The Man-Kzin Wars 06

Chapter 14

(2437 A.D.)

The kzin, bare in his yellow-orange fur, was escorted by armed guards into the chambers of Si-Kish, who was admiring his raiment in a gold-tinted minor, his tail motionless. The nameless prisoner noticed the lean tail. Ornamented-with a miniature silver mace. That son-of-a-vegetable can probably use it, too. With lashing swiftness. He glanced at the furniture of this splendarium, lit by diffuse skylight. All of it looked too fragile to make a good band weapon and too far away to grab.

The guards left. That meant that Si-Kish held the naked kzin’s fighting ability in contempt. Not a wise decision- but no W’kkaikzin could imagine physical power without its trappings. They needed some sobering time on the frontier where kzin lives were cavalierly squandered on the most trivial points of honor-and prisoners never behaved with humility. Nevertheless the nameless one waited for his new name which would contain his fate. If it was something like “Walking-Dead” he was doomed. He hoped it wouldn’t be as awful as “Grass-Eater.”

“I am not as angry with you as some of our lesser nobles.”

He’s keeping me suspended.

Si-Kish was arranging his collar lace, not yet deeming to notice the nameless one. “You have been useful to W’kkai. In fact, I admire your loyalty to the present Patriarch, whose slothful ways have brought us so much failure.

You honor our heroic traditions. I will not insult your honor by suggesting that your loyalty is misplaced. In my view it is the Patriarchy which must survive-not the Patriarch. When the son sees himself as a more able warrior than the father it is his duty to challenge his sire. This principle is the foundation of the continual renewal of the Patriarchy”

Si-Kish turned and the naked kzin knew that he was about to receive his new name-and fate. “We may need you again, Conundrum-Prisoner. My physicists have not yet wholly mastered their hunt through hyperspace. They say they no longer need you-but I don’t believe them. If we have more questions, you may volunteer your answers. If volunteering doesn’t appeal to you, telepathy might. Perhaps even the hot needle of inquiry.”

“Thank you for the name,” said Conundrum-Prisoner. His sarcasm was muted by the requirements of the Dominated Tense. So… they were delivering him to the Conundrum Priests for safekeeping.

Nobody had ever told Monkeyshine that as the eldest male he was bound by a special responsibility to his kin. It seemed like it was something he had always known from the time back on Hssin when he had saved mother and siblings by understanding a faulty atmosphere-lock mechanism that was baffling his frantic mother while their lives lay in forfeit to noxious gases-kzin master and Jotoki mechanics being absent at the time.

Mellow Yellow was often gone on trips, but why was there a new master? W’kkai was shock after shock. Get used to it, learn the new ways, feel safe-and then boom, a new shock. It had seemed so easy when he was young and there were so few of them living in their little world and skittering from bubble to bubble, from ship to shored-up ruin. Then the worst omen of doom had been a grumble in the air machine.

W’kkai was so vast! Space was so tiny! He still relished his memory of the day he had discovered that the sky wasn’t a roof. He had had to lie down on the ground and pile bricks on his stomach as high as he could to understand that it was just the weight of the air that kept the air in! Weird. But vastness meant that too much was happening.

He was always toilet training a baby or rescuing a young brother from a ditch or stealing fruit for his mother. Sometimes he was too interested in fun and forgot about his duties. Furlessface got her head stuck between boards and had been crying for half a workshift before he found her. She was so dumb! He felt guilty but a man had to have fun sometimes. There was too much work to do. It wasn’t easy being a slave. He wanted real clothes like a W’kkaikzin!

Kzinti constantly grumbled about the laziness of their slaves. Slaves were too indolent to survive by themselves. They had to be “induced” to work for their survival by a watchful eye. It was true. Monkeyshine avoided work with careful cunning which mostly meant when he was beyond observation. On W’kkai he had to learn new ways of avoiding work, mainly because there were so many more kzin overseers, none of them as easygoing as his mother’s Mellow Yellow.

It was a game. If he got caught, he worked very very hard. If no one was looking he didn’t work at all. He liked the long W’kkai nights. They were cool and no one could see him. Oh joy! The stars peeked out to announce the night before the clouds came. He liked the night insects because they were big and some had glowy segments on their bellies!

For now, two things made work-avoidance tolerably easy. The kzin were used to servants like the Jotoki for which they had hundreds of generations of training experience. Mellow Yellow had been a trainer of slaves, specializing in the Jotoki, and knew of dozens of machines and thousands of virtual-world training modes that would shape a Jotok to almost any skill. But for monkeys there were no training artifacts. And the kzinti weren’t patient with eyeball-to-eyeball training. When a kzin caught him idle, he respectfully asked for immediate training, and that was usually that.

He had painfully figured it out for himself during his sly wanderings about the estate. He couldn’t explain these ideas to his brothers. The slave language he knew was too simple to express such complicated ruminations. He understood what he was thinking but there was no way to share these thoughts by the method of saying. His was a special duty because if he failed, then doom would befall his monkey family. Fun got in the way of his serious thinking, but he could always make it up while he worked.

The best job was currying kzinretti. Sthondat thigh-bones, were they dumb!

Instinctively, he never broached his tortuous questions to any kzin, not even lord Grraf Nig-who was his teacher, his master and defender, his peculiar friend who had tussled and played with him since he was an infant. He dared to call his kzin lord “Mellow Yellow,” a bite’s distance from those carnivorous, flesh-odored teeth, but nothing in kzindom would have induced Monkeyshine to tease that mighty machine of flesh with images of monkeys who lolled about on kzin-hide rugs and fanned themselves with kzin ears. Such amusing thoughts had to be locked in absolute privacy.

In the course of his serving duties, he had overheard kzintosh boasting about the deeds of conquering Heroes, but the slave races appeared in the stories only as stilted background to the glory of kzin victories. Only the kzin had a history.

Monkeyshine would never have thought to share his curiosity with his mother though he chatted with her in monologue mode often. She, being female, did not have the wits to tell him of her origins. His father, who could, he supposed was dead. He assumed that monkeys, unlike Jotoki, did have fathers because Mellow Yellow addressed him and his brothers in the male tense and referred to his mother and her daughters in the same female tense with which he spoke of his kzinretti wives.

Of course, he wasn’t older than his befuddled sister, who was just as tall as he was, but she didn’t count as a partner in responsibility because she couldn’t think, could hardly make herself understood in the limited hisses and purrs of her tiny vocabulary He had to protect her all the time; it was annoying. His brothers were of little help- after all, they were only babies and they had to contend with their twin sisters who were really stupid brats.

He adored his mother. She wasn’t very bright either, and he had to protect her, too, as well as all of his siblings. But she was bigger than he was and quicker and it made Monkeyshine grin when she caught him being foolish. With the grip of her powerful hand she could restrain his greatest enthusiasm. She always grinned back at him- but would never let go until he started to think about the careless thing he was doing.

That was his greatest puzzle: she was so dumb, how did she always know when he was being dangerously stupid? Such a mystery impressed him. He could be ferociously fond of his mother, especially when he was assisting her during her frequent child bearing, and had to chase away her five-legged Jotoki midwives. What did they know about childbearing? They crawled out of ponds, whatever a pond was.

He didn’t know whether he was grown-up or not. He felt big and it seemed like he knew everything but he kept growing. A kzin male was about twice as large as a kzinrett. If he was going to grow up twice as large as his mother he had a long way to go. He wasn’t even as big as she was yet. When he got bigger, the work would be easier.

Things began to get stranger. He was currying a kzinrett one morning and her fur was standing on end in anger. She snarled at him and he was afraid of her but she seemed to like his attentions. There were hissing matches in the harem. It got worse every day until the harem was in an uproar. All the alliances between the kzinretti were changing. He found one of them digging a den in the hillside.

Monkeyshine was proud of the way begot along with Mellow Yellow’s females. He could understand their gestures and their moods, when they wanted to be groomed, when they wanted to play, and when they wanted to be left alone. He knew what gifts to bring them-pretty stones and colored leaves-and he could understand their talk-talk and even chatter with them while he played. So he took the trouble to find out what was wrong.

Their new master smelled peculiar and they were afraid he was going to eat their kits. What had happened to Mellow Yellow? Why was the new master beginning to reorganize the slave quarters?

It was just curiosity and caution that was driving him toward answers-until Long-Reach returned from somewhere in an almost catatonic state, only one of his arms articulate. Then the boy’s curiosity became an intense case of anxiety. His Jotoki friends abandoned him to babble hysterically in their tree huts. Only Joker crawled down to comfort Monkeyshine and all he would say was that something terrible had happened to Mellow Yellow. He couldn’t say more; he didn’t have a calm arm.

For the next thirty hours Monkeyshine did not let his family out of sight. He watched his mother and made all sorts of excuses to help her while she worked. He herded his sisters. He kept his brothers out of trouble and as much out of sight of any kzin as possible.

Nightfall on W’kkai is a slow dimming and it takes forever for the darkness to overlay the land, but at first-darkness a Jotoki delegation called Monkeyshine into the tree huts for a council. He had never before been treated with such respect Monkeyshines a child at that unique stage in human development where he was observant enough to notice the richness of his universe yet wise enough to understand that he knew nothing.

To him the Jotoki were the fonts of all wisdom. Mellow Yellow was too busy to answer his questions, though Monkeyshine knew how to bring out the father in him for a sparring match, a thing he wouldn’t have dared do with any other lain. Mellow Yellow’s kzin retainers thought only of work and not why “washers” were round. The Jotoki, on the other hand, knew everything about how machines worked and were only too willing to take them apart to show you why a washer had to be round. They could make a ship fly between the stars-and that awed Monkeyshine. He had only two arms and it made him feel like an inferior slave.

In the trees, the Jotoki crowd were very serious about their council. Nervously munching leaves that one arm stuffed into his underside mouth, and talking through the lungs of his others arms, Long-Reach told him that Mellow Yellow was in confinement. “We have a new master who owns all.”

The other Jotoki keened their distress and the five shoulder eyes of each one of them stared at Monkeyshine. He looked at the eyes glinting in the night lights and uneasily glanced back at Long-Reach-and then at his toes, He knew they wanted something. “Why is he confined?”

“He is a warrior.”

That, of course, was supposed to explain everything. Fighting was warriors’ work and some fights were lost and others won. Monkeyshine was not satisfied with the explanation. Warring led to honorable death, not to confinement. “Warriors die!” he said disdainfully.

“No.” Long-Reach was collectively sad. “Sometimes warriors are confined after a loss. Mellow Yellow has been confined before. Then it is the duty of another warrior to free him.”

“A warrior must free him,” said one of Creeps arms. ‘We insist,” reiterated Creepy’s thinnest arm.

Monkeyshine was aware that his friends were setting him up. There had a message for him to deliver to some great warrior kzin. “I’ll get lost,” he replied defensively. “I’ve hardly been off the estate.”

“A great warrior freed him during the Battle of Wunderland,” intoned Long-Reach, his five voices resonating together.

“Will his friend help him now?” Monkeyshine asked slyly, hoping to stay out of the discussion.

“No. But it is the duty of the son of a crippled warrior to carryon his father’s purpose.”

Monkeyshine giggled. Slaves would be beaten even for talking like that. “Is this Hero son aware of his father’s noble cause?” if such a warrior was just a few hours away, he might be able to sneak a message through at night to tell him of Grraf-Nig’s dire need. Monkeyshine was scared already just thinking about it even if he was good at sneaking. And then he thought of his dim-witted mother. What would they all do without Mellow Yellow? The situation was desperate. “I’m only a little boy!” He was crying.

“You are the son of a warrior!” Long-Reach insisted sonorously in a collective voice that was followed by a squeaking from the most sympathetic of Long-Reach’s arms in defiance of the other four. “Leave him alone! He’s not a warrior yet.”

“I’m not Mellow Yellow’s son!” lamented Monkeyshine, only now wakening to the purpose of this cabal. “I only spar with him! It’s pretend!”

“You come of a warrior race,” said Long-Reach gently. Were they hinting about his unknown father? “Was my father a warrior?” The mere thought terrified him.

“We know nothing of your father. Your mother was a great warrior.

Monkeyshine rebelled. That again. They had hinted at such foolishness before, in their multiple babblings. He’s angry “My mother is my foolish mother!” he shouted.

“Your mother killed thirteen kzin warriors,” came a slow melodious reply.

The other Jotoki had folded up their stalklike limbs to protect their heads and were sitting defensively on their undermouths, arm-lungs fixed in the mode that allowed soft breathing but silenced the voice. The remembrance of the horrible crime gripped the council and only one tiny voice had the courage to justify it “She was saving Mellow Yellow… from confinement,” it piped.

Monkeyshine was just as frightened by the tale as his hosts.

They told the story in bits and pieces, sharing the details to share the guilt, exaggerating to impress the boy. The account wasn’t always coherent for it was told in a slave language poorly designed to discuss revolt and war strategy. They had to make up words and string words together and build explanations around their compound words to define them. They had to make analogies to machines and slave work. They had to tell this to an eight-year-old-boy who had only half the language abilities of a human adult. Totally unaware of the human developmental cycle, they thought of Monkeyshine as the full intellectual equal of the Lieutenant Nora Argamentine they had once known.

They had once convinced the kzinti war captive to lead a rebellion against the crew of the Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch to save their master, and they were fully convinced that they could do the same now. Guilt and horror had long suppressed their memories of the mutiny. Now it was necessary to save their master again and they argued and squabbled back and forth, arm to arm, Jotok to Jotok, to revive the details so that Monkeyshine might profit from them. Nora’s warrior deeds seemed clear to them-but they argued long and hotly about how she had planned her campaign. Military strategy was still a mystery to them. What they couldn’t understand they expected Monkeyshine to understand for them because he was of a warrior race.

When Monkeyshine, in an effort to understand, pointed out his mother’s obvious mental failings, they spoke evasively of “wounds” or “injuries.” None of them dared tell Monkeyshine of their part in betraying her. After she had masterminded the destruction of the crew of the Bitch they had been afraid that she would also destroy their beloved master, too. Nor did they dare tell Monkeyshine of their collaboration while Mellow Yellow delicately destroyed Nora’s memories and her ability to manipulate language. To make her safe. To make her over into something he could understand.

The household learned that the name Grraf-Nig was never to be mentioned again. They learned from their authoritarian new master that their old master was being sent to the Conundrum Priests of the Rivals Range. They were told that they would have to work harder. A new factory to assemble delicate naval components was to be built on the estate.

I’m a slave; I’m a slave; I’m a slave, Monkeyshine kept telling himself. He treated his mother with a new respect when he came to curry her with his kzinretti brush. Grinning while he combed the knots out of her long auburn mane, he imagined that her kzin opponents had died of surprise when she growled. He curried her fur vigorously, the way she liked, never even wondering why female monkeys had fur and males didn’t that’s the way it had always been. He buried his head in her hair, afraid, hugging her.

He was not used to thinking of himself as a warrior. It was safer to be a slave. He’d have to be angry when he grinned. What would he do for claws? His teeth weren’t sharp. Something stubborn in him was resisting his Jotoki comrades. They were ready to rescue Mellow Yellow tomorrow. He wasn’t. He knew the difference between being and pretending. Being something could get you killed. Pretending let you repeat yourself. For now he was only willing to pretend to rescue Mellow Yellow.

Eight+One acolytes guided the naked kzin at pike point, pleased to have duty away from their studies. He would remain naked no matter how cold it got. They wore weavings of yellow and gold done in maze design. The claspings were a ring-puzzle and let the Fanged God help the acolyte who forgot the untwining sequence. Their tall headdresses of multiple heads made them bob and loom like the giants of mythology.

The tidal action of W’kkaisun kept the crust of W’kkai active even though that leisurely planet had a week-long day. There were plenty of mountains and upwelled plateaus. It was middle morning in the Rival’s Range but the evening’s snow still lay on the northern slopes. The steps to the Heart of Paradox were brilliant in the sunlight and wet with melting snow. Where was the entrance to this Temple carved high along the cliff? Even that was an enigma.

Conundrum-Prisoner could not see the roof of the Temple but it was the floor of the plateau. Conundrum Priests had carved there in the stone for millennia, building themselves a maze of prisons so wonderful that no warden ever needed keys. The balanced stones just closed around their victims. A finger’s push along the magic vectors would open the prison again, perhaps-or cause a rumbling that would close the cell down to the size of a coffin.

In the Temple they were led by a gray-furred warden, stooped, with a scar across his face that had removed half his nose. It wasn’t a corridor of cells they followed, it was a terrifying forest of stones and pillars and blocks and paving that had all the solidity of a master juggler’s climactic act at the Patriarch’s Palace. One looked around in desperation for the hand that was rushing around keeping it all from collapsing, but there was no such hand-only the occasional soft paving or pillar that swayed or monolith that swung down to block their way while it opened another. The Priests said it was earthquake proof.

Conundrum-Prisoner did not recognize his cell when they came upon it. It was like a field of cut stone, or some bizarre world from the eye of an electron microscope. It had been opened for him the day before. The acolytes gathered up the bones of the previous occupant. The warden pulled a hood over his head and wove it shut. All the prisoner heard was the slight whisperings and low rumble as the walls shifted and the plugs fell into place.

He tore at the hood with his claws, uselessly. Then he began to work at the lacings. Was this another kind of puzzle? Finally he smelled the slight odor of oxidation. The hood gradually disintegrated in strength until he could tear it off, and finally it turned to ash. The cell was ample, though of no sane geometric shape. There were openings, some of them large enough for a kzin to crawl into. Death traps. He could control light or darkness. He could control smell. He had a tap for liquid food. And he had a hose to wash away his excrement.

He thought of the cages in which he had kept the experimental monkeys procured from Wunderland for his studies of the man-beast’s nervous system.

He felt rage.

But the Conundrum Priests weren’t impressed by rage. Every item and action of their philosophy was designed to control rage. No amount of rage against these walls would move them by a claw’s breadth. Only reason would open them. The panicked reason of “try everything” wouldn’t work, either. There would be Sixty-four?One ways of moving those stones-and Sixty-four of them would collapse his cell to the volume of a coffin, and he’d die in some distorted pretzel shape.

He remembered a time of boredom when he had been stationed at Centauri’s Aarku base; he had found himself a W’kkai Conundrum Puzzle and stayed awake three clays and nights trying to solve it. It had driven him mad!

Now he was trapped in the puzzle. Controlling his rage was going to drive him mad. Restraining his reason was going to drive him mad. No matter how good his hypothesis about the geometry of his cell, he couldn’t test it with shove and push until all of the consequences had been reasoned out in his head. Madness, every alternative was madness! And there wasn’t even any grass to eat!

Conundrum-Prisoner was his name.