Nig watched one of his human slaves play with his younger brothers. The Lieutenant Nora-beast had proved to be excellent breeding stock. The way her sons showed their teeth to each other, a naive kzin might think they were about to attack but they were only laughing.

  He was genuinely disappointed that he would have to leave them behind. Leaving his wives he didn’t mind, but good slaves were hard to come by. The older male-beast might have made just the right slave gift for the Patriarch. Life’s regrets!

  · Chapter 9

  (2436 A.D.)

  Because Hwass-Hwasschoaw was on Wunderland, he had not dared bring with him his masks of human hide— there had been no secure place to conceal them on the tiny shuttle craft from Tigertown, staffed as it was by kzin hating animals. That made difficult any communion with God.

  Kdapt’s forms had to be observed rigorously.

  Hwass went into retreat above the cluttered electronics workshop in a room that was often used for secret meetings by München’s Kdaptists. He meditated in this claustrophobic space built to human size. How was a devout kzin to appeal to a Bearded God who had given the Patriarch thousands of years of victory—but who thwarted every kzinti attack on His newly discovered tree-climbing pets? Noseplugs attached, he fasted alone in darkness among the salvaged junk, thinking.

  Where was the logic behind God’s bias?

  Hwass, a noble of the Patriarch’s Eye, was here in a crumbling slum while they were being resurrected in prosperity all about him. Strange. God never interfered with a kzin who made an ill decision; such a kzin was respected as a noble intelligence and allowed to grow wise—or to die—by living the consequences of his decisions. Not so with humans. Why?

  A master crafter, Hwass reasoned, only interferes in his creation when it is moving away of his intention. A mechanic repairs only after his machine begins to fail. A potter touches clay only when he sees imperfection. God was an artisan. When he ceased admiring the beauty of His work, how did He choose to interfere?

  In all of God’s universal masterwork, the man-beasts, molded in God’s perfect image, seemed to be the only imperfection that disturbed God. God interfered ceaselessly for human salvation. Let a man-beast make a mistake, and God rushed in to save him. God’s simians might lie and cheat and beat their females, they might run in battle—but He was always saving them. Let a man make a lethal decision, and God invited him to be born again. Some divine author was not allowing the men to lose no matter how iniquitous their behavior. Saved from blunders, mankind was never allowed to grow wise... as a kzin became wise through the blunders of his youth.

  It was told by men that they had mightily offended their God by eating vegetables from the tree of knowledge. Perhaps God’s purpose in saving the man-beasts was to keep them in their animal state—naive, innocent, lacking in wisdom. What better way to cage an animal from knowledge than to save him from the consequences of his acts?

  Hwass was beginning to understand. The sins of men caused God pain; He interfered to put things right. Men tore down His work wantonly; God rebuilt their homes. While God demanded bravery and discipline and honesty of His kzin because he respected them, He spoiled His simians out of love. In their writings did not men see Him as one who raged at their sins but who was always merciful? Was not this Bearded God obsessed with the salvation of those He had created in His image? There, that was the path to His liver!

  Understanding salvation was the key to understanding God. And the Son of God was the key to salvation. Kdaptist rigor had found the way. His mighty frame stirred in the attic, shaking spiders into their cracks. Through His Son, Hwass could reach God.

  Clandeboye had planted on Hwass a homing device no more sophisticated than those the ARM used to map the wanderings of criminals. In the München workshop he showed his le
gless electronics Hero how to remove it and how to plant it on a young Kdaptist of the correct height and color who was to proceed to a safe house farther south—and stay there until Hwass returned.

  He chose a time before the rising of Beta, in the dark of the night, to slip from the back of a truck into the forest outside of München, intending to place himself far from any city The holy quest for the Son of God began as a kind of reverse hunt, avoiding everything, loping quickly, silently, tirelessly, always out of sight and smell—hiding himself by day, moving by night and by the pale ardor of Beta—until he was totally beyond human habitation. The journey was endless joy. Many times he broke his trail so that it could never be followed. It was joy to hunt the Son of God.

  Each evening the quetzbirds gargled on their night hunt. They hunted only when Alpha had set but were most active when brilliant Beta dominated the night sky of stars. Once he saw one on a log munching a luminescent fungus, its brilliant feathers eerily glowing. The smell of the bird and the tang of broken fungus was a forest poem. How could he ever give this up again for civilization?

  On the third day he sniffed the smoke of a human bonfire and thought he might have found the Son. He smelled burning oak from Earth, mixed with slightly green bundlestick. Fresh meat on the fire was too hot and charring blood was ablaze. He could detect human sweat and sourbeer, a background of spicy insect pheromones, moist soil. But long before he was close enough to see his prey he smelled its female scent. Not the Son of God. Avoiding the woman, he came to a steep slope that overlooked the stars. He reveled in the stars, then plunged on, silently swift.

  At dawn he found a grassy meadow being grazed by a small herd of six-legged sprinters, hardly taller than the grass itself. He was tempted and hungry but he did not attack. This was a religious mission and hunger drove a keener spirit. Now he was well beyond the boundaries of human settlement. It made the hunt venturesome because his prey was a man. Beta was now the only star in the dawn sky.

  Two days later, still deliberately fasting, eating only the odd rodent, ravenous, he found his first spoor, fish skins by a stream. By that evening, at Alpha-set, he had located the cabin, its log walls twice the length of a man, made from thin logs one man could haul and notch. The roof was pond reeds. Best of all was the smell of male. Hwass had saturated his orange fur in pond muck for the sake of invisibility. He could have attacked the recluse and killed him then—deadly claws against an ancient hunting rifle— but for religious reasons it was necessary to capture the Son of God alive.

  He waited. Animals moved in the forest, breaking twigs. Insects whistled and sprayed the air with their mating scents. A Terran squirrel warned the forest with indignant quarreling. Hwass remained silent, his thin, wing-like ears extended, listening for the man to settle in for sleep, nose relishing the night air, waiting. But he had to act before Beta-rise.

  Darkness. Wide pupils. The human stirrings ceased. Time to act. Only the cloud-diffused starlight and his flared nostrils guided him noiselessly across the lightless moor. It was so dark he had to finger-feel his way across the logs to find the opening. Carefully his mind measured the inside of the dwelling so that his strike might be quick and accurate.

  Hwass reached an arm deep into the open-shuttered window.

  Rudely he dragged the naked man through the opening with a hand tightly closed over the man’s mouth. “Hey now, easy does it,” mmmphed the struggling hermit. But the kzin was trussing his prey before the victim was fully awake. Surprise over, adrenaline surging, the Lamb of God fought with a silent clawing ferocity until he could no longer move at all. Immobile, his mouth free, he snapped, “I didn’t do it I’m not responsible! Gimme my clothes!” He glanced furtively at bear-black ghosts spread over a nearby bush. His patched shirt and utility trousers were molded from forever fabric, frayed beyond the bounds of forever, now recovering from awash and clubbing by the stream’s shore. They were valuable to him.

  “You iss Son of God,” Hwass answered gently, relieved that he had indeed captured a male. If it had been a female he would have had to put it back, or to kill it for the sake of silence.

  “Hey, you’ve got the wrong man!” came a desperate croak.

  “No. You iss His perfect Son.”

  “Not me. My grandfather came to Wunderkind to get away from that mouth-flap.”

  “Your Grandfather iss everywhere at all and once,” said the kzin. “He iss with you now. You iss holy.”

  “Tell Myrtle. To her I’m teufel. Already I’ve skipped out on two wives. I’m a mean cantankerous no-good who likes to fish and to rot in the woods by myself Peaceful like.”

  “I iss captured God’s Son,” Hwass hissed threateningly, a theologian daring to be contradicted.

  The hermit was surprised that kzin were still loose in the woods after sixteen years. This one had gone crazy after all that time. Still, the panic in him forced him to argue. The cantankerous wife-deserter said the first inane thing that came to his head. “My teeth are rotten. You can’t believe the Son of God would be plagued by rotten teeth,” he suggested hopefully.

  “All male mens iss the Son of God, teeth or no. You iss the Son of God I hunt. Men’s Bible iss say that the Son of God may be found anywhere in any disguise, even in dungeon. Matthew 25:40.”

  “Finagle save me!”

  Hwass hissed. “Finagle iss atheist devil-beast. Cannot touch Son of God.”

  The hermit took a moment to consider screaming at the top of his lungs—but there was no one to hear. With his arms tied to his sides, his only weapon was reason. “Whatever you want, you’ve got. Tell me and I’ll give it to you. I’ll kiss the ground you pee on.”

  “You iss the true-form.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You iss beautiful and iss shape in the image of God.”

  “My mother used to stare at me like that.”

  “Not to talk of mother. The mother of the Son iss soulless animal!”

  “Does that mean you’re not a Catholic?”

  “Tonight we converse only importantly with Father of Son.”

  The old hermit was beginning to feel sarcastic. “Hey Dad!” he shouted over his shoulder. “Company!”

  “Silence!” Hwass snarled. “Serious matters iss upon us. Your Father iss stressed at sins of all humankinds, men’s lying, deceit, vanity cowardice, and dishonorable scheming as you mens iss talk out of two sides of your head! Mens iss the greatest sinner of all sentients. A great sorrow.

  He has at your sinning in His liver and iss wish to help you mens, all too much, for you iss been made in true-form of God. He weeps at men’s deviations from true path. He wishes to help you to path of righteousness. He iss obsessed with helping you. Sorrow iss pain to bear— even for one who iss God. He iss so filled with crazy driving sorrow fixating His attention that He iss neglect His other kittens. This you iss will correct.”

  “Riiight!”

  “You iss now to lay God’s liver to its ease.”

  “If you’ll untie me, I’ll gladly go to my knees and pray to God fervently. Say your prayer and I’ll say it with you. I’m praying already”

  “You iss not pray. You iss take all mens sins to your soul with courage of true warrior, thus relieving God of His grief for mens. You iss be guilty for all sins. You iss accept all punishment. You iss forgive all mens their transgressions, wipe them clean with your suffering and make God glad again. This iss duty I require of Son of God.”

  While the trussed Son of God peered helplessly into the gloom, the devout kzin used his torch to fella straight tree. Flaking muck flickered on slick fur. The giant cut his log into two parts. He notched them and lashed together a sturdy cross. He measured the man’s arm span while the man pleaded hysterically, now aware of his fate. Holes were drilled at the right place on the crossbeam. Holes were drilled in his wrists which carefully avoided all major arteries and veins. The kzin used ironwood pegs to secure the Son of God to the cross and raised him to the night, higher than a kzin’s eye. It
began to rain.

  In the pouring rain, Hwass cheerfully cut and built two smaller crosses which he erected to the right and left of the crucified Son of God, one for the invisible Grandfather and the other to call God to the scene so that He would know He was wanted. When the clouds began to clear, Beta was rising through the misty frees and the hermit, in the first delirium of his pain, could actually see his enemy sitting on the wet moor weaving—what was it? a basket?

  ***

  Hwass-Hwasschoaw was weaving a human mask of pliant bark to replace the mask of human skin he had not been able to bring with him. Basket weaving was one of the skills he had ordered his father’s slaves to teach him as a youth. His patriarch had not allowed him to observe a slave without learning how to do all that the slave was doing. Once he had killed one of his father’s metal-working slaves for refusing to teach him the art of variable alloying. His father commended his act by sharing in the bloody meal—even though he had lost a valuable properly.

  It was predestined from birth that Hwass was to become Patriarch’s-Eye, an unmentionable name he was to carry in priority to all other social names he might be known by. Eyes sometimes led quiet lives of observance. Sometimes their lives became livery affairs of survival by wit where even the most impractical skill might be the key to survival. His father had ordered him to learn everything.

  While he wove, he recalled his father’s words. “A master who cannot do what his slaves do has become like an unskilled animal. A kzin is owned by his slaves if they are more clever than he.” His father was born on W’kkai of the Kzin aristocracy, nominally a member of the W’kkai aristocracy, but more of Kzin than of W’kkai. He had only contempt for the W’kkai habit of letting their slaves be the custodians of their gestalt.