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

  “Not much to look at,” he said, hefting one of the bags. It was a little larger than his fist, but heavy enough to bring a grunt of surprise.

  “No nuggets,” Hans nodded. “It’s rich, but not that rich. We’ve cleared about three thousand krona. Not bad for the first day’s work.”

  “First month’s work,” Bigs grunted, lying flat on his belly with his hands on either side of his chin. “Not counting walking in to this verminous spot.”

  “There is that, yes,” Hans went on cheerfully, and spat into the fire before lighting his pipe with a twig. “Thing is, we’ll get as much tomorrow. For a while, too. Sort of time for it all to pay off. Remember what I said back in Munchen; getting the benefit of all the labor that everyone else who went looking put into it. Now we reap the results. Should be tasty, very tasty”

  Spot’s tongue moistened his nose. “How much?” he said. At their looks: “How much shall we take out before we stop?”

  Hans pursed his mouth. “Twenty thousand over our expenses would do me fine. Twenty thousand’s enough to get the shop I’ve had my eye on.”

  “Not enough for me,” Bigs said; the humans looked at him in slight surprise. Usually the larger kzin spoke as little to them as he could. “For what I want…I need more.”

  “More is good,” Jonah nodded, remembering to turn away his eyes. Never stare at a kzin. Seven times, never stare at a hostile kzin. “I’d like forty thousand myself. Starting a business is risky. Plenty of people have gone bust just because they didn’t have enough cash to tide them over until the returns started.”

  “Forty thousand would satisfy me,” Spots mused, using a branch he had whittled to scratch himself on one cheek, then under his chin. He slitted his eyes and purred, tongue showing slightly. “Plenty of land coming on the market; we might even be able to buy back some of our Sire’s lost estate. Enough over to start a consulting firm; there are kzinti in the Serpent Swarm, on Tiamat, who would be glad to have Wunderland agents.”

  “Forty thousand it is, then,” Hans said. He hooked the coffeepot off the fire and poured himself a cup. “Nothing like a cup of hot coffee to settle you for sleep.”

  Bigs spoke up. “When shall we divide it?”

  The old man’s hands stopped and he looked up, face carefully calm. “Well, that’s a question. We could split it up when we leave, or when we get back to civilization, or each day. Something to be said for all three.”

  “Each day, where I can see it,” Bigs snarled. Literally; talking with kzinti made you realize that humans never really snarled. “I labor in the earth like a slave. The prey I toil for shall rest in no monkey’s larder.”

  Spots hissed at him; he turned and hissed back through open jaws, and the smaller kzin shrugged with an elaborate ripple of spotted orange fur.

  “I will be content either way,” he said. “By all means, divide it. It makes no difference.”

  Jonah locked eyes with Bigs for a moment, then shrugged himself. It didn’t make any difference. Except…why was the kzin so insistent? A surly brute, to be sure—if Jonah had been in the habit of naming kzinti, he would have christened him Goon—but it was also a little strange he had never so much as mentioned what he intended to do with the money. In modern kzin society few ever satisfied the longing for physical territory with game on it, and their harem and retainers about them; that was reserved for the patriarchs. It must have been doubly cruel for a noble’s sons to have the prospect snatched away; Spots daydreamed about it constantly, and Jonah could see him imagining the wilderness about them to be his own. Whereas Bigs seemed more and more withdrawn, as if Wunderland were not really real to him any more.

  Again, he shrugged. Kzinti psychology was still a mystery to those humans expert in it. Jonah Matthieson had killed quite a few kzin, and worked a few months with two. That was no basis for easy judgment—in fact, just enough to lull your sense of difference and put you most at risk of anthropomorphizing them. That could be dangerous; besides the weird culture the orange-furred aliens had produced, dragged straight from the Iron Age into an interstellar civilization, their basic mental reflexes were not like a human being’s. And never had been, even before they used the new technology to alter their own genes.

  They wanted to be more like their folk heroes. So they did genetic engineering to make it so. That was what the ARM intelligence people decided was the only plausible explanation for Kzinti behavior and customs. Usually civilization changes things. Defects don’t result in death. Evolution stops, then works backwards. Bad genes are preserved. Not with the kzin. They really are like the Heroes they admire.

  Hans wordlessly set out the scales, checking that each bag was identical. Then he divided them into four piles, and silently invited his partners to take their pick. Bigs scooped his up and disappeared into the dark; they heard him stop and make a long leap onto bare rock further up the slope, hiding his trail. Spots sighed and trotted out into the night in the opposite direction.

  “Of course, now we’ve each got to wonder about our goods,” Hans added; the smaller kzin hesitated for a second, then continued. “Wonder if any of the others has found them, you see. Couldn’t tell who, not if some of it just disappeared.”

  Jonah halted with an armful of small, heavy bags. “Finagle’s hairy arse, now you mention that?”

  “Well, son, if it was all in one place it’d also be a teufel of a temptation, now, wouldn’t it?” There was a twinkle in the little blue eyes beside the button nose, but they were as hard as any Jonah had ever seen. “Been at this business quite a few years now. Not the first time I’ve had partners, no indeed. Something to be said for all the methods.”

  Jonah yawned cavernously over his morning coffee, then hauled the crisp air deep into his lungs as he stretched work-stiffened muscles. It was a cool morning, a relief before the long blazing heat of the day. Alpha Centauri was rising red over the mountains to the east, and the eye-hurting bright speck of Beta hung on a peak like a jewel on a wizard’s staff. No mountain on Earth could have been so slender and so steep, but Wunderland pulled its heights less fiercely. Birds and orthinoids were waking down in the ribbon of forest that filled the valley, purling and cheeping. None of the kzin were present, which was not surprising in itself. The aliens had fallen into a gorge-and-fast cycle which seemed to be natural to them, and the bacon and eggs frying in the pan would be repulsive to them.

  They used to be that way to me, he admitted: far too natural. After this much pick-and-shovel work, he just felt hungry all the time.

  “Want some hash-browns?” Hans asked.

  “You’re bleeping right I do,” Jonah said, yawning again.

  “See you didn’t get any more sleep than the rest of us,” Hans said.

  “The rest of us?” Jonah paused with his fork raised over his loaded plate.

  “Oh, I may be getting on, but that don’t make me sleep any sounder. Just the opposite. First the big ratcat goes out to check nobody’s found his goods—then the little one. Then you. Then the big one again…”

  Jonah flushed. “I just had to piss,” he said.

  “Funny you went in that direction, then,” Hans said, and cackled with laughter. “This’ll get worse the longer we’re out here. That’s why I wanted to stop at twenty thousand, mostly. Now we’ll all have to check nightly. And each of us worry about the others ganging up on him.”

  Jonah forced himself to eat. His body remembered his hunger, even if his mind was telling him his stomach was full of lead.

  “You don’t seem too worried,” he said.

  “Well, it’s a matter of possibilities,” Hans said. “The two ratcats could take us out—but they don’t get on too well, you may have noticed. Still, blood counts for something. Or you and Spots could take the rest of us—Spots will be seeing Bigs as a real challenge down in his balls, while we’re just monkeys. Or—”

  “Or you could know where it all is and just take it and clear out,” Jonah said harshly, feeling the hair on his back creep.
As a programmer, he knew what an infinite regression setup could do to your logic; also how the Prisoner’s Dilemma generally worked out in real life.

  Hans lit his first pipe of the day with a stick from the fire. “No, don’t think so. You three are a lot tougher than you were when we started. You’d catch me and kill me. Still, it’s something to think about, isn’t it?” He blew a cloud of smoke. “Enough lollygagging—nobody told us to stop working.”

  “Sure,” Jonah muttered to himself. “Send me back to Neu Friborg for supplies. Why me?”

  Another charge of water went down the sluice, to his left past the beaten trail up to the shaft. The wood groaned less now after a week of operation; water had swollen it until the pegged joints were tight, and there was less leakage too. He ignored it, concentrating on strapping the pack-saddle tight; the mule just seemed quietly relieved to be free from hauling loads out of the mine. The pack was mostly empty, except for some hides and dried meat to lend credence to their cover-story of hunting for pelts. The last thing they needed was contact with the authorities. The Provisional Government was hard-up and had even more than the usual official determination to see that the citizenry and their money were soon parted. All four of them agreed on that, if nothing else, although it had been a bleeping struggle to get the kzinti to skin their kills before they ate them.

  Is Hans out of his mind? Or is he in it with them? Jonah thought. It would be a four-day trip. Four days he’d be unable to check on his goods, and that was nearly fifteen thousand krona by now. Without that gold he’d be back cadging handouts in Munchen soon enough. I put up more money than the others, he thought bitterly. As it is I’m getting less than my share. Tanjit, but it’s hot. He reached for the canteen and poured more water on the cloth draped over his head. He could hear Spots coming down the trail, dragging another load of dirt for the boxes. With a scowl, he led the mule behind a boulder it was downwind from the trail this time of day, so he wouldn’t have to talk to the kzin.

  Spots stopped for a moment, moaning softly and pulling the rope yoke over his head. His effort at grooming the matted, worn spots on his sloping shoulders seemed half-hearted, and after a few swipes he simply lay down in the roadway, groaning more loudly. Something he would never do if he were aware of being watched, of course…Jonah felt a moment’s guilt. I should cough or something, he thought. Then: No. If he did, he would have to explain why he was hiding behind the rock—and that would make Spots more suspicious than he was already. At least they were still talking when business made it necessary, while Bigs was barely speaking even to his sibling and not at all to the humans.

  The kzin lay still, panting in the sparse shade a pile of rocks threw over the path. Then his head came up, the big pink bat-ears swiveling downslope. Jonah held his breath, eyes narrowing in suspicion. Spots drew his wtsai and headed down the steeper slope, leaping over the water furrow and dodging along agile and swift as the hillside grew steeper. When the kzin stopped to cut a pole from a broombush and began prying up a large flat rock suspicion grew to rage. Jonah drew his magrifle out of its slings along the pack saddle and stepped out from behind the rock.

  I should let him have it right now, he thought, taking up the slack. No, he decided, as the back of the kzin’s head sprang into the holosight. No, I want him to see it coming.

  “Freeze, ratcat!” he shouted, and sent a round whack through the air over him.

  Spots whirled and leaped backward instead, the stone thumping back down on the others that supported it. His ears flared wide with surprise, as did the wet black nostrils, then folded away in anger. He crouched, opening his mouth wide and extending his hands to either side; one gripped the wtsai, and the claws slid out on the other, needles against the black leather of the hand.

  “What—put that rifle down, monkey!”

  “Right,” Jonah sneered; the ratcat had gotten good enough at Wunderlander to put indignation into its tones. “So you can cut me up—and then take my goods.”

  Spots’s pupils flared wider still, in surprise. “Oh, so that was where you put them,” he said. “Clever, clever, the spray from the furrow would obscure your scent.”

  The human had been moving downslope; he climbed across the furrow carefully, not that there was any danger with sixty-nine rounds still in the cassette, and baited beyond leaping distance.

  “Drop the knife,” he said, his voice flat and ugly.

  “I saw a fuzzball crawling under there,” Spots went on, staring at him in deliberate rudeness. “I was going to pry up the rock and kill it.”

  “Murphy, can’t you invent something more plausible than that?” Jonah jeered. There was a bounty on fuzzballs…although they were commoner here in the Jotuns than in more settled regions.

  Another footfall sounded on the trail Jonah risked a quick glance upslope; it was Hans, trotting up with his rifle at high port. He stopped at the sight of the tableau below and then climbed down, standing midway between Spots and Jonah but out of the line of fire, with the muzzle of his weapon carefully down.

  “You fellers mind telling me what’s going on?” he said mildly.

  They both began to speak at once. Jonah gestured Spots into silence with the rifle.

  “The bleeping ratcat found my goods, and I caught him trying to lift the rock”—he nodded at the lever still jutting into the air, and then at the boulder upslope where the mule still stood—“and clean me out.”

  He tensed slightly; Hans might be in it with the alien. Not likely, since Hans had voted to send Jonah off for the supplies. If it was Hans, they would have waited until he was gone and they could do it safely. Or wait—Spots could be double-crossing Hans by promising to wait until Jonah was gone, and then looting the cache first himself!

  “Of course,” Jonah went on sardonically, “he claims it was all because he saw a fuzzball crawl under there.”

  Spots had risen from his crouch. Ostentatiously, he sheathed the wtsai and stood up to his full two-meters plus of height, staring down his muzzle at Jonah with ears half-unfurled. That was an insult as well; it was the Posture of Assured Dominance, rather than the fighting crouch used to confront an adversary.

  “There is an easy way to find out, monkey,” he said. “Put your arm in through the gap you used to hide the bags of gold. If there is no fuzzball, it is perfectly safe.”

  He backed up along the slope, still in clear sight but more than leaping distance away from the tumbled rocks. Jonah licked his lips, tasting the salt of sweat, and moved closer to his once-secret cache.

  “Of course, you know that fuzzballs never let go once they bite, don’t you?” Spots said, as Jonah bent toward the hole. “The jaws have to be broken and pried loose. Not that that matters a great deal. The neurotoxin venom is quite deadly. Convulsions, bleeding from all the orifices, hallucinations and agonizing death.”

  Jonah snorted and bent further. Then he stopped, looking at Spots. Kzin don’t lie well, he thought. The slick film of sweat that covered his body suddenly seemed to cool. They don’t get enough practice—they can smell each other lying. Spots could be relying on human inability to smell, nearly total by kzinti standards…but Jonah knew enough of their body language to know that he really was relaxed. Even amused. And if there was a Beam’s Beast hiding down there—With a convulsive movement he turned and hauled one-handed on the lever. The big volcanic slab toppled backwards slowly in Wunderland’s .61 G, and the fuzzball cowered for a second as the light stabbed its dark-adapted eyes.

  “Pappy-eek!” it shrilled, the characteristic warning cry.

  Jonah gave a shout of loathing and pumped two rounds into the vermin. The little biped flew backward, half its torso torn away, but still snapping at the air. Beam’s Beast—the origin of the name was lost in the early settlement of the planet—was about half a meter long, covered in titan-blond fur. They had huge eyes, filling nearly half their faces, and clever monkey-like hands to match their demonic cunning. They could even be considered cute, if you didn’t notice the ov
erlapping fangs. In a frenzy of disgust the human leaped forward and stamped the heavy heel of his boot into the big-eyed face. Then be had to spend a minute using the muzzle of his magrifle to pry the jaws out of the tough synthetic.

  That was a welcome distraction. When he looked up Hans had slung his rifle and was looking at him with a speculative stare; Spots was grinning in contempt-threat. Jonah clicked his rifle onto safety.

  “Guess I’d better get back to the mules—” he began. Then the earth shook, and a cloud of dust rose from over the ridge where the mineshaft lay.

  None of them wasted words as they ran.

  Spots was the first to reach the entrance, but he hesitated. The exterior shoring on the hillside was still intact, but choking dust and grit billowed out. Most kzin are natural claustrophobes unless they are lactating females, and it had raised his opinion of his brother’s courage, if not his intelligence, when he volunteered for the job at the pit-face. It also kept Bigs more out of contact with the humans…

  Without a word, Jonah plunged past him into the interior.

  The outer stretch was intact, but the air broiled with metallic-tasting debris; hacking and coughing, he stopped for an instant to tie the wet headcloth over his mouth and nose and snatch a glowrod from the wall. Murk surrounded him, glowing with reflected light, thickening as he advanced wiping his streaming eyes. Ten meters in the roof had collapsed, and a tangle of dirt, rock, broken timbers and planking lay across his way. He dropped to the floor and raised the glowrod. A triangle of empty space in the lower right-hand corner of the pile gaped at him like a toothless mouth. He crawled close and shouted:

  “Bigs! Can you hear me?”

  Nothing; nothing but the trickling sound of dirt falling, and the groan of raw timber stressed to its limits. The rest might come down at any moment. He repeated the call in the Hero’s Tongue, shouting as loud as he could, grit raw in his throat and lungs.

  A sound; faint, and it could be wood collapsing as readily as a kzin moaning in pain. Spots and Hans came up behind him, and he turned urgently.