Man-Kzin Wars IV Larry Niven (ink ebook reader .txt) 📖

face. She was grinning the way humans did when they were radiantly happy, but the way she bared her teeth seemed to have a kzinlike ferocity. Some ancient hardwired instinct had been severed from its inhibitory subprograms.

“Kill! Kill! Kill!” she screamed happily through her grief and through the bars to drown out the wailing of the children.

Later, with the she-Svelda under sedation, Trainer-of-Slaves tried to repair the damage to her brain by regrowing neurons in the places where they had been excised, but it didn’t work. She went into a coma. The autodoc could keep her alive but she responded to no outside stimulation, could not groom or feed herself, or even eat. He had to give the meat to Grraf-Hromfi’s sons for good behavior, but he kept the head and sliced up the brain, feeding its neural circuitry into his data-link in the hopes that someday he could make sense of what had gone wrong.

He couldn’t resist clipping one of her ears to his belt. After the Fourth Fleet disaster, he needed a monkey ear at his waist.

He was thinking more about his mother than ever before. He had always thought of his mother as non-intelligent. All the idioms for stupidity in the Hero’s Tongue were references to females. If one kzintosh said of another kzintosh, “You kzinrret,” what he meant was, “You brainless stupid fool!” And yet … when Trainer-of-Slaves had tried to replicate, in human females, that endearing kzinrret stupidity, what he had achieved was bizarre non-functionality.

Still in a rage induced by the defeat of the Fourth Fleet, he took his rage out in an aggressive attack on this problem which had been plaguing him. He thought about his mother. He was thinking about all the times she had saved his life.

His experimental mistakes had confronted him with strange facts. He’d had to question his ideas about intelligence, to break that concept down into its many parts. Now he analyzed what his mother must have been aware of while she was actively protecting him and he came to the remarkable conclusion that his mother had to be intelligent.

But that was impossible. He flashed on his cherished image of catching her chewing on one of his first books, chewing it to a pulp.

The Fanged God had given souls to the first kzinrretti but at the crucial Battle of Hungry Years they had betrayed both Him and their mates while the males stayed loyal to their God and so He had taken away the female souls and given their bodies over to kzintosh masters so that the race might continue to propagate itself. That was mythology, tales of events that had happened before science, before writing. What had happened? What had the kzinrretti lost at the Battle of Hungry Years if it wasn’t intelligence?

Trainer-of-Slaves was sure that he loved his mother—whatever she was. What she was remained locked behind silence; she seldom spoke and when she did speak she used only the elementary vocabulary of the Female Tongue, no more than a few octal-squared words. Was it a contradiction in terms to call an animal intelligent if she couldn’t use language?

CHAPTER 19

(2414–2419 A.D.)

“Why don’t we go!” He stooped through the oval bulkhead door, trying to tromp out his anger. But in the light artificial gravity he had to hold on to the handrails to make the floor shake.

His Jotoki scattered before his voice and busied themselves with what they thought would please him. Some went to their sleeping frameworks and hid.

Trainer-of-Slaves was eager to launch toward Man-sun to avenge the Fourth Fleet. He had expected action after a ten year wait and buildup. His liver demanded an explosion of Heroism raging out toward the enemy star. He was tired of waiting, waiting, waiting with nothing to claw but the claw-sharpening “bark” in his miserably small stateroom. He was restless. His blood told him to make something happen…

But the implacable, immovable, unmoving Chuut-Riit thought differently. Waiting wasn’t waiting, said his bulk, grinning at his foes. Waiting was planning. The size of the defeat had sobered him. May the Fanged God not lose patience with his inaction!

Grraf-Hromfi conceded in one of his seminars that the Wunderland Admiralty was reassessing top strategy. Chuut-Riit had cynically expected the Fourth Fleet to fail because of its arrogant commanders, but he had also expected it to demoralize the monkey hive—and drastically weaken human military capability. Now Chuut-Riit was opting for a few more years of preparation. He wanted Centaurian industry built up to the point where it could keep an interstellar supply line filled. And he needed that extra crop of warriors that more time would provide.

In the meantime the Third Black Pride kept track of Sol through the distant transmissions of the First and Second Black Pride communication warships. Those scoutships of the Fifth Fleet had remained in place, well away from the battle zone—undetected as of 4.3 years ago—keeping their vigil out where Man-sun was only the brightest star in the heavens.

A steady flicker and hiss of messages came through to be filtered and cleaned and analyzed by the kzinti spoor specialists back in the Centaurian system. Fuzzy pictures of UNSN Gibraltar Base. Specks that looked like a fleet moving in the asteroid belt. Some new markings on Mercury. The trace of search beams scanning the skies. Non-military beamcasts giving the tone and morale of the monkey civilization. Better and better maps of the cities of Earth.

Trainer-of-Slaves often flipped through the images. He gave only a glance to one of the earliest post-battle transmissions. It was a single crude picture of a vehicle being assembled in the asteroid belt. The scale markings indicated enormous size but its size was deceptive. Most of the structure seemed to be a flimsy magnetic funnel: one of the monkey ramscoops of no military utility. To be noted and ignored. Perhaps it was to be an emissary to one of their local allies.

Months later there was a second flurry of activity when more pictures of