The Houses of the Kzinti

by Larry Niven

  "No," Conservor continued, making a palm-up gesture: do not seize what you cannot hold. "Ktrodni-Stkaa is . . . hasty. He is your enemy. He is not the best tactician in the fleets of the Great Pack. He is overproud of his blood. But he is a Hero; he would not engage in such deception against an honorable"—that was, kzinti—"foe."

  "Unless he has decided that I am not worthy of honorable combat, because of my cautious ideas," Chuut-Riit said. He snarled, drooling slightly, fingers flexing as he imagined fangs grinding into bone as he brought up his rear feet and ripped and ripped and ripped . . .

  "That is so," Conservor acknowledged with a ripple of his spinal fur. "Yet the balance of hard data could be construed to support his claim of noninvolvement. Is this not so?"

  Traat-Admiral gave a grunting cough and licked angrily at his forearms for a moment. "The fur lies flat in that direction," he said grudgingly. "Few recordings survived the EMP of the engagement. They show only a corvette of the Bone-Breaker class, of which there are thousands. Data is insufficient for identification. With the damage to our systemwide surveillance net, we have no direct remote tracking of where it went. Perhaps it is as Ktrodni-Stkaa says"—Traat-Admiral's claws slid in, sign of unconscious distaste—"and an individual firebrand was responsible."

  "Arreeoghw," Chuut-Riit said; he had stopped in mid-stride, his fur bottling out. "Bone-Breaker class—that is the older specification, is it not?"

  The other two kzinti flexed thumbclaws in agreement; when Chuut-Riit had arrived two decades ago he had brought the latest designs from the inner worlds. Not that there had been great differences—warship design was a mature technology, like most within the Patriarchy—but there had been some refinements in weapons mountings.

  "Many of those would have been dispatched with the Fourth Fleet," Chuut-Riit continued softly, musing. "Very many. According to the reports of the survivors, Kfraksha-Admiral lost a number of vessels relatively intact."

  "Arrrh." Traat-Admiral came up on all fours, back arching. Conservor sank down fluidly, eyes seeking something beyond the walls.

  "Arrrh," Traat-Admiral repeated. "The mass is low enough that the human ramscoop vessel could have included a corvette. But deceleration—the energy discharge— No corvette could carry enough fuel, not with the most efficient of polarizers. And a reaction-drive deceleration is ridiculous; such a discharge would have been a banner across the system for days."

  Chuut-Riit licked meditatively at his wrist and smoothed his ears with it, fluttering them out for the soothing feel of cool air on the pink bare-skin membranes.

  "Hrrrr. Doubtless correct. A thought, no more."

  "Still," Conservor said. The two younger kzin started slightly. "Physics is not my specialty. Yet consider: we and the humans have been learning of each other, in the best of schools." War—nothing taught you a being's inwardness like fighting it. "If such a thing were possible, and if the humans had learned somewhat of us, would this not be a shrewd jugular-strike?"

  "Not if we knew—arrrhhhg. Ktrodni-Stkaa."

  "Yes." They were all imagining trying to convince that arrogance that mere monkeys were capable of playing on kzinti internal rivalries. Ktrodni-Stkaa barely acknowledged that humans existed, save when he was hungry.

  "Still, it is unlikely," Traat-Admiral said, twitching the end of his tail.

  "So is sentience," Conservor said. Silence dwelt for long moments. "Let us consider, and clear our minds."

  All three sank into the hands-folded-under-chests posture of meditation and let their chins sink to the floor.

  * * *

  "They've accepted our bid, Captain."

  Jonah nodded stiffly. "Thank you, Lieutenant. Not that I'm surprised."

  "No, sir."

  Back in Sol system a thousand hackers had labored to produce advanced software they thought might be salable on Wunderland. Most of it had been too advanced; they'd predicted a higher state of the art than Wunderland had retained, and the stuff wouldn't work on the ancient hardware. Even so, there was plenty that did work. It had only taken fifty days to make Jan Hardman and Lucy van den Berg moderately big names in the Datamongers' Guild. The computer records showed them as old timers, with a scattering of previous individual sales. They told everyone on the net that they owed their big success to teaming up.

  Teaming up. A damned tough fifty days . . . Jonah looked unashamedly at Ingrid. "I admit you've improved Herr Yarthkin's disposition one whole hell of a lot, but do you have to look so tanj happy?"

  "Capt—Jonah, I am happy."

  "Yeah."

  "I—Jonah, I'm sorry if it hurts you."

  "Yeah. All right. Lieutenant. We've got work to do."

  * * *

  "These are the same monkeys as before." The guards spoke in the Hero's Tongue. "The computer says they have access."

  The kzin tapped a large button on the console, and the door lifted.

  Jonah and Ingrid cringed and waited. The kzin sniffed, then led the way outside. Another kzin warrior followed, and two more fell in on either side. The routine had been the same the other two times they had been here.

  This will be different. Maybe. Jonah pushed the thoughts away. Kzin weren't really telepathic, but they could sense excitement and smell fear. Of course the fear's natural. They probably like that scent.

  Sunlight was failing behind evening clouds, and the air held a dank chill and the wild odors of storm-swept grassland. The two humans crossed the landing field between forms a third again their height, living walls of orange-red fur; claws slid out in unconscious reflex on the stocks of the giants' heavy beam rifles.

  Jonah kept his eyes carefully down. It would be an unbearable irony if they were killed by mistake, victims of some overzealous kzin spooked by the upsurge in guerrilla activity. The attack of the Yamamoto had created the chaos that let them into Wunderland, but that same chaos just might kill them.

  Doors slid aside, and they descended into chill corridors like a dreadnought's, surfaces laced with armored data conduits and the superconducting coil-complexes of field generators.

  One of the kzin followed. "This way," he said, prodding Jonah's shoulder with the muzzle of his weapon. The light down here was reddish, frequencies adjusted to the aliens' convenience; the air was drier, colder than humans would have wished. And everything was too big, grips and stairs and doors adapted to a thick-bodied, short-legged race with the bulk of terrestrial gorillas.

  They went through a chamber filled with computer consoles. This was as far as they'd been allowed the last two times. "Honored Governor Chuut-Riit is pleased with your work," the kzin officer said.

  "We are honored," Ingrid replied.

  "This way."

  The kzin led them through another door. They stepped into an outsized elevator, dropped for a small eternity; when the door opened they were in another complex, this one with its own gravity polarizer set to Kzin normal. Their knees sagged, and they stepped through into another checkzone. The desire to gawk around was intolerable, but the gingery smell of kzin was enough to restrain them as they walked through a thick sliding door with the telltale slickness of density-enhanced matter. Jonah recognized the snouts of heavy remote-waldoed weapons up along the edges of the roof. Past that was another control room, a dozen kzin operators lying recumbent on spaceship-style swiveling couches before semicircular consoles. Their helmets were not the featureless wraparounds humans would have used; these had thin crystal facepieces, adjustable audio pickups, and cutouts for the ears. Not as efficient, but probably a psychological necessity. Kzin have keener senses than man, but are more vulnerable to claustrophobia, any sort of confinement that cuts off the flow of scent, sound, light.

  Patience comes harder to them, too, Jonah thought. Ancestral kzin had chased their prey down in relays.

  They penetrated still another set of armored doors to the ultimate sanctum. At last!

  "Accomplish your work," the kzin said. "The inspector will arrive in six hours. Sanitary facilities are ther
e."

  Jonah exhaled a long breath as the alien left. Now there was only the featureless four-meter box of the control room; the walls were a neutral pearly white, ready to transmit visual data. The only console was a standup model modified with a pedestal so that humans could use it. Ingrid and he exchanged a wordless glance as they walked to it and began unpacking their own gear, snapping out the support tripod and sliding home the thin black lines of the data jacks.

  A long pause, while their fingers played over the small black rectangles of their portable interfacing units; the only sound was a subliminal sough of ventilators and the faint natural chorus that the kzin always broadcast through the speakers of a closed installation; insects and the rustle of vegetation. Jonah felt a familiar narrowing, a focus of concentration more intense than sex or even combat, as the lines of a program-schematic sprang out on his unit.

  "Finagle, talk about paranoids," he muttered. "See this freeze-function here?"

  Ingrid's face was similarly intent, and the rushing flicker of the scroll-display on her unit gave her face a momentary look as of light through stained glass.

  "Got it. Freeze."

  "We're bypassed?"

  "This is under our authorized codes. All right, these are the four major subsystems. See the physical channeling? The hardware won't accept config commands of more than 10K except through this channel we're at."

  "Slow response, for a major system like this," he mused. The security locks were massive and complex, but a little cumbrous.

  "It's the man-kzin hardware interfacing," Ingrid said. "I think. Their basic architecture's more synchronic. Betcha they never had an industrial-espionage problem . . . Hey, notice that?"

  "Ahhhh. Interesting." Jonah kept his voice carefully phlegmatic. Tricky kitty. Tricky indeed. "Odd. This would be much harder to access through the original Hero system."

  "Tanj, you're right," Ingrid said. She looked up with an urchin grin that blossomed with the pure delight of solving a software problem.

  Jonah gave her a cautioning look.

  Her face went back to a mask of concentration. "Clearly this was designed with security against kzinti in mind. See, here and here? That's why they've deliberately preserved the original human operating system on this—two of them—and used this patch-cocked integral translation chip here, see?"

  "Right!" His fingers flew. "In fact, if analyzed with the original system as an integrating node and catchpoint . . . See?"

  "Right. Murphy, but you'd have more luck wandering through a minefield blindfolded than trying to get at this from an exterior connection! There's nothing in the original stem system but censor programs; by the time you got by them, the human additions would have alarmed and frozen. Catches you on the interface transitions, see? That's why they haven't tried to bring the core system up to the subsystem operating speeds. Sure slows things down, though."

  "We'll just have to live with it," Jonah said for the benefit of any hidden listeners. It seemed unlikely. There weren't that many kzin programmers, and all of them were working for the navy or the government. This was the strictly personal system of Viceroy Chuut-Riit.

  "Wheels within wheels," Ingrid muttered.

  "Right." Jonah shook his head; there was a certain perverse beauty in using a cobbled-up rig's own lack of functional integration as a screening mechanism. But all designed against kzinti. Not against us. Ye gods, it would be easy enough for Chuut-Riit's rivals to work through humans—

  Only none of them would think of that. This is the only estate that uses outside contractors. And the Heroes don't think that way to begin with.

  His fingers flew. Ingrid—Lieutenant Raines—would be busy installing the new data management system they were supposed to be working at. What he was doing was far beyond her. Jonah let his awareness and fingers work together, almost bypassing his conscious mind. Absently he reached for a squeeze-bulb before he remembered that the nearest Jolt Cola was four light-years away.

  Now. Bypass the kzin core system. Move into the back door. He keyed in the ancient passwords embedded into the Wunderland computer system by Earth hackers almost a hundred years before. Terran corporate managers had been concerned about competition, and the ARM had had their sticky fingers here too, and they'd built backdoors into every operating system destined for Wunderland. A built-in industrial espionage system. And the kzin attack and occupation should have kept the Wunderlanders from finding them . . .

  / Murphy Magic. The SeCrEt of the UnIvErSe is 43, NOT 42.

  $

  "There is justice," Jonah muttered.

  "Joy?"

  "Yeah." He typed frantically.

  She caught her breath. "All right."

  By the time the core realizes what's going on, we'll all be dead of old age. "Maybe take a while. Here we go."

  Two hours later he was done. He looked over at Ingrid. She had long finished, except for sending the final signals that would tell the system they were done. "About ready," he said.

  She bit her lip. "All right."

  For a moment he was shocked at the dark half-moons below her eyes, the lank hair sweat-plastered to her cheeks, and then concentration dropped enough for him to feel his own reaction. Pain clamped at his stomach, and the muscles of his lower back screamed protest at the posture he had been frozen in for long hours of extra gravity.

  He raised his hand to his mouth and extended the little finger back to the rear molars. Precisely machined surfaces slipped into nanospaced fittings in the vat-cultured substitute that had been serving him as a fingernail; anything else would have wiped the coded data. He took a deep breath and pulled; there was a flash of pain before the embedded duller drugs kicked in, and then it settled to a tearing ache. The raw surface of the stripped finger was before him, the wrist clenched in the opposite hand. Ingrid moved forward swiftly to bandage it, and he spat the translucent oblong into his palm.

  "Tanj," he said resentfully. Those sadistic flatlander morons could have used a nervepinch.

  Ingrid picked the biochip up between thumb and forefinger. She licked her lips nervously. "Will it work?"

  "It's supposed to." The sound of his own pulse in his ears was louder than the background noise the kzin used to fool their subconscious into comfort. Pain receded, irrelevant, as he looked at the tiny oblong of modified claw. Scores of highly skilled men and women, thousands of hours of computer time on machines whose pricetags ran into the billions of stars, all for this. No, for the information contained in this . . . nearly as much information as was required to make a complete human body; it was amazing what they could do these days with quantum-well storage. Although the complete specs for a man were in a packet considerably smaller, if it came to that.

  "Give it here." It ought to be quick. Milliseconds quick. A lot better than being hunted down by the ratcats, if we can blow the defenses. Vaporization was the commonest way for a space-soldier to die, anyway.

  She handed over the nail, and he slipped it into his own interface unit. "As your boyfriend likes to say, here's viewing, kinder."

  She nodded tightly. He raised a thumb, pressed it down on one of the outlined squares of the schematic that occupied his interfacer.

  "Ram dam," he said. The words came from nowhere, until an eerie memory of old Mukeriji speaking flitted through his mind. That had been as they closed on the kzinti ship, coming in to board before they could blow the self-destruct bomb. Dreadful Bride, spare us: ram dam ram dam ram dam ram—

  The walls pulsed, flickered green, flashed into an intricate strobing pattern and froze. Jonah closed his eyes for a second and felt an enormous thankfulness. They might still be only seconds away from death, but at least it wouldn't be for nothing.

  "Finagle!" Jonah said bitterly. "How could even a kzin be this paranoid?"

  He kicked the pillar-console; it hurt through the light slipper. There were weapons and self-destruct systems in plenty, enough to leave nothing but a very large crater with magma at its core where Chuut-Riit's palace-
estate-preserve had stood . . . but it wasn't clear how any of them could be triggered from here.

  "Who ever heard of . . . wheels within wheels!" Jonah said disbelievingly. "Am I imagining things, or are these systems completely separate?"

  Ingrid shook her head slowly. "I'm afraid that's a long way past me. Can't you do anything about it?"

  "Complain to the manufacturer . . . oh, maybe. There's a chance. Worth a try, anyway."

  He touched icons on the screen surface, then tapped in new commands. "Nope. All right, what does this do? Nothing. Hmmm. But if— Yeah, this may work. Not immediately, though. You about through?"

  "Hours ago. We don't have much longer."

  "Right. I do want to look at a couple of things, though." Jonah's eyes narrowed. "Call," he said to the computer. "Weekly schedule for user-CR, regression, six months, common elements." His finger flicked out to a sequence on the wall ahead of them. "Got it! Got it, by Murphy's asshole; that's the single common element outside going to his office? What is it?"

  Ingrid's fingers were busy. "No joy, Jonah. That's his visit to his kiddies. The males, weanlings up to subadult, they're in an isolation facility."

  "Oh. Bat puckey. Here, let me look—"

  A warning light blazed on the console.

  "They're coming," Ingrid hissed. "Hurry."

  "Right. Plan B. Only—" Jonah stared at the files in wonder. "I will be dipped in shit. This will work."

  * * *

  "We have positive identification," Axelrod-Bauergartner said. The staff conference rustled, ten men and women grouped around a table of black ebony. It was an elegant room, walls of white stone fretwork and floor of tile, a sideboard with refreshments. No sound but the gentle rush of water in the courtyard outside; this had been the Herrenhaus, the legislature, before the kzin came.

  Montferrat leaned forward slightly, looking down the table to his second in command. How alike we all are, he thought. Not physical appearance, but something about the eyes . . . She was a pallid woman, with a beginning potbelly disgusting on someone her age, hair cropped close on the left and in a braided ponytail on the other.