Man-Kzin Wars IX Larry Niven (grave mercy .txt) 📖

"So I have seen."

"In return I offer you and these kzin safe conduct to . . . wherever you wish to go."

"And where would that be?"

"The UNSN has set up holding camps. You can see it is caring for the surrendered kzin—giving them food, medical care even. I . . . I will go further: safe conduct to the hills, if you give me your Name as your word that you will harm no humans. You see I do not believe that you lie. You can stay there till things . . . settle down."

You have won one planet. Do you think you have won the war? What when the Patriarch's forces return? No, I must not be too provocative. Yet where else is there for me to go? Perhaps, false arm and wounded legs and all, I could live like a hunter, as Sire once said the Fanged God meant kzintosh to live . . . free in the hills of Ka'ashi, with kzinretts, perhaps, get more kits, ensure my line. Jocelyn watched him as though reading his thoughts.

"I never believed I would say this to a ratcat, but this is your home, too, isn't it?"

"Rratcat? What is rratcat?"

"The name we always called you kzin out of your hearing."

"You mean to insult me?" His wtsai was in his hand, his body in the fighting crouch. Fast for a human, a ratchet-knife was in one of her hands, the outline of its blade extended, its high wailing sound filling the room, a pistol in the other. Humans and kzinti raised their weapons.

There was a sudden cry. A nightmarish parody of a human was moving towards them. A thing long dead, with vast staring eye sockets empty save for fragments of dried matter, and yellow fangs. As Jocelyn turned to it with a cry of her own he struck with the wtsai, twice, but to disarm, not to kill, knocking her weapons to the floor. Then they saw what the thing was. A dried Morlock head and hide from the trophy hoard, carried by the kzin kitten. At any instant the situation could have exploded. Then some human of the guard laughed, and others joined in. Quickly Jocelyn laughed as well, though the laughter to human ears would have sounded forced and mechanical. There was even kzin laughter. She picked up the weapons carefully, offering no aggression, switched off the knife and replaced them in her belt. Then she ostentatiously buttoned the flaps that covered them. It had been a very near thing.

"You mean to insult me?" he asked again.

"Not necessarily . . . I don't know." Then: "I apologize. No insult was intended. My words cannot affect your Honor."

"I have never insulted you!"

"Insulted! Insulted! Didn't you ever understand how much we hated you! You terrified us and enslaved us and killed us in tens of thousands. Killed us in millions, not only by direct murder but by starvation and by smashing our civilization into chaos!"

"At first, yes. There was much to be done, much trouble for monk—for humans who did not show respect. But things were becoming orderly with time. You learned decorum . . . most of you."

"We learnt not to show our teeth when we smiled, if we ever smiled. We learnt not to hunt in the woods even with sharpened sticks unless you had deigned to tell us you would not be there that day, not to let our children cuddle pet kittens, not to show possessions that a kzin kit or kzinrett might fancy, not to shout or to pass kzin or kzinretts without prostration or with alcohol or tobacco on our breaths. Death could follow all such even if you did not need us or our children for experiments or hunts. To toil in your war factories so other humans might be killed and enslaved. All slaves, and any runaway slave was monkeymeat, fair game for all kzint—" She corrected herself deliberately. "For all ratcats. Our population is half what it was before you came—as far as statistics can be kept to tell us. And we aged and died and saw our loved ones age and die before their time because there were no more modern medicines or geriatric drugs except for the privileged few—for people like him."

"And you."

"Yes. God forgive me! I have a family too . . . I compromised to stay alive . . .

"Oh, a few humans, Jorg was one—damaged goods, that creature—may have dreamed that they or their descendants might somehow rise—the eternal dream of the deluded slave—and some tried to snuggle into your fur like parasites, and some used you for revenge against their own kind, but most of us who worked for you hated you even more than those who fought openly against you. Wasn't that obvious to you?"

"No. Till Chuut-Riit instituted human studies we never cared what monkeys thought so long as they obeyed and were decorous slaves. Why should we? Oh, I look into the sky and see now why we should have cared. . . . But some humans rose to high places. Life for some humans slaves was good and seemly. Look at your Henrietta-human, a female but executive secretary to the great Chuut-Riit himself."

"There is a special price on that one's head! The UNSN will not protect that one! We will have that head if we must cut down our own liberators to get it! We have prayed to the God to spare her life so we may take it!"

"Some of your monkey lawyers then, have made most useful slaves. Your book Law of Contracts stopped several death-duels."

"Should I be glad of that? More kzin dead in duels meant less terror for us, less human land taken, fewer fangs and claws on Wunderland or in space."

"But right at the start we offered you amnesty," he replied. "As the war drew on we . . . some of us . . . came to respect your kind in a way . . . The feral leader Markham . . . I heard an officer say once: 'That one is almost a kzin.'

"A lost human kit, if it or its parents had not offended and it was decorous, could probably walk with safety past