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

personally? No, sheath your claws, Raargh-Sergeant—remember, was not the great Chuut-Riit among those who thought humans were worth systematic study?"

"That took mainly the form of dissection of their nervous systems, as far as I know. I do not think that is what you monkeys who looked to 'cooperation' had in mind. But there was some monkey history, too. And that brought back memories for me . . . When I was a kit a house-slave read me a human poem, 'The Ballad of the White Horse.' I like bits of that, though I do not know why:

Death blazes bright above the cup,

And high above the Crown

Yet in that Dream of battle

We seem to tread it down . . . 

* * *

"There were other lines: 'are slavery and starvation flowers/that you should pluck them so . . .' Yes, it comes back to me:

Short time had shaggy Ogier

to swing his lance in line.

He knew King Alfred's axe on high,

He heard it singing through the sky,

He cowered beneath it with a cry.

It split him to the spine . . ."

* * *

Jorg nodded as the great felinoid's voice trailed off: "I know that poem too:

 . . . I know

The spirit with which you blindly band

Has blessed destruction with his hand,

But by God's death the stars still stand,

And the small apples grow."

* * *

He went on: "We each worship a single all-powerful God, a jealous God. Is that not also a bond between us? That we see something of the same truth behind the universe."

"That is for Priests and Conservors to say. A Priest of the Dark Pelt once said to me that with your bearded Jova you may have a little glimmering of the truth. Your Bearded God and the Fanged God had their own respective kingdoms, perhaps. Mark you, he was very old and had been drinking bourbon at the time. He thought that though you are irritatingly between herd animals and hunters, yours is a god of the herd animals you partly resemble. You seek this thing lurve instead of Heroes' Respect for you are partial herd creatures.

"But I know we Heroes are the only pure carnivores to whom the Fanged God has granted the power to leap from star to star. We have encountered no others in hundreds of years of the Eternal Hunt, only a few herbivores or omnivores at best creeping between their own planets . . . until now. Assuredly the Fanged God decreed that we dominate you omnivores as you dominate herbivores and as herbivores dominate vegetables."

"With due respect, Raargh-Sergeant, it has not worked out like that."

"Who could have foreseen the hyperdrive?"

"Not I. I might have cut my cloak differently otherwise."

"Chuut-Riit thought human inventiveness was valuable: dental floss, blow dryers, toilet paper . . . You are amused?"

"That is what you valued in our culture?"

"We would never have thought of such things for ourselves . . . but many other things: chess, using reaction drives and ramscoop fields as weapons, ice cream, catnip, some of your liquors, h'rr . . ."

"See. Our words have entered the Heroes' Tongue. You pronounce them without thinking. Could we have worked together?"

"I am Raargh-Sergeant. It is not for me to say."

"There may be many things it is for you to say now. Hroarh-Captain has not returned."

"What do you mean, monkey?" Claws to wtsai.

"I respectfully ask you to be calm. Perhaps he is not returning. Perhaps misfortune has befallen him. What if there is no one left higher in the chain of command than you?"

"If so, I will be guided by Honor. And that answers your question. You shall not go to the humans. Honor states that you shall continue to be protected by the Patriarchy. A little while ago I thought of this time as forsaken by the Fanged God. But is that not the point of it: is it not Honor to look at a universe in which your God has forsaken you, and still obey as He commands? What good is fair-weather Honor?"

"Very well. If you are content, so am I."

"Raargh-Sergeant!" Lesser-Sergeant's cry took him to the window at a painful bound.

A human groundcar entered the gates and stopped in the courtyard. It had been an ordinary car such as until lately privileged humans had still occasionally been permitted to use: powered by hydrogen fuel rather than the molecular-distortion batteries which were rather too easily adaptable into bombs. More recently a medium field laser cannon had been mounted on it behind a hemispherical shield. It came to a halt with the cannon pointed at the Sergeants' Mess.

Jocelyn crossed the courtyard, alone and on foot as the kzin crouched at their weapons. She is brave, thought Raargh-Sergeant. A worthy enemy. Her head would make an acceptable trophy for the Mess. And then, in one of those dangerous and distracting tangents in which he found his mind had begun to run: So long, so eagerly, did our ancestors search space for worthy enemies!

"Raargh-Sergeant!"

"I hear you."

"You now have twenty minutes. After that time I will use this cannon to destroy this building and every kzin in it as well as the human traitor. I ask you not to force me to do it."

He made no answer. Among kzin infantry gear were antilaser smoke and dust-cloud generators and mirrors that could, in theory, deflect small lasers for a short time until they boiled or burned away. Nothing that would stop a military laser of that size for an eye blink. Jocelyn turned away after a time and walked back across the courtyard. He saw her addressing a gathering of humans at the gates.

With that cannon she can make it all look like a regrettable accident when her UNSN masters arrive, he thought. It will be easily explained by monkey lies as a beam that went astray in the final stages of the battle. No monkey to bear responsibility or be disciplined. At such a range, the degree of spread of the laser will be so small as to tell them nothing, and in any case would they bother to examine it closely? Without that cannon we could hold