“Strange. Some thought our God had sent you to teach us lessons.”
“You think that makes a bond between us, Monkey?…Ratcats…You always called us ratcats? But you say Ka’ashi is my home. So it is. I have lived nowhere else.”
“We call it Wunderland, remember. Some of us see you kzinti who were born here as a little…different…to the first Conquest Warriors.” Her voice changed and he perceived some other shift in her chemistry since she had made herself laugh at the kit. “We sometimes call you Wunderkzin. You are changed physically. Already in this light gravity you are taller and more lightly built. It has changed us in the same way, but for you the difference is even greater for Kzinhome was heavier than Earth. I think perhaps you are changed mentally more. May I drink? The Heroes’ Tongue is not easy for human throats.”
“Yes. I concede that life on Ka’ashi was changing us. Who could live with you daffy monkeys and not be changed?”
“Chuut-Riit nearly began to understand us. And unlike most of your geniuses—”
“Chuut-Riit was a warrior! A great Hero!”
“For us ‘genius’ is not an insult…Chuut-Riit, and perhaps Traat-Admiral, were the first high-ranking kzintosh to try to understand us…and all the more dangerous enemies for it. And yet I have wondered once or twice if it were not possible that…a son of Chuut-Riit, brought up on Wunderland with humans, might…No! No! And again, no! Have you kzin driven us mad?” There was liquid on her face again. He smelled its salt.
“There could still be a life here for you and yours,” she went on. “Sometimes, just lately, when it seemed we would be slaves and prey no longer, I wondered if the children of our two kinds might work together on this world.” She gestured at the sleeping youngster and at the kit, who had been watching them with his huge eyes. “Would you not save those at least? Is one of them not as your son might have been, Raargh-Sergeant?”
This monkey is a female and knows female wiles. Does she try to wheedle me? She cannot know my son and his mother died in the UNSN ramscoop raid. But Chuut-Riit’s son! How has the God devised it that I am caught in this vise! The life of a monkey or blood of the Riit is spilt and Chuut-Riit’s seed is lost! A monkey under my protection. Raargh-Sergeant’s eye fell upon the poison pill. He wondered if it would be deadly for kzinti as well as humans. Probably. After all, their biochemistry was patently alike enough for them to eat one another. He picked it up, then threw it with all his strength out the open door. A dead Hero was no use. Responsibility could not be abrogated that way. And if he died, he would die as a kzin should, in battle, on the attack.
“You spoke of terror. You are not so terrified of this old kzintosh now, with one arm and eye gone and holes in his legs?”
“I have the weapons now. Except for those which you are about to hand over along with Jorg the traitor. There is not a kzin formation left fighting on the surface of the planet or a kzin warcraft left in the space of Alpha Centauri! No, ratcat, I am not terrified now! I am offering you life and freedom if you surrender the traitor and the weapons at once. Death for all otherwise. Your deaths will cause me no loss of sleep nor tears.”
“I cannot…I will not hand over the Jorg-human or the weapons without authority from Hroarh-Captain or higher Patriarchal orders,” he said.
“I will return in one hour,” she said. “Then there will be no further argument.” She spoke the last words in the Heroes’ Tongue’s tense of ultimatum. She turned and left, her escort following.
Chapter 3
The tank display showed almost no orange lights now, only the green of human, moving and deploying without interruption.
“Those manretts can be trouble,” said Trader-Gunner. “It was a manrett that killed Cherrg-Captain.”
A last orange light grew into a globe, flashed and disappeared in a sea of green. It appeared that kzin resistance had ceased everywhere. He clicked to erase the tank’s memory. Around the room, the kzinti remained crouched behind their scanty collection of weapons.
“What is happening, Raargh-Sergeant?” Lesser-Sergeant asked him.
“I think there is tension between the two human bands. The UNSN dominates the locals, who have all or almost all turned feral, even many of those who swore to serve the Patriarchy.”
“They are not attacking because they fear our weapons?”
“I think they are not attacking because the UNSN wants us alive.”
“Why?”
“I do not know. If it is a matter of dishonor we may still die heroically. But I have Hroarh-Captain’s orders.” He dialed some food. There was almost nothing left now but basic infantry rations. He sloshed bourbon-and-prawn ice cream on one of the unappetizing blocks of protein and carbohydrate and passed it to the kit.
“Now you may say you have eaten Sergeant’s food, Vaemar-Riit,” he told it. “Soon you will make a soldier!” The kit looked dubious but took determined bites at the brick-like material. Not what you would have got at the palace, the Sergeant thought. Still, none could accuse Chuut-Riit of softness, even to his own. You have missed training by the most lethal combat master on the planet, little one.
Some had accused Chuut-Riit of certain other things, of course, though not within his hearing if they wished to live. According to Lord Ktrodni-Stkaa’s faction he had been a human-lover, altogether too interested in the behavior of the slave species (the former slave species).
Raargh-Sergeant had attended a couple of Chuut-Riit’s lectures on the subject of how valuable, with a few more generations of culling, humans might be. He was on the right track to be interested, he thought, even if, to use a human term, he didn’t know the half of it. He remembered something of those lectures now.
Humans, according to Chuut-Riit, had originally hunted in larger groups than had kzin. This both gave them greater social cohesion and meant the greater growth of power diversity. In the Kzinti Empire, power had diversified because, with the slowness of the speed of light, communications took many years. In the Alpha Centauri system humans had diversified more rapidly and spontaneously. Those who lived among the asteroids were in many ways not the same as those on-planet, tending to be descended from space-born stock in the Man-Sun system, and all the humans in this system were different to those who lived on their home-world.
Humans could be the most valuable slaves ever encountered. And yet, Chuut-Riit had said in his last lecture, there were things beyond this: the new kzinti study of humans was indicating secret spoor.
Until the war had disrupted communications between them, the humans of their homeworld had set out to subtly and secretly control and influence the humans of the Ka’ashi System. The UNSN, or Yarooensssn, the Sol-humans’ chief space and military force, the simian equivalent of the Patriarch’s Navy (only Chuut-Riit could get away with saying there was a simian equivalent to the Patriarch’s Navy) was not the ultimate human power.
There was something called Arrum, itself apparently the tool of something else that had no name. There was a system known as konspirruussee, which, Chuut-Riit has said, subtly sought to control not only the monkeys, but might in some way come to threaten the Heroic Race itself. Its invisible tentacles reached far. Individuals on Ka’ashi, kzintosh who had had dealings with humans, had already touched the edges of it…
Well, there was meat in all this. It seemed the Ka’ashi humans—the Wunderland humans now—were not the ultimate masters of the situation on this world. The Yarooensssn—it was easier to visualize the symbols UNSN—had some claw upon them. And, it seemed, there might be something else beyond that…
That was, no doubt, what restrained the Jocelyn-human at present and why he and his charges were still alive. The UNSN wanted them.
For what? Slaves? They must know no kzin would live long as a prisoner or live at all as a slave. Interrogation? There were dark stories of monkey tortures and chemicals for any kzin unHeroic enough to be taken alive, but what could sergeants and rankers tell the UNSN that it did not know? Sport in some human Public Hunt?
Most of those here were too shot up to run well, though monkeys might like tormenting cripples (well, monkeys who had refused to run in the Hunt had gained nothing from it).
Hostages? The kzin had occasionally taken human hostages when wishing to compel cooperation or the surrender of ferals but for a Hero, a kit of the Fanged God, the fate of a hostage of his own kind would not deflect his feet from the path of Heroism in dealing with an Enemy. A Hero taken hostage would be expected to die like a Hero…They must not know of Chuut-Riit’s son!
A darker possibility crossed his mind. Earlier in the war a human female had appeared briefly on television screens promising them roomy cages in the Munchen zoo with a diet of carrots and cabbages to pasture on, should they surrender, but this had apparently been a trick to madden senior officers into losing control and had not been seen for some time. He told himself it was not true. Rather, the UNSN and now Jocelyn had been promising honorable treatment. But which was the lie? Do not think of it. That way leads to madness, to clouded thoughts and inappropriate actions. That had been the subject of another lecture from the Great One: “They learnt early to make us lose control of our emotions. They exploited this ability in the earliest space battles for this system, almost instinctively, before they had seen us. It is a variation of the old story of the kz’eerkti teasing Heroes into frenzy in the forests of Homeworld.”
That reminded him of something. He beckoned to the kitten.
“That was a strange thing you did, Vaemar-Riit,” he told it.
“I could think of nothing else, Raargh-Sergeant Hero. The man had to be diverted.”
Kits of this one’s age spent their time chasing their own tails and flutterbys in the meadow grass. “You mean”—he felt stunned for a moment—“that was what you planned?”
“Yes, Raargh-Sergeant Hero. I wished to scream and leap when she drew weapons but I knew I was too little.”
“There was danger. You know she might have shot you where you stood. Or flung the ratchet-knife into you.”
“Yes, Raargh-Sergeant Hero. I knew. But here your life is more important than mine.”
“I see…You do not need your blazon or your ear tattoos, Vaemar-Riit…not for all to see that you are truly Chuut-Riit’s son. And here no life is more important than yours. The kzin of Ka’ashi will have need of you.” He bent and licked the kitten’s head.
Jorg came forward: “Raargh-Sergeant, your pardon, may I speak?”
“Yes. Speak on.”
“They demand my life, don’t they?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps I should go to them. It would save you.”
“You would give your life for us?”
“I think I am a dead man one way or another.”
“You want your head on a pole like those others?”
“When you are dead, it hardly matters where your head is.”
“We think differently. Look at Ptrr-Brunurn. He is honored.”
“If I or my kind deserve any Honor, history may honor us.”
“I do not understand.”
“Passions may cool in a generation or so. They will come to see that we collaborators did what we did partly for them. Yes, for them. Without us to intercede between the mass of humans and the Heroes, things would have been worse for them than they were.
“I do not say this to sound heroi—to sound better than I am. But where would they have been without us to run some sort of government, to arrange some system of food and shelter as poverty and breakdown spread, to police our towns, to keep our farms and mines and factories working as well as we might, yes, to control lawless humans who might have attacked their own kind or brought terrible reprisals for attacking Heroes, to remove litter and maintain orphanages and see the dead were buried, to keep at least a few factories manufacturing the geriatric drugs?”
“Is that why you became chief of the monkey police? To be useful to your own kind?”
“This is no time for lying. I did it partly for those reasons but also to protect myself, my mate, my kits. But I am not innocent. I delivered resistance fighters to the Public Hunt. At first with sickness and shame and loathing and because I told myself I was serving a greater good, later more because it was my job and my nerves were deadened—trained monkey indeed. I and my people ate well when each day more starved. We drafted people to your war factories and shipyards and constructions, yes, and to serve in the Kzin fleets that attacked Earth. Later we helped hunt down Earth and UNSN agents and infiltrators. Some of us did a little sabotage of the administration when it was safe, or turned a blind eye to some resistance, at least before the Telepaths’ checks began. We walked a tightrope. I am no human hero, like the abbot of this monastery. I am neither innocent nor wicked. I am guilty.”
“The abbot? The Head of the Three Monkey-Gods cult? I have played chesss with him”—that human word was easy to pronounce. Indeed it had entered the Heroes’ Tongue. “Why do you say ‘human hero’?”
“He fed and clothed many refugees here. Also, he sheltered human resistance fighters. I half knew. God help me, perhaps I would have handed him over long ago or pointed a Telepath towards him, for he was helping prolong the whole agony, but he was too popular with humans. And too many monks had been too brave. To send him to the Hunt would have meant more feral activity, more sabotage, more throats cut, more hydrofluoric acid thrown over Heroes in city alleyways at night, and more humans killed in reprisals, too, more human land expropriated. My lot was not to steer the ship of human destiny to some fair harbor, just to help keep it more or less afloat.”
“He lied to me, then. I spoke to him at times. I thought he showed his mind to me at chesss, and when we drank bourbon and ice cream together after a long game. Is there no end to monkey trickery?”
“I did not wholly lie to you. Neither, I think, did he. Once when we spoke he—I mean no insult and nor did he—likened you Raargh-Sergeant to a figure in his holy book, a centurion…
“There is much about kzinti I admire—your strength, your honor, your courage. Many humans, even your greatest enemies like Markham, admire you, more perhaps than those who merely tried to endure kzinti rule…As to an end to monkey trickery, I don’t know. You have a low opinion of humans.”
“You are omnivores. You are beneath opinion. We acknowledge some monkeys—like your Ptrr-Brunurn—may be entitled to fighters’ privileges and honors. I suppose you hated us too. Strange, a few weeks ago nothing in the world would have mattered to me less than how a human felt about me.”
“Does it matter now? Yes, very nearly all of us hated you. For a very few lucky privileged ones perhaps admiration overcame hatred.”
“H’rr. So my Honor is bound up with protecting a monkey who hates me? Will you kill me, monkey?”
“Did you not just say it did not matter how we felt? I will not lie to you now. How could we love the kzinti? As for killing you, until lately I was not one to think of such things much, save as a dream sometimes…Still, there were other things which some of us looked to,” said Jorg. “We collaborators took them as signs of justification for our lives, of hope. Future generations might have invoked the wisdom and statesmanship of Jorg von Thoma. I am not a Markham who fights for humanity like a steel blade…Sometimes I have felt that Judas also had a necessary part to play and knew exactly what he was doing and the price that he would have to pay…
“Some of the younger generations of both kinds were cooperating more easily. You know that kzinti and human computer nerds would talk together. Some had begun to meet regularly. Each kind shared insights with the other, even unintentionally, and there was talk of forming something that might have developed into a club. Oh, I know kzinti computer nerds are despised by normal kzin as freaks and geniuses, but it might have been a start.
“And some, a very few, human and kzin poets had talked together, too. There was the story of Gunga Din, a dutiful monkey. I know one kzin poet was moved to describe ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ as pedestrian but showing that s
ome monkeys at least had understandable military common sense and could celebrate a demonstration of it.”
“If it comforts you,” said Raargh-Sergeant, “know we have gradually come to refer to the most useful and obedient of you by your own monkey rank-titles more, and as sziirrirt-Kz’eerkti less…or some like Markham as Ya-nar Kzinti…”
“Sziirrirt-Kz’eerkti…that means ‘trained monkeys,’ doesn’t it? and the other”—he struggled to pronounce it—“the ‘defiers of kzin’?”
“I know some of our kind were interested in humans. But as you say, they tended to be freaks.”
“Perhaps they were freaks your people needed. I mean no disrespect, but was there not a little of that feeling in you personally? No, sheath your claws, Raargh-Sergeant remember, was not the great Chuut-Riit among those who thought humans were worth systematic study?”
“That took mainly the form of dissection of their nervous systems, as far as I know. I do not think that is what you monkeys who looked to ‘cooperation’ had in mind. But there was some monkey history, too. And that brought back memories for me…When I was a kit a house-slave read me a human poem, ‘The Ballad of the White Horse.’ I like bits of that, though I do not know why:
Death blazes bright above the cup,
And high above the Crown
Yet in that Dream of battle
We seem to tread it down…
“There were other lines: ‘are slavery and starvation flowers/that you should pluck them so…’ Yes, it comes back to me:
Short time had shaggy Ogier
to swing his lance in line.
He knew King Alfred’s axe on high,
He heard it singing through the sky,
He cowered beneath it with a cry.
It split him to the spine…”
Jorg nodded as the great felinoid’s voice trailed off: “I know that poem too:
…I know
The spirit with which you blindly band