Man-Kzin Wars XII Page 5

  The shiver of loathing Trader gave was completely genuine. The ends of his whiskers and the muscles of his flanks tingled at the thought of unyielding rock and earth pressing against them so on either side. Like most felinoids, kzinti loved exploring likely holes and caves but hated spaces which held and confined on any terms other than their own.

  "Finally we mapped it, more or less, with ground-penetrating radar, then sealed up all the exits and pumped in nerve gas. There were some, I may tell you, including Noble Trrask-Rarr, who wished to simply turn the whole hill over with a nuclear strike. However the lands of Honored Warrgh-Churrg and others would have been in the path of the fallout. . . . There was talk of building ground-piercing conventional bombs but it was felt that it was not worth tooling up factories for such a one-off use. We turn multifrequency masers on it at irregular intervals and, we hope, cook any monkeys inside. Now and then they come running out, which can be amusing. We wait for them, but on occasion they have ambushed the waiting party. . . . What do you think of your monkeys now?"

  "I thought they were tree-swingers."

  "Only among other things. The kz'zeerekti have unblocked that entrance again recently. No, I do not think we will enter it on this occasion. I was in the tunnels before, and from now on I will allow some other Hunt Master the glory of discovering what surprises they may have installed in there, and how deep they may have dug. Further, our radar shows there are big natural caves further south. They might link up. I believe in hard training but there is no point in throwing kits away for nothing."

  "What surprises did they have before?"

  "Too many. Not just poisoned arrows and stakes in the darkness. Roof collapses, gases of their own—not as effective as ours, but worthy enough in a confined space—fire, those swords and knives they use, and, increasingly, guns they took from our own dead—or at least I hope they took them from our dead. There were feral Jotoki, too. They cooperated with the monkeys."

  "Strange," said Trader. "I know of feral Jotoki on many worlds, in many hunting preserves. But unless they are trained young they are solitary and savage. I have never heard of them behaving cooperatively before, least of all with another species. Anyway, it seems these monkeys of yours are smart."

  "I doubt you'll find them good slaves. At least, not without a lot of breaking in and culling. However I have not had the opportunity to travel to other worlds and I do not know what the fashions may be. Perhaps some like savage little animals for their own hunts."

  "Kill them all!" snarled Trrask-Rarr. "Why tolerate a plague on our planet?" He glared at Trader and Hunt Master as if defying them to say differently. An insult or an aspersion cast by one kzin on another could explode into a death duel in an instant, but the full-named Noble knew both were under the protection of Warrgh-Churrg, and an attack on his people would be an attack on the magnate himself.

  Trader, avoiding any overt gesture of either insolence or subservience to the snarling kzin, made a diplomatic answer: "It can be difficult to throw things away sometimes." It was about as far as he could go in exploiting Warrgh-Churrg's protective power; and the association of kz'zeerekti with inedible offals did seem to amuse Trrask-Rarr.

  "You said, you hoped they had taken guns from your dead," Trader prompted Hunt Master.

  "Yes. They certainly shot at us with guns; the alternative supposition is that they made their own. I like that idea less."

  "Do they have any technology?"

  "Some. They sometimes wear pieces of metal armor, so I suppose they have smelters somewhere." There was no interest in Hunt Master's voice or body language. Kzinti were as curious as any other cats when on the hunt, but sustained abstract curiosity was a fairly rare trait in them—their intelligences could be very high, but their culture militated against the survival of intellectuals.

  "How good could their armor be?" Trader also betrayed no great interest. "You understand their level of competence may be of professional importance to me—and of benefit to this planet, if they are acute enough to be an exportable resource. I have spoken to Honored Warrgh-Churrg but you are the expert and on the spot. Would you say they could be as technologically capable—potentially—as trained Jotoki, for example?"

  "I could not say. Their armor is metal alloys. But you may find pieces of it lying around if you wish to see it. There have been hunts here for a long time."

  Hunt Master's keen eyes lit on something on the ground. He picked it up and handed it to Trader, bending the flattened, corroded metal back into its original shape with his powerful grip. "This looks as if it was one of their helmets once."

  "Worthy Hunt Master, may I keep it to examine?"

  "It is of no use to me."

  "A Hero collects his enemies' ears for trophies," Trader agreed. His own eyes now recognizing what they sought, he too bent and collected a few more scraps of metal from the ground, stowing them in a belt pouch. He also, as Hunt Master turned away, gathered up a few scraps of weathered bone.

  Estate Manager screamed and leapt to one side. There was the sudden unmistakable whistle of a flight of arrows and a sudden turmoil in the bushes on the crest above them. Kzinti screamed with rage and pain, kzinti rifles cracked. Dim shapes could just be made out high in trees too slender for full-grown kzintoshi to climb. A couple fell.

  "After them, kits!" cried Hunt Master. "Win your first ears! Anticipate their counterattack and destroy it!"

  The youngsters, ululating joyously again, raced for the trees through whose upper branches the shadows of kz'zeerekti were fast disappearing. Another flight of arrows made them pause for a moment, but a running kzin among the whipping branches was too fast to be any sort of target. Estate Manager, who had got into the spirit of the hunt by sporting a crossbow of antique design, fired several bolts in rapid succession. The solid thump of a bolt finding its home was followed by a dead kz'zeerekt plumping to the ground.

  The kz'zeerekti screams were not meaningless animal noises, Trader realized. They were taunts and insults in the Hero's Tongue: "Come and get your Name! Come give your ears for my trophy belt! Piss-Licker! Arrow-Target! Coward!" Females too joined in, exploiting all the Hero's Tongue's truly remarkable resources of deadly insults: "Come watch me shit half-digested vegetable matter down on your ancestors' shrines!" At any rate they were effective, kits breaking away and rushing shrieking into battle. Trader saw the white-striped kit completely out of control, screaming meaninglessly. As they passed he found himself fighting down an atavistic impulse to join them.

  A couple more adult kzintoshi had been wounded by the first volley: Rress Landowner, and a Senior-Fixer-of-Computers, here in honor for what must have been immense competence. Hunt Master sent them back to the cars with a peremptory voice that brooked no denial. When the hunt turned to battle his orders compelled even nobles of partial Name. Trader followed him to examine the fallen kz'zeerekti.

  They were pale-skinned under the dirt on their bodies, and, for kz'zeerekti, who tended to be spindly and fragile, they were tough, wiry-looking specimens. A male and female. One was dead, killed either by the shots that had brought them down or by the fall. The other was thrashing feebly in terminal "shock," that mysterious alien condition. Hunt Master gave them a cursory glance.

  "None of the old-men monkeys I'm after here," he said.

  "You know them?" asked Trader.

  "Most of the local old stagers, yes. I've even picked up a few words of their language over the years." He bent and placed the sucker of what looked like an electronic book on the mouths of each, holding the dying female still with his extended claws.

  "DNA readouts," he explained.

  "What do you need them for?" Trader asked with rather elaborate casualness.

  "To see if these are part of a local troop or if they've moved here from somewhere else." He dropped the female onto the ground and bent his gaze to the readouts. "Yes, these are locals, related to others I've got recorded here. If a big new kz'zeerekt band moves into the area it's as well to know about it.
"

  "You are very thorough, Skilled Hunt Master."

  "Got to know your monkey. I pick up what I can about them when things are quiet. Not like Trrask-Rarr."

  "The Full-Named one? How so?"

  "He's a Noble coming down in the world. To add to his troubles, the monkeys have raided his lands and destroyed some of his hunt-beasts' pastures. Not a great thing, but he hates them. I mean really hates them."

  "Have any in the hunt used telepaths?" That was a delicate question. No fighting kzin liked admitting association with telepaths. They had mainly military uses, and to suggest to a hunter that he accepted aid from such despised creatures might be taken as an insult. Hunt Master, tough, hulking, hard-bitten, and scarred, with a good collection of kzinti as well as simian ears on his belt ring, did not look like the sort of kzintosh one would duel lightly. However, perhaps because of his orders to cooperate with the trader, he evidently decided to take it as a mere professional question.

  "No. One picks things up. They shout insults, sometimes the kits shout things back. One follows tracks, spoor, droppings, you pick up some knowledge of their ways. Where they'll hide, where they'll ambush, where they'll dodge and flee, whether they'll use poison or pitfalls, how they'll provoke the kits. Some of the rascals really have personalities of their own. You come to know which are likely to arrow you from behind, which to dig pitfalls, which may stand and fight. But it's Marrrkusarrg-tuss I'm really after."

  "Who?"

  "Their local leader."

  "They have Names?"

  In the Hero's Tongue the word "Name" had huge significance, something far beyond "Title" or "Honorific" or "Designation" or "Description." A partial Name signified Nobility, the highest Valor, and Heroism, a limited right to breed. Names had to be earned or won and not even the Patriarch's offspring were given them at birth. A Full Name signified these things with a quantum leap of intensity.

  The idea of any non-kzin having a Name was, to a kzin of the old school, a contradiction in terms, though after two wars devastatingly lost to the humans some kzinti attitudes were changing, and not, Trader thought, only among the Wunderkzin—the kdaptist families of Wunderland, like his own. Kzinti had, for purposes of identification and communication, in their first major war against a spacefaring enemy since they overthrew the Jotoki millennia before, come to identify human warships by their own odd names: Missouri, Graf Spee, Ark Royal, Yamato, Blue Baboon, Male Mandrill, and so forth, and individual humans as well: simply to refer to "the monkeyship" or "the dominant monkey" had been unsatisfactory for military intelligence purposes. But on a backwater planet like Kzrral he had not expected the old ways to have altered so.

  "They give themselves names. To tell one another apart, I suppose, since they cannot smell and their sight and hearing are poor," Hunt Master said. "It seems the easiest thing to do. Since they attach no honor to them there is no dishonor in us using them."

  So even in these circumstances they are subverting your culture a little, Trader thought.

  He left the bodies to the trophy-takers and they hurried on to follow the hunt on foot. In the dark trees ahead and above them was a confusion of cries. Another young kzin fell not far away, fangs and claws tearing at a monkey that in turn still slashed with a knife that looked the size of a wtsai. There was also a commotion on the ground under the dark bushes away to the left. Trader, night-eyed, saw three young kzinti struggling on the ground with the shapes of Jotoki. Hunt Master must have seen it too, but he affected not to notice. Young kzinti caught and killed—or were killed by—their own prey. Trrask-Rarr was dismembering another simian.

  "They're certainly tool-users," said Trader.

  "Oh yes, there's even a lot of standardization in their gear." They crossed to the combatants, who had fallen silent.

  "I'd like to get one of those knives of theirs. I will gladly part with a piece of gold."

  "Take that one, then." He gestured at the two still forms of kzin and simian on the ground, locked together in death. "Neither of them will be needing it again. Two pieces of gold."

  "Indeed, it does not become me to offer a warrior such as yourself less than a fair price. Two pieces it shall be."

  A crescendo of simian and kzinti screams filled the night. Again the whistle and thump of arrows came to the felinoids' ears. There was the roar of kzinti rifles.

  "That sounds like their counterattack," Hunt Master said, "as I warned the kits."

  "Counterattack? Is that common?"

  "The monkeys often have a reserve waiting. They watch and see what they're up against. If it's seasoned warriors they pull back. If it's kits and youngsters they'll wait till they are engrossed in the chase and scattered, then come up. You see a kit who collects kz'zeerekti ears here can feel he's earned them."

  "It sounds like a properly organized military culture."

  "It is. Well, Trader, how does their potential strike you? Nice house slaves for Kzinhome? Decorous tenders of the Nobility's harems? Would this—" he turned the female over with his foot, its bloody head and slack, splayed limbs flopping and twitching. "—have made a groom for the Patriarch's favorite kzinrett?"

  "I suppose it's a matter of catching and training them young, like Jotoki. . . ."

  "There!" Hunt Master leapt vertically, claws slashing at something like a huge black starfish in the bushes above.

  "Speaking of Jotoki," he remarked, disentangling himself from the pieces, "there was an old rogue. Ready to drop on us. Well, Jotok and monkey meat for all survivors tonight!"

  IV

  "Seven kz'zeerekti dead at least," said Ginger as he reentered the groundcar and closed the hatch, "and eleven kzinti—though eight were kits on their first hunt, and of course it's important to cull the unfit early. But from the kzinti point of view, not a very successful kill ratio. There might have been more kz'zeerekti dead that the others carried away. But a successful night for Warrgh-Churrg."

  "How so?"

  "One of the adult kzinti who died was a small landowner. He had an estate that borders on Warrgh-Churrg's and owed him money. Warrgh-Churrg will pick it up without trouble now. Plus the harem, of course, and the kits if he should happen to want them—and the deceased landowner's eldest kit was among the other dead. A fairly easy night's work for Warrgh-Churrg, letting the kz'zeerekti expand his estates for him."

  "But a casualty ratio like that? There was nothing like it in the wars, even when human troops were well equipped. How do you account for it?" asked Perpetua. She had kept the car locked in Ginger's absence and herself crouched down inside it, well out of the sight and the attention of the guard—and especially of the furious wounded kzinti as they returned.

  "The kzinti sought out the kz'zeerekti on their own ground, as usual, and the kz'zeerekti had well-prepared traps and ambushes—"

  "As usual."

  "Tactless, Pet. These kz'zeerekti were exceptionally tough with it. And the kits, also as usual, were overexcited, overeager and inexperienced."

  "And nobody told them?"

  "Hunt Master believes there's no teacher like experience. Between you and me—which is a rather silly phrase in these circumstances—I think Hunt Master had directions to get a few knocked off. With modern life most affluent kzinti households grow up with too many male kits unless they are thinned out one way or another—and this helps thin out the slow and stupid, as well as the overeager who might grow up to be a nuisance by challenging their fathers. It's a rough and ready system, though. Among the kits who survived tonight were some I'd marked down as not the brightest."

  "It sounds a pretty unstable society."

  "It is, once you come to see it a certain way. Why do you think you humans keep winning wars? One reason my great-grandsire and a few others threw in their lot with humans after the Liberation was because they could see kzinti technology and culture were so grossly out of sync. We're barbarians with high technology, and we're lucky we didn't exterminate ourselves before space travel gave us elbow room.

&nbs
p; "Perhaps you understand now something of what I was trying to explain before, about me. We Wunderkzin families are called the ultimate traitors to our species by the Patriarchy, but we believe we carry the best ultimate hope of our species' survival, because we see that hope as encompassing a society where half the male children don't have to be killed in the process of growing up; and where there are other ends in life beyond war and hunting. But I'm getting off the point."

  "I don't mind, it's all new to me still. I'm eating it up."

  Ginger curled his ears at her briefly, then said, "You omnivores have some disturbing turns of phrase. Anyway, Hunt Master limited the technology they used—with modern weapons and detection equipment it would have been a different story and no hunt at all. The kz'zeerekti were tough for humans, and had resourcefulness and cooperation. And those Jotoki cooperating with them were very aggressive and well trained. They accounted for several of the young kzinti on their own. Also, they're good in trees; I think it was a Jotok that acted to create a diversion in the branches, to draw the hunt away from the human withdrawal. I've not known them to cooperate with another species before, apart from those specially trained by kzinti slave masters."

  "Kz'zeerekti on Kzinhome don't speak, do they?"

  "Not really. A variety of squeals and grunts. I guess if any evolved speech or intelligence in the past they would have been jumped on pretty quickly."

  "And yet these talk?"

  "Oh, yes, no doubt about it! Damned cheek, some of it! I heard one of them calling me a—Well, I won't go into that."

  "Are they truly human?"

  "That's for you to say. They certainly seemed to have the usual number of fingers and toes and nipples and things. I kept some tissue samples when they passed out the monkey meat afterwards, as well as some old bones. Here."

  "Thanks. How delightful." Perpetua placed the fragments into an autodoc.