The Man-Kzin Wars 06 mw-6

by Donald Kingsbury

  The collectors of the memorabilia for this holocaust museum had been thorough. But Hwass (cynically wearing a black ribbon of contrition so that he could gain admittance) noticed one item that he was sure the humans didn’t understand. It was labeled as a little three-dimensional puzzle used by Trainer-of-Slaves to amuse himself while long experiments were in progress. But it wasn’t that at all. Hwass-Hwasschoaw, whose patrilinial ancestry was rooted in W’kkai, recognized it as a wooden puzzle built by the Conundrum Priests. But it was much more than that to a Patriarch’s Eye. It was a covert datastore.

  Hwass shopped around in the back streets of München until he found a real Conundrum Puzzle in a curiosity and antique shop. He repolished it to duplicate the sheen of the other, then returned to the museum and switched the two. The locks on the display cases were human-primitive. From the engraved markings on the original he traced it to a now legless kzin who had originally given the device to Trainer-of-Slaves as a present of respect for a problem solved.

  The crippled warrior restored obsolete kzin electronic devices for a living—hundreds of thousands of them were still in circulation. He had no trouble in reading the datastore. The solution to the puzzle itself was the codekey. The database proved to be an encyclopedic compendium of the neurochemistry of the human nervous system bought by the lives of slaves and orphans. Interestingly, among the poisons were micro-dose gases that would stop a human nervous system instantly but not affect a kzin at all.

  From his malfunctioning gravitic chair, Trainer’s friend shared a wealth of stories about his polyvalent comrade and thus it was revealed to Hwass that this Trainer-of-Slaves had excellent credentials in gravitic maintenance and, even though he was not qualified as an engineer, he was more knowledgeable of gravitic mathematics than his duties required.

  The extensive discussion provided fresh meat for Hwass’s speculative chewing. Trainer knew chemistry and gravitics—an unusual technical versatility. Difficult problems never seemed to bother him. Where another ship’s captain might be baffled by hyperdrive mechanics, Trainer would be inclined, at the least, to try to restore the function of a misbehaving hypershunt motor. Had he succeeded?

  Did he have the courage? That was always important. Grraf-Hromfi’s youngest son had survived the battle and told stories of how Trainer-of-Slaves had served as an instructor for Grraf-Hromfi’s kits and had even killed several of them for lack of discipline. Hwass knew that challenging and killing a kit of one’s dominant superior was a very dangerous act—if the kit wasn’t victorious the father might be so incensed as to challenge the instructor himself. And no Hero had ever survived a fight with Grraf-Hromfi. Yes, the courage was there—even if he had a reputation as a “grass-eater.”

  It was not probable, but it was possible for such a strange warrior to have challenged the captain of the Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch to a duel—but to win? Had he had an ally among the crew to bring him out of hibernation? Two against a full crew? Preposterous! But the ship had escaped Alpha Centauri. How? It was useless to speculate.

  This Trainer-of-Slaves was a Hssin barbarian, recruited when Chuut-Riit’s armada passed through R’hshssira on the last leap of the crusade to Wunderland. If he had achieved command of the Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch, where would he have taken it? To nearby Hssin. He could not have abandoned the Bitch and proceeded in the Shark—the human scout had been badly damaged when captured and subsequent analysis had shown that it had only been captured because its drive unit was malfunctioning. On-board repair was impossible, even on a superbly equipped repair vessel like the Bitch.

  Hwass had much time to review and check out and correct his projection of events. By human reckoning Hssin had been sacked in 2422. The Bitch could not have arrived before 2423. That had been thirteen human years ago. Trainer-of-Slaves would have required elaborate facilities at Hssin to reoutfit and re-equip the Bitch for another interstellar hop. The Bitch was not a vessel that could flit from star to star. Could it have pushed on from the ruins of Hssin? Not likely. Was it still there?

  Such a delicate decision. Hwass could sniff out no way to reach Hssin without being taken there by Major Clandeboye on a human ship. Clandeboye would not help him unless he received some kind of cooperation in return.

  So he would have to be a valuable assistant to Clandeboye. Then he’d have to destroy the human expedition and proceed to Kzin on his own. Perhaps they’d never notice if he smuggled aboard a tiny capsule of Trainer’s neural gas.

  Could he succeed? He thought about it for only a moment. A Hero might attempt such a coup—but if there was anything to be learned from the debacle at Wunderland it was that a warrior would not win without the aid of the Bearded God. To claim God’s favor in a contest with the favored humans required the greatest of Kdaptist skills. No simple prayer, no wordy supplication would be enough.

  This hunt was in fresh theological territory! Perhaps a sacrifice? But the most ferocious fighting animal of Kzin delivered on a golden altar would not impress this God when His precious humans were at stake. A Kdaptist must ceaselessly strive to understand God’s needs and His view of the universe. Certainly a sacrifice had to involve great fighting bravery and skill—but it must also be appropriate. Would a wise herbivore proffer a gift of rare grasses to the Patriarch!

  What was it that God seemed to desire most?

  Chapter 8

  (2436 A.D.)

  The lord called Grraf-Nig was out for a solitary hunt on his W’kkai estate, naked in his fur, seeking a little relaxation while he tried to make order out of what he was up against one of his more adventurous wives, in estrus, had been following him at a discreet distance, watching his every move with cool yellow eyes, patiently waiting for his attentions. She was the daughter of his most powerful W’kkai sponsor, Si-Kish the High Admiral. He let her tag along, but ignored her, his alertness elsewhere. The pungent scent of a zianya distracted him into a marvelous chase up along the rocky crests, where he trapped the animal in a ravine, killing the beast after one sudden leap while it tried to escape. His blood lust satiated, he had time to climb the talus to the top of his world.

  His year and a half on W’kkai had been exhilarating, yet Grraf-Nig felt deceived.

  He had been swept into direct contact with the best philosophers and tool makers. He merely had to grope aloud with a question and a work force appeared with tools to master the answer. He was flown across continents to hunt with W’kkai’s best mathematicians who gloriously tore apart the fabric of the universe while they tore apart their meat by the light of all-night campfires. He had been flown to space often, where a whole shielded laboratory was being built to study hyperspace. He had been given females and honors and servants to manage his estate—but he had been deceived.

  At first the sashes and clasps and pinned-on ruffles of W’kkai clothing had intrigued him—now they felt like a straitjacket. He was often close to killing his valet. His servants were spies. His closest associates were guardians. If his co-workers spoke the truth they also told him only what the W’kkai patriarchs wished him to know.

  The brilliantly slow sunset was worth watching from high on these ridges, though it hardly seemed natural standing here on broken shale, exposed to the sky, without pressure walls to protect him, without even the walls of a ravine to hold in the air. He had lived in space too long ever to adjust to a planet. But the orange play of light on the scudding clouds was a worthy battleground for his imagination. Aboriginal plains kzinti could have evolved their protective coloring hunting among such clouds.

  The sunset would bring night. He shuddered. The weather here was harder to get used to than his overstocked harem.

  W’kkai was too close to its K2 sun. Tidal friction had slowed W’kkai’s rotation until there were only two seasons-seventy-nine hours of light and seventy-nine hours of night. The huge sun broiled them by day, steaming them in their fur, sapping the energy of the hunt. After dark a cloud cover formed and the rains came, dumping heat into the atmosphere, retarding nightt
ime cooling. Even so there was a skin of ice on the puddles at dawn and, sometimes, snow.

  Orange W’kkaisun seemed to have twice the diameter of Alpha Centauri as seen from Wunderland, but it was not nearly as immense to behold or as red as R’hshssira, the brown dwarf that had warmed Grraf-Nig when he was the young Trainer-of-Slaves. Why, amidst the luxury of his own estate, should he suddenly be nostalgic for the tiny hellworld of Hssin, for the hunting caves of its Jotok Run where he had taken refuge as a nameless hunted kit?

  A furless tail lashed.

  He was aware of his wife’s overpowering attraction, the beauty of her black fingers clinging to the red rock below him, but instead of responding, he threw to her the remains of the zianya. She must have been hungry for she ripped into it with a coy glance of thanks. He did not move to her; he talked to her instead, coaxing her closer, knowing she would not comprehend an iota of what he said. Because he did not have to make her understand, he omitted the inflected growls and hisses, the spices and smells of language, hearing them only in his mind’s ear. He rambled, dredging up memories he would not have bared before a male.

  How to tell her that out there alone with only slaves he had dreamed of his own harem of lovelies? He had dreamed of her. He lapsed into the simple patois of gestures and grunts that a female could respond to. “Love you. Lust your fingers,” was all he could manage within her vocabulary. It was not enough. His wives were a burden; he had been without females too long in the wretched emptiness of space ever to get used to the attention they required.

  One almost had to be raised as the spoiled son of a W’kkai lord to have the energy to deal with female demands.

  Her response to his musings, obviously cast in her direction, came as a tilt of the head and a raunchy smell from the erect fur of her haunches. A female always understood something but never what was meant. Absently he turned his great orange-yellow head out over the ridge and the bushes that clung there in the wind. He flapped his fan-like ears. He spoke forcefully to the God of Air and Wind and Smell. “With my own eyes I found the W’kkai star in the firmament and dreamed, wishing myself here.” His voice chose for its message the Mocking Tense with which the Hero’s Tongue derided victims.

  First he had escaped from Hssin to Wunderland, joining the armada of Chuut-Riit. Then after the disastrous Battle of Wunderland, after slinking back to Hssin at less than light speed with a captured UNSN scout, he had scrabbled through its war-smashed ruins for twelve years, talking to ghosts—like he talked to his wives now— repairing the damaged hyperdrive unit, despairing of a second chance to escape gloomy R’hshssira, rejoicing when the opportunity came. Rejoicing when he reached fabled W’kkai.

  That which is possessed is never as important as that which is lacking. Had it always been thus? In brief reverie he flashed on a peaceful hunt through the forested caves and domes of Hssin’s Jotok Run, a day he could never have again. He remembered his passion to escape the claustrophobic horror that had once been his birth world, but the memory no longer carried passion. It only reminded him of a smelly UNSN cabin stuffed with slaves and a cantankerous hypershunt motor and the irony of picking W’kkai as his destination. Nothing was easy.

  The trouble he had taken to get himself transferred from that prison to this prison!

  The warrior Grraf-Nig was more and more certain that the Lords of W’kkai were holding him as a guest prisoner—and didn’t want him to know about it. He had tested his hypothesis delicately, in ways too subtle for his enemies to detect. Grraf-Nig had expected better—he had expected adulation, exposed throats even—but he had arrived here with mere slaves, with Jotoki and human slaves, not a warrior among them, and so he should have anticipated an unpleasant fate. No matter that he had also arrived with an extraordinary prize of his; one of the humans’ fearsome spacedrives that shunted their ships through hyperspace.

  It wasn’t enough. To the W’kkaikzin he was Trainer-of-Slaves, though they did not dare call him that to his face. His claws unsheathed. He suspected that once his stolen machine had been duplicated by W’kkai’s naturalists and engineers, he would be no more than chopped zianya liver, an outcast kzin who had wandered into the wrong hunting park. W’kkai was not his territory. He had no territory.

  Hssin was irretrievably gone.

  His mouth twitched to show his fangs while he recalled how Hssin had been destroyed by the raping monkeys. He owed it to those tree apes to blacken the stars with a fleet that would convert every human warren into a hunting park. But his plan was going awry.

  The W’kkai thought it would be their fleet breaking the blockade and humbling mankind. Well and good—but they also thought it would be their grand fleet which would humble the present Patriarch. They thought a reinvigorated Patriarchy would rise from the grass of W’kkai. They were dreaming a monopoly of hyperdrive power. He could taste it; he could smell it. They were dreaming of dominance for W’kkai. There it was, a raw wound: the need to dominate, coexistent with the necessity to submit—the bane of all kzinti.

  Ships of the Patriarch had been collecting taxes from the W’kkaisun system for longer than humankind had known the nature of their sky and—for as long—the nobles of W’kkai had resented parting with those taxes. Why should the culturally superior world of W’kkai deliver their wealth to degenerate Father Eaters! Now W’kkai physicists were examining the only hyperdrive ship in kzinti claws. For the first time in their history they had the longer swipe. And Grraf-Nig was in an ideal position to catch glimpses of their response. They were recklessly planning to build a fleet of warships that the Patriarch’s admirals couldn’t match. They were, in fact, building it.

  Self deceivers! Only once during the war had they fought! Their local naval collision with a light reconnaissance of fighting ships from Procyon during the Humiliation had been bloated into an Epic Saga. The haughty W’kkai Warriors of this minor skirmish, led by Si-Kish, remembered themselves as the Heroes who had saved W’kkai. In fact they were losers. Had they witnessed the Battle of Wunderland they would not be so eager to throw together their fleet of hyperdrive ships and defy the infamous MacDonald-Rishshi Peace Treaty without even bothering to inform the Patriarch whose very life might be sacrificed by their impetuousness.

  In a universe of sub-light warships, it was the duty of a Conquest Commander to act independently, of necessity informing the Patriarch of his heroic deeds only later through laggard time; at sub-light speeds the Patriarch could not be involved in time-sensitive decisions. But Grraf-Nig was uneasy about applying such a doctrine to a battlespace dominated by hypercraft. It seemed to him that warfare had been redefined.

  Grraf-Nig found himself strangely loyal to the Patriarch. Why? He didn’t know. On the tiny frontier backworld of Hssin, the Patriarch had been a distant myth. Nobody on Hssin had ever shown their throats to the Patriarchy, they’d hardly been touched by taxes, and they had been blind to its splendor until the fleet of Chuut-Riit had passed through on the way to Wunderland. Still, distant as Kzin had always been, a lowly slave-trainer could not help but envisage W’kkai ambition as the most terrible of treasons.

  The whole problem had been a moot point as long as it was impossible to build a hyperdrive shunt Grraf-Nig and his Jotoki technicians had had a hard enough time just repairing and tuning the one motor they had captured. He had assumed that it would take generations of secret probing to learn how to build a copy. He had pictured a covert network of kzin worlds dedicated to the task, secretly running physicists back and forth through the human blockade in a united conspiracy directed by the Patriarch.

  The brilliance of the W’kkai mathematicians had never occurred to Grraf-Nig, who knew mathematics but who was, himself, hardly more than a glorified gravity-polarizer mechanic. That they had been able to construct a working theory of hyperspace within a few years had astonished him. That engineers were already building hypershunt test beds was a stunning breakthrough.

  Yet the advance was uneven. Grraf-Nig saw the superluminal technical march bein
g grafted onto a conservative military strategy that had evolved over millennia against a constant background of subluminal transport—faster-than-light claws attached to slower-than-light minds. The Patriarch had to be told what was going on—and soon. Otherwise, another disaster.

  Grraf-Nig had begun to toy with the details of an escape to Kzinhome. Yes, I will; no, I won’t. Visions of sharing zianya with the Patriarch alternated with his knowledge of W’kkai dungeons. Like any nascent schemer he dreaded the hard decisions.

  How he would recapture the Shark or commandeer one of the newer experimental ships he didn’t know, so he began by dreaming about his piloting skills. It was probable that he would find the relevant kzin navigation tools denied him—but he had investigated the human navigational paradigm on Hssin before rebuilding Lieutenant Argamentine’s unnatural mind to the female-norm. Early on he had understood the necessity of deciphering the human navigation computer in order to steer his captured vessel to a friendly port. He doubted that his W’kkai allies were aware of the function of a certain coded box, so focused were they on the nature of the hyperdrive shunt.

  The monkeys referred to W’kkai’s trifling K2-star by catalog numbers BD+50° 1725, or HDraper-88230, or Gliese-380. Under those names there had been neither helpful listings of less-than-giant planets nor listings of nearby interstellar hazards—the humans were woefully ignorant about kzinspace. He’d had to fly blind on his near approach to W’kkaisun. But the human system was usable. He had already deduced that they cataloged Kzinsun as 61 Ursa Majoris. Its hyperspace coordinates were in the box and would be accurate enough even if the fine details were missing.