by Larry Niven
"Most of the morlocks died here," said Hroarh-Officer. "Your Heroes accounted for many eights squared. You held the biggest morlock force. And I see you accounted for many personally. Urrr." He pulled some of the clotted tissue from Sergeant's claws. For an officer to do that was a compliment worth having.
He was in considerable pain, including the monstrous headache of a telepath's probing. He knew the reason for that: as the sole survivor of his platoon there must be no possibility that he had been cowardly in battle. He had evidently passed the test. Had cowardice been found in him he would be either dead or in much worse pain: It was one of the things that destroyed even the most decorous kzin's inhibitions against torture.
"Humans too, Honored Hroarh-Officer," said Sergeant. He meant both that the humans had accounted for morlocks and that his Heroes had accounted for many humans. Hroarh-Officer surveyed the carnage with some satisfaction. He sprayed a little urine over Sergeant in a gesture of pleasure and approval. "You have some human ears to collect for your trophy belt," Hroarh-Officer said. "And there will be heads for the NCOs' Mess. You have behaved with guile, but Telepath reports that you were by no means backward in the fighting. In using humans and morlocks against each other, you displayed a knowledge of human behavior and the ability to turn it to our advantage. Chuut-Riit will be pleased. It will vindicate him on the value of Thinking Soldiers. And of humans, for that matter. Some day we may use humans to do more fighting for us... Kfrashaka-Admiral and his pride may... " He bit off his words. Even in post-battle relaxation, there was only so much fit to say before a Sergeant. "At least that will be something for Chuut-Riit to be pleased about," he went on. "There is not much else. Not many others have done well. We lost a lot to their stinking wires, and those dung-bombs and other things, screaming and charging straight into traps. Nor did the Staff expect morlocks to be so feral and numerous. Urrr, they have paid for that mistake! Morlocks got to Battalion Forward Headquarters after humans lured the guards away! Then humans used dung bombs on the lot of them. There will be many promotions. Urrr."
Despite his words, Hroarh-Officer did not seem enraged. Rather, the emotions Sergeant detected were those of a kzintosh assessing a new and by no means disagreeable situation. After any serious fight there tended to be vacancies for promotions, and this one had evidently been more serious than anticipated. Sergeant realized he himself had seen only a little of it. Hroarh-Officer appeared to have acceded to battalion command. No doubt that and the satisfaction of wading into recent slaughter contributed to his benign mood. He too had new ears on his belt. "When we return here we will be better prepared," said Hroarh-Officer.
Chuut-Riit will approve of that, thought Sergeant. He will approve of Hroarh-Officer, too. "It will take a long campaign to clear out these caves thoroughly," said Hroarh-Officer, lashing his tail. "Beyond the pictures of our radar we have found new tunnels and galleries we did not know of. The morlocks have taken a fierce and praiseworthy slashing here, but they breed fast, and we have not got all the humans by any means. It will be good training for the new Troopers, and it would be good if there were Heroes whose valor and blood-lust we could point to especially... There has been hard fighting here."
"Yes, Honored Hroarh-Officer."
"Hard fighting... Urrr... a campaign like this needs special Heroes. Exemplars... You have done well. You may dry the new ears for your belt at the battalion Kzirzarrgh," he added solemnly. Hroarh-Officer turned to the dying human. There was another important formality to be settled, which the scattered swaths of dead had raised. Hroarh-Officer asked Sergeant: "Is this monkey entitled to Fighter's Privileges?"
"Yes, Dominant One." Hroarh-Officer must have known this from Telepath's report, since the human was still uneaten and possessed its ears, but Sergeant's voluntary confirmation was necessary. Fighter's Privileges entitled a worthy enemy not only to dignified consumption or other disposal or display of his remains after death, but, in the case of a dying enemy, the granting of any reasonable last request. Hroarh-Officer bent over the human, putting this to him in his own mixture of Wunderlander vocabulary and Heroes' grammar.
Sergeant watched him, wondering vaguely what request a human in such circumstances might make that a kzin officer could satisfy. He could not move closer, being held in a medical web. A box on his chest stimulated his muscles as military circulatory fluid was pumped into him. He had been wounded before and knew better than to attempt great movement. Indeed, at that moment he could hardly turn his head. The bone-baring wounds on his neck and shoulders had been sewn up and salved and would make admirable scars.
When the human replied its voice was too weak for Sergeant to catch what it said. But Hroarh-Officer seemed to understand. His tail stiffened as if in anger for a moment, and he raised a claw as if for a slash. Then he relaxed. "Iss bekomess rreasssonibble. Urrr," he grated out, as much as he could not in the slaves' patois but the difficult human tongue. Then he waved to Medical Orderly, who had finished attending to the kzinrett and the other wounded and injured, to come forward. Perhaps the human would respond to kzin medical treatment, and if in the circumstances it lived it would be spared this time. So be it. Lying in the bracing smell of Hroarh-Officer's urine Sergeant was almost content. He would mourn his comrades later. But they had died acceptably.
Hroarh-Officer squatted beside Sergeant as the human was carried away. "It is suitable that he asked for treatment," Sergeant said. "That one should not die before his time. Not at the hands of morlocks. I will have his head for the Mess one day."
"It did not ask for treatment. That is an ordinary part of Fighter's Privileges," said Hroarh-Officer. "It asked for another thing.
"It is a little irregular and will need to come officially from me, but seeing what has transpired here I believe it will be considered fitting to grant it, Raargh-Sergeant."
Music Box
"I do not know whether you are my friend or my foe, but I should count it my honour to have you as either. Has not one of the poets said that a noble friend is the best gift and a noble enemy the next best?"
—C. S. Lewis
"A promise made under duress doesn't count, that's the law."
But this is East and South of Suez, where there is no law."
—The Katzenjammer Kids
"Is it not joyful to have friends come from a far land?"
—Confucius
Chapter 1
2425 a.d.
The kzin screamed and leaped. The gagrumpher was a young one, lagging a little behind the herd, half-asleep on its feet in the warm forenoon. The kzin landed on its back, above its middle pair of legs. The centauroid reared up, shrieking. The gagrumpher herd wheeled, the males charging back.
But the gagrumphers rearing had brought its throat in range of the feline's razor fangs. The kzin swung its jaws, slashing. There was time for one crushing bite at the neck bones, and it was down, racing for the trees like an orange shadow a second before the gagrumpher bull-males arrived.
The wounded gagrumpher stood for a moment, blood jetting, then it collapsed, its oxygen-starved brain already dying, though its rear legs kicked for some time under the instinctual commands of the dorsal ganglia knot.
The males could not pursue the predator into the trees, and as they stood in a bellowing group, the snarl of another kzin tore the air on the opposite side of the clearing, between them and the rest of the herd. They could not leave the females and the other juveniles unguarded. They hastened back, and the herd moved on.
The body of the adolescent became still in its pool of blood as the dorsal ganglia died. A colony of leather-flappers that had risen shrieking into the sky returned to their trees, and the forest settled down again to its own affairs.
Warily, two kzin approached the kill. The killer, like its prey, was a youngster, showing a mixture of kitten spots and adolescent stripes against its bright orange fur. The other was older—much older. There was gray at its muzzle, one eye and one arm were artificial, its ears were torn shreds and t
he fur at its neck and shoulders grew raggedly over a complex of scar tissue. The youngster kept watch as the elder kzin lowered its great head and lapped the blood, then crouched and lapped in turn.
The forest was quiet again. They ate undisturbed.
"That was a good kill, Vaemar," the elder kzin said. He gave the youngster a grooming lick. "Thank you, Raargh-Hero. But I doubt I could handle an adult yet. And it was a stupid one to lag behind the herd in this close country."
"Then you have seen the fate of the stupid. You feel nothing in the ground?"
"Feet. Distant enough."
"Gagrumpher feet?"
"Yes. I think so." The pattern of the gagrumpher's centauroid footfalls could never be mistaken for those of a quadruped, but many of Wunderland's native life-forms were centauroid.
"Are they approaching or receding?
"I think... I think they are still receding."
"Be sure, be very sure. The males could be returning quietly through the cover."
"They do not sound heavy."
"Nor would they, to your senses yet, if they put their feet down slowly. They are very different things, leaping on the back of a dreaming youngster, and looking up to see a dozen charging adult males. You do not want to be under those forelegs when they rear up. I have heard some humans made the skins of our kind into what they call rrrugz. Adult gagrumphers can do the same more quickly."
They are moving away, Raargh-Hero, I am sure of it now."
"Indeed. Do you know why they move away?"
"No."
"The males know we are here. Their usual response would be—I will not say of such clumsy and noisy herbivores to 'stalk' us—but to attempt to take us by surprise. If they are moving away, it is for a reason. Perhaps some other enemy approaches.
"Never feel shame like the foolish ones at using ziirgah. It is a gift of the Fanged God," the old kzin went on. Ziirgah was the rudimentary ability of all kzinti to detect emotions of other hunters or prey. Most used it quite unthinkingly, but because it was developed in a few into the despised talent of the telepaths, many felt unease at using it consciously. It had saved Raargh's life on more than one occasion. "Always danger, Raargh-Hero."
"Vaemar, when you look at me, see always two things: I am old, and I am alive. I notice danger. Not all who were kits with me, or recruits, or fighting soldiers, did so... Listen now!"
"There... !" The young kzin's ears and tail shot up.
"Yes, mechanism! You know the enemy now."
"We must get under cover!"
"Finish your meat. It is your kill, and we have enough time. We will take the haunches to salt before the Beam's beasts and the snufflers get them."
The sound of the vehicle grew. The kzinti slashed what remained of the gagrumpher carcass to pieces, bagging it in tough fabric. They were in deep cover, invisible, when the human car, flying low, entered the clearing.
It landed beside what was left of the gagrumpher, and the driver got out. The human examined the scattered, bloody bones, the imprints of clawed feet and of Raargh's prosthetic hand on the ground about, sniffing with a feeble, almost useless nose, then crossed the clearing toward the shade of the red Wunderland trees where the kzinti lurked. His eye lighted on some of the bagged meat. "Anyone for chess?" he called.
The young kzin leaped from the undergrowth. His hands with sheathed claws struck the human in the chest, knocking him down. Though far less than fully grown, he already overtopped and easily outweighed the man.
"Be careful, Vaemar," the elder admonished him in what, five years previously, would have been called the slaves' patois. "He has not the strength of a Hero!" He made a swipe at Vaemar with his prosthetic arm. The youngster ducked and rolled away.
"There is no offense, Raargh," the human said in the same dialect, those words in the Heroes' Tongue being couched in the Tense of Equals. He climbed to his feet and reached to scratch the top of the youngster's head. "Young will be young."
"Urrr. To live with you monkeys, young need be cautious. You have a board?"
"Yes."
"Old weakling! To let youngster leap you so!"
"Many of us are old, Companion, but some of us have a trick or two yet."
"Come to our cave." He spoke now with the grammar of the Heroes' Tongue to this human who understood it, rather than the simplified patois. "We have got it well set up now. Even a chair for any monkey brave enough to stick its nose in. Vaemar will cover your eyes while I make safe the defenses."
The human held his captured chessman up to the light. "These are nice pieces."
"Vaemar made them. He is good with a sculpting tool."
"From what you tell me he is good at many things. But he is fortunate to have you."
"So what you will tell the Arrum?"
"There is no point in lying, to them or to you. So far they have asked little of me. He has the right to live as he wishes, as do you... but I think... "
"Yesss? Go on." A hint of the Menacing Tense.
"Someday he will need more than this."
"It is good to stalk the gagrumphers and fight the tigripards, good to look out at night upon the Fanged God's stars, or sleep under them when we range far, to scent the game in the forests under the hunters' moons or lie in the deep grass glades at noontide," said Raargh. "Few high nobles live so well. And unlike high nobles we have no palace intrigues to poison our livers."
The man nodded, pinching his lower lip between thumb and index finger in a characteristic gesture of thought. "And yet... for him it cannot be like this forever. You know as well as I he is exceptional. Your kind on this planet need leaders now, and they will need them tomorrow."
"To lead them to what?"
"Hardly for me to say."
"To become imitation monkeys? Apes of apes?"
"Do you really think the seed of Heroes would accept such a destiny? I think not."
"What then? Check! Urrr."
"You know your kind have some deadly enemies among the humans on this world. Jocelyn van der Stratt is far from the only one of her party. I think, as you do, I know, that Vaemar may be a great treasure for this planet, a natural leader for the Kzin but one who can deal with humans, too. What might we not do combined? I think even Chuut-Riit may have felt that, or something like it. It will be very slow, but perhaps on Wunderland both our kinds have been given a strange chance.
"But there are many humans who do not want kzinti leaders to emerge, who do not want the Kzin to be. Vaemar has a duty, companion mine. And so, I think, do you. Perhaps, if I may speak as soldier to soldier, a harder one than any you faced in battle."
"You think the monkeys will attack us? There will be many more guts spilled then. There are many Heroes left on Ka'ashi!"
"I hope not. And I think I have grounds for hope. Each day that passes is a day in which humans and Kzin share the planet, a day for some memory of the war and the Occupation to be forgotten. But it is slow."
"It does not matter if the days here pass fast or slowly," said Raargh. "We hunt, we watch the stars. Vaemar grows. I will not be able to play chesss with him much longer—too many easy victories for him on this little board, and my authority is undermined."
"If he can beat you easily, Raargh, he must be a player indeed. But most kzinti who bother with the game become masters... Once when we talked, you too said the Kzin of Wunderland would have need of him."
"He still does not get the best out of his rooks. He does not use them to smash through the front... And I am not good enough a player to be the best teacher for him—I announce checkmate in three moves, by the way. They do not have need of him yet."
"We hold things together, I grant you, but there are a lot of hopes on that youngster."
He comes. Let him try his rook work on you. He has been waiting for his game."
"If you can beat me so easily, what hope have I against him?"
"I, who am old, am schooling myself to perceive things like a human. He, who is young, has only me to learn from,
me, and one or other two oddities about in these unpeopled parts... You are right, he will have to go soon, though it shaves my mane and twists my liver to say it... But I warn you, he learns quickly."
The sound of the human car died away. Raargh gazed after it for a long time. Night was falling on Wunderland, Alpha Centauri B magnificent in the purplish sky, the sky that humans now ruled. "Finish salting and dressing the meat, Vaemar," he said. "I must pace and think."
The forest made way for the kzin, though he was hardly hunting. He made a single, small kill, enough for relaxation and a clear mind.
I lost my own kit and my mate in the ramscoop raid, he thought. Must I lose Vaemar too? Perhaps not. As things had once been, a Hero did not worry over his kits, who should make their own fortune, provided only that they did not dishonor him. But ever since the human acquisition of the hyperdrive had turned the tide of battle in space, for Raargh and Vaemar ever since the day the Patriarchy's forces on Wunderland had surrendered to the victorious humans and Raargh had fled with the Royal Governor Chuut-Riit's last kit to the open country beyond the great scarp of the Hohe Kalkstein, things had been different.
They had lived wild and free, but not entirely so. Wunderland was a sparsely settled world, and during the Kzin occupation and the decades-long war its human population had been further reduced, through heavy casualties, through the poverty and chaos that spread with a destroyed infrastructure, and as a result of suddenly being denied many modern drugs and medical procedures. Birth rates had collapsed as death rates had soared. Now, with rebuilding and the UNSN present in force, and with automated farming and food-production methods being restored, the cities were draining off the human rural population from many areas.