The Man-Kzin Wars 08 - Choosing Names

by Larry Niven

  “Yes, Dominant One.”

  “But you are thinking that is a long time? Even in sleep?”

  “Urrr.” Weeow-Captain gestured assent. They had been together a long time and thought they knew each other well. Zraar-Admiral believed Weeow-Captain was not so brilliant as to be a threat to him, which was one reason he was there. He also believed him to be a completely efficient and reliable officer, which was the other reason. Ambitious of course, like any healthy Kzin. They had fought side by side on the ground and won scars together. Weeow-Captain met his gaze.

  “If it is necessary we must take the time, Sire, but...” That “but” said it all.

  “Obviously that is what we should do, if the aliens were fighters, despite any loss of time involved,” Zraar-Admiral told him, “but since it is plain they are not, I say we should leap on with this squadron alone. I will send dispatch vessels to Kzin and Hssin with the operational diaries.”

  It was phrased in the Equal-acknowledging tense, a request for comment as much as an order. The squadron riding in Cutting Claw was already small for its task, but there was no help for it. Radio or lasers were both too unreliable over such distances and too insecure in what might, after all, be a sort of combat situation, disappointing as the kz’eerkti were in that respect. Security was more important to prevent a rush for spoils should other Kzin become aware of them. If what he had seen was a fair sample, even a reduced squadron would be more than enough for the monkey-worlds. Let other prowlers like Chuut-Riit find their own. Weeow-Captain’s eyes flared with eagerness.

  “A Hero’s leap! Yes!”

  There was nothing unfeigned in that delight. He is a good companion thought Zraar-Admiral. They had dreamed together of such actions.

  Alone in his quarters Zraar-Admiral meditated upon Conquest and its implications. Honored Maaug-Riit might not like such independent action, but surely the monkeydom would produce gifts to appease the Fleet Admiral and other high nobility. Besides, Zraar-Admiral guessed, the Patriarch would not be too displeased to see a relatively minor noble like Zraar-Admiral improve his position relative to a Fleet Admiral of the Patriarch’s own house who had grown very mighty indeed.

  I shall have to start culling my sons more rigorously, Zraar-Admiral thought. Um-For more than an Admiral’s inheritance.

  Suddenly Zraar-Admiral knew that the monkeys might be leading him on the most dangerous hunt of his life. What if this, instead of being a simple leap to glory, turns me into a politician? His tail curled. Now he would have to do something about Telepath.

  Zraar-Admiral had power of life and death over every creature aboard—any Kzin commander did—but the Patriarch’s family would have other ears and noses. To wantonly silence any Telepath would be highly suspicious. He was confident that even if he was a spy for Honored Maaug-Riit, Telepath could not read his own mind, with its inculcate Authority, but those of his officers were naturally weaker.

  He thought of killing Telepath and disguising the act, but banished the idea immediately. To murder Telepath would be shameful, a violation of the honor which to a Kzin commander was virtually a physical reality. He would have Weeow-Captain put him in charge of guarding the apes. It was a logical job for the little Kzin when his special talents were not required on the bridge. Already, with the battleship not having such luxuries as eunuchs, Telepath had shown himself a reliable tender of the small harem, which Zraar-Admiral had had little time for recently. No fighting Kzin would want the degrading task of herding plant-eaters and he could continue extracting information from their minds.

  Both Telepath’s investigations so far and the first quick dissections of a couple of specimens showed the monkeys were omnivores. That was not unexpected. Pure herbivores had never been found in Space. There seemed no strictly logical reason why the evading of hunters should not have led to intelligence as great as, or greater than, that of the hunters themselves —one, after all, was running for its meal, the other for its life— but it would be blasphemous to suppose herbivores could dominate their environment or defeat and subjugate carnivores! At some time in the past the monkeys had fought and killed.

  The two large teats on the females (if that was what they were) were significant. The number indicated small litters, and the bizarre size of the teats suggested prolonged lactation. That in turn suggested the apes’ get must survive a lengthy and helpless kittenhood. How numerous must they have become before they controlled the resources to build a Space-ship?

  Telepath had said that on their home-world they numbered in billions. So they evidently had no enemies that were a major threat there. Though lacking significant teeth and claws they had some characteristics of a dominant animal—heiin [sic], they had Star-ships. They would have had to fight sometime in the past to accomplish that, presumably against real carnivores. The larger size of the males, though nothing like the degree of sexual dimorphism in Kzinti, indicated competition for mating privileges in their history.

  Their small teeth were a typical omnivore mixture.

  Telepath said their meat had come from automated kitchens, partly burnt in a disgusting manner. Perhaps it was grown from cancers in vats like infantry rations.

  Presumably the monkeys’ ancestors had been scavengers, and had become used to burning carrion to kill toxic microbes rather than eating their own fresh kills. They must have fought for carrion against large predators, wielded clubs and thrown stones to make up for their deficient teeth and claws.

  And ended up with a drive that collected hydrogen atoms from interstellar Space to carry them between stars.

  Or had these got their ship from somewhere else? Surely no-one would recruit monkeys for mercenary warriors as the Jotok had once been foolish enough to recruit on Old Kzin.

  There was a story of a kz’eerkt-band on Kzin that had once seized a Space-craft and performed outrageous tricks and monkey-shines to the discomfiture of certain overly-confident Heroes.

  But that was a fable, a joke, an exercise in poets’ ingenuity! A piece of entertainment set down by the Conservors to smuggle germs of wisdom into the hot livers of adolescents. It did not seem possible in the real universe. Space-craft were complicated. An idea flicked away from him. Like a kitten chasing the tip of its own tail he sensed something maddeningly just out of reach. Something about monkeys and Telepaths and Kzinretti. Once or twice behavior by Telepath, and also by some of his harem, especially Rilla, the lithest, and Niza who had the biggest vocabulary, had struck a note of inconsistency and puzzled him as the monkeys did. Was the common factor a conditioned species showing less than perfect conditioning. No knowledge of weapons... Was monkey pacifism conditioned? Had their tails, surely indispensable to free-roaming arboreals, been amputated in connection with their conditioned status?

  Were the monkeys slaves of a race that no Kzin except perhaps the late crew of Tracker had met so far? The glandular rush he felt at that idea had no fear about it, only exhilaration. Postulate a race that had conditioned the monkeys, and riddles disappeared! It remained only to find the Conditioners, and leap upon them with the Fleet. The ship they were pursuing was the obvious place to start.

  He thought of Rilla and Niza again. He had not, he realized, seen either of them recently. Telepath had told him they were pregnant and had dug themselves birthing burrows. Two more Sons to compete for the Sire’s Inheritance. Well, that might be to the good. Two more daughters, useful gifts to superiors or subordinates. A nuisance that his two most attractive females were engaged in birthing at the same time.

  But why did he think of Kzinretti now? There was no odor of estrus in the system, he had deliberately had that programmed out, wanting no distractions for anyone at present. He had not been thinking of mating, but... Rilla and Niza... Was Kzinrett stupidity a product of conditioning too? That was not exactly what either the Priests or the Conservors said. It was a punishment by the Fanged God, with a bit of help from the Priestly Order long ago. Zraar-Admiral’s ears folded. The Navy respected the Conservors of the A
ncestral Past, some of the history of the Priest-kind it respected less.

  Telepath said the monkeys know nothing of other contemporary Space-travelling species. Had the Conditioners, whoever they were, gained control of the monkeys without the monkeys’ knowledge?

  Where the conditioners that good? Or was he discarding Churga’s W'tsai and breeding entities he did not need? Perhaps the monkeys were simply behaving as Kzin’s own arboreals would had they got into Space. Zraar-Admiral was used to exercising self-control. Now he slashed at the bulkhead in puzzlement.

  I slept not only because of Sthondat-drug. Sleep was my escape from existence. On the world where I was born I had known my life would be lowly, nameless, despised and short, my minds open to the violating contempt of all warriors. Space was worse. I could never block out entirely the Kzinti minds confined with me. Sleep, some Telepaths believed, helped hold the Death at bay, allowed our minds time to heal. Sleep, I sometimes felt, especially the sleeps when I dreamed of Karan, had taken on some quality of a Hunt, though it was a Hunt for a prey whose nature was dark to me.

  Usually I had more or less the run of the ship. The officers did not deign to notice me, the others avoided me. I was unchallenged. My talent which cursed me also protected me. No subordinate would risk destroying such an asset.

  Already Zraar-Admiral had delegated me to tend his harem—I was beneath insulting by being given this task normally reserved for eunuchs. Telepaths were hardly thought of as males.

  I saw that the Kzinretti were exercised and given space for birthing burrows as necessary. The female tongue is easy and I did not need to read their dim minds to learn, their simple wants and problems. Since the harem was small and Zraar-Admiral often distracted there were few kittens, and the males, when they were old enough, I took to Zraar-Admiral’s Family Trainer at the crèche. But soon the harem gave me new secrets to chew upon. Now I had added to this my tasks as ape-keeper.

  The trail of burnt hydrogen we were following was growing fresher. It was similar to that of the monkey-ship we had defeated. It did not deviate and we simply headed straight down it.

  It became easier with time to enter the aliens’ minds, and I tried to learn more than AT could as he picked through the litter of their boat and suits. At first I felt degraded at having to rummage through monkey-minds but Feared Zraar-Admiral complimented me for finding out about toilet-paper, ice-cream and the potential weapons-properties of electromagnetic ramscoop fields. AT liked tooth-brushes and made one, but I should have got the credit for that too.

  Ten surviving monkeys to begin with, all yammering at my mind with not only their alienness, but also with pure fear and despair if I raised my mental guard. And fear is a huge part of the Telepath’s Curse. All creatures’ minds tend to take on what they are bombarded with, to resonate with it. How can we be Heroes, who feel the pain of all, yes, even the secret pains of terror and loss that no real warrior will admit to? Even when I shielded myself those alien minds seemed to crawl around in my consciousness. I had felt shamed, concealed fear in Heroes’ minds often, and hated it, but this fear was unashamed. Had they no pride?

  And they all had names! Full names! Sometimes more than two! They had been born with them! Paul van Barrow (that was a troublesome one) had been the leader (Zraar-Admiral wanted him for himself). Rick Chew, Henry Nakamura, Michael Patrick, Peter Gordon Brown... even the females had full names: Anna Nagle, Lee Jean Armstrong (that one tried to ambush and attack me when I brought it food, not knowing I could read its mind as it crouched behind the door with a length of pipe it had found), Selina Guthlac... But none were fighters, none had earned names. I finally decided they could not be counted as real names at all, rather they were the sort of means of identification we gave to Kzinretti and kittens.

  Some of the monkeys had a god, a Bearded God that was a Patriarch of Patriarchs like the Fanged God, but different. Where this image was present, the monkeys concerned were usually beseeching this god to forgive them for having forgotten him and crying to him for help. I tried to follow this further but became lost in monkey-logic and the welter of alien images. Reading their minds when they had been calm and complacent in their ship had been easy by comparison. It did not lead back to useful technology or to monkey secret weapons.

  On Kzin the more intelligent types of kz’eerkti— those with enough mind to read—often had a kind of playfulness like that of kittens about them with tricks and games. These did not. They were miserable creatures.

  They were in general poor performers on the miniature hunting range, too, without cunning, stamina, speed or fighting prowess. Or mostly so. I noticed that once or twice, when I got my tongue round their language and explained to them, their fear somehow diminished. The Peter Gordon Brown male and Anna Nagle female rigged up a makeshift dead-fall trap and did some damage to one of Zraar-Admiral’s hunting-party. That amused the others (and me, though I dared not show it) but it also gave me food for thought. Of course, the miniaturized hunting preserve, though it ran cleverly in and out of several decks of the battleship, was hardly a real test of skills.

  Those who did not or could not learn to use the excrement turbines with which all cabins were fitted were the first to go, though I did not tell the officers this, of course. Some that I simply took straight up to the officer’s banquets screamed and struggled. Some, and this gave me more to think upon, insisted on walking on their own feet and tried, I think, to be dignified. The Peter Cordon Brown died uttering cool-headed curses that might have come from a warrior. His last monkey-words as the hunters closed in on him were:

  “I despise you.” Although I did not know exactly why, it showed some kind of defiance as he ran at them for the last time.

  Although I did not use their words with them more than necessary, this behavior made me uncomfortable. Anyway, I was told by the officers that they were good to eat.

  Of course for a Telepath speech translation is quite easy. As soon as I heard the monkey-language I recognized that it matched the speech from the Tracker recorder.

  Zraar-Admiral was pleased when I gave him a report on what this said. Indeed some time later he sent for me for a discussion with him such as I had never had before.

  “You are more intelligent than most addicts,” he told me. He had received me in his own quarters, in an Admiral’s luxury. Then, and rare indeed was it for such as he to ask the opinion of such as I: “What do you think this tells?”

  “First, Feared Zraar-Admiral, the creatures which destroyed Tracker have the same language as these monkeys of ours,” I told him. “They are connected, though ours know nothing of that battle.”

  “Yes. Go on.”

  “Dominant One, the words ‘They may not be so obliging as to leave themselves in the way of our drive next time’ seem of the greatest significance. We know now how Tracker was destroyed. It was nothing to do with superior or secret weaponry. It fell in with a monkey-ship like the—pardon me, Dominant One— like the so-called Successful Plant-Eater, powered by a reaction-drive, evidently called the Writing Stick, or, more fully, The Winged Undying Shining Monkey’s Writing Stick.” The name was not much odder than many other concepts I had taken from the monkeys’ minds.

  “The monkeys in that craft,” I continued, “used the reaction-drive as a weapon. Tracker’s Telepath picked up no thoughts of weapons because the apes did not know what weapons were. The laser was a function of the drive, or aligned parallel to the drive. Our own prisoners used lasers for signaling back along the way they had come.”

  “Clever of them to think of that. It sounds as if they are adaptable. Or lucky.”

  There was a saying, “Monkey-daffy, Monkey-lucky.” It was applied to many stories of the scampering kz’eerkti. A Hero should not rely on luck unless he or the Fanged Cod owed one another a jest Zraar-Admiral looked thoughtfully at the monkey-leader, the Paul, which he had had stuffed for his hoard, as though it might tell him something (Freeze-drying was much more convenient with a universe-sized freeze-drie
r around us, but Zraar-Admiral was a traditionalist and also had me to do the cleaning and other dirty work involved). The Paul looked back at him quizzically as he sprayed a little urine absent-mindedly on it and several other trophies, though he scarcely needed to mark them again as his own. Even had I not been Telepath his mood would have been obvious to me.

  “Dominant One, these Space-kz’eerkti maybe trick certainly. Many of their artifacts are clever, and though I am too lowly to understand such matters in full, AT tells me their boat’s computers are more versatile than our own. Their connectivity is such that they have pattern-recognition and other machine-reasoning capabilities which our own computers, however fast, have not achieved—indeed we have never attempted to achieve it. Those properties could confer great advantages, military and medical...“—We took military medicine seriously—”Perhaps it is because they are used to looking down from tree-tops and therefore perceive relationships differently to Heroes who once hunted on plains. We have kept one of their programmers, also one of their navigators. It is a female, but in each case I feel there may be useful knowledge still to be extracted.”

  “Merrower. Say nothing yet of this to any other.” Feared Zraar-Admiral did not need to use the Menacing tense to me. “In any event,” he went on, “their flavor may be a reason to husband them. I am inclined to keep a pair to breed from. Or would tissue be enough? (The Dominant One would not, of course, be an expert in such an unHeroic matter as cellular biology). “Anyway, there ought to be plenty more of them soon. You may pace, Telepath,” he added graciously, “if it will aid your thoughts.”

  “And third, Dominant One,” I continued, “We learn the monkeys who destroyed Tracker are now warning ‘Earth’ of our presence. That is their home planet.” I felt his conflicting emotions at the thought of the Earth-monkeys’ impotent terror when that warning was received.