by Larry Niven
The hovercraft slowed as traffic thickened on the river, strings of barges, hydrofoils, pleasure craft with their colored sails taut in the stiff southerly breeze. The steel spire of St. Joachim's Cathedral blazed in the light of Alpha, with Beta high in the sky as well. Farther north there were parks along the waterside, with palm groves and frangipani, but the section the hovercraft edged toward was workaday and bustling, sparkling with welding torches as the old wrecked autocranes were replaced with temporary steel frames; in the meantime stevedores sweated to haul rope pulleys. Jonah flicked the butt of his cigarette into the water like a minor meteor undergoing reentry.
"Nice to be affluent," he said cheerfully.
Bigs made an indescribable sound and turned away from the irritating human, lying flat on the decking with his chin extended. Spots waggled his ears in the kzin equivalent of an ironic chuckle.
"Three thousand krona each," he said dryly. "The prospect heats my liver—I truly feel one of Heaven's Admirals. This for thirty diurnal periods of laboring like a slave in a swamp and improvising machinery out of muck and junk. There is fungus growing on my fur. I may never be able to eat fish again."
"Let's collect, then," Jonah answered.
They heaved themselves erect under the burden of their kitbags and shouldered their way to the bows as the big vehicle ran up on a concrete landing ramp and sank to the surface. It was easy enough, although the cargo well was crowded; nobody on Wunderland was going to jostle a kzin, liberation or no. Legal prosecution would be cold comfort after you fell to the ground in several pieces. The surf-noise of voices sounded tinny after the long hours of engine roar.
"Fra Eldasson," Jonah called. The contractor was slipping out of the control cabin and walking up the ramp. "Finagle dammit, wait for us!"
She turned, frowning, then smiled without showing her teeth as she saw the three of them wading through the crowd toward her.
"Problem you haf?" she said brusquely.
"I thought you were going to pay us as soon as we got back to Munchen," Jonah said.
"Certainly," she replied, glancing out of the corner of her eyes at the two towering orange figures behind him. They grinned at her. "I've told everyone”—a hand waved at the others disembarking—“credit chips or account transfers will be made at the opening of bank hours tomorrow. It is Sunday, you know."
Jonah blinked in bewilderment for a moment, then realized what she meant. Wunderland was a very conservative place; about what you would expect from a settlement founded by North European plutocrats in the late twenty-first century. Even now they still observed religious holidays.
"May we eat it if it attempts to snatch away our gain/prey?" Bigs snarled in the Hero's Tongue: in the Menacing Tense, at that.
"Shut up," Jonah whispered; Bigs was uncivilized, even for a kzin. "A lot of people around here understand that language—do you want to start a riot, talking about eating a human?" Far too many had been eaten; compulsory holocasts of kzinti hunting parties chasing down political prisoners had been a staple of the occupation.
Tanjit, I was the quarry for a kzinti hunting party, he reminded himself. Me and Ingrid. He pushed the memory out of his mind; thinking about Ingrid was too painful. Besides, the kzin hunting him had died.
From Eldasson's narrowed eyes and slight smile, he suspected that she had understood. Tanjit. If there's a disturbance, she might really try to stiff us. Kzinti were not popular with the courts, understandably enough—although Jonah's war record would help. It was not everyone who had assassinated a Planetary Governor like Chuut-Riit.
"Look, Fra Eldasson, we're broke until we get paid—we don't even have enough to buy a drink," he said reasonably.
"Ja. Hmmm. Here”—She took him by the arm and lead him to one side, behind a wrecked crane. The thick synthetic bars had frayed out into tangled fiber fragments; heavy beam-rifle hit, from the look of it. Composites did not weather, so it might have been from last year, or from the street-fighting fifty years ago when the kzin landed.
"Here's four hundred in cash," she said. "Don't let any of the others know, or everyone will be about me like grisflies. Meet me at Suuomalisen's Sauna later tonight, and I'll transfer the rest for you and your two ratcats."
"All right."
"Hrraer."
* * *
"I thank Eldasson for the drink and the meat," Spots said, "but the delay is irksome. We will have much to set at rights in our households; our younger siblings are still immature, of shrunken liver and rattlepate."
Bigs wrinkled his upper lip in agreement and stropped his claws on the table. Shavings of tekdar curled back, creamy yellow beneath the darker patina of the surface.
Jonah nodded. They were in one of the quieter rooms of the Sauna, which despite its name was an entertainment center of varied attractions, some shocking even to him; the tamer floor shows were interesting, but of course wasted on non-humans. The kzinti had eaten on their own—no human felt comfortable with a feeding kzin, and the felinoids detested the smell of what men ate—but had returned to wait with him.
"Yeah; I'm anxious to get the credit deposited myself," he said. And you're not bad company for ratcats, but you're not half as pretty as what I have in mind, he thought: it had been a long month in the swamps. "Eldasson had better show up soon."
"Eldasson?" a voice said.
Jonah looked up, slightly surprised. A man who associated with kzinti got used to being ignored, or left to his own thoughts, whichever way you preferred to look at it. The speaker was a thickset man for a Wunderlander, with a blue-jowled stubble of beard and a grubby turban; from one of the little ethnic enclaves that hung on even here in Munchen. The light from the stained-glass overhead lamps flickered across his olive skin.
"She owes you money?" the man went on.
"A fair bit," Jonah replied.
The other man giggled and lifted his drink; the steel bracelets on his wrist tinkled.
"Then you had better have a written contract," he said. "Notarized."
"Notarized?" Jonah said in alarm. "We've got the contracts, right here." He tapped his belt-unit. "With mods for bonuses and overtime."
"A personal recording?" the turbaned man said scornfully. "How long have you been on Wunderland, flatlander?"
Jonah bristled and ran a reflexive hand down his Sol-Belter strip of hair; his great-great-grandmother had been the last of his family to be born on Earth.
"Sorry—I knew by your accent you were Sol-System," the other said, raising a placating hand. "I just wanted to warn you; Eldasson and Suuomalisen are like that”—he held up two fingers, twined about each other—“and they're both crooked as a kzin's hind leg. You'd better be ready to sue for that money."
A gingery scent filled the air; the stranger backed off in alarm, as the two kzin stood and grinned, lines of slaver falling from their thin black lips. The same thought had occurred to Jonah; a kzin was not likely to receive much justice from the Wunderland junta's courts, these days.
"Let's go hunting," he said.
"Hraareow."
Munchen was the biggest city Jonah had ever traveled: over a quarter of a million people. There were many times that in the Belt, but not even Gibraltar Base had as much in one habitat. Of course, much of Earth was one huge city—over eighteen billion, an impossible number—but he had been born to the Belt and the war against the Kzin. The other problem was that it wasn't a habitat at all; it was uncontained, sprawling with the disregard for distances of a thinly settled planet and a people who had been wealthy enough to give most families their own aircar. The open space above still made him a little nervous; he pretended it was the blue dome of a bubbleworld, one of the larger farming ones with a high spin. Luckily, it was unlikely that Eldasson was in the residential neighborhoods, or the slums that had grown up during the occupation. Nor was she at the address Public Info listed as her home, which had turned out to be a townhouse with several loud, extremely xenophobic—or at least anti-kzinti—dogs.
"
Hrunge k'tze hvrafo tui," Bigs said; he stopped, opened his mouth and wet his nose with his tongue. "Tui, tza!"
I think I scent the prey, Jonah translated mentally. He let the length of skeelwood he was carrying up the sleeve of his overall drop until the tip rested on his fingers. The prey is here.
The nightspot they were staking out was a few hundred meters behind them, around a slight curve in the tree-lined road. It was a converted house, and the buildings here stood well apart; hedges lined the outer lawns, making the turf roadway a glimmer of green-black under the glowglobes. The summer night was quiet and dark, the moon and Beta both down and the stars little dimmed by city lights; the smell of dew was stronger than that of men's engines. Feet came walking, several pair. Then he saw them. Eldasson right enough, but dressed in a fancy outfit of black embroidered tunic and ballooning indigo trousers. A dark woman in a tight shipsuit to one side of her, arm in arm, talking and laughing. Another behind them, tall even for a Wunderlander but thick-built, almost a giant, shaggy ashblond hair . . .
"Fra Eldasson," Jonah said, stepping into the pool of light under one of the globes that hung from the treebranches; they were biologicals, hitched into the tree's sap system. "How pleasant to meet you."
He could sense the kzinti spreading out behind him. Not hear them—their padded feet were soundless on the grass—but a whisper of movement, a hint of sour-ginger scent. Kzin anger: it sent the hair on his own backbone to bristling as conditioned reflex said danger. His smile was grim. Danger in truth, but not to him.
Eldasson stopped, blinking at him. "What are you doing here?" she snapped. Her companions looked at Jonah, then recoiled slightly at the sudden looming appearance of Spots and Bigs. The tall blond rumbled a challenge; the two women crouched slightly, spreading to either side.
Finagle, Jonah thought. These aren't flatlanders. I miscalculated. Even after decades of war between Man and Kzin, most Earthers were still culturally conditioned against violence. That had never gone as far on Wunderland, and there had been little law here for humans while the kzinti ruled. Nobody who prospered in those years was likely to be a pacifist. Jonah rapped his belt unit, for emphasis and for a record of what followed.
"We got a little tired of waiting for you to show up with our money, Fra Eldasson," he said calmly. "We'd like it now, if you please."
"You'll get it as soon as the transfer to me clears," she said. The voice was flat and wary; her right hand was behind her back.
Calm settled on Jonah, a comforting familiarity. The feeling of being completely immersed in reality and completely detached at the same time, what the adepts who trained him for war had said was the closest he would ever approach satori. For the first time in a year, the wounds within his mind ceased to itch.
"Not good enough. We want it now."
"No! Now get out of this neighborhood; you're not welcome here."
Bigs spoke; his Wunderlander was more thickly accented than his sibling's and distorted by anger as well:
"Why do you think you can cheat a Hero and live, monkey?"
"Ah, a racial slur," Eldasson said, smiling tightly. "Jilla, von Sydow, remember that." To the kzin: "Go ch'rowl your Patriarch, ratcat."
Bigs screamed and leaped. Everything seemed to move very slowly after that. Jonah dove forward and down, the yawara-stick snapping out into his hand, then sweeping toward Eldasson's wrist as it came out with the chunky shape of a military-grade stunner. She was throwing herself backward; the wood met the synthetic of the weapon instead of flesh, and there was a high karking buzz before the stunner flew off into darkness. Bigs's leap turned from fluid perfection into a ballistic arch, and his body met the earth with a thud that shook through Jonah's body. The human came up coiling off his hands, one long leg pistoning out into Eldasson's stomach.
That hurt. She was wearing impact armor, memory-plastic that stiffened under rapid stress. The heelstrike still sent her back winded and wheezing against the hedge. Spots came on in a hunching four-footed rush, like a giant orange weasel; the blond giant roared and swept out a chopping cut with a Gurkha knife. They circled, eight claws against a knife. The kzin was limping as he turned, dark-red blood running down one columnar thigh, naked pink tail held out rigidly to sweep around as a weapon in itself. The man had been wearing armor too; it showed through the rents in his tunic, glittering where the claws had scraped. Bigs was stirring and muttering, no longer a mute limp pile of orange fur. Only the edge of the beam could have clipped him.
Enough. The woman in the skinsuit came for Jonah, hands stripping two black-plastic rods out of sheaths along her thighs, each baton a meter long. Shockrods; the touch would bring utter pain, possible brain damage or even death in the wrong place. She had delicate Oriental features, lynx-calm, and the movements were unmistakable. Well, Nipponjin were common in the Alpha Centauri system too, out in the Serpent Swarm. He lunged, using the length of arm and leg, the point of his yawara punching out for her throat.
This is uncivilized. Maybe the ARM were right.
The hard wood clacked on plastic as both rods came around, one smashing at the stick, the second driving for his elbow with bone-breaking force. He let the force of the blow help him pivot the stick to block the second rod. Clack. Faint brushing contact against his left arm. Pain! A datum, nothing more. Pain did not hurt; paying attention to it hurt. Snap-kick to the inside of her knee, damage done but she rolled forward with the fall and backflipped, coming up crouching with the rods before her in an X, guard position.
Eldasson was straightening up, whooping for breath. Her hand snapped out a flat black lozenge and clenched; a shimmering appeared in the air before it, and a tooth-gritting whine. Jonah knew what that was; ratchet knife, a wire blade stiffened and set trembling thousands of times a second by a magnetic field. It would slash through tissue and bone as if they were jelly.
Things just became more serious, he thought, feeling his testicles trying to draw themselves up into his abdomen.
He rushed toward the woman with the shockrods, bringing his yawara down in a straight overarm blow. It smacked into the X, and she slid the shockrods down toward his hand. Jonah accepted it, accepted the sudden agony that froze his lungs and sent shimmers of random light across his pupils. His other hand flashed up to her wrists and he bore forward with his full weight and strength. They went over backward; he landed with a knee in her stomach, and the rods came down across her throat. The face beneath him convulsed, the galvanic reaction tossing him aside before she slumped into unconsciousness. Wheezing with pain he shoulder-rolled erect, both arms trembling as he brought them back to guard position.
Eldasson was on her feet and shuffling toward him, the ratchet knife extended. Behind her the big human and Spots were still circling. It could only have been thirty seconds or so. She lunged at him, the blade invisible in the dimness, but he could hear it keening malevolently. Jonah twisted aside desperately, felt something like a hot thread stroke along his side. He tried for a kick and snatched the foot back when the knife moved down, backing and feeling at the cut along his side. Not too deep, he realized with a hot surge of relief; only enough to break the skin. Blood flowed down his flank and soaked into his coverall around the waistband. He retreated a little faster, looking around for something to use.
Then Bigs rose in the shadows by the sidewalk.
"Look behind you," Jonah suggested helpfully, flexing his arms to try and work the feeling back into them. Eldasson snorted contempt and bored in, holding the ratchet knife before her like a ribbon saber and lunging as he skipped away. She was breathing more normally now, and the twin red spots on her cheekbones might have been anger as much as the aftereffects of being gut-kicked. A grunt of triumph as he dodged to the side and went down on the pavement; the ratchet knife went up for a slash, night air peeling back from its buzzing wire edge. There was a yawp of sound; the woman's eyes rolled up in their sockets, and the knife went silent as fingers released it. She crumpled bonelessly to the ground, her head going thock
on the asphalt.
Bigs clipped the stunner to his belt. Spots unlocked his jaws from the knife-man's right shoulder and threw him a dozen paces to crumple bonelessly on the soft turf of a lawn. Jonah swept up the ratchet knife and flipped the hilt in his hand, the molecular-distortion battery making it heavy even in the .61-G field of Wunderland. The contractor's eyes were open; Bigs had taken time to reset the stunner's field to light. That meant that Eldasson could feel and see, although not move the main voluntary muscles. The Sol-Belter drove his heel into her ribs with judiciously calculated force.
"Paytime, Fra Eldasson," he said. "Payback time."
Her lips worked, trying to spit at him. Bigs picked her up by the back of her tunic and shook her at arm's length, as effortlessly as he might have a rag doll. When he was finished he brought her close and smiled in her face, tongue dangling and carnivore breath hot.
"How . . . how much?" she croaked.
"Just what you owe us," Jonah said. "Not one fennig more . . . in money."
* * *
General Buford Early looked a little less out of place in Munchen than he did in his native Sol System, these days; men as black as he were rare on Wunderland, and mostly from the Krio enclaves. They were even rarer in the polyglot genetic stew of Earth. That was not true at the time of his birth. He had been born while there were still distinct human sub-races, a fact he took some care to disguise. Not least by keeping a careful ear for the changes in language, and by muting the inhuman gracefulness learned through the centuries. Other things he hid more deeply; but the power he held from his rank in the UN Space Navy, from his role in the ARM, and from his own force of personality, he did not bother to conceal. Heldja Eldasson looked a little intimidated, sitting across the wide oak desk in the upper offices of the Ritterhaus, once more headquarters of Wunderland's government.