Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIV

“This is Captain Jonas Hale, who was blinded fighting the officer of the kzin attack boat. He advised the Pilot through as much of the trip as he could, and was the best friend the Pilot could have wished for.” One by one, they all touched the tree.

“This is Olga Blacker, who kept us all from going mad, by listening to everything we needed to say, and reminding us of the good things.” The procession continued.

“This is Russelle Wells, who sneaked aboard to be with her boyfriend, who had lied and wasn’t actually part of the crew. She raised thirty-one infants with adult bodies into people who could raise children of their own, and never once had to hurt any of them.” The Blacker bowed to the tree before moving on.

“This is Lavinia Schafer, who taught kzin prisoners English, and then taught them to answer questions. And outlived them all.” The Blacker clenched a fist and raised it overhead in salute.

“This is Academician Marion Johnson, who made so many ruined things work that we could spend two days and a night naming them all, and who got aboard the Galaxias in a crate because he was judged too ill for space travel. He showed us how to cool the planet we needed, and died while we were waiting.”

The seventh tree was touched with special care. “This is Stuart William Denver, who brought us here in a damaged ship through uncharted wilderness, who gave us all hope when we despaired, and who landed all of us and all we needed to live on this world, and died of his burns after getting the last passengers out of the lander as it sank.” She kissed the tree. One by one, the rest did too. After the children had moved on, the adults moved in to do the same.

As she moved on to introduce the next rank of trees, Persoff, who was blind with tears, heard Kershner say softly, “And the kzinti call themselves Heroes?”

by Hal Colebatch

“I think I’ve solved the Marmalade problem,” General Leonie Rykermann told her husband, Nils Rykermann. “The monastery.”

The Marmalade problem had been preoccupying her thoughts for some time. Had Marmalade been reared on Kzin or on any kzin-ruled world, it is very unlikely that he would have survived childhood. However, he was reared on Wunderland, after Liberation, and had lived to be a problem.

What the circumstances of his birth were, no one knew. After the cease-fire there had been many orphans, kzin and human, wandering the scarred surface of the planet. Some formed savage feral gangs. Marmalade had been found, very near death, not far from Circle Bay Monastery. He had been clutching a locket, engraved with a sigil such as were issued by Conservers of the Ancestral Past.

Instead of killing him the farmers had obeyed the abbot’s instructions and handed him over to the monastery’s care. It appeared he had previously been selected for telepath training-so much he could tell them, and the telepath syndrome generally produced smaller and weaker creatures than the huge fighting kzin-but he remembered very little beyond that. He fetched up at length in the orphanage where Leonie Rykermann was trying, in the face of considerable opposition, to turn parentless kittens into Wunderkzin -kzin who might cooperate with the humans on Wunderland.

Leonie was a patient, dedicated woman, and had established understandings-friendships even-with some kzin, not least Rarrgh, the Senechal of Vaemar-Riit, prince of the kzin on liberated Wunderland, while Orlando, Vaemar’s eldest son, regarded her with fierce possessiveness.

Very few humans knew more of kzin psychology (if that was the term for it), and she and Rarrgh had saved one another’s lives-indeed, that was how they had met. But though she was relatively used to dealing with kzin, including young kzin, she found Marmalade a handful.

The problem was not the usual one among young male kzin of wild, reckless bravery and aggression. Marmalade was a coward. Not merely cautious as Vaemar-Riit sometimes was (and as he had tried to teach Orlando to be), but obsessively, unreasoningly fearful. It was probably something to do with his aborted telepath conditioning, allowing him to feel empathy for other creatures’ minds, but not how to control or use this faculty. His mind had been opened for telepath training but not trained further, and fear had run wild in it. It might also be because he had the typical telepath’s physical weakness, which marked him out in the rough-and-tumble of the other kittens’ play and hunts. Some cowardly kzin compensated for their condition with cunning, but Marmalade had no particularly large ration of that.

When he had been taken sailing on Wunderland’s seas, in the boisterous low-gravity waves, he had clung to the boat’s mast with all four limbs, shivering with fear. When the orphanage kits were taken for a brief excursion into sub-orbital space, he had been found trying to hide from the rollcall, and during the flight he had disappeared, to be found crouched under a bunk, flooding the cabin with fear-pheromones.

He was not only afraid of real dangers, like lightning storms and flash floods, or animals like the poison-fanged Beam’s Beasts or tigrepards, or the crocodilians and other carnivores of nearby Grossgeister Swamp such fears would have been more than bad enough in the eyes of a real kzin, even a humble noncombatant, but Marmalade was frightened also of innocuous things like noise, crowds and strangers.

Leonie had soon realized that Marmalade was a problem. He had to be kept separate from the other kittens, who would have made short work of him if they had been given the chance. To turn him out to make his own way on Wunderland would have been an equally certain death sentence. His very “name,” ridiculous and meaningless, would be taken as a deadly insult to a kzin of real Name should he encounter one. Not only were there kzin at large, there were also fanatically anti-kzin humans, survivors of the Occupation, who, peace treaty or not, would attack any kzin they found alone and vulnerable-looking. In the orphanage he was kept in a sort of protective custody, in one of the isolation units, but plainly this state could not go on for ever.

There was no point in Leonie even asking the kzinti she knew well, like Rarrgh or Vaemar, for advice. They, she knew, would simply consider him a disgrace to the Heroes’ species. Vaemar might live as a modern, Wunderkzin prince, but he was not as advanced as all that. Rarrgh and she had an odd bond and a strong one between them, dating back to the day he had received his Name, but he was an old senior sergeant of the Patriarch’s armed forces, and the motto of senior sergeants of all races tended to be: “There are no excuses for anything!”

They might give him a chance to prove his worth in a death-duel, but she would not bet on it, and anyway, weak and slow as he was, he would be bound to lose. Leonie herself could beat him in the practice arena, wearing heavily padded protective clothing, for he did not know how to even try to fight. And it was a rough rule of thumb that in hand-to-hand combat, a real kzin was the equal of about forty humans. That was not a guess. That kill-ratio had actually been achieved many a time, though of course guns tended to equalize things. (Specially trained Jinxians, the heaviest bipeds in known space after the full-grown male kzinti, might do better with long-practiced scientific kicks and blows, but only, it was understood, at the cost of their own lives. They would get in one strike and no more.)

Anyway, Marmalade was neither fighting kzin nor telepath. He had no other special gifts that would justify his continued existence, even in Wunderkzin society, even as a mere noncombatant. His stooped gait, hunched shoulders and scuffling feet proclaimed “weakling” and “victim.” Fortunately for him, “coward” was less easy to recognize, simply because among kzinti of all classes it was so rare. And yet, there was something about him that touched Leonie. Perhaps it was the fact that she had seen him trying to be brave.