Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - VI

by Donald Kingsbury, Mark O. Martin, Gregory Benford

  Images began to shift in staccato rhythm. Yankee had no clear idea of why the camera moved to look where it did, except that the glances were quick and purposeful as if Hwass was clicking down a checksheet of his own devising He hastened through the few sealed rooms, checking this and checking that. He was memorizing detail that he wasn’t sure his human masters would give him a second chance to see. Finally he just stopped in the middle of examining a row of machine tools. They could not see his face—but they could hear his voice. “You iss defeated, Major Yankee Clandeboye. They iss gone. The Shark’s motor iss has be here but iss gone.”

  Yankee switched his mike back to the frigate. He got the comm officer. “Send a message by hyperwave directly to General Fry Sol, Gibraltar Base.” (They had dropped off a hyperwave buoy outside of R’hshssira singularity and could communicate with it electromagnetically It would take longer for the message to reach the buoy than to travel the 5.3 light years from R’hshssira to Sol.)

  “Quote: ‘The Shark has been delivered to the Patriarchy.’ Unquote.”

  The captain came on line. “What’s this? What have you got?”

  “No details yet.”

  “What’s the verification?”

  “None. Hwass just told us and he seems sure. Get that message off! I don’t want him deciding that we know too much. He might think we’re all worth killing to keep the news quiet. We can send the rest later as it comes in. I told you, I don’t trust that kzin.”

  “There’s such a thing as overcaution,” the captain chided.

  “Captain, why does a man have tits?”

  “You got me, Yankee. Why?”

  “Just in case.”

  Later that day, Yankee’s team began its painstaking assessment of the find.

  On a separate floor, below the main working area that Trainer-of-Slaves had salvaged for himself, Yankee discovered a suite of luxurious apartments with its own airlock and life support. It had been repaired. Once inside he recognized it for what it had once been in the heyday of Hssin’s power—the harem quarters of some consequential kzin.

  The interior was all stone (or structurally enhanced stone) of abnormally large proportions even for a kzin dwelling. Spaciousness meant power and wealth—and a full name. On the floor was a tapestry-like rug, round as the world, woven with scenes of the hunt: here a kzin stalking through the orange grass, there a magnificent kzin head between the leaves of a forest. And everywhere the brilliant colors of animals of the hunt, fleeing, hushed, flying, hiding in the branches. The rug was cuddly soft. It was just right for games of coy chase and play.

  There were no hanging weapons or trophies, yet it was a male’s hall. Carved into the eastern wall, an august glyph glorified some noble family a dozen kzinti in profile, the faces of conquerors. An arched niche held a crotch of polished wood, half tree, half tale of nature transformed by sculptor’s power. Next to the niche a floor-to-ceiling tapestry cut a narrow window into the gray stone to a colorful landscape on some unconquered planet of fantastic imagination. A final touch to the male decor might have been lithe kzinrretti moving through the hall to entertain and serve.

  An arched entrance at the back of the hall led to the living quarters of individual kzinrretti: kitchens, birthing chambers, nurseries for the kits and Yankee couldn’t guess what-all. There was no trace that a whole harem might have died here. Its most recent occupants had been human. The auburn hairs in the rug were of Lieutenant Argamentine’s genotype. He remembered the way she used to pull at a curl of that hair when she was agitated. Damn, damn, damn.

  In the tunnels and caves shaped for romping kits they found a box of crudely made toys, alien—perhaps a kzin’s idea (a Jotok’s idea?) of what a human child would play with—perhaps leftovers from an earlier time. The only food stocks in the kitchen were formulated for a human child. Somebody had manufactured a stack of diapers. One of the leather-bound picture books wore not only the tooth marks of a kzinrret but what looked like the practice scribbles of a two-year-old child. There were enough organic bits and pieces to establish that Argamentine was the mother of the children. They didn’t seem to have a common father. Frozen sperm from Wunderland?

  The discards from the machine shop, hundreds of them, were all attempts to duplicate the same hypershunt part. Yankee took samples to the frigate’s engineer who tested them and had a good laugh.

  “Does he know what he’s doing?” asked Yankee.

  “Can’t tell. He might be trying random variations to see what works, but I doubt it. That’s like having random variations in a quantum effect chip and expecting the hundredth one to be a fully operational computer. I suspect he knows what he’s doing but is working at the outer limits of his equipment.”

  Yankee was still having to grasp the implications of a functional hyperdrive in the claws of the Patriarchy. “It seems he made one that was good enough.”

  “Maybe not. The specs are tough. Maybe they took one jump and they are stuck out there in interstellar space freezing to death. I rebuilt a motor once and it checked out perfect. Died on the first jump, though. The navy never would have found us if our hyperwave had gone, too.”

  Yankee kept going back to the kzinrretti palazzo. He was looking for something that didn’t seem to be there. He brooded about his cousin. She wasn’t the type to just live in a place. She needed people. If you locked her up, she’d go to the phones. If you cut the phone lines, she’d chat on the net. If you took away her infocomp she’d start to write letters. Yankee still had her letters from that boarding school she had attended after her dad got killed at Ceres. She’d meet a little old lady in the grocery and start up a conversation about the brands of coffee—and remember three months later to send the little old lady a birthday card. He was sure General Fry had love letters from her tucked away somewhere.

  She had a pen. There were those scribbles in the picture book, done by one of her babies who was sure to have been imitating mother. Yankee knew that Nora couldn’t escape the temptations that came from owning a pen.

  He was tearing up a fur rug in one of the least likely of the kzinrretti rooms looking for a biding place when his back pocket got caught in loose molding. While unhooking himself, a panel slipped open—just a crack. He pounced. What he found amazed him. It was a kzinrret-built hiding place, something a dog might have made for bones if a dog had hands. Inside was mostly a vulgar collection of baubles, charming. A three-year-old might have prized them. Sitting with the gewgaws was one of the small kzinrretti picture books. He opened it, and there, written across the pictures in Nora’s fine hand, was a diary.

  She had no one to talk to, so she was talking to herself.

  Almost the first thing he saw when he flipped through the pages was the capitalized. “THIS IS MY MEMORY.” He back-skipped and read, “Nora-From-My-Future, if you are reading this over and do not understand it, I am writing it because my memory is going.”

  He was too impatient to wait until he got back to the inflatable command center so he sat on the rug in the great hall of the palazzo and read straight through starting from the first page where her writing squiggled around the picture, seeking white space.

  •

  Chapter 14

  (2437 A.D.)

  The kzin, bare in his yellow-orange fur, was escorted by armed guards into the chambers of Si-Kish, who was admiring his raiment in a gold-tinted minor, his tail motionless. The nameless prisoner noticed the lean tail. Ornamented—with a miniature silver mace. That son-of-a-vegetable can probably use it, too. With lashing swiftness. He glanced at the furniture of this splendarium, lit by diffuse skylight. All of it looked too fragile to make a good hand weapon and too far away to grab.

  The guards left. That meant that Si-Kish held the naked kzin’s fighting ability in contempt. Not a wise decision—but no W’kkaikzin could imagine physical power without its trappings. They needed some sobering time on the frontier where kzin lives were cavalierly squandered on the most trivial points of honor—and prisoners never
behaved with humility. Nevertheless the nameless one waited for his new name which would contain his fate. If it was something like “Walking-Dead” he was doomed. He hoped it wouldn’t be as awful as “Grass-Eater.”

  “I am not as angry with you as some of our lesser nobles.”

  He’s keeping me suspended.

  Si-Kish was arranging his collar lace, not yet deeming to notice the nameless one. “You have been useful to W’kkai. In fact, I admire your loyalty to the present Patriarch, whose slothful ways have brought us so much failure. You honor our heroic traditions. I will not insult your honor by suggesting that your loyalty is misplaced. In my view it is the Patriarchy which must survive—not the Patriarch. When the son sees himself as a more able warrior than the father it is his duty to challenge his sire. This principle is the foundation of the continual renewal of the Patriarchy.”

  Si-Kish turned and the naked kzin knew that he was about to receive his new name—and fate. “We may need you again, Conundrum-Prisoner. My physicists have not yet wholly mastered their hunt through hyperspace. They say they no longer need you—but I don’t believe them. If we have more questions, you may volunteer your answers. If volunteering doesn’t appeal to you, telepathy might. Perhaps even the hot needle of inquiry.”

  “Thank you for the name,” said Conundrum-Prisoner. His sarcasm was muted by the requirements of the Dominated Tense. So…they were delivering him to the Conundrum Priests for safekeeping.

  Nobody had ever told Monkeyshine that as the eldest male he was bound by a special responsibility to his kin. It seemed like it was something he had always known from the time back on Hssin when he had saved mother and siblings by understanding a faulty atmosphere-lock mechanism that was baffling his frantic mother while their lives lay in forfeit to noxious gases—kzin master and Jotoki mechanics being absent at the time.

  Mellow Yellow was often gone on trips, but why was there a new master? W’kkai was shock after shock. Get used to it, learn the new ways, feel safe—and then boom, a new shock. It had seemed so easy when he was young and there were so few of them living in their little world and skittering from bubble to bubble, from ship to shored-up ruin. Then the worst omen of doom had been a grumble in the air machine.

  W’kkai was so vast! Space was so tiny! He still relished his memory of the day he had discovered that the sky wasn’t a roof. He had had to lie down on the ground and pile bricks on his stomach as high as he could to understand that it was just the weight of the air that kept the air in! Weird. But vastness meant that too much was happening.

  He was always toilet training a baby or rescuing a young brother from a ditch or stealing fruit for his mother. Sometimes he was too interested in fun and forgot about his duties. Furlessface got her head stuck between boards and had been crying for half a workshift before he found her. She was so dumb! He felt guilty but a man had to have fun sometimes. There was too much work to do. It wasn’t easy being a slave. He wanted real clothes like a W’kkaikzin!

  Kzinti constantly grumbled about the laziness of their slaves. Slaves were too indolent to survive by themselves. They had to be “induced” to work for their survival by a watchful eye. It was true. Monkeyshine avoided work with careful cunning which mostly meant when he was beyond observation. On W’kkai he had to learn new ways of avoiding work, mainly because there were so many more kzin overseers, none of them as easygoing as his mother’s Mellow Yellow.

  It was a game. If he got caught, he worked very very hard. If no one was looking he didn’t work at all. He liked the long W’kkai nights. They were cool and no one could see him. Oh joy! The stars peeked out to announce the night before the clouds came. He liked the night insects because they were big and some had glowy segments on their bellies!

  For now, two things made work-avoidance tolerably easy. The kzin were used to servants like the Jotoki for which they had hundreds of generations of training experience. Mellow Yellow had been a trainer of slaves, specializing in the Jotoki, and knew of dozens of machines and thousands of virtual-world training modes that would shape a Jotok to almost any skill. But for monkeys there were no training artifacts. And the kzinti weren’t patient with eyeball-to-eyeball training. When a kzin caught him idle, he respectfully asked for immediate training, and that was usually that.

  He had painfully figured it out for himself during his sly wanderings about the estate. He couldn’t explain these ideas to his brothers. The slave language he knew was too simple to express such complicated ruminations. He understood what he was thinking but there was no way to share these thoughts by the method of saying. His was a special duty because if he failed, then doom would befall his monkey family. Fun got in the way of his serious thinking, but he could always make it up while he worked.

  The best job was currying kzinrretti. Sthondat thigh-bones, were they dumb!

  Instinctively, he never broached his tortuous questions to any kzin, not even lord Grraf-Nig—who was his teacher, his master and defender, his peculiar friend who had tussled and played with him since he was an infant. He dared to call his kzin lord “Mellow Yellow,” a bite’s distance from those carnivorous, flesh-odored teeth, but nothing in kzindom would have induced Monkeyshine to tease that mighty machine of flesh with images of monkeys who lolled about on kzin-hide rugs and fanned themselves with kzin ears. Such amusing thoughts had to be locked in absolute privacy.

  In the course of his serving duties, he had overheard kzintosh boasting about the deeds of conquering Heroes, but the slave races appeared in the stories only as stilted background to the glory of kzin victories. Only the kzin had a history.

  Monkeyshine would never have thought to share his curiosity with his mother though he chatted with her in monologue mode often. She, being female, did not have the wits to tell him of her origins. His father, who could, he supposed was dead. He assumed that monkeys, unlike Jotoki, did have fathers because Mellow Yellow addressed him and his brothers in the male tense and referred to his mother and her daughters in the same female tense with which he spoke of his kzinrretti wives.

  Of course, he wasn’t older than his befuddled sister, who was just as tall as he was, but she didn’t count as a partner in responsibility because she couldn’t think, could hardly make herself understood in the limited hisses and purrs of her tiny vocabulary He had to protect her all the time; it was annoying. His brothers were of little help—after all, they were only babies and they had to contend with their twin sisters who were really stupid brats.

  He adored his mother. She wasn’t very bright either, and he had to protect her, too, as well as all of his siblings. But she was bigger than he was and quicker and it made Monkeyshine grin when she caught him being foolish. With the grip of her powerful hand she could restrain his greatest enthusiasm. She always grinned back at him—but would never let go until he started to think about the careless thing he was doing.

  That was his greatest puzzle: she was so dumb, how did she always know when he was being dangerously stupid? Such a mystery impressed him. He could be ferociously fond of his mother, especially when he was assisting her during her frequent childbearing, and had to chase away her five-legged Jotoki midwives. What did they know about childbearing? They crawled out of ponds, whatever a pond was.

  He didn’t know whether he was grown-up or not. He felt big and it seemed like he knew everything but he kept growing. A kzin male was about twice as large as a kzinrret. If he was going to grow up twice as large as his mother he had a long way to go. He wasn’t even as big as she was yet. When he got bigger, the work would be easier.

  Things began to get stranger. He was currying a kzinrret one morning and her fur was standing on end in anger. She snarled at him and he was afraid of her but she seemed to like his attentions. There were hissing matches in the harem. It got worse every day until the harem was in an uproar. All the alliances between the kzinrretti were changing. He found one of them digging a den in the hillside.

  Monkeyshine was proud of the way he got along with M
ellow Yellow’s females. He could understand their gestures and their moods, when they wanted to be groomed, when they wanted to play, and when they wanted to be left alone. He knew what gifts to bring them—pretty stones and colored leaves—and he could understand their talk-talk and even chatter with them while he played. So he took the trouble to find out what was wrong.

  Their new master smelled peculiar and they were afraid he was going to eat their kits. What had happened to Mellow Yellow? Why was the new master beginning to reorganize the slave quarters?

  It was just curiosity and caution that was driving him toward answers—until Long-Reach returned from somewhere in an almost catatonic state, only one of his arms articulate. Then the boy’s curiosity became an intense case of anxiety. His Jotoki friends abandoned him to babble hysterically in their tree huts. Only Joker crawled down to comfort Monkeyshine and all he would say was that something terrible had happened to Mellow Yellow. He couldn’t say more; he didn’t have a calm arm.

  For the next thirty hours Monkeyshine did not let his family out of sight. He watched his mother and made all sorts of excuses to help her while she worked. He herded his sisters. He kept his brothers out of trouble and as much out of sight of any kzin as possible.

  Nightfall on W’kkai is a slow dimming and it takes forever for the darkness to overlay the land, but at first-darkness a Jotoki delegation called Monkeyshine into the tree huts for a council. He had never before been treated with such respect. Monkeyshine was a child at that unique stage in human development where he was observant enough to notice the richness of his universe yet wise enough to understand that he knew nothing.

  To him the Jotoki were the fonts of all wisdom. Mellow Yellow was too busy to answer his questions, though Monkeyshine knew how to bring out the father in him for a sparring match, a thing he wouldn’t have dared do with any other kzin. Mellow Yellow’s kzin retainers thought only of work and not why “washers” were round. The Jotoki, on the other hand, knew everything about how machines worked and were only too willing to take them apart to show you why a washer had to be round. They could make a ship fly between the stars—and that awed Monkeyshine. He had only two arms and it made him feel like an inferior slave.