Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XIV Read online

  “It remains top secret, with your permission, sir,” the general said. “No need for people to know what’s coming.”

  The shuddering patterns of interference were coming more quickly and frequently to the picture now, and the distortions becoming more gross. Then the picture dwindled to a pinpoint of light and died. Our glimpse into the future had ended. We looked at each other wordlessly. There was nothing to say.

  But there had just been time to see the white column, on a soundless beam of light, lift from the ground, turn towards the Pleiades, and vanish in a flash.

  DEADLY

  KNOWLEDGE

  A Story of the Man-Kzin Wars

  by Hal Colebatch

  DEADLY KNOWLEDGE

  A Story of the Man-Kzin Wars

  Occupied Wunderland, 2419

  “THE MONKEY IS TELLING THE TRUTH,” the telepath reported. “It does not know why the other monkeys died.”

  I knew enough of the Heroes’ Tongue to follow what it said. I had not tried to resist it or make its task more difficult, so we were both feeling in better shape than would otherwise be the case. And I had told the truth. The telepath was bewildered, and so was I.

  Slave Supervisor nodded, a mannerism he must have unconsciously picked up from humans. Anyway, it seemed I was off the hook.

  “Resume your duties,” he growled at me.

  I made a prostration of obedience—not gratitude, kzin would not appreciate that—and gathered my books and left. The telepath followed me. I gave silent thanks that Krar-Skrei and his pride had not been present. To Krar-Skrei, a dead monkey was a good thing on principle.

  An apparently motiveless murder and a suicide. The kzin would not have cared, except we three had been tasked with teaching a class of kzin about human culture, on Chuut-Riit’s orders. I could guess why, after killing von Kleist, Thompson had opened his own veins—the kzin punishment for destroying the Patriarch’s property and spoiling Chuut-Riit’s schemes would have been a great deal worse than a largely painless death in a hot bath. It was an end that befitted a classical scholar devoted to Petronius, who had died similarly on Nero’s orders. But why had he killed von Kleist in the first place?

  We still had wills, or some of us did, part of the fast-vanishing remnants of legality. Thompson, we discovered, had left everything to his wife, to whom, for all his faults, I knew him to be devoted. Had there been a love triangle there?

  Another document had been left by Thompson, apparently meant to be attached to his will like a codicil, and made apparently just before he committed suicide. In it he claimed von Kleist had been a member of the Resistance. This stopped kzin reprisals against Thompson’s family—he was written off as a monkey who, by killing a feral monkey, had tried to do his duty to the Patriarchy, even if in a typically monkey-daffy way. Yet as far as I could tell, it was untrue. To a human it made no sense. Anyway, we lived and worked too closely together to have secrets of that magnitude from one another. More, it would have been impossible. The Resistance in Neu Munchen had finished long ago. The humans still carrying on were holed up in the wild country, apart from occasional furtive trips to the city to pick up what supplies they could.

  Well, I was too busy staying alive myself to worry overmuch. Suicides, and, for that matter, murders, on occupied Wunderland were by no means uncommon. As I returned to my quarters that night, it seemed to me, not for the first time, that suicide made a good deal of sense for us all. Even if I had had two good arms, I would not have dared even think about escaping to join the Resistance: my mind might easily be swept by a telepath again, perhaps a more thorough and more viciously hostile one.

  There had not been much left of the Munchen University. The kzin had forbidden human research into any branches of science that might have military application, and as for the fine arts—well, what was the point of a BA now? The University had some endowment lands, and the collaborationist government allowed it to collect a little, diminishing, rent from these, I presumed to help prop up an appearance of normality, though some of the collabos might have their own games and rationalizations. That kept some of us alive, until the tenants died or walked off, or the kzin took over rent-collecting for themselves. Some of us, yes. There were few humans more helpless on Wunderland—on Ka’ashi, rather, than an academic whose department fell apart. Most of the University’s remaining productive farmland was worked by robots who didn’t care who their masters were.

  We had almost nothing to do, apart from competing with the hedge-teachers who gained a pittance from teaching children the basics of reading and writing. We spent our days in the common room, drinking foul ersatz coffee, and wondering how long our lucky position as unassigned slaves would endure. To venture out of doors meant the risk of being robbed as the last of law and order gradually broke down, or worse, being conscripted by the kzin for slave-labor. The braver members of the faculty who had joined the Resistance were gone and mostly dead.

  We all knew what might happen. Shortly after the cease-fire we had been summoned to watch the University’s vice-chancellor and his family die in one of the Public Hunts, the first we had seen. Captain von Rathenau of the collabo police force had set it up. The vice-chancellor and his family had not made good sport, however—they had been too old, too young, too out of shape, or too paralyzed with fear to run, let alone fight. So as not to disappoint the kzin youngsters who had turned up for the hunt, von Rathenau, under Krar-Skrei’s orders, had then drafted a number of the human spectators to replace them.

  The vice-chancellor had not even died for a great cause, just for misdirecting the collabo government, possibly unintentionally, in the hunt for Nils and Leonie Rykermann. The collabos had learned of the Rykermanns’ work in organizing the Resistance, and Krar-Skrei, the area governor, had put a price on their heads. The Rykermanns, when they heard about this, had insolently retaliated by putting a price on Krar-Skrei’s head—a supply of the geriatric drugs which had suddenly become worth far more than gold, and double that for von Rathenau, who was a more possible target. Krar-Skrei was a terrifying piece of work, even as kzin nobles went.

  Our position was similar to that of the purveyors of luxuries in any depression in Earth’s history, only immeasurably worse than most. We offered classes to children of the officials of the collabo Government, with an almost total lack of success. Apart from the basics of reading, writing and counting, what was the point of learning anything? And how could we discipline or examine them? If the child of a collabo official wanted a degree, he or she got one without more ado.

  This more-or-less wretched existence had been interrupted by a visit from the collabo security forces. They rounded us up and began checking off our specialties against lists they carried.

  Finally they selected three of us: von Kleist, Thompson and me. I did not like either of the others much. Too cowardly or insufficiently patriotic to join the Resistance themselves, I had the feeling that they despised those quaint enough to do so (at least I had an excuse). But when our names were first called, there was little room to think of anything save to not let oneself be overmastered by terror. Something told me to put on a good front.

  We were taken to one of the empty buildings and told to wait. The waiting was not pleasant. There was no point in running or speculating on the future. Finally a collabo security guard returned, accompanied by a kzin whose title, we were told, was Slave Supervisor, prefixed by some distinguishing number, and a telepath. The telepath ran over our minds quickly, not very thoroughly, as far as I could tell, merely establishing that there were no feral monkeys among us. Then we were taken into another room. There were a couple of dozen kzin reclining on footches. By this time I was on the verge of fouling myself with terror, and nearly fainted, but it passed, and I began to notice things.

  A large number of these kzin looked like cripples, with missing limbs or eyes. Also, to judge from the white fur, a number were old. A couple were overweight, and some were small and scrawny. Three were completely black-furred
, the color of their priesthood. Not many, apart from a few who were clearly disabled veterans, had impressive collections of ears on their ear-rings. Most of them, in short, did not look like fighting kzin. Also most of them, as far as I could tell, had a sour look, although that was difficult to tell. And they were carrying, incongruously, what I realized were electronic notebooks. The telepath joined us. Even for a telepath, he looked in bad shape, violet-eyed, hunched and bent, and generally very near the end of the road.

  Then the collabo security man explained.

  Chuut-Riit, he said, had ordered the study of humans. Some humans had been turned over to a specially designated kzin unit for medical experiments. However, we were more fortunate. Our job would be to teach these kzin about human society. Von Kleist would teach literature, Thompson would teach history, and I would teach politics. That explained the curious composition of this group. They were the kzin equivalent of academics or intellectuals, or poor fighters, and, apart from the priests, whose position was anomalous, and the honorably crippled, lowly and despised in their own society. Even so, to us they were threatening enough. Still, the class was orderly. Kzin were bad administrators. But they enforced their orders with ruthless discipline.

  Von Kleist was a haughty aristocrat, with the asymmetrical beard and mobile ears of a true Herrenmann. He left no one in any doubt that he considered himself several cuts above other members of the faculty and considered teaching at a university to be beneath him. Thompson was a little cock-sparrow of a man, also with a gift for rubbing people up the wrong way. I wondered how long their very limited diplomatic skills would keep them alive among the kzin. Both of them, I felt, regarded the war as vulgar, and human patriotism as the greatest vulgarity of all. Well, their meals were still being delivered three times a day, and they had not become meals yet.

  The teaching, conducted in the slaves’ patois, was not terribly difficult, but hideously stressful. The kzinti had been ordered to learn, and they learned. After a few days, when my terror had subsided somewhat, I even found it interesting to explain voting and parties and majorities. Inevitably, our teaching overlapped somewhat (another possible pitfall—don’t bore them!). Otherwise, I knew I was fairly safe, so long as I did not insult them, and there was no call to do that. The main thing was not to imply that monkey social organization was in any way superior to that of the Heroes. A major difficulty was that I dared not give them tests, which they might possibly fail. I became adept, I think, at the use of various psychological tricks for having the cleverer ones discipline the stupid and lazy. If I dared not sneer at their work, another kzin might, and the resultant death-duel did not displease me. I could not be blamed for it.

  I kept in mind H. G. Wells’s ancient story The First Men on the Moon, in which the foolish scientist, Cavor, marooned on Earth’s Moon, was killed by the inhabitants after telling them too much about human society. We got some help: Morris, a shy little man, was drafted to assist us. He had had some family on Wunderl—on Ka’ashi—but had none now, and the experience had broken his spirit. Someone told me he had suffered from hysterical blindness for many months afterwards. Anyway, he fetched and carried for us, did our research, cowered at the sight of even an old or crippled kzin, and generally made no trouble.

  I found a digest of Nietzsche’s aphorisms, presumably brought from Earth by one of the nineteen Herrenmanner families, and destroyed it. “The weak and the botched must perish…I tell you that a good war hallows every cause.” I thought they had rather too much of that doctrine already. Markham, the guerrilla leader was, I knew, devoted to Nietzsche.

  At least my conscience was clear. I could not see how teaching them the basics of human civics could harm the human war effort. As time went on, the idea even came to me that I might be importing some civilized values into their minds—but perhaps that was self-deception.

  I taught them the theories of Adam Smith, and, straying out of my area somewhat dangerously, of James Watt and the generations-long endeavors which had led to the harnessing of steam, and then of electricity. I found that some of them, including the telepath, had a surprising interest in religion and its role in the history of science. I quoted to them an epigram I remembered from Einstein: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” I told them of the troubles Columbus had had in gaining finance for his voyages, and the parallel troubles that had nearly destroyed the early American space program. Some of my students, it seemed to me, were coming to comment upon human institutions with less that total disgust. This, I thought, was not uncommon among certain people who studied any subject. Students of some of the vilest societies on Earth, assigned to study them only for the purpose of defeating them, had come to admire them. This also made me feel better about what I was doing. Further, I was learning about them. There was little they bothered to hide from a monkey.

  Although literature was not my subject, I learned a little about their own. They had some works I would call “thrillers,” but reading or viewing them was considered somewhat shameful, like watching pornography. Their respectable literature dealt with Lord Chmeee and other ancient Heroes, and was embellished with as many stylistic conventions as a Japanese Noh drama or an American Western. When the conventions were not observed, they often had difficulty in telling fact from fiction (I had to be very careful not to humiliate them here). I did not envy my colleagues, scrabbling in their little free time in the archives of the University for books and fragments which had been brought from Earth and forgotten in the excitement of settling a new planet in order to put inoffensive courses together.

  I did not see as much of the other three humans as you might expect. By the end of the day we were all too mentally exhausted to socialize. Two or three of my kzin students, mainly the telepath, who, I gathered, was regarded as having become almost useless for real work (which was reassuring) took to seeking me out after hours with questions. Though my free time was limited and precious, I came to find this flattering. I talked some geriatric treatments out of the collabo Government, not exactly telling them, or myself, that I was civilizing the kzin (those telepath sweeps! Always a haunting dread!), but allowing them to draw that conclusion for themselves. The ubiquitous threat of telepaths was subtly changing the ways all humans thought and communicated. Fortunately for us, telepaths were rare, and were assigned to military duties nearly all the time. Even luckier, our telepath, who, I guessed, was assigned to the class to keep a more-or-less watching brief over us all, human and kzin, was of relatively mild nature. When I saw him he did not inject himself with the sthondat-lymph drug which heightened his powers, and I did not feel the headache which would have indicated that he was reading my mind. The telepath and I played chess occasionally. Most kzin adore chess, regarding it along with blow-dryers, talcum powder and toilet paper as the finest fruit of human civilization. I had an ulterior motive in this: there was no point in the telepath playing chess if he read my mind: that would have made it no game. So I was, I felt, subtly conditioning him to interact with me but to leave my mind alone. Even so, I dared not insult him by letting him win. He played like a typical kzin—fast and aggressive. He generally lost the first few games in short order, coming dangerously close to losing his temper—he could crush a solid metal chessman in his claws in a rage—but would then improve. I caught no trace of him probing my mind; it was just the way he worked. Of course, no other kzin would play with him. It was also a chance to pick up scraps of gossip from him—the kzin, or Telepath at least, cared little about military security. I gathered some details of the humans who were still fighting in the great caves, in Grossgeister Swamp, in the eastern hills and on the other, sparsely settled land masses. Battles were going on in space, and Sol System was still putting up fleets.

  I noticed Thompson seemed to have formed a queer association with the telepath, rather as I had done. A case of uttermost underlings coming together. All of us, in our different ways, were protected a little by our value to Chuut-Riit from the ca
sual savagery of kzin society. Much to my surprise, the telepath asked me to read aloud to him. I gathered it helped him relax, or gave him some relief from the mental noise that constantly surrounded him. I had heard rumors of telepaths with prohuman leanings, and perhaps that was what saved me at the time of the meat incident.

  I dropped some meat, the food of another kzin (I had had a shock when I recognized the human bones). I was terrified the owner of the meat would attack me. Telepath, to my surprise, stopped him, as slavering, claws extended, he gathered himself to spring.

  “Do not harm the Patriarch’s property!” Telepath said, and there had been something like a command in his voice.

  The angry kzin, one who plainly had been drafted into the class to rid some fighting unit of his stupidity, growled and snarled. Even he, however, could realize that damaging the Patriarch’s property and Chuut-Riit’s was not a wise move. He snarled some threats about me losing my other arm, and resumed his seat. I gave the telepath some books, and tried to broadcast feelings of friendship to him—with how much success I did not know. But from that time there seemed, though I dared not have presumed upon it, to be some sort of unspoken understanding between the telepath and myself. He was, I guessed, like many telepaths, a secret intellectual, desperately lonely, and as frightened as I was, secretly not only terrified of the strutting Heroes, but also despising them.

  Gradually, I began to realize the politics of the situation. I knew Chuut-Riit’s interest in humans was not universally approved of among senior kzinti. Some considered it disgusting, virtually a perversion. Others thought it a waste of time. Instead of building up the elite corps that Chuut-Riit had envisioned, many commanders had used the unit as a dumping-ground to get rid of unwanted personnel. Apart from those who were simply old or physically disabled, some of these were misfits because they were stupid, and some were misfits because they were intelligent.