Man-Kzin Wars XIV

by Larry Niven

His finger tightened, then he slumped and put the gun back in his pocket.

  “I can’t do it,” he said savagely.

  “That’s good,” the abbot said in relief.

  “Good for you, you mean,” von Höhenheim snarled at him.

  “Oh, who can tell? I meant good for you. It would be dreadful to have to kill someone. You would find it very difficult to live with, don’t you think? Your conscience would give you terrible pain. It already has, you know. I can feel it. But I wouldn’t feel anything, I’d be dead. Or perhaps if the stories are true, I would be somewhere else.”

  Von Höhenheim glared at him.

  “Some people don’t seem to have a conscience,” the abbot explained, “but I think we all do really. It’s just that if you keep telling it to shut up, it sort of loses specificity. You know there is something wrong, something badly wrong, but you don’t know exactly what, so it just becomes a general wretchedness. And some poor souls live their lives that way. I think that is what hell is. And they never find out.” He shuddered, as a man glimpsing horror beyond words.

  “Conscience! You babble of nothingness,” von Höhenheim snarled.

  “That’s just silly,” the abbot told him calmly. “It’s one of the most important things in this wide and amazing universe. What was it stopped you killing me? Such a small thing, so easy to do, but you couldn’t do it.”

  “I still could, and if you annoy me with this prattle, maybe I will,” von Höhenheim shouted at him.

  “Perhaps,” the abbot answered prosaically, as if it hardly mattered. “I think though that you should ask yourself why this so-called prattle is making you angry. Do you think it could be because it’s about a great truth you have been trying to deny for a long time?”

  “Nonsense,” von Höhenheim replied.

  “Would you like another glass of our liqueur, do you think?” the abbot asked him. “It’s good for the nerves, and I think you could do with some.”

  Von Höhenheim made a noise of intense frustration, and the abbot took this as agreement and bustled out. In a moment he returned with an ancient bottle and a single glass. He glugged a healthy quantity into the glass and gave it to von Höhenheim, who was feeling bemused.

  “Try that. But don’t drink it too fast, you need to savor it. We went to a lot of trouble to get it right.”

  Von Höhenheim sipped the drink and looked at anything but the abbot. The fire was burning nicely. Outside, birds were singing.

  “Tell me about it,” the abbot said softly. “It often helps, you know.”

  “Since I cannot leave you alive, I suppose I might as well,” von Höhenheim said savagely.

  And he told the abbot, “I was a leader of the KzinDiener during the Occupation.

  “Servants of the kzin?” the abbot asked.

  “Yes. We all but worshipped them. And they betrayed us in the end.”

  “Well, false gods do that, you know. It’s one of their distinguishing characteristics,” the abbot pointed out reasonably. “How did they betray you?”

  “They lost the war. They were so strong and so beautiful. But they lost.”

  “I see,” the abbot said thoughtfully. “Yes, I can see that might look like betrayal. But I daresay they did their best, you know. The mistake was to worship them; they are only animals, after all. Intelligent, of course, and with souls, no doubt. Much like us, really. I suppose the trouble is that some people need to see their gods in a very human form. A failure of imagination or perhaps perception, don’t you think?”

  “What do you mean?” von Höhenheim asked suspiciously.

  “Well, the trouble is, God is everywhere you look. So some people don’t see Him at all. I find that amazing, but it’s true. I suppose it’s a bit like an ant not seeing a human being, they’re just too big. The world is so full of wonders, and some poor folk just don’t notice. And we all have a hunger for the transcendent, and if we don’t notice it because it’s everywhere, then when you see a kzin prowling, and you’ve never seen a kzin before, I suppose for those poor people, it must look as if it’s what they’ve been searching for all their lives. A tragic mistake, of course, but one can see how it could be made.”

  “I don’t understand you,” von Höhenheim said angrily.

  “I think you do, you know. I think you saw the power and the glory and fell for what is really only a poor copy of the real thing. Of course, we are all made in the image of God, all of us, man and kzin alike. But it’s only an image, not the real thing.”

  Von Höhenheim’s mind was in turmoil. Yes, he did understand, at least in part.

  “Where are all those wonders you speak of?” he asked.

  “Oh, my. Haven’t you ever seen a green shoot coming out of the bare brown soil? Isn’t that a miracle? Aren’t you a miracle? That anything should live among this vast whirligig of suns is a miracle, as is the whirligig of suns itself. Just think of the galaxy turning in endless patience, for time beyond comprehension. We can talk glibly of billions of years, but the mind cannot grasp the wonder and the majesty of it. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork. And if that were all it would be enough; but it is only a tiny part. There is life, there is intelligence. And you and I are a tiny part of that, and we can see something of the wonder. Well, I can. Maybe you can’t.”

  Von Höhenheim was silent. Something inside him was crying. The abbot was right, there was wonder in the universe, as well as atoms and galaxies. And he had never really seen it. Not until he had been shown.

  “There was a man named Saul,” the abbot said, looking at him in sympathy. “Very like you, I should guess. Full of certainty. Very competent, very clear in his thinking, but perhaps lacking in humor. And he took the road to Damascus in pursuit of what he thought was important work: making life difficult for people he hated, actually. And on the way, God spoke to him. That sort of conjures up a deep voice speaking out of heaven, but I find that hard to believe. God speaks to me quite often, but he doesn’t do it with sound waves, you know. It’s more commonly a sort of internal niggle, a sort of spiritual itch that you just have to scratch. And sometimes it’s a great warmth that spreads right through me. So I’m inclined to think it was likely that Saul had something similar. He had a sudden insight into what he was doing, and it shocked him so much he went blind for a while. Or so the story goes. It’s a very easy story to believe, for me.”

  “What happened to him?” von Höhenheim asked.

  “He became someone else. He changed his name because of that. All of a sudden he figured out how to be happy. God asked him why he kept trying to turn against the road, to do the wrong thing, and he suddenly realized he didn’t have to. What had looked the easy road became very hard, and what had looked impossibly hard was suddenly inevitable. So, he became another man. A man who could be happy.”

  “I wish I could become another man,” von Höhenheim said, and the abbot heard the yearning in his voice.

  “Well, I daresay getting to the point where you want to and see that it’s possible is the hard bit,” the abbot said cheerfully.

  Two days later von Höhenheim waved goodbye to the abbot and set out to the east, walking steadily. In his last words, he had asked humbly if the abbot would report his presence.

  “No. I am not answerable to man, but to my God and my conscience,” the abbot had replied firmly.

  Having waved back, the abbot went into his study and thought. “My goodness, I think I’ve performed a miracle,” he said aloud. “Well, You did it, of course, but You let me be the one it was done through.”

  He fell to his knees and looked up to a heaven he saw quite clearly.

  “Oh, thank you so much, God,” he said happily. “That was such a wonderful birthday present.”

  A long time later . . .

  A solitary figure came slowly through the dark. He was obviously footsore, the gatekeeper thought. Come a long way, and lucky to make it without bumping into a tigrepard.

  “Can I
rest here the night,” the stranger asked. “I can pay. I have gold.”

  “We got more o’ the stuff than we know what t’ do with, but yes, you can stay the night. If you want to stay longer, you’ll have to talk to the judge an’ see if he agrees.”

  “You have a judge?”

  “Sure we got a judge, an’ a damn good one, too. We even got us a sheriff an’ a couple o’ deputies. An’ you sure better not piss them off, I’m telling ya.”

  The stranger was passed inside and directed to Ma Jones, who had a spare room and was prepared to serve food to people who looked reasonably clean. With the traffic they were getting these days, she might find she was running a hotel before long, the gatekeeper thought.

  In the morning, the stranger appeared before the judge. No, the Judge, the stranger told himself. The judge was sitting at ease in a chair, smoking something that could pass for a cigar most places. He looked up.

  “G’day, stranger. Where you from?”

  “Ah, I come from Munchen,” the stranger told him.

  The judge looked at him hard. “Seems to me I’ve seen you before, stranger. Long time ago. And more recently in one of they noospapies we been getting’ since we got enough hard money t’ pay for them. Frivolity I call it, but some o’ the folk around here like it, an’ it’s a free world these days. Thank the Lord.”

  The stranger looked at him carefully.

  The judge looked hard right back at him.

  “Seems t’me you might just be on the lam from what some folks call justice,” the judge told him.

  “And you too, Herr Jorg von Thoma,” the stranger said.

  The judge laughed. “That one won’t fly, Senator von Höhenheim. Sure, that was my name once. And sure, I came out here and lived alone in the valley for years. And one day another man came, and then another with his wife, and we lived reasonably close, for help if we needed it, mostly against the lesslocks.”

  “Some sort of species related to the Morlocks?” von Höhenheim hazarded.

  “Yep. Shorter, more like chimps or baboons, and not too afraid of the light. And varying from being a damn nuisance to a lot worse, until recently when we done taught them a lesson not to mess with man. Or kzin. But now I’m sort of in charge here. Working in the government meant I was good at organizin’ and arguin’, and these people needed a lot of that. So now, hereabouts, I am the government. And the Law. These are my people; I stand by them, and they’ll stand by me. They understand loyalty. So do the kzin we have here. Anyone calls for me to come back to Munchen and face the music is wasting his time. I won’t go, and even if I wanted to, nobody here would let me.”

  Von Höhenheim digested this. “You were a better man than me,” he admitted. “You cooperated with the kzin, but you didn’t shame yourself. I adored them. I worshipped power, and they seemed to have all of it. It didn’t work of course, I understand them better now. They could work with you, thinking of you as a servant. I claimed to be a servant of the kzin, one of the KzinDiener, but they knew better. I admired them, hell, I worshipped them for their power, their strength; I saw them as living gods, I wanted to abase myself before them, to adore them. Me they despised. Perhaps the ancient gods of man always despised those who would abase themselves. Those who respect power and do not respect themselves.”

  There was a silence.

  “And how do you feel about it now?” the judge asked, shaking the ash off his cigar.

  Von Höhenheim thought. “I do not know. I am running from an attempted kidnapping and also a murder charge, but the man I killed was slime. Worse than me. But I was slime too. I have nothing to be proud of. I have sought power all my life, and now I see that it was nothing. Once I met a kzin telepath who had been living in a sunken wreck with skeletons. He was grateful for life, and when the moment came, he did his duty. He was nobody important, he will be forgotten, but he did his duty. And because of that, some of the evil I had planned was undone.

  “I had a long time to think while I was walking here, it has taken me months, and on the way I stayed at the abbey and talked to Abbot Boniface. He showed me what I was, all in gentle words, most of them questions about why I’d done what I did. I told him everything, it just poured out of me. Ashes in the mouth. There was nothing of value in any of it, and it leaves nothing in the end but contempt for the self. The little triumphs seem so empty, the setbacks devoid of meaning. I thought it was all about me, but it wasn’t. I am nothing. Plaited reeds, blown through by the wind.”

  “Yeah. That’s all any of us are in the end. It’s good ya found it out. Most don’t.”

  There was another long silence.

  “I will go further east. Maybe one day I shall find somewhere I can stay, somewhere where they won’t know me. Then I shall have only to live with myself. That will be hard enough.”

  “Better stay here, stranger. Now you figured out what you are, ya can do some work and earn a place here. I’m gettin’ old. These folk here are the usual sort. You know, mainly stupid and silly, but also mainly decent and kind. They need the help o’ someone with more sense, someone who is prepared to take care o’ them and stop them doin’ dumb things . . . yes, and to love them. I could do with a rest. We may need a new judge East o’ the Ranges before too long.”

  There was another long silence. “You would appoint a murderer, a cheat, a liar, someone who has abased himself before the kzin?”

  “That’s politics, ain’t it? And maybe want of courage and self-respect, which can be learned. You’re here because they caught ya out. Don’t get caught out again. An’ the best way is t’ be middlin’ honest. Ya know, the most successful cultures on old Earth were those that engaged with the rest of the world and learned all the other culture’s best ideas. Now we got the kzin t’ learn from. And they tell the truth. And hey, it works better than you’d think. Your big nemesis was a kzin. Vaemar-Riit. Seen it in the noospapies. Learn off him. That’s the smart way.”

  “If I could start again . . .” there was dreadful pain in von Höhenheim’s voice, and a kind of yearning.

  “It’s a big, big country, stranger. An entire planet. Room for people who see they screwed up and wish they’d done things differently.”

  “I spent my entire life screwing up,” von Höhenheim said bitterly. “I worshipped power. It took a lot of walking and thinking and talking to the abbot to see it, but What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”

  “Then now would be a good time to change strategies, don’t ya think?” the judge asked cheerfully. “I had time t’ think too. Long ago. And I got a gift of mercy I never deserved. From a kzin warrior, a sergeant, with a sense of honor as deep as a well. And kindness from Vaemar-Riit, no less. So I owe those guys, I owe them big time. And ya know what they say? They say, pass it down the line.”

  “You are a great man, judge. I could never fill your shoes. But I will do all that I can. If you will give me mercy, then I will try to earn it.”

  “Right, then ya can find Ruat, our sheriff, an’ ya can tell him I have appointed ya his clerk, so ya can learn the ropes. Have to get ya one o’ them starry things made up for ya to wear. Ya might have t’ explain what a clerk is. He’s a kzin, an’ still learnin’ stuff.”

  The former senator swallowed. Well, the kzin could only eat him, he thought. He squared his shoulders. This was a new life, a promise, something shiny and wonderful had this moment opened up before him. He had been forced to look into his own soul, and seen the wretched smallness of it. He was more than lucky to have a second chance, and he wasn’t going to mess this one up. If a kzin sergeant could have a sense of honor as deep as a well, then a man could at least try to equal that.

  This story is respectfully dedicated to the descendants of the Bounty survivors on Norfolk Island.

  THE UNSN CARRIER YORKTOWN had been an experiment which might not be repeated.

  A colony ramship, started by Skyhook Enterprises and completed just before the end of the First War, had been
fitted with hyperdrive and gravity compensators at the beginning of the Second, making it the largest warship humans had ever constructed. Much of its interior was hangar space for singleships sheathed in superconductor, which allowed them to go through a ramfield without scrambling the pilot’s nerve impulses. The carrier’s mission had been to: a) accelerate to relativistic speed, b) reach the kzin home system in hyperdrive, c) reenter normal space, d) wreak multiple kinds of havoc with the Yorktown’s drive and field as they decelerated through the system, e) drop off its singleships to destroy targets of opportunity, f) take a close turn around the star with the field stirring up flares, g) pick up the singleships, h) accelerate out of the system, and i) go into hyperdrive as soon as they were out of the singularity.

  They had gotten as far as “a.” Then they were spotted by the battleship, which had possibly been scouting ahead for an invasion; the kzinti were a little less reckless than they’d been in the First War.

  Captain Persoff had the Yorktown take evasive action as the kzin fired weapons and began matching course, but a ramship is not built to dodge. Over the intercom, Monstro, as the commander of the fighters was known, said, “We can take him out, Captain. Get in close untouched and slice him into chum.”

  “Then you’d better,” said Persoff.

  They had only been waiting for the order. Forty dolphins locked, loaded, and launched.

  The kzinti had sixty-four fighter ships and the best tracking systems in Known Space. Out of forty targets, they got two. They were completely unprepared for an enemy that maneuvered instinctively in three dimensions. They quickly altered their tactics to attempt to ram the Yorktown. The fact that getting within a thousand miles of the carrier would be fatal only meant that they aimed very carefully. The Yorktown’s beam weapons were diversions of the main drive, and none of the kzinti got within fifty miles except as vapor.

  The kzinti had learned the Lesson of the Laser in the First War, and the outer layer of their ship was water tanks. It vented steam wherever it was perforated, and this not only kept the damage from penetrating further, it acted to diffuse and disperse later attacks.