by Larry Niven
I looked at him. Male kzin generally refer to one another as “Hero”—something like kzintosh in their own language. That was an oddity in his expression. Information is often traded, but what would I get for this? And I was being paid by the Captain, so I owed him the information of this present kzin’s existence, while I owed this one nothing. He saw my hesitation.
“Come little monkey,” he crooned, and seized my arm. His claws pinched, not yet drawing blood, but clearly capable of doing so with only a little more pressure. “Be a good boy, a talkative kz’zeerkt, an open and friendly little gossip of a kz’zeerkt, and no harm will come to ye.” No ambiguity about that. Kz’zeerkt is the kzin word for “monkey,” occasionally used affectionately between friends, but as a rule much more insulting than “Man,” though, as I said, the kzin can make that sound like an insult too. Unless affectionately, and among intimate equals, Kz’zeerkt is not used in the village, just as we don’t say “ratcat.”
I was getting angry. “Let me go this instant, you ratc…” I shouted at him, but not struggling against those claws. I had to look up at him. He did not look like a great warrior, but against me he did not need to be.
“Yes. Let him go, Addict. Or I will have your heart’s blood. Count on it.” Marthar’s voice, strangely flat, spoke from the doorway. She was as big as the telepath, bigger, and a whole lot more alive. It was as if she radiated power; she always did, but usually it was just sort of life. Now, suddenly, it was death too. I saw his eyes go to her ear-tattoos. I had seen kzin pay attention to them before. Her lips drew back in a grimace and her fangs shone. She took a step forward, a prowling step with her eyes fixed on the telepath as if he were magnetic. He let me go as if I were red hot and retreated with something like panic in his eyes.
“No offense, no offense i’ the world, your grace,” he said to Marthar. It’s true that Marthar’s father is some sort of big buzz among the kzin—just how big I learned later—and it’s true she held herself like a very princess, one of the sort that drove chariots with slashing blades on the wheels and threw spears clean through the enemy soldiers, armor and all. The kzin have such stories as well as do humans; I guess we’re about equally ferocious when you get right down to it. They say their god punished the females long ago for rebellion by taking away their intelligence, but I know that is not true. I had seen her talking with Vaemar-Riit and Karan, standing tall and proud. I’d seen the Captain looking crosswise at Marthar when she served the drinks of an evening, but he’d never said anything.
It crossed my mind to wonder if the Captain wasn’t maybe a little afraid of Marthar. Or at least, afraid of what she represented.
“Go. Now.” Marthar told him and turned back without waiting to see whether he would obey. Homework called, and Marthar heard it. The telepath wasn’t game to face Marthar if he interrupted her from something she obviously thought a lot more important than him, and he slunk out, his tail quite literally between his legs. He didn’t look at me once.
As he opened the door, I saw that the Captain was coming down the hill. He saw us, and the telepath saw him at the same time. The telepath went out quickly and closed the door behind him, and I went to it and opened it slightly so I could hear the conversation. I believe in getting information. Makes all the difference in combat and also in commerce.
“You know an old shipmate, Skel, I hope?” the telepath said whiningly. But under the whine the tone was not pleasant, and the Captain’s face had changed with something very like fear. After growing up with kzin, I could read their expressions, although not as well as Marthar could read mine.
“So ’tes the Dog hisself,” the Captain said with what was almost a gasp. Dog when used by a kzin makes Kz’zeerkt seem almost a compliment by comparison. There were no dogs in the village now, though I was told that in the bad time we had needed them to make insulin.
“Surely, and I’ve come t’see me old shipmate Skel, as was with me for so long a time. Recall, Skel, when I lost these two talons?” He held up his left paw to show the gaps. “Ah, it’s been many a long year since then, old companion.”
“I’ll grant ye that ye’ve run me down, Dog; well, what is it that ye want o’ me?”
“Why nothing more than a little conversation. Why do we not go inside this little inn and join in a jug of rum? Then we can talk of old times, and even a little of what the future holds for either of us, mayhap.”
The Captain was less than gracious, but capitulated, so I pulled back hurriedly behind the bar as they came in, Dog first, and the Captain, Skel was his name apparently, behind.
“Ah, the young servant monkey”—there was no affection in the term—“the one I took such a fancy to and treated so gently,” Dog said, with a quick glance at the door from which Marthar had come. “Fetch us a jug of rum, me bully manling, and leave us for a little talking.” He spoke civilly and quietly, evidently not wishing to attract the attention of Marthar again. I got them a jug of rum.
“Off ye go kz’zeerkt, and close the door behind ye; I know what young kz’zeerkti are, inquisitive and wanting to find out all they can of other people’s business which they don’t have no right to do, dear me, no they doesn’t,” said Dog. I went to join Marthar after tapping on the door. She looked up at me. She was lying on the floor besides a fire of burning logs which crackled energetically.
I closed the door behind me. “I think I’d like to know what they are saying, but it will be hard through the keyhole,” I explained to her in a whisper as I bent down on her side of the door. She came and stood by me as I knelt, and I glimpsed a thoughtful look in her eye and her ears come erect before I lost sight of her behind me.
“A fool,” I heard her whisper. “A closed door hides and protects us as an open door would not.” I caught a wild ginger-like scent coming from her, and knew what it signified. Fortunately the two adult male kzin were pouring out too much of it themselves to detect it. I remembered Dog was a telepath, and was glad he was concentrating everything on the Captain, not on searching for eavesdroppers’ thoughts.
I could hear very little. Just a rattling and growling in the Heroes’ Tongue that was hard to understand. But the tempers frayed quickly. “I urinate on the shrines of your ancestors from a height!” That was an old-fashioned kzin curse. “And excrete partly-digested vegetable material on them!” So was that. I had seen enough of kzin being disciplined by other kzin to know that at any moment might come a scream and leap from one of them.
I heard the Captain say something I translated as, “One dies, we all die,” though the word he used for “die” (there are many words for “die” in the Heroes’ Tongue), had a suggestion of death by torture in it, something no longer permitted for judicial execution under Vaemar-Riit’s rule. Then there was an explosion of curses, something for which the Heroes’ Tongue is so well suited, and the crash of furniture together with a clash of steel, mono-molecular-edged with osmium, and I stood up to feel Marthar’s warm breath on my neck. We opened the door and looked out to see the Captain waving his wtsai and cutlass, one in each hand, screaming at Dog, who had drawn his own weapons and parried the blows. The energy of the old Captain was astonishing, he swung again and again and drove the other to the door, from which he ran. The Captain followed Dog outside, and the fighting continued. At the same time as this flashing combat, with sparks coming off the blades and a clanging that smote the ear, there were curses and screams of rage from both parties.
Once outside, it did not take the telepath long to decide he would lose if he continued. He had neither the height nor the mass nor yet the total ferocity of the older kzin, so he threw his wtsai at the captain and ran. The Captain swept the flying weapon aside contemptuously, and ran after him, cursing as he went. Telepaths are reputed to have a sort of mind-weapon of their own, but if so, I did not see this one use it.
It did not take the Captain long to see that the telepath had the legs to outrun him, so he gave up reluctantly and after shouting further curses, turned and descend
ed the hill. He got to the door before his face turned gray. He passed his paw over his face, looked bewildered and saw me. “Peter, rum,” he said, and fell forward. Marthar and I tried to help him stand up, and got him as far as the footch, where he lay making some terrible noises. Marthar got him some rum and tried to force it between his lips, while I ran to call the Doctor, who fortunately was back with the woman with the liver problem again, and followed me around immediately.
“Is it alright to give him rum? He begged for it,” Marthar asked, anxiously.
“Oh, one won’t harm him. The trouble is, once he’s had one he’ll want another, and then another. Weakens the will, which is never much anyway for the older kzin with a long habit of drinking, unless you know the right triggers to invoke. Impulsive beggars. Earthcats can’t taste sugar, and rum’s full of it, but he’s no Earthcat.”
“There doesn’t seem to be any blood,” Marthar said, puzzled. “He hit the telepath, I saw blood running from his shoulder, although it didn’t slow him down much, and it was only venous blood.” (Kzin’s venous blood is orange-colored. Arterial blood is purple.) “I thought the telepath must have got in a cut somewhere, but I can’t see it.”
“Ha, he’s got too much blood, not too little,” Doctor Lemoine explained. “He’s had an internal aneurysm maybe, most likely a simple stroke. I warned him of that. Let’s see…” He fished in his little black bag and pulled out a syringe and an ampoule with a purple top. “Three hundred years ago they’d have given him rat poison. Warfarin, a blood thinner. Enough to kill a rat would have just given a human being a few liver spots, and had no detectable effect on a kzin, except to bypass the brain blockage. Three centuries before that, they’d cup him, take out about two pints of blood. Both would have had some beneficial effects, though the warfarin was much better. Nowadays we can do a lot better again. He’ll still be vulnerable, though, unless he changes his lifestyle. Which he won’t. People prefer death to change. Goes for kzin too, young lady. Think about it. And never forget, like all cats, your kidneys are your weak point. Care for them and you’ll never need a transplant.”
He injected the ampoule into the moaning kzin. “Nannites to ream out his arterial system. There, he’ll recover now. Give him a day of resting if you can make him do it. Two days would be better. Best of luck with that.”
He stood and looked down at the kzin. Then he turned to Marthar. “I hope you have your implant updated regularly. I don’t want to see you turn into a vegetable.”
“No chance of that,” Marthar told him. She shivered. “My mother was born before they invented the little green pills, and it is horrible. She likes to rub herself against my father and be petted, like pictures I’ve seen of housecats on Earth. She hardly has the sense to talk even. I would rather die than be like her.”
The Doctor looked grim for a moment. “Yes, the male kzin has slightly more neuro-transmitters than humans do, and the kzinretti have two less. It’s not a development one can explain by reference to evolution. We theorize that some evil shits did some genetic manipulations a long time ago so that females couldn’t metabolize some vital transmitters that are used mainly in the dominant hemisphere. Left for human beings, right for kzin, you don’t have the lunatic cross-over human beings have. Hence the little green pills. One day we’ll repair the damage with genetic surgery, but we are too backward on Wunderland to be able to do it yet. We’re working on it.”
“Why did they do something so horrible?” Marthar demanded.
“Because the culture was male-dominated and because a smart kzinrett could twist a male kzin around her finger if she wanted to. That didn’t sit well with some of the older kzin. They wanted to keep their harems and their dominance. From what little we humans know of kzin history, we think the priesthood were chiefly responsible. You don’t hear much of the fanged demons these days, but they were all female. Tells you how they saw the kzinretti.”
“That’s terrible,” I exclaimed. “How could anyone be so vile?”
“Mark you, the males lost by it as well. A male lacking a mate who can also be a companion is diminished in more ways than I can go into. My own theory—and it is not mine alone—is that kzin males who never come into contact with intelligent females—or at least never knowingly so—live in a permanent state of loss and black rage. Fortunately, the Lord Vaemar understands this and has supported our program to boost the kzinretti’ brainpower.
“And there have been human cultures that did much the same sort of thing. Not by genetic manipulation, they didn’t have the technology. But three centuries ago there was a culture which kept their women at home and wouldn’t let them go out into the world and learn about it, so they stayed as children. And we in the west weren’t much better a hundred years earlier. The playwright George Bernard Shaw pointed out that the Chinese had the horrid practice of binding female babies’ feet, after breaking the bones, so they would grow up to have small feet, which were considered attractive. It also displayed the fact that they were of such high position that they did not have to walk. While the English of that time, he pointed out, would bind the females’ minds instead to keep them small and stunted. Which, he declared, was far worse. And the English, from my reading, were actually among the more enlightened. That was only four hundred years ago. If you grew up in such a society, it all seemed natural. Women never went to university, not even to school in most cases. People can be persuaded to anything, no matter how repulsive, if they are accustomed to it. And if you change slowly enough, you can get to anywhere from anywhere. Do you know that in the Earth city of London in 2011, there was an official called the Head of Behavior Change? Changing behavior might be a good thing, but not when governments do it for you. That was one of the things that came together in ARM’s great ‘Project’ to turn humans into sheep. That was when many people thought space flight was a waste of money, and having landed a few men on the Moon, decades before, thought that there was no more to be done in space! A politician in the richest country who proposed a Moon colony was laughed at.”
“That’s ridiculous!” I protested.
“Yes. Yet that was in the culture from which many of our notions of freedom had once originated. We were lucky to grow out of that phase, or to have been pushed out of it. To have all the challenge and adventure of space travel before us, and to have turned away from it, that would have murdered something in the human spirit. We might easily have remained mired in medievalism, using up Earth’s resources without replacing them, with our technology slowly regressing until our population collapsed upon itself, and certainly until the kzin arrived. We could never have met them as we did, beyond the orbit of Saturn. We would never even have been warned they were coming from a deep-space colony ship…”
I’d done some of this in history lessons, but I’d never seen before how custom is king of everything. It was my first lesson, too, on free Wunderland, how subtly and pervasively bad governments can control the way people think. It made me feel slightly sick when I contemplated it. But it was followed by a less depressing thought: for all the horrors of the decades-long war and the occupation of Wunderland which followed, the kzin had saved us from turning ourselves into herd animals.
“Right, now I have other people to see. Until we can afford autodocs in Thoma’stown, I’m the next best thing. You kids be good, and look after each other.”
I didn’t see that I could look after Marthar very much, but I would certainly do my best. She had looked after me, and I was grateful.
Marthar and I sat with Captain Skel until he recovered consciousness. He sat up with a jerk, almost jumping out of the footch. “Where is Dog?” he wanted to know. He had come gradually to accept Marthar, though he was a kzin of the old school if ever there was one.
“Dog is gone. You chased him away and wounded him in the shoulder,” Marthar told him. “And the Doctor says you must rest for a day. But we can help you up to your room, I expect.”
The Captain groaned, but agreed to be helped up
, and leaned on Marthar as she patiently helped him to his room. I went with them, although I was not much use.
The room was a mess. The backpack was on the floor and some of its contents strewn around. There was a half-full bottle of rum, which the Captain grabbed greedily.
“You’re not supposed to have that,” Marthar told him sternly. He answered her by taking off the top and swigging it like lemonade. Then he lowered himself onto the bigger footch that was his bed with another groan. “I must get away,” he said to himself, and then dropped the bottle, which Marthar caught before it hit the floor. She put the top back and carried it out of the room. The Captain’s eyes rolled up and he fell back and started snoring almost immediately.
CHAPTER THREE
I passed by the Captain’s room an hour later, and the snoring had stopped so, rather frightened, I knocked and went in. The Captain was half-up and out of the footch, and nodding groggily.
“Har, Peter, there, help me up, boy. Or that kzinrett of yours. And get me a noggin o’ rum.”
Marthar wasn’t my kzinrett, and the Doctor had forbidden more drink, I told him.
“Just the one, lad, just the one. A single one can’t do me harm. Now yer a good one for a Kz’zeerkt, Peter, and the on’y one I can trust. And haven’t I paid ye regular, a silver thruppenny, once a month? And doctors is quacks and knows nothing o’ the world. Why, I’ve been in places where wi’out rum, I’d ha’ died o’ the fever. I been places where the swamps were fuller of disease than o’ mud, where the birds died on the wing from the insex, an’ where the insex bit worse than what ye call crocodilians or zeitungers here. An’ ’twas the rum saved me then, an’ it’ll be the rum saves me now, d’ye see? For I’m startin’ t’ get the shakes, d’ye see?” He held up his paw, and it trembled right enough. I felt torn. The Doctor had said that one wouldn’t hurt him. And he did look terrible.