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

  Bigs clipped the stunner to his belt. Spots unlocked his jaws from the knife-man’s right shoulder and threw him a dozen paces to crumple bonelessly on the soft turf of a lawn. Jonah swept up the ratchet knife and flipped the hilt in his hand, the molecular-distortion battery making it heavy even in the .61-G field of Wunderland. The contractor’s eyes were open; Bigs had taken time to reset the stunner’s field to light. That meant that Eldasson could feel and see, although not move the main voluntary muscles. The Sol-Belter drove his heel into her ribs with judiciously calculated force.

  “Paytime, Fra Eldasson,” he said. “Payback time.”

  Her lips worked, trying to spit at him. Bigs picked her up by the back of her tunic and shook her at arm’s length, as effortlessly as he might have a rag doll. When he was finished he brought her close and smiled in her face, tongue dangling and carnivore breath hot.

  “How…how much?” she croaked.

  “Just what you owe us,” Jonah said. “Not one fennig more…in money.”

  General Buford Early looked a little less out of place in Munchen than he did in his native Sol System, these days; men as black as he were rare on Wunderland, and mostly from the Krio enclaves. They were even rarer in the polyglot genetic stew of Earth. That was not true at the time of his birth. He had been born while there were still distinct human sub-races, a fact he took some care to disguise. Not least by keeping a careful ear for the changes in language, and by muting the inhuman gracefulness learned through the centuries. Other things he hid more deeply; but the power he held from his rank in the UN Space Navy, from his role in the ARM, and from his own force of personality, he did not bother to conceal. Heldja Eldasson looked a little intimidated, sitting across the wide oak desk in the upper offices of the Ritterhaus, once more headquarters of Wunderland’s government.

  “What else could I do?” she said sullenly. The autodoc had healed the worst of her injuries, but she had not been allowed enough time to clear up the bruises that marked her face with red and blue splotches. “The ratcat-lover had his tame kzin grin at me until I transferred the funds and authenticated the contract.”

  “You could have gone to the police,” he pointed out, lighting a cigar. That was also more common here on Wunderland than on Earth, among the many archaisms he found rather pleasant.

  “Teufelheim! They had the contracts—and would the police believe me, with my record? I wouldn’t have chanced stiffing them, if you hadn’t suggested it.”

  He stared at her for a moment, and she dropped her eyes before the steady yellowish glare of his.

  “Excellency,” she finished sullenly.

  “It should have occurred to you that—” Early stopped. That I have influence with the courts, and the police. Both quite true, although not to the extent he would on Earth. There, opponents of the ARM—or the Brotherhood, if they were unlucky enough to learn of its existence—could be ignored so completely that they found nobody even acknowledged their existence any longer. Harsher measures were rarely necessary; overt fear was a crude tool. The Secret Reign had survived the centuries by manipulating men, not by trying to rule them directly. It was already far older than any mere state in the year Buford Early was born…

  “Never mind,” he continued. “You’ll be compensated for your loss.” Loss of stolen money, he thought ironically. “And keep me informed of anything to do with Matthieson. Understood?”

  “Jawul,” she replied.

  • CHAPTER EIGHT

  Jonah pulled his head out of the fountain and shook it; the two kzin looked up from tending their wounds and complained with yeowls as drops hit their fur. The human restrained an impulse to grin at them; from the way they were wagging their ears back at him, they felt the same way.

  “Well, we’re rich,” he said. “Comparatively speaking. Rich in spirit, too—I never did like being cheated.” And this time I got to do something about it, he added silently. Finagle, but I feel good! Better than he had in a year. Better than he had since the psychists released him and Early began his campaign of persecution.

  Bigs grunt-snarled. Spots answered aloud: “We have fought side by side,” he said. His whiskers drooped. “Although there will be little enough left of this money when our debts are paid and supplies laid in for our households.”

  “Considering that you were contemplating suicide the night I met you, that’s not bad,” Jonah observed dryly, turning and sitting on the cornice of the fountain. “How much will you have left?”

  “If we pay no more than the most pressing of our debts…” Spots turned and consulted with his sibling in the Hero’s Tongue; kzin felt uneasy with a language as verbal as English. “A thousand each.”

  “Hmmm. The idea is to let money make money,” Jonah replied. “You ought to invest it.”

  Bigs folded his ears in anger, and the pelt laid itself flat on his face, sculpting against the massive bones. Spots lifted his upper lip and let his tail twitch in derision.

  “If we had the skill, we would not have the opportunity. Business—who would do business of that sort with a kzin?”

  “Well, I—” Jonah snapped his fingers. “Wait a minute! Remember that dosshouse we stayed at, the night I told you about the job?”

  “I would rather forget,” Spots said.

  “Vermin,” Bigs rasped. “Human-specific vermin at that. If the Fanged God is humorous, they will die from ingesting kzin blood.”

  “No, the old man I talked to—he’d been on prospecting expeditions into the Jotuns.”

  Spots had bent his head to lap at the water in the fountain; now he raised it, hands still braced on the rim, long pink washcloth-sized tongue lapping at his jowls and whiskers.

  “You are altruistic, for a monk—for a human,” he said suspiciously.

  “Tanj,” Jonah replied. “There Ain’t No Justice. You two are out of luck because your side lost the war; I’m in bad odor with…hmmm, an influential patriarch, let’s say. And we’ve just pounded on some people who, if not respectable, are certainly established citizens of Munchen. Reason and health both say we should get out of town. If nothing else, living’s cheaper in the countryside. The Jotuns are pretty wild; we could hunt most of our food.”

  That brought the kzinti heads up, both of them. The aliens stared at him with their huge round lion-colored eyes for a moment, then looked at each other.

  “I’ve got three thousand, you’ve got thirty-five hundred, our two friends here have a thousand apiece. No, that’s not enough. Mm-hm. Need about twice that”

  The old man’s name was Hans Shwartz, and he had been perfectly willing to discuss an expedition. His honesty was reassuring, if depressing.

  “Why so much?” Jonah asked. “I’ve done rockjack work, back in the Sol-Belt, but this is planetside—the air’s free.”

  “Ja, but nothing else is,” Hans said. “Look. You’ve got animals—no sense in trying to take ground vehicles, it’s too rough in there—and you’ve got personal supplies, you’ve got weapons—”

  “Weapons?”

  “Bandits. Worse now than during the war. Weapons, then there’s detector equipment. Southern Jotuns have funny geography, difficult—that’s why it’s worthwhile going in there. Scattered pockets of high-yield stuff; doesn’t pay for large-scale mining, even these days.”

  Jonah nodded, and the two kzin flared their nostrils in agreement. The Serpent Swarm had been stripped of experienced rockjacks; they made the best stingship fighter-pilots, and the Alpha Centauran space-navy had inherited plenty of shipbuilding capacity from the occupation. Thousands of small strike craft built in Tiamat and the other space fabrication plants were riding in UN carriers deeper and deeper into kzinti space. Even so, the natural superiority of asteroid mining was only somewhat diminished. There would have been little or no mining and industry on the surface of Wunderland but for the kzinti. Kzin bad been in its late Iron Age when the Jotok arrived and brought with them the full panoply of fusion power and gravity polarizers. The polarizer made su
rface-to-orbit travel fantastically cheap, and with fusion power pollution had never been a problem either.

  “Ja, lot of stuff we’d need to make it worthwhile going. I’m willing to invest my savings, but not lose them—why do you think I’m sleeping in flophouses with three thousand krona in the bank? The return would be worth it, but only if we’re properly equipped.”

  Jonah rubbed at his jaw; the stubble was bristly, and he reminded himself to pick up some depilatory, now that he could afford it.

  “What prey is in prospect?” Bigs said.

  Shwartz understood the idiom; he seemed to have had some experience with kzin. Enough to know basic etiquette like not staring, at least.

  “Depends, t’kzintar.” Warrior, in the Hero’s Tongue; a derivative of kzintosh, male. “Possibly, nothing at all! That’s the risk. Have to go way outback; anything near a road or shipline’s been surveyed to hell and back. Take in filter membranes, then build a hydraulic system if we discover anything. Pack it out. Only the heavy metals and rare earths worth enough. With luck, oh, maybe ten, twenty thousand krona each—profit, that is, after expenses. Depends on when you want to stop, of course.”

  “Twenty thousand sounds fine to me,” Jonah said. About the price of a rockjack’s singleship, in normal times. More than enough for independence, if he managed carefully; passage back to Sol System, if he wanted it. “Excuse us for a minute?”

  “Ja,” the old man said mildly, stuffing his pipe and turning away to sit quietly on his cot, blowing smoke rings at the grimy ceiling of the dosshouse.

  Jonah and the kzin brothers huddled in a corner; the half-ton of sentient flesh made a barrier as good as any privacy screen.

  “Sounds like the best prospect going,” he murmured.

  “Yes,” Spots said. He took a comp from his belt and tapped at the screen; a kzin military model, rather chunky, marked in the dots-and-commas of the aliens’ script. “That would repurchase enough land to sustain our households. With an independent base, we could contract work to meet our cash-flow problems.”

  “I am tempted,” Bigs cut in; they both looked at him in surprise. “My liver steams with the juices of anticipation. With enough wealth, we need no longer associate so much with humans.” His ears folded away and he ducked his muzzle. “No offense, Jonah-Matthieson. You hardly seem like a monkey.”

  “None taken,” Jonah said dryly. Actually, he’s quite reasonable…for a pussy, he thought, using the old UN Space Navy slang for the felinoids. That was flattery. Accepting defeat violated kzin instincts as fundamental to them as sex was to a human. Walking among aliens who did not recognize kzinti dominance without lashing out at them took enormous strength of will.

  “Hrrrr” Spots closed his eyes to a slit; the pink tip of his tongue protruded slightly. “How are we to raise the additional capital?” He brightened, unfurling ears. “A raid! We will—”

  Jonah groaned; Bigs was grinning with enthusiasm…aggressive enthusiasm. How had these two survived since the liberation? Badly, he knew.

  “No, no—do you want to end up in prison?”

  That made them both wince. Kzinti were more vulnerable to sensory deprivation than humans; they were a cruel race, but rarely imprisoned their victims except as a temporary holding measure. Kzin imprisoned for long periods usually suicided by beating their own brains out against a wall, or died in raving insanity if restrained.

  “No, we’ll have to go with what the old coot had in mind,” Jonah concluded.

  Huge round amber-colored eyes blinked at him. “But he said he did not have access to sufficient Funds,” Spots pointed out reasonably, licking his nose and sniffing. Puzzlement: I sniff for your reasoning.

  It was amazing how much you learned about kzinti, working with them for a month or two. Back in Sol System, nobody had known squat about the aliens, except that they kept attacking—even when they shouldn’t. Now he knew kzin body language; he also knew their economic system was primitive to the point of absurdity. Not surprising, when a bunch of feudal-pastoral savages were hired as mercenaries by a star-faring race, given specialized educations, and then revolted and overthrew their employers. That had happened a long, long, long time ago, long enough to be quasi-legend among the kzin. They had never developed much sophistication, though; nor a real civilization.

  What they had done was to freeze their own development. The kzin became a space-faring power long before they understood what that meant; and with space travel came access to genetic alteration techniques. The kzin used those, both on their captives and on themselves. The plan was to make them better; but better to the Race of Heroes meant to be even more primitive, even more dedicated to the Fanged God, even more loyal to the Patriarch. Civilization breeds for rationality; but the kzin used gene mechanics to build in proof against that.

  While they were at it, they altered their social customs, then changed their genes so the new customs would be stable. The result was a race of barbarians, culturally well below the level of the Holy Roman Empire, roaming through space in wars of conquest and slavery.

  Fortunately they had also changed their genes to make themselves more Heroic; and to a kzin, Heroes were rarely subtle and never deceptive.

  Heroes don’t lie, and they don’t steal. It should be enough, Jonah thought. So.—

  “He’ll have a backer in mind,” Jonah said. “A beneath-the-grass patriarch. A silent partner.” Explaining the concept took a few minutes. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have talked to us at all.”

  The huge kzinti heads turned toward each other.

  “We need him,” Spots said. “Badly.”

  “Truth,” Bigs replied morosely.

  Each of them solemnly bared the skin on the inside of a wrist and scratched a red line with one claw, then stared at him expectantly.

  Oh, Finagle, the human thought. “Can I use a knife?” he said aloud.

  “I won’t take money from Harold Yarthkin,” Jonah said bluntly.

  He stared narrow-eyed at the lean Herrenmann face across the table, with its arrogant asymmetric double spike of beard. The room was large, elegant, and airy in the manner of Old Munchen, on the third story of a townhouse overlooking the Donau and the gardens along its banks. Almost as elegant as Claude Montferrat-Palme in his tweeds and suede, looking for all the world like a squire just in from riding over the home farm. He lounged back in the tall carved-oak chair, framed against the bright sunlight and the wisteria and wrought iron of the balcony behind him. His smile was lazy and relaxed.

  “Oh, I assure you, there’s no money of his in this. We’re…close, but not bosom companions, if you know what I mean.”

  Ingrid, Jonah’s mind supplied. An old and tangled rivalry; resolved now, but the scratches must linger. His were about healed, but he hadn’t spent forty years brooding on them.

  “Although he probably would back you up. You did save both their lives, there at the end.”

  Jonah felt a cold shudder ripple his skin, but the sensation was fading. There are no more thrint, he told himself. None at all, except for the Sea Statue in the UN museum, and that was safely bottled in a stasis field until the primal monobloc recondensed. After an instant the sensation went away. A year ago the memory attacks had been overwhelming; now they were just very, very unpleasant. Progress, of a sort.

  “Not interested,” he said flatly. For one thing, our dear friend Harold might have left me here for the pussies, if it wouldn’t have made him look bad in front of Ingrid. Harold Yarthkin was a hero of sorts; Jonah knew the breed, from the inside. As ruthless as a kzin, when he was crossed or almighty Principle was at stake.

  “But as I said, it’s my money.”

  “Why are you spending your time on this penny-ante stuff, then?” Jonah asked. His nod took in the room, the old paintings and wood shining with generations of labor and wax.

  “I’m not as rich as all that,” Montferrat said to Jonah’s skeptical eyebrow. “Contrary to rumor, most of the money I, hmmm, disassociated from official
channels during the occupation didn’t stick. Much of the remainder went after the liberation—my vindication wasn’t an automatic matter, you see. Too many ambiguous actions. And I’m not exactly in good odor with the new government. The ARM doesn’t like any of us who were involved in…that business, you know. Therefore the most lucrative investments, like buying up confiscated estates, are barred to me. But yes, backing an expedition like yours isn’t all that good a bet. I’ve funded a number, and no more than broken even.”

  “Why bother?”

  “For some reason, the Provisional Government—our acquaintance Markham, and General Early—doesn’t really want exploration in that quarter. Among the many other things they dislike. Just to put a spoke in their wheels is satisfaction enough for me, so long as it doesn’t cost money. And besides, perhaps the horse will learn to sing.”

  Jonah shrugged off the reference and sat in thought for a moment.

  “Accepted,” he said, and leaned forward to press his palm to the recorder.

  “…and that, my dear, was how Jonah Matthieson came to be prospecting in these hills,” Montferrat finished.

  Night had fallen during the tale, and the outdoor patio was lit by the dim light of the town’s glowstrips. Insectoids fluttered around them, things the size of a palm with wings in swirling patterns of indigo and crimson; they smelled of burnt cinnamon and made a sound as of glass chimes. Tyra took a cigarette and leaned forward to accept the man’s offer of a light, she leaned back and blew a meditative puff at the stars before answering him.

  “You certainly don’t believe in letting the left hand know what the right does, do you, Herr Montferrat Palme. Claude.”

  His grin was raffish and his expression boyishly frank. “No,” he said. “But I’ll tell you everything…”