Man-Kzin Wars XI, Hal Colbatch [story books to read .txt] 📗

rest of his pride after a successful kz'eerkti-hunt on Homeworld." Vaemar quoted:

"Oh, Race of Heroes, have a care.

Tree-swinging monkeys are not all

That wait. Pride may precede a fall

When under distant stars you fare.

"Your claws pull down each alien race.

Each is your prey, and our God's laws

Deliver them into your jaws.

So thought the Jotok in your place . . .

"But of course you know how hard it is to preserve the nuances when translating rhyme into rhyme . . . some think there is a hint of an emotion in that stanza which we have no word for, but which has a human name . . ." His voice trailed off. The priesthood, then as now, had not liked prophets outside their own prides, and a prophet whose Full Name had included any suffix other than Riit would not have got away with it. Unspoken, another verse from the sage's ancient chant, recently resurrected by a few Conservors of the Ancestral Past, ran through his mind:

Death then for many. For some few

Another, stranger fate will be:

Tree-swingers who have left the tree

Will turn kzinti into something new . . .

"Are you happy, Vaemar?" Anne asked suddenly. "I mean, with your life?"

"Happy? I don't perhaps quite understand . . . to a kzin warrior of the old school the question would hardly make sense. Heroism and Conquest are—were—what were meant to matter, not happiness. Except, perhaps, a noble death in battle, a worship-shrine where your descendents might honor your bones, honor and esteem during your life as well, your Heroism recognized and wide estates and hunting territories and of course a large harem siezed while you lived . . . I had a privileged background originally, you know, which would have made things easier in some ways if not in others. I suppose happiness entered into it incidentally. I must reflect on that."

"Does the question make sense to you?"

"I'm not sure . . . I have enjoyed much of my life so far . . . hunting with Honored Step-Sire Raargh Hero, the mental achievements of my studies . . . collecting a few ears. Many things—university, our projects in the caves, smelling the hunter's winds, even writing for the review, even watching the swamp-creatures here as a kind of student of life, not just as a hunter after sport or prey . . . and now, we have a real Hunt again to give it meaning. Yes, Anne, I have much to be content with in my life."

"Even the university, then?"

"I am told," Vaemar said, stretching to his nearly three-meter length and ripping a thick dead branch effortlessly to pieces in a muscle-rippling gesture that might recall a house-cat idly sharpening its claws, "that some . . . outsiders . . . at University, in fraternities especially, members of ethnic minorities who were reputed to have collaborated unduly during the Occuption, for example, have had to put up with unfair bullying and hazing. That never happened to me. Certainly my family could not be called collaborators. But perhaps it was because of my early victories for the Chess Club."

Anne laughed, "You say that so innocently! . . . I actually think you mean it!" Her voice became more serious again: "But you speak of the real Hunt we are engaged on. What animal is big enough and fierce enough to predate upon kzinti? Dragons?"

"Humans, perhaps."

"But humans have disappeared too."

"What do the other humans think?"

Vaemar settled himself onto the sand, forelimbs before him, head raised, hindlimbs tucked ready to spring, his tail curled out of the way but ready to give that spring extra power. He looked like a sphinx. Anne sat before him, almost between his great forepaws, arms wrapped around her knees.

"Hugo and Toby, like you and Swirl-Stripes if I may say so, like the adventure of the hunt," she said. "Simian curiosity, feline inquisitiveness . . . they're not so far apart. And hunters' pride. Rosalind never says much."

"No. But in some ways she is a little like a cat, that one. Or she has spent time with cats."

"She wanted to share this watch with you. But so did I."

"Indeed? Am I to be flattered by such attentions?"

"I asked her why, and she changed the subject."

"There will be other watches."

"So I said. She has always been nice to me. I think she is lonely. I gather she grew up in Munchen, without family." Delicate ground to tread on when talking to a kzin, thought Vaemar. But there are many kzinti on Wunderland without families also. Thoughts ran on: Zroght-Guard Captain carrying me out of the Keep, pausing at the bloody litter of my Honored Sire's bones so I might remember. Old Traat-Admiral comforting me with a few grooming licks and a spray of his urine . . .

"Perhaps she saw more of kzinti than I did during the Occupation," Anne went on. "They say the human city-bred and farm-bred are different on this planet now."

"She does not move like you," said Vaemar. "And there is something strange about her hair."

"I hadn't noticed."

"I have to watch humans."

"None of them have any theories about a predator here. Obviously," she laughed again, "it can hardly be an alien from space!"

"It is an ecological mystery," said Vaemar seriously. "From what we saw at the island I have a puzzling feeling—it is not more than a feeling—that our prey . . . our enemy . . . behaves like both a sapient and a nonsapient. It does not seem to use weapons, yet it disables computers."

"And it appears to attack kzinti," said Anne. "When there is so much food in the swamp, is it sapient behavior to select the most fearsome warriors in the Galaxy for prey?"

"As you have reminded me," said Vaemar, "it also appears to hunt humans. You speak of the most fearsome warriors. But you are the species that have defeated the kzinti on this planet."

"I am not sure