Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - X

by Hal Colebatch

  Once, when I had left the great mass of refugees behind, I saw a kzin aircraft. I was flying very low and cut the engine and landed. I think it saw us but to my surprise it took no notice. Like cats, the kzin seemed often unpredictable. It headed toward the great columns of smoke rising from the city and from farther east. I noticed there were no more of our lasers lighting the smoke clouds. Dimity continued to breathe.

  I reached the monastery towards nightfall.

  I noticed as I approached that the wooden building had been removed from the foot of the metal steeple which we once speculated the alien scout might have taken for a rocket or missile. It stood on bulky strap-on reaction motors and a complex of wide circular craters showed it had already landed and taken off several times. Fueling lines ran to it and it was surrounded by a ring of armed men.

  The gates were closed. There were more monks with strakkakers on the wall. There was already a crowd outside, begging to be let in. Others of them were cooking one of the monks’ zebras on a spit. A single kzin fighting aircraft would have got the lot in one pass.

  I brought the car in low. Strakkakers were raised at us, but none fired. The place looked untouched by the direct effects of war, and I suppose the monks were still hesitant about killing humans. I saw Brother Joachim among those on the wall and shouted my identity to him.

  We landed in the garth. I had checked my own strakkaker and its loading, folded its stock and barrel again and hidden it under my coat. Dimity was carried to the infirmary. The monks had good, modern medical equipment, and as well as autodocs there were brothers who were trained as human doctors, though much of the equipment and resources were already in use. I did not dare kiss or touch her as her head was shaved. They did not let me go with her further.

  A few minutes after she was taken away I was in the abbot’s study. He was staring at a bank of television sets that were alive and receiving.

  Chapter 15

  Comfort, content, delight—

  The ages’ slow-bought gain—

  They shrivelled in a night.

  Only ourselves remain

  —Rudyard Kipling

  There was a view from space of Munchen and the surrounding territory. Large areas of the suburbs were still in flames. To the east continuing fire and explosions as well as beams suggested a human army was still fighting. To the southwest, Dresden was a firestorm. Other screens showed human refugees, some scattering out to the north and the farms of the northwest and northeast without apparent plan or purpose, others, who seemed to be in a more organized column, heading for the hills.

  “That looks another futile stand,” I said, indicating a knot southwest of the crater at Manstein’s Folly. The abbot shook his head. He seemed to take my presence for granted but perhaps that was an effect of extreme weariness.

  “Not altogether. They know what they’re doing. It’s drawing off kzin from the city and the refugees. The humans have done better than I thought. Are still doing better. At this rate it’ll take the kzin weeks or months to destroy all the pockets of resistance. It’s still buying time, at least.”

  “Time for what?” I said, thinking of von Diderachs’s words. I moved behind him and stepped back to get an overall view.

  “At the moment, time is valuable for its own sake. It takes their attention from the slowboats.”

  “They could shoot them down if they wanted to.”

  “It also gives time to get more people into the hills. And…it seems from intercepted transmissions that the Kzin may actually…respect a bit of resistance, somehow.”

  However weary he was, he spoke with some calm authority. And guessing what I had guessed, I felt myself blazing with simultaneous hope and fury.

  “You know a lot, don’t you?”

  “As much as I can learn.”

  “Inside information from military channels?”

  “I’ve been calling in favors lately.”

  I moved my hand to my belt as unobtrusively as possible. With my next words things might get difficult. “You knew for a long time.”

  “Yes. More or less.”

  “Where are these pictures coming from?”

  “A satellite, obviously.” The abbot’s voice implied he didn’t know or care which.

  “The Kzin have destroyed all satellites.”

  “They must have overlooked this one, then.”

  He was too keyed up to feel the tiny prick on the back of his neck from the little collecting-gun’s microscopic, instantly dissolving, sliver of tranquillizer. It seemed the first time in a long while that my professional training and equipment had been of use to me.

  “Because it’s shielded?”

  “How should I know?” He put his hand up to his neck and patted it vaguely. His voice was changing. I hoped that a sudden shock now would get the truth out of him.

  “How should you know?”

  I had the strakkaker out now. I jumped across the desk and grabbed him by the throat, jabbing the muzzle under his nose.

  “Don’t play games with me! You know exactly what I mean!”

  “Brother!…Professor!…Nils?”

  “It’s disguised, isn’t it? And it’s not a satellite so much as a spaceship in orbit?”

  He didn’t try to dissemble.

  “How did you know?”

  “I remembered what you said, the night it all began: ‘We came here independently…It almost bankrupted the Vatican.’ Passage in a big slowboat would have been expensive, but not that expensive. I searched some of the old records when we got them up, and found no mention of your people on any of the slowboat passenger lists. My conclusion was: You came to Wunderland on your own ship.”

  “Yes. We left later than the original slowboats but we came faster. The state of the art had advanced by the time it was launched.”

  “Where did that ship go? Not back to Earth. There would be no justification for sending an empty craft all the way back. So it’s still here. Isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “In a system as full of rubble as this it would be easy enough to cover with rocks and dust so it looks like another planetoid. With a low albedo and a high orbit it would be more or less unnoticeable from the ground among everything else that’s up there. Your ace in the hole in case you really had to run or fight?”

  “Yes.”

  “You made sure it was forgotten.”

  “Yes. Later we did a deal with some of the Families. Records of how we arrived were removed and people forgot. But we argued that in an emergency the ship would be at their disposal or ours—as lifeboat or…or warship. Then time went by and they forgot about it too. Who cared?”

  “You denied it to the defense effort now, when we needed every ship we had to defend our world against alien invaders.”

  “But it was deactivated. There are no weapons aboard. It couldn’t have helped the defense effort.”

  Weapons could have been fitted, and it might have been used for an ambush. Any spaceship is a weapon, properly used. But I let it pass. It would simply have been destroyed without affecting the eventual outcome of events, and at least it was a ship in being now.

  “And now it’s been activated again. These transmissions prove it.”

  “Yes. One of the families helped us, and we have a shuttlecraft.

  “You can put that gun down,” he said, “I’m not going to fight you. We have enough problems already.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Get some of our people away, and some refugees. But it’s a small ship. We can’t take many.”

  “To Earth?”

  “No. Earth is plainly under attack as well. What would be the point? I’m thinking of sending it to We Made It.”

  “Why?”

  “First, to give them warning. Second, because it’s taking some of our eggs out of two threatened baskets. These kzin may not know of We Made It.”

  “No. You must send it to Earth. With Dimity Carmody aboard.”

  “Why?
She is a shapely and clever young lady, and I know that you are in love with her. But your subjective feelings are not important now, Nils. As God is my witness I’m sorry, but to send her would be at the cost of not sending somebody else. It seems to me she is better equipped to survive here than some. If any are to survive the kzin.”

  “At this moment she is in your infirmary, badly injured. Head injured. Isn’t regrowing brain and central nervous tissue the hardest surgical procedure of all?”

  It stopped him for a moment. But he replied:

  “You must see that that makes no better case for her. To take her in that condition with a lot of medical equipment—equipment that’s needed here—would mean leaving even more of the others behind…You cannot think I enjoy making decisions like this?

  “I, of course will not go,” he went on. “These are my flock and I will not abandon them. In any case, I have already told you that it will not go to Earth. Earth warned us, remember. They already know of the kzin attack even if they are not directly experiencing it. And I can tell you we have had no laser messages from Sol System for some time. That strongly suggests their big lasers are busy.” The drug might be making him tell the truth but I could see it was not affecting his willpower.

  “I will stay here if I must, but send her to Earth!” I shouted. “She thinks she has…she knows she has made a mathematical discovery that may have military applications.”

  “Can you believe that?” He was nodding in his chair now. I hoped he was not going to lose consciousness.

  “Do you know of her work?”

  “I’ve heard of it. Who hasn’t?”

  “Given her own chair and research unit at the age of sixteen. Discoverer of Carmody’s Transform. Can’t you take what I say on trust? And if the Kzin get her…”

  “If the Kzin get her she dies. Or perhaps not. Again, as a man, I’m more sorry than I can say, but I believe my duty is clear. I’ve thought of you as a friend and I’ve no wish to hurt you or any man or woman. But a lot of people are going to die. Having more neuronic connections in her brain than average doesn’t morally entitle her to special treatment.”

  “She has a military value. This is not for me or for her. The survival of the human race may depend on it.”

  “Perhaps I should ask her.”

  There was a soft phut, a pneumatic sound. I saw a dart appear in the back of my right hand. I reached to pull it out but it worked quicker and more heavily than the one I had used. The room began to go black. As I fell I saw Brother Peter advancing, with his own collecting gun.

  I came around on a couch in the same room. The daylight slanting through the window told me a night and more had passed. And it was a smoky light, pulsating with distant fire. I felt, stupidly, for my strakkaker. It was gone, of course.

  “How do you feel?” the abbot asked.

  “Rotten.” There were pains everywhere. The locator implant in my arm was doing something. I thought in a disorganized way that it was probably triggered by my generally disordered metabolism.

  “Well, you can be thankful. She’s gone. You convinced me. You and rereading the effects and importance of Carmody’s Transform and her other published work.”

  “To Earth?”

  “To We Made It.”

  “That was a mistake.”

  “Think about it. The Kzin have let the slowboats go so far. They may change their minds and pursue them. If so, they’ll be likely to go after the big ones, which are all going the same way, only a few days apart. A smaller and faster ship on its own may have more chance. Anyway, she’s safely away.

  “The Kzin have been landing heavier warcraft in the last few hours and using heavier weapons,” he went on. “Apparently they’ve had enough play.”

  “I could have gone with her.”

  “I have watched you since you were a child. You have always been one of our human insurance policies, and now you are one of the few of them left alive. That last night you came here to the monastery, after the first feline was seen, I knew a storm was coming. The real reports from the Meteor Guard had been passed on to us for some time. Our culture was soft, complacent, faction-ridden, our people had lost much of their pioneering heritage very quickly, and few had survival skills. You have no faction and you know something of survival. You are even a public figure. You are needed here…as a leader, now.

  “There is another thing,” he went on, meeting my gaze. “The shuttle was full. I had to have twelve people dragged off as it was to accommodate her and her medical equipment. God help me! The rest were families. Should I have broken them up to make room for one more?”

  “Yes, God help you!” Then, loath as I was to ask him anything further, “Can I…see the ship?”

  “Are you sure you want to?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “You can’t see her,” he said, “Even if you should. She’s in coldsleep. But you can see she’s out of this horror. She’s as safe as any can hope to be. And so is whatever’s in her brain. There’s a camera on the ship. You can see she’s getting away.”

  He touched the desk. There was a framed view of Wunderland from space, already shrinking. At one corner of the screen I could see some of the stony plating that had disguised the ship, now shed and tumbling rapidly away. Then we saw something else. I think we both cried out together. The abbot had fallen on his knees and was praying loudly. Something about a cup passing.

  Two points of light on the screen: A red ovoid ship, moving fast, and behind it (or I guessed behind it—such things are almost impossible to judge in space except by comparing relative sizes) a black dot with a yellow halo: a reaction-drive ship, pursuing.

  I saw the hull metal around the camera port beginning to change color, volatilize. The kzin ship was holding a laser on the fleeing vessel. It seems so intent on its attack as not to see the reaction-drive ship closing. Then I saw the reaction-drive ship firing at the Kzin. There was the beginning of an explosion, and the screen went blank.

  “So the Kzin did pursue them. Why did you think they would not?”

  “I hoped.”

  I could have killed him as he knelt there. Bare-handed, I nearly tried, but an overwhelming sense of futility prevented me. Besides, it was not his fault. He had more or less done for Dimity what I had wanted him to do.

  The only ones to blame were the Kzin. And she would have died in sleep without the least knowledge. A better death than many would have on this planet…or on Earth, perhaps. I realized that perhaps taking the chance to send her to We Made It had been the right one: the Kzin would not spare Sol System, and the refugees cramming the big slowboats had probably bought themselves no more than a temporary lease of life that would be spent in coldsleep. Besides, I thought more savagely, killing him in these circumstances was too kind. The little ginger cat jumped suddenly onto his shoulder and looked at me with bright button eyes. It patted at something glittering on his fat cheek which I realized was a tear. He lifted the cat down, stroking it.

  I don’t know how much he read in my face. His voice was calm now.

  “And now I have something else to do. Come with me.”

  I followed him. He climbed a spiral staircase to a room I had not seen before, lined with old books. He threw open a window.

  “You get a better view from here,” he said: “Look!”

  There were the armed monks on the walls. A small door within the large main gates was open and people were entering the garth through it. Outside was a great crowd, more streaming to join it all the time.

  “You can’t take them all,” I said, stating the obvious.

  “That’s hardly the most pressing concern.” He handed me some high-magnification binoculars and gestured to the southwest. “Look toward Munchen.”

  More refugees. The line seemed to reach to the horizon. The fueling depot for the shuttle rocket had been demolished and was a smoking crater. But there was something else. I edited out the drifting smoke and haze. Above the straggling humans was the red ovoi
d of a kzin war-machine.

  “They’re coming.” I felt some malicious satisfaction. “The refugees are drawing them to you.”

  “Yes, but they aren’t attacking the refugees.”

  “I suppose they want to keep their meat fresh.” I saw him flinch.

  “What will you do?” I pressed him. It was sheer viciousness on my part, since there was so obviously nothing to be done. “You can’t flee into the mountains or the swamp. And doesn’t your church disapprove of suicide?”

  “It is a great sin,” he said, but his voice seemed abstracted and far away. “Condemned by solemn anathema from the days of the earliest councils.”

  “So what will you do?”

  His momentary composure was gone again. If he was no longer weeping, there were beads of sweat running down his pasty brows to his face, and his voice shook. “What Pope Leo did.”

  I had no idea what Pope Leo did. I stood silent, staring with loathing at this fat, frightened little man who I had once thought of as a teacher and friend. There was an old paper-knife by one of the books. I reminded myself that was pointless for me to kill him when I doubted I could give him a worse death than the Kzin would, but I hoped that I might live long enough to see him die. He beckoned me back to his study.

  He opened a standing closet and began to pull things from it. I smelled a musty whiff of aged fabric preservative and noted it somewhere even at that moment.

  He pulled the colored fabrics over his head and around his shoulders, dressing himself in stranger clothes than I had seen him wear before, flowing multicolored robes with a vaguely horned-like hat. He groped in the closet again and brought forth a peculiar carved rod with an ornate, curved handle.

  “I told you I am also a bishop,” he said, as though that explained everything.

  “Do you expect God to intervene? He’s hardly been noticeable by his presence so far.”

  “He did when Pope Leo stopped Attila the Hun from sacking Rome.”

  “How did he do that?”

  “He asked him not to.”

  “You intend to ask them?”