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

  The lightning flared.

  The head I saw in dim, momentary silhouette was not like a kzin’s head. Was that a trumpet-shaped protuberance? The lightning flared again, longer and brighter.

  The thing I saw was not a kzin.

  I gave a roar of panic and terror from the bottom of my diaphragm, worse, more tearing, than a scream. Not a very courageous reaction from a decorated brigadier, but I tell myself now that my brain still had some zeitunger-poison in it. I leapt backwards in horror, knocking over the fire-screen, hitting the wall. The firelight flared brighter and the hideous thing seemed to leap at me. The walls were thick, as in any kzin-built structure, and the small window deeply recessed. I jumped onto the window sill, gibbering like a monkey. Then Gale turned on the light.

  The ghoul, the thing, the obscenity, stared back at me.

  I saw I was wrong. It was a kzin. Or it had been one, once.

  Both ears were completely gone—not merely ears but hair and skin and flesh. Much of the head was naked bone, veins led across it by some makeshift, ghastly amateur medical procedure. One eye was an empty, bony socket, the other partly occluded by a projecting keloid-scar. The nose and muzzle were gone, leaving only a red cavity. So too was the whole lower jaw gone, and the fangs of the upper jaw. There was only a wobbling fragment of tongue dripping blood and slaver and the hole of a gullet. I saw it had been feeding by sucking bloody liquid through a tube. There were stained lumps of cotton-wool lying near.

  The kzin raised its paws as if to hide its mutilated head. Paws, I saw, not hands. The fingers and claws were gone as well, and its fore-limbs were asymmetrical, the right one withered and twisted. Burns. Attached to the left one was a metal rod. I guessed it communicated by using this on a keyboard.

  I had been aware of Gale’s muscles when I saw her handle the rifle and then when we held each other in the night. Wunderlander or not, she had lived a strenuous life. She went to the kzin now and helped it stand. I saw that for a kzin it was a small one, the smallest male I had seen except for a telepath. It gazed at me from between its mutilated paws with its single half-eye. She said something to it I could not follow, then led it away. Again it took a long time, for it shuffled very slowly. There was something wrong with its legs and feet as well, and it was hunched and bent as if its spine was damaged.

  I was left alone on the window ledge. I climbed down and returned to the table, breathing hard and trying to control myself and to retain my food. I was still sitting there when she returned.

  “He was in the ramscoop raid,” she said. “He had run into a burning building and it collapsed while he was inside it. Now I keep him alive. He is ashamed to be seen. But after last night he wished to see you.”

  “You seek to torture him?” I understood very well how many on Wunderland hated the kzinti. Well, who could understand that better than I? But still I disliked torture for its own sake. And the state of this creature could inspire horror and revulsion but not, in a sane being, hatred.

  “No, no!” There were tears on her cheeks. “But he wanted to feel if you were…if you were…” More tears, almost uncontrollable, like a dam breaking. After a time she calmed down.

  “Then, if you wish to be kind, is it kind to let him live?” I asked. “I would have thought most kzinti would prefer to die and go their God rather than drag out life so reduced.”

  “He fears death because he is no Hero,” she replied. “He believes that if he meets the Fanged God he will meet him as a coward and the God will regurgitate his soul into nothingness. For he did not get his wounds in battle. He was not a warrior kzintosh, you see. He never saw battle. His rank-title was Groom/Assistant-To-Healers. A medical orderly, a corpsman, a stretcher-bearer. Despised by other kzinti always. A humble, lowly semi-civilian. No Fighter’s Privileges. If he had died in that burning building, or died of his injuries afterwards, he would not have died acceptably, in battle, on the attack. He had his injuries in a shameful manner. He fears to die now. I help him live.”

  “And for the same reason, I suppose, he hides away?” I asked.

  “Yes. And so he did not want me to tell you. He wanted you to think he was a fearsome warrior…a Hero. It left him a little…pride. A little less shame. He is…often confused. I tried to tell him…that…that even as his own kind count such things, he would be…” She made a sound of helplessness.

  I made some gesture, some sound, of non-understanding. “I have not heard of a kzin who was ashamed of scars before,” I said. “Quite the reverse.”

  She gave a peculiar, tearful smile. “No Hero,” she said. “But there was more to it than that. After the building collapsed he was under the burning, smoldering, wreckage for a long time. There were other priorities in damage-control and rescue. While he was there the zeitungers got to him. They had been in the cellarage there, too, like your rats. Whether they could reach him physically to tear what was left of his flesh I don’t know. But they tore his mind, for days. You can imagine that, now.”

  I could. Not the cruelest human being, I thought, who had experienced the zeitungers could but feel a throb of pity for this creature of a pitiless species. This wreck of a kzin and I had something in common, I thought.

  “The effect, as far as I can tell, on human and kzin minds is parallel,” Gale said. “What do kzinti fear? Many things, secretly. But to fail as Heroes perhaps most of all.”

  Even, perhaps, those far-off dreams of glory were something this lowly kzin and Arthur Guthlac the museum guard had shared.

  “They lodged their poison deep in his mind,” she went on. “He was there with them too long. And you see the state he was already in.” Kzinti, even nontelepaths, had that rudimentary telepathic sense more acute than that of nearly all humans. More receptive. I had no difficulty understanding that a prolonged zeitunger attack, setting up patterns and paths in the brain, would be a different matter to the brief one I had endured. And the zeitungers themselves would presumably then have been filled with animal fear and panic. I tried briefly to imagine an unremitting zeitunger attack if one was already desperately injured and mutilated, blind, trapped, alone, helpless, in agony, hour after hour as fire crept closer. After a very short time I stopped doing that. Again, as I stopped shaking, the wan ghost of a smile crossed her strained face. This Wunderland woman was at least as tall as me, and our eyes were level. “Unlike your case,” she said, “there was no treatment.” Our faces moved together and I found myself kissing her again, gently, tenderly.

  “Yet that,” she went on after a moment, “may be another reason he struggles to live. To die of such shame and despair would be a victory for the zeitungers.”

  “Why has he had no modern treatment since?” I asked. “For anything? Body or mind?”

  “Treatment? How?”

  I did not understand everything yet, but I wanted to be gentle with her. At least some of my ghastlier and more grotesque fears and suspicions about her and this kzin seemed wrong. I put my arms around her and stroked her hair and after a moment she rested her head on my shoulder, hiding her face against me.

  “I know an old kzintosh warrior, Raargh, who has many wounds from the war,” I told her. “One arm and one eye are not his own, and his knees are metal. His scars are honored and honorable among the kzinti. There are kzintoshi with sons”—was I babbling a little now?—“who point them to the likes of Raargh as Heroes to emulate. But he had his wounds in battle.”

  “Then he is fortunate among the kzinti. This one they would despise. Or so he believes.”

  “But your kzin could have a better life,” I told her. “Far better. There is good surgery. Transplants, prostheses, quick nerve, bone and tissue-growth are available now. For kzinti as well as humans. His mind, too, perhaps. There are facilities…

  “Raargh lives well enough, even as kzinti count such things,” I went on. “In hunts he pulls down game with his prosthetic arm and his artificial eye allows him to see in the dark.” When I thought of Raargh I knew again that I felt rather
more warmly to him than to most of the creatures. I remembered certain things that had happened in the caves. “He has adopted a youngster who is his pride and joy and I think he is getting more sons of his own.”

  “In the city hospitals, perhaps, and for the Herrenmanner and their clients, there is such treatment,” she replied, raising her eyes. “What money do we have for that?” I remembered what a backwoods part of Wunderland this was.

  “And who would help a kzin?” she added after a moment, with genuine puzzlement in her voice. “The kzinti have no power. On this planet they are destroyed. And I was no collaborator. I did my part to destroy them.”

  “It costs nothing,” I said. “Part of the terms we offered the kzinti on this planet when we made peace was that their wounded would be treated.”

  I saw her face change.

  “I did not know that!” Her face lit so that she looked a different person. Then it fell again. “But how would we get there?”

  Explaining the new political situation in the cities would have taken a long time. I owed this deformed kzin little enough, thinking of what the kzinti had done to me and mine. But I owed Gale. If she had done nothing but save me from the zeitungers, I would have owed her. Anyway, she was a beautiful and desirable woman and, it seemed, an innocent one. And if I felt dawning love for her, along with desire, I suppose I also wanted to impress her. I took the identity-disk from my neck and passed it to her, my fingers twining round hers as I did so—a strange situation for lovers to be courting!

  “You see my rank? I am a brigadier general attached to the UNSN general staff. At present on leave. But I can arrange transport for him…and you.”

  I had become embarrassed by my earlier behavior. Now I was embarrassed by her reaction to my words. She went down on her knees and clasped my own. She kissed my hands, where the previous night she had kissed my lips. Her face was like a light of joy. I raised her to her feet and, holding her, walked with her to the window. Together we looked out. The lightning flashes were definitely further away now, the rain was thinning and, I guessed, the floods would subside quickly. I accepted all that she said, but one question remained.

  “I still don’t understand,” I told her. “A kzin. An enemy. An invader of this planet who would have enslaved and destroyed us all. Yes, his burns and injuries are terrible. But why do you care for him so?”

  There were sounds behind us. The mutilated kzin shuffled slowly into the room again. Evidently it had decided to face me, with courage of a kind that I hoped I would never need, though it still held its paws as if to try to hide what was left of its head from my sight. But it looked less horrible now. It made some gestures to Gale that she plainly understood.

  She went to a dresser and took a bottle that I recognized: bourbon, something both species drank. She took two glasses for us and another bowl that she put in front of the kzin, pouring a little into each.

  “I will explain to him,” she said. “Things must be explained to him carefully.”

  “But first,” she said, “we usually drink a toast each night.” And then, raising her glass, “To my children.”

  Following her example, I drank. The kzin, manipulating its trumpet with difficulty between its paws, dipped it into its bowl and sucked.

  Without words I understood, and I saw that she knew I understood.

  “Yes,” she said. “He held up the building while they escaped.”

  GROSSGEISTER SWAMP

  Hal Colebatch

  Wunderland, 2430 A.D.

  The kzin lapped noisily, then raised its head and looked into the eyes of the Abbot of Circle Bay Monastery. The kzin was young and its ear tattoos betokened the highest nobility. The abbot was small and elderly.

  “This is excellent brandy, Father,” the kzin remarked. His Wunderlander had only intermittent nonhuman accent. “My Honored Step-Sire Raargh Hero told me not to miss it.”

  “I am glad, Vaemar, My Son-within-these-walls. We try to mitigate the austerities of the field-naturalist’s life.”

  “I don’t know if I’m really entitled to be called that,” Vaemar said, putting down the empty bowl. “I’m only a student.”

  “These are the statistics we’ve compiled,” said the abbot, extracting a memory brick from his computer and passing it to Vaemar. “What we know of human use of the swamp since the first landings on this planet. I hope it’s helpful.”

  They crossed the garth to the car parked in the meadow just beyond the monastery gates. A few crumbling fragments of walls, overgrown with multicolored vegetation, were the only traces of the refugee camp that had stood there at the time of Liberation ten years before. What had been a refuse-filled ditch then was now an ornamental moat with floating plants. A couple of monks were tending the fish-ponds that joined with it. “There are the monkeys!” remarked the abbot. It was an old joke between then, dating from Vaemar’s confusion over nomenclature on his second visit to the monastery. A grazing pony caught the odor of the kzin and fled.

  “I feel a little foolish telling you to be careful,” said the abbot, looking up at Vaemar who stood beside him like a tower of teeth, claws and muscle. “And I hope I’m not insulting. But nonetheless, I will tell you. Again. We’ve never known everything that’s in the swamp, but we’ve always known a lot of the life there is highly dangerous, certainly to humans. Overly inquisitive or incautious people have long had a habit of disappearing there. Of course, if you go in a small canoe alone up a waterway inhabited by big crocodilians that’s perhaps not overly surprising, but…Marshy can tell you more.”

  “Our canoe should be bite-proof,” said Vaemar. “And it’s a good deal harder to upset than a one-man job.”

  “I know. But some of those who have disappeared ought to have known their business. There was a sailors’ rhyme on Earth, once:

  Take care and beware of the Bight of Benin

  Where one comes out and forty go in.

  I’ll not nag further. But I want your expedition to be a success. And no more disappearances.”

  They boarded the car for the short flight over the rolling, flower-bright meadowland and down to the creek, last reach of Grossgeister Swamp, where the big canoe and the rest of the expedition waited.

  Vaemar checked the loading of the canoe and its outriggers as the abbot chatted with the other five expedition members. It was a primitive and stupid craft compared to those which had been generally available on Wunderland before the invasion and the following decades of occupation and war, but it was the best the university had available for student expeditions now, and in some ways its very low-tech nature could be an advantage. They moved out of the creek under the engine, then took up their paddles.

  The canoe travelled almost silently under the thrust of the six paddles, two of them worked by the muscles of kzinti.

  Water-dwellers, amphibians, land-dwellers occupying the ecological niches that on Earth would be filled by swamp-deer, peccaries and the like, were plentiful, as were flyers. Creatures of all sizes that would have fled at the sound of the engine presented themselves for the expedition’s cameras. But this part of Grossgeister Swamp was never quite silent. Water lapped in the channels between the islands and the stands of trees, insectoids and amphibians sang in ceaseless choirs and choruses, and from time to time there came the splash of some larger creature breaking the surface.

  The land varied from rises of mud supporting reed-clumps and a few drowning bushes to substantial sandy islands with game trails and occasional dwellings, some occupied, some plainly abandoned and going back to the swamp. Occasional floats in the channels marked fishermen’s nets. The vegetation was almost entirely the red of Wunderland: neither the green plants of Earth nor the orange of Kzin had been able to colonize this place.

  After an hour of paddling they reached one of these substantial islands with more obvious signs of long-term occupation. The house on it was a solid structure, with the vegetation before and about it clipped and trimmed like a lush red lawn and hedge. There wa
s a dock and a moored boat spiky with electronics. Marshy, the occupant, a lean old man who reminded Vaemar of a farmer in the backblocks beyond the Hohe Kalkstein, greeted them warily, taking no trouble to disguise the fact that both he and the house were armed, even though ten years after the end of the war on Wunderland a party of four young humans, two of them girls, and two young kzinti, did not look particularly threatening. The human students had a couple of slung strakkakers as well as their collecting guns (unusual strakkakers on Wunderland in that they had large trigger-guards and given the right personalized coding could be operated by kzin as well as human hands) but Vaemar and the other kzin, Swirl-Stripes, carried only their w’tsais here. Vaemar presented the abbot’s letter of introduction.

  Marshy ushered them in. One large room, lined with shelves on which curious odds and ends were interspersed with old books, had as its dominating feature a great sweep of curved window, once plainly the main viewport of a spaceship’s bridge. Its upper part gave a panoramic view of a maze of islands, channels and sloughs, with here and there in the distance open water rippling and sparkling in the sun. Its lower part extended below the water-line, giving a view like a great aquarium. Some of the life-forms they saw would have been recognizable to a terrestrial biologist as examples of parallel evolution. Some, a few, were introduced creatures from Earth. Some were familiar Wunderland creatures. Some were still utterly strange. There were comfortable viewing arrangements, even a kzin-sized indoor fooch as well as human couches in front of the great window. Vaemar wandered over to it as Swirl-Stripes and the human students appropriated the seating. Rosalind MacGowan came to the window beside him. Marshy dialed them refreshments.

  “He told me you were coming,” he said. “Asked me to keep an eye on you. Don’t know if I can do much in that direction. And you appear capable of looking after yourselves. What do you know about the Great Ghost? Have you been here before?”