Larry Niven - The Man-Kzin Wars 05

Jonah and the kzinti squatted on their bedrolls in the center of the cargo bay, with the hunched backs of the other workers and the waist-high bulwarks at the edge between them and the spray cast up by the river. Spots hated to get his pelt wet, spitting and snarling under his breath, while Bigs endured stolidly. The human rolled a cigarette of teufelshag, ignoring the feinoids’ urrows of protest. They were well up into the settled areas now. Thinly settled, but the banks of the middle Donau had been where humans first came to Wunderland. The floodplain and benchland were mostly cleared, or in planted woodlots; farther back from the floodplain the old Herrenmann estates stood, bowered in gardens, whitewashed stone and tile roofs. Many were broken and abandoned, during the occupation, by kzin nobles who had seized a good deal of this country for their own, or by anticollaborationist mobs after the liberation. They passed robot combines gathering rice, blocks of orange grove fragrant with cream-white flowers, herds of beefalo and kzinti zitragor under the watch of mounted herdsmen. Villages were planted among small farms, many of them worked by hand; machinery had gotten very scarce while the kzinti were masters.

The hovercraft slowed as traffic thickened on the river, strings of barges, hydrofoils, pleasure craft with their colored sails taut in the stiff southerly breeze. The steel spire of St. Joachim’s Cathedral blazed in the light of Alpha, with Beta high in the sky as well. Farther north there were parks along the waterside, with palm groves and frangipani, but the section the hovercraft edged toward was workaday and bustling, sparkling with welding torches as the old wrecked autocranes were replaced with temporary steel frames; in the meantime stevedores sweated to haul rope pulleys. Jonah flicked the butt of his cigarette into the water like a minor meteor undergoing reentry.

“Nice to be affluent,” he said cheerfully.

Bigs made an indescribable sound and turned away from the irritating human, lying flat on the decking with his chin extended. Spots waggled his ears in the kzin equivalent of an ironic chuckle.

“Three thousand krona each,” he said dryly. “The prospect heats my liver-I truly feel one of Heaven’s Admirals. This for thirty diurnal periods of laboring like a slave in a swamp and improvising machinery out of muck and junk. There is fungus growing on my fur. I may never be able to eat fish again.”

“Let’s collect, then,” Jonah answered.

They heaved themselves erect under the burden of their kitbags and shouldered their way to the bows as the big vehicle ran up on a concrete landing ramp and sank to the surface. It was easy enough, although the cargo well was crowded; nobody on Wunderland was going to jostle a kzin, liberation or no. Legal prosecution would be cold comfort after you fell to the ground in several pieces. The surf-noise of voices sounded tinny after the long hours of engine roar.

“Fra Eldasson,” Jonah called. The contractor was slipping out of the control cabin and walking up the ramp. “Finagle dammit, wait for us!”

She turned, frowning, then smiled without showing her teeth as she saw the three of them wading through the crowd toward her.

“Problem you haf?” she said brusquely.

“I thought you were going to pay us as soon as we got back to Munchen,” Jonah said.

“Certainly,” she replied, glancing out of the corner of her eyes at the two towering orange figures behind him. They grinned at her. “I’ve told everyone”-a hand waved at the others disembarking-“credit chips or account transfers will be made at the opening of bank hours tomorrow. It is Sunday, you know.”

Jonah blinked in bewilderment for a moment, then realized what she meant. Wunderland was a very conservative place; about what you would expect from a settlement founded by North European plutocrats in the late twenty-first century. Even now they still observed religious holidays.

“May we eat it if it attempts to snatch away our gain/p re?” Bigs snarled in the Hero’s Tongue: in the Menacing Tense, at that.

“Shut up,” Jonah whispered; Bigs was uncivilized, even for a kzin. “A lot of people around here understand that language-do you want to start a riot, talking about eating a human?” Far too many had been eaten; compulsory holocasts of kzinti hunting parties chasing down political prisoners had been a staple of the occupation.

Tanjit, I was the quarry for a kzinti hunting party, he reminded himself. Me and Ingrid. He pushed the memory out of his mind; thinking about Ingrid was too painful. Besides, the kzin hunting him had died.

From Eldasson’s narrowed eyes and slight smile, he suspected that she had understood. Tanjit. If there’s a disturbance, she might really try to stiff us. Kzinti were not popular with the courts, understandably enough-although Jonah’s war record would help. It was not everyone who had assassinated a Planetary Governor like Chuut-Riit.

“Look, Fra Eldasson, we’re broke until we get paid- we don’t even have enough to buy a drink,” he said reasonably.

“Ja. Hmmm. Here”-She took him by the arm and lead him to one side, behind a wrecked crane. The thick synthetic bars had frayed out into tangled fiber fragments; heavy beam-rifle hit, from the look of it. Composites did not weather, so it might have been from last year, or from the street-fighting fifty years ago when the kzin landed.

“Here’s four hundred in cash,” she said. “Don’t let any of the others know, or everyone will be about me like grisflies. Meet me at Suuomalisen’s Sauna later tonight, and I’ll transfer the rest for you and your two ratcats.”

“All right.”

“Hrraer”

“I thank Eldasson for the drink and the meat,” Spots said, “but the delay is irksome. We will have much to set at rights in our households; our younger siblings are still immature, of shrunken liver and rattlepate.”

Bigs wrinkled his upper lip in agreement and stropped his claws on the table. Shavings of tekdar curled back, creamy yellow beneath the darker patina of the surface.

Jonah nodded. They were in one of the quieter rooms of the Sauna, which despite its name was an entertainment center of varied attractions, some shocking even to him; the tamer floor shows were interesting, but of course wasted on non-humans. The kzinti had eaten on their own-no human felt comfortable with a feeding kzin, and the felinoids detested the smell of what men ate -but had returned to wait with him.

“Yeah; I’m anxious to get the credit deposited myself,” he said. And you’re not bad company for ratcats, but you’re not half as pretty as what I have in mind, he thought: it had been a long month in the swamps. “Eldasson had better show up soon.”

“Eldasson?” a voice said.

Jonah looked up, slightly surprised. A man who associated with kzinti got used to being ignored, or left to his own thoughts, whichever way you preferred to look at it. The speaker was a thickset man for a Wunderlander, with a blue-jowled stubble of beard and a grubby turban; from one of the little ethnic enclaves that hung on even here in Munchen. The light from the stained-glass overhead lamps flickered across his olive skin.

“She owes you money?” the man went on.

“A fair bit,” Jonah replied.

The other man giggled and lifted his drink; the steel bracelets on his wrist tinkled.

“Then you had better have a written contract,” he said. “Notarized.”

“Notarized?” Jonah said in alarm. “We’ve got the contracts, right here.” He tapped his belt-unit. “With mods for bonuses and overtime.”

“A personal recording?” the turbaned man said scornfully. “How long have you been on Wunderland, flatlander?”

Jonah bristled and ran a reflexive hand down his Sol-Belter strip of hair; his great-great-grandmother had been the last of his family to be born on Earth.