Man-Kzin Wars 9

by Larry Niven

  “No, of course not.” Reassuring. “Listen do me a favor and keep your ears open. If you hear anything, let me know.” I handed him my callcard and he assured me he would call with almost comical solemnity. My work is high drama for the citizens.

  On the dance floor, another woman was looking at me, this one was a red-haired Wunderlander. She held my gaze for five intense seconds before whirling away, sensuous as a cat. Not an invitation but a challenge. “Bet you can’t keep up.”

  I looked for the blonde. She was on her way out, arm in arm with a UNF captain. Maybe she liked Flatlanders. She was a Belter and I watched her long legs with frank appreciation. She caught me looking and gave me a look. “See what you’re missing.”

  I shrugged and went to the edge of the dance floor. The holoshow had become a stormscape, thickened with real fog from a hidden nozzle. The clouds twisted in the virtual wind, forming wraiths for an instant before collapsing back into mist. At the height of the transformation, bolts of lightning formed eyes in the dark folds of their cowls. When the redhead came by, I caught her hand and she pulled me into the maelstrom. Her dancing was precise but uninhibited. I fell into rhythm with the bouncebeat, catching my partner and spinning her back into the crowd. Drowning myself in the deep blue pools of her eyes. I forgot about Miranda—and Holly.

  As the music climaxed, she pulled me to her, pressing herself hard against me in the crush. She gave me the merest whisper of a kiss when the drumbeat crescendoed. Then thunder drowned out the music and strobes split the clouds with artificial lightning. She spun away as the new rhythm came up. By the time the spots cleared from my eyes, she was gone.

  I was disappointed but intrigued. We hadn’t spoken a word but her message was clear. “Catch me if you can.”

  She’d chosen the right man for the job.

  The next day I got down to business. Identification had put together a composite holo of our suspect. Interview reports were trickling in as well. I also did a little personal work on UN time. I called up the Inferno’s sales files for the previous night, cross-referenced for sex and description and found three women who might be my mysterious redhead. I screened their holos and found a match.

  TLU5A169—Suze Vanreuter, 32, unmarried, no dependants, no record. She was a mining engineer, just arrived on Tiamat as a consultant to Corona Exploration. That’s confidential information. A lot of speculators would pay high to learn that a prospecting operation has hired a mining engineer.

  I wasn’t interested in the stock market. The file didn’t mention her catlike grace. The holo didn’t show the sparkle in her eyes. No matter, I knew where I could find the real thing. I closed my eyes and remembered her taut body pressed against me. And the kiss. She put more erotic energy into that barely-there kiss than most women put into an orgasm.

  That thought gave me pause and I thought back to my life with Holly. She’d been more than an enthusiastic bed partner, she’d been my lifemate, my friend. Losing her left an aching void in my soul. Was I now replacing her with Suze? Surely I was too experienced, too jaded to confuse love and lust.

  I decided not. Suze wasn’t better, she was different. I didn’t love her, I didn’t even know her, but I desired her more than I’d ever desired a woman before. Even more than Holly.

  Hunter came in and looked over my shoulder. I should have closed my door. He gestured to Suze’s holo on my screen. “What is this one’s role in the crime?”

  I blanked the screen. “She isn’t a suspect, she’s just a woman I saw at the Inferno while I was gathering information. I called up her file for…” I hesitated “…personal reasons.”

  The kzin nodded knowingly, rippling his ears in amusement. He had dealt with humans, he understood the subtext of the conversation. “You have mated with her.”

  I was taken aback. “No, I haven’t, I am…” I groped for words “…interested in learning if I want to mate with her.”

  The big cat sniffed the air, looking baffled. “How can you not know if you are attracted to a female? Certainly your pheromones speak of desire.”

  Did he have any idea how personal he was being? “I do know I’m attracted to her.”

  “Then you have already learned what you need to know.”

  “Well…It’s not so simple, she also has to…want to mate with me.”

  “And this information is available in her dossier?”

  “No no no. She’s made it clear she’s interested in me. I’m looking at her file to get to know her better.”

  “Would it not be easier to ask questions directly? And if you both desire sex with each other, why have you not already mated?”

  Curiosity might not be killing the cat but it was certainly embarrassing the human. I groped for words, then inspiration struck. “Among humans, sexual negotiations are often like a hunt. The goal is hopefully achieved, but the real attraction is the excitement and challenge of the chase. The harder the pursuit, the more satisfying the feast is.”

  He nodded sagely. “I understand. This is the violent sex you spoke of earlier.”

  “No!” He was making me look like a schitz. “There is no violence involved.”

  “How then do you secure sexual relations with a resisting female?”

  “She isn’t resisting, damnit! She wants to be caught. More than that, she’s actively seeking me as well.”

  “This sounds more like a duel than a hunt.”

  “Yah, maybe that’s a better word.” I was relieved that some understanding had been conveyed. Now maybe we could move on to less personal topics.

  My relief had come too soon. Hunter had another question. “How do you determine the victor in this duel then?”

  I wondered if he knew how disconcerting his persistence was. I watched him for signs of amusement but his face showed only curiosity.

  I answered carefully. “There isn’t a winner or a loser. If we manage to establish a…relationship…on mutually acceptable terms, we both win, insofar as we have gained something pleasant and desirable.”

  The kzin just looked baffled. “A hunt with no hunting, where neither side knows if it is predator or prey. A chase that ends not with feasting but with procreation. A duel with no winner. Why go through these convolutions? If the scent is right, mate.”

  It occurred to me that battle might be a better analogy. I started to sort out how to explain it in those terms but quickly gave it up.

  Hunter was shaking his head dolefully. “I will never understand humans.”

  I was content to let him wonder. My concept of kzinti had been formed by holocubes on Earth. I’d learned they were remorseless alien killing machines intent on turning humanity into slaves and game animals. If anyone had told me then that one day I’d be trying to explain the dynamics of bounce bar dating to one, I would have died laughing.

  I didn’t laugh now. I didn’t want Hunter to feel I was making fun of his lack of understanding. Even so, it was hard to keep my teeth from showing through my smile. I cleared Suze’s file from the screen and brought up my investigation records in its place. I spent some time filling him in on my suspicions and intentions. He listened carefully before speaking.

  “Have you further evidence that a schitz is involved?”

  “None yet, it’s still just a hunch.”

  “I would not dissuade you from your line of inquiry but I now have concrete reasons to suspect a kzin.”

  “What evidence?”

  “My liver councils my head but my head councils my tongue.”

  It took a couple of moments before I figured out that the saying meant he wasn’t going to tell me. I tried another tack. “How long before you know?”

  “Soon enough, today or perhaps tomorrow. Even now First Tracker is stalking our quarry. I will inform you when I have more information.”

  He left to help First Tracker set his snares. Tracker was Hunter-of-Outlaw’s right-hand man—or rather right paw kzin. I find it incredible that a population of fifty thousand can be policed by just two
individuals—particularly when the population is made up of fiercely individualistic carnivores with hair-trigger killer instincts. The contradiction underscored the curious nature of the kzinti social structure. At first glance, it’s barely a step above anarchy. Kzinti are always fighting amongst themselves for wealth, status and honor. They fight individually and in groups, usually violently, often lethally. The only leaven of law is the Hero’s code of honor, a rough-and-ready standard enforced with rough-and-ready justice. Yet despite this, they possess a cultural unity and stability that defies humanity. They had a single language and world government when human culture was nothing more than cave art. What’s more, they have maintained their cohesiveness throughout the formation by colonization and conquest of an interstellar empire. Humanity’s world government is already miserably failing in its attempt to make the transition to space.

  Humans are more civilized than kzinti—any human can tell you that. But Hunter-of-Outlaws and First Tracker had no difficulty maintaining order in their bailiwick. Mostly they investigated the facts in disputes brought before the Conservors. They had lots of time left over to lend me a hand with human crimes.

  Of course their caseload was helped by the fact that the kzin community required little “policing” in the human sense of the word. The Conservors offered guidance on the application of the honor code to new situations based on tradition and common sense. Individuals who violated the code were chastised, ostracized or killed depending on the severity of their transgression. Any other problem was a matter for the involved parties to settle by compromise, duel or Conservor arbitration according to their wishes. Most kzinti crimes were crimes against humans. It had taken a while after the liberation before kzin realized they couldn’t simply kill a human for breaking a verbal contract or failing to show the proper respect. Finally, the Conservors had decreed that loyalty to the Patriarch required survival which required that humans be dealt with under human law. Eventually the majority had come around to that view. Those who didn’t got weeded out sooner or later. Then the problem became humans who cheated kzinti knowing they hadn’t the resources to secure redress. This issue was a much smaller problem for the UN, partly because it still took a brave human to cheat a kzin, but mostly because they just didn’t care.

  They cared a lot about violence against humans though. I had been hoping that a kzin had killed Miranda because I didn’t want to think about a human so depraved. Now I worried that I might get my wish along with the explosive can of political worms it would open. Even ten years after the war, there were those who called for the extermination of the kzinti survivors of the Liberation. This incident would only fan those flames. If my fears about a kzin ring intent on hijacking a hyperdrive proved correct, the whole damn asteroid would go to war.

  Alpha Centauri already had enough problems. I decided to keep working on the schitzies until Hunter gave me something solid. Before I’d hoped to find a kzin because I feared I’d find a schitz. Now I hoped to find a schitz because I feared finding a kzin.

  Niggling at the back of my mind was another fear—the fear that the killer might not be a schitz either. Faced with a crime like this, one’s natural instinct is to push it as far away as possible, to an outsider, to a deviant, to an alien. Easy to do when the victim is innocent and the crime abhorrent. Harder when the crime is clean and abstract. Hardest when you see yourself reflected in the criminal.

  The more unhuman you can make the criminal, the easier it is to deny the common threads that bind our experience together. To feel empathy for a criminal is to admit that it is circumstance as much as virtue that separates the outlaw and the community. Most important, it is to deny ourselves the only socially sanctioned target for the anger and frustration obeisance to the communal laws brings. If we didn’t vilify outlaws, we might envy them for their freedom—the freedom we have traded for property, social position and stability.

  I’d learned during Brandywine what true freedom is. Entering crime is like entering cold water. However daunting the prospect is at first, the exhilaration once you’re immersed in it is indescribable. To make decisions with no pretense at morality grants immense personal power. Ironically, only when you have rendered society’s laws irrelevant can you be truly honest with yourself. Your thoughts become incisive, unfettered by external entanglements. Your mind is free, you can do anything you like, be anything you want. Ultimately, freedom is about power. Ultimately, society has only the power we give it. Refuse the demand to submit to the social norm and, if you are smart enough and fast enough, you can walk like a god on earth. Such freedom is a heady drug indeed.

  That drug comes with a high price. It means sacrificing home, career, family, every anchor and reward society offers us. I wasn’t ready to make that sacrifice when Holly was my home. I thought I’d found a compromise in ARM undercover work—a challenging career, exciting work, unbridled license and a happy family too. I even got paid to do it, it was like living a dream. What I didn’t realize is that freedom really is a drug—a little is never enough and too much is always disastrous. How far I’d slipped didn’t register until I’d lost Holly and then it was too late. I nearly lost my career in the bargain and at the time I wouldn’t have cared. I felt burnt out and directionless. I was an addict forced to confront my addiction. I made a decision and my career became the anchor that held me back from the abyss.

  So far I’d managed to hold on.

  I forced my mind back to the job at hand. Detective work is a matter of sorting through hunches. I glanced over the interview reports from Trist Materials and other sources. They were pretty sparse—Miranda had no family here and she hadn’t been on station long enough for people to get to know her too deeply. I wasn’t really as interested in what the interviewees had said as in the impression they’d made on the interviewer. Even more, I wanted to see if any of them had anything to do with hyperdrive production. None did, nor had any of my investigators red-flagged any as a potential suspect. With no way to narrow down my search for a hyperdrive connection, I concentrated on the schitz angle. There were about five dozen people with severe schitz tendencies on their medical records in the Swarm. I cut that in half by looking only at males on the theory that the killing was a sex crime. By midafternoon I’d eliminated all but eight of them for having the wrong physical description, for not being on Tiamat when the crime was committed or some other disqualification. I ran a detailed movement analysis on the remainder, tying up my hardware for over an hour. Three were eliminated, none were implicated outright. What to do?

  I considered having the remaining five hauled in so I could ask a few questions. I didn’t have to haul them in, my desk performs voice stress analysis perfectly well over the screen, but I prefer to talk to a suspect one on one. It makes the interview more personal, raising the stress level and giving the software something to work on. Besides, I like to see the reactions for myself and come to my own conclusions. The computer isn’t infallible and neither am I. Using both techniques cuts the error rate.

  If it worked I could wrap the case up that afternoon, if it didn’t at least I could eliminate those five and get to work finding a new line of investigation. The risk was tipping off the murderer. If one of the suspects bolted, we’d have our man. Then we’d just have to find him. My instincts warned me that we never would. He’d disappear into the Swarm or the mountains down on Wunderland. Maybe in a year or ten the Provopolizei would catch him sniping politicians in Munchen for the Isolationists. The Isolationists would suit a schitz just fine.

  My instincts were wrong, of course. I was used to Earth with its swarming crowds that could swallow a runner forever. Even on lightly settled Wunderland a fugitive who made it to the outskirts of Munchen could disappear into a thousand kilometres of virgin wilderness. In Tiamat’s sealed environment there was nowhere to run and very few places to hide. Every time the suspect keyed a phone, the call would be monitored. Every time he thumbed a door or bought something, the computers would log it. Every time h
e walked a pedestrian mall, the vidscanners would be looking for him. If he were so foolish as to board a tube car, he’d be delivered right to the Goldskin headquarters’ tube station and left locked in until I felt like coming to collect him. Tiamat was a law enforcement dream and a privacy nightmare. I punched the front desk and had my schitzies rounded up.

  All five came in voluntarily, concerned about the murder, eager to do what they could to help. Ian Vanhoff was the one I had the most hope for. He ran a power loader in the container bays of the down-axis hub, giving him direct access to tunnel nineteen. I was sure I had the case locked up when I read that in his file. He gave me an ironclad alibi. The night Miranda disappeared he’d been working an extra shift in a storage bay on the other side of the asteroid. It hadn’t been run through his personnel card yet because of union rules but his foreman and the rest of the loader crew could verify the times down to the minute. His wife could vouch for his arrival at home.

  Thank you, citizen, you’ve been very helpful.

  Dieter Lorz was at his girlfriend’s apt that evening. She could corroborate that, as could another couple who’d visited with them.

  Thank you, citizen.

  Myro Havchek was upgrading his single-ship license. He’d been at the library studying. Yes, there were people who could testify they’d seen him there.

  Get out of here, citizen. I’ve got a case to solve.

  Two lacked alibis. Keve McCallum claimed to be asleep in his apt. Why hadn’t the computer logged his entry? He didn’t like the computer watching his every move, he had a mechanical lock on his door. Darren Sioban had been relaxing alone in a park on the 1G level. Why didn’t he show as having taken the tube there? He’d walked, he needed the exercise.

  Thank you, citizens.

  The stress analyzer hadn’t twitched, neither had my internal lie detector. I mulled it over. Could a schitz lie well enough to fool the computer and me? In our different ways we both responded to changes in stress. Getting past that would require nerves of ice.