The Man-Kzin Wars 06 mw-6

by Donald Kingsbury

  They wandered through the trees together until they came to a meadow of green, streaked with the rushes of a small stream’s swamp, their bulbs open to the sun, storing energy for the long night. Mellow Yellow muttered and kicked at the grass. “Different kind of grass here than on Hssin. When I was your age, I once ate the grass on Hssin. Tastes terrible!”

  “You never! Hshumpfss! Grass. Yeach!”

  “When I was your age, I wasn’t as brave as you are.”

  Monkeyshine loved compliments like that. Grinning, he attacked Mellow Yellow with an immediate grand leap and a punch to the belly. The kzin had to fling him to the grass—gently. It didn’t stop the boy-beast. He rolled to an erect position and was attacking again the instant his feet hit the turf. Mellow Yellow had to take a real fighting crouch to protect himself. They hissed and spat at each other, circling, charging, whacking, kicking. The kzin kept at the sparring longer than he usually did with this slave, but he was angry and it felt good. The boy was bleeding from scratches but still he fought without letup, the grin wide across his furless face.

  Finally Mellow Yellow had had enough, but the monkey hadn’t—so he just stood there and let the boy try to tackle him, shaking the child away with spasms of his leg. “What kind of nonsense is this?” he growled. “Where did you get your warrior’s liver?”

  “Long-Reach said my mother was a warrior. That’s not true, is it?”

  “It shouldn’t be! Females don’t fight well!”

  “Unless you poke them!” said Monkeyshine happily, who had practice at poking.

  “Well, there’s that. Then you have to run like a herd of sthondats are after you!”

  “Long-Reach told me to save you,” said Monkeyshine gravely.

  “My Long-Reach has been a faithful valet. You did well. The Patriarchy is the better for it.”

  ***

  Hwass-Hwasschoaw was no longer angry when they got back. He had another mad scheme of conquest to propose. They would attack and capture a human ship—another long argument that would end in frayed tempers, thought Grraf-Nig. He had no choice but to listen. Hwass was a font of leaps. In the middle of a leap he was so impatient that he would begin a new leap. Sometimes he would jump from the most serious of discussions to a lecture on the latest fashions. While debating a favorite plot (that might cost them their lives if misplanned) he could suddenly begin an arcane discourse broadly covering the finest points of religion—or of sheep ranching on Wunderland. He held the strange belief that God was manifest in the shape of the man-beasts. With his philosophical training Grraf-Nig was wryly sure that Hwass could have proved that God was manifest in the shape of a sheep.

  Slyly Hwass began by mentioning the research on the human nervous system that Grraf-Nig had done as Trainer-of-Slaves, costing the lives of hundreds of experimental animals imported from the Wunderland orphanages. “Among your discoveries there was a nerve gas that will disable a human immediately and then kill him by inhibiting the transmission of neural impulses.”

  “Several of them. But the discovery was not mine. I got the formula from a human disc that came to Wunderland with the first slowboat in the luggage of a beast hunted by the ARM.”

  “It could kill the crew of a ship before they could defend themselves?”

  “In principle. On a larger ship such as the Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch the same weapon, using a slightly slower-acting gas that attacks the kzinti neural system, was not as effective.”

  “You planned that attack,” said Hwass grimly, “and your slaves executed the plan on your instructions. It was successful.”

  “Yes.” Grraf-Nig did not dare reveal that his slaves had also done the planning.

  “So it can be done.”

  “I wouldn’t advise trying it in a larger ship.”

  “Then we’ll attract and ambush a small human ship.”

  This was going to be a long hunt, thought Grraf-Nig. He’d have to track his energetic prey with probing questions that would tire until finally, in the end, Hwass understood the stupidity of his latest scheme. “And if we appear in sartorial splendor at Si-Kish’s manor, he will be delighted to give us ships to ambush some UNSN patrol?”

  “You think of me as an impractical dreamer. But you have also seen my practical talents. There is no lock that can stop my fingers. Did I not reach into a Conundrum Cell and pick you out, a feat that has never before been done in the entire history of W’kkai? I have the old navy in my livery. Why do you think Si-Kish is building his new navy from the ground up? The old navy is full of old kzin loyal to the legitimate Patriarch. A covert ride to the edge of the singularity can be arranged as a routine patrol.”

  “And from there it is only a matter of inviting ourselves to tea in the monkeys’ mess?”

  Hwass grinned with a battle eagerness. The grin did not challenge or offend Grraf-Nig because the eyes of this malevolent kzin were directed inward at some internal vision. “I know a Major Yankee Clandeboye who will be only too willing to bring us our ship and welcome us inside so that we may take it as a prize of war.”

  Chapter 18

  (2438 A.D.)

  Chloe Blumenhandler had joined the Young Woman’s Auxiliary on her seventeenth birthday. A significant sector of Wunderland society believed in early military training for the young and there were dozens of semi-military corps, militias, stellar scouts, rangers, and young guardians. It wasn’t just an underlying unease about the kzin that fostered these groups.

  Wunderland’s culture had been founded on a sense of profound interstellar isolation from its root stock. Then… Warriors descending from the empty black. Subjugation for a people who had left Sol honoring their freedom more than comfort. Loss of land. Confiscation of property relatives, children. Terror. Taxes. Death. Running like a fox in the hunting parks. Soul-breaking work in slave camps with strange imported slave races. And Outsiders selling military might. Wunderland had suffered a fundamental reality shock.

  No parents want their children to be as naive as they once were when they were young. And so the older generation founded quasi-military groups and inducted their children—building hard-won wisdom into institutions that couldn’t forget “Will our children be ready for them?” Were there others out there?

  Chloe was not interested in a military career. She had grown up in a military family without a mother. Her babysitters had been petty officers and sometimes burly marine sergeants. Her fantasies were about a landholder’s castle on Wunderland, or a run-down artist’s studio in a twenty-second-century ranch house on the French Somme. (She’d walked through a virtual seventeenth-century French house and didn’t like the plumbing.)

  In her dreams she fell in love with Wunderland statesmen, or crashlander explorers, or Jinxian scientists or deep space artists. In one of her recurring fantasies she lived with a musician who worked with his instruments in a great house on Plateau at the void edge of Mount Lookitthat overlooking the Long Fall River where it broke out into the tallest waterfall in Known Space. The man with a view.

  Flatlanders both repelled and fascinated her. Earth was so crowded! It was like Tiamat turned into a whole planet! And flatlanders had such odd jobs—like reconstructing ancient Portuguese caravels dredged up from a watery Pacific grave. Her best flatlander fantasy was filled with the laughing Romans and Italians of a rosy Naples where the sun was always setting on a golden bay; she was one of a saucy menagerie of teen-aged girls held prisoner by a gay old Neapolitan classics scholar who was a sexual athlete and wit. The fantasy had lasted her a delicious week until she got bored with Italian men and moved on to the Chinese Imperial Court.

  Whatever her dreams of civilian splendor, in real life she fell madly in love with military men. And so it was natural that at the age of seventeen, in total revolt against her father’s military life, she should declare her independence by joining a military organization so that she could pursue her one-sided love affair with a handsome older officer of the UNSN.

  Chloe was devastated when Major Ya
nkee Clandeboye was transferred to Barnard’s Starbase, something that Admiral Jenkins had demanded and something that fitted nicely into one of General Fry’s more nefarious schemes. She sent her major letters, five in all. He replied once. That short note was signed with the scrawl, “Fondly, Yankee.” It was all the encouragement she needed.

  In a state of euphoria, with his short note tucked in her bra, she just happened to notice a recruiting ad. The Young Woman’s Auxiliary needed twenty girls who were looking for a disciplined and rewarding experience at Barnard’s Starbase. The “discipline” didn’t appeal to her but the “rewarding experience” did. Being only seventeen, she needed her father’s permission. The rear admiral objected and fought a losing war for three days before surrendering. He signed her away for a two-year contract and groaned.

  Chloe, of course, had not told her father about her intentions toward the forty-nine-year-old Yankee, knowing that there were limits to Admiral Blumenhandler’s permissiveness. To her father Yankee was just another one of those men upon whom she practiced her flirtation skills. The rear admiral, used to command, and respecting Yankee as a competent officer and gentleman, sent the major an almost pleading letter to take his daughter under his wing and see that no harm befell her. In effect the plea amounted to an order.

  So at Barnard’s Starbase it was very easy for her to find a need for counseling and to fall into small mishaps for which she needed extracting. Often they ate in the cafeteria together, a bleak humongous hut of “temporary” wartime construction. She told him horror stories of the matron who was her first officer and he sneaked her into some of the private beer parties, where she flirted outrageously with all of the men. That made him feel safe.

  Barnard’s Starbase was not Known Space’s best posting. It was built hastily in secret during the war as a staging area for raids into kzinti space, at a time when a major worry was that the Outsiders might go on and sell hyperdrive technology to the Patriarchy for a handsome sum. The UNSN needed safe bases about which the kzinti knew nothing.

  It was built on a rocky Mars-sized world glaciated with ices and dark hydrocarbons, the moon of an inhospitable planet of about eight Earth masses. The Base was conveniently at the edge of the Barnard’s Star system, far enough inside Barnard’s singularity to be immune from surprise hyperdrive attack, but close enough to it so that UNSN ships could quickly reach hyperspace launching distance. Inward there were two gas giants for an ample supply of hydrogen and helium, and a thin belt of rubble for heavier metals. The original intent had been to make Barnard’s Starbase an independent manufacturing center but other priorities and the end of the war left the manufacturing centers incomplete. Postwar budget restraints meant that temporary facilities were still in use, even the original construction bunkers.

  Yankee’s main job, again, was training. General Fry had singled out Barnard’s Star as a nucleus for fomenting dissatisfaction with ARM policies. Without a kzinti threat there was little purpose in Barnard’s Starbase. Men need a purpose. Where better to do some long-range thinking than on a base which had been designed with a possible hyperdrive kzinti threat in mind? Here men were liable to find their purpose in preparing for a hyperarmed Patriarchy.

  Yankee found his charge to be an often pleasant diversion. She listened to his worries and never hesitated to give an off-the-wall opinion on any subject. That irritated him but it often forced him to explain strategic concepts about which he was not himself clear. He began giving her research assignments, even requisitioning some of her official on-the-job time. He was delighted to find that she had inherited her father’s sense of strategic thoroughness. What she had inherited from her mother, he did not know. Her mother had been killed swinging an axe at a kzin, and she certainly seemed to have that kind of aggressiveness.

  The crisis in their relationship came unexpectedly. They were in the Starbase’s honor library—their infocomps were not powerful enough to do the particularly difficult and tedious weapons tradeoff analysis that Yankee needed.

  He was in a bad mood, which killed her enthusiasm. She only meant to tease him enough until he laughed so that they could get back to work. It was easier to be gay and irreverent than bored.

  Glibly she began to mutate the weapons discussion into free-flowing nonsense. It eventually blossomed into a free-for-all about ancient Japanese pornography. She was doing her brush strokes in the air and faking geisha flirtations about which she knew nothing—and he was richly enjoying himself pretending to be a sake-saturated teen-aged samurai on his first groping visit to the pillow world of a light-gravity planet. At least he was giggling like a teenager. She was so fascinated—she’d never seen him so wonderfully foolish—that she couldn’t stop provoking him. It was true, she thought, that being alone in a public place brings out the devil in men. The devil keeps whispering that someone may walk in and that makes it impossible not to be silly. Even she felt silly and dangerously bold.

  Though the eight terminal booths were empty, the library was heavily used—but mostly accessed from distant terminals. They were alone and they were likely to remain alone. For no sane reason they decided to rob the library of Kakabuni’s Instructive Erotica, though robbing was entirely unnecessary in a library that took less than a second to copy a chip into a personal infocomp. Their crazy mood told them that they had to own the Starbase’s only copy of Kakabuni. To get at it they needed to unlock and pull out one of the hundred sliding ROM doors—something that only the librarian was supposed to do. They managed to slide out the chip-rack but their chip was near the floor and required a chip-puller that they didn’t have so they made love on the floor with their clothes on instead. He even put his arm around her when he walked her back up through the maze to her dorm.

  The next day she woke up anxiously because she’d never done something so stupid in her life! On the floor! In her clothes! She faked sickness and did not report for work. All morning on the day after the next day she kept telling herself that her mother was brave enough to swing an axe at a kzin (even though her bravery had killed her). She found a way to wander up and down a corridor that Yankee would have to pass through, carrying a package so that she could pretend to be delivering messages.

  She saw him coming before he saw her and tried to duck behind a support pillar but it was too thin. The package stuck out. She looked the other way in panic.

  “Hi, Chloe,” he said.

  “Oh. You.” She tried to bat her eyes but they froze. “I’ve been sick.” Sick? She saw him seeing her wan and in crutches and desperately cast around for a more appropriate bright conversation. Yankee, damn him, wasn’t saying anything. Food was all she could think of. Even Murphy couldn’t get you in trouble with food. “Lunch?”

  He seemed almost relieved. “Thirteen-hundred at the Cal?”

  “Sure. I’ll bring my teeth.” She was outraged at herself for saying such a stupid thing but it was already out of her mouth. I’ll bring my teeth! She cringed. And she was outraged at the way he had crawled back inside his straitlaced self. She wanted to shout Kakabuni! at his hastily retreating back but she didn’t dare. Growing up wasn’t pleasant. She’d never had any trouble with sex when she was thirteen.

  Lunch was terrible. They had ground guinea-pig steak and veggies that had been programmed with the wrong spice. They had nothing to talk about. They had come to that horrible time in their relationship when they had already said everything that they had to say to each other. Finagle’s Eyes, they were talking about the color of the veggies!

  “You know what this parsnip looks like? It looks like one of those old brass naval cannons of the seventeenth century.”

  That saved them. It reminded her of weapons tradeoff analysis. Soon they were comfortable old friends again discussing the impact that hyperdrive ships might have on a millennia-old kzinti military tradition. That culture was based on a bedrock of subluminal assumptions. Supply depots were dispersed. Manufacturing was dispersed. A son could be executed for not carrying out the orders issued
to his father—unto the fourth generation. Local conquest commanders had wide authority. The military kzin valued truth so highly because that was the only way of keeping messages from degrading over the centuries.

  Chloe became resigned to a Yankee stuck back in his old shell. She knew she was never going to get him to talk about love, not in the Caf. He was more like a cozy confrere than a lover. Her damn father had ordered him to take care of her and that’s what that damn Yankee was doing. Maybe he didn’t even like her. Here she had gone to all the damn trouble of chasing down a damn romantic hero of the war and he’d turned out to be just another awkward damn adolescent like the damned boys she’d been trying to avoid.

  Two days later everything was back to normal and she could even tease him without having him go stiff on her.

  “Kakabuni” remained a taboo word. They never talked about sex. Worse, they never even talked about relationships. Having an admiral for a father was like having an anchor chained to her neck. She was six and a half light-years from Alpha Centauri and she was still winched to her father.

  Four days later he actually put his arm around her and gave her a quick squeeze.

  Two weeks later “fellow-prisoner” Jinny of the Young Woman’s Auxiliary invited her on a double date. Her date turned out to be intellectually challenged so she left Jinny to manage both their dates and found her own double date. It was fun to wit-lash young men who were in such good shape physically that their brains recovered in minutes—not like a certain senile old man of her acquaintance.

  A month later she missed her period. She thought about that for a few days and then went to the pharmacy for a pregnancy patch. It was positive. She returned for a more expensive test in the pharmacy’s autodoc booth. It too was positive, predicting a completely normal pregnancy. That meant she could ask the autodoc for a nonprescription abortion right then. It was between her and the autodoc. No one had to know.