The Man-Kzin Wars 06

Chapter 23

(2438 A.D.)

One morning Tam Claukski eased himself into Yankee’s office, warily stepping around a wobbly pile of books, Adam’s apple bobbing. He had big plans. Before he had even found secure footing, he was proposing a gigantic simulation of a future Second Man-Kzin War that he had just thought up.

It was Tam’s immoderate imagination which had induced Yankee to steal him from Admiral Blumenhandler. Like most enthusiastic young men this prodigy was totally unaware of the size and scope of the tasks he took upon himself. Yankee liked to describe such gargantuan efforts in terms of “gallons,” an ancient flatlander measure of the amount of midnight oil that had to be burned in a whale oil lamp to get the job done. The major kept a straight face. “Well, don’t just stand there pontificating, sit down!”

“Where?”

Yankee motioned for Tam to move the VR helmet onto the pile of books. Then he took assorted reports off the controller for the wall screen so that Tam would have a way to showoff. “Fire away. You have five minutes.”

In response, Tam moved the helmet to its pedestal, balanced it, and recklessly rolled his chair up to the controller, smiling the whole while. What appeared on the screen was “several gallons” worth of an incomprehensible organization chart. Tam was rapturous. “I got hit by this bolt of lightning. For a tactician like me, Grand Strategy is a bit awesome.”

“I suppose one cure for awe is to grab a million volt line.”

“This is the first time I’ve ever been able to get a handle on the whole bag.” He raised his arms in supplication to the wall. “What do you think of that?”

“I don’t understand a line of it,” complained Yankee. “It looks like the command structure of a military org. That’s not the way ARM is organized.”

“But the ARM is peacekeeping,” admonished Tam. “We’re talking about a real war, here.”

“You realize, of course, that we’ll be well into a third war by the time you get the ARM to consider the idea that it might be a good idea to set up a study commission to plan an approach to reorganizing for the second war.”

Tam looked at his diagram in consternation. “You’re misunderstanding me, sir! That’s not a military reorganization chart. I’ve just arranged my ideas into manageable lumps. Strategy is complicated. It takes a lot of praying to Murphy. I just want to know if I’ve left anything out before Murphy clobbers me for my neglect”

“Leave it on the wall and I’ll stare at it for a while.” Yankee stared at the wall. “I hope you’re not in a hurry!”

“No, sir. You’ll have a couple of days with my masterpiece. Tonight I have to make up a strategy chart for the kzinti High Command. That’s going to be hard because they are used to making their major decisions at the local level. And we don’t have enough information on the Far Side.” He meant the worlds at the far side of the Patriarchy.

“So, you’re appointing kzinti admirals too, eh?”

“With your permission, sir.”

“That’s quite all right with me. Make sure we have a worthy Patriarch to oppose us-and put the VR helmet back on the chair when you leave.”

From time to time during the day, Yankee called up various different flies that were attached to the wall screen’s boxes. He couldn’t get the idea out of his head that these were all job descriptions. Poor Tam thought like a Von Neumann machine; he was going to linearize the graph, and then continually cycle through it, doing everything himself, Finagle help the boy.

Chloe called in to chat-a pleasant interlude. Her gossip about the Brozik industrial family primed him to turn from his routine screenwork to read up on the current economic outlook of We Made It Military budgets were tight. He had been trying to determine for a long time how much strain the crashlander civilian economy could take doing military research under the table.

The Broziks seemed to be putting all their efforts into a set of basic spaceship shells that could be finished either for civilian use or as warcraft. That meant that, in case of war, the naval assembly lines would already be in place- though Yankee wasn’t sure how much good that would do; Procyon was sitting up there with its head in the Patriarch’s jaws. Chloe’s news, direct from her father, was that Barnard’s Starbase was receiving, for test and finishing, one of the Brozik shells equipped with a Wunderland salvaged kzinti gravitic drive, courtesy of Admiral Blumenhandler. Gossip through hyperspace was faster than the military command line.

He called up his naval architect specialist to meet him for a coffee and salad. If Stefan Brozik wasn’t continually getting the right military feedback, his project could be a disaster. It was going to be damn good to get their hands on one of his shells. They could give it a workout, shake down the problems.

When he returned from the snack he rearranged some of the book piles on his floor so that he would have pacing space. The chart on the wall kept staring at him. He sighed at its supreme logic, if only he belonged to such a rationally structured org, he could get something done. It seemed like everything that had to be done was being done out of channels if it got done at all.

General Fry was a master at that. He didn’t even have a command at Starbase but he was essentially acting as its staffing officer from distant Gibraltar-quietly pulling out the men from Barnard who weren’t wanted here, or didn’t jibe with Starbase’s aggressive philosophy, and as quietly arranging for the inflow of people who were inclined to take the Patriarchy as a real threat. Yankee had learned a few tricks from his mentor. He was already making tough hardware decisions-and hardware wasn’t even part of his training duties. And there was Tam who didn’t even know that he was doing the work of a chief of staff’s adjutant.

The strain of thinking was sometimes physically exhausting. Yankee stopped pacing. He flopped into his chair, confronting Tam’s electronic glyphs. Unbelievable, the number of things that had to be done just to position mankind against a new assault. In a dream world he would have real power to assign names to the boxes on the wall! They were job descriptions and jobs had to be carried out by men, didn’t they?

The dream took on a life of its own. Reverie transported his spirit to Sol, where, in a fanciful office as the biggest black gorilla at ARM, he made endless profound decisions. He put Blumenhandler in charge of patrols. Jay Mazzetta became his top trouble-shooter. Fry was, of course, chief of staff. It was a pleasant power fantasy Names for his mythical duty roster came like the flow of a bursting dam.

The shock of that brought him back to Starbase. The dream had been an astonishing exercise of his imagination. He hadn’t realized just how many competent people he knew. When had that happened? That old bastard Fry had been doing things to him.

He peered into his past. One must look back to have the wisdom to look forward. What had Fry seen in him, a misfit who was challenging every petty mind with words, even fists? What exactly had Fry done to transform him into a man who felt comfortable with the people who did the real work of the world? It was a bit of a puzzle.

A liberating idea was forming in Yankee’s head as he continued to stare at Tam’s chart. Why not set up a General Staff-In-Exile and really get ready for the Patriarch’s next move. What had the sergeant said to the soldier who found himself recruited into an incompetent army? “Complaining will only kill you-fast; start recruiting your own good men!”

Chloe was now very pregnant. One of her more devious schemes involved deceiving her obstetrician. She planned it very carefully without Nora’s help. Nora wasn’t very good with lists and lying. She thought of the idea when Nora started to plan for the birth in her own way- everything they’d need, water for washing the baby, swaddling clothes, makeshift tools to cut and tie the cord.

“How does she know these things?” Chloe asked in bed with Yankee that night “I can’t believe it. Look. What do you think this is?”

“It looks like a piece of wood.” He pinched it. “Hardwood.”

“It’s for me to bite on when I’m in labor! She made me test it.”

“What’s so surprising about that?”

“She doesn’t remember anything about Earth!”

“Her kzin taught her.”

“Those male-centered strutters! What would they know about women?”

“He was a professional slave trainer, remember. In her dairy Nora thought he wanted to set up a business breeding human slaves. He taught her everything she’d need to know to teach her daughters how to bear healthy babies.”

“You’re joking! A kzin?”

“Who do you think was Nora’s midwife? According to our xenologists, kzinti males are wiser about birthing than human males. Their females bear and nourish, even protect. The males have to handle the emergencies and the cultural transmission. Fathering one’s male kits is a very serious business.”

“They are warriors who go off to war and abandon their young!”

“Chloe. You were pregnant. I abandoned you to go off on a wild military cloak-and-dagger adventure to W’kkai that some young firebrand could have done just as well. If the kzin had killed me, you would have born our child and probably done a very good job of raising the tyke, teaching, nourishing. That’s human society. Men have abandoned women all through history-and the women have raised their children. Why do you think, willy-nilly, that kzin society works the same?”

“They’re warriors! They run off to battle the minute they hear a shot fired!”

“You’re anthropomorphizing.”

“What?”

“Seeing man in kzin. Think about this. In a kzin warship there is no age barrier to service. If a kzin cannot find a baby-sitter for his sons, or a creche, or a brother to take care of them, he takes them to battle with him. They fight-just like the four-year-old son of one of your farmer ancestors milked the cows.”

“Child labor on a warship? That’s horrible!”

“Think about this. Suppose a kzin leaves or sells a wife. Suppose she runs away. Suppose a mightier kzin is attracted to her and takes her by force. Who gets the kits? Always, always, always the father. Suppose he is killed or goes to prison or abandons his kits. The male who takes over the family of a kzinrett who is left with young kits kills her male offspring. That is hell on the patriarchal line of any kzin who doesn’t have very strong fathering genes. Now a monkey like me, I can sow my wild oats, abandon my woman and know that some other man will bring up my kid, or she will.”

Chloe switched on the night light. She rose in the bed like a Valkyrie who had chosen a warrior about to die. “You wouldn’t do that to me!”

“I already have. I have a boy on Earth, about your age. He was raised by another man-successfully, so far as I know”

She was shocked, “You never told me.”

He smiled wanly. “You never told me about the first boy you seduced when you were thirteen.”

“You ratcat!” She smashed a pillow down on his face.

“Mumflpuf,” he said.

She lifted the pillow off because she wanted to hear the rest of the story ‘Well?” she said.

“It’s a long story I’ll tell you someday. It was war. The kzinti were at our gates. Who knew? The next fleet might be the end of the human race. The hyperdrive was new I had a chance at a deep space attack, maybe farther than any man had ever gone. It seemed like the thing to do.”

“You just abandoned him?”

“Chloe, I never got back to Earth. The mail to 59 Virginis is very slow.”

When the first of the labor pangs came to Chloe, she sneaked up to Nora’s apartment. She was worried about the one-way mirrors so she began to pile couches and different pieces of furniture into a cave with a crooked entrance, Nora helped. (She thought she knew what was going on. At Mellow Yellow’s estate on W’kkai she had seen some of his kzinretti go into a nesting frenzy) Chloe had no intention of depending upon Nora. Nora might be a mother. She might have been trained by a kzin midwife-shudder-but Chloe had read books. She had her infocomp loaded with obstetric advice, with its comm ready to call out. In case. And she had a flashlight.

She crawled into her cave and began to deliver the baby. It was a strange sort of bonding gift that she wanted to give to Nora. Besides, she was curious about what it had been like to give birth in a kzinrett nest deep in the plundered city of Hssin, poisonous gases swirling outside, protected only by makeshift seals and a refurbished life-support machine, with no human company for light-years. It took hours. After nearly biting through her hardwood chip, she was beginning to decide that she was crazy.

The baby came out with a plop, and Nora knew what to do faster than Chloe could remember what she had read. The baby cried to fill its lungs. Nora tied off the umbilical cord while Chloe was looking up the right picture in her infocomp. They washed her tiny body in temperate water. And there she lay cuddled in swaddling clothes, a sleepy, exhausted baby girl. They watched her by flashlight in the cave of furniture, two grinning women.

Yankee was furious. He rushed her and the baby off to the infirmary. Her obstetrician was furious and she rushed the very healthy baby into an infant’s autodoc for a careful checkout. The baby woke up and wanted to be fed.

Yankee got over being mad. He was getting used to being married to a teen-ager. In many ways he was the father of nine children, varying in age from Nora down to his own newborn. It was quite an experience dealing with an adult child, a wild teen, three silent daughters, two shy boys, a baby, and Monk.

Sir Monk, as Yankee called him, helped out enthusiastically. Monk had always thought of himself as the man of the family when his family had been the whole human race. In that way he thought like a kzin. He had gross problems: when in control he acted kzinish, when unsure or overwhelmed he turned into a slave. He had a frightful time with English grammar and idiom but loved the computer that patiently taught him. He was happy to have an uncle. Politics confused him. His first real conversation with Yankee was about master Mellow Yellow, told in a broken mixture of spitting-hisses and English that never quite jelled into grammatical sentences-how he had saved his friend from the dungeons of W’kkai. Yankee didn’t have the heart to tell him that it was Mellow Yellow who had mind-wiped his mother and eaten boys like Monkeyshine for lunch after finishing up his experiments.

As a reward for working so hard, Yankee sneaked Monk into the Starbase simulators and taught him how to fly a starship in virtual space. There was no stopping this kid. He was a born warrior-and eventually his kzinti accent would wear off. What Yankee dreaded was the lessons in kzinti martial arts that Monk insisted on giving him, claw to claw.

So it always came as a welcome relief to change diapers and feed the tiny girl whom Chloe insisted on naming Valiance. Val pursued the simple things of life such as sleeping in her father’s arms.