The Man-Kzin Wars 09

by Larry Niven

  Well, there was meat in all this. It seemed the Ka'ashi humans-the Wunderland humans now-were not the ultimate masters of the situation on this world. The Yarooensssn-it was easier to visualize the symbols UNSN-had some claw upon them. And, it seemed, there might be something else beyond that.... That was, no doubt, what restrained the Jocelyn-human at present and why he and his charges were still alive. The UNSN wanted them.

  For what? Slaves? They must know no kzin would live long as a prisoner or live at all as a slave. Interrogation? There were dark stories of monkey tortures and chemicals for any kzin unHeroic enough to be taken alive, but what could sergeants and rankers tell the UNSN that it did not know? Sport in some human Public Hunt? Most of those here were too shot up to run well, though monkeys might like tormenting cripples (well, monkeys who had refused to run in the Hunt had gained nothing from it).

  Hostages? The kzin had occasionally taken human hostages when wishing to compel cooperation or the surrender of ferals but for a Hero, a kit of the Fanged God, the fate of a hostage of his own kind would not deflect his feet from the path of Heroism in dealing with an Enemy. A Hero taken hostage would be expected to die like a Hero.... They must not know of Chuut-Riit's son!

  A darker possibility crossed his mind. Earlier in the war a human female had appeared briefly on television screens promising them roomy cages in the München zoo with a diet of carrots and cabbages to pasture on, should they surrender, but this had apparently been a trick to madden senior officers into losing control and had not been seen for some time. He told himself it was not true. Rather, the UNSN and now Jocelyn had been promising honorable treatment. But which was the lie? Do not think of it. That way leads to madness, to clouded thoughts and inappropriate actions. That had been the subject of another lecture from the Great One: "They learnt early to make us lose control of our emotions. They exploited this ability in the earliest space battles for this system, almost instinctively, before they had seen us. It is a variation of the old story of the kz'eerkti teasing Heroes into frenzy in the forests of Homeworld." That reminded him of something. He beckoned to the kitten.

  "That was a strange thing you did, Vaemar-Riit," he told it.

  "I could think of nothing else, Raargh-Sergeant Hero. The man had to be diverted."

  Kits of this one's age spent their time chasing their own tails and flutterbys in the meadow grass. "You mean"-he felt stunned for a moment-"that was what you planned?"

  "Yes, Raargh-Sergeant Hero. I wished to scream and leap when she drew weapons but I knew I was too little."

  "There was danger. You know she might have shot you where you stood. Or flung the ratchet-knife into you."

  "Yes, Raargh-Sergeant Hero. I knew. But here your life is more important than mine."

  "I see... You do not need your blazon or your ear tattoos, Vaemar-Riit... not for all to see that you are truly Chuut-Riit's son. And here no life is more important than yours. The kzin of Ka'ashi will have need of you." He bent and licked the kitten's head.

  Jorg came forward: "Raargh-Sergeant, your pardon, may I speak?"

  "Yes. Speak on."

  "They demand my life, don't they?"

  "Yes."

  "Perhaps I should go to them. It would save you."

  "You would give your life for us?"

  "I think I am a dead man one way or another."

  "You want your head on a pole like those others?"

  "When you are dead, it hardly matters where your head is."

  "We think differently. Look at Ptrr-Brunurn. He is honored."

  "If I or my kind deserve any Honor, history may honor us."

  "I do not understand."

  "Passions may cool in a generation or so. They will come to see that we collaborators did what we did partly for them. Yes, for them. Without us to intercede between the mass of humans and the Heroes, things would have been worse for them than they were.

  "I do not say this to sound heroic-to sound better than I am. But where would they have been without us to run some sort of government, to arrange some system of food and shelter as poverty and breakdown spread, to police our towns, to keep our farms and mines and factories working as well as we might, yes, to control lawless humans who might have attacked their own kind or brought terrible reprisals for attacking Heroes, to remove litter and maintain orphanages and see the dead were buried, to keep at least a few factories manufacturing the geriatric drugs?"

  "Is that why you became chief of the monkey police? To be useful to your own kind?"

  "This is no time for lying. I did it partly for those reasons but also to protect myself, my mate, my kits. But I am not innocent. I delivered resistance fighters to the Public Hunt. At first with sickness and shame and loathing and because I told myself I was serving a greater good, later more because it was my job and my nerves were deadened-trained monkey indeed. I and my people ate well when each day more starved. We drafted people to your war factories and shipyards and constructions, yes, and to serve in the Kzin fleets that attacked Earth. Later we helped hunt down Earth and UNSN agents and infiltrators. Some of us did a little sabotage of the administration when it was safe, or turned a blind eye to some resistance, at least before the Telepaths' checks began. We walked a tightrope. I am no human hero, like the abbot of this monastery. I am neither innocent nor wicked. I am guilty."

  "The abbot? The Head of the Three Monkey-Gods cult? I have played chesss with him"-that human word was easy to pronounce. Indeed it had entered the Heroes' Tongue. "Why do you say 'human hero'?"

  "He fed and clothed many refugees here. Also, he sheltered human resistance fighters. I half knew. God help me, perhaps I would have handed him over long ago or pointed a Telepath towards him, for he was helping prolong the whole agony, but he was too popular with humans. And too many monks had been too brave. To send him to the Hunt would have meant more feral activity, more sabotage, more throats cut, more hydrofluoric acid thrown over Heroes in city alleyways at night, and more humans killed in reprisals, too, more human land expropriated. My lot was not to steer the ship of human destiny to some fair harbor, just to help keep it more or less afloat."

  "He lied to me, then. I spoke to him at times. I thought he showed his mind to me at chesss, and when we drank bourbon and ice cream together after a long game. Is there no end to monkey trickery?"

  "I did not wholly lie to you. Neither, I think, did he. Once when we spoke he-I mean no insult and nor did he-likened you Raargh-Sergeant to a figure in his holy book, a centurion ...

  "There is much about kzinti I admire-your strength, your honor, your courage. Many humans, even your greatest enemies like Markham, admire you, more perhaps than those who merely tried to endure kzinti rule... As to an end to monkey trickery, I don't know. You have a low opinion of humans."

  "You are omnivores. You are beneath opinion. We acknowledge some monkeys-like your Ptrr-Brunurn-may be entitled to fighters' privileges and honors. I suppose you hated us too. Strange, a few weeks ago nothing in the world would have mattered to me less than how a human felt about me."

  "Does it matter now? Yes, very nearly all of us hated you. For a very few lucky privileged ones perhaps admiration overcame hatred."

  "H'rr. So my Honor is bound up with protecting a monkey who hates me? Will you kill me, monkey?"

  "Did you not just say it did not matter how we felt? I will not lie to you now. How could we love the kzinti? As for killing you, until lately I was not one to think of such things much, save as a dream sometimes... Still, there were other things which some of us looked to," said Jorg. "We collaborators took them as signs of justification for our lives, of hope. Future generations might have invoked the wisdom and statesmanship of Jorg von Thoma. I am not a Markham who fights for humanity like a steel blade.... Sometimes I have felt that Judas also had a necessary part to play and knew exactly what he was doing and the price that he would have to pay....

  "Some of the younger generations of both kinds were cooperating more easily. You know that kzinti
and human computer nerds would talk together. Some had begun to meet regularly. Each kind shared insights with the other, even unintentionally, and there was talk of forming something that might have developed into a club. Oh, I know kzinti computer nerds are despised by normal kzin as freaks and geniuses, but it might have been a start.

  "And some, a very few, human and kzin poets had talked together, too. There was the story of Gunga Din, a dutiful monkey. I know one kzin poet was moved to describe 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' as pedestrian but showing that some monkeys at least had understandable military common sense and could celebrate a demonstration of it."

  "If it comforts you," said Raargh-Sergeant, "know we have gradually come to refer to the most useful and obedient of you by your own monkey rank-titles more, and as sziirrirt-Kz'eerkti less... or some like Markham as Ya-nar Kzinti ..."

  "Sziirrirt-Kz'eerkti... that means 'trained monkeys,' doesn't it? and the other"-he struggled to pronounce it-"the 'defiers of kzin'?'"

  "I know some of our kind were interested in humans. But as you say, they tended to be freaks."

  "Perhaps they were freaks your people needed. I mean no disrespect, but was there not a little of that feeling in you personally? No, sheath your claws, Raargh-Sergeant remember, was not the great Chuut-Riit among those who thought humans were worth systematic study?"

  "That took mainly the form of dissection of their nervous systems, as far as I know. I do not think that is what you monkeys who looked to 'cooperation' had in mind. But there was some monkey history, too. And that brought back memories for me... When I was a kit a house-slave read me a human poem, 'The Ballad of the White Horse.' I like bits of that, though I do not know why:

  Death blazes bright above the cup, And high above the Crown

  Yet in that Dream of battle

  We seem to tread it down ...

  "There were other lines: 'are slavery and starvation flowers/that you should pluck them so ...' Yes, it comes back to me:

  Short time had shaggy Ogier

  to swing his lance in line.

  He knew King Alfred's axe on high, He heard it singing through the sky, He cowered beneath it with a cry. It split him to the spine ..."

  Jorg nodded as the great felinoid's voice trailed off: "I know that poem too:

  ... I know

  The spirit with which you blindly band Has blessed destruction with his hand, But by God's death the stars still stand, And the small apples grow."

  He went on: "We each worship a single all-powerful God, a jealous God. Is that not also a bond between us? That we see something of the same truth behind the universe."

  "That is for Priests and Conservors to say. A Priest of the Dark Pelt once said to me that with your bearded Jova you may have a little glimmering of the truth. Your Bearded God and the Fanged God had their own respective kingdoms, perhaps. Mark you, he was very old and had been drinking bourbon at the time. He thought that though you are irritatingly between herd animals and hunters, yours is a god of the herd animals you partly resemble. You seek this thing lurve instead of Heroes' Respect for you are partial herd creatures.

  "But I know we Heroes are the only pure carnivores to whom the Fanged God has granted the power to leap from star to star. We have encountered no others in hundreds of years of the Eternal Hunt, only a few herbivores or omnivores at best creeping between their own planets... until now. Assuredly the Fanged God decreed that we dominate you omnivores as you dominate herbivores and as herbivores dominate vegetables."

  "With due respect, Raargh-Sergeant, it has not worked out like that." "Who could have foreseen the hyperdrive?"

  "Not I. I might have cut my cloak differently otherwise."

  "Chuut-Riit thought human inventiveness was valuable: dental floss, blow dryers, toilet paper... You are amused?"

  "That is what you valued in our culture?"

  "We would never have thought of such things for ourselves... but many other things: chess, using reaction drives and ramscoop fields as weapons, ice cream, catnip, some of your liquors, h'rr ..."

  "See. Our words have entered the Heroes' Tongue. You pronounce them without thinking. Could we have worked together?"

  "I am Raargh-Sergeant. It is not for me to say."

  "There may be many things it is for you to say now. Hroarh-Captain has not returned."

  "What do you mean, monkey?" Claws to w'tsai.

  "I respectfully ask you to be calm. Perhaps he is not returning. Perhaps misfortune has befallen him. What if there is no one left higher in the chain of command than you?"

  "If so, I will be guided by Honor. And that answers your question. You shall not go to the humans. Honor states that you shall continue to be protected by the Patriarchy. A little while ago I thought of this time as forsaken by the Fanged God. But is that not the point of it: is it not Honor to look at a universe in which your God has forsaken you, and still obey as He commands? What good is fair-weather Honor?"

  "Very well. If you are content, so am I."

  "Raargh-Sergeant!" Lesser-Sergeant's cry took him to the window at a painful bound.

  A human groundcar entered the gates and stopped in the courtyard. It had been an ordinary car such as until lately privileged humans had still occasionally been permitted to use: powered by hydrogen fuel rather than the molecular-distortion batteries which were rather too easily adaptable into bombs. More recently a medium field laser cannon had been mounted on it behind a hemispherical shield. It came to a halt with the cannon pointed at the Sergeants' Mess. Jocelyn crossed the courtyard, alone and on foot as the kzin crouched at their weapons. She is brave, thought Raargh-Sergeant. A worthy enemy. Her head would make an acceptable trophy for the Mess. And then, in one of those dangerous and distracting tangents in which he found his mind had begun to run: So long, so eagerly, did our ancestors search space for worthy enemies!

  "Raargh-Sergeant!"

  "I hear you."

  "You now have twenty minutes. After that time I will use this cannon to destroy this building and every kzin in it as well as the human traitor. I ask you not to force me to do it."

  He made no answer. Among kzin infantry gear were antilaser smoke and dust-cloud generators and mirrors that could, in theory, deflect small lasers for a short time until they boiled or burned away. Nothing that would stop a military laser of that size for an eye blink. Jocelyn turned away after a time and walked back across the courtyard. He saw her addressing a gathering of humans at the gates. With that cannon she can make it all look like a regrettable accident when her UNSN masters arrive, he thought. It will be easily explained by monkey lies as a beam that went astray in the final stages of the battle. No monkey to bear responsibility or be disciplined. At such a range, the degree of spread of the laser will be so small as to tell them nothing, and in any case would they bother to examine it closely? Without that cannon we could hold them off, or at least put up a fight such as they could not disguise, even we pawful of cripples. She is probably expecting me to lead all these out in a last charge into the laser canon, as many Heroes have done lately. That would solve her problems. And mine.

  Without that cannon!

  Think like a monkey.

  There was something forcing itself up from deep in his memory, something sparked by his words with Jorg about monkey poetry, and the monkey studies that Chuut-Riit had begun to put on a systematic basis shortly before his murder. In the old monkey libraries of München there had been other records of Earth, fragmentary and disordered after the burnings and bombings of the initial landings, included primitive moving pictures. One had been shown to his group of NCOs, called Guns at Batasi, showing the way a monkey sergeant thought. Yes, and the situation of that monkey had not been unlike the one he now found himself in ...

  "Lesser-Sergeant! Kzintosh!" It was spat in the battle imperative tense. They snapped to the attention position.

  "Lead us, Raargh-Sergeant!"

  "Lesser-Sergeant, we have still the battle drum?"

  "Yes, Raargh-S
ergeant. The monkeys were so busy with the other trophies they did not take it. In any case, it is in its shrouding."

  Puzzlement in the others' eyes for a moment. Quickly he told them his plan. "Unshroud the drum, and bring it here. All of you! Junior Doctor, Corporals, Old One, kzintosh all! Can you sing?"

  "Sing?"

  "Our battle songs! You know them!"

  "Yes, Raargh-Sergeant!" from every throat.

  "Then sing. Strike the drum! Sing and strike loud! First Corporal, you shall lead!"

  Their voices rang out as though in triumph, though it was actually a bawdy song about the mating habits of manretts. The Sthondat-hide chambers of the drum reverberated as Orderly leapt upon it.

  The humans had not thought of Heroes retreating. The rear of the building was unwatched as Raargh-Sergeant, Lesser-Sergeant, Trainer and Trader-Gunner made their hobbling run from it into what had been the Abbot's apartments. They crossed the cloister and chapel. A human, one of their priest kind, saw them and fled with a cry down a narrow flight of stairs. The kzin had no time or inclination to pursue but dragged a door shut behind the human and wedged it roughly shut. Raargh-Sergeant with his wounded legs and prosthetic arm, and carrying the sidearm, could not scale the rear wall at a bound, and Lesser-Sergeant and Trainer were partly crippled also, but they dragged a large piece of fallen rubble to it to make a step.

  Then they were over the wall and in the outer ditch that circled the monastery. The roaring song from the Mess and the drum's booming had apparently masked any noise, and distracted the humans. They crawled forward.

  "Look!" Lesser-Sergeant gripped his shoulder and hissed.

  Two cars were approaching in the smoky sky. One seemed to be gathering the drifting bodies, which the wind was now blowing beyond the monastery and towards Grossgeister Swamp. The other seemed to be heading for the main gate. They were military vehicles, of course, drab-painted and snouted with weapons. Get into tall grass! Instinct shrieked. There was none. The monastery had been built in meadowland but the human refugees had taken all the vegetation long since to boil or as fuel for their cooking fires. Only hard bare earth and mud remained, almost black, with a scattering of bones and rubbish. Raargh-Sergeant had no time to curse the lack of camouflage gear: against that ground the kzins' orange fur blazed like a flare.