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

their spirits (and indeed with the medicines and physicians of the Jotoki, much more could be done for them than I would ever have believed possible), cheering the surviving legionaries with promises of promotion and decorations, inventorying the stores with the quartermasters, and consoling widows and orphans. We had had a shortage of women previously. Now we had a surplus. I suspected that with our next battle the surplus would grow larger. I also noticed that some of the Caledonian women, now that they had been washed and decently dressed, some in the Romano-British style, were by no means uncomely, with their red hair and their muscles and bodies hardened in their hard country. The first mothers of Rome must have been women like these. The Caledonian chiefs had, sensibly, taken the comeliest women for themselves. A number of these were now among the widows.

I had much to do and learn, and it was some time before I had a chance to talk at leisure with Jegarvindertsa again.

"Next time they board, use gravity traps," I told him. "Direct them into spaces on the ship where you have previously hidden gravity engines, then activate them and crush them. It will save us men and Jotoki."

"Did you think of that by yourselves?"

"By myself, yes."

"We are astonished. We did not think of that. We sorrow we found you so late. We hope we have not found you too late.

"You are warriors yet administrators too. And for primitives you have a remarkable capacity for abstract thought. Who else in a culture with your technological level would have a god of excrement disposal? And a military system with NCOs as its hinge, specialized engineering corps, and books of strategy? To say nothing of the systematized disaster-relief that first interested us in you."

"We are the heirs of Troy, so Virgil tells us. The Hero Aeneas founded Rome."

"Yes, that is odd, too. Your art. Something gave your kind more brain than you had any obvious need for. That is true of all spacefaring races, of course. It is one of the Great Mysteries. But you are mystery beyond mystery. In shape and physiology, you are like the kzinti. But in some aspects of mind you are more like us. Our kinds have both tried to be bearers of civilization in a Barbaricum. We are an old race, but we have found traces of other civilizations that rose and perished long ago, across a waste of time which you could not conceive. We did not intend to follow them into oblivion. We had poets and thinkers, once, who wrote of the Jotoki Mission, and celebrated the Jotoki who died to bring civilization to barbaric planets. We thought well of ourselves. We brought happiness and prosperity to many worlds."

"Where are those worlds now? Will they not come to our help?"

"The kzinti have them for hunting territories and their inhabitants as slaves or prey. We unleashed huge evil on the galaxy. It would be better if we had never been."

"You did not know."

"We should have. We had the science, the civilization. We should have had the foresight. There is a great virtue for traders: strict attention to business. And there is a great vice of traders: too little attention to anything else. We learned too late that in our way we were as unbalanced as the kzinti."

"But now you know better?"

"Yes. Too late. We have lost too many. We fight a rearguard action without hope as the kzinti devour all we created. . . . We did not do it all for ourselves, you know, though profit was the engine that drove us. Yes, we wanted wealthy and prosperous customers and trading partners—was that evil? Prosperous customers rather than slaves? We lifted species from savagery and barbarism, added a cumulative total of countless billions of years to the lives of individuals alien to us, created security and happiness . . . our mistake was to assume that given knowledge and instruction, the kzinti would be the same as other species."

"What can one legion and the people of a few Pictish villages do against such an enemy?"

"You are an . . . experiment. Some of us wanted no more alien mercenaries. If you are good enough soldiers to beat the kzinti, and faithful, we may recruit more of you."

"Raid Earth again, you mean? To enslave more?"

"No. We are not slavers, however we may seem to you. We recruited you as we did because we had little choice in the matter. When we return to your Earth we will release you from our service with fair pay—enough to make you more than rich for life—and trust you to recruit for us. We know that enslaved conscripts do not fight as well as freely enlisted men."

That was true enough. It was one of the principles on which Rome had built her Empire.

"Besides the gold, you will have the products of our science and medicine. And I think I can promise that you will be rich in stories to tell your children."

That was worth pondering too. Rome with Jotoki weapons would be invincible indeed! Providing—and here a thought came to chill the heart—providing its enemies were no more than men! But I thought of another matter.

"By the time we see Earth again, we will be too old to make sense," I said.

"We trust not. First, you will spend time in deep sleep if needs be, and will not age. Second, we travel at near the speed of light. There is an effect at such speeds so that time seems to change. You will find when you set your feet on Terra again that less time has passed for you than might seem. . . . Now, we must leave this region before kzinti reconnaissance returns."

But when we spoke again things had changed. There was news of other battles, more feline victories. It seemed that we would not be going home yet. When I spoke with Jegarvindertsa a few weeks later there was a change in their manner. There was less talk of possibilities of victories, or even of prolonging the