Man-Kzin Wars IX, Larry Niven [leveled readers TXT] 📗

and the Heroes, things would have been worse for them than they were.

"I do not say this to sound heroi—to sound better than I am. But where would they have been without us to run some sort of government, to arrange some system of food and shelter as poverty and breakdown spread, to police our towns, to keep our farms and mines and factories working as well as we might, yes, to control lawless humans who might have attacked their own kind or brought terrible reprisals for attacking Heroes, to remove litter and maintain orphanages and see the dead were buried, to keep at least a few factories manufacturing the geriatric drugs?"

"Is that why you became chief of the monkey police? To be useful to your own kind?"

"This is no time for lying. I did it partly for those reasons but also to protect myself, my mate, my kits. But I am not innocent. I delivered resistance fighters to the Public Hunt. At first with sickness and shame and loathing and because I told myself I was serving a greater good, later more because it was my job and my nerves were deadened—trained monkey indeed. I and my people ate well when each day more starved. We drafted people to your war factories and shipyards and constructions, yes, and to serve in the Kzin fleets that attacked Earth. Later we helped hunt down Earth and UNSN agents and infiltrators. Some of us did a little sabotage of the administration when it was safe, or turned a blind eye to some resistance, at least before the Telepaths' checks began. We walked a tightrope. I am no human hero, like the abbot of this monastery. I am neither innocent nor wicked. I am guilty."

"The abbot? The Head of the Three Monkey-Gods cult? I have played chesss with him"—that human word was easy to pronounce. Indeed it had entered the Heroes' Tongue. "Why do you say 'human hero'?"

"He fed and clothed many refugees here. Also, he sheltered human resistance fighters. I half knew. God help me, perhaps I would have handed him over long ago or pointed a Telepath towards him, for he was helping prolong the whole agony, but he was too popular with humans. And too many monks had been too brave. To send him to the Hunt would have meant more feral activity, more sabotage, more throats cut, more hydrofluoric acid thrown over Heroes in city alleyways at night, and more humans killed in reprisals, too, more human land expropriated. My lot was not to steer the ship of human destiny to some fair harbor, just to help keep it more or less afloat."

"He lied to me, then. I spoke to him at times. I thought he showed his mind to me at chesss, and when we drank bourbon and ice cream together after a long game. Is there no end to monkey trickery?"

"I did not wholly lie to you. Neither, I think, did he. Once when we spoke he—I mean no insult and nor did he—likened you Raargh-Sergeant to a figure in his holy book, a centurion . . .

"There is much about kzinti I admire—your strength, your honor, your courage. Many humans, even your greatest enemies like Markham, admire you, more perhaps than those who merely tried to endure kzinti rule . . . As to an end to monkey trickery, I don't know. You have a low opinion of humans."

"You are omnivores. You are beneath opinion. We acknowledge some monkeys—like your Ptrr-Brunurn—may be entitled to fighters' privileges and honors. I suppose you hated us too. Strange, a few weeks ago nothing in the world would have mattered to me less than how a human felt about me."

"Does it matter now? Yes, very nearly all of us hated you. For a very few lucky privileged ones perhaps admiration overcame hatred."

"H'rr. So my Honor is bound up with protecting a monkey who hates me? Will you kill me, monkey?"

"Did you not just say it did not matter how we felt? I will not lie to you now. How could we love the kzinti? As for killing you, until lately I was not one to think of such things much, save as a dream sometimes . . . Still, there were other things which some of us looked to," said Jorg. "We collaborators took them as signs of justification for our lives, of hope. Future generations might have invoked the wisdom and statesmanship of Jorg von Thoma. I am not a Markham who fights for humanity like a steel blade. . . . Sometimes I have felt that Judas also had a necessary part to play and knew exactly what he was doing and the price that he would have to pay. . . .

"Some of the younger generations of both kinds were cooperating more easily. You know that kzinti and human computer nerds would talk together. Some had begun to meet regularly. Each kind shared insights with the other, even unintentionally, and there was talk of forming something that might have developed into a club. Oh, I know kzinti computer nerds are despised by normal kzin as freaks and geniuses, but it might have been a start.

"And some, a very few, human and kzin poets had talked together, too. There was the story of Gunga Din, a dutiful monkey. I know one kzin poet was moved to describe 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' as pedestrian but showing that some monkeys at least had understandable military common sense and could celebrate a demonstration of it."

"If it comforts you," said Raargh-Sergeant, "know we have gradually come to refer to the most useful and obedient of you by your own monkey rank-titles more, and as sziirrirt-Kz'eerkti less . . . or some like Markham as Ya-nar Kzinti . . ."

"Sziirrirt-Kz'eerkti . . . that means 'trained monkeys,' doesn't it? and the other"—he struggled to pronounce it—"the 'defiers of kzin'?'"

"I know some of our kind were interested in humans. But as you say, they tended to be freaks."

"Perhaps they were freaks your people needed. I mean no disrespect, but was there not a little of that feeling in you