Man-Kzin Wars XII, Larry Niven [readnow .TXT] 📗

effective, kits breaking away and rushing shrieking into battle. Trader saw the white-striped kit completely out of control, screaming meaninglessly. As they passed he found himself fighting down an atavistic impulse to join them.

A couple more adult kzintoshi had been wounded by the first volley: Rress Landowner, and a Senior-Fixer-of-Computers, here in honor for what must have been immense competence. Hunt Master sent them back to the cars with a peremptory voice that brooked no denial. When the hunt turned to battle his orders compelled even nobles of partial Name. Trader followed him to examine the fallen kz'zeerekti.

They were pale-skinned under the dirt on their bodies, and, for kz'zeerekti, who tended to be spindly and fragile, they were tough, wiry-looking specimens. A male and female. One was dead, killed either by the shots that had brought them down or by the fall. The other was thrashing feebly in terminal "shock," that mysterious alien condition. Hunt Master gave them a cursory glance.

"None of the old-men monkeys I'm after here," he said.

"You know them?" asked Trader.

"Most of the local old stagers, yes. I've even picked up a few words of their language over the years." He bent and placed the sucker of what looked like an electronic book on the mouths of each, holding the dying female still with his extended claws.

"DNA readouts," he explained.

"What do you need them for?" Trader asked with rather elaborate casualness.

"To see if these are part of a local troop or if they've moved here from somewhere else." He dropped the female onto the ground and bent his gaze to the readouts. "Yes, these are locals, related to others I've got recorded here. If a big new kz'zeerekt band moves into the area it's as well to know about it."

"You are very thorough, Skilled Hunt Master."

"Got to know your monkey. I pick up what I can about them when things are quiet. Not like Trrask-Rarr."

"The Full-Named one? How so?"

"He's a Noble coming down in the world. To add to his troubles, the monkeys have raided his lands and destroyed some of his hunt-beasts' pastures. Not a great thing, but he hates them. I mean really hates them."

"Have any in the hunt used telepaths?" That was a delicate question. No fighting kzin liked admitting association with telepaths. They had mainly military uses, and to suggest to a hunter that he accepted aid from such despised creatures might be taken as an insult. Hunt Master, tough, hulking, hard-bitten, and scarred, with a good collection of kzinti as well as simian ears on his belt ring, did not look like the sort of kzintosh one would duel lightly. However, perhaps because of his orders to cooperate with the trader, he evidently decided to take it as a mere professional question.

"No. One picks things up. They shout insults, sometimes the kits shout things back. One follows tracks, spoor, droppings, you pick up some knowledge of their ways. Where they'll hide, where they'll ambush, where they'll dodge and flee, whether they'll use poison or pitfalls, how they'll provoke the kits. Some of the rascals really have personalities of their own. You come to know which are likely to arrow you from behind, which to dig pitfalls, which may stand and fight. But it's Marrrkusarrg-tuss I'm really after."

"Who?"

"Their local leader."

"They have Names?"

In the Hero's Tongue the word "Name" had huge significance, something far beyond "Title" or "Honorific" or "Designation" or "Description." A partial Name signified Nobility, the highest Valor, and Heroism, a limited right to breed. Names had to be earned or won and not even the Patriarch's offspring were given them at birth. A Full Name signified these things with a quantum leap of intensity.

The idea of any non-kzin having a Name was, to a kzin of the old school, a contradiction in terms, though after two wars devastatingly lost to the humans some kzinti attitudes were changing, and not, Trader thought, only among the Wunderkzin—the kdaptist families of Wunderland, like his own. Kzinti had, for purposes of identification and communication, in their first major war against a spacefaring enemy since they overthrew the Jotoki millennia before, come to identify human warships by their own odd names: Missouri, Graf Spee, Ark Royal, Yamato, Blue Baboon, Male Mandrill, and so forth, and individual humans as well: simply to refer to "the monkeyship" or "the dominant monkey" had been unsatisfactory for military intelligence purposes. But on a backwater planet like Kzrral he had not expected the old ways to have altered so.

"They give themselves names. To tell one another apart, I suppose, since they cannot smell and their sight and hearing are poor," Hunt Master said. "It seems the easiest thing to do. Since they attach no honor to them there is no dishonor in us using them."

So even in these circumstances they are subverting your culture a little, Trader thought.

He left the bodies to the trophy-takers and they hurried on to follow the hunt on foot. In the dark trees ahead and above them was a confusion of cries. Another young kzin fell not far away, fangs and claws tearing at a monkey that in turn still slashed with a knife that looked the size of a wtsai. There was also a commotion on the ground under the dark bushes away to the left. Trader, night-eyed, saw three young kzinti struggling on the ground with the shapes of Jotoki. Hunt Master must have seen it too, but he affected not to notice. Young kzinti caught and killed—or were killed by—their own prey. Trrask-Rarr was dismembering another simian.

"They're certainly tool-users," said Trader.

"Oh yes, there's even a lot of standardization in their gear." They crossed to the combatants, who had fallen silent.

"I'd like to get one of those knives of theirs. I will gladly part with a piece of gold."

"Take that one, then." He gestured at the two still forms of kzin and simian on the ground, locked together in death. "Neither of them will be needing it again. Two pieces of gold."

"Indeed, it does