The Man-Kzin Wars 04

CHAPTER 17

(2404 – 2409 A.D.)

Over the years Grraf-Hromfi honed his force, expanded it. The shipyards of the Serpent's Swarm were busy. Gradually, he acquired the warcraft he needed to bring the Third Black Pride up to strength. He ran the Pride as if it were actually in place above Man-sun. Perhaps his Heroes spied on the Wunderland Admiralty for fun, but they listened to the fading broadcasts of the Fourth Fleet with disciplined seriousness.

Once they received their floating drydock, the duties of Trainer-of-Slaves multiplied.

Grraf-Hromfi did not trust the monkey workmanship of any Alpha Centauri-built ship or weapons system. He had his maintenance staff check everything, sometimes rebuilding to tighter specifications. It was exhausting work for Trainer. By necessity he learned the customs of the naval architect. Eventually he just gave up, found ways to delay the overhauling and trained more Jotoki to do the work for him.

At other times there was no real activity at all. He filed reports and played cards. He sniffed for trouble. During one of those lulls he learned to fly a Scream-of-Vengeance fighter. That was safer than dreaming about Grraf-Hromfi's harem. Dreams about kzinretti tended to fill idle moments. Sometimes he was back in the Chirr-Nig household on Hssin, in the study, with his mother's loyal head in his lap, scratching her forehead. He regretted having to sell his sex-demon, Jriingh.

It was natural for a kzinti want a household. But Trainer couldn't understand why he wanted sons, not after he'd had to teach the Terrible-Sons of Hromfi. Nor was it moral for a coward to pass on his traits to sons who would disgrace the Patriarchy. Nevertheless he wanted sons. He supposed that his real sons were the Jotoki he took on during their fixation phase.

Sons challenged their fathers to physical combat. His many Jotoki "sons" wore him out by a different kind of challenge. The curiosity of a pestering Jotok in transition demanded that Trainer keep learning. It wasn't that he needed to learn. It wasn't that he was curious. He never asked a question whose answer didn't have a solidly rank smell. But he hated not to have a ready retort when a slave asked a stupid question like, "What is the minimum size of the universe?"

The answer to a question like that not only didn't have a smell it couldn't even be seen or heard.

Long-Reach started it all by telling four of his young apprentice polarizer mechanics about the black dwarf R'hshssira. It would collapse forever without fusing its hydrogen because it only had seven-eighths of the mass needed for ignition. But R'hshssira would still have a finite radius when there was no longer any radiation pressure pushing out from within.

The four youthful Jotoki had been learning gravity polarizer mechanics together under the supervision of Long-Reach and Creepy. That was twenty freshly curious brains in concert in teams of five-to-a-body. To rebuild and tune a polarizer one did not need to master unified field theory, but such practical constraints never appealed to an eager transient.

The "terrible four" roughed out the calculation that gave them the minimum diameter of a white dwarf star as a function of its mass. They didn't do nova mechanics that was beyond their youthful abilities, but they did work out the mass range and size at which neutron stars existed. For each mass they could calculate a number for the diameter of the neutron star.

Masses large enough to collapse behind a light barrier were more difficult. Before those calculations were done, one of their brains infected all the others with the burningly important question, "If the whole universe collapsed, what would be its minimum diameter?"

Mellow-Yellow tried to give them a practical kzin answer. "The universe is expanding."

But all four Jotoki (twenty voices) wouldn't let him get away with that. Tuning polarizers was practical. This was recreation. What if the universe was contracting?

Data-link texts on gravity shouldn't be allowed. Worse, gravity polarizers were constructed all too elegantly. They should have flashing lights and be built along the lines of a W'kkai wooden puzzle. Then his Jotok would be kept too busy to go off onto one of their wild chases.

Alas! Let it slip that the polarizer worked with negative space curvature and immediately they were delving into the tensor equations. From there insanity was only questions away. What is the difference between negative and positive curvature? Since positive curvature is common and that means everything attracts everything else why isn't the universe imploding?

When will it start to implode? If the universe imploded, how small would it get? Tell us, Mellow-Yellow!

Thank the Fanged God that Long-Reach and Creepy and Joker had outgrown such questions. Nevertheless, Trainer-of-Slaves gave up an interesting card game to examine the matter. His data-link surprised him. It asked him to rephrase his inquiry several times, then produced the answer which had been known for some octal-squared generations. It was a theorem named after Stkaa-Mathematician-to-S'Rawl.

Stkaa, of course, was one of those kzin who wrote the commas and dots of the Hero's Tongue in the blood of martyrs. For the return price of an equal amount of blood, he made himself clear. On the datalink screen Trainer had to run the theorem's equations with different boundary values. He had to call up the definitions of words he'd never seen sometimes because unified field theory was an arcane subject with its own hisses and snarls, and sometimes just because the language had mutated since the time of Stkaa. As often as not the definitions required that he run even more equations before he could make sense of the definition.

Three days late…

It was an easy enough theorem to declare. "A universe cannot contract beyond its lowest state of information." But it required a hackles-raising use of the uncertainty principle to find the temperature at which every particle in the contracting universe had an equal probability of being anywhere in the fireball the required lowest state. But once you did that: outpopped the minimum radius. Very neat.

Trainer-of-Slaves dutifully lectured his four "sons." He set up the unified field equations. He contracted to the essentials. He pulled a trick out of his ears-that allowed him to apply the uncertainty principle to eliminate all the singularities.

If you knew the velocity of a particle you didn't know its position. Was it still approaching the central point or had it already passed through? If you fixed the position of a particle you no longer knew its velocity. Was it inward or outward bound? All information about whether the universe was contracting or expanding had been lost.

Presto! A minimum radius for the universe. (Thanks to Stkaa-Mathematician-to-S'Rawl, but don't tell them that.)

You knew you had the attention of a Jotok when three eyes were focused on you when you commanded all five eyes you were a sensation. Big-Undermouth skittered off to bring him some squealing Grashi-burrowers in a bowl, which he munched while other arms curried his fur. Why couldn't kzin sons be like this?

He was beginning to understand his success as a Jotok trainer. At the onset of intelligence a Jotok bonded to anything that gave the basic verbal cues. He'd seen a machine-bonded-Jo/ok cripple its mind trying to be the son of a machine. The bonding moment was critical but it wasn't enough. The Jotok was looking for a father, and you had to be a father if you wanted a reliable Jotok slave.

This was a confusing concept for Trainer-of-Slaves. He couldn't be a real father to his Jotoki because he couldn't give them combat training. They were herbivores, not Heroes. Only a father who was a coward would sire sons who were unable to fight. (Did Trainer still remember the murder of Puller-of-Noses? Perhaps. As an inexplicable aberration.)

Trainer-of-Slaves liked his isolation, mostly because it kept him out of fights. He had to maintain a delicate balance between dueling and not dueling. He preferred to be obsequious older warriors appreciated subservience because it allowed them to delegate duties but younger Heroes tended to mark a deferential kzin as potential prey.

To keep that nuisance at bay he had to maintain a reputation in the tournament ring. That he was Grraf-Hromfi's favorite opponent was enormously useful to him. The proud warriors of the Third Black Pride, awed by their Commandant, didn't see that Hromfi would never have hurt or humiliate Trainer, that the old warrior was only interested in providing an able disciplinarian for his sons. He was training Trainer-of-Slaves as proxy to cull his sons, a fatherly duty for which he had no liver.

A warrior who smelled Trainer's fear was restrained by the ear of the Commandant's son he wore on his belt, and by the many scars Trainer carried on his arm and body from contests with those same sons. The scars were a badge of sorts which Trainer appreciated, however painful had been their healing, because they warned others to keep their irritation in check.

Nevertheless, despite his growing skill as a combatant, he preferred his isolation. In the old days he would have hunted the savannas of Kzin-home alone.