by Larry Niven
“Why?”
“Why do you think?”
Selena wondered: was this kind of insolence a common feature in kzin maturation? Probably not: their relationship with the older males would be a very businesslike affair. Open insubordination—for that is how their culture would almost certainly view such a testy response—would no doubt be met by a sharp cuff and dire threats of more. At the very least.
So, by elimination, this was an example of how human upbringing was changing him. Like Boyle’s Law of Gases, the contentiousness of his age was expanding to occupy any space that it was not soundly, physically, beaten back from. And even if they knew enough to imitate a true kzin upbringing, that would do no good, not anymore. He was what his upbringing thus far had made him: insightful, reflective, self-determining, curious, and capable of many intensities and shadings of affection for any number of humans. He was no more a natural kzin than a cockroach was, and never had she realized that so clearly as now.
His tone was exaggeratedly patient. “I said, ‘why do you think I started with the toys’?”
Selena set her shoulders back a little further and withdrew her emotions from her eyes. “I’m not here to make guesses, Hap. This is not a game.”
“Really? Then why these?” He gestured at the broken playthings. “Toys are for playing games, aren’t they?”
“They’re not just toys, Hap.”
“No? Then what else are they for?”
“For training you. For making sure you can exercise all your physical abilities.”
Hap sat back; the kzin smirk was surprisingly similar to its human equivalent. “Tell me about my physical abilities, please.”
“You don’t need me to tell you what you can see by looking in a mirror.”
“What I see and feel is not what I’m talking about.” He stood, and Selena thought: my god, he’s become so big, so fast. She felt, and quickly pushed down, a pang of fear. Hap was either too caught up in his own thoughts to have smelled it, or very possibly, would not have known what the smell meant: kzin senses were hard-wired to read the emotional states of the prey-creatures of their home world, not Earth. “What I’m talking about is what you expect me to become. What you know about my species, my birth, my family. Yes, you’ve told me I’m an orphan, but not why or how. Yes, you’ve told me that I’m a kzin and that I’m from another world, but not how I got here, or why. And every time I ask, you—what is the term?—you redirect me.” He sat down again, reclined. “You know, it gets pretty tiresome, being redirected all the time. And pretty insulting, too: I can hardly believe you didn’t expect that I would eventually catch on to what you were doing.”
“Oh, I knew you would, Hap. I knew.”
“Then why did you keep doing it? Why didn’t you stop redirecting, and just talk to me?”
What a wonderful question. And what a shitty answer I have: because I didn’t have the clearance to do that. Because once we start down this road, you won’t accept anything less than complete answers. And you shouldn’t. But no one can agree on when to drop the big bomb on you, Hap: no one can agree that the time has come to level with you about all the dirty truths of how you came to be here. That your race and ours are at war. That we slaughtered your mother and sister. That we don’t keep you here out of love, or even kindness, but bloody-minded strategic benefit.
Hap’s stare was quizzical, the same look she remembered from when he was a kit. Then, his eyes opened wide: “You weren’t allowed to tell me, were you?”
Selena had no clearance for any of this, but the situation had gone beyond concerns over clearance now. If she shut down this conversation, Hap would never trust her again. The relationship would be proven to be a sham. And suddenly, everything Selena had ever done for, or said to, Hap would become suspect; at the very least, he would know it had only occurred because it had been permitted by higher powers, that Selena’s own feelings and motivations were secondary to the dictates of others.
So Selena shook her head. “No. I was not allowed.” She smiled ruefully. “And to be honest, I’m not allowed to reveal that I was not allowed to reveal things to you.”
Hap frowned and then grinned. “That statement took me a moment to work through. Zzhreef’f!” Which, Selena knew, was the Heroes’ Tongue equivalent of “I’ll be damned.” He looked at her for a long moment. “So you’re going to break all the rules, now?”
“Hap, I won’t. I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Oh, Hap, because if I do, there will be consequences.”
“For you?”
“For you, too.”
“Such as?”
“Well, in all probability, the same people who haven’t allowed me to speak openly to you would probably keep me from coming back here. Ever again. It would be the last time we see each other. And there’s nothing I could do about it.”
Hap’s ears had laid back tightly against his increasingly angular skull. “They’d do that? Really?”
“Really. Look, Hap: you were right when you said that nothing here is natural. But the unnaturalness goes far beyond the fenced-in range, the lack of contact with your own kind, the refusals to let you see the rest of the world, the carefully edited books about history and current events, and these insipid toys.” He smiled happily when she spat out the words “insipid toys.” Clearly, that admission of repressed fellow-feeling restored much of his confidence in her. “I can’t tell you about all of that unnaturalness, not yet. But I think that is going to start changing now.”
“Why? Why should it start changing now?”
“Because of you.”
“Me?” Hap sat up: curiosity and pride—the pride of an adolescent being told that their input has made an impact in the inscrutable world of adults—was clear in his expression. “What did I do?”
“This.” She gestured to the rank of mangled toys. “And the impatience you expressed with your current information limits. It will show the people who have resisted telling you more about yourself, and your origins, that the matter is really out of their hands, now. They can hardly counsel patience anymore, because there’s nothing to be gained by it. Your comments today show that you understand that you’re living in the middle of a stilted game, not the real world.”
Selena had the impression that Hap was trying very hard not to look smug: he was failing miserably, and didn’t much care. “Did they, whoever ‘they’ are, really think I could get to be this old and not ask myself, ‘Hey, does everyone grow up alone in a special enclosure? Why are there only two other kzinti and why do they hate me? Where does all the stuff around me come from? Why are there so many questions that never get answered?’ Perhaps they thought that since I never knew any different, I wouldn’t see anything strange in all that?” His last point rose on a note of incredulity.
At which Selena smiled, because Pyragy had insisted that Hap would remain just that ingenuous. According to him, “the subject, knowing no different, will be unable to adequately frame doubts for some time yet, and will therefore, not be distressed by the peculiarities of his condition.”
Before she could respond, Hap sat erect again, surprise writ large on his wide face. “They did! They really thought I wouldn’t notice anything wrong? I can’t believe anyone would be that stupid.”
“You’d be surprised. But Hap, I’d like to start making things better for you, less unnatural. So tell me: if you could change one thing about your life here, right now, what would it be?”
“You mean, other than having to live here at all?”
“Yes, other than that.”
“Well—” he stared at the savaged toys again “—I’d like to change all that.”
She looked at the mauled bits of pseudo fur. “You mean, you want them removed?”
“No, no.” He seemed uncertain for a second; his pelt shook with annoyance. Then he looked her square in the eyes. “I just want to know this: when can I kill something?”
Selena felt the equivalent of a snowball
materialize in her gut. Two years ago, he had still been her cheery, cuddly little Hap; now he was asking her about killing as matter-of-factly as a human teen might have asked when he or she could start dating. It was as natural to him as the pelt covering his body. And just as alien as that to Selena. She felt as if, in a single second, he had dwindled into some impossible distance, an invisible speck beyond the heliopause.
Selena swallowed, and said calmly, “You want something to chase, I presume?”
“Well, of course I do!” Hap smiled, stared at her indulgently. “What do you think, that I just want to slit a throat? Like snick—?” and he demonstrated in the air with a single, suddenly unsheathed claw. “Come on, Selena; where’s the thrill in that?”
Selena managed not to blink or retch. “Where, indeed,” she agreed.
* * *
After Selena completed her report, Pyragy looked away, sat silent for a full ten seconds. Then: “Thank you, Dr. Navarre. This is important information. And we will take your recommendations under advisement.”
Boroshinsky goggled at the director but said nothing. Poor Mikhail was starting to show his age a bit, despite the anti-senescence cocktails they had him on. He didn’t jump into fights like this one with the same alacrity that he used to.
Which left it to Selena. “Director Pyragy, I’m the one in direct contact with the subject. Who now knows that I take orders from a higher authority. If we put this off—if I am not allowed to give him certain minimal assurances about our increased forthrightness—then we will lose him. My personal relationship with him will be shattered beyond repair, and I am quite certain he will have nothing to do with anyone else. Not at this stage, and not under these conditions.”
“I was not aware your relationship with the subject had become an indispensable part of our project, Dr. Navarre.”
“This was outlined as a high-probability outcome before we even started, Director Pyragy. It has come to pass. As everyone—well, almost everyone—expected it would.”
He turned to look at her. “So what are you requesting?”
“It’s not what I’m requesting; it’s what Hap is requesting. And it is utterly reasonable.”
“What? That he be allowed to kill creatures?”
“Yes. More specifically, to hunt them down and eat them.”
Pyragy shuddered. “It is barbarous even to suggest it.”
“Director, we are not talking about a human. We are talking about a kzin. This is part of their growth process. It is only natural that he express this desire, this need. Indeed, it is a sign of our profound cultural influence upon him that he chose to wait—could force himself to wait—this long.”
Pyragy was silent for a long time; Selena watched a variety of emotions contend on his face. Stubbornness, prudence, distaste, pragmatism, willfulness, cunning. “Small animals,” he said at last. “Rodents only.”
Selena tried to think where she could find the largest, fastest rabbits. Squirrels, too. “That won’t work for long. The references we just received with the rest of Dr. Yang’s first reply all indicate that the kzinti bring down game many times their size and mass, and nearly equal to them in ferocity.”
“For now, this will have to do. We will cross the next bridge when we come to it.”
“I think we’ve already reached it, Director Pyragy. The subject has also asked about killing sapients.”
Pyragy swiveled to face her, his face rigid with horror. “He has asked about killing humans?”
Selena shook her head sharply. “No, no; his questions were philosophical in nature. In particular, he focused on the concept of justified homicide: he is having a hard time understanding that.”
“What? He wants to slaughter bunnies but he has a hard time understanding justified homicide? That is such a bizarre juxtaposition that I frankly suspect him of playing a joke on you, Doctor.”
“Director, I am afraid you are misconstruing my statement. The subject does not have a problem understanding the ‘homicide’ part of ‘justifiable homicide.’ His confusion stems from what he considers the endless and overfine moralizing that informs the extreme constraints our society imposes upon sufficient justification for killing another sentient. He called our attention to the ethics of killing ‘obsessive, pointless, and unnatural.’”
“And I presume you informed him of his error?”
“Director, for him, that opinion is not an error: that is the voice of his nature speaking.”
“Nature be damned. We were killers, once, too. But we have trained ourselves to be otherwise. So can the kzinti. This is the moment when his inclinations must not be indulged: he must be conditioned away from an easy acceptance of wanton slaughter.”
Selena stilled her drumming fingers. Here’s where the real fight starts—unavoidably. “Director, I’m sorry, but this is simply not a question of behavioral training. It is a matter of his nature, and it is not subject to our nurture, as so many of the ARM’s idealists presumed when this project started. Sapience is not a guarantee of ethics that evolve around a universal core of pluralism or sanctity of life. For the kzinti, there are worse things than killing, and that’s true for them no matter which end of equation they find themselves on: killing or being killed. What we need to realize is that it had to be that way for them, that there wasn’t any viable alternative. For them, the impulse to hunt, chase, and kill is a positive evolutionary trait. It’s how they survived as a species. Every part of both their inbred impulses and early social construction was determined by increasing their chances of success in taking on big, lethal prey animals: the only kind that could sustain a tribe of kzinti, given their immense appetites.”
Pyragy’s eyes had narrowed. “We suspected as much when we began this project, Dr. Navarre. And we proceeded with a moral resolve to mitigate this behavior, both so that the subjects could eventually become liaisons for us, and so that they could be used to civilize the kzinti.” He studied her carefully, clearly giving her enough time to realize that the pause implied the importance of what he was going to say next. “Are you proposing, Doctor, that we—including the ARM’s oversight personnel, such as the admiral and the executive—have all made a fundamental error?”
“I’m proposing, Director, that many of us were not well-prepared to face the challenges of this project squarely. And I am not referring to the methodological challenges, but the implicit ideological challenges.”
“What do you mean, ideological challenges? Do you mean the conflict between our system of values and the kzinti’s?”
“No, sir; I mean a conflict between the realities of our own existence and the ideologies under which we had buried them. Hindsight suggests that, during the last century and a half, during our Golden Age of Peace, there was a tendency to slip into a moral anthropomorphization of the universe.”
Pyragy’s ever-thickening brows lowered further. “I warn you, Dr. Navarre, if you cannot trouble yourself to be clear, I will be forced to censure you.”
“Okay, then, how about this: for the last one hundred and fifty years, many of our leaders were so pleased with how we supposedly purged violence from our natures that they generalized that lofty state of existence into a universal constant: it became the presumed zenith of social accomplishment for any civilization. And no one dared raise a hand in objection or doubt, for fear that they’d be reprogrammed due to their recidivistic sympathies, for aiding and abetting primitivism. From top to bottom, we all drank the Kool-Aid with blissful smiles on our wan little faces.”
“‘Drank the Kool-Aid’?”
“It’s an old reference to sheeplike behavior that got people killed back in the twentieth century. It was a group phenomenon not unlike the one we observe in lemmings, except that we humans leap to our deaths following ideologies, not instincts. Everyone goes over the cliff because they’re too busy staring at and complimenting the emperor on his new clothes.”
“I asked for pellucidity, not insolence.”
“You got the tr
uth as best I know how to say it. And since you didn’t seem willing or able to get my earlier hints about how our own social conditioning blinded us to the real challenges that we’d experience working with the kzinti—”
“Silence. I will not be schooled by you, Dr. Navarre.”
“Fine—but then you’d better find someone who you are willing to be schooled by, because your present policies are going to ruin our relationship with the test subject.”
“How? By compelling him to initially restrict his murderous appetites to rodents?”
“No: by retarding his development, by withering away those essential parts of him that don’t fit into the pacifistic procrustean bed that you’ve constructed not merely for him, but for all of humanity.” When Selena was finished, she realized that her voice had become sharp and that she was panting with suppressed rage.
Pyragy’s smile was small, but very smug. “I regret that I will have to report this outburst to our overseers, Dr. Navarre.”
Boroshinsky’s voice had risen even before the Director had finished: “Yes, Director, do. And add to your report that the entirety of the biology group supports Dr. Navarre’s findings and handling of this matter.”
Pyragy considered the back wall over steepled fingers. “Well, in light of your unanimity of opinion, I suppose a report might be precipitous. I shall therefore desist—”
“Too late,” Boroshinsky snapped. He tapped his wristcomp. “I’ve just sent a message to Admiral Coelho-Chase and Associate Executive Chair Dennehy that independent assessments from all the project’s group leaders are forthcoming.”
If looks could kill, Pyragy’s would have slain Boroshinsky on the spot. “That,” he almost whispered, “was very ill-advised.”
Boroshinsky shrugged. “Then fire me.” He smiled, sent a sideways wink at Selena. “But I suppose we’d all need to report that too, wouldn’t we?”
Selena had never had an impulse to kiss a man so old that his lips had a perpetual quaver in them.