Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIV

He was wearing a garment over his fur like a vest with pockets-purely utility. From one of these he produced some sheets of paper.

“This is what it contained,” he said.

I read:

There is not much time to explain. I wish it to be known, by my descendants at least, that I am not a maniacal killer. And I am not a traitor. I have killed von Kleist for the benefit of the human race. Now I must kill myself, to avoid the Telepath’s probing and Kzin torture, both of which would reveal the truth and make what I have done pointless. By the time this is opened it should not matter. Things will have been settled one way or another. I hope it will allow my name to be restored.

I tried to subvert the Kzin with stories of human prowess.

I begged von Kleist to see reason, but he dug in his heels through sheer stubbornness. He was determined to put Moby Dick on the kzin reading list. An academic dedicated to his studies.

He claimed, when I pressed him, it would give them a better understanding of human courage and determination. I told him that many of them might have trouble telling fact from fiction, but it made no impression. He called it a great classic.

Yes, a great classic that might destroy us all. For what is its message, to a kzin reader? That the whale wins in the end, in spite of all Ahab’s effort and sacrifice. THAT HUMANS CAN BE DEFEATED, THAT HUMAN BRAVERY AND DETERMINATION ARE NOT ENOUGH FOR SUCCESS, that we are but monkeys that batter our lives away in a futile quest for vengeance upon a brainless fish. And the fish wins. Its message of human despair and nihilism would work its way through the kzin fleet. It would hearten the enemy.

That is what, even now, the von Kleists will never understand. For them, ideas and consequences exist in different universes. The power of words to create or destroy. I suggested Churchill’s wartime speeches. He said they were not literature, which it was his job to teach. He would have spread poison through the Patriarch’s weapons, made the death of every human who had died fighting the kzin seem as meaningless as Ahab’s, for the sake of teaching literature. If they understood it was fiction, that would be worse, for the very knowledge that a human would write such a fiction would increase their contempt for the human race, and their confidence in themselves.

My motive has been to help the human race survive. Care for my family.

I dialed my flashlight to high power and focused it on the paper. As it crumbled to ashes I asked: “Do you know what happened to his family?”

“No,” he said. We both knew there was a good chance they were dead. But I could advertise for them.

“So what are you doing now?”

“I am still at the orphanage. I teach the orphans reading and writing. What you and the other professors taught me.”

“Not Moby Dick , I trust.”

“No, that would contain quite the wrong lesson. My favorite is called The Magic Pudding : ‘ We much prefer to chew / the steak and kidney stew… ’ Giving you this has rid me of a burden. There was another page, giving details of where he had hidden a cache of diamonds, industrial diamonds, that he had salvaged from a bombed factory at the time of the first kzin landings. Leonie will be able to use them, for the orphanage is always short of funds. There are young kzin in it who might have grown up like me. Farewell, Professor. Drink blood and tear cattle into gobbets!”

He left. Seeing me alone, the human waiter sought my order. I drank a glass of wine to Thompson’s memory.

by Alex Hernandez

“There are monsters beneath the surface,” Daneel Guthlac said to the kit standing next to him at the edge of a cliff overlooking the roiling Kcheemic Ocean. Gliding toothy pteranobats, which infested many of the marine cliffs of Sheathclaws, skimmed over the water with long snouts in frothy waves, ready to snap up their prey. Occasionally, a large creature would burst out of the sea and catch one of the flyers. “When I said we were going to bag the biggest, meanest beast in all of Sheathclaws, I meant it.”

“What do you mean?” The kitten’s fur flattened, his naked tail curved between his legs in the presence of the infinite, crashing water. Ashamed of his display of fear, he forced his tail to relax.

“See that town down there?” Dan pointed toward a collection of houses at the bottom of the cliff, where surf met rock in battle. The houses were painted bright orange to fill some deep-seated psychological need and stood on stilts to defend against sudden storm surges. “These kzinti have learned to live off the sea.”

“I told all my crèche mates I would bring back a wombadon! When I come back with fish, they’re going to tear me apart!”

Dan scratched the kit’s scruffy neck and felt the welts of his mate’s teeth beneath the fur. Schro was about the size of an average adult human, which meant he was small for his age, an inheritance of his biological Sire, and the older kzin kittens got, the crueler and more aggressive they became. On any other kzin world, the puny kit would’ve been killed. On Sheathclaws, he was merely the target of vicious bullying. Dan sent him a telepathic flash of his own days in the crèche: a small monkey surrounded by violent, broad-pawed kittens. The human boy quickly learned to toughen up and use all his cunning to survive. “Trust me, son. When we return to Shrawl’ta, those little bastards will fear and respect you.”

Schro’s ears receded incredulously. He didn’t know which he feared more: the terrible sea, or his peers.

Dan and Schro crunched down the slope onto the rocky shore. Tall kzinti with saffron pelts watched their descent with reserved interest. Only a ragged kzintosh, whose fur had grown out patchy after severe burns had stripped him of most of his flesh, left one of the square, long-legged buildings and headed their way. The local leader.

“Chief Programmer?” Dan called from a safe distance.

The kzin slowed his advance and approached less urgently. He was massive, three heads taller than Dan, with fierce and undefeated eyes. “I haven’t been Chief Programmer in a long time, human.” He glowered at the odd pair, an unruly man with long, sandy hair and close-cropped beard, and a soft runt of a kitten. “Daneel Guthlac?”

“Correct, and this is my son, Schro.”

The old Hero breathed in the kit. Dan sensed that he found the scent familiar and unpleasant. Dan instinctively touched his sidearm, but the kzin decided it was only the stink of monkey clinging to the kit’s spotted fur. “I call myself Fraaf’kur now, and this is my territory, Krazári.”

Sea-lion? Dan got a blaze of immense pride attached to the kzintosh’s current name and opted not to correct his assumptions of what a sea lion actually was. Instead he asked, “Krazári means something like Ocean Master in the Heroes’ Tongue, right?”

“Yes, those two words had been mutually exclusive until kzinti settled on Shasht, my home planet.”

“And now you have an entirely new ocean to tame here on Sheathclaws. I envy you.”

The kzin’s ragged fur puffed up pompously, but he said nothing, unsure if the human was genuinely envious or only mocking him.

“Fraaf’kur,” Dan stifled a smile, “we want to book passage on your boat. We heard you were the only kzintosh in all of Raoneer that could take us fishing.”

“My get could also take you and your adopted kit out on the sea,” he emphasized the word “adopted” with a hint of disgust. “The longnecks are plentiful this season and make impressive trophies.”