Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIV

“I can’t move my arm,” he said after a time.

There was only one thing for it. It was a highly distasteful idea, but it was a chance to win some brownie points with my masters. Anyway, I owed him. After explaining what I was going to do, I sucked some of the venom out of the wound.

“If you had had a cut on your mouth, you would be dead too by now,” Telepath said when I had finished and was spitting and retching, with a finger down my throat.

“That did occur to me,” I said when I could. Somehow I knew it was safe now to say something mildly sarcastic to him. We seemed to have moved away from “Dominant One.”

“Did it? You saved my life? A monkey saved a kzin?”

“You saved mine,” I told him. “I would never have reached this place without you.”

He took a spray from his belt, and looked as if he was preparing to apply it. Then he returned it, unused.

“It would dishonorable to read your mind in this situation,” he said. “I must assume you are telling me the truth.”

I climbed out of the tank, but the rusty ladder would not bear telepath’s weight. With my arm there was not much I could do to help him, and in that confined space he could not leap. There was fire and death in the streets all around us. Fortunately, as we later learned, the missiles used in the Ramscoop Raid had been inert dumb bombs, their destructive force coming only from their colossal kinetic energy. There was no radioactivity. Eventually I found an old-fashioned fire engine, one of the museum pieces the kzin allowed us to use. The firemen were unimpressed when I told them I wanted to rescue a kzin, but of course they were part of the collabo government themselves. I could see a couple debating whether to quietly kill me and say nothing about it. I pointed out that they could expect a reward, and that swayed them. I also lied to the effect that the kzin command knew where I was. I don’t think they were greedy men-on occupied Wunderland, a small reward from the kzin might well be the difference between life and death for oneself and one’s family.

The “meteor” had struck well beyond the outer fringes of Munchen. A direct hit would have levelled the city. We got Telepath out, though his arm was still stiff. Since it did not interfere with his mind-reading abilities, I doubted the kzin authorities would care about that much. We somehow agreed without words to say nothing of who had saved whom.

Somewhat to my surprise, Krar-Skrei supervised some of the rescue operations. Although he looked askance at Chuut-Riit’s whole human project and regarded humans as vermin, they were vermin who belonged to the Patriarch, and he did his duty to them as effectively as he might. I saw the burning ruins of a schoolroom cleared, and a badly injured kzin who had been inside taken away.

I also saw Krar-Skrei supervising the lifting of a fallen beam, which had blocked the entrance to a meteor-shelter. The firemen descended into it. I stood, with Telepath beside me, feeling shocked and useless. Telepath caught my arm, thankfully remembering to retract his claws, and pointed.

“The Morris-human,” he said.

It was Morris, all right, heading for the unattended fire engine. Telepath was getting out his injector now. Why? Something in Morris’s walk? Something Telepath picked up even with his unheightened powers?

It happened very quickly. Morris flung the fire engine into gear and drove it forward over Krar-Skrei and von Rathenau, killing them both instantly, if the bump it made going over them was anything to go by. Morris was screaming something, and I picked up the last words “…but I’ll slay him yet!” Half a dozen guns turned on the fire engine from a group of kzinti beside a burning wall, and melted it to slag almost instantaneously.

Lucky Telepath. The burning wall collapsed on them. He turned and stared at me. There was no one else in sight alive. I knew what he was thinking, and he knew I knew: The human firemen were all working down in the shelter. I was the only witness to his negligence. He began to raise one arm. I reached, as furtively as I could, for my flashlight, a pea-shooter wielded by a cripple against a saber-tooth. Then he lowered his arm. “A bad accident,” he said.

I agreed. “Not even the usual suspects to round up,” he continued. I started laughing hysterically.

I am no telepath, but even I picked up the wave of Telepath’s relief and joy. Krar-Skrei was dead.

Since the course was nearly completed, the first class of Chuut-Riit’s human experts was pronounced graduated, and its members posted to the fleet and elsewhere. That solved a problem for me. I presented them all with diplomas, written on parchment made of the finest human skin, each illustrated by a picture of a Hero standing rampant atop a pile of slain simians.

I felt as if my teaching had been a furlough in the cool First Circle of Hell, but that I could not take any more teaching, and contemplated escaping into the eastern mountains before the next class, which would presumably also include a telepath with a watching brief. Perhaps the Resistance would have me in spite of my arm. They must be running very short of personnel. Perhaps I could even survive on my own. If not, so be it.

But that was to be the only one of Chuut-Riit’s human classes. In quick succession, Chuut-Riit was killed as a result of techno-sabotage, civil war broke out between the followers of Traat-Admiral and Ktrodni-Stkaa, and the UNSN Hyperdrive Armada arrived. The sky was suddenly filled with fighters, and humans in battle-armor descending with lift-belts.

Escaping to the wild was not necessary. The kzin lost interest in me and I was able to keep alive, cowering with a few other academics in a sub-basement while the battle raged above us. Since then I have seen some rediscovered film of the fall of Berlin in 1945 (our civics classes had become more realistic by then). It was like that, only worse. Once a lost kzin kitten blundered down among us, and, moved by some impulse I still do not understand, I took him up into the street and found a kzin warrior and handed him over-the only really brave thing I have ever done. The kitten, I remember, had a curious red patch on the fur of its chest, and specially elaborate ear-tattoos, and the kzin who received it prostrated himself before it, before snatching it up and vanishing with it into the smoke.

The fighting moved on. I talked my way past the vengeful humans, and fortunately, when he was recovered, my old colleague Nils Rykermann spoke up for me. There was no telepath this time to defend me, and I had some hairy moments-my former head of department was beheaded, and his deputy taken to Munchen Zoo and fed to the kzinretti-but once again my arm served as an excuse, and perhaps I was lucky in the composition of the panel I faced. I found the firemen who had helped Telepath and me, and expended my credit, such as it was, pleading for them, pointing to the lives they had saved in the Ramscoop Raid.

Had von Kleist and Thompson survived, the Resistance would have made short work of them, I mused-dirty KzinDiener . At least I, heart in my mouth, had occasionally towards the end left food parcels where the Resistance might find them. It wasn’t much, but it had, just, passed under the telepath’s radar, and some humans remembered it.

Liberated Wunderland, 2420

THERE WAS PLENTYfor all of us to do in the months that followed. The kzin who remained on Wunderland were no longer our dreaded conquerors. Many of those who remained had formed some sort of relationship with humans. There was modern medicine available again, and my arm was repaired.

I was walking back to my apartment one evening when a voice hailed me out of the shadows of an alley: “Professor!”