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here and now, I see Kzersatz as a prison and every tabby on this planet will
be locked up there for the duration of the war!" With that, Locklear sealed
the canopy and made a quick check of the console readouts. He
reached across to adjust the inertia-reel harness of his companion, then
shrugged into his own. "You have no choice, and no tabby telepath can ever
claim you did.
Now do you understand?"
The big kzin was looking below as the forest dropped away, but Locklear could
see his ears forming the kzin equivalent of a smile.
"No wonder you win wars,"
said Scarface.
The Children's Hour by Jerry Pournelle
& S.M. Stirling
Prologue
The kzin floated motionless in the bubble of space.
The yacht Boundless-Ranger was orbiting beyond the circle of Wunderland's
moons, and the planet obscured the disk of Alpha Centauri; Beta was a brighter
point of light. All around him the stars shone, glorious and chill, multihued.
He was utterly relaxed; the points of his claws showed slightly, and the pink
tip of his tongue. Long ago he had mastered the impulse to draw back from
vertigo, uncoupling the conscious mind and accepting the endless falling,
forever and ever. . . .
A small chiming brought him gradually back to selfhood. "Hrrrr," he muttered,
suddenly conscious of dry throat and nose. The bubble was retracting into the
personal spacecraft; he oriented himself and landed lightly as the chamber
switched to opaque and Kzin-normal gravity. Twice that of Wunderland, about a
fifth more than that of Earth, home of the great enemies.
"Arrrgg."
The dispenser opened and he took out a flat dish of chilled cream, lapping
gratefully. A human observer would have found him
very catlike at that moment, like some great orange-red tiger hunched over the
beautiful subtle curve of the saucer. A closer examination would have shown
endless differences of detail, the full-torso sheathing of flexible ribs,
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naked pink tail, the eyes round-pupiled and huge and golden. Most important of
all, the four-digit hands with a fully opposable thumb, like a black leather
glove; that and the long braincase that swept back from the heavy brow-ridges
above the blunt muzzle.
Claws scratched at the door; he recognized the mellow but elderly scent.
"Enter," he said.
The kzin who stepped through was ancient, his face seamed by a ridge of scar
that tracked through his right eye and left it milky-white and blind.
"Recline, Conservor-of-the-Patriarchal-Past," he said. "Will you take
refreshment?"
"I touch nose, honored Chuut-Riit," the familiar gravelly voice said.
The younger kzin fetched a jug of heated milk and bourbon from the dispenser,
and a fresh saucer. The two reclined in silence for long minutes. As always,
Chuut-Riit felt the slightest prickling of unease, despite their long
familiarity. Conservor had served his Sire before him, and helped to tutor the
Riit siblings. Yet still there was an unkzin quality to the ancient
priest-sage-counselor . . . a Hero strove all his life to win a full Name, to
become a patriarch and sire a heroic Line. Here was one who had attained that
and then renounced it of his own will, to follow wisdom purely for the sake of
kzinkind. Rare and not quite canny; such a kzintosh was dedicated. The word he
thought was from the Old Faith; sacrifices had been dedicated, in the days
when kzinti fought with swords of wood and volcanic glass.
"What have you learned?" Conservor said at last.
"Hrrr. That which is difficult to express,"
Chuut-Riit muttered.
"Yet you seem calmer."
"Yes. There was risk in the course of study you set me." Chuut-Riit's hardy
soul shuddered slightly. The human . . . fictions, that was the term . . .
had been disturbing. Alien to the point of incomprehensibility at one moment,
mind-wrackingly kzinlike the next. "I begin to integrate the insights,
though."
"Excellent. The soul of the true Conquest Hero is strong through flexibility,
like the steel of a fine sword-not the rigidity of stone, which shatters
beneath stress."
"Arreowg. Yes. Yet . . . my mind does not return to all its accustomed
patterns." He brooded, twitching out his batwing ears. "Contemplating the
stars, I am oppressed by their magnitude. Is the universe not merely greater
than we imagine, but greater than we can imagine? We seek the
Infinite Hunt, to shape all that is to the will of kzinkind. Yet is this a
delusion imposed by our genes, our nature?" His pelt quivered as skin rippled
in a shudder.
"Such thoughts are the food of leadership," Conservor said. "Only the lowly
may keep all sixteen claws dug firmly in the earth. Ever since the outer
universe came to Homeworld, such as you have been driven to feed on strange
game and follow unknown scents."
"Hrrrr." He flicked his tail-tip, bringing the discussion back to more
immediate matters. "At least, I think that now my understanding of the humans
becomes more
intuitive. It would be valuable if others could undertake this course of
meditation and knowledge-stalking as well.
Traat-Admiral, perhaps?"
Conservor flared his whiskers in agreement. "To a limited extent. As much as
his spirit-a strong one-can bear. Too long has the expansion of our hunting
grounds waited here, unable to encompass Sol, fettering the spirit of kzin.
Whatever is necessary must be done."
"Rrrrr. Agreed. Yet . . . yet there are times, my teacher, when I think that
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our conquest of the humans may be as much a lurker-by-water threat as their
open resistance."
Chapter 1
"We want you to kill a kzin," the general said.
Captain Jonah Matthieson blinked. Is this some sort of flatlander idea of a
joke? he thought.
"Well . . . that's more or less what I've been doing," the Sol-Belter said,
running a hand down the short-cropped black crest that was his concession to
military dress codes. He was a tall man even for a
Belter, slim, with slanted green eyes.
The general sighed and lit another cheroot. "Display.
A-7, schematic," he said.
The rear wall of the office lit with a display of hashmarked columns; Jonah
studied it for a moment and decided it represented the duration and intensity
of a kzin attack: number of ships, weapons, comparative casualties.
"Time sequence, phased," the senior officer continued. The computer obliged,
superimposing four separate mats.
"That," he said, "is the record of the four fleets the kzin have sent since
they took Wunderland and the Alpha Centauri system,
forty-two years ago. Notice anything?"
Jonah shrugged: "We're losing." The war with the felinoid aliens had been
going on since before his birth, since humanity's first contact with them,
sixty years before. Interstellar warfare at sublight speeds was a game for the
patient.
"Fucking brilliant, Captain!" General Early was a short man, even for a
Terran:
black, balding, carrying a weight of muscle that was almost obscene to someone
raised in low gravity; he looked to be in early middle age, which, depending
on how much he cared about appearances, might mean anything up to a century
and a half these days. With a visible effort, he controlled himself.
"Yeah, we're losing. Their fleets have been getting bigger and their weapons
are getting better. We've made some improvements too, but not as fast as they
have."
Jonah nodded. There wasn't any need to say anything.
"What do you think I did before the war?" the general demanded.
"I have no idea, sir."
"Sure you do. ARM bureaucrat, like all the other generals," Early said. The
ARM
was the UN's enforcement arm, and supervised-mainly suppressed, before the
kzin had arrived-technology of all types. "Well, I was.
But I also taught military history in the ARM academy. Damn near the only
Terran left who paid any attention to the subject."
"Oh."
"Right. We weren't ready for wars, any of us. Terrans didn't believe in them.
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