by Larry Niven
Louis Wu followed the puppeteer out of the booth and into the dim, luxurious interior of a restaurant. He recognized the place by the black-and-gold decor and the space-wasteful configuration of horseshoe booths. Krushenkos, in New York.
Incredulous whispers followed in the path of the puppeteer. A human headwaiter, imperturbable as a robot, led them to a table. One of the chairs had been removed at that table and replaced by a big square pillow, which the alien placed between hip and hind hoof as it sat down.
“You were expected,” Louis deduced.
“Yes. I called ahead. Krushenkos is accustomed to serving alien guests.”
Now Louis noticed other alien diners: four Kzinti at the next table, and a kdatlyno halfway across the room. It figured, with the United Nations Building so close. Louis dialed for a tequila sour and took it as it arrived. “This was a good thought,” he said. “I’m half starved.”
“We did not come to eat. We came to recruit our third member.”
“Oh? In a restaurant?”
The puppeteer raised its voice to answer, but what it said was not an answer. “You never met my kzin, Kchula-Rrit? I keep it as a pet.”
Louies' tequila tried to go down the wrong way. At the table behind the puppeteer, four walls of orange far were each and every one a kzin; and as the puppeteer spoke, they all turned with their needle teeth bared. It looked like a smile, but on a kzin that rictus is not a smile.
The -Rrit name belongs to the family of the Patriarch of Kzin. Louis, downing the rest of his drink, decided that it didn’t matter The insult would have been mortal regardless, and you could only be eaten once.
The nearest kzin stood up.
Rich orange fur, with black markings over the eyes, covered what might have been a very fat tabby cat eight feet tall. The fat was muscle, smooth and powerful and oddly arranged over an equally odd skeleton. On hands like black leather gloves, sharpened and polished claws slid out of their sheaths.
A quarter of a ton of sentient carnivore stooped over the puppeteer and said, “Tell me now, why do you think that you can insult the Patriarch of Kzin and live?”
The puppeteer answered immediately, and without a tremor in its voice. “It was I who, on a world which circles Beta Lyrae, kicked a kzin called Chuft-Captain in the belly with my hind hoof, breaking three struts of his endoskeletal structure. I have need of a kzin of courage.”
“Continue,” said the kzin of the black eyes. Despite limitations imposed by the structure of his mouth, the kzin’s Interworld was excellent. But his voice showed no sign of the rage he must have felt. For all the emotion shown by Kzinti or puppeteer, Louis might have been watching some time-dulled ritual.
But the meat set before the Kzinti was blood-raw and steaming; it had been flash-heated to body temperature just before serving. And all of the Kzinti were smiling.
“This human and I,” said the puppeteer, “will explore a place such as no kzin has ever dreamed. We will need a kzin in our crew. Dare a kzin follow where a puppeteer leads?”
“It has been said that puppeteers were plant-eaters, that they would lead away from battle and not toward it.”
“You shall judge. Your fee, if you survive, will be the plans for a new and valuable type of spacecraft, plus a model of the ship itself. You may consider this fee to be extreme hazard pay.”
The puppeteer, Louis thought, was sparing no pains to insult the Kzinti. One never offers a kzin hazard pay. The kzin is not supposed to have noticed the danger!
But the kzin’s only remark was, “I accept.”
The other three Kzinti snarled at him.
The first kzin snarled back.
One kzin alone sounded like a catfight. Four Kzinti in heated argument sounded like a major feline war, with atonics. Sonic deadeners went on automatically in the restaurant, and the snarls became remote, but they went on.
Louis ordered another drink. Considering what he knew of Kzinti history, these four must have remarkable restraint. The puppeteer still lived.
The argument died away, and the four Kzinti turned back. He of the black eye-markings said, “What is your name?”
“I take the human name of Nessus,” said the puppeteer. “My true name is—“ Orchestral music flowed for an instant from the puppeteer’s remarkable throats.
“Well and good, Nessus. You must understand that we four constitute a Kzinti embassy to Earth. This is Harch, that is Ftanss, he with the yellow striping is Hroth. I, being only an apprentice and a kzin of low family, bear no name. I am styled by my profession: Speaker-To-Animals.”
Louis bridled.
“Our problem is that we are needed here. Delicate negotiations ... but these are not your concern. It has been decided that I alone can be replaced. If your new kind of ship proves worth having, I will join you. Otherwise I must prove my courage another way.”
“Satisfactory,” said the puppeteer, and rose.
Louis remained seated. He asked, “What is the Kzinti form of your title?”
“In the Hero’s Tongue—“ The kzin snarled on a rising note.
“Then why didn’t you give that as your title? Was it a deliberate insult?”
“Yes,” said Speaker-To-Animals. “I was angered.”
Accustomed to his own standards of tact, Louis had expected the kzin to lie. Then Louis would have pretended to believe him, and the kzin would have been more polite in future ... too late to back out now. Louis hesitated a fraction of a second before he said, “And what is the custom?”
“We must fight bare-handed—as soon as you deliver the challenge. Or one of us must apologize.”
Louis stood up. He was committing suicide; but he’d known tanj well what the custom was. “I challenge you,” he said. “Tooth against tooth, claw against fingernail, since we cannot share a universe in peace.”
Without lifting his head, the kzin who had been called Hroth spoke up. “I must apologize for my comrade, Speaker-To-Animals.”
Louis said, “Huh?”
“This is my function,” said the kzin with the yellow striping. “To be found in situations where one must apologize or fight is Kzinti nature. We know what happens when we fight. Today our numbers are less than an eighth of what they were when kzin first met man. Our colony worlds are your colony worlds, our slave species are freed and taught human technology and human ethics. When we must apologize or fight, it is my function to apologize.”
Louis sat down. It seemed that he would live. He said, “I wouldn’t have your job for anything.”
“Obviously not, if you would fight a kzin barehanded. But the Patriarch judges me useless for any other purpose. My intelligence is low, my health is bad, my coordination terrible. How else can I keep my name?”
Louis sipped at his drink and wished for someone to change the subject. He found the humble kzin embarrassing.
“Let us eat,” said the one called Speaker-To-Animals. “Unless our mission is urgent, Nessus.”
“Not at all. Our crew is not yet complete. My colleagues will call me when they have located a qualified fourth crewman. By all means let us eat.”
Speaker-To-Animals said one thing more before he turned back to his table. “Louis Wu, I found your challenge verbose. In challenging a kzin, a simple scream of rage is sufficient. You scream and you leap.”
“You scream and you leap,” said Louis. “Great.”
Chapter 2 -
And His Motley Crew
Louis Wu knew people who closed their eyes when they used a transfer booth. The jump in scenery gave them vertigo. To Louis this was nonsense; but then, some of his friends were much odder than that.
He kept his eyes open as he dialed. The watching aliens vanished. Someone called, “Hi
! He’s back!”
A mob formed around the door. Louis forced it open against them. “Finagle fool you all! Didn’t any of you go home?” He spread his arms to engulf them, then pushed forward like a snowplow, forcing them back. “Clear the door, you boors! I’ve more guests coming.”
“Great!” a voice shouted in his ear. Anonymous hands took his hand and forced the fingers around a drinking bulb. Louis hugged the seven or eight of his invited guests within the circle of his arms and smiled at his welcome.
Louis Wu. From a distance he was an oriental, with pale yellow skin and flowing white hair. His rich blue robe was carelessly draped, so that it should have hampered his movements; but it didn’t.
Close up, it was all a fraud. His skin was not pale yellow-brown, but a smooth chrome yellow, the color of a comic-book Fu Manchu. His queue was too thick; it was not the white of age, but sheer clean white with a subliminal touch of blue, the color of dwarf star sunlight. As with all flatlanders, cosmetic dyes were the colors of Louis Wu.
A flatlander. You could tell at a glance. His features were neither Caucasian nor Mongoloid nor Negroid, though there were traces of all three: a uniform blend which must have required centuries. In a gravitational pull of 9.98 meters/second, his stance was unconsciously natural. He gripped a drinking bulb and smiled around at his guests.
As it happened, he was smiling into a pair of reflective silver eyes an inch from his own.
One Teela Brown had somehow ended up nose to nose and breast to breast with him. Her skin was blue with a netting of silver threads; her coiffure was streaming bonfire flames; her eyes were convex mirrors. She was twenty years old. Louis had talked to her earlier. Her conversation was shallow, full of cliches and easy enthusiasms; but she was very pretty.
“I had to ask you,” she said breathlessly. “How did you get a Trinoc to come?”
“Don’t tell me he’s still here.”
“Oh, no. His air was running out and he had to go home.”
“A little white lie,” Louis informed her. “A Trinoc airmaker lasts for weeks. Well, if you really want to know, that particular Trinoc was once my guest and prisoner for a couple of weeks. His ship and crew got themselves killed at the edge of known space, and I had to ferry him to Margrave so they could set up an environment box for him.”
The girl’s eyes registered delighted wonder. Louis found it pleasantly strange that they were on a level with his own eyes; for Teela Brown’s fragile beauty made her look smaller than she really was. Her eyes shifted over Louis’s shoulder and widened even further. Louis grinned as he turned.
Nessus the puppeteer trotted out of the transfer booth.
Louis had thought of this as they were leaving Krushenko’s. He had been trying to persuade Nessus to tell them something of their proposed destination. But the puppeteer was afraid of spy beams.
“Then come to my place,” Louis had suggested.
“But your guests!”
“Not in my office. And my office is absolutely bugproof. Besides, think of the hit you’ll make at the party! Assuming everyone hasn’t gone home by now.”
The impact was all Louis could have desired. The tap-tap-tap of the puppeteer’s hooves was suddenly the only sound in the room. Behind him, Speaker-To-Animals flickered into existence. The kzin considered the sea of human faces surrounding the booth. Then, slowly, he bared his teeth.
Someone poured half his drink into a potted palm. The grand gesture. From one of the branches a Gummidgy orchid-thing chattered angrily. People edged away from the transfer booth. There were comments: “You’re okay. I see them too.”
“Sober pills? Let me look in my sporan.”
“Throws a hell of a party, doesn’t he?”
“Good old Louis.”
“What did you call that thing?”
They didn’t know what to make of Nessus. Mostly they ignored the puppeteer; they were afraid to comment on him, afraid of sounding like fools. They reacted even more curiously to Speaker-To-Animals. Once mankind’s most dangerous enemy, the kzin was being treated with awed deference, like some kind of hero.
“Follow me,” Louis told the puppeteer. With luck the kzin would follow them both. “Excuse us,” he bellowed, and pushed his way into the throng. In response to various excited and/or puzzled questions he merely grinned secretively.
Safely in his office, Louis barred the door and turned on the bugproofing set. “Okay. Who needs refreshment?”
“If you can heat some bourbon, I can drink it,” said the kzin. “If you cannot heat it, I can still drink it.”
“Nessus?”
“Any kind of vegetable juice will serve. Have you warm carrot juice?”
“Gah,” said Louis; but he instructed the bar, which produced bulbs of warm carrot juice.
While Nessus rested on its folded hind leg, the kzin dropped heavily onto an inflated hassock. Under his weight it should have exploded like any lesser balloon. Man’s second oldest enemy looked curious and ridiculous balanced on a hassock too small for him.
The Man-Kzin wars had been numerous and terrible. Had the Kzinti won the first of these, mankind would have been a slave and a meat animal for the rest of eternity. But the Kzinti had suffered in the wars which followed. They tended to attack before they were ready. They had little concept of patience, and no concept of mercy or of limited war. Each war had cost them a respectable chunk of population and the punitive confiscation of a couple of Kzinti worlds.
For two hundred and fifty years the Kzinti had not attacked human space. They had nothing to attack with. For two hundred and fifty years men had not attacked the Kzinti worlds; and no kzin could understand it. Men confused them terribly.
They were rough and they were tough, and Nessus, an avowed coward, had insulted four fully-grown Kzinti in a public restaurant.
“Tell me again,” said Louis, “about a puppeteer’s proverbial caution. I forget.”
“Perhaps I was not strictly fair with you, Louis. My species judges me mad.”
“Oh, fine.” Louis sucked at the bulb an anonymous donor had handed him. It held vodka and droobleberry juice and shaved ice.
The kzin’s tail lashed restlessly. “Why should we ride with an avowed maniac? You must be madder than most, to wish to ride with a kzin.”
“You alarm yourselves too easily,” said Nessus, in its soft, persuasive, unbearably sensual voice. “Men have never met a puppeteer who was not mad in the judgment of his own species. No alien has ever seen the puppeteer world, and no sane puppeteer would trust his very life to the fallible life-support system of a spacecraft, or the unknown and possibly deadly dangers of an alien world.”
“A mad puppeteer, a full grown kzin, and me. Our fourth crew member had better be a psychiatrist.”
“No, Louis, none of our candidates are psychiatrists.”
“Well, why not?”
“I did not select at random.” The puppeteer sucked at its bulb with one mouth and talked with the other. “First, there was myself. Our proposed voyage is intended to benefit my species; hence we must include a representative. Such a one should be mad enough to face an unknown world, yet sane enough to use his intellect to survive. I, as it happens, am just on the borderline.
“We had reason to include a kzin. Speaker-To-Animals, what I tell you now is secret. We have been observing your species for some considerable time. We knew of you even before you attacked humanity.”
“Well that you did not show yourselves,” rumbled the kzin.
“Doubtless. At first we deduced that the Kzinti species was both useless and dangerous. Lines of research were initiated to determine whether your species could be exterminated in safety.”
“I will tie your necks in a bow knot.”
The kzin stood up.
“He’s right,” said Louis. “Sit down, Speaker. You don’t stand to profit by murdering a puppeteer.”
The kzin sat down. Again his hassock did not collapse.
“The project was cancelled,” said Nessus. “We found that the Man-Kzin wars put sufficient restriction on Kzinti expansion, made you less dangerous. We continued to watch.
“Six times over several centuries, you attacked the worlds of men. Six times you were defeated, having lost approximately two-thirds of your male population in each war. Need I comment on the level of intelligence displayed? No? In any case, you were never in real danger of extermination. Your nonsentient females were largely untouched by war, so that the next generation helped to replace the numbers lost. Still, you steadily lost an empire you had built up over thousands of years.
“It became apparent to us that the Kzinti were evolving at a furious rate.”
“Evolving?”
Nessus snarled a word in the Hero’s Tongue. Louis jumped. He had not suspected that the puppeteer’s throats could do that.
“Yes,” said Speaker-To-Animals, “I thought that was what you said. But I do not understand the application.”
“Evolution depends on the survival of the fittest. For several hundred kzin years, the fittest of your species were those members with the wit or the forebearance to avoid fighting human beings. The results are apparent. For nearly two hundred kzin years there has been peace between man and kzin.”
“But there would be no point! We could not win a war!”
“That did not stop your ancestors.”
Speaker-To-Animals gulped at his hot bourbon. His tail, naked and pink and ratlike, lashed in turmoil.
“Your species has been decimated,” said the puppeteer. “All Kzinti alive today are descended from those who avoided death in the Man-Kzin wars. Some among us speculate that the Kzinti now have the intelligence or the empathy or the self-restraint necessary to deal with races alien to them.”