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

  Hwass-Hwasschoaw was weaving a human mask of pliant bark to replace the mask of human skin he had not been able to bring with him. Basket weaving was one of the skills he had ordered his father’s slaves to teach him as a youth. His patriarch had not allowed him to observe a slave without learning how to do all that the slave was doing. Once he had killed one of his father’s metal-working slaves for refusing to teach him the art of variable alloying. His father commended his act by sharing in the bloody meal—even though he had lost a valuable property.

  It was predestined from birth that Hwass was to become Patriarch’s-Eye, an unmentionable name he was to carry in priority to all other social names he might be known by. Eyes sometimes led quiet lives of observance. Sometimes their lives became livery affairs of survival by wit where even the most impractical skill might be the key to survival. His father had ordered him to learn everything.

  While he wove, he recalled his father’s words. “A master who cannot do what his slaves do has become like an unskilled animal. A kzin is owned by his slaves if they are more clever than he.” His father was born on W’kkai of the Kzin aristocracy, nominally a member of the W’kkai aristocracy, but more of Kzin than of W’kkai. He had only contempt for the W’kkai habit of letting their slaves be the custodians of their gestalt.

  He did not have to kill his father’s basket weavers for they were enthusiastic in teaching him all they knew. The mask shaped up nicely. The skin was finely woven with shaped cheekbones and cleft chin and protruding eyebrows. The eyes were of stream-polished quartz. The hair was of fine plant fiber which he pounded clean while the Son of God was dying with his awful burden of sin.

  Day came and night, and the pallor of Beta, and the dawn of Alpha. In his delirium the hermit was taken to a ghostly remembrance of Munchen in the spring of a year when Beta was an evening star. It cast shadows the length of Karl-Jorge Avenue and set the steel steeple of St. Joachim’s cathedral ashimmer against a purpling sky. Some kind of Mass was gathering, and his grandfather, whom he loved far more than his father, was holding on to his hand with the kind of vigor that adults use to protect children from Calvinists, nearby kzin, and other evils.

  The hermit was remembering this now because as a child this was the first time he had ever seen a statue-man nailed in agony to a cross. The cross was larger than life-size and it rose above the massive entrance to St. Joachim’s. He had not asked his grandfather about it but his grandfather had sensed his consternation and volunteered an explanation.

  “Son. Don’t be scared. The kzinti don’t do that to people. Crucifixion is peculiarly Christian—the kzinti have only been here nine years; they haven’t had the time to be reborn again. Give them fifty years to convert and then we’ll get some real atrocities.”

  The Son of God had not spoken for a day. Now, suddenly awakened to the present by his vision, oblivious of his pain, he shouted wildly down at his kzin. “You reborn?”

  “Ratcats iss live eleven lives?” The giant’s ears waggled in amusement as he used a monkey’s demeaning term for kzinti. He meant nine, but Hwass had never managed to master decimal mathematics. He got it garbled when he converted from base eight.

  “Born once of mother! Born twice of Christ!” shouted the hermit in explanation.

  The kzin remained puzzled.

  “Finagle’s censored balls! Are you a Christian convert? I’m trying to explain to myself what you’re doing! Crucifixion is a Christian sacrifice!”

  “I iss Kdaptist,” explained Hwass patiently to his victim.

  The hermit’s sight was wavering again. He followed his grandfather’s eyes to the St. Joachim cross of his hallucination. His dry lips were raving. “My grandfather warned me about people like you!” he screamed at the kzin. Then he was gone again into delirium and vision and revelation.

  “Christians!” his grandfather was lecturing with a booming voice that traveled all the way from Munchen to the Wunderland backlands, “they delegate their wrong-doing to Christ who suffers for them in proxy ‘Let Christ do the suffering,’ that’s their motto. ‘Let Christ be punished in my place.’ Christ earns God’s grace the hard way, and all they have to do is drink Christ’s blood and eat His flesh on Sunday. Christians acquire God’s grace secondhand. For this service they are grateful and worship him. Been a popular sales pitch for thousands of years. Christians are the ones who get indignant when they get nailed to a cross; they think God’s been falling down on His job and hire a lawyer to sue Him.”

  High on his cross the hermit was in a rage of indignation. He wasn’t Christ! It wasn’t his job! Why should he have to suffer? It was sacrilege!

  Below, Hwass was busy honing a theological point. Since God had granted to these animals the gift of superluminal communication, surely their awfulest sins had the superluminal ability to fly from all the realms of man, here, to the poultice Hwass had made from the body of the Son of God.

  Hwass had completed his mask. Wearing it, he was permitted to gaze directly into the eyes of the Son of God. He smelled the fear and the agony. The true face was tormented in pain. Sometimes the pain was so great that the Son fainted but then he would slump and choke, unable to fill his lungs, and had to awaken, to stiffen his legs so that he could breathe. The sacrifice was working. The sins of mankind were arriving, a new one with each gasp and groan, and with them the punishment that went with sin. Kdapt had truly mastered the nature of the simian form and mind.

  St. Joachim’s was gone but the grandfather had brought with him a spinning Munchen hotel, made shabby by the fist of the kzinti occupation, horribly fuzzed by the delirium. Grandpa was trying to convince his grandson not to abandon his first wife. The guy could be a bore! What did it matter so many years too late? Cindy-belle was bones under a kzin factory. You can’t go back. Finagle, what did all that matter when a kzin had you nailed to a cross? Die. I want to die.

  “You can blame Cindy-belle all you want, son, for your own incompetence. It’s a painless way to go, top off all your sins on to her, to make her guilty, to attribute to her the source of your own stupidities. That will make you feel good. You’ll be absolved. You’ll be saved—for the moment. But Finagle knows it won’t do you any good in the long run. Your sins aren’t transferable. In the long run you get nailed to your own cross. Christ never saved a single soul but his own.”

  Shut up, old man! The universe wasn’t supposed to be literal.

  The grandfather held tightly to his grandson’s hand and they were back in Munchen with the painted wooden Christ. “He wanted to take on the world’s sins. He wanted to suffer in your place, and he suffered. But he didn’t save anyone. A sin is something even Jesus can’t take from you. A sin is something you can’t give away. You can’t even run away from it.”

  Shut up. Let me die. He was dying of regret. I could be with Cindy-belle now, and the boy grown up, and my mad kzin would have found someone else, some other sinner. Too soon old; too late wise. Why didn’t the raving old ghost just shut up!

  From parched lips almost too stiff to speak, he asked for water. If the damn ratcat had read the Bible, like he claimed, he’d hold up a rag soaked in vinegar. The man fainted. He woke. He found a cup of stream water in front of his face…attached to a pole that went all the way down there to a crazy kzin wearing the outsized mask of a man’s face. Why water and not vinegar? Did the rat kzin want him alive to suffer longer? He smiled through cracked lips. He was warm and cozy. Pain was its own anesthetic. He was floating. Still, he wanted the water and slurped at it awkwardly. The water revived him but he wished it hadn’t because his grandfather was still chattering away. That damn old man was never going to give him any peace; somber advice right up to the end. They were having beer in a trunkshuppen in wartime Munchen.

  “The road you’re taking, son, running away from your wife, letting father handle it—that leads nowhere but to death. No matter where you run, son, all you’ll find there is your own deathbed, and the faster you run, the quicker you’ll get there.”
r />   The cantankerous hermit was choking again. This time he was grown-up and at the end of his life. When he tried to stiffen, his legs refused to obey. He couldn’t breathe with limp legs and he couldn’t talk his legs into helping him. He was pleading with his legs to raise his body when he blacked out.

  The kzin was watching intently.

  At the exact moment of death the man-beasts would all be saved, at least temporarily. Every man, across all the realms of men, would be in a state of grace. Their suffering would die as the Son died. And God would no longer be distracted by the pain emanating from their multiple true-shapes.

  He prayed. Grant the Bearded God tranquility! The Great God’s Patriarchal courage and bravery and strength were about to be restored by the sacrifice of His Son. Rejuvenated, He would be alert and ready to listen to all who called upon Him, not just the whining of His favorites.

  The body on the cross slumped, convulsed, was still. Hwass turned to the smaller cross, God’s antenna. Now! The mask respecting the true-form was firmly upon his muzzle. He composed himself. In the air were the songs of heaven and the smells of glory. His hunter’s senses felt the full attention of God. He delivered only one request, a resonant, powerful request, carefully phrased in the purrs of the Dominated Tense of the Hero’s Tongue:

  “Mighty Patriarch, Son of the Grandfather, and Father of the Son,” he began formally, “the aroma of Your piss emanates from every star. As Your feces was dropped into the mud of Earth to bring forth the true-shape, I throw my soul to the mud of Kzin to bring forth loyalty to God’s purpose. Obedient children I promise You.”

  Hwass was remembering a lost life on the sheep estates of Wunderland. “A fanged dog may be ugly in Your eyes. An untamed dog may kill sheep. But a fanged dog who has been bred to the faith is a shepherd.”

  Then he made his plea. “Place in my loyal claws the hypershunt drive so that my brave kzinti may move freely to their destiny! Let us guide Your true-shaped children. We will discipline their behavior! In the whole of the galaxy, You command no greater race than the race of Heroes. Use us. I ask no more.”

  After a respectful silence, Hwass-Hwasschoaw feasted upon the body of the Son of God so that he might share in the grace of the true-form, as God had commanded in Matthew 26:26, and drank of the blood, all of it, which was shed for the remission of sins as commanded in Matthew 26:27-28.

  •

  Chapter 10

  (2436-7 A.D.)

  When Major Yankee Clandeboye tried to organize an expedition to Hssin he discovered just how many naval officers he had alienated. He had full authority to mount such an expedition, but it took more than authority; it took cooperation. Whatever request he made was referred to some other naval department. Clearly Admiral Jenkins was not cooperating.

  From the scuttlebutt he learned that Admiral Jenkins, in command of the Eighth Fleet based at Wunderland, had been involved in a running internecine war with General Fry for years, a covert war involving character assassination by secret ballot, redirected supplies, gerrymandering, reluctance to share ideas and innovations, officer sidelining—and an overt war over budgets and weapons procurement. They had policy quarrels, philosophical differences, and they belonged to competing power blocs. A sort of simmering truce had been in place since their last open conflict during the invasion of Down.

  One informant thought it was funny. “He actually enjoys his little wars. Keeps about six or seven fronts going at the same time. He once tried to have Buford Early court-martialed. Didn’t succeed but sure kept the volcanoes puffing.”

  “Admiral Jenkins did that?” Yankee was incredulous.

  “No. General Fry.”

  “And the ARM just lets my boss get away with it?”

  “What can they do? Fry has goldskin roots. The goldskins and ARM collaborate reluctantly. You know, Belter and flatlander rivalry.”

  “And I thought I was unpopular!”

  The higher authorities of the ARM had done their best to keep such disputes compartmentalized. Yet the very structure of the Amalgamated Regional Militia exacerbated such conflicts. The ARM had never been designed to wage war against the kzin or mediate between alien races. For 350 years it had shaped itself to find and suppress military technologies rather than to use them. The ARM’s military response to the kzinti had been hastily cobbled together out of the wrong pieces of bureaucracy.

  Yankee’s men suggested that they bypass Jenkins and go back to Sol and pick up a ship. Besides the fact that this option put a ten-light-year (thirty-day) dogleg detour into the Hssin trip, it wasn’t the kind of failure that Clandeboye had the courage to pass on to Fry to fix—the old game player had doubtless moved him into this hotseat quite deliberately.

  He was left crawling from rumor factory to rumor factory, grasping at wild stories for some kind of lever into his problem. Perhaps, he thought ironically, he could lay charges of mutiny against Jenkins. Good idea; bad odds. It was in such a mood that he accepted Brobding Shaeffer’s invitation to dinner at Tiamat’s Star Well. Brobding was always a good source of gossip.

  The Star Well was more formal than Yankee liked, complete with a flatland headwaiter with black suit and oyster-sized turquoise jacket buttons who actually escorted him to the Shaeffer table on one of the tiers overlooking the well. His eyes fell off the rim—down to the beginning of the universe. It was vaguely disconcerting to know that a structural failure in the “skin” would suck him through the floor into an even better view of the stars. If you hadn’t noticed that Tiamat was rotating, its motion was brilliantly obvious here; the constellation of Pavo was just slipping across the bottom of the well. He recognized Peacock from his days as starstruck navigator. Binary giants, period 11.7 days. Minds were filled with such useless detail.

  True to form, Brobding Shaeffer immediately began to pass on the latest gossip—while Yankee was still standing. He was ensconced in a cushioned crescent overlooking the well, his lips happily assaulting his nose in a pincers maneuver, long arm happily around a young lady. “I just got it straight from the ISC Adjunct that Sourface Jenkins considers your mission to be a direct violation of Eighth Fleet territory. A pointed insult. He was raving at 3D soccer last night that a mutineer has been given sweeping authority in his bailiwick.”

  “And here I thought he was happy,” Yankee said sarcastically. “The last time we talked, he was grinning like a kzin.”

  “Sit down. Meet Chloe.” Shaeffer turned to Chloe and jerked a thumb at his friend. “That’s Yankee. He’s a mutineer.”

  Yankee sat down. “Knock it off.”

  “That sounds like a real adventure!” exclaimed Chloe with the skill of a young woman who has read about how to get a man talking. There was an artificial spring to her loose black curls. She was either a naive twenty-year-old on her first date or else a very sophisticated sixteen-year-old pretending to be twenty. Brobding could be trusted to date underage girls or to get caught in his spacesuit without underpants or to drink too much in Tigertown. The girl, and she was a girl, continued to stare at Yankee. She actually batted her eyes. “Well?”

  “Just another war story,” grumbled Yankee.

  “Tell us. I’ve never asked you what happened,” said Brobding. “I’m too polite.”

  “That’s what I like about you.”

  “Aren’t you going to tell us?” Chloe sighed. “Please, I’m a navy brat and I like war stories.”

  “No.”

  “What can I bribe you with?” she flirted.

  “A ship, sweetheart.” He smiled kindly and she chewed her lip.

  That was when Brobding announced happily that he had brought in a kzin mechanic from Aarku to sham some of the black art of gravitic drive maintenance. “I’ll be taking him back with me to Procyon.”

  “I hope you have a rage-proof cage,” mused Yankee.

  “Don’t need one. He lost his legs in the war. That’s the deal; he helps us. We grow him a new pair of legs.”

  “Are you sure he’s going to buy that?
Kzin wear their wounds proudly.”

  Brobding grinned. “They’re not all the same. This one would be humiliated to ask a kzin for legs. He’d never do it—even though he wants legs now more than life. He’s old. But he reasons that humans have no honor—so he can ask us. He comes from Ch’Aakin. We’ll send him back home once Brozik’s boys are through pumping his brains.”

  Yankee remembered that Ch’Aakin was a neighbor of Procyon—nine light years. It was a lousy M2 star, not worth a gold-plated lead napoleon. The crashlanders had tried to take it during the war—it was too near for comfort—but Ch’Aakin had turned into a bloodbath and one of the defeats the navy didn’t like to talk about.

  The next evening Yankee was invited to the naval mess for dinner. There he had to endure a different kind of formality. The gray bulkhead walls were decorated with stiffly mounted brass portholes salvaged off the bottom of Earth’s Pacific, and, at the head of the main table, a coral encrusted propeller from some ancient pursuit plane which had overshot its mother carrier. These were flatlanders, importing their ties to Earth. The officers were seated by rank, their placeholders Chinese ivory military weapons.

  Yankee had hoped it might be an informal gathering to break down whatever obstacles were impeding an unorthodox intelligence mission. Instead it was an ambush.

  “The Clandeboye articles” had not been published in major datamags. Nevertheless they had been widely circulated and frequently condemned. Often the critics had read only other reviews. His dinner critics were ruthless. They wanted to prove to him that he was wrong, that the UNSN patrols had a vise grip on kzinti space.

  Every single man at the dinner had combat experience from the ferocious thirteen-year offensive that had followed the Battle of Wunderland. An average of four percent of their ships had been destroyed on every mission. These were the hardened survivors, some of them brilliant combat officers, some of them just lucky men. None of them had a good reason to discount kzinti strength, yet all of them did.