The Man-Kzin Wars 06 mw-6

by Donald Kingsbury

  “Then came the peace and the pre-kzin mindset all snapped back like so much memory-plastic. How easy was it to end slavery? How easy was it to end the Hundred Year War? How easy was it to shift from the paradigm of Biblical authority to the paradigm of science? Right now the ARM is bigger than any man. The precepts of the ARM were already built into the hidden assumptions of billions of people long before we met the kzin. Shoot every member of ARM today and it would just recreate itself out of the ashes and go about its business of wiping war from the minds of men. At Starbase we have no traditions. We can travel light and fast. The next war is going to be the worst war that mankind has ever faced and we need men who can think about it unencumbered.”

  At the end of the seminar, Lucas Fry turned to Yankee. “Let’s sneak out. I’d like nothing better than to play some silly game with Nora. Is there a place where I can buy her a present? Is there anything she likes?”

  Yankee took the general over to a friend’s house whose daughter fashioned jewelry as a hobby. “I can’t think of a thing she likes better than baubles.”

  Lucas picked out a chain platinum headband inlaid with translucent stones from Starbase’s primary “Do you think she’ll like it?”

  “She probably won’t wear it. She likes to squirrel away pretty things where she can dig them up and cherish them.”

  “Well, women don’t wear their jewelry anyway. They keep all that stuff in boxes to show their girlfriends.” Fry bought the headband from the young girl with praise for her workmanship.

  “That was a good speech you gave us,” said Yankee, gliding along the hallway and up the steel stairs. “You make a fine mentor.”

  “That’s what Grand Viziers are for,” muttered the general gruffly. “It’s going to be touch and go. My biggest worry is Earth.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re a flatlander. You figure it out. I can’t. But we have to bring the mass of them over to our side. They’ve forgotten that there ever was a war. Amnesia. Only the colonies are preparing. But once the kzinti have the factories to churn out hypershunt motors they will be converging on every human world from all over the Patriarchy. Flatlander’s will have to take the brunt of the attack. Earth is the place with the population. It’s where we’ll have to find our cannon-fodder.”

  “Do you think the ARM is behind the shut down of public debate?”

  “Yah. For security reasons. Old habit. They can’t resist any ploy if it might stop people from thinking about war. Maybe you flatlanders were buying too many toy guns. Made them nervous. They reacted. But it is not just the ARM. It’s the flatlanders themselves. The ARM’S message has been assimilated into the culture. War is no longer even part of the idiom. Kzinti warriors have to be marching across Kansas before… Oh what the hell. I want to see Nora’s face when she sees my bauble. You don’t think she is afraid of me, do you?”

  Yankee had all of his cousin’s old papers. Her high school yearbooks. Her many attempts at writing a diary. Her letters to her father. School essays. Drawings. Her photo album. Her anguished, and finally angry, exchange with the war department. Her patriotic newspaper essays that had been franchised for a while on the net. Drafts of the many love letters she wrote to boys. First drafts of letters never sent—embarrassments that she had neglected to erase. One of them was a mushy love letter to a certain Yankee Clandeboye. He had never known, from the way she treated him, that she had ever had a crush on him.

  For no particular reason he began to organize this unsorted mess. They all hoped Nora might recover her use of words. She would never recover her memories. She would always be the woman who had grown up half-slave, half-kzinrett, born on Hssin. Those were the only memories she had. But maybe, if she ever learned to read and talk again, she might find an interest in these papers by the woman she once had been—like a granddaughter reading the musty diary of a heroic grandmother never known.

  Gradually, as Yankee got involved, as memories reminded him of the charmer who had twiddled compulsively with the same strand of hair for all the years he had known her, he started to write about her. He had a need to organize his thoughts. He wanted other people to understand this heroine. It was a story that grew on him, built around her Hssin diaries.

  Something that stirred inside him told him it was a way to talk to the flatlander soul.

  He began his story while Lieutenant Nora Argamentine was living as a kzinrett in the dungeon of a wrecked interstellar fortress beside a dying star, totally dependent upon a kzin who thought that it was natural for females to tend their males and young without the aid of an independent self—a kzin who had the biotechnical power, and the inclination, to take away her mind so that she might more easily fit into his world and serve him.

  He built the legend around her hidden diary. With each brain operation it became more urgent for her to record what she was afraid she was losing forever. Yankee lovingly annotated her entries with her pictures, with other things she had written, with his own personal memories. On far-off Hssin she’d wistfully remember a boy she had once known on Earth. Yankee would include her love letter to that boy in a fourteen-year-olds grammar.

  Very carefully he wove through the book the saga of the hypershunt motor that had been captured at the Battle of Wunderland, and of Lieutenant Argamentine’s valiant attempts to destroy it. An almost successful mutiny. The killing of the kzinti crew. The last kzin. The recapture. The attempts to kill the last kzin. The failure. Her captor could have killed her but he found her useful, yet too dangerous to be left with a mind. Human heroes aren’t defined by their wins. A hero is the one who remains committed to principles. A hero is the one who never stops trying and never stops learning.

  Why did Lieutenant Nora Argamentine try so hard to destroy that motor when she could have played it cool, been non-threatening, and perhaps saved her mind? Yankee hinted to his reader the chilling truth. Wasn’t it because she could see what a reverse-engineered hypershunt would mean to the Patriarchy? Had she seen the assembly lines on a hundred kzin worlds building a new and greater fleet to launch against Sol with all the resources of the Patriarchy behind it?

  Her father died in the desperate days of the Ceres conflagration defending mankind against a fleet that had nearly brought the race to slavery—yet the enemy was only an adventurer’s ragtag knock-together manned by border barbarians whose resource base depended wholly upon the factories of Wunderland. In the next war light-lag would not protect Sol from a sluggish giant driven to anger by swarms of alien gnats who had penetrated its territory with impunity on wings that might be plucked out and turned to better use by warriors who knew what to do with such speeded reflexes.

  To teach his readers how to see the man-kzin conflict with the eyes of Nora Argamentine, that was Yankee’s hope.

  It was a mad project and he worked too hard on it, after his other duties. Sometimes a man just had to stop and go home.

  “You’re late,” said Chloe, happy to see him. She was breast-feeding Val on the bed.

  “Let me hold her.”

  “After she’s fed, dummy.”

  “How was your day?”

  “I was with Nora and the kids again. Her boys are too much for me. They still don’t know what to make of a woman who can talk. Yankee,” she added sadly, “Nora isn’t getting better.”

  “She might be.” He stripped and crawled under the covers. All he wanted was to close his eyes and sink his head deep into the pillow, but you lose wives you ignore. He reached a hand out and switched on the bedroom flatscreen, fiddling with it until it networked with his office.

  He called up a picture that was an obvious brain scan.

  “One of Dr. Hunker’s pictures. See the white fuzz inside that gray area? Let me contrast it in false color.” He made adjustments. “Those are baby neurons.”

  “She’s going to talk?”

  “Hunker doesn’t know, but he’s giving it his best shot. It will be easier with the girls because of their age.”

  “Didn�
��t that kzin grow a lot of neurons in her head?”

  “He sure did. He killed a lot, too. And played around with dendritic growth like a yo-yo. Hunker has studied Trainer-of-Slaves’ notes. He’s incorporating bits and pieces of kzin biotechnology into some of his tailor-made boosterspices.”

  “Is he going to make one for you so I can have a nice giggling teen-aged husband?”

  “No. But I’m having to convince him to cook up a reverse boosterspice that I can sneak into your soup. Imagine the glories of waking up to a mature wife.”

  “You’ve never liked boosterspice.”

  “Scares me out of my mind,” said Yankee. “Especially after I’ve talked to Hunker for a while about some of the weird side-effects that can turn up on his rich old playboy experimental animals. Is he experimenting on Nora?”

  “Yah. He’s being careful. Taking it easy. A little at a time. It’s a tough problem. Construction and repair don’t go by the same rules. It is easier to build something that can’t be repaired than it is to build something that can be repaired. Humans weren’t built to be repaired. We come in disposable containers. If we last long enough to see our children live through the terrible teens, our genes don’t see the need to have us repaired.”

  “My poor daddy is ready for the junkyard?”

  “You haven’t made it out of your teens yet, kid. You might still need him.”

  “Men think of women as disposable containers,” said Chloe.

  “Aw, no we don’t. Neither of you.” And he kissed the baby. “I didn’t design humans as disposable containers; God did. Suppose you build a gizmo and it wears out and you have to repair it. What do you do? If it is cheaper to build a new one than repair the old one, you throw away your gizmo. If it is cheaper to repair than replace, you repair it. Humans are too hard to repair so they have evolved in disposable format. They are cheap to make.”

  “Just wave your magic wand and say ‘Kakabuni,’ right?” She grinned.

  “Not that easy.” He took Val and laid her on his chest where she burbled. “You’ve got to factor in the price of raising the little buggers until they are smart enough to leave home. There’s a bit of expense in that. You and I don’t know the worst of it yet. But still, for the price of one boosterspice shot I can raise ten teen-agers. At prices like that, what is a company going to do? They can hire a freshly weaned kid out of university, train him and bury the worn-out worker, or they can buy a boosterspice shot for the older worker. At present prices they have no choice.”

  “Is it costing so much to help Nora?”

  “It’s costing a fortune. The Institute of Knowledge is footing the bill. They expect to learn a lot. The information in our genes tells us how to build a brain and not a damn thing about repairing it because the genetic cost of carrying that information is greater than the going price for a teen-ager, you being the exception.”

  “You’re into buying me now!”

  “I’m into going to sleep—and your little darling just pissed on me.”

  At breakfast, refreshed, Yankee continued the discussion. He printed out pictures of Nora’s brain with enlargements of critical segments. Breakfast consisted of guinea pig jerky and flapjacks with cultured maple syrup.

  “When Hunker tells me about brain repair my eyes go into orbit. That’s why nature knows enough not to try. Brain cells die and that’s it. We can’t activate the genes that grow the brain because Nora already has a brain. We can’t just plant the right kind of baby neurons where Nora’s language processor used to be because they have to grow and connect—and the rules for connecting them in an adult are different than the rules for connecting them in a baby. Hunker has to design the language-repair protocols and program it into the spice. Boosterspice already has in it half the information of the whole human genome. That’s a lot.”

  “Yankee, I’m miserable. You don’t come home at night. Don’t you love me anymore?”

  “Just another one of my damn projects.”

  “What project!?! A new one? You don’t tell me anything! Is it a military secret?”

  “No. I’m too involved in this Nora thing.”

  “So am I! You’re supposed to talk to me. We’re supposed to work together.”

  “I thought you might be jealous. It’s almost like I’m caught up in an old love.”

  “Oh Yankee!”

  “You’re right.” He took her into the bedroom and transferred the whole Nora file in from his work computer. “Read it. It’ll take all day. Tell me what you think.”

  ***

  Chloe had rabbit stew for dinner and he came home early. She was happy again. “It’s marvelous. Now what are you going to do with it? They’ll kill you. You never change.”

  “I’ll publish it.”

  “On Earth? Over the ARM’S dead body you will! You’ll never get clearance!”

  “Did I lay it on that thick? I guess I did. I want to tell Nora’s story but I’m also trying to use her as a political club.”

  “Neither of the Noras would mind and you know it!”

  “I’m not going to try for clearance. I’m not going to publish with a copyright. I’m going to make a thousand chip copies and hide them under rocks. Then I’m going to smuggle one copy to Earth and put it on the nets, free. The ARM can try to suppress the story. It will be like running around with cans of antiweed, spraying the dandelions.”

  Chloe was wide-eyed. “Defy them? They haven’t let anyone write about Nora. They’ll kill you. They’ll put you in the brig. They’ll send you to the other side of Kzin. They’ll feed you tranquilizers!” What would become of Val? Happiness was supposed to last—at least forever. But it never did.

  “Nah.”

  “Nah!” she imitated angrily. “Why do I fall in love with brave men? I’m such a damn fool.”

  “Chloe. Listen carefully to an old man’s advice. I’ve been in trouble since I was a kid. Suppressive people have one great weakness. They believe their own stories. They hint darkly at what they’ll do to you when you speak up. Naive people believe them and get afraid and, being afraid, suppress themselves. The suppressors are stupid enough to think that they are doing the suppressing. I don’t have anything to worry about from the ARM. I just have to dodge all those poor people who are afraid.”

  “Will General Fry protect you?”

  “Sure. And so will your father. The best people are my friends. You’d be surprised at how large that group has become.”

  “After reading your story I feel brave myself. But I’m still one of those people who are afraid.”

  “It’s okay. For us it’ll be a roller-coaster ride for a few years. Outrage and argument. No big deal. Then in about five years some poor schmuck will come back bloodied by an encounter with a kzinti hyperdrive warship. Then instantly, I’ll be a prophet and a hero. But it is Nora they’ll remember. When the going gets rough and the starscape is full of grinning kzinti and monkey-life looks hopeless, they’ll remember the Heroic Myth of Lieutenant Nora Argamentine, and they’ll say, ‘What the hell, if Nora could do a little kzin bashing, so can I.’ ”

  “Why do you call it a myth? Yankee, she did all of those things.”

  “Chloe. Look at me. All writers are liars. I’m a political writer. Humanity hasn’t been at war for hundreds of years. We’re short of heroes. We’re going to need them. So I took this story and built Nora up larger than life. I wrapped it around all the old archetypes. That’s a myth. My only excuse is that I was inspired. Stories just grow. This one will become humongous. I’m sorry to do it to my sweet Nora but I couldn’t help myself. Guys in cans being shot at by kzinti hypershunt dreadnoughts will take courage from this crazy story. That’s what myth is all about.”

  TROJAN CAT

  Mark O. Martin

  Gregory Benford

  Chapter One

  Relativistic Hunt

  We were only a half light-year out from Sol, but it took me a moment to find that bright point among so many other suns. Somehow it looked no
warmer than the other brilliant dots. Probably my imagination.

  The more immediate target was obvious. A finger pointed straight at it—a radiant finger a hundred thousand klicks long.

  The slowboat was huge, even by the standards of the kzin troopship that had carried me across four light-years. Distant stars glittered coldly around the image-enhanced shape on the viewscreen. It was a relief to see a starscape not distorted and squashed by relativity, fore and aft. The Doppler shift was almost imperceptible at 10 percent of lightspeed.

  I felt an itching sensation all over my body, but I didn’t look away from the viewscreen to scratch. My little singleship had to be within their sensor range by now, and the crew had no way to determine if I was friend or foe.

  I waited to die. I almost hoped for it.

  No such luck, of course. Not that I was special. All of humanity was running out of luck.

  Goosing the viewscreen magnification up a bit, I studied the target across two hundred kilometers of deep space. The slowboat was a fat cylinder sitting on the hard white blaze of a fusion drive. Even with the jury-rigged gravitic polarizer, it had taken me an hour to maneuver far around the deadly plume of the drive wash pushing the R. P. Feynman back to Sol. Getting anywhere near that column of fusion fire would have fried me thoroughly.

  Reaction drives can be effective weapons, in direct proportion to their power. Such was the kzinti lesson, according to rumors overheard from the singed-tailed ratcats returning from at least two attempts on Sol. I frowned. If only…