Man-Kzin Wars XIV (4 page)

“Quite a paragon of felinoid virtue, in fact!”
The sneer would play well with a big part of the audience
, the senator thought. “Perhaps you’d like to remind your audience of his family connections, also! And the humans his sire sent to the public hunts!”

Stan the Man’s body language projected confidence and relaxation. It was a tool of his trade that he he’d worked on for a long time, and modern fabrics dealt with the sweat. “Yes, it is true that Chuut-Riit was his sire. Personally, I don’t think that that should be held against him in this context. Quite the reverse, if anything: the values of the high kzin nobility may differ from ours in many ways, but their sense of honor is almost physically real. Unless there is a very strong reason for supposing otherwise, I think it likely that he is telling the truth.”

“High nobility . . . Assuming what you say is true, the kzin still fighting us in space—and many of those who have grudgingly accepted a peace with us here on Wunderland—regard him as a quisling.”

“Sometimes it takes courage to accept the name of quisling. Vaemar has mixed with humans—on equal terms—since he was a kit . . . But tell me, Senator, why are you so hostile to Vaemar-Ritt?”

“Apart from the fact that the idea of quislings—of any species—disgusts me, I am hostile to all kzin—I suppose it is no longer politically correct to call them
ratcats
. It you want a reason, doesn’t my record in the Resistance speak for itself? Of my guerrilla group, only I and one other survived to see the Liberation. I am a lawmaker and a law-abiding citizen, but I don’t mind telling you and the people of Wunderland that I have some sympathy for the exterminationist position. Wipe them out while we still have a chance! Before they get the hyperdrive!”
Careful
, he thought,
don’t go overboard here.
“Or so many say.” He caught himself up quickly. “I’m not saying that is exactly how I feel, I appreciate the necessity for peace, but I do understand how the exterminationists feel.”

Stan fired back. “But if we attack the surrendered kzinti here, the war in space will have no chance of a settlement. Surely it would mean a fight to the finish, with one race or the other annihilated—and they might very well be the ones doing the annhilating. The Kzin Empire is big. We don’t even know its full size. There is no guarantee we would win, hyperdrive or not.”

“Exactly, Stan. That is why I have used my influence, when I can, to try to restrain the exterminationists as a movement. We must have peace with the kzin of this planet at least, but let it be a firm and watchful peace. Anyway,” he continued, “although I am opposed to this expedition, if I should be overridden by the lower house, I intend to accompany it personally. I will pay my own expenses, and will be able to ensure that there is no more wastage than necessary.”

“Don’t you have to be invited?” Stan asked quizzically.

“Professor Rykerman and his wife will no doubt be organizing it, and they are old colleagues of mine, both politically since Liberation, albeit on opposing sides, and before that in the Resistance, though we were in different groups. I shall have no trouble arranging it with them.”

Senator von Höhenheim was thinking he had diverted the interview satisfactorily, when Stan the Man returned to the attack like a barracuda.

“And now, we come back to Vaemar-Riit. I talked to him earlier today, and here is what he said.”

Stan the Man turned to a screen, which took up most of a wall, and still showed Vaemar at reduced size. The young kzin was standing in the garden of his palace, and Stan, seen from the back, held up a microphone.

“Lord Vaemar, I gather you have seen the video we showed last week of the wreck of the
Valiant
?”

“Yes, I saw it nearly two weeks ago.” The kzin was a long way from the microphone, but his voice was unmistakably clear.

“How come you saw it before we broadcast it?” Stan appeared miffed.

“The two humans who took it came to see me and showed it to me.”

“Why did they show it to you?”

To those who knew how to tell, Vaemar looked slightly uncomfortable. “They wanted to know if I thought it should be made public out of fear that it might damage man-kzin relations.”

“And what did you say?” Stan asked.

“I told them that complete openness between us is the only basis for the trust both species need if we are to live together on this world,” Vaemar told him reluctantly.
It was true enough,
he told himself
, but it sounded too good and virtuous
. Kzin didn’t like feeling virtuous. It tended to go with self-deception, a very bad habit for a warrior.

“So, you told them to go ahead and give it to the media?” Stan asked.

“I take it that they would want to sell it to the highest bidder, not give it,” Vaemar explained. Stan changed the subject hurriedly.

“It was obviously important for us to know about this tragedy, and the kids deserved some sort of reward for their enterprise. And did you think it was likely that the
Valiant
was shot down by a kzin warship?”

“It was the simplest explanation, of course, but it was a little puzzling that it had got so close. Most of the Earth ships trying to run the blockade were detected way out in space. There were few kzin resources so close to the planet beyond aircraft and satellite defense. But I now know that it was not a kzin satellite or aircraft. I have had the surviving records checked, and they show no sign of any strike from space defenses at a spacecraft at that time.”

“Then what could it have been that brought it down?”

Vaemar looked thoughtful. “The most likely explanation is that it was wounded but not destroyed out in space. Since we do not know exactly when the
Valiant
crashed, we cannot say with confidence that this did not happen. A kzin commander might have thought he had destroyed a vessel that he had only injured. However, that particular error seems to have been more common in human than in kzin record-keeping. But there were not many blockade runners at around that time. A close examination of the ship and its log would go some way to resolving the matter. There would be records of when it left Sol System, but they would only give an estimated time of arrival. It might have slowed or been diverted for some reason.

“There were countless minor skirmishes in space of which no records were kept. One of my earliest memories is of my Honored Sire’s rage when the
Man’s Bone-Shredder
disappeared. There were many such. Our capital ships travelled in squadrons—’prides’—as we called them, or fleets, but there were a variety of smaller ships travelling alone on innumerable tasks. Perhaps one met the
Valiant
, though I think that is unlikely.”

“Why, sir?”

“Space is too big to make chance encounters likely. Especially with modern detection technology.”

“Indeed. Yet they have happened. Especially near planets. And what other possibilities are there?”

“There is always the possibility of a freak accident. Even a meteor impact, for instance. Although that would seem most improbable given modern meteor-defenses. But the Wunderland System is cluttered with junk, of course. And again, an examination of the wreck might provide evidence on this point.”

“You are a qualified space pilot. Is there any other explanation that you can think of?”

Vaemar thought hard, but he couldn’t see any way to avoid this.

“There is the possibility that the KzinDiener fired missiles at it. There was a group of very enthusiastic collaborators who had some weaponry. They were not under very strict control; they had been passed as loyal by telepaths. Eventually their armaments would have had to be replaced, and the kzin commander would have found out that missiles had been launched. The missiles would have been numbered, of course, but if this happened just before the truce, then it might have been overlooked. It would not have had a high priority by then.”

“You mean it might have been attacked by human beings working for the kzin?” Stan sounded aghast at the thought. Today more or less the entire human population claimed to have been in the Resistance at one level or another. Known collaborators, at least the prominent ones, were either dead or hunted outlaws. Officially there was a general amnesty and reconciliation, but a number of people had commited suicide in some very strange ways, sometimes stabbing themselves in the back on dark nights, or shooting themselves in the head several times. Stan, who had been a genuine member of the Resistance, although not at any high level, had congratulated (on prime time television) the corpses who had recognized the error of their ways and atoned for their treachery to humanity with such remarkable dedication and persistence. Sniffing out collaborators and naming them was good television. Unlike kzin, most human beings enjoy feeling virtuous.

“It is not something I can rule out,” Vaemar told him politely. Although he felt more comfortable with humans than many kzin did, he did not enjoy television interviews. However, some kzin was going to have to do it, and anybody else might make an even worse mess of it than he would. Besides, actually answering the questions, and doing so truthfully, seemed to cause the interviewers such consternation and surprise that it had its entertaining side. Perhaps the custom would spread to human ‘politicians.’ There were some kzin on Wunderland who would lose no opportunity in their considerable repertoire of psychological tricks to discomfort humans. Vaemar, who genuinely desired peace between the two species and got on well with his human friends, was not like that, but even he found it impossible to pass up the temptation to tweak the monkeys’ tails at times.

“Thank you, Lord Vaemar, I’m very grateful for the kzin perspective.” Stan had finished. He had cut the bit where Vaemar had explained that he wasn’t a Lord exactly, and that as far as kzin were concerned, they weren’t so extensively equipped with herd genes as human beings, so there would always be in any group of kzin at least as many opinions as there were kzinti. Sometimes more than twice as many.

The screen blanked out and Stan turned back to the Senator who was projecting a slightly bored indifference. Over the years von Höhenheim had worked as hard on his mannerisms as Stan had on his.

“Comments, Senator?”

“I don’t see anything much there. You would expect the kzin to try to shift the blame onto humans. Oh, he was subtle, I’ll give Vaemar that. He didn’t offer it as his first guess, it was his third, but he left the inference there for your viewers.”

“Crap, Senator. I had to drag it out of him. And if he’d wanted to exonerate the kzin, why did he tell the kids to publish and be damned?”

“Because he knew it would get out sooner or later. Better to try to establish that he was in favor of it being made public than that he had tried to suppress it.” The senator looked smug.

“Then why were
you
trying to suppress it? Not the video, that’s out there, but the examination to see what
did
down the
Valiant
?”

The senator sighed. “Nothing of the kind. I have said that we need to know the truth and we will find it. I give you my word on that. I think, though, that this is ancient history. The government is always anxious to pursue the truth. But what difference could it make these days? The old bad days of private revenge are over anyway, even if, to take the most implausible case, human deviants were involved. And I simply cannot believe that many human beings would have aided the enemy in this fashion. Oh, some did, no doubt, some malcontents, traitors. And any who still live must surely be ashamed of themselves.” Von Höhenheim put on his stateman’s face.

“The utter shame and disgrace of collaborating is now obvious to everyone. I am sure your viewers feel that as strongly as you or I do,” he went on smoothly. “But we need to move on, to strive for reconciliation with all. Some may well have collaborated to protect their families. Some may have believed, in a twisted way, that they were doing humanity a service—that they or their children might eventually rise to positions of authority or influence within the Patriarchy.”

“But they would have seen what happened to the Jotok—a once proud and civilized species, reduced to the kzins’ slaves and food animals,” Stan objected.

“I did not say that I agreed with such an attitude, or that it was plausible, only that it may have existed. We are reconciled with our
quondam
conquerors, as you have shown by interviewing a kzin tonight. We have forgiven them. We are striving to extend the hand of friendship even to these ferocious aliens. And we should extend it also to those lost souls who strayed under the occupation and gave aid to the enemy.”

“It’s not the hand of friendship I’ll be extending if I find a human traitor who shot down a human ship to cozy up to the kzin rulers,” Stan told him. “It would be a quite different hand, believe me. That wasn’t just shameful or disgraceful, though it was that too. Not exactly on the order of some wretch in the
Ordungspolitzei
issuing a traffic violation notice on behalf of the collabo Government! Treason to humanity is a bit closer, don’t you think?”

Without waiting for an answer, Stan turned to the camera and started his closing spiel. “This is Stan the Man, Stan Adler here, on the topic of who shot down the
Valiant.
Was it a legitimate kzin strike, a part of the war, or something much worse? Was it an act of treachery by human collaborators trying to ingratiate themselves with their overlords? Tonight you’ve seen one of the kzin, a student, not an overlord, and only born towards the end of the war, who has shown himself friendly to man. We of Wunderland also know that, however cruel and merciless they may be, the kzin despise liars and seldom if ever lie themselves. And you’ve seen Senator von Höhenheim, who doesn’t want us to find the truth any time soon. You make up your own minds as to which of them you’d rather have on your side in a fight, which one you’d trust. Good night.”

“That bastard knows something. He’d not have dared speak to me that way if he didn’t.” The senator was white with rage. Alois Grün sat down without permission. They were alone in the senator’s office, a suitably large room with a rich carpet and wood panelling enriched by gold and crimson swirls, in a suite of rooms high above the streets of Munchen, spread out like a plan below. Low gravity encouraged high building, but the war had flattened much. Lights moved at the park near the spaceport, where acres of hulked kzin warships were gradually being demolished. It was night, but the sky was lit by the vast jewel of Alpha Centauri B, and the sliding points of light that were natural and artificial satellites.