Man-Kzin Wars XIV Read online

  It sounded very, very strange to the kzin. This trade idea was unnatural, surely. There was some trade between Heroes, mainly on long-settled planets, but between Heroes and slaves it was a different matter. Heroes generally took what they wanted, though they sometimes gave token payments to pets or as rewards to old retainers. He had known a trooper, long dead, whose sire on Kzin had sold medicines that the healers prescribed, but he had been honorably crippled. Things were different on Kzin. There were even organizations in which an economic historian might have seen the rudiments of guilds. But these still had as long way to go.

  “You mean I give you this gold, you give it to a man far away, he gives it to a man even farther away who makes it into a manrett toy, and in exchange gives some medicine to the man not so far away, who gives it to you. Why does everbody do this?”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that; you see, we have the stuff called money, which . . . Oh, never mind, you’ll pick up the idea gradually. And we need a name for you.”

  “I have no Name,” the Kzin said, with a doleful stare at the ground.

  “Then I shall give you one. From now on, you are Ruat,” the judge told him calmly.

  The kzin pondered. Truly this Judge human must be important if he could give names. And was a human-conferred name legitimate? It might as well be.

  “Rrhouarrghrrt,” he pronounced it doubtfully.

  “Yep. That’ll do fine. And I know you aren’t much inclined to socialize with other kzin, but if you know of others in the same condition as you were, bring them in. We’ll take care of them until they are healthy, and if they want to stay with us, well, we’ll just have to learn to get along.”

  The judge and Ruat were making a patrol of the village just inside the perimeter the next evening. The judge felt a little tense. Something in the air, but not just that. Andersen, the community’s chief woodworker and bowyer, had gone searching for some exotic red wood and had been away a long time. The judge had ideas that, now that the hyperdrive was making communication with Sol System a matter of weeks, most of them spent in accelerating and decelerating, rather than a one-way voyage of decades, a market might exist there for some of the more exotic Wunderland timber products, and Anderson had been building up a stock of the beautiful red and orange woods. There might even be a market among the kzin, many of whom were fanatical chess-players and prized ornate sets. The judge knew of Andersen’s enthusiasm for his craft. Still, he should not have lingered out until this hour. Indeed, it was unlike him.

  “The kits are growing stronger,” Ruat said. “I shall have to make them new quarters. Male and female cannot grow up together.”

  The judge realized he had a point. Female kzinti, as far as he knew, were of very low intelligence. Why this was so, nobody knew, but there were theories that it was the result of some intervention long ago at the dawn of kzinti science. During the years of Occupation the human population of the Alpha Centauri System had had more pressing matters to think about.

  “I suppose,” Ruat went on, “I will have to be thinking of a nursery-name at least for my son.”

  “Think carefully,” said the judge. “It may be that he will grow into a major historical figure.”

  “How so?”

  “Who is to stop him?”

  The lesslocks attacked with howls and screams. They carried bushes, which they used as scaling ladders. The human watch had grown slack after months of quiet. Had they been silent, a good number might have scrambled over the wall unobserved.

  The judge had a double-barreled percussion-cap pistol. Men and women, wielding a variety of weapons, poured from the huts. The rush of the lesslocks overwhelmed the first humans. The judge realized with horror that they were outnumbered several times over. The armory contained most of their precious supply of percussion caps and most of what few modern combat weapons they possessed. Their hunting muskets had limited stopping power against the heavily-muscled anthropoids.

  He fired his pistol as Ruat roared the kzin battle-cry, “I lead my Heroes!” the blade of his wtsai flashing, and tore into the thickest press of the lesslocks. The lesslocks clumped round him, allowing the humans to get to the armory. The human shots were telling now. It had been wearisome and time-consuming to beat out percussion caps from sheets of copper, but it paid off now in rapidity of fire and reliability. Someone threw a grenade. It was a homemade contraption, but the blast was effective in scattering the creatures. For a moment, before they closed in again, the judge saw Ruat standing in a heap of bodies, his roars drowning out the lesslocks’ screams.

  There was the sizzling roar of a modern strakkaker, its blizzard of glass-and-Teflon needles turning lesslocks into instant anatomist’s diagrams. (The judge thought again with the detached part of his mind how human their structure was. Perhaps one day someone would find out why. Convergent evolution, he guessed. Maybe their remote ancestors had lived in trees.)

  The lesslocks were armed with stones and weighted sticks. Whatever they had expected, it had not been that the defense would be led by a kzin. Ruat hurled himself into the thickest press of them. If they had anything like a chief or leader, he would be there. Between the flashes of the muskets, the judge had an impression of body parts flying. Like a streak of orange lightning, Ruat’s male kit shot into the fray. He was already the size of a leopard. Whether he had been taught or whether his warrior instincts were enough, he was effective. He swiped and snapped at the throat of one of the lesslocks, swiped at a second, and was onto another before the first hit the ground. The second blundered past, howling in agony, entrails spilling. There was a third the kit had swiped, staggering blindly, a tier of white ribs showing.

  The lesslocks were retreating. Outnumbered though they were, the humans were now keeping up a disciplined fire, one file loading as the other covered it. Fresh ammunition supplies were being brought up and passed out methodically.

  The lesslocks found getting out of the stockade considerably more difficult than getting into it. Not many survived to get over the wall and back to the tree cover.

  Ruat was bleeding from numerous new bites and scratches, but his eyes were shining. He walked back to the humans with the kit on his shoulder and a positive swagger in his step. He contemplated his ear-ring, imagining how it would look adorned with many new ears. There would be an ear-ring for his son too. The judge would have slapped him on the back, but remembered in time never to touch an adult male kzin without permission. Still, there were plenty of cheers for him. It was hard to estimate exactly how many lesslocks had died, but it seemed unlikely that they would attack again for a long time. Wendy Cantor produced some fish-flavored ice cream that she had been secretly preparing as a treat for the kits. They purred and preened against her, already knowing enough not to press so hard as to knock her down.

  “I was an infantry trooper once,” Ruat said. “I never thought it would fall to my lot to be the one to give our battle-cry—and lead.”

  “You are truly a Hero now,” the judge told him. “But I think you will have the chance to lead us in battle again. That was a coordinated attack. I do not think it will be the last . . . We must heighten the wall, and make sure there are always sentries posted. The degree of organization behind the attack concerns me.”

  “Thinking of those days,” said Ruat, “I remember the Surrender Day.”

  “So do I,” said the judge. There was suddenly something very bleak in his voice. Then he laughed to cover it, but the laugh sounded forced and artificial to him.

  “Our officer gave me a kzinrett from his own harem and told me I was not permitted to die nobly in battle. He said I was to make for the forest and do what I could to keep our species alive. You say you remember those days? A bad time.”

  “My Hero, you do not know how bad. I was once Captain Jorg von Thoma, of the Patriarch’s human auxiliary police,” said the judge. “A kzin saved my life at the risk of his own, that day. That secret puts my life in your hands.”

  “Why do you
tell me this, then?”

  “To seal the trust between us.”

  A month later there were four kzin families living in the village and Wendy had treated them successfully with antibiotics, which they now had in large quantities for both human and kzin. One single kzin had come in, had been made healthy as far as his body was concerned, and had subsequently killed a man who had laughed at him. Ruat had broken his neck with contemptuous ease: Darwin was working on the kzinti, too. The judge approved Ruat for maintaining Law and Order, and gave him a job as a policeman—the first the village had ever had. Some of the humans had grumbled at the appointment, but a larger number felt safer. Previously there hadn’t been much by way of crime beyond the odd drunken fight, but afterwards there wasn’t any.

  Wunderland, Southern Continent, 2438 AD

  “HEY, WHAT’S THAT?” Sarah pointed across the waves, high and roiling in Wunderland’s light gravity.

  Greg focused his binoculars on the object. “Looks a bit like a monster fin, doesn’t it?”

  Sarah shivered in her parka. The Southland was always cold, and with Wunderland between A and B, the biggest components of the Alpha Centauri triple star system, the planet was as far from A as it ever got. Winter on Wunderland was determined by the orbit, because the planetary axis inclination was small. And B sucked the aphelion out and made it precess. Coming here for a honeymoon was even more eccentric than the orbit.

  “It’s rolling a bit. Hold on, it’s coming more upright. There’s some letters on it,” Greg turned his head sideways to read them. “It says ‘UN’ something . . . You look at it, and tell me I haven’t lost my marbles.”

  Sarah took the binoculars and adjusted them. “I think you’re right. Can we get closer?”

  “If it’s what it might be, we need to take the flyer over it. We can record it for the television studios. Hey, we might get enough to pay for the whole honeymoon! Come on, let’s get back inside. It will be warmer, too.”

  They trudged through flurries of snow back to the flyer. Half an hour later, Sarah had gone back to T-shirt and shorts and was poised with the videocamera ready as Greg took them out to sea.

  “Low tide, or we wouldn’t have seen anything, but look, there’s a lot of it underwater. It’s a spaceship, or more than half of one. And it doesn’t look like one of ours.”

  Wunderland ships had evolved their own design architecture around enclosed globes and spaces. The kzin favored wedge-and-ovoid shapes. Sol ships, however, came in many varieties.

  “Must be one of the blockade runners from Sol System, one that nearly made it. Must have been here for at least since the end of the war.”

  “Why haven’t the satellites picked it up, then?”

  “Not many pass ’round here. The stationary ones look north, and the others look up for kzin warships, not down. Besides, a lot of the kzin satellites as well as nearly all the pre-war ones were destroyed.”

  Southland had never had too much interest to anybody. No minerals worth extracting, a lousy climate for crops or humans. There had been some kzin bases, of course, but they got a pasting at Liberation. Greg and Sarah had chosen it as an unusual honeymoon spot because it was practically pristine. Also, it lacked the dangerous life-forms of little Southland—or so they hoped. So far, they had seen nothing that a modern vehicle couldn’t easily keep out.

  Wunderland’s biology was by no means fully classified yet. Now that the war was over, on the surface of the planet at least, and scientific research was resuming, professional and amateur scientists and collectors could still hope for major discoveries. Meanwhile, military craft and dedicated satellites guarded the skies, ceaselessly alert for anything that might be the radiation signature of a kzin ship that was unaware of, or disregarded, the still fragile cease-fire on the planet.

  “Now, try not to interrupt, I’m starting to record.” Sarah pointed the camera down as Greg obligingly tilted the flyer.

  “This is Sarah and Greg Rankin reporting from just half a kilometer into the not particularly great Southern Ocean, off Southland, and less than a hundred meters up from the water,” Sarah narrated.

  “We’re looking down at what appears to be a spaceship, sunken and hard to detect. It has quite a lot of marine growth on it. We saw the fin by chance, and came for a closer look. You can see that it has a UNSN insignia, so it must have been here for a couple of years. We think it’s the wreck of a blockade runner.” She looked straight at the camera and blinked.

  “It’s a very sad discovery to make on our honeymoon. Brave men and women died in that ship, and to no good purpose. They got so close, but crashed when they’d nearly made it. It would be worth finding out what it was that stopped them from bringing arms and other supplies to us, and perhaps to commemorate their efforts. Bravery should be recognized.” No point in speculating too much. Every spacer knew the phrase “The many deaths of space.” She went on: “Maybe the kzin shot them down. But we don’t know what brought them to Southland.”

  She turned off the recorder. “I’ll send a copy to my parents to show them that coming here wasn’t as stupid as they reckoned, and another to the government. And I’ll ask the television news channels if they are willing to pay for the video before I send anything. Once they’ve got it, goodbye to our getting another cent for it. But if we can build up a bidding war, we might just pay for the rent on the flier at least.”

  “Go for it, girl. Who is that current affairs guy? Stan Adler? Try him, and tell your parents not to part with their copy. And instead of the government, try the Guthlacs. If it goes straight into the bureaucracy, nobody will ever hear anything more about it.”

  “You mean you don’t trust the government?” She pronounced it “gummint” as a term of mockery. “But all those warm, loving politicians and bureaucrats exist only to look after us and protect us.” Sarah grinned at him. Greg would either explode or start a rant. Either would be entertaining, and she had an instant cure for both. All she had to do was lean forward seductively and say: “Ooh, Greg, you are so clever,” and he’d start laughing.

  “There is one thing, though,” she said before he could get started. “It was generally kzin tactical doctrine, after they got the measure of us in the early days, to travel in the largest possible fleets. This ship doesn’t look as it it was hit by a fleet.”

  “Well, that’s very interesting, but what has it got to do with me?” Vaemar asked the two humans. Their breathing indicated they were nervous, but confronting a predator with more than twice their combined bodyweight would tend to have that effect. Vaemar was used to it, and went out of his way to underplay the fangs. Yawning was definitely out, and watching a videotape of a downed spacecraft isn’t particularly stimulating, so concentration was needed.

  “Well, we were all set to sell the video to a news channel. We’d agreed to a huge price, and everything looked grand. But then Sarah thought of something.”

  Sarah explained: “You see, I figured it was probably shot down by a kzin warcraft. I mean it’s the easy explanation, isn’t it? And that might stir up old resentments. If you think it would cause interspecies trouble, we wouldn’t go through with it. I mean, we could do with the money, but money isn’t everything, and it was just luck that we saw the fin. So it’s not as if we did anything to earn any. We don’t really deserve it.” She would have smiled, but knew better. The circumstances in which humans showed their teeth to kzin were very restricted.

  Vaemar looked at her thoughtfully. A sense of honor in a female human. He’d known it before, of course; he had several manrett friends, but it was not altogether common, and rather refreshing. “But why me?”

  “We talked to Abbot Boniface first, and he said you were the one to see. He said you are effectively leader of the kzin, and it was time you got into politics,” Sarah told him innocently.

  Vaemar sighed, a kzin noise like treacle going down a drain. He was already getting into politics, and he hated every single politic he’d gotten into. But he liked these people. Th
e male was ginger-haired and had orange spots all over his face. Freckles, he thought they were called. The female was a nice chocolate color, which looked much healthier, and she had crinkly black hair, which looked like spun wire. When he moved, the sun flashed on the metal of his ear-ring. After the adventure in the caves with Rarrgh, he had the beginnings of a respectable collection of human and kzinti ears hanging from his belt. The kzin—yes, call it “surrender”—on Wunderland, while the war went on in space, had been inevitable, and he was overwhelmingly glad of it for many reasons, but it did make life complex sometimes.

  “It might, of course, have been downed by a kzin warcraft,” his deep voice half-purred. “But a spacecraft is unlikely. Most of the ships from Earth that tried to run the blockade were detected and intercepted when still in deep space. Getting this close would have been difficult. An approach well out of the ecliptic might have been tried, but there were detecting satellites out there, too. If it had got as far as low orbit of Ka’ashi—I beg your pardon, of Wunderland—there would be little defense except aircraft and a few satellites. If it had run into the fleet or one of its prides, there would have been nothing left of it.

  “I shall have records searched to see if there is any mention of the kzin shooting down a craft that got very close. They may not exist—much was destroyed at . . .” He couldn’t quite bring himself to say either “Liberation” or “surrender” easily, and the humans noticed it—“at the signing of the truce with Man, but it would be interesting to see if there is anything left. Hroth, who was staff-officer, is writing an account.”

  Not a pleasant job for a kzin to undertake, thought Sarah. Still, it may be an interesting document. And humans will enjoy buying it to read heroic things about themselves.

  The young kzin looked at them both. “But that is of historical interest. The question is, should you suppress your finding in the interests of kzin-man relations. The answer is ‘no,’ you must not. Sell it to your television station. Only complete honesty and openness between our species can help us forge the trust we both need. This is history, it is our task to make the future, we must not let the past dictate to us. And now, please join my mate and me for afternoon tea. I hope you like cucumber and tomato sandwiches, Karan is rather proud of her sandwiches. She has even tried eating some of them . . . I must confess my own vices include a taste for cake. My Sire took me when I was a very young kit to his secretary’s children’s party. She gave me cake and a large ball of fiber to leap upon. I sometimes wondered where she got that idea—until I found out.” His ears lifted in the kzin equivalent of a smile.