by Larry Niven
Still, the Lord Vaemar spoke to me, and asked me about my schoolwork. He spoke rather longer with Marthar, but I suppose that was to be expected. “Remember you are my envoy here,” I understood him say to her. The Judge and Rarrgh-Hero, I noticed, greeted each other like old acquaintances. “You seized your chances with both paws, I see,” I heard Rarrgh-Hero say. “The chance that you gave me,” the Judge replied. “I do not forget that I owe you a life.” I wondered what they referred to. I left them with the Judge proudly showing Rarrgh the giant chessboard and pieces one of the kzin had carved for the little park beside the town square. Most kzin adore chess, though they have given the pieces their own names. They are liable to smash them when they lose, but consider it a point of honor to make new ones, better than the old.
Most of our regulars at the inn were afraid of the Captain, though I think he enjoyed their fear. He was fierce and overbearing to a degree. He didn’t actually do anything violent, but he seemed to radiate menace. It gave me some faint shadow of a notion of how kzin must have appeared to humans during the Occupation, dread overlords, the humblest of whom had the power of life or death over any human. It made me realize the work Vaemar, The Rykermanns and others, kzin and human, had done to enable the two species to share a planet and live together, even if only in a few pockets like our village.
Of an evening, the Captain would recline on a footch we had for kzin visitors at the back of the room and drink his rum, and then he would tell stories, space stories, to the assembled crowd, stories to make the blood run cold. Of men and kzin in combat and in uneasy alliance, of both being spaced, ejected as exploded corpses into hard vacuum, with their lungs spewed out of their mouths (eating a Christmas tree); of planetfall on worlds that had atmospheres of corrosive poison, on others where his comrades had fallen in hundreds, victims of what he called the green rot; of monsters that had fought armed kzin to a standstill. Some of the young men actually seemed to admire him, and pointed out that a man-kzin alliance would make our kinds unbeatable if we ever encountered another foe. A couple of the younger kzin, still with traces of their kitten spots, listened too, and remarked proudly that he was the kind who made the name of kzin feared on countless worlds, until the sheriff took them aside for what he called a “talking to.” What this consisted of I do not know, but they returned severely chastened, and we heard no more of such talk.
He spoke of beings with two heads; of others (or were they the same?) with voices like sirens or mermaids, hauntingly beautiful and seductive; of warfare in space between every possible combination of man, kzin and alien. He told of rebellious Jotok, and of battles against the Chunquen and rumors of wars with other alien beings—mythical, perhaps—on the other side of the vast, irregular globe of space that was the Patriarchy, of relics of the ancient slavers; it occurred to me that an ARM agent might have picked up a good deal of useful information about the far-flung Kzin Empire from his ramblings, though how much of them were true was another matter.
He did have some discretion: he did not speak of the Occupation. At first I thought it was almost certain he had been involved, but Marthar suggested to me that perhaps he had kept away from Wunderland when it was called Ka’ashi and Chuut-Riit, Lord Vaemar’s Sire, had ruled it on behalf of the Patriarchy. None of the men in the village remembered him from those days, but that did not prove anything; it was a long time ago and he would have been much younger then. Once the Judge spoke to me privately about his concern that the old pirate might stir up the kzin-human hatred that he and others had worked to eliminate in the village, but it did not seem to happen. Some of the men even seemed to enjoy his blood-curdling insults, his stories and his almost equally frightening rum-fueled good fellowship.
And he would sing, a gruff crooning voice that was half purr and which didn’t seem to fit him, in some kzin patois, a dialect which only a few of us understood (the ordinary kzin languages are difficult enough). One night, Marthar had come to help in the bar, and she told me the song was about death and treachery and horrible things that she didn’t want to talk about. I’d already worked out that much for myself! And he made the whole company sing it too, with little or no comprehension, but every one of them stumbling through it as loud as they could, for fear the captain would take it out on any who held back. Mother thought he would lose us every customer we had, but strange to say, the company got bigger than ever before. People like to be frightened a bit, and they would talk about it to each other, and so strangers came from all over the town to see our resident pirate-kzin (as we described him to ourselves). A deputy stuck his head in once or twice, looked around and vanished again. So long as it was only words, they didn’t seem to care.
Once, when he was walking in the wild country outside the town walls, I accompanied him. It was as well he was there because we were attacked by a small troop of lesslocks. It could have been worse. It could have been Morlocks, driven out of the great caves of the High Kalkstein, though they were normally nocturnal on the surface. It was the first time I saw him in action with wtsai and cutlass, and it was breathtaking. He produced another knife, which he had concealed somewhere, and tossed it to me, with a cry of, “Now, Peter, young Kz’zeerkt, warrior, show them what a Man can do!” A blade flashing in each hand, too fast for my eyes to follow, he leapt on them, roaring. It was all over in a few minutes. I have heard it said that in hand-to-hand combat without beam or projectile weapons, one kzin was the equal of about forty fit men, and nothing I saw that day disproved that. When the slaughter was over, he seemed calmer and happier, even somehow more youthful. I had killed one of them, and he remarked jovially it was a pity I did not have an ear-ring of my own. He roared with laughter at a piece of lesslock I found dangling, wobbling from the brim of my hat.
There was another thing I found out about him: he openly despised Kdaptists. We had been told at school that in the last days of the Occupation, when the human counter-attacks from Sol had been beginning to bite on the kzin military machine, a strange set of religious beliefs called Kdaptism had made an appearance among some kzin. It owed its origin to the shocking, blasphemous realization, after the ecstatic joy of finding a species actually prepared to give them a fight, that this time, impossibly, blasphemously, the kzin might actually be defeated. The God, it was said, loved his humans, and gave them luck, whereas he honored his sons the kzin by giving them respect. Its baseline belief was that the God (precisely which god—the fanged or the bearded—it did not seem entirely clear), was coming to favor humans.
It had quickly split into several factions. Some, the high Kdaptists, saw the future as lying in cooperating with humans; others, the low Kdaptists, hoped to fool the God into granting them victory by dressing in garments made of human skin, and carrying out religious rites, which they had forced humans to teach them, with vessels made of human bone.
The Kdaptists fought among themselves until Lord Vaemar and his followers and the Free Wunderland and UNSN forces imposed peace. Mind you, I never heard of a kzin trying to ingratiate himself with humans by falsely claiming allegiance to Kdaptism. Kzin don’t lie. At least, I thought then that kzin didn’t lie, and certainly most don’t, though some are capable of twisting the truth, particularly when talking to an enemy. Now and then when we talked, our conversation drifted into metaphysical areas, but it was plain that in his long, battle-scarred life, pity and mercy had played a negligible part. Whether he had voyaged with cut-throats of unusual brutality, or whether that had been standard behavior for kzin during the war, I was unsure.
Several of the men of the village had remarked how much most of the ordinary kzin on Wunderland had changed since those days, though of course the only ones we saw much of were those who had chosen to live with men in the village, or in the country nearby. The kzin remaining on Wunderland were not the very fiercest warriors—that was why they had survived—but any Kzin is fierce enough. There were, as I said, hold-out bands in the wild country. Wunderland, after all, was a whole world, much bigger than Ma
rs, partially grown with forests and jungles as well as boasting ranges of hills, and there was no lack of refuges and hidingplaces.
Doctor Lemoine was in the neighborhood visiting some local woman with a liver condition, so he explained, and had gone into the parlor after taking a dinner from my mother, with a kindly “Thank-ee Mistress Cartwright, your servant, ma’am!” in his cold, clear voice. There he smoked a pipe and, in his neat, white lace and smart black suit, was a great contrast, with the old pirate-kzin in the corner, who had ragged fur and many belts and ear-rings so disarranged and multi-colored. The local tobacco crop was very fine and most human people, men and women, smoked cigars, so the long pipe of Doctor Lemoine was something of an oddity. Kzin seldom, and intelligent kzinretti never smoked cigars, possibly for fear of setting fire to their whiskers, and most claimed that the smell of tobacco disgusted them, so the Captain wrinkled his considerable nose, but took an interest in the pipe.
“And what be that contrivance, human? A machine for making a stink?” the captain asked truculently.
“It is a way of smoking tobacco that keeps the taste away from my palate and yet allows me to savor the scent of burning aromatic leaves,” the Doctor explained with good humor. “They contain a little of the stimulant nicotine. It is known that small amounts of nicotine reduce certain common mental sicknesses, particularly neurosis and schizophrenia. There are minor carcinogenic side effects, but they are easily treated these days.”
“So you would all go mad if you didn’t sniff on a burning weed,” the captain sneered.
“Some of us humans are prone to overlearning; you can mark us by the way we talk, a tendency to gabble too fast,” the Doctor explained comfortably. “Sometimes this can get out of hand, the overlearning, not the gabbling, and we learn something which isn’t so. And then we spread it around among others of our kind, transmitted much like a physical disease, a virus or bacterium. More of a problem in big cities, and we have only one real city after what happened to Neue Dresden, and München is not overbig. But it afflicted some cultures on Old Earth a few centuries ago, with odd neuroses running rampant. So no, I don’t fear adopting a neurosis or being attracted to some cult, I just like the smell. It is also addictive, I confess. You should try it.”
“I’ve more than enough bad habits,” the Captain growled. A small enough joke, but coming from him, it sounded funnier than perhaps it was.
“Indeed you have, and your drinking too much rum is one of them,” the Doctor told him. “I can see from your eyes and tell from your voice and manner that you are far into choler, and it is affecting your maintenance drugs.”
“What business is that of yours, monkey?” the Captain demanded.
“I’m a medical man, and have a duty to point out bad habits and their consequences. Maybe you should take up smoking, it might relax your choler. Although it may exacerbate your heart condition, so perhaps better not.”
“What heart condition?” roared the kzin, bounding to his feet and towering over the Doctor in one stride. His claws extended and his jaws opened wide to show those great, curving incisors. My heart jumped within me as I watched.
“Why, the condition that you most clearly suffer from, and which may necessitate surgery if you persist in drinking rum every night. That’s if we can get treatment to you in time.” The Doctor looked up calmly, not the least overawed by the huge animal. “Not to mention the risk of blood clots which will lay you low. At least take some regular aspirin to thin your blood, or you’ll have a stroke within the year. Were you a human, your face would be purple and I’d give you less than six months unless you went in for a major reaming out of your arterial system. And cut down on the rum. I would guess that you need the rum to sleep, but the dependence is not good. Surely a Hero like you appreciates that. And your liver must be like an old black boot.”
The Captain slumped and retreated. “Aarrgh, what would ye know of what troubles me, of what keeps me from sleep?”
“What in humans we would call a guilty conscience, at a guess. Bad memories, no doubt. Your brain is structured much like that of human beings. Two hemispheres joined by a corpus callosum, a dominant verbal one and a subdominant one where the ideas come from. And memories are thrown up, fears are transmitted from it and give you dreams. Bad dreams, I should judge. Alcohol is a powerful depressant and you drink enough for a fleet. Kzin and excessive alcohol don’t mix well, and most of you have the sense to know it.”
“Bad dreams,” muttered the Captain, returning to his footch. “Aye, bad enough, I grant ye. And I’ve reason for them. But the future haunts me more than the past, human. ’Tes what the morrow may bring plagues me.” He threw himself down and went back to his rum.
“Kzin have had very little concept of mercy, compassion or remorse,” said the Doctor to me quietly. “Whatever he has done…well, it must have been pretty bad, that it should trouble him so. Or his fears for the future are terrible indeed.”
Doctor Lemoine came back a few nights later to hear the gruesome stories and the strange wild song. He sat at the back and didn’t join in the singing, but smoked his pipe and listened carefully. The Captain usually took it hard when anyone refused to join in the caterwauling, and roared at them, but he ignored the Doctor. They seemed to have some sort of uneasy truce. There was no doubt that the Doctor saw the Captain as a ruffian or worse, and I could not doubt that he was right to think so. He would tolerate a ruffian if the latter kept his behavior within the Doctor’s capacious bounds. But there was steel in the Doctor that the Captain acknowledged, if reluctantly, and he never tried to compel the Doctor to his will as he did almost everyone else. I doubt he was aware that the Doctor had fought in the resistance, and more than that, had been decorated with the Centauri Cross.
1 For the previous history of Jorg von Thoma see His Sergeant’s Honor in Man-Kzin Wars IX.
CHAPTER TWO
Shortly after Doctor Lemoine had faced down the snarling Captain, the next event in the mystery occurred. It would mean the end of the captain, although not our involvement in his affairs.
The Captain had gone out early that morning, his breath making smoke as he strode up the hill, clutching his phone in one hand and a stick in the other. His wtsai swung from his left hip, his gun was down on his right thigh and his cutlass slung over his shoulder. I thought he looked as if he were going into battle.
Much of a year had passed since the Captain’s arrival, and we were well into a bitter, cold winter when the kzin telepath turned up. The dust in the air from the war had left Wunderland’s climate a mess. The newcomer was small and spindly for a kzin, though far bigger than me or any human. He, too, carried a cutlass. He had the tattoo on his forehead that marked some, not all, telepaths, and he walked with a telepath’s stoop. (I had heard that we were trying to cure and rehabilitate the wretched creatures with new drugs, though evidently he was not of this number). His pelt was dingy gray with darker gray spots as big as saucers, and he had two claws missing on his left paw. Mostly, a missing claw is replaced by a steel one, as in the case of the Captain or, if there was not enough to root it, by a prosthetic claw stronger than the original. I was all but alone in the inn at the time, my mother being at the markets. Marthar was doing her homework next door, and, truth to tell, mine too. She explains algebra and stuff to me until my head spins, and sometimes I almost understand it. But I can give her help on history, although I hear that there is algebra in that later on, so we’ll have to work even closer if it is true, and not just a rumor made up to frighten us. Schoolteachers are capable of anything.
Working counts as being part of school of course; we get credit for economics if we know how businesses work, and I should by now. So I was planning, for the millionth time, what to do to make the inn more attractive to customers and laying the breakfast table in the parlor for the Captain’s return when I heard the outside door creak, and turned to see a fanged and whiskered face look in. Seeing I was alone, the kzin entered, not in the usual lope, but in a
sort of sidle like a mudcrawler.
I’ve nothing against kzin. Several of the younger ones, not only Marthar, are friends with the young humans in the village. But something about this one struck me as bad before he spoke. Another thing: there are a myriad of small matters—postures, gestures, a special quickness and neatness of movement, even of the part of the shabby old Captain, that, in human or kzin, signal an experienced spacer. This one didn’t have those things, yet he had an air of a spacer about him.
“Well, man, what are you then, the waiter? Some sort of servant? Speak up.” He had a strangely sibilant voice, a sort of perpetual whine. Even the way he said ‘man’ somehow recalled instantly the sixty-plus years of war and Occupation well before my birth (the marks of which were still with us), and sent invisible things running up and down my spine. It suddenly made me aware of how friendly our own kzin in the village were, and how lucky I was to have been born when I was. He would never have made a living as a servant or a waiter, such unappealing company would have lost us every customer we had. I’ve been brought up to feel that there is no shame in any work so it is done well and honestly, and doing someone a service in exchange for money is honorable employ. This kzin clearly felt quite differently about it. Perhaps it is what happens when people are raised to value honor and confuse respect with deference.
“I serve here, true enough. Who are you, sir kzin,” (I thought as I said it that in the days of the Occupation, any human-to-kzin address less obsequious than ‘Noble Hero’ could have been fatal. He had a way of making me think of things like that), “and what may I do for you?” I asked boldly, for a servant is not a slave, least of all in a family business; he trades his skills, and a pleasant and agreeable manner is an asset to be counted, one our visitor plainly lacked.
“Information, man, I need information. Do you have a kzin here, a space-farer? One with an ear missing and a steel claw? Striped black and gold?” Why didn’t he use his telepath power? I wondered briefly. Perhaps he had lost it. I have heard that can happen.