The Man-Kzin Wars 06

Chapter 24

(2439 A.D.)

The interstellar game of “Trolls amp; Bridges” became an instant success among a certain group of the military Major Yankee Clandeboye had toyed with the name “General Staff-In-Exile” but went chicken before typing such blasphemy into the net. He put it down to his new maturity. After all, he had just turned fifty.

The game developed a different structure than he had originally imagined. It proved impossibly complicated to set up a “shadow” ARM. Instead, “Trolls amp; Bridges” evolved into a “command patch.” There were a lot of isolated officers out there for whom the command lines had failed, who were looking for the kind of “work-around” that the structure of T amp;B provided.

Normally, bypassing command lines in a military organization is a bad habit because it leads to contradictions and inconsistencies in practice. Nothing destroys an army faster than captains who have to carry out the orders of generals who aren’t speaking to each other. Nevertheless command lines are bypassed all the time through what has been called for centuries “the old boy’s network” Bypassing command lines is an art form with definite strategies, rules, and protocols.

Young men under sixty are not adept practitioners of this arcane art and are advised to seek counsel from a mentor. The game of T amp;B, in its first naive implementation, presently put its players in conflict with powerful men. Admiral Jenkins had a fit when one of his patrols received two sets of orders. He suspected the hand of Fry-though Fry was innocent-and moved in for the kill, demanding a full investigation of Starbase shenanigans.

Fry caught off guard, did his own instant investigation and found out that he had been elevated to Grand Vizier of a very weird caper that had been going on under his nose for months. He studied the rules in shock, penned a scathing rejoinder to all Starbase nitwits, reconsidered, remembered that he needed an excuse to see Nora and hastily hitched a ride to Barnard’s Star. Immediately on arrival he lectured his young fans in the sternest terms. But by then he was amused, even elated.

As Grand Vizier of T amp;B, he sat his boys down and showed them how their game really worked. With one hand he arranged to have Admiral Jenkins promoted to head up the “Jenkins Commission on Military Ethics.” Writing that report would take up at least five years of the admiral’s life. In case Jenkins got too pushy… well, there were ethical issues from his own past that he had forgotten about. With the other hand Fry used some contacts in the Wunderland House of Patricians to outmaneuver the ARM and push Rear Admiral Blumenhandler into Jenkins’ old job.

While these promotions were going through, Fry suspected that a quick review of patrol methods, desk ready might please Blumenhandler when he moved into Jenkins office to take over. The current T amp;B Grand Kzin Strategy model was laid on the table. It called for new kinds of patrol information. Then a document was compiled out of recent T amp;B items sent in by patrol officers who felt that certain unacknowledged reports needed a critical second ear. Fry added his own wish list. Gibraltar was stumbling for lack of an aggressive assessment of the Patriarchy’s smaller worlds. Finally, synthesis produced a written policy that Blumenhandler could take seriously.

“That was a lot of work.” Fry was enjoying teaching his students. He was coming to like his maverick major. “But is your stuffy father-in-law going to read it? We need an insurance policy. A personal touch. I’m going to ask him a favor. That sets me up in his debt so later on, when he needs it, he can ask me a favor.”

With Blumenhandler’s biases in mind Fry made a special request, in his own name, for patrol time to seek out the rumored kzinti stronghold, Warhead. Perhaps, while finding it, they could also locate the rumored Pierin aliens, who might then become mankind’s ally. He implied that Wunderland officers were best equipped to carry out such a mission.

Lucas Fry had no authority to issue any such orders to the UNSN patrols. But, of course, Chloe’s father, in his new capacity, did. The orders would get issued.

Over the weeks that the general was with them, Tam Claukski watched him in awe, taking notes and codifying what he saw. The old reprobate held seminars on everything that a devious officer should know about side-stepping the rules. The general was very adamant about what should go through channels, what might profitably be transmitted through the T amp;B comm lines, and what had to be aborted.

One whole day he spent with Tam manually processing messages which Tam’s procedures had been editing and routing automatically.

“Take this guy” Fry meant the message, not the sender. He used his pen as a pointer. “These three sentences are a lament to the gods and a whine about the sender’s powerlessness. The next paragraph is an outright appeal for sympathy. Then he gets angry and we have to read what is essentially a page of diatribe against his commanding officer. He wraps up his case with a conspiracy theory. Only the last two lines contain the nub of a useful suggestion. If this sadsack tried to put such a missive through normal channels, he’d get head detail.” Fry laughed. “But as I understand it, T amp;B is trying to be more than a normal channel.”

Tam grimaced. “It’s pretty hard to do something with that kind of ranting mess. I have a good semantic program that I’m training to sort and flush gripes like that”

“No,” said the general. “Flushing just dumps out the gold dust with the sand.” Fry used his pen to block the whining in red, then attached the note, “Delete.” He recast the last two lines in a larger, bold typeface, this time attaching the message, “Expand and resubmit.” He grinned. “That ought to shock the shit out of our raving victim. Make him think. Otherwise send him out on head detail.”

The next day, too early, Fry held a seminar for the Starbase coterie who had signed up for “Trolls amp; Bridges.” He combed over the T amp;B categories with a razor sharp ruthlessness. Tam saw his categories as a skeleton around which to build a defense strategy. Yankee saw them as an alternate command structure. Fry saw them as communication nodes that connected people in ways that command lines couldn’t. The general tried to explain to them why, in two months, the T amp;B team had been able to make a better strategic analysis of the rising kzinti threat than the whole apparatus of expensive ARM think tanks.

Looking out over the room, he saw that these eager officers, who would probably dominate the roster of heroes of the next war, were flattered but didn’t really believe him. They might make jokes about the ARM, but they had been brought up in awe of its secret dominion. The ARM had pulled some deadly tricks out of its hat when the kzinti seemed overwhelming. The ARM wore a mystique of invincibility, of endless cabalistic powers it could command if it had to.

So go back to basics. The general spent the next hour lecturing these neophytes on ARM’S modus operandi. How did the ARM develop Grand Strategies? It had the resources to recruit mankind’s best strategic minds. It even had a science of creative mood drugs. Inject just the right sense of danger in which to think about threat strategy Inject just the right kind of cold concentration in which to work out logistic problems. The ARM’s think tanks were high-powered places. But they weren’t working-because they couldn’t transfer what they knew to the grunt tacticians who had to implement the Grand Strategy. Why?

For four hundred years the ARM had been acting to repress the cycles of revenge that once threatened to tear the Earth apart and infect space. From immemorial time mothers had pledged their infant sons to the task of murdering their father’s murderer. Men plotted revenge for the rape of daughters. Tribes massacred each other to revenge an insult. Each brooding generation laid down its sedimentary layer of pain, claiming special victim status. Revenge was gradually formalized to the level of religious dogma and elevated to an art form by technology-eventually scouring Europe with religious wars, devastating the Middle East with Holy jihads when vengeful Christian pushed Jew into lands where prophets had elevated revenge to a way of life.

It was all nonsense. Yet none of it was easily given up. Even later thinkers of this violent era, atheists repelled by the mindlessness of a religious spirit that buried men in the mud of France’s trenches, invented “class warfare” as their new spiritual cleanser. The ARM forced men’s minds into a mold of peace, catholic in its guidance.

The centuries of effort had been so successful that these young officers of Barnard’s Starbase didn’t know their own history. Each one of them saw mankind as essentially benevolent. Whatever they thought, they felt that evil was an aberration, not a choice. Whatever they thought, they felt that a soldier’s soul remained in mortal peril, absolution his lot.

The general spoke to shock them: whatever lurked out there, kzin or no kzin, the ARM could not permit men to risk their souls by thinking about war Better that they die and go to heaven in a state of grace. The military strategists of the ARM were like the priests of the Old Catholic Church who read the Bible but did not permit their parishioners to read the Bible because it was too dangerous. Fry noted wryly that a priest who cannot talk to his flock about theology atrophies as a theologian and ends his days by harassing Galileos.

The general drove on with his analogies. Like deadly experimental viruses, the ARM kept its military strategists in sealed bottles, inside sealed labs, a fragile mankind protected from contact with the military mind through elaborate protocols. Were these strategists still virile? How dangerous could a mutating virus be after generations of isolation from its host, feeding on government pabulum?

Was he making his audience hostile by laying on the heresy so thick? He had to convince these boys that they were mankind’s mainline of defense against the kzin. ‘The ARM’s military strategists can’t even talk to each other without going through rigorous need-to-know protocols. I can’t talk to them without going through channels and telling the protocol keepers what I need to know and why! I could be dangerous. I might get infected and lead Earth to a rediscovery of revenge. I might resurrect the ultimate weapon and use it.” Fry paused, then paced until he had his curious audience waiting for his next words. “When I tell you that Barnard’s Starbase is the best strategic think tank that humanity has right now, I mean you to take me seriously.”

A cocky officer in the back interrupted. “When is ARM going to close us down?”

“Ah, we have a conspiracy theorist in the back ARM isn’t going to close us down. Perhaps you think the ARM is an oligarchy desperate to cling to power, even if that means losing a war with the Patriarchy. Nonsense. The ARM is just another tradition with a lot of social inertia. I’ve talked with men high in the ARM. They know what’s wrong. We lost battles in the last war because they couldn’t bring themselves to release the tech in time-they were genuinely afraid that we would turn the tech against ourselves. Have you ever read the Los Alamos plea to Truman asking him not to use the first fission bomb on Japan? The ARM struggled to make critical changes during the war. They did make changes. You can’t imagine the agonies they went through when the kzinti were winning.

“Then came the peace and the pre-kzin mindset all snapped back like so much memory-plastic. How easy was it to end slavery? How easy was it to end the Hundred Year War? How easy was it to shift from the paradigm of Biblical authority to the paradigm of science? Right now the ARM is bigger than any man. The precepts of the ARM were already built into the hidden assumptions of billions of people long before we met the kzin. Shoot every member of ARM today and it would just recreate itself out of the ashes and go about its business of wiping war from the minds of men. At Starbase we have no traditions. We can travel light and fast. The next war is going to be the worst war that mankind has ever faced and we need men who can think about it unencumbered.”

At the end of the seminar, Lucas Fry turned to Yankee. “Let’s sneak out I’d like nothing better than to play some silly game with Nora. Is there a place where I can buy her a present? Is there anything she likes?”

Yankee took the general over to a friend’s house whose daughter fashioned jewelry as a hobby. “I can’t think of a thing she likes better than baubles.”

Lucas picked out a chain platinum headband inlaid with translucent stones from Starbase’s primary “Do you think she’ll like it?”

“She probably won’t wear it. She likes to squirrel away pretty things where she can dig them up and cherish them.”

“Well, women don’t wear their jewelry anyway. They keep all that stuff in boxes to show their girlfriends.” Fry bought the headband from the young girl with praise for her workmanship.

“That was a good speech you gave us,” said Yankee, gliding along the hallway and up the steel stairs. “You make a fine mentor.”

“That’s what Grand Viziers are for,” muttered the general gruffly. “It’s going to be touch and go. My biggest worry is Earth.”

“Why?”

“You’re a flatlander. You figure it out I can’t. But we have to bring the mass of them over to our side. They’ve forgotten that there ever was a war. Amnesia. Only the colonies are preparing. But once the kzinti have the factories to churn out hypershunt motors they will be converging on every human world from all over the Patriarchy. Flatlander’s will have to take the brunt of the attack Earth is the place with the population. It’s where we’ll have to find our cannon-fodder.”

“Do you think the ARM is behind the shut down of public debate?”

“Yah. For security reasons. Old habit. They can’t resist any ploy if it might stop people from thinking about war.

Maybe you flatlanders were buying too many toy guns. Made them nervous. They reacted. But it is not just the ARM. It’s the flatlanders themselves. The ARM’S message has been assimilated into the culture. War is no longer even part of the idiom. Kzinti warriors have to be marching across Kansas before… Oh what the hell. I want to see Nora’s face when she sees my bauble. You don’t think she is afraid of me, do you?”

Yankee had all of his cousin’s old papers. Her high school yearbooks. Her many attempts at writing a diary. Her letters to her father. School essays. Drawings. Her photo album. Her anguished, and finally angry, exchange with the war department. Her patriotic newspaper essays that had been franchised for a while on the net. Drafts of the many love letters she wrote to boys. First drafts of letters never sent-embarrassments that she had neglected to erase. One of them was a mushy love letter to a certain Yankee Clandeboye. He had never known, from the way she treated him, that she had ever had a crush on him.

For no particular reason he began to organize this unsorted mess. They all hoped Nora might recover her use of words. She would never recover her memories. She would always be the woman who had grown up half-slave, half-kzinrett, born on Hssin. Those were the only memories she had. But maybe, if she ever learned to read and talk again, she might find an interest in these papers by the woman she once had been-like a granddaughter reading the musty diary of a heroic grandmother never known.

Gradually, as Yankee got involved, as memories reminded him of the charmer who had twiddled compulsively with the same strand of hair for all the years he had known her, he started to write about her. He had a need to organize his thoughts. He wanted other people to understand this heroine. It was a story that grew on him, built around her Hssin diaries.

Something that stirred inside him told him it was a way to talk to the flatlander soul.

He began his story while Lieutenant Nora Argamentine was living as a kzinrett in the dungeon of a wrecked interstellar fortress beside a dying star, totally dependent upon a kzin who thought that it was natural for females to tend their males and young without the aid of an independent self-a kzin who had the biotechnical power, and the inclination, to take away her mind so that she might more easily fit into his world and serve him.

He built the legend around her hidden diary. With each brain operation it became more urgent for her to record what she was afraid she was losing forever. Yankee lovingly annotated her entries with her pictures, with other things she had written, with his own personal memories. On far-off Hssin she’d wistfully remember a boy she had once known on Earth. Yankee would include her love letter to that boy in a fourteen-year-olds grammar.

Very carefully he wove through the book the saga of the hypershunt motor that had been captured at the Battle of Wunderland, and of Lieutenant Argamentine’s valiant attempts to destroy it. An almost successful mutiny. The killing of the kzinti crew. The last kzin. The recapture. The attempts to kill the last kzin. The failure. Her captor could have killed her but he found her useful, yet too dangerous to be left with a mind. Human heroes aren’t defined by their wins. A hero is the one who remains committed to principles. A hero is the one who never stops trying and never stops learning.

Why did Lieutenant Nora Argamentine try so hard to destroy that motor when she could have played it cool, been non-threatening, and perhaps saved her mind? Yankee hinted to his reader the chilling truth. Wasn’t it because she could see what a reverse-engineered hypershunt would mean to the Patriarchy? Had she seen the assembly lines on a hundred kzin worlds building a new and greater fleet to launch against Sol with all the resources of the Patriarchy behind it?

Her father died in the desperate days of the Ceres conflagration defending mankind against a fleet that had nearly brought the race to slavery-yet the enemy was only an adventurer’s ragtag knock-together manned by border barbarians whose resource base depended wholly upon the factories of Wunderland. In the next war light-lag would not protect Sol from a sluggish giant driven to anger by swarms of alien gnats who had penetrated its territory with impunity on wings that might be plucked out and turned to better use by warriors who knew what to do with such speeded reflexes.

To teach his readers how to see the man-kzin conflict with the eyes of Nora Argamentine, that was Yankee’s hope.

It was a mad project and he worked too hard on it, after his other duties. Sometimes a man just had to stop and go home.

“You’re late,” said Chloe, happy to see him. She was breast-feeding Val on the bed.

“Let me hold her.”

“After she’s fed, dummy”

“How was your day?”

“I was with Nora and the kids again. Her boys are too much for me. They still don’t know what to make of a woman who can talk. Yankee,” she added sadly, “Nora isn’t getting better.”

“She might be.” He stripped and crawled under the covers. All he wanted was to close his eyes and sink his head deep into the pillow, but you lose wives you ignore. He reached a hand out and switched on the bedroom flatscreen, fiddling with it until it networked with his office.

He called up a picture that was an obvious brain scan.

“One of Dr. Hunker’s pictures. See the white fuzz inside that gray area? Let me contrast it in false color.” He made adjustments. “Those are baby neurons.”

“She’s going to talk?”

“Hunker doesn’t know, but he’s giving it his best shot. It will be easier with the girls because of their age.”

“Didn’t that kzin grow a lot of neurons in her head?”

“He sure did. He killed a lot, too. And played around with dendritic growth like a yo-yo. Hunker has studied Trainer-of-Slaves’ notes. He’s incorporating bits and pieces of kzin biotechnology into some of his tailor-made boosterspices.”

“Is he going to make one for you so I can have a nice giggling teen-aged husband?”

“No. But I’m having to convince him to cook up a reverse boosterspice that I can sneak into your soup. Imagine the glories of waking up to a mature wife.”

“You’ve never liked boosterspice.”

“Scares me out of my mind,” said Yankee. “Especially after I’ve talked to Hunker for a while about some of the weird side-effects that can turn up.” on his rich old playboy experimental animals. Is he experimenting on Nora?”

“Yah. He’s being careful. Taking it easy. A little at a time. It’s a tough problem. Construction and repair don’t go by the same rules. It is easier to build something that can’t be repaired than it is to build something that can be repaired. Humans weren’t built to be repaired. We come in disposable containers. If we last long enough to see our children live through the terrible teens, our genes don’t see the need to have us repaired.”

“My poor daddy is ready for the junkyard?”

“You haven’t made it out of your teens yet, kid. You might still need him.”

“Men think of women as disposable containers,” said Chloe.

“Aw, no we don’t. Neither of you.” And he kissed the baby. “I didn’t design humans as disposable containers; God did. Suppose you build a gizmo and it wears out and you have to repair it. What do you do? If it is cheaper to build a new one than repair the old one, you throw away your gizmo. If it is cheaper to repair than replace, you repair it Humans are too hard to repair so they have evolved in disposable format. They are cheap to make.”

“Just wave your magic wand and say ‘Kakabuni,’ right?” She grinned.

“Not that easy.” He took Val and laid her on his chest where she burbled. “You’ve got to factor in the price of raising the little buggers until they are smart enough to leave home. There’s a bit of expense in that. You and I don’t know the worst of it yet. But still, for the price of one boosterspice shot I can raise ten teen-agers. At prices like that, what is a company going to do? They can hire a freshly weaned kid out of university train him and bury the worn-out worker, or they can buy a boosterspice shot for the older worker. At present prices they have no choice.”

“Is it costing so much to help Nora?”

“It’s costing a fortune. The Institute of Knowledge is footing the bill. They expect to learn a lot. The information in our genes tells us how to build a brain and not a damn thing about repairing it because the genetic cost of carrying that information is greater than the going price for a teen-ager, you being the exception.”

“You’re into buying me now!”

“I’m into going to sleep-and your little darling just pissed on me.”

At breakfast, refreshed, Yankee continued the discussion. He printed out pictures of Nora’s brain with enlargements of critical segments. Breakfast consisted of guinea pig jerky and flapjacks with cultured maple syrup.

“When Hunker tells me about brain repair my eyes go into orbit. That’s why nature knows enough not to try. Brain cells die and that’s it. We can’t activate the genes that grow the brain because Nora already has a brain. We can’t just plant the right kind of baby neurons where Nora’s language processor used to be because they have to grow and connect-and the rules for connecting them in an adult are different than the rules for connecting them in a baby. Hunker has to design the language-repair protocols and program it into the spice. Boosterspice already has in it half the information of the whole human genome. That’s a lot”

“Yankee, I’m miserable. You don’t come home at night. Don’t you love me anymore?”

“Just another one of my damn projects.”

“What project!?! A new one? You don’t tell me anything! Is it a military secret?”

“No. I’m too involved in this Nora thing.”

“So am I! You’re supposed to talk to me. We’re supposed to work together.”

“I thought you might be jealous. It’s almost like I’m caught up in an old love.”

“Oh Yankee!”

“You’re right.” He took her into the bedroom and transferred the whole Nora file in from his work computer. “Read it. It’ll take all day. Tell me what you think.”

Chloe had rabbit stew for dinner and he came home early. She was happy again. “It’s marvelous. Now what are you going to do with it? They’ll kill you. You never change.”

“I’ll publish it.”

“On Earth? Over the ARM’S dead body you will! You’ll never get clearance!”

“Did I lay it on that thick? I guess I did. I want to tell Nora’s story but I’m also trying to use her as a political club.”

“Neither of the Noras would mind and you know it!”

“I’m not going to try for clearance. I’m not going to publish with a copyright. I’m going to make a thousand chip copies and hide them under rocks. Then I’m going to smuggle one copy to Earth and put it on the nets, free. The ARM can try to suppress the story. It will be like running around with cans of antiweed, spraying the dandelions.”

Chloe was wide-eyed. “Defy them? They haven’t let anyone write about Nora. They’ll kill you. They’ll put you in the brig. They’ll send you to the other side of Kzin. They’ll feed you tranquilizers!” What would become of Val? Happiness was supposed to last-at least forever. But it never did.

“Nah.”

“Nah!” she imitated angrily. “Why do I fall in love with brave men? I’m such a damn fool.”

“Chloe. Listen carefully to an old man’s advice. I’ve been in trouble since I was a kid. Suppressive people have one great weakness. They believe their own stories. They hint darkly at what they’ll do to you when you speak up. Naive people believe them and get afraid and, being afraid, suppress themselves. The suppressors are stupid enough to think that they are doing the suppressing. I don’t have anything to worry about from the ARM. I just have to dodge all those poor people who are afraid.”

“Will General Fry protect you?”

“Sure. And so will your father. The best people are my friends. You’d be surprised at how large that group has become.”

“After reading your story I feel brave myself. But I’m still one of those people who are afraid.”

“It’s okay. For us it’ll be a roller-coaster ride for a few years. Outrage and argument. No big deal. Then in about five years some poor schmuck will come back bloodied by an encounter with a kzinti hyperdrive warship. Then instantly, I’ll be a prophet and a hero. But it is Nora they’ll remember. When the going gets rough and the starscape is full of grinning kzinti and monkey-life looks hopeless, they’ll remember the Heroic Myth of Lieutenant Nora Argamentine, and they’ll say, ‘What the hell, if Nora could do a little kzin bashing, so can I.’ ”

“Why do you call it a myth? Yankee, she did all of those things.”

“Chloe. Look at me. All writers are liars. I’m a political writer. Humanity hasn’t been at war for hundreds of years. We’re short of heroes. We’re going to need them. So I took this story and built Nora up larger than life. I wrapped it around all the old archetypes. That’s a myth. My only excuse is that I was inspired. Stories just grow. This one will become humongous. I’m sorry to do it to my sweet Nora but I couldn’t help myself. Guys in cans being shot at by kzinti hypershunt dreadnoughts will take courage from this crazy story. That’s what myth is all about.”