Man-Kzin Wars XIII-ARC (3 page)

“Some might manage to learn it,” John Wayne went on, “but only if they want to. And I doubt if anyone would. There’s always the odd nutty eccentric of course, but not many that odd. Or that nutty. Still, we do hope you’ll come soon and talk it over with us. Or perhaps we shall come to see you, in person, so to speak. Yes, we’ll visit tomorrow sometime, if that’s alright with you, Coco?”

Coco nodded, looking slightly bored, though equipped with very little by way of facial expression to manage it with.

“Nutty” . . . that seemed to have multiple meanings. Captain knew what nuts were—seed-pods of certain vegetable matter. He did not know he was being offered a fleeting clue to many things that would bewilder him.

“There you are then, we’ll drop in tomorrow.” John Wayne waved nonchalantly at the kzinti. “Bye-bye for now.” And the picture vanished.

* * *

“What do they mean
drop in
?” the captain asked Alien Technologies and the rest of the Bridge Team.

“I interpret it as meaning that they will appear on
Prowler
some time within an eight of hours. Some sort of teleporting by the sound of it. They said ‘tomorrow,’ and that would seem to mean a day away. Their planet, like their sun, rotates very quickly.”

“Then we must be ready for them. They clearly have some advanced technology, but they may not be expecting an attack. I, of course, shall lead my Heroes. Follow me with whatever weapons we can use without damage to the ship. Technology, Weapons, you will prepare every weapon we have that might be useful in conquering them. Oh, and make sure Telepath is awake. It might get us useful information from their minds.”

Strategist was not consulted. He was used to that. He had long ago concluded that his captain, although undoubtedly brave and aggressive, was not very bright. Telepath might, of course, detect that thought; but Telepath was intelligent enough to work out that Strategist would know that he might. Simply doing nothing made a certain kind of alliance there. Alliances were something which had occasioned Strategist a good deal of thought. They did not come naturally to the kzinti, for whom the largest natural group was the pride, and packing hundreds of them into a spaceship caused stress. Clans were, of course, much larger than prides, but essentially an alliance of prides. Alliances of individuals was a radical idea. Exploring new and radical ideas was a part of how Strategist saw his job description.

* * *

Far-Ranging Prowler
was heading for Altair One under the full thrust of its gravity-motor. Coco and John Wayne appeared on the bridge as promised the following day. They were not images on a screen, but three-dimensional and apparently solid, and they glanced around with keen interest, looking fearlessly into the eyes of the captain and each of the bridge team. It would have been considered the most appalling insolence in any species, including the kzin. Captain held his instinctive reaction in check.

“Captain,” John Wayne said, “I understand you mean to land on our world. We call it Glot, by the way. At least, that’s as close as we can get in your spoken language.”

“You understand correctly,” Captain told him grimly. With remarkable self-control, not to mention an unadmitted hint of caution, he had decided that he would not scream and leap at them just yet.

“Well, we’ve given the matter a certain amount of thought, and this is really rather embarrassing, but, frankly, we don’t feel a meeting would be a good idea. We had hoped for an exchange of ideas, but you don’t seem to have many. Of all the possible relationships we might establish in principle, you don’t seem to get beyond eating us or enslaving us. Neither of which, after extended reflection, look to be a whole lot of fun. And if you tried your ideas, you might damage us. Or, much more likely, we might have to damage you. So we have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the best thing for you to do is to copulate off.”

Captain, not for the first time when dealing with the Dilillipsan, was rendered speechless. Telepath, unable to stop himself, howled in terror.

“We shall land, whatever the results of your
thinking
,” the captain told them contemptuously. “And then I shall hunt you down and rip your entrails out with my bare claws.”

Coco and John Wayne looked at each other.

“Oh, you won’t find us, you know,” John Wayne told him brightly. “We shall simply move to a different time. Our religious studies require us to do a certain amount of time-travelling, so we shall just all move somewhen else. A few thousand years in the past should do it. That will avoid unpleasant complications all round.”

Coco gave him an odd look but didn’t speak.

“You . . . travel . . . in . . . time?” Captain ground out the words with difficulty.

“Yes, just like Rod Taylor. Don’t you? I thought everybody did it. Even the humans do it.”

Had Captain thought to pursue what the Dilillipsan meant by
humans
, subsequent history might have been very different. He was, however, too preoccupied with this matter of insolent slaves, an idea comparable to his earlier thoughts on insolent food.

“How?” He demanded.

“Well, that would be rather difficult to explain,” replied John Wayne, cheerfully. “In any event, I don’t think your primitive physics has the terminology to express it.”

Many things in the Heroes’ Tongue are insults, but “primitive” is generally regarded as a compliment. It implies connection with the
sthondat
-defeating progenitors of Old Kzin.

“You will reveal it under torture,” Captain told him, a little calmed by the compliment.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” John Wayne told him. “You see, we won’t be around.”

They disappeared. The captain’s scream and leap ended in empty air and he landed on the deck in a somewhat less than dignified manner. He surveyed his officers, hoping one of them would laugh. None did, and they turned to preparations for the landing.

* * *

Down on Altair One, Coco and John Wayne were discussing their first contact. “You don’t think they are semi-autonomous avatars of something with genuine intelligence do you? Sort of avatars made of meat?” Coco asked. John Wayne thought about it.

“We made that mistake with the human beings for a long time. No, I think they are more like wasps. There is a sort of hive-mind which is extremely stupid, and the individuals are a bit brighter. Brighter than the hive-mind that is. Brighter even than wasps. The hive-mind directs them to go out in spaceships and make slaves of other species and also to make their young. Using sex I expect, just like the human beings.”

They both laughed boisterously at the thought. There’s nothing quite as funny as a pornographic movie made by a totally different species. Coco and John Wayne had watched dozens of human porno-flicks, or what they thought were porno-flicks, before the joke had begun to pall. Still, they liked straight comedy best.
Dunkirk
had been particularly hilarious. (The moment when the Stukas dived on the artillery battery was positively convulsive. They watched it again and again.)

“No, seriously, if their hive-mind wants them to run around to different planets and eat whatever they can find palatable and enslave everything intelligent, I can’t believe that they have much to offer us.” Coco was thoughtful. “And I am sure you were right in thinking that they assumed our avatars were like them. Sort of autonomous and intelligent on their own.”

“Yes, it’s a considerable disappointment,” John Wayne admitted. “But perhaps we should have given them a chance. They might be prepared to trade. Human beings do it quite a lot, with each other.”

“I don’t remember Shere Khan trading in
The Jungle Book
,” Coco said. “Maybe tigers don’t. These certainly didn’t give any sign of it.”

“These tiger folk can’t have met human beings yet,” John Wayne said reflectively. “But it won’t be long before they detect their television signals. I wonder what will happen then.”

“I suspect the human beings won’t much want to be eaten either. And probably they won’t want to be enslaved. It will be interesting to find out, there could be some really complicated arguments for both sides,” Coco said, recalling
Spartacus
. “Possibly involving those gun and bomb things the human beings used with each other. I never thought that showed much feeling for logic, you know.”

“Their hive-mind is too stupid for logic. So is that of the tiger people, I am afraid. Not the one on the spaceship, anyway. At least there are some signs the human one has developed a bit recently. But there’s a good chance that the tiger folk will be the same as the human beings used to be. And if one side uses logic and reason and the other side uses guns and bombs, it’s not altogether clear that the logic will win. Which makes being illogical quite logical really.”

“I don’t expect it will work out that way,” John Wayne objected. “If the tiger folk look like winning with guns and bombs, the human beings might use them back. They were pretty good at killing each other before they saw sense. The tiger folk may need a bit of guns and bombs argument before they see that logic is a lot cheaper. I don’t recall Shere Khan ever used a gun . . . These might be different, of course.”

“I don’t think the human beings have come to logic for logical reasons. They seem to have got there by telling each other lies. They’ve rewritten their history so as to make people think that they can’t use guns and bombs without being intensely bad mannered. It’s not much of an argument. Better than guns and bombs perhaps, but not really convincing.”

“True,” John Wayne admitted. “You know these lies are fascinating. It’s all a matter of bandwidth. The lower the bandwidth, the easier it is. You’d think evolution would make it harder to get away with it.”

“I expect it does. Give them time. Just a few of our lifetimes and they’ll have evolved enough to see the awful waste involved.”

“In the meanwhile, I must say I could get to really enjoy it . . .”

When, like the Dilillipsans you have no natural enemies on your planet, and when there are certain problems with movement once you have matured, communication becomes very important. So does fun. They worked overnight preparing a city for the kzinti.

A new star shone in the sky that night:
Far-Ranging Prowler
descending on chemical rockets. Before long the details of the city became visible from the kzin ship, but they were puzzling. Rocking with laughter, the Dilillipsans reabsorbed most of their avatars. All of them, planet wide. Unlike human beings and the kzinti, they didn’t have to be close to each other, or rely on mobile phones to pass the word around. They warned their children not to move for the next few days, explaining that it was a matter of life or death.

The children wanted to know the details of course, and took some convincing, but the arguments were flawless and backed up by comprehensive records. The children would watch carefully and see for themselves. They weren’t big on trust, but the hypotheses had high
a priori
credibility.

* * *

Captain led his Heroes in the landing, of course. They descended on a number of well-armed gravity-sleds, and spread out on foot, weapons at the ready. They had discovered only one city on the entire planet, which seemed strange, particularly as it was not a very big one. The captain had landed close to the city, which was where the action might be expected, others had landed further afield to find out if there were outposts of single homes scattered about hidden by the trees, of which there were a lot.

Captain recalled the conquest of Chunquen. Rich industrial cities, bordered by wide blue seas. The locals had been feeling proud of themselves because, despite the fighting between the sexes, they had just sent a rocket to the nearest of their moons. Telepath had translated their excited and boastful broadcasts to one another.
Far-Ranging Prowler
had been scout for a squadron of dreadnaughts then.

Gutting Claw
and the sibling dreadnaughts,
Spine-Cruncher
,
Sthondat’s Leg-Bone Crusher Leaving it Crippled
and
Careless Blood-Spiller
had landed infantry and put a stop to their boasting.

They had been passing over the seas to the next continent when the Chunquen missiles rose from their undersea ships
Spine-Cruncher
,
Crusher
and
Careless Blood-Spiller
had closed to destroy the primitive devices. Another missile was detected heading toward the main encampment which the kzinti had established on the first continent. The kzinti, having only encountered peaceful space-faring races in the Eternal Hunt up the Spiral Arm, had had little experience of war.

Captain had been at a conference aboard
Gutting Claw
at the time, dealing with the agreeable subjects of dividing up land, loot, and slaves, and the recommendations for the award of Names to appropriate Heroes, and he remembered Feared Greiff-Admiral’s puzzlement that the enemy had fired only one missile rather than a volley at each of the ships and at the kzin ground installation.

The reason had occurred to Greiff-Admiral and to Captain simultaneously. Captain remembered leaping to the com-link, screaming to his ship to boost out of orbit.
Gutting Claw
did the same. It was too late for the other ships and the ground-troops. When the electromagnetic pulses from the thermonuclear explosions cleared, three kzinti dreadnaughts and several thousand Heroes had been converted to unstable isotopes, their very atoms dying. Greiff-Admiral himself had gone to the arena over that blunder, when the Supreme Council of Lords heard about it, and Feared Zrarr-Admiral had taken his place. Captain had sometimes thought that had he been in Feared Greiff-Admiral’s fur he would have gathered together what remained of his fleet and headed beyond the frontiers of the Patriarchy; but presumably, when one was an Admiral, honor prohibited such a course.

It was, the episode had taught him, unwise to assume anything about a new world, or to take even an apparently easy Conquest for granted.

Then he wondered if these new aliens could overhear his unspoken thoughts. Perhaps they were telepathic. The Ancients had had telepathy, as they, apparently, had used faster-than-light travel. Some students had speculated on a possible connection between the Slaver power and the Telepathic ability which kzinti possessed to a greater or lesser degree, even though the two species were not contemporaries by billions of years.