Man-Kzin Wars XIV (26 page)

Lucky Telepath. The burning wall collapsed on them. He turned and stared at me. There was no one else in sight alive. I knew what he was thinking, and he knew I knew: The human firemen were all working down in the shelter. I was the only witness to his negligence. He began to raise one arm. I reached, as furtively as I could, for my flashlight, a pea-shooter wielded by a cripple against a saber-tooth. Then he lowered his arm. “A bad accident,” he said.

I agreed. “Not even the usual suspects to round up,” he continued. I started laughing hysterically.

I am no telepath, but even I picked up the wave of Telepath’s relief and joy. Krar-Skrei was dead.

Since the course was nearly completed, the first class of Chuut-Riit’s human experts was pronounced graduated, and its members posted to the fleet and elsewhere. That solved a problem for me. I presented them all with diplomas, written on parchment made of the finest human skin, each illustrated by a picture of a Hero standing rampant atop a pile of slain simians.

I felt as if my teaching had been a furlough in the cool First Circle of Hell, but that I could not take any more teaching, and contemplated escaping into the eastern mountains before the next class, which would presumably also include a telepath with a watching brief. Perhaps the Resistance would have me in spite of my arm. They must be running very short of personnel. Perhaps I could even survive on my own. If not, so be it.

But that was to be the only one of Chuut-Riit’s human classes. In quick succession, Chuut-Riit was killed as a result of techno-sabotage, civil war broke out between the followers of Traat-Admiral and Ktrodni-Stkaa, and the UNSN Hyperdrive Armada arrived. The sky was suddenly filled with fighters, and humans in battle-armor descending with lift-belts.

Escaping to the wild was not necessary. The kzin lost interest in me and I was able to keep alive, cowering with a few other academics in a sub-basement while the battle raged above us. Since then I have seen some rediscovered film of the fall of Berlin in 1945 (our civics classes had become more realistic by then). It was like that, only worse. Once a lost kzin kitten blundered down among us, and, moved by some impulse I still do not understand, I took him up into the street and found a kzin warrior and handed him over—the only really brave thing I have ever done. The kitten, I remember, had a curious red patch on the fur of its chest, and specially elaborate ear-tattoos, and the kzin who received it prostrated himself before it, before snatching it up and vanishing with it into the smoke.

The fighting moved on. I talked my way past the vengeful humans, and fortunately, when he was recovered, my old colleague Nils Rykermann spoke up for me. There was no telepath this time to defend me, and I had some hairy moments—my former head of department was beheaded, and his deputy taken to Munchen Zoo and fed to the kzinretti—but once again my arm served as an excuse, and perhaps I was lucky in the composition of the panel I faced. I found the firemen who had helped Telepath and me, and expended my credit, such as it was, pleading for them, pointing to the lives they had saved in the Ramscoop Raid.

Had von Kleist and Thompson survived, the Resistance would have made short work of them, I mused—dirty
KzinDiener
. At least I, heart in my mouth, had occasionally towards the end left food parcels where the Resistance
might
find them. It wasn’t much, but it had, just, passed under the telepath’s radar, and some humans remembered it.

Liberated Wunderland, 2420

THERE WAS PLENTY
for all of us to do in the months that followed. The kzin who remained on Wunderland were no longer our dreaded conquerors. Many of those who remained had formed some sort of relationship with humans. There was modern medicine available again, and my arm was repaired.

I was walking back to my apartment one evening when a voice hailed me out of the shadows of an alley: “Professor!”

Not a voice produced from a human voice-box. I spun round. A dark shape, too big for a man, but small for a kzin. Well, we were officially at peace on Wunderland now, and I knew it was no use running from a kzin—many had tried. I waited until it emerged into the bright light of the main street.

It was tTelepath. He looked bad, but telepaths usually did. He stumbled as he walked, and almost fell at my feet.

Did I owe him anything? Thinking it over, I decided that perhaps I did. He could have made my life a lot more uncomfortable, and a lot shorter, if he had tried. I remembered the incident of the meat, the time in the tank, and the risk he rook letting me live at the end. And, well, even in this case, I felt as a teacher I owed a former student something. I called up an aircar and, lifting him with considerable difficulty (lifting a normal male kzin would have been out of the question, but my repaired arm with its metal bones was now stronger than a natural one), carried him home.

I had thought he was starving, but he appeared no more emaciated than before. A large bowl of hot milk and a couple of raw chops and sausages did seem to do him good.

“Remember the meat?” he asked me. Like all telepaths, his command of the language was perfect, though his accent was strange. What was wrong with him, I learned as he talked, was that he was suffering from a near-terminal case of uselessness. He was shunned by other kzin, humans fled from him. ARM had assessed him, like all telepaths they had captured, and found him so nearly burnt-out as not to be worth recruiting. He was in a kind of passive state, which was a recognized clinical symptom indicating that the end was near. Like practically all telepaths, the drug had left him a wreck, and he had not been physically able to handle the effects of sudden, brutal, total withdrawal, though mentally he seemed clear enough.

I called Leonie Rykermann, who had been a student at the University at the time of the invasion. Kept young with unlimited geriatric drugs, she and her husband, Nils, had been among the most respected of the Resistance leaders, and were now political powers. Further, like a surprising number of other Resistance leaders, she got on well with kzin and was running an orphanage for some of the many parentless kzin kittens, as well as human children, on the planet. She came and spoke to the telepath for a time. I gathered she could find him a job at the orphanage, where he might feel useful.

As they were preparing to leave, he asked me: “Do you remember the poem, ‘Spanish Waters,’ that Herr von Kleist used to say for us?” I didn’t, but I remembered von Kleist had been interested in sea stories. He piped up:

I‘m the last alive that knows it, all the rest have gone their ways.

Killed, or died, or come to anchor in the old Mulatas Cays

And I go singing, fiddling, old and starved and in despair,

And I know where all that gold is hid, if only I were there . . .

“But,” he went on, “I don’t know of much gold.”

Liberated Wunderland, 2425

FIVE YEARS OR MORE PASSED
before I saw him again. The UNSN had taken the telepaths in hand and were well on the way to developing nondestructive drugs for them. Apparently the kzin Patriarchy had always known that the
sthondat
lymph-derived drug burned out the telepaths’ brains, leaving them not merely mindless, but, unless someone mercifully euthanized them, in a state of endless, screaming horror. Under the Patriarch, they were generally euthanized, not from mercy, but merely to stop the noise and because they were now useless (we heard that better drugs were produced in small quantities on Kzin and reserved for the Patriarch’s own telepaths, the highest masters of the art, who were treated as nobles in their own right). The Patriarchy needed the telepaths, but feared them for many reasons. The solution they had arrived at resulted in short, down-trodden neurotic lives for them.

Even with the incongruous wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses, giving him an appearance something like a tiger that had eaten an old-time gangster, he was looking a great deal better. In fact, apart from his small size, he looked like a healthy kzin. Indeed, I did not recognize him at first. He was leading a well-grown kit with buttons on its claws. One of the orphans, I guessed. I remarked that I was pleased to see him looking so well.

“It is the new drugs, the human drugs,” he said. “I am under a life-debt to you and your kind, Professor.”

“If that is so, I am under one to you,” I told him. “Let us say the scales balance.”

“Have you got a few moments?” he asked me. “There is something I would share with you.”

The
Lindenbaum
café was not far away. It had
footch
couches for kzin now. I wondered what the prewar students would have made of it. Not a good idea to think that way. It raised too many ghosts.

“As a matter of fact, it was to see you that I came here,” he said. “You remember Herr von Kleist?”

“Yes.” I nearly said “Of course,” but one who is powerfully conditioned never says anything that might be interpreted as rudeness to a kzin, even a small and apparently friendly one. Feeble telepath or not, he could have dismantled a tiger without undue trouble.

“And Herr Thompson?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Would you be interested in knowing why they died? And Herr Morris?”

“Certainly. I have often wondered.”

“Herr Thompson, before he died, prepared a package,” he said. “It was star-locked.”

That meant it could only be opened when the stars had moved to a certain position in the sky. Generally an attempt to force it resulted in the destruction of its contents. The kzinti had got the technology, like many others, from one of the scientific races they had conquered in the past. They had invented very little of their own.

“He gave it to you?”

“No indeed, to another monk
. . .
human. He, in turn, fled Munchen to join the Resistance and left it with a third human, what you call an ‘attorney.’ I remember you explaining those terms to us.”

“Yes.”

“I could follow all this easily enough. I had read Herr Thompson’s mind, and from that I read the minds of the other human and the attorney.”

“Did you tell the Patriarch’s authorities?”

“No.”

“May I ask why?” I would not have dared put such a question, save that I felt he was inviting it.

“What have they ever done for me, except make me a wreck and rob me of my strength and pride? But I bided my time. When the Ramscoop Raid came, the attorney’s offices were in one of many buildings reduced to rubble. I let Herr Morris wreak part of my vengeance for me. He did more than I expected. Much later, after I was released from the assessment camp, after I had seen you, I found the package—I had read the attorney’s mind and knew where it was stored. He was dead and had no further use for it. I took it and kept it.

“I did not know how long it would be before the star-lock allowed the package to be opened—centuries, perhaps. At last I had an idea, a very simple one, which the ingenious beings who invented the star-lock could not have anticipated, though perhaps Herr Thompson should have. I took it to the planetarium.”

“As simple as that!”

“As simple as that. I opened it. It contained, as I had suspected, a message, which I read. By then, the kzin were overthrown on this planet. I kept it for some time, unsure what to do with it. Recently I decided to give it to you . . .

“Thank you.”

“I had thought it might contain a treasure, or the guide to one. I warn you, it does not.”

There must be something about humans and locked boxes. I felt an absurd sense of disappointment.

He was wearing a garment over his fur like a vest with pockets—purely utility. From one of these he produced some sheets of paper.

“This is what it contained,” he said

I read:

T
here is not much time to explain. I wish it to be known, by my descendants at least, that I am not a maniacal killer. And I am not a traitor. I have killed von Kleist for the benefit of the human race. Now I must kill myself, to avoid the Telepath’s probing and Kzin torture, both of which would reveal the truth and make what I have done pointless. By the time this is opened it should not matter. Things will have been settled one way or another. I hope it will allow my name to be restored.

I tried to subvert the Kzin with stories of human prowess.

I begged von Kleist to see reason, but he dug in his heels through sheer stubbornness. He was determined to put
Moby Dick
on the kzin reading list. An academic dedicated to his studies.

He claimed, when I pressed him, it would give them a better understanding of human courage and determination. I told him that many of them might have trouble telling fact from fiction, but it made no impression. He called it a great classic.

Yes, a great classic that might destroy us all. For what is its message, to a kzin reader? That the whale wins in the end, in spite of all Ahab’s effort and sacrifice. THAT HUMANS CAN BE DEFEATED, THAT HUMAN BRAVERY AND DETERMINATION ARE NOT ENOUGH FOR SUCCESS, that we are but monkeys that batter our lives away in a futile quest for vengeance upon a brainless fish. And the fish wins. Its message of human despair and nihilism would work its way through the kzin fleet. It would hearten the enemy.

That is what, even now, the von Kleists will never understand. For them, ideas and consequences exist in different universes. The power of words to create or destroy. I suggested Churchill’s wartime speeches. He said they were not literature, which it was his job to teach. He would have spread poison
t
hrough the Patriarch’s weapons, made the death of every human who had died fighting the kzin seem as meaningless as Ahab’s, for the sake of teaching literature. If they understood it was fiction, that would be worse, for the very knowledge that a human would write such a fiction would increase their contempt for the human race, and their confidence in themselves.

My motive has been to help the human race survive. Care for my family.

I dialed my flashlight to high power and focused it on the paper. As it crumbled to ashes I asked: “Do you know what happened to his family?”