Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIV

Not a voice produced from a human voice-box. I spun round. A dark shape, too big for a man, but small for a kzin. Well, we were officially at peace on Wunderland now, and I knew it was no use running from a kzin-many had tried. I waited until it emerged into the bright light of the main street.

It was Telepath. He looked bad, but telepaths usually did. He stumbled as he walked, and almost fell at my feet.

Did I owe him anything? Thinking it over, I decided that perhaps I did. He could have made my life a lot more uncomfortable, and a lot shorter, if he had tried. I remembered the incident of the meat, the time in the tank, and the risk he rook letting me live at the end. And, well, even in this case, I felt as a teacher I owed a former student something. I called up an aircar and, lifting him with considerable difficulty (lifting a normal male kzin would have been out of the question, but my repaired arm with its metal bones was now stronger than a natural one), carried him home.

I had thought he was starving, but he appeared no more emaciated than before. A large bowl of hot milk and a couple of raw chops and sausages did seem to do him good.

“Remember the meat?” he asked me. Like all telepaths, his command of the language was perfect, though his accent was strange. What was wrong with him, I learned as he talked, was that he was suffering from a near-terminal case of uselessness. He was shunned by other kzin, humans fled from him. ARM had assessed him, like all telepaths they had captured, and found him so nearly burnt-out as not to be worth recruiting. He was in a kind of passive state, which was a recognized clinical symptom indicating that the end was near. Like practically all telepaths, the drug had left him a wreck, and he had not been physically able to handle the effects of sudden, brutal, total withdrawal, though mentally he seemed clear enough.

I called Leonie Rykermann, who had been a student at the University at the time of the invasion. Kept young with unlimited geriatric drugs, she and her husband, Nils, had been among the most respected of the Resistance leaders, and were now political powers. Further, like a surprising number of other Resistance leaders, she got on well with kzin and was running an orphanage for some of the many parentless kzin kittens, as well as human children, on the planet. She came and spoke to the telepath for a time. I gathered she could find him a job at the orphanage, where he might feel useful.

As they were preparing to leave, he asked me: “Do you remember the poem, ‘Spanish Waters,’ that Herr von Kleist used to say for us?” I didn’t, but I remembered von Kleist had been interested in sea stories. He piped up:

I’m the last alive that knows it, all the rest have gone their ways.

Killed, or died, or come to anchor in the old Mulatas Cays

And I go singing, fiddling, old and starved and in despair,

And I know where all that gold is hid, if only I were there…

“But,” he went on, “I don’t know of much gold.”

Liberated Wunderland, 2425

Five years or more passed before I saw him again. The UNSN had taken the telepaths in hand and were well on the way to developing nondestructive drugs for them. Apparently the kzin Patriarchy had always known that the sthondat lymph-derived drug burned out the telepaths’ brains, leaving them not merely mindless, but, unless someone mercifully euthanized them, in a state of endless, screaming horror. Under the Patriarch, they were generally euthanized, not from mercy, but merely to stop the noise and because they were now useless (we heard that better drugs were produced in small quantities on Kzin and reserved for the Patriarch’s own telepaths, the highest masters of the art, who were treated as nobles in their own right). The Patriarchy needed the telepaths, but feared them for many reasons. The solution they had arrived at resulted in short, down-trodden neurotic lives for them.

Even with the incongruous wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses, giving him an appearance something like a tiger that had eaten an old-time gangster, he was looking a great deal better. In fact, apart from his small size, he looked like a healthy kzin. Indeed, I did not recognize him at first. He was leading a well-grown kit with buttons on its claws. One of the orphans, I guessed. I remarked that I was pleased to see him looking so well.

“It is the new drugs, the human drugs,” he said. “I am under a life-debt to you and your kind, Professor.”

“If that is so, I am under one to you,” I told him. “Let us say the scales balance.”

“Have you got a few moments?” he asked me. “There is something I would share with you.”

The Lindenbaum café was not far away. It had footch couches for kzin now. I wondered what the prewar students would have made of it. Not a good idea to think that way. It raised too many ghosts.

“As a matter of fact, it was to see you that I came here,” he said. “You remember Herr von Kleist?”

“Yes.” I nearly said “Of course,” but one who is powerfully conditioned never says anything that might be interpreted as rudeness to a kzin, even a small and apparently friendly one. Feeble telepath or not, he could have dismantled a tiger without undue trouble.

“And Herr Thompson?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Would you be interested in knowing why they died? And Herr Morris?”

“Certainly. I have often wondered.”

“Herr Thompson, before he died, prepared a package,” he said. “It was star-locked.”

That meant it could only be opened when the stars had moved to a certain position in the sky. Generally an attempt to force it resulted in the destruction of its contents. The kzinti had got the technology, like many others, from one of the scientific races they had conquered in the past. They had invented very little of their own.

“He gave it to you?”

“No indeed, to another monk…human. He, in turn, fled Munchen to join the Resistance and left it with a third human, what you call an ‘attorney.’ I remember you explaining those terms to us.”

“Yes.”

“I could follow all this easily enough. I had read Herr Thompson’s mind, and from that I read the minds of the other human and the attorney.”

“Did you tell the Patriarch’s authorities?”

“No.”

“May I ask why?” I would not have dared put such a question, save that I felt he was inviting it.

“What have they ever done for me, except make me a wreck and rob me of my strength and pride? But I bided my time. When the Ramscoop Raid came, the attorney’s offices were in one of many buildings reduced to rubble. I let Herr Morris wreak part of my vengeance for me. He did more than I expected. Much later, after I was released from the assessment camp, after I had seen you, I found the package-I had read the attorney’s mind and knew where it was stored. He was dead and had no further use for it. I took it and kept it.

“I did not know how long it would be before the star-lock allowed the package to be opened-centuries, perhaps. At last I had an idea, a very simple one, which the ingenious beings who invented the star-lock could not have anticipated, though perhaps Herr Thompson should have. I took it to the planetarium.”

“As simple as that!”

“As simple as that. I opened it. It contained, as I had suspected, a message, which I read. By then, the kzin were overthrown on this planet. I kept it for some time, unsure what to do with it. Recently I decided to give it to you…”

“Thank you.”

“I had thought it might contain a treasure, or the guide to one. I warn you, it does not.”

There must be something about humans and locked boxes. I felt an absurd sense of disappointment.