Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIV

“A kitten,” said Leonie, “a weak kitten. A failed telepath, I think. Or rather, he was separated from other Heroes before the training began.” It was just permissible, given her relationship with Vaemar, to describe the kitten as “weak.” Some, after all, were born so, and could not help it. But for a human to describe one kzin to another, even Vaemar (and she knew Vaemar would die for her if Honor required it) as a coward…!

“It would be useful if he finished his telepath training,” said Vaemar.

“I think he is too old for that.”

“I should like to have a look at him, anyway.”

Leonie was not happy at the prospect of Vaemar-Riit meeting Marmalade, but there was no argument she could put against it. She was unhappily aware that if Marmalade disgraced himself before the greatest kzin on the planet, the consequences could be unfortunate.

The day of the presentation was cool and cloudy. The kzin did not need to wear the hats and sunglasses which sometimes gave them an odd appearance. Vaemar, with his mate Karan, Rarrgh, and other members of his household, were dressed in finery, Rarrgh with his two ear-rings on prominent display. Also present were the Rykermanns, the abbot, and several other human dignitaries. Marmalade was to be presented to Vaemar-Riit.

However, terrified of the gathering crowd, Marmalade was nowhere to be found. Leonie, the abbot and Rarrgh went in search of him while Vaemar and Nils Rykermann took refreshments.

Using Rarrgh’s ziirgrah sense and his artificial eye with its infrared vision, they eventually found Marmalade cowering in the darkest corner of the monastery’s old and disused chicken coop. Rarrgh, shocked, was in favor of tearing him to pieces then and there, as a disgrace to the Heroes’ Race, but Leonie, to whom Rarrgh also was secretly devoted, talked him out of it, saying Marmalade was under her protection. The fact that Marmalade was still young enough to have retained the juvenile spots on his fur may also have inhibited Rarrgh-though mature male kzin sometimes killed kittens, they also developed a protective reflex towards them, and Rarrgh now had new kittens of his own. Still, Rarrgh was boiling with rage and vicarious shame, perhaps, indeed, to the extent that his ziirgrah sense was affected by the effort of keeping his emotions in check.

With somewhat more difficulty, Leonie talked Marmalade out of his hiding place. “Will he hurt me?” he asked, gazing up at Rarrgh with huge, terrified eyes. In all her dealing with kzin, Leonie wore unobtrusive but very strong armor under her clothes. It was just as well, for Marmalade seized her arm for comfort, too frightened to retract his claws, now looking down with fear at a small mouse-like creature that had been eating some spilled grain. Rarrgh seized the arm and threw it off her. Marmalade’s claws had not penetrated Leonie’s shielding or drawn blood, but still Marmalade was closer to death than he had ever been in that moment.

They joined the little crowd. Fortunately, there were a number of other kzin in the gathering, and this made Marmalade a little less conspicuous, at the back of the group and partly hidden from the VIPs on the ceremonial dais by a tree-stump. He was, if anything, even more frightened of telepaths than of ordinary kzinti, and Leonie was relieved to find there were none present. Some drums, an important part of many kzin ceremonies, were produced, and Vaemar’s younger kittens danced on them.

Von Pelt and the nameless kzin brought the jar forward and placed it on a table covered with cloth of gold. Marmalade, Rykermann noticed, looking a little nervously behind him, was staring at them with an unusual intensity. The pair bowed to Vaemar-Riit. Then, with a few well-chosen words from the old man, they stepped modestly back into the crowd. Their aircar was nearby.

The next part of the ceremony called for Nils Rykermann to present the jar to Vaemar on behalf of humanity, an enduring symbol of the respect in which humanity held him. Vaemar would then make a speech of acknowledgement, to be followed by a feast for which two sorts of food had been prepared.

Marmalade’s telepathic sense was dormant and unschooled but not completely absent. Screaming a single word, he burst out of the crowd like a rocket, scattering humans and kzin left and right. He snatched up the jar and ran with it to the edge of the crowd. He threw it to the ground and flung himself upon it to cover it before it exploded, scattering hydrofluoric acid in all directions.

Between the acid and the explosion there was not enough left of Marmalade to place in a shrine. One of Vaemar-Riit’s kittens bears his name.

by Matthew Joseph Harrington

Unless he was staying over with a woman he’d met, Buford Early slept in his autodoc. At his age most people died in their sleep, and while he wasn’t as afraid of dying as most people, it struck him as an undignified way to go after surviving five wars. On the other hand, his psychist program told him it was really a way of distancing himself, since the lack of a bed in his apartment meant that any woman who came home with him couldn’t stay over herself. The clincher, however, was that it was the most comfortable place he’d ever had to sleep.

He was not accustomed to being startled when he woke up.

He was certainly not accustomed to being so badly startled, ever. There was a head floating outside the observation window.

It was a head of truly astonishing ugliness, resembling nothing so much as a really cruel caricature of a dragon. A bulging snout of a nose hung over a rigid and lipless bony beak, whose molar-textured gash extended back to the hinge of the jaws. Huge ears flanked a face with the texture of boiled leather, which had been crammed into the bottom third of a swollen bald head, which looked as if someone had overinflated the brain and then stuck another on in back.

Which was more or less what had happened. The thing belonged to a Protector, which meant that the human race was about to begin a long period of being micromanaged like so many small and rather stupid children.

Buford reached into the receptacles adjacent to his hands, but instead of finding a stunner and a one-shot puncher, he felt only small pieces of paper. He brought them up to look at them. Each had one word printed on it: COLD.

Next to the head, his robe, draped over nothing, waved itself at the window. He’d have to bide his time, keep his mind off the subject, wait for a chance, and take it. Meanwhile, he opened the lid of the ’doc, sat up, and said, “George Olduvai?”

The Protector rolled its eyes and said, “Puns are the pornography of mathematicians. Jack Brennan is dead.”

“How did that happen?” he exclaimed, taking the robe as he got out.

“A weapon whose programming he hadn’t supervised himself activated a laser and cut him in half at the waist. Aberrantly careless, I suspect suicide. As a breeder he seems to have been sociable, so he never got used to being the smartest person he knew.”

As Early tied his robe sash, he felt for the coil of Sinclair filament in the capsule at the end. The capsule was there, but it held another piece of paper that read COLD. “So who are you?” he said, crumpling the paper and tossing it toward the cleaner.

“You can call me Ursula.”

“You’re female?” he said, then winced at the gaffe.

She let it go. “If memory serves. Let me get you a sandwich,” she said, and the control panel started doing things.

“Can I see something besides a head, please?”

“Sure.” A pressure suit appeared below the head, mostly covered with pockets. It looked like a suit of medieval armor that had just been swallowed by an enormous mutant potholder. Though she didn’t have the accent, it was like a Belter’s suit, with a conspicuous and distinctive emblem on the chest. The picture was of a wheel station, seen from along its axis, and covered with weapon emplacements, with two of the eight spokes shot away on either side. “How’s grilled cheese and bacon suit you?”