Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - The Houses of the Kzinti Read online

  At a meter and a half per step, he had covered twenty-one klicks, give or take a bit, that day. Not bad in this gravity, he decided, even if the collarbone was aching again. On his abominable map, that placed him about midway down the long side of the lake. The following morning he turned west, following another stream through an open grassy plain, jogging, resting, jogging. He gathered tubers floating downstream and ate one, fearing that it would surely be deadly because it tasted like a wild strawberry.

  He followed the stream for three more days, living mostly on those delicious tubers and water, nesting warmly in thick sheaves of grass. On the next day he spied a dark mass of basalt rising to the northwest, captured two litres of water in an empty plastic bag, and risked all. It was well that he did for, late in the following day with heaving chest, he saw clouds sweeping in from the north, dragging a gray downpour as a bride drags her train. That stream far below and klicks distant was soon a broad river which would have swept him to the lake. But now he stood on a rocky escarpment, seeing the glisten of water from those crags in the distance, and knew that he would not die of thirst in the highlands. He also suspected, judging from the shredded-cotton roiling of cloud beyond those crags, that he was very near the walls of his cage.

  Even for a runner, the two-kilometer rise of those crags was daunting in high gravity. Locklear aimed for a saddleback only a thousand meters high where sheets of rain had fallen not long before, hiking beside a swollen stream until he found its source. It wasn’t much as glaciers went, but he found green depths of ice filling the saddleback, shouldering up against a force wall that beggared anything he had ever seen up close.

  The wall was transparent, apparent to the eye only by its effects and by the eldritch blackness just beyond it. The thing was horrendously cold, seeming to cut straight across hills and crags with an inner border of ice to define this kzin compound. Locklear knew it only seemed straight because the curvature was so gradual. When he tossed a stone at it, the stone slowed abruptly and soundlessly as if encountering a meters-deep cushion, then slid downward and back to clatter onto the minuscule glacier. Uphill and down, for as far as he could see, ice rimmed the inside of the force wall. He moved nearer, staring through that invisible sponge, and saw another line of ice a klick distant. Between those ice rims lay bare basalt, as uncompromisingly primitive as the surface of an asteroid. Most of that raw surface was so dark as to seem featureless, but reflections from ice lenses on each side dappled the dark basalt here and there. The dapples of light were crystal clear, without the usual fuzziness of objects a thousand meters away, and Locklear realized he was staring into a vacuum.

  “So visitors to Zoo can wander comfortably around with gravity polarizer platforms between the cages,” he said aloud, angrily because he could see the towering masses of conifers in the next compound. It was an Earth compound, all right—but he could see no evidence of animals across that distance, and that made him fiercely glad for some reason. He ached to cross those impenetrable barriers, and his vision of lofty conifers blurred with his tears.

  His feet were freezing, now, and no vegetation grew as near as the frost that lined the ice rim. “You’re good, but you’re not perfect,” he said to the builders. “You can’t keep the heat in these compounds from leaking away at the rims.” Hence frozen moisture and the lack of vegetation along the rim, and higher rainfall where clouds skirted that cold force wall.

  Scanning the vast panoramic arc of that ice rim, Locklear noted that his prison compound had a gentle bowl shape, though some hills and crags surged up in the lowlands. Maybe using the natural contours of old craters? Or maybe you made those craters. It was an engineering project that held tremendous secrets for humankind, and it had been there for one hell of a long time. Widely spaced across that enormous bowl were spots of dramatic color, perhaps flowers. But they won’t scatter much without animal vectors to help the wind disperse seeds and such. Dammit, this place wasn’t finished!

  He retraced his steps downward. There was no point in making a camp in this inclement place, and with every sudden whistle of breeze now he was starting to look up, scanning for the kzin ship he knew might come at any time. He needed to find a cave, or to make one, and that would require construction tools.

  Late in the afternoon, while tying grass bundles at the edge of a low rolling plain, Locklear found wood of the kind he’d hardly dared to hope for. He simply had not expected it to grow horizontally. With a thin bark that simulated its surroundings, it lay mostly below the surface with shallow roots at intervals like bamboo. Kzinti probably would’ve known to seek it from the first, damn their hairy hides. The stuff—he dubbed it shamboo—grew parallel to the ground and arrow-straight, and its foliage popped up at regular intervals too. Some of its hard, hollow segments stored water, and some specimens grew thick as his thighs and ten meters long, tapering to wicked growth spines on each end. Locklear had been walking over potential hiking staffs, construction shoring, and rafts for a week without noticing. He pulled up one the size of a javelin and clipped it smooth.

  His grooming tool would do precision work, but Locklear abraded blisters on his palms fashioning an axehead from a chertlike stone common in seams where basalt crags soared from the prairie. He spent two days learning how to socket a handaxe in a shamboo handle, living mostly on tuberberries and grain from grassheads, and elevated his respect for the first tool-using creatures in the process.

  By now, Locklear’s right arm felt almost as good as new, and the process of rediscovering primitive technology became a compelling pastime. He was so intent on ways to weave split shamboo filaments into cordage for a firebow, while trudging just below the basalt heights, that he almost missed the most important moment of his life.

  He stepped from savannah grass onto a gritty surface that looked like other dry washes, continued for three paces, stepped up onto grassy turf again, then stopped. He recalled walking across sand-sprinkled tiles as a youth, and something in that old memory made him look back. The dry wash held wavelike patterns of grit, pebbles, and sand, but here and there were bare patches.

  And those bare patches were as black and as smooth as machine-polished obsidian.

  Locklear crammed the half-braided cord into a pocket and began to follow that dry wash up a gentle slope, toward the cleft ahead, and toward his destiny.

  His heart pounding with hope and fear, Locklear stood five meters inside the perfect arc of obsidian that formed the entrance to that cave. No runoff had ever spilled grit across the smooth broad floor inside, and he felt an irrational concern that his footsteps were defiling something perfectly pristine, clean and cold as an ice cavern. But a far, far more rational concern was the portal before him, its facing made of the same material as the floor, the opening itself four meters wide and just as high. A faint flickering luminescence, as of gossamer film stretched across the portal, gave barely enough light to see. Locklear saw his reflection in it, and wanted to laugh aloud at this ragged, skinny, barrel-chested apparition with the stubble of beard wearing stained flight togs. And the apparition reminded him that he might not be alone.

  He felt silly, but after clearing his throat twice he managed to call out: “Anybody home?”

  Echoes; several of them, more than this little entrance space could possibly generate. He poked his sturdy shamboo hiking staff into the gossamer film and jumped when stronger light flickered in the distance. “Maybe you just eat animal tissue,” he said, with a wavering chuckle. “Well—” He took his grooming pincers and cut away the dried curl of skin around a broken blister on his palm, clipped away sizeable crescents of fingernails, tossed them at the film.

  Nothing but the tiny clicks of cuticles on obsidian, inside; that’s how quiet it was. He held the pointed end of the staff like a lance in his right hand, extended the handaxe ahead in his left. He was right-handed, after all, so he’d rather lose the left one…

  No sensation on his flesh, but a sudden flood of light as he moved through the portal, and Loc
klear dashed backward to the mouth of the cave. “Take it easy, fool,” he chided himself. “What did you see?”

  A long smooth passageway; walls without signs or features; light seeming to leap from obsidian walls, not too strong but damned disconcerting. He took several deep breaths and went in again, standing his ground this time when light flooded the artificial cave. His first thought, seeing the passageway’s apparent end in another film-spanned portal two hundred meters distant, was, Does it go all the way from Kzersatz to Newduvai? He couldn’t recall when he’d begun to think of this kzin compound as Kzersatz and the adjoining, Earthlike, compound as Newduvai.

  Footfalls echoing down side corridors, Locklear hurried to the opposite portal, but frost glistened on its facing and his staff would not penetrate more than a half-meter through the luminous film. He could see his exhalations fogging the film. The resistance beyond it felt spongy but increasingly hard, probably an extension of that damned force wall. If his sense of direction was right, he should be just about beneath the rim of Kzersatz. No doubt someone or something knew how to penetrate that wall, because the portal was there. But Locklear knew enough about force walls and screens to despair of getting through it without better understanding. Besides, if he did get through he might punch a hole into vacuum. If his suspicions about the builders of Zoo were correct, that’s exactly what lay beyond the portal.

  Sighing, he turned back, counting nine secondary passages that yawned darkly on each side, choosing the first one to his right. Light flooded it instantly. Locklear gasped.

  Row upon row of cubical, transparent containers stretched down the corridor for fifty meters, some of them tiny, some the size of a small room. And in each container floated a specimen of animal life, rotating slowly, evidently above its own gravity polarizer field. Locklear had seen a few of the creatures; had seen pictures of a few more; all, every last one that he could identify, native to the kzin homeworld. He knew that many museums maintained ranks of pickled specimens, and told himself he should not feel such a surge of anger about this one. Well, you’re an ethologist, you twit, he told himself silently. You’re just pissed off because you can’t study behaviors of dead animals. Yet, even taking that into consideration, he felt a kind of righteous wrath toward builders who played at godhood without playing it perfectly. It was a responsibility he would never have chosen. He did not yet realize that he was surrounded with similar choices.

  He stood before a floating vatach, in life a fast-moving burrower the size of an earless hare, reputedly tasty but too mild-mannered for kzinti sport. No symbols on any container, but obvious differences among the score of vatach in those containers.

  How many sexes? He couldn’t recall. “But I bet you guys would,” he said aloud. He passed on, shuddering at the critters with fangs and leathery wings, marveling at the stump-legged creatures the height of a horse and the mass of a rhino, all in positions that were probably fetal though some were obviously adult.

  Retracing his steps to the vatach again, Locklear leaned a hand casually against the smooth metal base of one container. He heard nothing, but when he withdrew his hand the entire front face of the glasslike container levered up, the vatach settling gently to a cage floor that slid forward toward Locklear like an offering.

  The vatach moved.

  Locklear leaped back so fast he nearly fell, then darted forward again and shoved hard on the cage floor. Back it went, down came the transparent panel, up went the vatach, inert, into its permanent rotating waltz.

  “Stasis fields! By God, they’re alive,” he said. The animals hadn’t been pickled at all, only stored until someone was ready to stock Kzersatz. Vatach were edible herbivores—but if he released them without natural enemies, how long before they overran the whole damned compound? And did he really want to release their natural enemies, even if he could identify them?

  “Sorry, fellas. Maybe I can find you an island,” he told the little creatures, and moved on with an alertness that made him forget the time. He did not consider time because the glow of illumination did not dim when the sun of Kzersatz did, and only the growl of his empty belly sent him back to the cave entrance where he had left his jacket with his remaining food and water. Even then he chewed tuberberries from sheer necessity, his hands trembling as he looked out at the blackness of the Kzersatz night. Because he had passed down each of those eighteen side passages, and knew what they held, and knew that he had some godplaying of his own to ponder.

  He said to the night and to himself, “Like for instance, whether to take one of those goddamned kzinti out of stasis.”

  His wristcomp held a hundred megabytes, much of it concerning zoology and ethology. Some native kzin animals were marginally intelligent, but he found nothing whatever in memory storage that might help him communicate abstract ideas with them. “Except the tabbies themselves, eighty-one by actual count,” he mused aloud the next morning, sitting in sunlight outside. “Damned if I do. Damned if I don’t. Damn if I know which is the damnedest,” he admitted. But the issue was never very much in doubt; if a kzin ship did return, they’d find the cave sooner or later because they were the best hunters in known space. He’d make it expensive in flying fur, maybe—but there seemed to be no rear entrance. Well, he didn’t have to go it alone; Kdaptist kzinti made wondrous allies. Maybe he could convert one, or win his loyalty by setting him free.

  If the kzin ship didn’t return, he was stuck with a neolithic future or with playing God to populate Kzersatz, unless—“Aw shitshitshit,” he said at last, getting up, striding into the cave. “I’ll just wake the smallest one and hope he’s reasonable.”

  But the smallest ones weren’t male; the females, with their four small but prominent nipples and the bushier fur on their tails, were the runts of that exhibit. In their way they were almost beautiful, with longer hindquarters and shorter torsos than the great bulky males, all eighty-one of the species rotating nude in fetal curls before him. He studied his wristcomp and his own memory, uncomfortably aware that female kzin were, at best, morons. Bred for bearing kits, and for catering to their warrior males, female kzinti were little more than ferociously protected pets in their own culture.

  “Maybe that’s what I need anyhow,” he muttered, and finally chose the female that bulked smallest of them all. When he pressed that baseplate, he did it with grim forebodings.

  She settled to the cage bottom and slid out, and Locklear stood well away, axe in one hand, lance in the other, trying to look as if he had no intention of using either. His Adam’s apple bobbed as the female began to uncoil from her fetal position.

  Her eyes snapped open so fast, Locklear thought they should have clicked audibly. She made motions like someone waving cobwebs aside, mewing in a way that he found pathetic, and then she fully noticed the little man standing near, and she screamed and leaped. That leap carried her to the top of a nearby container, away from him, cowering, eyes wide, ear umbrellas folded flat.

  He remembered not to grin as he asked, “Is this my thanks for bringing you back?”

  She blinked. “You (something, something) a devil, then?”

  He denied it, pointing to the scores of other kzin around her, admitting he had found them this way.

  If curiosity killed cats, this one would have died then and there. She remained crouched and wary, her eyes flickering around as she formed more questions. Her speech was barely understandable. She used a form of verbal negation utterly new to him, and some familiar words were longer the way she pronounced them. The general linguistic rule was that abstract ideas first enter a lexicon as several words, later shortened by the impatient.

  Probably her longer words were primitive forms; God only knew how long she had been in stasis! He told her who he was, but that did not reduce her wary hostility much. She had never heard of men. Nor of any intelligent race other than kzinti. Nor, for that matter, of spaceflight. But she was remarkably quick to absorb new ideas, and from Locklear’s demeanor she realized all too soon that he, i
n fact, was scared spitless of her. That was the point when she came down off that container like a leopard from a limb, snatched his handaxe while he hesitated, and poked him in the gut with its haft.

  It appeared, after all, that Locklear had revived a very, very old-fashioned female.

  “You (something or other) captive,” she sizzled, unsheathing a set of shining claws from her fingers as if to remind him of their potency. She turned a bit away from him then, looking sideways at him. “Do you have sex?”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed again before he intuited her meaning. Her first move was to gain control, her second to establish sex roles. A bright female; yeah, that’s about what an ethologist should expect…“Humans have two sexes just as kzinti do,” he said, “and I am male, and I won’t submit as your captive. You people eat captives. You’re not all that much bigger than I am, and this lance is sharp. I’m your benefactor. Ask yourself why I didn’t spear you for lunch before you awoke.”

  “If you could eat me, I could eat you,” she said. “Why do you cut words short?”

  Bewildering changes of pace but always practical, he thought. Oh yes, an exceedingly bright female. “I speak modern Kzinti,” he explained. “One day we may learn how many thousands of years you have been asleep.” He enjoyed the almost human widening of her yellow eyes, and went on doggedly. “Since I have honorably waked you from what might have been a permanent sleep, I ask this: what does your honor suggest?”

  “That I (something) clothes,” she said. “And owe you a favor, if nakedness is what you want.”

  “It’s cold for me, too.” He’d left his food outside but was wearing the jacket, and took it off. “I’ll trade this for the axe.”

  She took it, studying it with distaste, and eventually tied its sleeves like an apron to hide her mammaries. It could not have warmed her much. His question was half disbelief: “That’s it? Now you’re clothed?”

  “As (something) of the (something) always do,” she said. “Do you have a special name?”