Larry Niven: The Man-Kzin Wars 12

"I have much wealth already, Trader." Warrgh-Churrg again gestured expansively about the room, heavy with gold, hung with lustrous purple, panels on floors and walls bedizened with intricate stones, their tiles slanted minutely to catch the shifting sunlight in changing pictures and patterns.

"Feared Warrgh-Churrg, that is plain from the magnificence of your abode and of your hospitality. Still, perhaps there are things I can offer…with trade between the stars so limited by the cursed kz’eerkti…"

Warrgh-Churrg nodded, his ears and tail twitching thoughtfully.

"Urrr. I will speak to Estate Manager. We will perhaps discuss this later. Now I shall prepare for the entertainment tonight."

"I am looking forward to it. I respectfully seek your leave to return to my ship and prepare on my own account, that my apparel and grooming may be less unworthy of your hospitality."

Trader bent while Warrgh-Churrg sprayed a little urine on him, an archaic lordly gesture signifying to all kzinti that he was the magnate's guest and under his protection. Trader exposed his throat and belly in the equally ancient ritual gesture of submission and Warrgh-Churrg dismissed him with a gracious flick of his tail.

The offworld kzin departed with decorum, striding through the great doors and down the wide snowy street toward the space port, the bowed, shackled human scurrying behind on its lead.

The inner door of the airlock closed behind the kzin and the human. Both moved differently as they stepped into the main cabin. The gravity-planer, running with a low, continuous purr, reduced gravity here to 61 percent of Earth, the gravity of Wunderland in which both had been born and grown up. The human removed her shackles and they sat down together in the control cabin. A touch on a keyboard opaqued the windows.

"Ginger, did I do all right?" asked the human. She rubbed her chilled bare feet, and slipped out of her brown slave's robe and into a modern fabric overall.

"I thought you acted convincingly scared," said the kzin in Wunderland-accented English. "A veteran couldn't have done better."

"I wasn't acting! I was bloody terrified!"

"I know. So was I. It's a scary job. You'll get used to it."

"I couldn't feel I'm much of a replacement for Simon."

"Simon was good. A good partner as well as a good friend. But you'll learn…

"There's a first time for everyone, Pet. First time for piloting an air-car solo, first time for a soldier in battle, first time for walking into a kzinti palace on a kzinti world with a lie. You'll get used to it.

"Bloody vatach blood! I need a civilized drink," continued the kzin as he dialed a bourbon and ice cream, "I think you do too… You followed all that, Perpetua?"

"Pretty well," said the woman. "So you've got a party on tonight."

"By the Fanged God! If he wishes to test his son, I hope I can survive it! And Zianya! If the Bearded God also loves me, let there not be Zianya!" Zianya were semi-intelligent animals, highly esteemed as a delicacy on kzinti worlds. The important thing was that they be torn to pieces alive at table. Their anticipatory terror and subsequent death-agonies with the first tearing bites set up a hormonal reaction that gave what was generally considered a particularly delicious flavor to their meat. "They make me sick!"

"But that's hardly the important thing."

"No. There are kz’eerkti here, even if he's a bit vague about them."

"He's obviously not too interested in monkeys."

"His body language suggested he may be more interested than he lets on. He wants to establish it's a seller's market. But he said of the slaves from Wunderland that 'they mixed with the locals.' Odd. Very odd. They would hardly have just let slaves go to breed in the bush."

"Perhaps they escaped."

"Even so. But odder than that…'mixed with the locals'? What locals? Convergent evolution? And mixed how? Could they interbreed? From different planets? Have you ever heard of such a thing?"

"No, never. But is that what he was suggesting?"

"I thought it was ambiguous," said the kzin, "but if he means the humans from Ka'-from Wunderland…mixed with the locals… It sounded as if he meant 'interbred.' I'm aware of problems with dialect, but yes, I think that's what he meant."

"You know, he didn't specifically say that they'd brought Wunderlanders back. Maybe he was just getting your interest up. I mean, convergent evolution can hardly be that convergent! Creatures from different planets-different stars!-can't interbreed."

"Well," laughed the kzin, rippling his ears, "Simon and I always said we could trust each other with our wives." The laughter ended.

"How is his wife?" the human asked.

"I saw her before we left. I think she'll be all right. She's strong. But he's a loss. Simon the Simian."

He touched a pad on the control console with a black, ripping-chisel claw and a hologram of the planet shivered into shape above it. Kzrral's polar and subpolar continents were colored green, with ice fields in the polar regions and mountains. It was 1.2 times the diameter of Earth, but with a smaller iron core giving it comparable gravity. It was warmer than Earth overall, though with extensive temperate zones in the high latitudes. A telltale far in the north of the largest continent marked the main kzinti settlement and their own position. At latitudes lower than 30 degrees savannah and then jungle belts were indicated, turning to wastelands while still many degrees from the equator; there, the seas steamed, and only a few mountaintops rose above ceaseless convection storms. The south pole was landless, though there was a small cap of water-ice sitting on the shallow seafloor, and some minor landmasses in the southern ocean. The planet was mostly hotter than Earth or Wunderland, much hotter than Kzinhome. Perpetua thought for a moment how fascinating a human biologist might find life-forms adapted to live in or pass through those near-boiling equatorial seas and steam-heated lands.

"In the tropics there could be anything," the kzin commented. "Kzinti wouldn't have much interest in it."

"Unless population pressure forced them into the tropics." Perpetua was tentative. A human-historical specialist, transferred out of academia as human Space geared up for another possible war, kzinti culture was all still largely academic for her. She had, she felt, reason to be tentative. Her experienced predecessor had either overestimated his own knowledge of that culture or been unlucky.

"Not a problem here. There are about a thousand estates on this continent, and they haven't yet occupied all the prime hunting territory by a long way yet."

"Quite a small population."

"About twenty-five thousand males in the whole northern hemisphere. Plus several times that number of females, of course, and kittens."

There had been quite a lot more before, and there would be again, as soon as the kittens grew up. Kzrral had lost a lot of males in both wars, as well as most of its spaceships. The economy was still a long way from recovering from that loss. The kzinti had come as colonists with their own spaceships, and before the wars they had never needed to build a great new spaceflight industry with the communication that led to.

"Always a backwater planet, relatively poor in mineral production-nothing to attract a huge population, and a good incentive to the kzinti already settled here not to welcome others. Why open up your world to competitors for territory?"

"Military security? A bigger population means you can support a bigger army."

"Against whom? We met everything in space and swallowed it up. No one was going to attack us! Worse luck, a lot of kzinti thought-no space-traveling races with the warrior skills to give us good sport. Well, we know better now. As for the Patriarch's regular forces, there would be no point in building up armed forces to defend against them. If they wanted such a planet they could take it. No doubt communications with the homeworld emphasized how mineral-poor it was, and presented the local kzinti as a loyal garrison of Heroes holding it for the Patriarch in case of need.