Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIV

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“I knew the abbot once. He was old and I don’t know if he’s still alive, but if the present one is anything like the man I knew, they will help us without payment. Or I could give them a few hours’ work on their machinery. They’ve still got a lot of rebuilding to do. The kzin took most of their equipment.”

“Would they want gunpowder?”

“They can make better than we can. They’ve got dogwood trees there-makes the best charcoal. I’ve heard they are trying to breed Jotok. They’ll need ponds for that.”

“You know a lot of things, Judge.”

“Knowing things was my business.”

“Say, Judge, sometimes, when you forget yourself, you don’t talk like one of us back-country hicks. I’ve noticed it before.”

“I see…have you ever talked about that to the others?”

“We’re Wunderlanders, Judge. We’re live Wunderlanders. We didn’t come through the occupation alive by letting our mouths flap. Unless there’s good reason we keep our lips closed…but our ears open, maybe. But you never told us what you were…before…”

“No, I never did, did I. Well, I’m a live Wunderlander, too. But just remember this: we are getting ourselves a kzin with a debt of honor to us.”

Treating the kzin was at least not going to use much of what precious little resources they had, the judge realized. If it worked, he could easily defend the expense.

It worked. It took two weeks, but it worked. And in that time, someone had noticed the kits were playing with some pretty stones, a couple of chunks of gold, an uncut diamond and two sapphires. The kzin also liked gold as an ornament, and on some planets used it as currency, and, of course, it would have had many uses if they had anything left of a technology. The kzin remarked, as mildly as he was able, that the kits might not like to give the shiny nuggets up.

“Not these; wrestling your kits for them could cause some bad feeling, not to mention loss of body parts. But if you could show us where you got them, it will more than pay for the medicine and the treatment,” the judge had explained.

“You want a kit’s toys?” the kzin asked in disbelief.

The judge nearly grinned, but stopped himself in time.

“That’s the way it goes, kzin warrior. What means little to you means a lot to us and the other way around. That’s why trade is a good idea. We both gain. Dumb people think it’s zero-sum, but it ain’t. Not unless the government gets involved, and here, I’m the government, and the law, and a lot of other things besides, and I come pretty cheap, I can tell you.”

“I can get you as much as a man can carry,” with a shrugging motion, the kzin conveyed the impression that it did not believe a man’s carrying abilities were great, which, compared to its own, was true enough. “If you come with me, I will show you. Which sort do you want?”

“We can use all of them, they’ll all fetch something. But the gold is the best bet. That we can trade easily.”

The kzin was bewildered. “You are mad creatures, human,” he said. “What do you do with them?” Then, more thoughtfully, as though answering his own question. “These things are for Nobles’ palaces.”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” the judge told him. “But rich people will pay a lot for pretty stones. The manretti like to wear them, and the men buy them to impress the manretti.”

“Something to do with your mating rituals?” the kzin hazarded.

“Yep, I guess so,” the judge admitted. “There’s other stuff too, but when you come down to the jewelry uses, I guess it amounts to getting a gal by giving her something other gals would like to have too. Pretty dumb when you think about it. But people are.”

“Then we go tomorrow, Judge human,” the kzin said. He had picked up the Judge part by hearing what other people called him. It was not clear if it was a name or a rank. But these human beings gave everyone a name, as if it meant nothing. Truly they were astonishing. Nothing to look at, but they had defeated the might of all the kzin on Ka’ashi . Not merely in space. The kzin remembered the last days of infantry combat on the ground.

“You can leave the kzinrett and the kits here,” the judge said casually.

“But our base is in the cave,” the kzin objected. “I must take them back. And my mate cannot care for the kits yet on her own.”

“And in the cave you will run into trouble with the lesslocks all over again. It was partly those scratches that made you all sick. Why not live in the village? There’s a house here that’s empty. Too small for you, but we’ll show you how to build it up. Our manrett is a skilled healer. Much experienced.”

“I sometimes forget your manretti are sentient,” the kzin admitted, “though I should not. My first sergeant warned me: ‘Those manretti can be trouble,’ he said. Next day one fetched the meat for the sergeant’s mess. There was a bomb inside it. But indeed the lesslock vermin are getting worse. They get worse every year. We have moved to higher caves, but they find a way in. They appear to have an ability to learn from experience. But if I come here, I will have an honor debt to you. The home you speak of. And I do not know if there is much prey around.”

“Any time you want to pay us, a few of those pretty stones, particularly the ones with soft yellow metal in, that will get you plenty. And there are wild deerylopes and boaries in the woods, as well as a herd of gagrumphers. Kill more than you can eat, bring some back and trade them for anything you might want.”

It sounded very, very strange to the kzin. This trade idea was unnatural, surely. There was some trade between Heroes, mainly on long-settled planets, but between Heroes and slaves it was a different matter. Heroes generally took what they wanted, though they sometimes gave token payments to pets or as rewards to old retainers. He had known a trooper, long dead, whose sire on Kzin had sold medicines that the healers prescribed, but he had been honorably crippled. Things were different on Kzin. There were even organizations in which an economic historian might have seen the rudiments of guilds. But these still had as long way to go.

“You mean I give you this gold, you give it to a man far away, he gives it to a man even farther away who makes it into a manrett toy, and in exchange gives some medicine to the man not so far away, who gives it to you. Why does everbody do this?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that; you see, we have the stuff called money , which…Oh, never mind, you’ll pick up the idea gradually. And we need a name for you.”

“I have no Name,” the Kzin said, with a doleful stare at the ground.

“Then I shall give you one. From now on, you are Ruat ,” the judge told him calmly.

The kzin pondered. Truly this Judge human must be important if he could give names. And was a human-conferred name legitimate? It might as well be.

“Rrhouarrghrrt,” he pronounced it doubtfully.

“Yep. That’ll do fine. And I know you aren’t much inclined to socialize with other kzin, but if you know of others in the same condition as you were, bring them in. We’ll take care of them until they are healthy, and if they want to stay with us, well, we’ll just have to learn to get along.”

The judge and Ruat were making a patrol of the village just inside the perimeter the next evening. The judge felt a little tense. Something in the air, but not just that. Andersen, the community’s chief woodworker and bowyer, had gone searching for some exotic red wood and had been away a long time. The judge had ideas that, now that the hyperdrive was making communication with Sol System a matter of weeks, most of them spent in accelerating and decelerating, rather than a one-way voyage of decades, a market might exist there for some of the more exotic Wunderland timber products, and Anderson had been building up a stock of the beautiful red and orange woods. There might even be a market among the kzin, many of whom were fanatical chess-players and prized ornate sets. The judge knew of Andersen’s enthusiasm for his craft. Still, he should not have lingered out until this hour. Indeed, it was unlike him.

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