The Man-Kzin Wars 04 Read online

  MAN- KZIN WARS IV

  Created by

  Larry Niven

  with

  Donald Kingsbury

  Greg Bear

  and

  S.M. Stirling

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright 1991 by Larry Niven

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baan Books Original

  Baan Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, N.Y. 10471

  ISBN: 0-671-72079-1

  Cover art by Stephen Hickman

  First printing, September 1991

  Distributed by SIMON & SCHUSTER

  1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10020

  Printed in the United States of America

  INTRODUCTION

  Last month a stranger in New Jersey asked permission to use the kzinti in his fanzine. (Fanzines, fan magazines, exist strictly for recreation.) Gary Wells wanted nothing of Known Space, just the kzinti, embedded in a Star Trek backgrounds

  I wrote I hereby refuse you permission to use the kzinti in any literary property.

  The last guy who did that involved the kzinti in a sadomasochistic homosexual gang, bang, badly, and published it on a computer network. A friend alerted me and we spoke the magic word and frightened him away. (Lawsuits) I'm still a little twitchy on the subject, so don't take any of this too personally...

  Wells persisted. He sent me the Fleet bio for his kzin: a crewman aboard a federation battlewagon. He's got his format well worked out. It would have been fun to see what he might do with it; but I'm going to refuse him anyway. I don't want the playground getting too crowded.

  I hope the network bandit doesn't turn up again.

  I wouldn't be so picky with a story set in someone else's territory... but when you play in my playground you don't vandalize the equipment. Jim Baan and I have solicited stories which we bought and then rejected because they didn't fit my standards.

  The bandit's kzin was ridiculous. Large warm-blooded animals that have to fight don't have big impressive dongs. There's no flexibility in their mating habits. (We have some partial understanding of why humans are an exception.) Humans will smell wrong; this is established as important to kzinti.

  Yet such matters can be handled with taste, or at least verisimilitude.

  If you once read Donald Kingsbury's Courtship Rite... but the nightmares have since gone away... "The Survivor" is your chance to get them back. Kingsbury writes horror stories for bright people. You will come to understand his cowardly kzin, and even to sympathize with him, but not, I hope, to love him. Grass-Eater is not normal.

  "The Man Who Would Be Kzin," as portrayed by Greg Bear and S. M. Stirling, isn't normal either.

  There are writers out there who know considerably more about the kzinti than I do. The Man-Kzin Wars authors have already delved deep into normal kzinti family life. The kzinti are mean and dangerous and intelligent. I fear I've been taking them too lightly.

  Larry Niven

  THE SURVIVOR

  Copyright 1991 by Donald Kingsbury

  CHAPTER 1

  (2391 A.D.)

  His tail was cold. Where could he run to?

  The Short-Son of Chirr-Nig fluffed the fur inside his suit to help him keep warm. At the airlock exit he hadn't had time to appropriate better surface garb from the public racks. The suit was non-standard, too large and good only for a limited surface excursion. Eventually he would freeze. The oxygen mask and support pack should last indefinitely.

  Ruddy light from an enormous red sun gilded the snow-swept rocks. A dim rose cast itself across the hunching sprawl of atmosphere-tight buildings that spread down into the valley gloom. The scene demanded infra-red goggles to penetrate the shadows but Short-Son had no goggles. Could he run to the mountains? The jags against the sky had been named the Mountains of Promised Victory by the founding warriors of Hssin, but they were mountains of death.

  Dim as R'hshssira was, the sanguine glare from the snow peaks drowned the stars along the horizon. But above, undismayed by the pale glow of R'hshssira, the heavens peered from a darkly mauve sky, seeming to give more light than Hssin's litter-runt-of-a-star, even as they peered through wisps of cirrus.

  If there was little light, there was warmth. But one had to be standing out on the open plain of Hssin in full daylight forge-red R'hshssira looming full round in the sky to feel the warmth. Nevertheless it was real warmth that soaked into space armor if one was willing to freeze his backside and tail.

  Short-Son of Chirr-Nig turned his back to the sun, his tail held up to the radiation.

  His warrior elders sometimes joked about whether Hssin was a planet or a moon because no kzin was really sure whether the pitiful primary, R'hshssira, was a father star or a mere lost whelp with slave. R'hshssira was too cool, too small to be a star, already having collapsed, without igniting its hydrogen, to the density of a heavy metal. Still it bathed them in a bloody warmth.

  A star-beast in hibernation, its metabolism inactive.

  A beast with no rotation, no magnetic field, fighting nothing. It slept and the slave satellite Hssin patrolled protectively close to the master's lair.

  Short-Son couldn't go to the mountains. He had to escape back into the city he had just run from. He stared up at the constellations, at five brilliant, distant giants that lay across the River of Heaven. If there was no place to run to then let the Fanged God Who Drank at the River of Heaven take him to the stars.

  Hssin served as a forward military base of the Kzin Patriarchy, barren as a moon, yet with atmosphere like a planet. The gas was thin, wicked, noxious, sometimes as stormy as the surface of R'hshssira was docile. The temperatures ranged over extremes impossible for life to endure. Nothing worth hunting could Eve in those hills and plains of shattered rock and ice.

  The kzinti who stayed here were pitied by the kzinti who passed through on their way to greater glory.

  ...And, thought Short-Son bitterly, who mock and torture the loyal kzin whose heroism keeps this wretched base open for the use of the Patriarchy. He envied the outward-bound warriors their journey, their wily females, the wood and leather and tapestry in their starships. He scorned their petty complaints about the hardships of space. He openly hated their sons who used him as sport, but kept private his thoughts about violating their soft-furred daughters.

  The Short-Son of Chirr-Nig knew where they were running to. The brightest star on the horizon of Hssin was the beacon that made them endure both their travels and the tedious duty at bleak military bases along the way. Looking at it, he refused to call that white binary by its Kzin name, Ka'ashi he always called it by its unpronounceable exotic alien name, Alpha Centaurs. What did those weird sounds mean?

  An old warrior had once told him that the monkey aliens had named it after a beast that was half monkey, half herbivore; four cloven hooves and two hands. Just the name could make him smell the hunting and stalking of strange beasts!

  He had salivated over smellpictures of the six-legged underland gagrumphers.

  But it was he who was being hunted!

  The Son of Chirr-Nig thought of himself as a freak, as the only kzin in the Patriarchy who had ever felt fear. Perhaps others had felt fear but they did not run.

  What was a half-grown kzin youth doing on the surface, hurrying in a pressure suit so hastily donned that he had forgotten his thermal underwear? He had also forgotten his oxygen. His mask-pack was rumbling to make up the lack by the dissociation of atmospheric carbon dioxide and his fur was not keeping him
warm. His tail was already numb. Heroes as stupid as he was, died, he castigated himself. He was alone. He didn't even have his mother to protect him.

  ...coward, he thought, using a particularly vicious word from the Hero's Tongue which referred to scurrying animals too small to bring hunt-honor. He would never have let another kzin know that he used such a word to describe himself. Nevertheless, he wished he could understand why no one else was afraid to die.

  Puller-of-Noses and Hidden-Smiler he had his own private names for his youthful comrades were hunting him and they would catch him and kill him. A game. His father was always pushing him into such games before he was ready. His father wouldn't care if he died stupidly. It would please Short-Son's sire not to be embarrassed anymore. That noble one had a name and many sons to do him honor, enough sons themselves to earn names and make themselves rich on the labor of monkey slaves.

  An old warrior friend of Short-Son had told him that there were octal-to-the-octals of the man-monkeys to be had out there, swarms! herds! forestfulls! You could kill them by the army and eat them by the feast and still have enough monkey slaves left over to make you rich! For a while Son-of-Chirr-Nig held his furless tail between his legs to warm it and, shivering, found Man-sun, a radian to the right of Wunderland's two stars, at the edge of the constellation Raised Dagger. It was almost touching Victim's Blood, a distant red giant star that the man-beasts worshiped as lucky Mirach or simply as Beta Andromeda. They had a rich vocabulary of hauntingly soft sounds.

  Sometimes it awed him to be on the frontier. From within the Patriarchy, it was said, one could gaze at the night sky and be unable to espy any nearby unconquered stars but out here the sky was filled with unspoiled herds and grass! So much monkey meat; too bad those kit warriors were going to kill him before he got his fangs into it. What a waste! His claws extended and retracted.

  Short-Son had a problem. As long as he was outside, he was probably safe. But Puller-of-Noses was one organized kzin, a born commander. Already Puller's father was arranging to send him with the recruits to Wunderland for the fourth assault on Man-home. By now there were probably two octals of his fur-licking sycophants waiting at the entrances to the city with their w'tsai daggers ready to clip ears.

  Looking for me.

  But the base was enormous. The original assault on Wunderland had been staged from here. And the base had grown fivefold since then as the news of the coming conquest of the Man-system spread back deep into the Patriarchy. New ships arrived constantly and new facilities, tunnels, buildings, floater landing sites were springing up with disordered proliferation. Surely there was a place to hide.

  The kzin youth began stumbling his way in the direction of some newer diggings, taking deceptive shortcuts that only led into mazes of walls. He had certainly not been prepared for this frantic expedition. He was already too cold to continue. When the pads of his feet began to go numb a more local solution seemed in order. He almost turned back when he found his advance blocked by the great Jotok Run, an extensive collection of domes and subterranean warrens used for the breeding and hunting of the Jotok slaves. He was going to freeze to death before he worked around it.

  Why didn't he get it over with? If he went back through a main residential entrance, they'd catch him there would be a fight and he would be killed or hopelessly maimed. Maybe he could surprise them with a terrible rage and kill one of them before they t him? He could smile, but the rage paralyzed his leap. He had never been able to leap. It was hopeless. Why not let them kill him today? Even if he escaped today, they'd find him tomorrow and kill him to purify the race.

  That was when he remembered that kits were not allowed to hunt in the Jotok Run without a guardian. Puller-of-Noses could not be there with his gang. Of course, Short-Son was not allowed in the Jotok Run either, and if he was found there he'd be mauled, but at least the adults would not kill him.

  There were no windows, and the walls were thick, self-repairing mechanisms which would give warning of malfunction. He found ways to climb up over the walls, with four fingered hands that had evolved for rock climbing.

  In his mind, as he climbed, he dreamed that he was clandestinely attacking a monkey-fort. At every corner and ramp he brought out an invisible beam-rifle and poured light into the swarming man-monkeys. By the time he was overlooking the central loading courtyard, vast enough to take twenty floaters, he had killed octals and octals of the furless beasts. He gazed down upon the shadowed landing area and planned his final assault on Man-home.

  Doom for all mankind! Then he could hunt giraffes!

  He saw surface elevators big enough to take a floater down into the city. He could dimly make out some small kzin-sized airlocks. But a freight entrance would be the easiest to jimmy. There were good locks on the inside to contain the Jotok, who were clever and sometimes treacherous, but no real barriers from the outside. There was no need for barriers from the outside a kzin did not break and enter without a reason he would be willing to explain to another kzin.

  Short-Son did not have the normal entering tools, but he did have a toolkit on his suit and he had always been curious about mechanisms, probing them until he understood their function. He could no longer feel his feet when he dropped into the courtyard, and his fingers were so frozen he took an eternity to release the outer freight door. Stupid mechanism! A female could design a better latch hold!

  The black wall slid open. He entered the freight chamber to swirls of condensation while the outer door rolled shut and the purifiers hummed to life cleaning the nitrogen of carbon dioxide and methane, and adding oxygen. It took him seconds to disable the alarm. By virtue of kzin habit he was battle ready when the inner door released, ready for the fivelimbed Jotok leap, or an adult custodian, or even a follower of Puller-of-Noses.

  What he found was three of the baby five-armed Jotok, about the size of his hand, crawling around the loading area, totally confused by the stone floor. He squashed them with his foot. He passed through the barrier maze of opaque glass walls into a verdant biocology tall trees, the babble of a brook, and when he removed his oxygen mask, the rotting steamy smells of a pampered rainforest and the hint of a distant pond with rushes. Some of the smells he couldn't classify.

  CHAPTER 2

  (2391 A.D.)

  Short-Son of Chirr-Nig shivered in relief at the warmth. He packed his face-mask and holstered his tools with stiff fingers, dropping one of them. Just having to pick it up brought his fear and rage out in a grumbling snarls not too loud. He didn't want to attract attention. He assessed his location and picked out a cluster of bushes and trees where he could hide without leaving a trampled trail. Assume an imminent attack.

  He removed his boots and began to massage blood back into his feet. Another of the baby Jotok was trying to climb a thin tree, unsuccessfully, three spindly arms waving impotently, while the other two double elbowed arms pushed against the ground. Short-Son did not kill it his rage was subsiding. Stupid leafeater. You’ll make a stupid slave when you grow up. The bark was too smooth. The soft-boned fingers of the tiny infant needed to catch on rough bark. He noticed more of the creatures. They were probably coming from the pond.

  Leaves rustled, and he looked up quickly, scanning the branches. The ceiling lamps that imitated a tropical sky did not make it easy, there were too many of them and not enough shadows. Had to watch out for those Jotok. They were smart when they grew up and big, too. They had five cunning brains, one in each arm, and they never slept without at least one brain on the alert and in control.

  Short-Son did not feel too threatened. The Jotoki ran from danger and the wild ones were used to being hunted. Give them an escape route and they ran. But they were said to have no fear at all when they were hidden. Caution was still called for. The father of Striped-Son of Hromfi had been killed in seconds when a wild Jotok dropped on him from above during a hunt. Yes, they knew how to hide. A nose couldn't even find them because their skin glands imitated the smells of the forest.

  What to
do now? Rest. Catch some game and gorge even if it was poaching. Short-Son was famished. The odors were turning his mind toward its natural ferocity, but he had no intention of hunting Jotoki without training. Any small dumb animal would do. This vast array of domes and caves was made for hunting. It was the best he'd ever do on Hssin, much better than buying frightened vatach in cages at the market, and lugging them home on his back for his father.

  What he found on the second layer down was a slithering snake as long as his leg. He made a fool of himself catching it. Kzinti enjoyed hunting anywhere, but they were not built for hunting in the forest, and tree climbing snakes were not their natural prey. Nonetheless it made a good morsel and the blood had an interesting tang. The bones were unpleasantly crunchy.

  He had to think about getting out of the reserve even though he didn't want to leave. If he stayed, some adult would find and thrash him; if he left, his peers would kill him. Finding refuge in his father's compound was, perhaps, not the best idea. His brothers were allies, even though they taunted and humiliated him, but his father would just throw him back into the jaws of his peers to make a good warrior out of him. He could hear his father lecturing him in the sonorous formal tense of the Hero's Tongue, "Make every use of the games to hone your skills."

  He found a large fungus the size of his head, growing between two roping trees, with microscopic flowers flourishing on the black patches. He sniffed in wonder. He found the trail of some small animal and he saw a wild Jotok sitting high above on a lamp, its elbows in the air, watching him with an armored eye that poked up out of a shoulder blade. The eyes of the other arms were retracted, probably asleep.

  And he wandered down to the pond and waded among the reeds, looking for fish. All he found were prejotok arms swimming about, the size of his finger, the gill-slit red. Each arm was an individual creature only joining in a colony of five when they were ready to crawl upon the land. The polliwogs had an armored eye already, but only graceful fins where the fingers would develop.