“I know you do. But they’ll keep in stasis for as long as the war lasts, and on Newduvai—well, Ruth’s people agree with me that there’s been enough killing.” Locklear turned his back on the crypt and Ruth moved to his side, still wary of the huge alien whose speech sounded like the sizzle of fat on a skewer.
“Your ways are strange,” said the kzin, as they walked toward the nearby pinnace. “I know something of Interworld beauty standards. As long as you want that female lieutenant alive, it seems to me you would keep her, um, available.”
“Grace Agostinho’s beauty is all on the outside. And there’s a girl hiding somewhere on Newduvai that those deserters never did catch. In a few years she’ll be—well, you’ll meet her someday.” Locklear put an arm around Ruth’s waist and grinned. “The truth is, Ruth thinks I’m pretty funny-looking, but some things you can learn to overlook.”
At the clearing, Ruth hopped from the pinnace first. “Ruth will fix place nice, like before,” she promised, and walked to the cabin.
“She’s learning Interworld fast,” Locklear said proudly. “Her telepathy helps—in a lot of ways. Scarface, do you realize that her people may be the most tremendous discovery of modern times? And the irony of it! The empathy these people share probably helped isolate them from the modern humans that came from their own gene pool. Yet their kind of empathy might be the only viable future for us.” He sighed and stepped to the turf. “Sometimes I wonder whether I want to be found.”
Standing beside the pinnace, they gazed at the Anthony Wayne. Scarface said, “With that warship, you could do the finding.”
Locklear assessed the longing in the face of the big kzin. “I know how you feel about piloting, Scarface. But you must accept that I can’t let you have any craft more advanced than your scooter back on Kzersatz.”
“But—surely, the pinnace or my own lifeboat?”
“You see that?” Locklear pointed toward the forest.
Scarface looked dutifully away, then back, and when he saw the sidearm pointing at his breast, a look of terrible loss crossed his face. “I see that I will never understand you,” he growled, clasping his hands behind his head. “And I see that you still doubt my honor.” Locklear forced him to lean against the pinnace, arms behind his back, and secured his hands with binder tape. “Sorry, but I have to do this,” he said. “Now get back in the pinnace. I’m taking you to Kzersatz.”
“But I would have—”
“Don’t say it,” Locklear demanded. “Don’t tell me what you want, and don’t remind me of your honor, goddammit! Look here, I know you don’t lie. And what if the next ship here is another kzin ship? You won’t lie to them either, your bloody honor won’t let you. They’ll find you sitting pretty on Kzersatz, right?”
Teetering off-balance as he climbed into the pinnace without using his arms, Scarface still glowered. But after a moment he admitted, “Correct.”
“They won’t court-martial you, Scarface. Because a lying, sneaking monkey pulled a gun on you, tied you up, and sent you back to prison. I’m telling you here and now, I see Kzersatz as a prison and every tabby on this planet will be locked up there for the duration of the war!” With that, Locklear sealed the canopy and made a quick check of the console readouts. He reached across to adjust the inertia-reel harness of his companion, then shrugged into his own. “You have no choice, and no tabby telepath can ever claim you did. Now do you understand?”
The big kzin was looking below as the forest dropped away, but Locklear could see his ears forming the kzin equivalent of a smile. “No wonder you win wars,” said Scarface.
The Children’s Hour
by Jerry Pournelle
& S.M. Stirling
Prologue
The kzin floated motionless in the bubble of space. The yacht Boundless-Ranger was orbiting beyond the circle of Wunderland’s moons, and the planet obscured the disk of Alpha Centauri; Beta was a brighter point of light. All around him the stars shone, glorious and chill, multihued. He was utterly relaxed; the points of his claws showed slightly, and the pink tip of his tongue. Long ago he had mastered the impulse to draw back from vertigo, uncoupling the conscious mind and accepting the endless falling, forever and ever…
A small chiming brought him gradually back to selfhood. “Hrrrr,” he muttered, suddenly conscious of dry throat and nose. The bubble was retracting into the personal spacecraft; he oriented himself and landed lightly as the chamber switched to opaque and Kzin-normal gravity. Twice that of Wunderland, about a fifth more than that of Earth, home of the great enemies.
“Arrrgg.”
The dispenser opened and he took out a flat dish of chilled cream, lapping gratefully. A human observer would have found him very catlike at that moment, like some great orange-red tiger hunched over the beautiful subtle curve of the saucer. A closer examination would have shown endless differences of detail, the full-torso sheathing of flexible ribs, naked pink tail, the eyes round-pupiled and huge and golden. Most important of all, the four-digit hands with a fully opposable thumb, like a black leather glove; that and the long braincase that swept back from the heavy brow-ridges above the blunt muzzle.
Claws scratched at the door; he recognized the mellow but elderly scent.
“Enter,” he said.
The kzin who stepped through was ancient, his face seamed by a ridge of scar that tracked through his right eye and left it milky-white and blind.
“Recline, Conservor-of-the-Patriarchal-Past,” he said. “Will you take refreshment?”
“I touch nose, honored Chuut-Riit,” the familiar gravelly voice said.
The younger kzin fetched a jug of heated milk and bourbon from the dispenser, and a fresh saucer. The two reclined in silence for long minutes. As always, Chuut-Riit felt the slightest prickling of unease, despite their long familiarity. Conservor had served his Sire before him, and helped to tutor the Riit siblings. Yet still there was an unkzin quality to the ancient priest-sage-counselor…a Hero strove all his life to win a full Name, to become a patriarch and sire a heroic Line. Here was one who had attained that and then renounced it of his own will, to follow wisdom purely for the sake of kzinkind. Rare and not quite canny; such a kzintosh was dedicated. The word he thought was from the Old Faith; sacrifices had been dedicated, in the days when kzinti fought with swords of wood and volcanic glass.
“What have you learned?” Conservor said at last.
“Hrrr. That which is difficult to express,” Chuut-Riit muttered.
“Yet you seem calmer.”
“Yes. There was risk in the course of study you set me.” Chuut-Riit’s hardy soul shuddered slightly. The human…fictions, that was the term…had been disturbing. Alien to the point of incomprehensibility at one moment, mind-wrackingly kzinlike the next. “I begin to integrate the insights, though.”
“Excellent. The soul of the true Conquest Hero is strong through flexibility, like the steel of a fine sword—not the rigidity of stone, which shatters beneath stress.”
“Arreowg. Yes. Yet…my mind does not return to all its accustomed patterns.” He brooded, twitching out his batwing ears. “Contemplating the stars, I am oppressed by their magnitude. Is the universe not merely greater than we imagine, but greater than we can imagine? We seek the Infinite Hunt, to shape all that is to the will of kzinkind. Yet is this a delusion imposed by our genes, our nature?” His pelt quivered as skin rippled in a shudder.
“Such thoughts are the food of leadership,” Conservor said. “Only the lowly may keep all sixteen claws dug firmly in the earth. Ever since the outer universe came to Homeworld, such as you have been driven to feed on strange game and follow unknown scents.”
“Hrrrr.” He flicked his tail-tip, bringing the discussion back to more immediate matters. “At least, I think that now my understanding of the humans becomes more intuitive. It would be valuable if others could undertake this course of meditation and knowledge-stalking as well. Traat-Admiral, perhaps?”
Conservor flared his wh
iskers in agreement. “To a limited extent. As much as his spirit—a strong one—can bear. Too long has the expansion of our hunting grounds waited here, unable to encompass Sol, fettering the spirit of kzin. Whatever is necessary must be done.”
“Rrrrr. Agreed. Yet…yet there are times, my teacher, when I think that our conquest of the humans may be as much a lurker-by-water threat as their open resistance.”
Chapter 1
“We want you to kill a kzin,” the general said.
Captain Jonah Matthieson blinked. Is this some sort of flatlander idea of a joke? he thought.
“Well…that’s more or less what I’ve been doing,” the Sol-Belter said, running a hand down the short-cropped black crest that was his concession to military dress codes. He was a tall man even for a Belter, slim, with slanted green eyes.
The general sighed and lit another cheroot. “Display. A-7, schematic,” he said. The rear wall of the office lit with a display of hashmarked columns; Jonah studied it for a moment and decided it represented the duration and intensity of a kzin attack: number of ships, weapons, comparative casualties.
“Time sequence, phased,” the senior officer continued. The computer obliged, superimposing four separate mats.
“That,” he said, “is the record of the four fleets the kzin have sent since they took Wunderland and the Alpha Centauri system, forty-two years ago. Notice anything?”
Jonah shrugged: “We’re losing.” The war with the felinoid aliens had been going on since before his birth, since humanity’s first contact with them, sixty years before. Interstellar warfare at sublight speeds was a game for the patient.
“Fucking brilliant, Captain!” General Early was a short man, even for a Terran: black, balding, carrying a weight of muscle that was almost obscene to someone raised in low gravity; he looked to be in early middle age, which, depending on how much he cared about appearances, might mean anything up to a century and a half these days. With a visible effort, he controlled himself.
“Yeah, we’re losing. Their fleets have been getting bigger and their weapons are getting better. We’ve made some improvements too, but not as fast as they have.”
Jonah nodded. There wasn’t any need to say anything.
“What do you think I did before the war?” the general demanded.
“I have no idea, sir.”
“Sure you do. ARM bureaucrat, like all the other generals,” Early said. The ARM was the UN’s enforcement arm, and supervised—mainly suppressed, before the kzin had arrived—technology of all types. “Well, I was. But I also taught military history in the ARM academy. Damn near the only Terran left who paid any attention to the subject.”
“Oh.”
“Right. We weren’t ready for wars, any of us. Terrans didn’t believe in them. Belters didn’t either; too damned independent. Well, the goddam pussies do.”
“Yes sir.” Goddam, he thought. This joker is older than I thought. It had been a long time since many in the Sol system took a deity’s name in vain.
“Right. Everyone knows that. Now think about it. We’re facing a race of carnivores with a unified interstellar government of completely unknown size, organized for war. They started ahead of us, and now they’ve had Wunderland and its belt for better than a generation. If nothing else, at this rate they can eventually swamp us with numbers. Just one set of multimegatonners getting through to Earth…”
He puffed on the cigar with short, vicious breaths. Jonah shivered inside himself at the thought: all those people, dependent on a single life-support system…He wondered how flatlanders had ever stood it. Why, a single asteroid impact…The Belt was less vulnerable. Too much delta vee required to match the wildly varying vectors of its scores of thousands of rocks, its targets weaker individually but vastly more numerous and scattered.
He forced his mind back to the man before him, gagging slightly on the smell of the tobacco. How does he get away with that on shipboard? For that matter, the habit had almost died out; it must have been revived since the pussies came, like so many archaic customs.
Like war and armies, the Belter thought sardonically. The branch-of-service flashes on the shoulder of the flatlander’s coverall were not ones he recognized. Of course, there were 18 billion people in the solar system, and most of them seemed to be wearing some sort of uniform these days; flatlanders particularly, they loved playing dress-up. Comes of having nothing useful to do most of their lives, he thought. Except wear uniforms and collect knickknacks. There was a truly odd one on the flatlander’s desk, a weird-looking pyramid with an eye in it, topped by a tiny cross.
“So every time it gets harder. First time was bad enough, but they really underestimated us. Did the next time, too, but not so badly. They’re getting better all the time. This last one—that was bad.” General Early pointedly eyed the ribbons on Jonah’s chest. Two Comets, and the unit citation his squadron of Darts had earned when they destroyed a kzin fighter-base ship.
“As you know. You saw some of that. What you didn’t see was the big picture—because we censored it, even from our military units. Captain, they nearly broke us. Because we underestimated them. This time they didn’t just ‘shriek and leap.’ They came in tricky, fooled us completely when they looked like retreating…and we know why.”
He spoke to the computer again, and the rear wall turned to holo image. A woman in lieutenant’s stripes, but with the same branch-badges as the general. Tall and slender, paler-skinned than most, and muscular in the fashion of low-gravity types who exercise. When she spoke it was in Belter dialect.
“The subject’s name was Esteban Cheung Jagrannath,” the woman said. The screen split, and a battered-looking individual appeared beside her; Jonah’s eye picked out the glisten of sealant over artificial skin, the dying-rummy pattern of burst blood vessels from explosive decompression, the mangy look of someone given accelerated marrow treatments for radiation overdose. That is one sorry-looking son of a bitch. “He claims to have been born in Tiamat, in the Serpent Swarm of Wunderland, twenty-five subjective years ago.”
Now I recognize the accent, Jonah thought. The lieutenant’s English had a guttural overtone despite the crisp Belter vowels; the Belters who migrated to the asteroids of Alpha Centauri talked that way. Wunderlander influence.
“Subject is a power-systems specialist, drafted into the kzin service as a crewman on a corvette tender”—the blue eyes looked down to a readout below the pickup’s line of sight “—called—” Something followed in the snarling hiss-spit of the Hero’s Tongue.
“Roughly translated, the Bounteous-Mother’s-Teats. Tits took a near-miss from a radiation-pulse bomb right toward the end. The kzin captain didn’t have time to self-destruct; the bridge took most of the blast. She was a big mother”—the general blinked, snorted—“so a few of the repair crew survived, like this gonzo. All humans, as were most of the technical staff. A few nonhuman, nonkzin species as well, but they were all killed. Pity.”
Jonah and the flatlander both nodded in unconscious union. The kzin empire was big, hostile, not interested in negotiation, and contained many subject species and planets; and that was about the limit of human knowledge. Not much background information had been included in the computers of the previous fleets, and very little of that survived; vessels too badly damaged for their crews to self-destruct before capture usually held little beyond wreckage.
The general spoke again: “Gracie, fast forward to the main point.” The holo-recording blurred ahead. “Captain, you can review at your leisure. It’s all important background, but for now—” He signed, and the recording returned to normal speed.
“…the new kzin commander arrived three years before they left. His name’s Chuut-Riit, which indicates a close relation to the…Patriarch, that’s as close as we’ve been able to get. Apparently, his first command was to delay the departure of the fleet.” A thin smile. “Chuut-Riit’s not just related to their panjandrum; he’s an author, of sorts. Two works on strategy: Logistical
Preparation as the Key to Victory in War and Conquest Through the Defensive Offensive.”
Jonah shaped a soundless whistle. Not your typical kzin. If we have any idea of what a typical kzin is like. We’ve met their warriors, coming our way behind beams and bombs.
The lieutenant’s image was agreeing with him. “The pussies find him a little eccentric, as well; according to the subject, gossip had it that he fought a whole series of duels, starting almost the moment he arrived and held a staff conference. The new directives included a pretty massive increase in the support infrastructure to go with the fleet. Meanwhile, he ordered a complete changeover in tactics, especially to ensure that accurate reports of the fighting got back to Wunderland.”
The flatlander general cut off the scene with a wave. “So.” He folded his hands and leaned forward, the yellowish whites of his eyes glittering in lights that must be kept deliberately low. “We are in trouble, Captain. So far we’ve beaten off the pussies because we’re a lot closer to our main sources of supply, and because they’re…predictable. Adequate tacticians, but with little strategic sense, even less than we had at first, despite the Long Peace. The analysts say that indicates they’ve never come across much in the way of significant opposition before. If they had they’d have learned from it like they are—damn it!—from us.
“In fact, what little intelligence information we’ve got, a lot of it from prisoners taken with the Fourth Fleet, backs that up; the kzin just don’t have much experience of war.”
Jonah blinked. “Not what you’d assume,” he said carefully.
A choppy nod. “Yep. Surprises you, eh? Me, too.”
General Early puffed delicately on his cigar. “Oh, they’re aggressive enough. Almost insanely so, barely gregarious enough to maintain a civilization. Ritualized conflict to the death is a central institution of theirs. Some of the xenologists swear they must have gotten their technology from somebody else, that this culture they’ve got could barely rise above the hunter-gatherer stage on its own.