Man-Kzin Wars XIV

by Larry Niven

  I called Leonie Rykermann, who had been a student at the University at the time of the invasion. Kept young with unlimited geriatric drugs, she and her husband, Nils, had been among the most respected of the Resistance leaders, and were now political powers. Further, like a surprising number of other Resistance leaders, she got on well with kzin and was running an orphanage for some of the many parentless kzin kittens, as well as human children, on the planet. She came and spoke to the telepath for a time. I gathered she could find him a job at the orphanage, where he might feel useful.

  As they were preparing to leave, he asked me: “Do you remember the poem, ‘Spanish Waters,’ that Herr von Kleist used to say for us?” I didn’t, but I remembered von Kleist had been interested in sea stories. He piped up:

  I‘m the last alive that knows it, all the rest have gone their ways.

  Killed, or died, or come to anchor in the old Mulatas Cays

  And I go singing, fiddling, old and starved and in despair,

  And I know where all that gold is hid, if only I were there . . .

  “But,” he went on, “I don’t know of much gold.”

  Liberated Wunderland, 2425

  FIVE YEARS OR MORE PASSED before I saw him again. The UNSN had taken the telepaths in hand and were well on the way to developing nondestructive drugs for them. Apparently the kzin Patriarchy had always known that the sthondat lymph-derived drug burned out the telepaths’ brains, leaving them not merely mindless, but, unless someone mercifully euthanized them, in a state of endless, screaming horror. Under the Patriarch, they were generally euthanized, not from mercy, but merely to stop the noise and because they were now useless (we heard that better drugs were produced in small quantities on Kzin and reserved for the Patriarch’s own telepaths, the highest masters of the art, who were treated as nobles in their own right). The Patriarchy needed the telepaths, but feared them for many reasons. The solution they had arrived at resulted in short, down-trodden neurotic lives for them.

  Even with the incongruous wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses, giving him an appearance something like a tiger that had eaten an old-time gangster, he was looking a great deal better. In fact, apart from his small size, he looked like a healthy kzin. Indeed, I did not recognize him at first. He was leading a well-grown kit with buttons on its claws. One of the orphans, I guessed. I remarked that I was pleased to see him looking so well.

  “It is the new drugs, the human drugs,” he said. “I am under a life-debt to you and your kind, Professor.”

  “If that is so, I am under one to you,” I told him. “Let us say the scales balance.”

  “Have you got a few moments?” he asked me. “There is something I would share with you.”

  The Lindenbaum café was not far away. It had footch couches for kzin now. I wondered what the prewar students would have made of it. Not a good idea to think that way. It raised too many ghosts.

  “As a matter of fact, it was to see you that I came here,” he said. “You remember Herr von Kleist?”

  “Yes.” I nearly said “Of course,” but one who is powerfully conditioned never says anything that might be interpreted as rudeness to a kzin, even a small and apparently friendly one. Feeble telepath or not, he could have dismantled a tiger without undue trouble.

  “And Herr Thompson?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “Would you be interested in knowing why they died? And Herr Morris?”

  “Certainly. I have often wondered.”

  “Herr Thompson, before he died, prepared a package,” he said. “It was star-locked.”

  That meant it could only be opened when the stars had moved to a certain position in the sky. Generally an attempt to force it resulted in the destruction of its contents. The kzinti had got the technology, like many others, from one of the scientific races they had conquered in the past. They had invented very little of their own.

  “He gave it to you?”

  “No indeed, to another monk . . . human. He, in turn, fled Munchen to join the Resistance and left it with a third human, what you call an ‘attorney.’ I remember you explaining those terms to us.”

  “Yes.”

  “I could follow all this easily enough. I had read Herr Thompson’s mind, and from that I read the minds of the other human and the attorney.”

  “Did you tell the Patriarch’s authorities?”

  “No.”

  “May I ask why?” I would not have dared put such a question, save that I felt he was inviting it.

  “What have they ever done for me, except make me a wreck and rob me of my strength and pride? But I bided my time. When the Ramscoop Raid came, the attorney’s offices were in one of many buildings reduced to rubble. I let Herr Morris wreak part of my vengeance for me. He did more than I expected. Much later, after I was released from the assessment camp, after I had seen you, I found the package—I had read the attorney’s mind and knew where it was stored. He was dead and had no further use for it. I took it and kept it.

  “I did not know how long it would be before the star-lock allowed the package to be opened—centuries, perhaps. At last I had an idea, a very simple one, which the ingenious beings who invented the star-lock could not have anticipated, though perhaps Herr Thompson should have. I took it to the planetarium.”

  “As simple as that!”

  “As simple as that. I opened it. It contained, as I had suspected, a message, which I read. By then, the kzin were overthrown on this planet. I kept it for some time, unsure what to do with it. Recently I decided to give it to you . . .

  “Thank you.”

  “I had thought it might contain a treasure, or the guide to one. I warn you, it does not.”

  There must be something about humans and locked boxes. I felt an absurd sense of disappointment.

  He was wearing a garment over his fur like a vest with pockets—purely utility. From one of these he produced some sheets of paper.

  “This is what it contained,” he said

  I read:

  There is not much time to explain. I wish it to be known, by my descendants at least, that I am not a maniacal killer. And I am not a traitor. I have killed von Kleist for the benefit of the human race. Now I must kill myself, to avoid the Telepath’s probing and Kzin torture, both of which would reveal the truth and make what I have done pointless. By the time this is opened it should not matter. Things will have been settled one way or another. I hope it will allow my name to be restored.

  I tried to subvert the Kzin with stories of human prowess.

  I begged von Kleist to see reason, but he dug in his heels through sheer stubbornness. He was determined to put Moby Dick on the kzin reading list. An academic dedicated to his studies.

  He claimed, when I pressed him, it would give them a better understanding of human courage and determination. I told him that many of them might have trouble telling fact from fiction, but it made no impression. He called it a great classic.

  Yes, a great classic that might destroy us all. For what is its message, to a kzin reader? That the whale wins in the end, in spite of all Ahab’s effort and sacrifice. THAT HUMANS CAN BE DEFEATED, THAT HUMAN BRAVERY AND DETERMINATION ARE NOT ENOUGH FOR SUCCESS, that we are but monkeys that batter our lives away in a futile quest for vengeance upon a brainless fish. And the fish wins. Its message of human despair and nihilism would work its way through the kzin fleet. It would hearten the enemy.

  That is what, even now, the von Kleists will never understand. For them, ideas and consequences exist in different universes. The power of words to create or destroy. I suggested Churchill’s wartime speeches. He said they were not literature, which it was his job to teach. He would have spread poison through the Patriarch’s weapons, made the death of every human who had died fighting the kzin seem as meaningless as Ahab’s, for the sake of teaching literature. If they understood it was fiction, that would be worse, for the very knowledge that a human would write such a fiction would increase their contempt for the human race, and
their confidence in themselves.

  My motive has been to help the human race survive. Care for my family.

  I dialed my flashlight to high power and focused it on the paper. As it crumbled to ashes I asked: “Do you know what happened to his family?”

  “No,” he said. We both knew there was a good chance they were dead. But I could advertise for them.

  “So what are you doing now?”

  “I am still at the orphanage. I teach the orphans reading and writing. What you and the other professors taught me.”

  “Not Moby Dick, I trust.”

  “No, that would contain quite the wrong lesson. My favorite is called The Magic Pudding: ‘We much prefer to chew/the steak and kidney stew. . .’ Giving you this has rid me of a burden. There was another page, giving details of where he had hidden a cache of diamonds, industrial diamonds, that he had salvaged from a bombed factory at the time of the first kzin landings. Leonie will be able to use them, for the orphanage is always short of funds. There are young kzin in it who might have grown up like me. Farewell, Professor. Drink blood and tear cattle into gobbets!”

  He left. Seeing me alone, the human waiter sought my order. I drank a glass of wine to Thompson’s memory.

  “He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach.

  They played like young cats in the dusk

  and he loved them as he loved the boy.”

  —Ernest Hemingway,

  The Old Man and the Sea

  “THERE ARE MONSTERS beneath the surface,” Daneel Guthlac said to the kit standing next to him at the edge of a cliff overlooking the roiling Kcheemic Ocean. Gliding toothy pteranobats, which infested many of the marine cliffs of Sheathclaws, skimmed over the water with long snouts in frothy waves, ready to snap up their prey. Occasionally, a large creature would burst out of the sea and catch one of the flyers. “When I said we were going to bag the biggest, meanest beast in all of Sheathclaws, I meant it.”

  “What do you mean?” The kitten’s fur flattened, his naked tail curved between his legs in the presence of the infinite, crashing water. Ashamed of his display of fear, he forced his tail to relax.

  “See that town down there?” Dan pointed toward a collection of houses at the bottom of the cliff, where surf met rock in battle. The houses were painted bright orange to fill some deep-seated psychological need and stood on stilts to defend against sudden storm surges. “These kzinti have learned to live off the sea.”

  “I told all my créche mates I would bring back a wombadon! When I come back with fish, they’re going to tear me apart!”

  Dan scratched the kit’s scruffy neck and felt the welts of his mate’s teeth beneath the fur. Schro was about the size of an average adult human, which meant he was small for his age, an inheritance of his biological Sire, and the older kzin kittens got, the crueler and more aggressive they became. On any other kzin world, the puny kit would’ve been killed. On Sheathclaws, he was merely the target of vicious bullying. Dan sent him a telepathic flash of his own days in the créche: a small monkey surrounded by violent, broad-pawed kittens. The human boy quickly learned to toughen up and use all his cunning to survive. “Trust me, son. When we return to Shrawl’ta, those little bastards will fear and respect you.”

  Schro’s ears receded incredulously. He didn’t know which he feared more: the terrible sea, or his peers.

  Dan and Schro crunched down the slope onto the rocky shore. Tall kzinti with saffron pelts watched their descent with reserved interest. Only a ragged kzintosh, whose fur had grown out patchy after severe burns had stripped him of most of his flesh, left one of the square, long-legged buildings and headed their way. The local leader.

  “Chief Programmer?” Dan called from a safe distance.

  The kzin slowed his advance and approached less urgently. He was massive, three heads taller than Dan, with fierce and undefeated eyes. “I haven’t been Chief Programmer in a long time, human.” He glowered at the odd pair, an unruly man with long, sandy hair and close-cropped beard, and a soft runt of a kitten. “Daneel Guthlac?”

  “Correct, and this is my son, Schro.”

  The old Hero breathed in the kit. Dan sensed that he found the scent familiar and unpleasant. Dan instinctively touched his sidearm, but the kzin decided it was only the stink of monkey clinging to the kit’s spotted fur. “I call myself Fraaf’kur now, and this is my territory, Krazári.”

  Sea-lion? Dan got a blaze of immense pride attached to the kzintosh’s current name and opted not to correct his assumptions of what a sea lion actually was. Instead he asked, “Krazári means something like Ocean Master in the Heroes’ Tongue, right?”

  “Yes, those two words had been mutually exclusive until kzinti settled on Shasht, my home planet.”

  “And now you have an entirely new ocean to tame here on Sheathclaws. I envy you.”

  The kzin’s ragged fur puffed up pompously, but he said nothing, unsure if the human was genuinely envious or only mocking him.

  “Fraaf’kur,” Dan stifled a smile, “we want to book passage on your boat. We heard you were the only kzintosh in all of Raoneer that could take us fishing.”

  “My get could also take you and your adopted kit out on the sea,” he emphasized the word “adopted” with a hint of disgust. “The longnecks are plentiful this season and make impressive trophies.”

  “I was thinking we could go a little higher on the food chain.” Dan flashed him a wicked smile that made Fraaf’kur’s ears flatten. Dan wanted the Hero to understand that behind the blunt, ape grin was a kzintosh’s soul waiting to pounce. “Ketosaurs hunt longnecks. If one is plentiful, the other couldn’t be too far behind.”

  Schro’s eyes widened at the mention of the sea monster. Dan could tell the kit was wondering if his father was mad enough to try to catch one of those. The kit searched their telepathic rapport and learned that, in fact, he was. It filled him with confidence.

  “I could take you to them and show you how to hunt them, but they are much too large. We’d never get one back here to eat or mount. It would be a wasted kill.”

  “A simple engineering problem I think I can fix.”

  Fraaf’kur made a low clicking sound with his throat, but Dan could sense the grudging respect the kzin was developing for this bold human. Dan also knew Schro was picking it up with his heightened ziirgrah and that pleased him more than impressing this old dock cat.

  “Very well. We will make preparations in my cabin.”

  “Does my son have permission to explore Krazári? He’s never seen a kzin fishing town before.”

  “Yes, but don’t stray too far; pteranobats have carried off and devoured a few of my get in the past.”

  “Stay close and stay sharp,” Dan instructed his son.

  The kit dashed away and disappeared between house stilts.

  Dan followed Fraaf’kur into the house he’d come out of. It was nice. It looked like the seaside cabins of Harp, but designed with kzin comfort in mind. The swan-like skeleton of a longneck hung from the ceiling. When the door shut, the kzin turned to Dan and asked, “Are you really here for the ketosaurus or for the humans skulking around on the island a few kilometers off the coast from here?”

  “The fishing trip is real. The créche is not an easy place for a small kit with a monkey father. Having the skull of a ketosaurus for show-and-tell will boost his chances of survival. That said, our good friend the Apex did suggest I check out the island while I’m here, and you don’t turn down the Apex.”

  “How did you end up with the kit?” the kzin asked finally.

  “I was married and divorced with no human kits of my own. She cited my obsessive work on the Righteous Manslaughter’s hyperdrive as the cause for leaving me. All of a sudden, I found myself alone and with nothing to show for all my hard work . . . I had killed his Sire in combat, and since my family has a history of rearing kzin kits, I took him as my own.”

  Fraaf’kur sniffed the air as if he found the whole matter distasteful
.

  “How did you end up out here?” Dan asked. “I thought the Apex had set you up in Shrawl’ta when he saved you and what was left of your shipmates from the Manslaughter.”

  The kzin silently worked the controls of an old holoset for a while, then said, “I tried to live there. When the Apex offered me two females of my own and prestigious work in his Hall, I was glad for it, but as I learned more of Sheathclaws—its founding by a treacherous telepath and its laissez-faire attitude toward kz’eerekti, I was revolted with the entire system and with myself for being a part of it. I came here and tried to recreate my life on Shasht before the war.

  “My get may be proud of their one drop of Shadow’s blood, and they may mewl to the Maned God, but I’ve instilled in them a love of the sea and they chose to settle here in Krazári. I’m proud to say they’ve made names for themselves out in these waters. Our pride trades seafood to Shrawl’ta.”

  A staticky hologram of the coast sprang from the holoset, and Fraaf’kur stopped talking. Dan could see a clump of rock out in the middle of the ocean, as if a piece of the same cliff he had descended had been torn off and tossed into the sea. Another image replaced the aerial view, this one a close-up of the isle itself. It was bare of everything except a few humans and a flock of pteranobats. “These are the images I’ve taken of the island. For the most part, they ignore my boat. The humans are clearly from the nation of Angel’s Tome.”

  Of course, they are, Dan thought, most humans on Sheathclaws resided on the human-controlled part of the continent, Angel’s Tome. “From the city-state of Hem,” Dan added out loud, recognizing their white uniforms. “Hem’s got the largest concentration of Rejoiners and they hate me for not delivering your old warship to them so they can end Sheathclaws’ long seclusion and become part of the growing network of human worlds in Known Space.” He continued to watch the shifting images. Something was off.