Man-Kzin Wars XII Read online

  The legionaries lacked nothing in death-defying courage, but the Caledonian charge simply passed through them. The felines had their own beam-weapons out now, and one beam-weapon, wielded by a ferocious beast at close quarters, is the equal of many swords and axes. But on the human sides there was ferocity too, and those of our own who had the new weapons flinched no more than did those who had the ancient steel of our fathers.

  In the way of all fights, I do not know how long it lasted, but end at last it did. The deck ran deep in blood. Humans, even armored legionaries, had been torn limb from limb. Legionaries lay dead in dozens, Caledonians in hundreds—more than half their men were gone. But all the felines were dead or dying, and their purple and orange blood mixed with the red of the humans. I have always had one weakness: I weep and shake a little after a battle, I know not why. But I wiped the tears away.

  The Jotoki mechanisms whined and roared as they strove to clear the air. Our legionary doctors hurried forward to tend the wounded, and so did certain Jotoki.

  Other Jotoki hurried to secure the kzinti craft.

  "Twenty times five kzinti dead," said Jegarvindertsa. The Jotoki counted strangely, but any might see that our human dead outnumbered the kzinti several times. "Also we have captured four kzinti spacecraft. There are tadpoles in this fleet's few breeding ponds who will live to join together and grow sentient because of this victory today. Strong and valiant are the legions. Yes, and your barbarians, too."

  "We lost too many. It was a Pyrrhic victory," I said. The one saving grace, I thought, was that the Caledoni had lost far more than the legions, partly because they had charged into battle without armor. There would be a supply of red-polled widows to keep our men happy.

  "You will not have to fight again without modern weapons and armor," Jegarvindertsa said. "That was the misfortune of war. Be proud that you conquered at all."

  There was no more time for talk then. As always after a battle, my duty was among the wounded, raising their spirits (and indeed with the medicines and physicians of the Jotoki, much more could be done for them than I would ever have believed possible), cheering the surviving legionaries with promises of promotion and decorations, inventorying the stores with the quartermasters, and consoling widows and orphans. We had had a shortage of women previously. Now we had a surplus. I suspected that with our next battle the surplus would grow larger. I also noticed that some of the Caledonian women, now that they had been washed and decently dressed, some in the Romano-British style, were by no means uncomely, with their red hair and their muscles and bodies hardened in their hard country. The first mothers of Rome must have been women like these. The Caledonian chiefs had, sensibly, taken the comeliest women for themselves. A number of these were now among the widows.

  I had much to do and learn, and it was some time before I had a chance to talk at leisure with Jegarvindertsa again.

  "Next time they board, use gravity traps," I told him. "Direct them into spaces on the ship where you have previously hidden gravity engines, then activate them and crush them. It will save us men and Jotoki."

  "Did you think of that by yourselves?"

  "By myself, yes."

  "We are astonished. We did not think of that. We sorrow we found you so late. We hope we have not found you too late.

  "You are warriors yet administrators too. And for primitives you have a remarkable capacity for abstract thought. Who else in a culture with your technological level would have a god of excrement disposal? And a military system with NCOs as its hinge, specialized engineering corps, and books of strategy? To say nothing of the systematized disaster-relief that first interested us in you."

  "We are the heirs of Troy, so Virgil tells us. The Hero Aeneas founded Rome."

  "Yes, that is odd, too. Your art. Something gave your kind more brain than you had any obvious need for. That is true of all spacefaring races, of course. It is one of the Great Mysteries. But you are mystery beyond mystery. In shape and physiology, you are like the kzinti. But in some aspects of mind you are more like us. Our kinds have both tried to be bearers of civilization in a Barbaricum. We are an old race, but we have found traces of other civilizations that rose and perished long ago, across a waste of time which you could not conceive. We did not intend to follow them into oblivion. We had poets and thinkers, once, who wrote of the Jotoki Mission, and celebrated the Jotoki who died to bring civilization to barbaric planets. We thought well of ourselves. We brought happiness and prosperity to many worlds."

  "Where are those worlds now? Will they not come to our help?"

  "The kzinti have them for hunting territories and their inhabitants as slaves or prey. We unleashed huge evil on the galaxy. It would be better if we had never been."

  "You did not know."

  "We should have. We had the science, the civilization. We should have had the foresight. There is a great virtue for traders: strict attention to business. And there is a great vice of traders: too little attention to anything else. We learned too late that in our way we were as unbalanced as the kzinti."

  "But now you know better?"

  "Yes. Too late. We have lost too many. We fight a rearguard action without hope as the kzinti devour all we created. . . . We did not do it all for ourselves, you know, though profit was the engine that drove us. Yes, we wanted wealthy and prosperous customers and trading partners—was that evil? Prosperous customers rather than slaves? We lifted species from savagery and barbarism, added a cumulative total of countless billions of years to the lives of individuals alien to us, created security and happiness . . . our mistake was to assume that given knowledge and instruction, the kzinti would be the same as other species."

  "What can one legion and the people of a few Pictish villages do against such an enemy?"

  "You are an . . . experiment. Some of us wanted no more alien mercenaries. If you are good enough soldiers to beat the kzinti, and faithful, we may recruit more of you."

  "Raid Earth again, you mean? To enslave more?"

  "No. We are not slavers, however we may seem to you. We recruited you as we did because we had little choice in the matter. When we return to your Earth we will release you from our service with fair pay—enough to make you more than rich for life—and trust you to recruit for us. We know that enslaved conscripts do not fight as well as freely enlisted men."

  That was true enough. It was one of the principles on which Rome had built her Empire.

  "Besides the gold, you will have the products of our science and medicine. And I think I can promise that you will be rich in stories to tell your children."

  That was worth pondering too. Rome with Jotoki weapons would be invincible indeed! Providing—and here a thought came to chill the heart—providing its enemies were no more than men! But I thought of another matter.

  "By the time we see Earth again, we will be too old to make sense," I said.

  "We trust not. First, you will spend time in deep sleep if needs be, and will not age. Second, we travel at near the speed of light. There is an effect at such speeds so that time seems to change. You will find when you set your feet on Terra again that less time has passed for you than might seem. . . . Now, we must leave this region before kzinti reconnaissance returns."

  But when we spoke again things had changed. There was news of other battles, more feline victories. It seemed that we would not be going home yet. When I spoke with Jegarvindertsa a few weeks later there was a change in their manner. There was less talk of possibilities of victories, or even of prolonging the war, now, more talk of fleeing. "We found you too late," they said. "There is nothing left on the ledger but to try to save some last poor remnant of our kind. We do not know if we can keep faith with you."

  I showed no feeling or emotion. I had my sword by my side, and it occurred to me that the best policy would to plunge it into them then and there. Some of us had learnt something of spaceflight by then, and I thought that with a scratch crew we might still be able to get the ship back to Earth. Take t
he consorts by surprise and destroy them without warning.

  Men had achieved such things before. I remembered the Greek story of Xenophon's march to the sea, of Odysseus and his wanderings, fighting perils and monsters. Better to die trying to get home than be lost in the stars forever. But I would try to learn a little more before I struck.

  "Where will you go?" I asked.

  "The universe is big."

  "So I have learned. Would they follow?"

  "We can accelerate to near light-speed. But so can the kzinti. The longer start we have the better."

  "Where will you go ultimately? Would you head for another star cluster? Another galaxy?" I talked of these things easily now.

  "It would take too long. Even if we put ourselves into hibernation, as we usually do, the air would gradually leak out through the hulls, atom by atom. Our automatics would fail, micrometeorites and free hydrogen atoms would erode hull material at last. In any event, our life systems would eventually disintegrate. So would our bodies, in hibernation or not. And so, at last, would the hulls of our ships. We can travel far, but there is a limit."

  "Where will you go?" I pressed them.

  "Our friend, if we do not tell you, you cannot reveal it under torture."

  "I am a Roman still. I do not fear torture."

  "Forgive us, but you have not experienced kzinti torture. In a matter as important as that they would not hesitate a moment. Also you know they have telepaths—think what it means to be tortured by a telepathic race, and pardon us if we do not entrust you with our most priceless secret. But perhaps we are not clear yet ourselves. We must seek among the stars for the furthest that it is practical for us or our tadpoles' tadpoles to reach."

  "You will go and leave us here? To fight the kzinti alone and without hope?"

  "No. Only a few of us will go. Enough, just, to crew the ships and care for the tadpoles. The rest remain to delay the kzinti."

  "I see. Like Horatius."

  "Who?"

  "A hero of our people."

  "If we defeat the kzinti, we buy not only the survival of our kind, but also the survival of your kind, perhaps. Conquer them, and you will have the ships to go where you will. Back to your own planet, perhaps. The kzinti will strike your kind sooner or later, but if it is late enough, perhaps your kind will have science enough to fight them."

  "You really believe that?" I thought of the onagers and javelins of the legions and of Rome attacked by kzinti weaponry. Hannibal and his elephants had been hard enough to subdue. And the cold hand that had touched my heart at a certain vision touched it again—kzinti falling upon Earth, upon the towns and cities of the Empire, of legions marching out with eagles and trumpets and small swords and javelins to fight sword-lights and plasma cannon. All the Empire, all Terra, turned into a vast arena for humans to be hunted by beasts. Forever. Delay them, he said. But could we delay them or divert them long enough?

  "All things are possible," Jegarvindertsa said. "You have barely begun to discover metal alloys, but your military and civil organization are amazingly advanced—we traded with many primitive races and we know potential when we see it."

  Their strange eyes with their pupils like crosses looked deep into my eyes. Somehow—perhaps Mithras Himself spoke to me—I knew that I stood at one of those moments when the decision of a soldier may change all the world. Mithras had been a soldier.

  "You have seen the star maps and you know we speak truth." Jegarvindertsa said. "Your world, your Terra, lies that way. We intend to flee. We think the kzinti will pursue us. We will draw them away from your Terra, a sector of space which they would otherwise reach within a few generations real-time."

  "But you have shown us how the kzinti advance everywhere."

  "In some directions faster than others. But the longer the kzinti are delayed, the better the chance we will have of escape. Which means leading their empire away from your Earth. That is also buying time for your kind to develop defenses of your own."

  "Spaceships? Beam-weapons?"

  "One day, perhaps. Why not? Your kind have the brain for arches and aqueducts, maps and mathematics and even a bureaucracy. That means, we think, you have the brain to build spaceships. We do not know why the gods gave your kind—plains-dwelling apes—so much brain, though they also gave it to us, colonial amphibians, and to the cursed cats. There is more brain in each of us than you—or we, or they—ever needed for mere survival. But if it happened once, if can happen again. Perhaps it is a condition of amphibianism."

  "But we are not amphibians! We are not frogs or sea creatures!"

  "You have poetry, art, philosophy, as well as arches and aqueducts and armies. You have religion. That makes you amphibians. That is why we argued against Jufadirvanlums that you be recruited."

  "The felines appear to have all those things too."

  "Yes. That is a part of the mystery. Those barbarians have a glimmering of something else as well. We have tried to civilize them and failed. Now nothing remains for us but to fight to ward off our final destruction by them. We, and the species we brought forward into the light, are doomed to be but their slaves and prey. And yet, perhaps, one day far beyond our vision, you may be the agent that . . ." They stopped, and their strange eyes took on a yet stranger cast, as though they were focused upon some faraway light.

  "Yes?"

  "Perhaps, perhaps . . . one day . . . you will civilize them. We cannot."

  "We have civilized Greeks, and Gauls, and Britons. A few Caledonians. Even a few Germans. But for how long? I do not know."

  "You are physically more like the kzinti than we are."

  "I am surprised you recruited us, then."

  The strange mood was broken. Jegarvindertsa laughed.

  "My dear Maximus, that was precisely the reason we did recruit you. That and the fact we were desperately short of mass for our fighting units anyway. But it was the argument we—that is, this five-unit of the Jotoki, comprising the group-individual that is Jegarvindertsa—put before the poor makeshift that has replaced our trade council."

  The strange mood was broken. But I left my sword sheathed. I knew now what the Ninth Legion had to do. The old man had often spoken to me when I was a child, of the ultimate duty of dying for civilization. I wished my task had been so simple and easy.

  Again the picture jumped.

  A strategos does not lead a Legion on foot. Nor did I now. For all that had changed, and for all the Jotoki learning machines had taught us, our legionaries still remembered something of Roman tactics: scrupulous preparation, and then a thrust in the right place—use the sword for the thrust into the belly, don't waste time slashing at the armored head and chest. We dealt with the felines in the same way. The vanguard of their ships rushed at us, and we passed between them to attack from behind.

  The kzinti gravity polarizers were as good as ours, as were their beam-weapons, but when the legions had fought barbarians it had been feet and hooves against feet and hooves, and swords and spears against swords and spears. When, with their scout ships and fighters smashed, we closed on their line of capital ships, it reminded me of tales of fighting in the arena.

  We had learnt not to attack the heavily armored weapons turrets, or the strengthened prows, but to burn into the sides. Damage in the vacuum of space multiplies itself. The first felines I saw then were bodies flying into space when my beams tore into the semi-globular belly of a great feline warship.

  We cut their line at two points, using their own speed against them and allowing their van to fly on until it could return and join the battle. By the time they did, the line was in chaos.

  Human barbarians often keep attacking though it is plain they have lost the tactical upper hand, and have no concept of a fighting, strategic withdrawal, fighting instead as a furious disorganized mass, each unable to support the other. The kzinti were much the same.

  There were gaps in our ranks—there always are after a battle—when we flew back to the carrier, but there was wine and wom
en and feasting too. The Jotoki poured freshly minted gold on us, still valuable even though they had a technology for transmuting metals. I had read Caesar's Commentaries and imagined how he would have relished being here, lecturing the Jotoki on how to improve their space tactics and quietly plotting to take them over. It was then that I began to write this commentary of my own.

  And we fought. Many times, crossing distances I cannot grasp even now, to strike in unexpected new places. And we won, many times.

  Not always.

  We must have missed a survivor once, who told the tale.

  Finally we found kzinti who were ready for us.

  Then, with our fleet slashed by kzinti claws, it was ground fighting again. We of the Ninth—the Caledonian cales were mostly expended by then—and what Jotoki could be spared.

  A couple of the Jotoki ships, almost empty, with only the barest shadows of Jotoki crews, escaped. We bought them that chance of escape at the cost of our own. I do not know where they went. But perhaps they led the kzinti away from Terra as they promised. Perhaps they escaped and bred their little swimmers again.

  We were left behind to divert and delay the kzinti like Horatius on the ground, defending the abandoned hulks of most of the Jotoki ships. Jegarvindertsa were one of the Jotoki who remained with us. The kzinti had withdrawn at last, but we knew they would soon be back, with fresh legions of their own.

  * * *

  Again the picture flickered and jumped.

  "We have lost everything and there is no hope. We die here on a strange, cruel world. Well, we can still die like Romans. We are not strangers to hardness. I suppose we had better kill the women and children first. We will not give them to the beasts as if they were criminals in the arena."