The Man-Kzin Wars 04

CHAPTER 4

(2391 – 2392 A.D.)

In the social protocol of the Hssin Fortress, Chirr-Nig, the elder, would never have entertained Hssin's nameless Jotok-Tender but a matter of father and son always took precedence. There was no better way to enter a named-one's household than to voluntarily take upon oneself the son-duties of an absent father, and, while doing so, protect the father's reputation. Since the Jotok-Tender had handled the son's transgression discreetly, without public humiliation for the father, with disciplined kindness for the son, he was welcome, even to a seat, in the great front room of the Chirr-Nig compound.

Awkward kdatlyno slaves were in attendance and two wives lounged on the rug beside the rippling dance of the infrared warmer. Chirr-Nig took the opportunity to unburden his disappointment and frustration at Short-Son's inability to master the basics of self-defense. While he lavishly fed his guest fresh Jotok-arm with fish, passing the fish from his own dish down to his youngest wife, he grumbled, first raging and then growling about the lack of self-discipline in the younger generation.

Quietly, Short-Son's mother had slipped into the high-ceilinged room, sensing from wherever she had been the emotional tone of the conflict. Gracefully Hamarr wandered river to sniff the welts on her kit's back. She paced about the reception room, eyeing the two males and her son, ignoring the kdatlyno. With a low growl she drove off one of Chirr-Nig's younger wives.

She nuzzled Chirr-Nig in a way that interrupted his conversation, trying to tell him that she was concerned about her son. Idly he scratched her head, paying her concerns no heed. She had fiercely protected the runt of her litter from his brothers and scrappy sisters, and especially from the sons of the compound's other Kzinretti but Chirr-Nig himself had too many sons for him to even think of playing favorites.

Frustrated by her inability to gain her named-one's attention Hamarr turned to Short-Son, nuzzling him. Playfully she began to shove him from the room, blocking his every attempt to return, to get past her, to stay.

Chirr-Nig watched the display with amused ears. His son was acting properly in attempting to stay while his fate was being discussed but a kzin indulged his females. They always provided good excuse to break the rigid rules. "Go play with Hamarr!" he dismissed his son, waving a hand. "She's bored. Take her for a run."

Presently Jotok-Tender and Chirr-Nig were exchanging stories about the escapades of their youth, when Hssin was a dynamic new base on the frontier. Chirr-Nig offered honors to the giant for bringing his son home, and the giant tactfully suggested that the son needed an intensive crash workout on the finer points of the martial attack.

A playful mother herded her son down to the recreation dome, loping ahead of him, then backtracking to hit him from behind, then facing him mill silently poised to run or attack. When she reached the recreation room, she chased away the other Kzinrett with low growls and threats, and bowled Short-Son onto the floor, where she could sniff and lick his welts. She stared at him with admonishing eyes, asking a question whose answer she would be unable to comprehend.

It bothered Hamarr that he was so passive. Her other sons weren't passive. She belted him to his feet, approached' withdrew, surprised him with a cuff that shook his head but was designed not to hurt. She smiled at him and rippled her ears at the same time. She retreated so fast that he had to come after her but when he got too close she cuffed him again with enough force to rattle his fangs. He enjoyed playing with her, but he was already bigger than she was and he didn't want to hurt her. Nevertheless she forced him to leap and attack until the juices of the fight were running in him savagely. Once he almost bit her too hard.

That evening Hamarr refused to leave him; she refused to return to her own quarters and insisted on sleeping at her son's feet, sometimes waking up to lick his welts, worriedly. She remembered how Greedy her other sons had been when they were suckling, how she'd had to growl and cuff the others away when they'd had their fill so that the runt wouldn't starve to death. He was an odd child, and she didn't understand him.

The father dutifully talked to Short-Son's brothers and the brothers good-naturedly set up practice sessions for their runt sibling. It gave them a chance to show their warrior skills, and to make the training so rigorous that the runt was hard pressed to meet their demands. They could cuff him around, goad his rage, tease him, work him over, all for the virtuous cause of improving his warriorness.

Short-Son merely endured the practice, resigned to his fate, knowing that the one-on-one combat was not preparing him to face a whole gang intent on killing him for his ears. The only thing of possible use that he had learned recently was the trick shown him by Jotok-Tender.

For a while he escaped the games. His father used his son's interest in machinery to get him apprenticed to the shipyards where he went to work on the gravitic motors being assembled for the Prowling Hunters. Many octals of them were being shipped out to the Wonderland System. He found himself working with Jotoki slaves, even being taught by them.

Kzinti-Supervisor had short words of advice for him. "The slaves will save you work, use them, but never put yourself in a position where a slave knows how to do something you do not. That is fatal. I will not consider you competent until you can replace at any time any slave under your command."

There was nothing new in the motors they were building, a four hundred year old design. The Patriarchy had long ago set up standardization so that no matter where a ship was assembled it could be serviced at any other base. How else could the Patriarch run an empire? When a ship needed repairs it might be a lifetime from its mother shipyard, as light traveled, totally dependent upon locally manufactured spare parts.

Innovation, anywhere except in the Admiralty labs of Kzin-home, was discouraged. Heroes, always chafing under inappropriate rules forged at a distance, tended to ignore the decree. But such insubordination was balanced as unauthorized invention was stripped out of weaponry and replaced by standard issue due to lack of spare parts for the innovation.

The engine work was not easy, the conditions of the shop impossibly dark and noisy, made for the needs of Jotok rather than kzin. He had a desk and console beside the superstructure that surrounded the motor being built or refurbished. The desk had never been cleaned and when Short-Son tried to clean it, the edges and pockets still stained his hands.

The superstructure seemed to have been designed by, Jotoki; they could swing from platform to platform with ease trees were their natural medium but it seemed to shake under kzinweight and frustrate his attempts at climbing. He didn't like to look down. His ever-present Jotok companion always watched him patiently with one eye, other eyes on handholds and general surveillance.

The language he had to learn drove him crazy. It was a corruption of the Hero's Tongue that didn't hiss or rumble, but flowed and chirped. Worse, the expressiveness of the Hero's Tongue had been disemboweled there were no more insults, the military idiom was gone, the mollifications and flattery were gone. What remained was a utilitarian ability to describe, to point, to anticipate.. With a language like that, a slave wouldn't even be able to think about revolt but it was annoyingly bland for a kzin to speak.

However, learning the patois gave Short-Son the first power he had ever had. If he asked a question of any of the Jotok who worked for him, the slave would stop working and explain very carefully whatever he wanted to know. Nobody teased him. Nobody insulted him. Nobody told him that a warrior didn't need to know that. He didn't have to phrase his questions to flatter, or worry that they might insult. He just got answers. If he grinned, he got answers quickly.

So absorbed was he in learning the craftsmanship of gravities and puzzling over the theory and mathematics of it, that he forgot the games that young warriors play, forgot that they were still hunting him down. They almost found him. After one of his shifts at the motoryard, while he was hurrying toward the shops that served the local factories, his mind occupied with the remembered taste of a vatach snack he was about to buy, he spotted a member of Puller-of-Noses's pride, waiting, watching, seeming to be busy doing nothing while he lounged beside the empty cages outside of the meat shop.

Short-Son backed up, fear driving him to return to his dim little desk on the vast floor of the motoryard. He couldn't think. He couldn't stay here. He couldn't leave. He chose instead to go up the yard maintained a grassland park up there for their kzin workers. It was empty at this hour, but the tall grass soothed him and he had an overview of the shops and the giant freight elevators that rose to the surface. He stayed here under the artificial light, repressing the growlings of his hunger, waiting, waiting until he was sure his enemy was gone. Then he sneaked back home to his father's compound, ashamed.

It didn't matter. He was sent with a crew into space to install new drives in a Hunting Prowler that had recently come in from Kzrrosh on its way to Wunderland to join the armada forming against the monkeys. It was his first time in space. And it was the first time he had ever seen a Hunting Prowler whole. Nothing of the experience was familiar, the deep space armor that constrained him, the sled that was bringing him closer, the bulky Jotok armor that extended his slaves' reach by a full metallic hand.

The spheroidal warship was one of the smaller kzin naval killers. Short-Son's chief slave pointed out a larger battleship in the far distance, a red dot moving in the light of R'hshssira, but their Hunting Prowler, close as it was, seemed far more formidable, studded with weapon pods, sensor booms, control domes, drive field ribs, and boat bays with a shuttle drifting alongside. Still, for the moment it was helpless its motor was gone, the new one still held in the claws of the shuttle, uninstalled.

Hssin rolled beneath them, clotted red, like another giant battleship. It was more than illusion. From Hssin, Wunderland had been conquered. Hssin still attracted warcraft from ever more distant regions of the Patriarchy as the news of the monkeys spread at the unhurried pace of light. The kzin fought their battles that way. Reinforcements arrived for a generation after the battle was won. Sometimes they were needed, sometimes not. In this case the latecoming Conquest Warriors were needed, for the star-swinging monkeys still owned unconquered systems.

Under the stars, maneuvering the giant gravitic motor into this lethal ship of conquest, Short-Son first thought that perhaps he too might be able to join the armada being thrown against Man-sun. His power gave him the illusion that he was a real warrior. It felt very good. With magnetic boots on the hull of the kzin ship, his ship, he could look up and imagine what it would be like to destroy the ships of men.

But the very same day he returned from space, the watcher for the pride of Puller-of-Noses was there, waiting patiently by the meat shop, waiting for him. He had thought that the glory of space had reformed him. He had given the power to travel between the stars to a valiant ship of prey, juggled that monstrous motor in his own army Didn't that give him the power to crush all fear? to become a warrior?

Yet it took only a second sighting of the watcher to trigger all the cowardice he had ever known. It meant that they had found him. Fear! An image of himself that he had brought from space, crumbled.

He was no kzin who could carry a star engine on his shoulder he had been no more than an insect carrying a stone. How to save himself?

Again he retreated back into the motoryard and climbed. It was all he could think of now, waiting them out a second time, hiding. Tomorrow he would think of some better plan. It was a miserable feeling. He stepped out onto the roof into the still tall grass. Why didn't they leave him alone?

Only when the Grass moved did he realize his terrible mistake. First he faced one casual kzin, in the shirt and epaulets favored by the young of Hssin. But there were others; he smelled their exertion. When he edged back toward the door he confronted the brown striped watcher who had followed him. To his right a third kzin rose from the grass. Before he could run, a fourth blocked his way. Two others guarded distant exits. He was trapped by six grinning kzin who wanted his ears.

"Now you'll have to fight," said Puller-of-Noses, already crouched and waiting for his leap.