The Man-Kzin Wars 10 - The Wunder War

by Larry Niven

  The remaining kzin, considerably to their own surprise, had, after the chaos and fighting that followed the Liberation, been allowed a fair degree of freedom, though they had been stripped of most of the land and estates which they had taken and, except in part of the asteroid Tiamat, where they had their own community, and recently in part in the settlement at Arhus, were subject to human government and laws in major matters. But there was still much wild country. Kzin like Raargh who settled in the backwoods were largely left alone (the little matter of the stolen air-car in which he had escaped after the Kzin surrender seemed to have been forgotten, and the car was still with them). But, he knew, they were under a degree of discreet, and even frank, surveillance. It would not, he suspected, be a good idea to test the limits of their freedom. Cumpston had taken it upon himself to call upon them. There were other humans who crossed their paths from time to time as well, such as the female called Emma, who apparently lived in the forest somewhere to the southeast.

  Sometimes he sold meat to the scattered human vegetation-cultivators in the area, rounded up or killed beasts for them, guarded their farms in their absence, or used his great strength to do other work. He had thus acquired goods and a small store of money. "You can trust old Raargh to do a job," he had heard one say. "He's not so bad for a ratcat." Here, in the open country beyond the Hohe Kalkstein, the claws of the occupying kzinti had rested relatively lightly, and his prosthetic arm and eye, though actually more effective than natural ones for many purposes, made him look less dangerous. It had been strange and distasteful at first to have to deal with former slaves and prey animals on such terms, but with the passage of time he was becoming used to it. The cultivator's words, when he thought them over, had actually not displeased him.

  There were also, Raargh knew, many humans who wished to kill every kzin on Wunderland. This provoked a fighting reflex, but it was hardly unexpected. He had installed defensive measures at their cave. The advice of other humans, including his chess partner Colonel Cumpston, had been to lie low and let, as he put it, "time heal some wounds."

  Those that were not fatal to start with, thought Raargh. Too many dead Heroes, too many dead monkeys, for all to be forgotten. I sometimes forget how favored by the Fanged God I am. How few who joined the Patriarch's Forces with me now live! Hroarh-Captain travels with a cart replacing his legs. He remembered Hroarh-Captain as a young officer, bursting through with his troops to rescue him, sole survivor of his platoon, at the First Battle of the Great Caves.

  And that led to another thought. The human Rykermann, who had fought beside him in the caves when they had been surrounded by morlocks. They had believed they would die together and had exchanged certain confidences. He had helped Rykermann's mate, Leonie, to escape the morlocks, and had asked Hroarh-Captain for Rykermann to be given fighter's privileges and for his life to be spared. And Rykermann in return had asked something for him, something which Hroarh-Captain had agreed to... partly for politics and because it was convenient, it was true, but... There were a few humans he could talk to. This is a human world now and I need human advice and contact. I do not like it, but if Vaemar is to live here and lead, he will need it too. He cannot stay in the forest forever.

  Cumpston was a good chess partner and had intervened to save his life from the female Jocelyn van der Stratt in the burning ruins of the refugee camp outside Circle Bay Monastery, the day the last Kzin forces on Wunderland surrendered. The abbot of the monastery, too, another old chess partner... But Cumpston, he knew, was an ARM agent still, and Raargh suspected his interest in Vaemar was more than avuncular. Raargh was prepared to admit that the stocky human might somehow presume to "like" them, but chess was not his only agenda. And the abbot was old and feeble. Raargh did know how he continued to impose his will on the... monks? monkeys? whatever they were called... who he had been set to dominate.

  It is Rykermann among the humans who owes me most, he thought. His life and his mate's life. He is high in their dominance structure, too. The television in the car had shown him Rykermann speaking in the monkey-assembly, when troops of them got together to chatter about laws. He had had Vaemar watch it too, as part of his education for this new world. I will go to Rykermann, he thought.

  Chapter 2

  Nils Rykermann looked out at the night over München . Rebuilding after the Liberation had been quick. The craters and the vast chaos of rubble and ruins were gone, as were many of the Kzin's architectural contributions. The last of the refugee camps and shantytowns on the outskirts were being cleared away. There in the light of Alpha Centauri B was the glittering steel spire of St. Joachim's as it had always been.

  But even, or especially, under the night sky, it was not the prewar city. The suburbs stretched farther, the spaceport was far bigger. Beyond the spaceport was a vast scrapyard where the hulks of Kzinti warcraft were piled. Moving dots of light showed where salvage teams worked on some of them. And now laser and missile batteries, and more experimental and esoteric weapons, visible and hidden, ringed the city and the surrounding hills.

  The sky was different too. One moon blown to pieces, and virtually every prewar and preliberation satellite shot down by one side or the other. Where there had once been advertising signs in orbit there were now guard ships and weapons systems. A double improvement, thought Rykermann. The people had changed more than the city. Most of Rykermann's Wunderlander contemporaries were dead. Born in 2332, he had been 35 at the time of the Kzin landings. His body, tonight in the grey uniform of the Wunderland Armed Forces with its discreet cluster of oak leaves at the collar, was slim, strong and taut. He was 93 now, in what on Earth was counted early middle age, and he looked less than early middle-aged until one saw his eyes.

  Like Raargh's, his neck and shoulders bore a complex of scars, including, strangely, the rough-and-ready suturing of a kzin field-medic, and an identifying kzin brand which he had not had removed. But he had regrown his beard, a moderately asymmetrical spike identifying him as important—what had once been called "quality"—without being quite Families, and there was little gray in its gold yet. One of his visitors was an obvious Earthman, shorter and heavier, wearing the crisp uniform of a Staff Brigadier of UNSN Intelligence. He was of about the same apparent age as Rykermann, or perhaps younger. In his case the geriatric drugs had never been interrupted.

  The other was Jocelyn van der Stratt. She was in the uniform of the Wunderland Police, with badges of high rank. Like certain other Wunderlanders she had adopted the kzinti custom of wearing a belt-ring, with a collection of dried Kzin and human ears.

  "The lady you lost, who you spoke of earlier, Dimity Carmody," said Guthlac. "If I may ask, what happened to her?" His voice was careful, delicate. "I do not mean to cause distress, but in this case I need to know. I know Jocelyn's story, and I know why she is committed to our cause."

  Not the usual," said Rykermann. "On this planet," he went on, " 'the usual' was disease, hunger or kzinti teeth. I suppose Dimity was lucky, or so I've told myself often enough. She was a scientist, and I thought she had something valuable, a theory about FTL. At my insistence there was an attempt to get her away in a slowboat, but by that time the Kzin had got tired of their cat-and-mouse game with the slowboats and destroyed it in space.

  "I had the privilege of watching, via a camera on her ship... until the screen went blank. At least I know she died quickly. In fact she can't have known anything about it. She'd been injured already and was in a doc. They were trying to reach We Made It."

  He strode across the room and opened a paneled cupboard with a key. He reached in and produced a small music box. "That's what I've got left of Dimity," he said. "A kzin kindly returned it to me... another story... I've kept it for fifty-eight years... All I have!" He struck his fist on the table. "Selina was probably long dead by then," said Arthur Guthlac. "The Happy Gatherer just disappeared. One of the first ships to go. I imagine them approaching some kzinti vessel... innocent, excited at the prospect of contact... I imagine it often
..."

  "Your wife?... Your lover?"

  "My sister. We were very close. It had always been the two of us against the world. Two square pegs in round holes. She went into space: the brilliant one. I'd become a museum guard and out of sheer bloody-mindedness I got involved in illegal studies."

  "Illegal?"

  "Military history. Totally forbidden. You could get your memory wiped and draw a few years' rehabilitation digging for water ice in the canyons on Mars for that in those days. And there were times before that when it would have been the organ banks. ARM had a long-term project to breed aggression out of the human race, and part of it was banning and systematically destroying military history. My chief at the museum was ARM, of course—all we museum staff were.

  "My forbidden studies were inevitably discovered, but I was lucky with the timing of that... I remember standing in front of my chief waiting to be formally charged and arrested, and wondering how much worse my case would be because I was a junior ARM officer myself. Anyway, he'd found I wasn't the only one in the place involved: 'I don't seem to have a very law-abiding general staff, Guthlac,' he said, 'but at this moment it's about all the General Staff that Earth's got.' Strange the difference a couple of capital letters can make. ARM had just concluded that the Angel's Pencil's messages were genuine... that the Kzin were real and they were coming to get us."

  "It wasn't like that on Wunderland," said Rykermann. "We didn't censor old history so much as lose interest in it. Earth history was Earth business. Irrelevant to us. We had a whole world to shape... A brave new world it still was... I remember, after we got the warnings, those months of scrabbling through old, chance preserved, fragments of Earth books and records trying to reinvent the wheel."

  We did something the same," said Guthlac.

  "We were just getting a military production base together here when the Kzin arrived."

  You look as if you had your share of it."

  "After Dimity was killed, I got away into the hills," Rykermann said. "I was a biologist and I knew some low-tech organic chemistry—nearly all our people were helpless without modern laboratories and industrial plants. I also knew as much as anyone about the great caves, full of bones and phosphates. I was the Resistance's biochemical production manager, overseeing the secret factories where nitrates and phosphates were made into explosives and war-gases.

  "I was also one of the few leaders deemed indispensable enough to get—when possible—geriatric drugs and other sophisticated medical treatment from the Resistance's stolen supplies. Leonie was another."

  She was fortunate to be your wife."

  "We didn't marry until we'd been in the hills for some time... and, I'll say... after the memory of Dimity had receded for me, a little. After I'd stopped hoping quite so hard that every attack we launched would turn out to be a suicide mission. In any case, we hardly had room for such sentimentalism as giving geriatric drugs to a spouse. The few we had went where they were needed most and she got them on her own merits. Not even my decision.

  "She'd been one of my postgraduate biology students, and in addition she had natural gifts with low-tech medical care. That made her important. We'd forgotten we were aliens on this world. Exotic diseases, which our parents and grandparents had controlled so easily with modern medicine and autodocs that we'd forgotten they existed, came raging out, along with a lot of the old human diseases we'd also forgotten and which we'd lost resistance against.

  "We did still have quite a lot of more-or-less old-fashioned farmers, thank God!—that's why we're not all dead—but most of us were twenty-fourth-century, machine-dependent people. Robots did a lot of the farming and other dirty jobs. Hell, apart from never seeing a dead animal, a lot of us ex–city dwellers had never seen recognizable meat! At first people starved from ignorance as much as shortages. Like the caveman, shivering with cold on a ledge of coal, fleeing weaponless from the cave-bear over outcrops of iron ore, lapping water muddy with clay... More of us perished from general softness... humaneness, lack of ruthless decisiveness, not knowing what mattered for immediate survival and what didn't. "Then they got the country and the old estates organized, and there was a supply of food back to the cities again. Some sort of government was got together under kzinti supervision and factories started turning over. Someone persuaded the Kzin that we couldn't pay taxes or slave for them if we were dead of starvation.

  "I was in the wild country by that time and didn't see it. Disease was what we were concerned about in the hills. Some of the old bacteria and viruses had been eliminated in our ancestors before they left Sol system—that's another reason why some of us lived—but it turned out that there were still plenty left. Common colds alone—to which we'd lost quite a lot of resistance—killed far more people than the Kzin killed directly. That's before we start counting the score of the big-league diseases and Wunderland's own contributions. Things were bad enough in the cities, but at least they kept some modern medical facilities functioning. Even there they suddenly had to find puppy dogs and sheep to make something called insulin. Do cataract operations by hand—yes, you may well look queasy. And that was high-tech compared to what we had in the hills. There was no proper birth control once the contraceptive implants' lives ran out, and yet for women pregnancy became a deadly danger again. Leonie—and it was not only her scientific training but also a matter of intuition with her—turned out to be a priceless asset. "She was a good fighter, too. A natural tactician and strategist and handy with a beam rifle. We've both outlived most of our contemporaries. It's not nice, watching your friends die of black rot or old age. Still, we've been happy together. She's an extraordinary woman. Kind to me, kind to all the world. The liberation, when it came, was a savage time, as savage as the invasion in its way, and a lot of people were in a sort of drunkenness of joy and vengeance. But even before the fighting stopped, before the relief operations were set up, she was taking care of stray kittens along with the pups and the orphans."

  Some people do. We had cats at home."

  "I mean kzin kittens! She's always believed in some kind of eventual... reconciliation."

  And you don't?"

  "No! First, it's impossible and suicidal, and second... I cannot forgive."

  "Nor I. And yet... "

  "Yes?"

  "I have heard that you had dealings with the kzinti and survived."

  "That was in the caves. A kzin and I found ourselves in a sort of temporary alliance against the morlocks—the big carnivores that live at the top of the food chain there. We thought we were going to die together. Then, when the other kzinti came, this one got them to sew me up, and they let me go with a branding and another implant in my skin—kzin-sized and a good deal less comfortable than human ones—and my word not to fight against Heroes again."

  "And did you?"

  "Is one's word to a ratcat binding? But there were other ways of helping the human cause by then. I think I kept to the letter of my promise, shall we say, though I exploited some loopholes in it."

  Scrupulous of you."

  "Partly pride. Whatever you say about the ratcats, they keep their word, and I wanted to show that a human could do so, too. Partly Leonie made me. The kzin in question had saved her life, too. Though I think she would have had me keep my word anyway. Partly fear. Break your word to the Kzin and you fare much worse than an ordinary monkey if you fall into their claws subsequently... I was still valuable to the human cause. There was plenty of work to be done in backwoods biochemistry that didn't require one to be a direct fighter.

  "Anyway, my motives were mixed. I'm human, aren't I? Mixed motives are our nature. I think my nerve was starting to go then and I'd had enough of tangling with kzinti. I thought of their tortures." He paused again, steepling his fingers in thought.

  "The Masonic orders kept some of Kipling's poetry alive on Wunderland when it had been banned on Earth for militarism," he said. "We used to recite it in our camps before battle sometimes:

  "Our world is passed away
In wantonness o'erthrown. There is nothing left to-day But steel and fire and stone.

  "Though all we knew depart The old commandments stand: 'In courage keep your heart, In strength lift up your hand!"

  "But I recall another poem of his I found that is not particularly militaristic. It went something like this:

  "What with noise, and fear of death, Waking, and wounds and cold,

  They filled the cup for My Mother's Son Fuller than it could hold.

  "That was the point that my mother's son had reached, too."

  Jocelyn van der Stratt nodded. "We understood that," she said. "Few could have done more than you."

  In any case again," Rykermann went on, "The kzinti weren't fools. They could track me with the implant, and any attempt to remove it would have killed me and anyone helping. Thing called a zzrou in their charming language. Full of poison and explosive. Still, I made myself useful enough to find, rather to my surprise, that I had a political base after the liberation. So here I am."

  "Markham has talked of a just settlement with them," Guthlac said. Jocelyn made a feral noise in her throat. Rykermann shook his head.

  "Justice isn't possible! Recently I've looked at the history of war crimes trials on Earth in ancient times. But war crimes trials for kzinti make no sense. How can you try members of an alien species whose concepts are so different from our own and who thought of us as slaves and prey animals? There was some rough and ready approximation of justice after the liberation, of course: a lot of the most brutal kzin individuals who survived were hunted down and killed—taking a lot of humans with them, often enough. The followers of Ktrodni-Stkaa, who had been especially savage and saw humans as nothing but monkey-meat, in particular. Those who'd treated humans better often got a better shake—often, that is, not always. The human collaborators... that was another matter. They'd done what they'd done knowingly.