The Man-Kzin Wars 06

Chapter 8

(2436 A.D.)

The lord called Grraf-Nig was out for a solitary hunt on his W’kkai estate, naked in his fur, seeking a little relaxation while he tried to make order out of what he was up against one of his more adventurous wives, in estrus, had been following him at a discreet distance, watching his every move with cool yellow eyes, patiently waiting for his attentions. She was the daughter of his most powerful W’kkai sponsor, Si-Kish the High Admiral. He let her tag along, but ignored her, his alertness elsewhere. The pungent scent of a zianya distracted him into a marvelous chase up along the rocky crests, where he trapped the animal in a ravine, killing the beast after one sudden leap while it tried to escape. His blood lust satiated, he had time to climb the talus to the top of his world.

His year and a half on W’kkai had been exhilarating, yet Grraf-Nig felt deceived.

He had been swept into direct contact with the best philosophers and tool makers. He merely had to grope aloud with a question and a work force appeared with tools to master the answer. He was flown across continents to hunt with W’kkai’s best mathematicians who gloriously tore apart the fabric of the universe while they tore apart their meat by the light of all-night campfires. He had been flown to space often, where a whole shielded laboratory was being built to study hyperspace. He had been given females and honors and servants to manage his estate-but he had been deceived.

At first the sashes and clasps and pinned-on ruffles of W’kkai clothing had intrigued him-now they felt like a straitjacket. He was often close to killing his valet. His servants were spies. His closest associates were guardians. If his co-workers spoke the truth they also told him only what the W’kkai patriarchs wished him to know.

The brilliantly slow sunset was worth watching from high on these ridges, though it hardly seemed natural standing here on broken shale, exposed to the sky, without pressure walls to protect him, without even the walls of a ravine to hold in the air. He had lived in space too long ever to adjust to a planet. But the orange play of light on the scudding clouds was a worthy battleground for his imagination. Aboriginal plains kzinti could have evolved their protective coloring hunting among such clouds.

The sunset would bring night. He shuddered. The weather here was harder to get used to than his overstocked harem.

W’kkai was too close to its K2 sun. Tidal friction had slowed W’kkai’s rotation until there were only two seasons-seventy-nine hours of light and seventy-nine hours of night. The huge sun broiled them by day, steaming them in their fur, sapping the energy of the hunt. After dark a cloud cover formed and the rains came, dumping heat into the atmosphere, retarding nighttime cooling. Even so there was a skin of ice on the puddles at dawn and, sometimes, snow.

Orange W’kkaisun seemed to have twice the diameter of Alpha Centauri as seen from Wunderland, but it was not nearly as immense to behold or as red as R’hshssira, the brown dwarf that had warmed Grraf-Nig when he was the young Trainer-of-Slaves. Why, amidst the luxury of his own estate, should he suddenly be nostalgic for the tiny hellworld of Hssin, for the hunting caves of its Jotok Run where he had taken refuge as a nameless hunted kit?

A furless tail lashed.

He was aware of his wife’s overpowering attraction, the beauty of her black fingers clinging to the red rock below him, but instead of responding, he threw to her the remains of the zianya. She must have been hungry for she ripped into it with a coy glance of thanks. He did not move to her; he talked to her instead, coaxing her closer, knowing she would not comprehend an iota of what he said. Because he did not have to make her understand, he omitted the inflected growls and hisses, the spices and smells of language, hearing them only in his mind’s ear He rambled, dredging up memories he would not have bared before a male.

How to tell her that out there alone with only slaves he had dreamed of his own harem of lovelies? He had dreamed of her. He lapsed into the simple patois of gestures and grunts that a female could respond to. “Love you. Lust your fingers,” was all he could manage within her vocabulary. It was not enough. His wives were a burden; he had been without females too long in the wretched emptiness of space ever to get used to the attention they required.

One almost had to be raised as the spoiled son of a W’kkai lord to have the energy to deal with female demands.

Her response to his musings, obviously cast in her direction, came as a tilt of the head and a raunchy smell from the erect fur of her haunches. A female always understood something but never what was meant. Absently he turned his great orange-yellow head out over the ridge and the bushes that clung there in the wind. He flapped his fan-like ears. He spoke forcefully to the God of Air and Wind and Smell. “With my own eyes I found the W’kkai star in the firmament and dreamed, wishing myself here.” His voice chose for its message the Mocking Tense with which the Hero’s Tongue derided victims.

First he had escaped from Hssin to Wunderkind, joining the armada of Chuut-Riit. Then after the disastrous Battle of Wunderland, after slinking back to Hssin at less than light speed with a captured UNSN scout, he had scrabbled through its war-smashed ruins for twelve years, talking to ghosts-like he talked to his wives now- repairing the damaged hyperdrive unit, despairing of a second chance to escape gloomy R’hshssira, rejoicing when the opportunity came. Rejoicing when he reached fabled W’kkai.

That which is possessed is never as important as that which is lacking. Had it always been thus? In brief reverie he flashed on a peaceful hunt through the forested caves and domes of Hssin’s Jotok Run, a day he could never have again. He remembered his passion to escape the claustrophobic horror that had once been his birth world, but the memory no longer carried passion. It only reminded him of a smelly UNSN cabin stuffed with slaves and a cantankerous hypershunt motor and the irony of picking W’kkai as his destination. Nothing was easy.

The trouble he had taken to get himself transferred from that prison to this prison!

The warrior Grraf-Nig was more and more certain that the Lords of W’kkai were holding him as a guest prisoner-and didn’t want him to know about it. He had tested his hypothesis delicately, in ways too subtle for his enemies to detect. Grraf-Nig had expected better-he had expected adulation, exposed throats even-but he had arrived here with mere slaves, with Jotoki and human slaves, not a warrior among them, and so he should have anticipated an unpleasant fate. No matter that he had also arrived with an extraordinary prize of was; one of the humans’ fearsome spacedrives that shunted their ships through hyperspace.

It wasn’t enough. To the W’kkaikzin he was Trainer-of-Slaves, though they did not dare call him that to his face. His claws unsheathed. He suspected that once his stolen machine had been duplicated by W’kkai’s naturalists and engineers, he would be no more than chopped zianya liver, an outcast kzin who had wandered into the wrong hunting park. W’kkai was not his territory. He had no territory.

Hssin was irretrievably gone.

His mouth twitched to show his fangs while he recalled how Hssin had been destroyed by the raping monkeys. He owed it to those tree apes to blacken the stars with a fleet that would convert every human warren into a hunting park. But his plan was going awry.

The W’kkai thought it would be their fleet breaking the blockade and humbling mankind. Well and good- but they also thought it would be their grand fleet which would humble the present Patriarch. They thought a reinvigorated Patriarchy would rise from the grass of W’kkai. They were dreaming a monopoly of hyperdrive power. He could taste it he could smell it. They were dreaming of dominance for W’kkai. There it was, a raw wound: the need to dominate, coexistent with the necessity to submit-the bane of all kzinti.

Ships of the Patriarch had been collecting taxes from the W’kkaisun system for longer than humankind had known the nature of their sky and-for as long-the nobles of W’kkai had resented parting with those taxes. Why should the culturally superior world of W’kkai deliver their wealth to degenerate Father Eaters! Now W’kkai physicists were examining the only hyperdrive ship in kzinti claws. For the first time in their history they had the longer swipe. And Grraf-Nig was in an ideal position to catch glimpses of their response. They were recklessly planning to build a fleet of warships that the Patriarch’s admirals couldn’t match. They were, in fact, building it.

Self deceivers! Only once during the war had they fought! Their local naval collision with a light reconnaissance of fighting ships from Procyon during the Humiliation had been bloated into an Epic Saga. The haughty W’kkai Warriors of this minor skirmish, led by Si-Kish, remembered themselves as the Heroes who had saved W’kkai. In fact they were losers. Had they witnessed the Battle of Wunderland they would not be so eager to throw together their fleet of hyperdrive ships and defy the infamous MacDonald-Rishshi Peace Treaty without even bothering to inform the Patriarch whose very life might be sacrificed by their impetuousness.

In a universe of sub-light warships, it was the duty of a Conquest Commander to act independently, of necessity informing the Patriarch of his heroic deeds only later through laggard time; at sub-light speeds the Patriarch could not be involved in time-sensitive decisions. But Grraf-Nig was uneasy about applying such a doctrine to a battlespace dominated by hypercraft. It seemed to him that warfare had been redefined.

Grraf-Nig found himself strangely loyal to the Path-arch. Why? He didn’t know. On the tiny frontier backworld of Hssin, the Patriarch had been a distant myth. Nobody on Hssin had ever shown their throats to the Patriarchy, they’d hardly been touched by taxes, and they had been blind to its splendor until the fleet of Chuut-Riit had passed through on the way to Wunderland. Still, distant as Kzin had always been, a lowly slave-trainer could not help but envisage W’kkai ambition as the most terrible of treasons.

The whole problem had been a moot point as long as it was impossible to build a hyperdrive shunt Grraf-Nig and his Jotoki technicians had had a hard enough time just repairing and tuning the one motor they had captured. He had assumed that it would take generations of secret probing to learn how to build a copy. He had pictured a covert network of kzin worlds dedicated to the task, secretly running physicists back and forth through the human blockade in a united conspiracy directed by the Patriarch.

The brilliance of the W’kkai mathematicians had never occurred to Grraf-Nig, who knew mathematics but who was, himself, hardly more than a glorified gravity-polarizer mechanic. That they had been able to construct a working theory of hyperspace within a few years had astonished him. That engineers were already building hypershunt test beds was a stunning breakthrough.

Yet the advance was uneven. Grraf-Nig saw the superluminal technical march being grafted onto a conservative military strategy that had evolved over millennia against a constant background of subluminal transport-faster-than-light claws attached to slower-than-light minds. The Patriarch had to be told what was going on- and soon. Otherwise, another disaster.

Grraf-Nig had begun to toy with the details of an escape to Kzinhome. Yes, I will; no, I won’t. Visions of sharing zianya with the Patriarch alternated with his knowledge of W’kkai dungeons. Like any nascent schemer he dreaded the hard decisions.

How he would recapture the Shark or commandeer one of the newer experimental ships he didn’t know, so he began by dreaming about his piloting skills. It was probable that he would find the relevant kzin navigation tools denied him-but he had investigated the human navigational paradigm on Hssin before rebuilding Lieutenant Argamentine’s unnatural mind to the female-norm. Early on he had understood the necessity of deciphering the human navigation computer in order to steer his captured vessel to a friendly port. He doubted that his W’kkai allies were aware of the function of a certain coded box, so focused were they on the nature of the hyperdrive shunt.

The monkeys referred to W’kkai’s trifling K2-star by catalog numbers BD+50° 1725, or HDraper-88230, or Gliese-380. Under those names there had been neither helpful listings of less-than-giant planets nor listings of nearby interstellar hazards-the humans were woefully ignorant about kzinspace. He’d had to fly blind on his near approach to W’kkaisun. But the human system was usable. He had already deduced that they cataloged Kzinsun as 61 Ursa Majoris. Its hyperspace coordinates were in the box and would be accurate enough even if the fine details were missing.

Then he sobered. Everything on W’kkai had been reduced to a fine art-even torture. A W’kkai dungeon was a Conundrum Puzzle that took a lifetime to solve. Its stones were sculpted by vow-sworn priests into shapes of beauty and balance and engineering. A finger might liberate you-or reshape your dungeon into a tinier cell or feed you to the fish.

Fighting his own kzinkind was worse than fighting humans. As a barbarian from Hssin he had been brought up to believe that W’kkai was one of the great centers of learning and wisdom. In fact it was parochial. The local lords were too far away from Kzin to share directly in the awesome power of the Patriarch, and too far away from the war to have been bloodied by any other battle than their petty internal duels.

The dangers inherent in escape came from W’kkai’s naval strength. He was a trained fighter pilot and knew what he was up against. It would be harder to evade the gravity-driven dreadnoughts of the W’kkaikzin than, after escape, to outmaneuver a lethargic superluminal ship whose monkeycrew had yet to master the tech of the gravitic polarizer. These UNSN treaty enforcers hovered outside the W’kkai system, beyond a spherical hyperbarrier generated by W’kkaisun’s mass, looking down at kzin military might from a height of three light-hours- like monkeys in a free throwing nuts at the prowling carnivores below. They had not dared come in toward W’kkaisun for a real fight.

Their silly blockade of military trade between the kzinti worlds was no big shake of the tail. A few kzinti hyperdrives could break it. The Procyon planet, the one that named itself by some incomprehensible human pun, could build starships for a millennium and still not have enough of a net to snatch each fish from the stream. Space was bigger than ignorant treaty-makers could dream.

Grraf-Nig did not doubt that, once beyond the hyperbarrier, he could slip past the monkeys. He was a veteran of deep space. Already, by himself, he had leapt halfway to the legendary world of Kzin. And he had done this, after the war was over, when the blockade was already in place. What was another fifteen light years? He could see Kzin from here, shining at magnitude 4, twelve degrees off galactic north, a proud hilt in the Constellation of Swords.

The trip had to be risked. There was no way around it. By the terms of the MacDonald-Rishshi Peace Treaty the humans insisted upon retaining control of all superlurninal communications. The Patriarch, light years to the galactic north, would not yet even know that a hyperdrive ship had been captured. No human was likely to tell him.

Escape was a matter of timing. If he stole away before the physicists of W’kkai fully understood the nature of the hyperdrive shunt, and if, by unluck, the Patriarchy’s only working model was captured or destroyed on the way to Kzin, then his premature decision would have left the kzinti in thrall to the humans forever Patience. That was the lesson Chuut-Riit had taught. That was the lesson his name donor, Grraf-Hromfi, had tried to teach, and had not quite learned himself.

Timing. Too soon or too late. If he waited too long to carry his gift to the Patriarch, the W’kkai might become so strong as to be deluded into waging war by themselves. And that, too, would leave the kzinti in the thrall of victorious humans. There was no such thing anymore as a “local” war. W’kkai could attack human space, but the humans would simply bypass W’kkai and destroy a helpless Kzin. All kzinti worlds would have to be armed with the hyperdrive shunt. If Heroes were to undo their humiliation, as one pride they would have to hunt and kill the man-beasts and their women and their children.

And where was the pride that could command that kind of interstellar loyalty? Only the glorious Patriarchy!

Later, returned from the hunt, walking along the balcony of his mansion, Grraf-Nig watched one of his human slaves play with his younger brothers. The Lieutenant Nora-beast had proved to be excellent breeding stock. The way her sons showed their teeth to each other, a naive kzin might think they were about to attack but they were only laughing.

He was genuinely disappointed that he would have to leave them behind. Leaving his wives he didn’t mind, but good slaves were hard to come by. The older male-beast might have made just the right slave gift for the Patriarch. Life’s regrets!