CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER ONE
My name is Peter Cartwright, and I was raised in Thoma’stown on Wunderland. It is East of the ranges and named after our first Judge, Jorg von Thoma1, who is still alive and an important man in the town and for miles around. He is pretty old by now, and sure looks it. I hear he objected to having the town named after him when the surveyor came from München, but everybody else voted against him, so it was not quite unanimous. I guess the surveyor must have grinned when he pencilled in the name and made it official.
I have been told to write this account by him and the Doctor, who I knew from childhood. It is a true account of what happened to us when we went to the Treasure Planet, and is as complete as I can make it, though there’s a bit of misdirection in where the Treasure Planet actually is, because one day we’re going back there, and we don’t want to find that any other human or kzin has got to it first. There is still lots of treasure left, a whole world of the stuff, and when I’m older I plan to go back again with my friend, Marthar.
We live in the back-blocks of Wunderland. Thoma’stown is still in quite wild country. We share the town with some of the kzin.
Before I was born, there was a long, long war between men and kzin, and kzin occupied the whole planet of Wunderland as masters.
Humans had control only of the Solar System four-and-a-bit light-years away, Earth, Sol’s asteroid belt, and a few scattered settlements in outlying Goldilocks planets which the early ramrobots had found. (We live under Alpha Centauri A. Its twin, Alpha Centauri B, is about twenty-five AUs away). After more than sixty years of war, kzin were breaking through Sol’s defenses. The Kzin Empire was very big, and their gravity drives were better than anything we had. Kzin are described as felinoids. They look something like tigers, but are much, much bigger and quicker—fiercer, too, say those who know both. And they look different in silhouette, also, for their brain-cases are far bigger. They fight with fangs and claws, and personal knives called wtsais and other blades (cutlasses, too, now, as you’ll hear); but they can also fight with laser-cannon, beam-weapons, rail-guns, mass-drivers, needlers, blasters, heat-induction rays, anemones and other things. Fortunately we can, too. The Kzin Empire has a ruler called The Patriarch, and over a long time the kzin have occupied many worlds.
It seems that most civilized, space-travelling species they came across had forgotten how to fight. As humans nearly had. But one thing this meant was that, apart from fighting among themselves, of which they had done a lot, the kzin had little experience of war.
They landed on and occupied Wunderland and the asteroids of the Serpent Swarm, getting some human collaborators to run them for them, collect taxes and organize the other humans as slaves or monkey-meat.
Those who disobeyed were eaten, either on the spot or in the public hunts. Fortunately, a lot of Wunderland is unsettled, and there were big caves, swamps and forests, so the humans who resisted had some hiding places. Some humans fought the kzin, on the ground and even in space, but as the Occupation wore on, the human resistance was being ground down.
The Kzin built fleets and sent them against Earth and the asteroids of the old Solar System. One fleet after another failed to break through Earth’s defenses in strength, but, as I said, the humans were gradually losing.
Then the Sol humans got an FTL—a faster-than-light drive—thanks to Dimity Carmody, who had been put on a ship out of Wunderland, and the Hyperdrive Armada came sweeping in from Earth to liberate us. But that’s a long story.
Most of the kzin and humans are at peace now. The most important kzin on Wunderland is Vaemar-Riit. You know from his name, Riit, that he is one of the Royal Family. His Sire, as the kzin call their fathers, Chuut-Riit, was Planetary Governor during the kzin Occupation, but was killed towards the end of it. I gather no one, kzin or human, likes talking about how he was killed.
When we learned the Kzin had a few hyperdrives (the technology was given to them by a treacherous human), many humans were afraid the war would start again and this time the humans would lose. But it turned out differently: it meant there were new planets accessible for everyone, though some say the kzin are waiting their chance to start another war. I hope that’s not true, for a lot of reasons. At one time some humans, especially some who had lived through the Occupation, wanted to kill all the kzin on Wunderland, but it was, felt I am told, that if that happened, the war would go on forever, or until everyone was dead and all the planets were smoking radioactive craters. Besides, there is no doubt that some kzin, led by the Lord Vaemar-Riit, want peace. And there are both humans and kzin who believe the two can learn from each other. The kzin who live in our village are friendly, anyway. They run the security force and a lot of other things. Female kzin, or kzinretti, except for a few like Lord Vaemar-Riit’s mate, the Lady Karan, are stupid unless they are given special treatments.
My mother used to run the Lord Templemount, which she called a hotel, though it was just an inn, with a few spare rooms that were rarely hired out. There are only two inns in the town, and ours was the smaller, out towards the wall on the southern side, and we didn’t make a lot of money. My father died two years before my story begins. It was a bit of a struggle, I see now, although I didn’t notice much at the time. I was just a lad with a taste for exploring the neighborhood with my friends. Particularly Marthar. In those days, she had to take some green pills every day. “If I don’t, I’ll get as stupid as you, or even worse,” she explained to me once. Later, to replace the pills, she had some sort of implant which does the job for a year at a time. She is quite smart, but not so smart as to worry me. And she is brave and basically kind (though inclined to sarcasm), so I care for her a lot.
I wasn’t particularly worried when the old kzin space-farer turned up at the inn one day. Of course, we had lots of kzin around the place, and the great war between men and kzin had been over for a long time. The sheriff and most of his deputies were kzin. They kept the Judge’s Law East of the Ranges, and I admired them a lot. They were brave and strong, and stood for justice, something Marthar and I believed in. But at school, where Marthar and I first made friends, we did history classes and learned about the Occupation and the Liberation and it seemed strange that once upon a time, man and kzin were deadly enemies on this planet. Anyway, that happened years and years before I was born. I don’t know what it’s like elsewhere, but in Thoma’stown, we get on fine. Maybe far away in space, humans and kzin still fight, and maybe we will again one day on Wunderland, but I can’t see it happening in Thoma’stown. There are some dangerous kzin in the wilds, but there are some dangerous humans too, and other things. I couldn’t possibly hurt Marthar. We’ve been friends too long, and we’ve been through a lot together, although that’s mostly in a part of my story that I’ll get to later.
It was a morning in early spring when the space-farer came to us. He was not overtall for a kzin, and his fur was grizzled and poorly trimmed; once it had been sable et or, black and gold stripes, but now the colors had faded to dirty brown and dark gray. His eyes had the red lines and purple hue which tell of decompression and mark the space-farer, human or kzin. One of his claws was steel, while his right ear was little more than a stump. He carried a huge backpack on his shoulders and a stick, which he used to bang on the open door. A battered wtsai scabbard hung by his left side, with a few jewels still on it, and low down on his right thigh there was a needler with the big handle the kzin need on their guns. While all adult male kzin have their personal wtsais, he also carried a great cutlass dangling on a cord down his back. A kzin cutlass, not a human one, with a blade at least seven feet long. I had heard they were becoming popular among kzin, especially since they still needed special permission on Wunderland to carry more sophisticated weapons. These various weapons were a give-away for a certain kind of spacer. You risk blowing a hole in a lightly built ship if you use a blaster, and you can run out of ammunition for a needler, so a wtsai or other blade-weapon is a sensible thing to have aboard a spaceship, assuming it’s the kind of ship where you might need to kill another creature on board, plunder some other craft, or fight off pirates, like Gutfoot’s Horde or some of the others who had not accepted the Armistice. Space is big enough for a lot of ships to hide, and the Serpent Swarm and other asteroids, as well as the planetoids of Alpha Centauri B and Proxima, made handy bases. Still, spacers have told me they prefer mounted laser-cannon to side-arms and it’s pretty obvious why. Don’t let an enemy ship get close, and don’t let hostile kzin board.
The new arrival had two large ear-rings with a collection of kzin ears on them, but, from the gaps, I thought it likely that they had once also carried in other types of ears, ears that it would not be wise for a kzin to display on liberated Wunderland.
“Bit out of the way, here?” he asked my mother who was behind the bar. He had a foreign sort of accent as well as some strange ways with language which he rather mangled. Still, very few kzin spoke Wunderlander perfectly. He looked around appraisingly.
“Bit too far,” my mother admitted. “We could do with some more customers, I will say.”
“That suits me well enough,” the kzin stated. “I don’t go for socializing m’self. And what have you got that an old kzin could drink wi’out pizenin’ ’imself?”
“We’ve got the very best beer, I brew it myself,” my mother told him proudly. “And there’s whisky and brandy and rum for them as like’s it.”
“Beer!” He growled disgustedly. “Monkey-piss! I’ll have a big, big glass o’ your rum, my lady. In a beer mug. A big beer mug. An’ there’s some coin will pay f’r it, I daresay.” He threw a gold coin on the countertop. Mother poured him a generous quantity of the brown fluid, and he took it with a grunt, sniffed it and then sipped it.
I was a little surprised. Kzin are not strict tea-totalers, but as a rule, they are suspicious of alcohol, or anything else that makes them lose control. They generally drink, if at all, with small, cat-like sips of surprising daintiness, and brandy is a favorite drink.
“So there’s not too many Heroes comes out this way, I’ll wager?” the kzin asked.
“Most of the kzin in the town don’t drink much, and there’s a kzin bar for the others,” Mother explained. “No, you’re the first we’ve seen in a while.”
The answered seemed to satisfy him. “Then this is the berth for me, I’ll be bound,” he said. “No dangers about, I take it?”
Now that was a very odd thing for a kzin to say. I had learned some kzinti etiquette from Marthar, and knew they were not supposed to notice danger, especially not scarred old warriors like this one. It was the height of bad manners to even mention it. And one look at any kzin was enough to indicate that bad manners were not a good idea.
“There are lesslocks outside,” Mother said, “but we keep them under control—or the deputies do.”
Lesslocks were a smaller, surface-dwelling variety of morlocks, the big, vaguely humanoid creatures at the top end of the food chain in the great caves. The kzin appeared to think little of lesslocks, though I knew well—too well—how deadly they could be. He went on:
“Ye have a room that will fit me though?”
“Of course,” Mother replied. My father had hoped for both human and kzin customers, though truth to tell, there had been few of either. He’d had a few kzin-sized rooms installed, and a kzin kitchen. Since they ate mostly raw meat, the latter had not been difficult.
“Then I’ll take your room, Manrett. And here’s some further coin to pay for it.” He threw down three or four gold coins. “Let me know when there’s need for more. Ye may call me Captain, for I’ve a right to that name, if no others.”
Another oddity. While most kzin were assigned rank-titles when young, most were desperate to acquire official Names and the respect and privileges they brought. Some had nicknames, though these were considered a poor substitute for the real thing. The etiquette of the matter was complex. But still, we knew that on liberated Wunderland many customs, especially kzin customs, were changing or being changed.
That was how the old space-farer came to stay at the Lord Templemount. Whether he had really captained a spacecraft I could not say, but he had the air of command despite his ragged appearance. If he’d ever kept a crew of kzin under control, with or without the fearsome disciplinary measures of the Patriarch’s regular navy to back him, he would have needed that air of command, as well as a rapidly-swinging claw. I’ve seen the deputies deal with some bad-tempered kzin, and boy, it’s scary.
The Captain would go out for a stroll every day, and he’d watch the news on a big phone he carried with him. Every evening he’d ask if there’d been any new kzin in town, and at first we thought he hungered for the company of his own kind, but we soon discovered that he wanted to avoid them. He had almost nothing to do with the kzin that lived there, once he had looked them over. I was his lookout, for he had promised me a silver three-neumark bit on the first of each month for reporting to him about any strangers. He cared little for human strangers, but was anxious to know of any kzin. “If you ever sees or hears of a red-furred Hero with a silver blaze on ’is chest an’ one of his legs an arty-fish-al one, be sure to let me know quick as a wink, Peter, m’ little kz’zeerkt,” he had told me. “And there’ll be another silver bit for ye, be sure of it.” He was not much inclined to pay me when I went to him on the first of each month, and would growl at the back of his throat and stare at me from those bloodshot eyes, but he soon thought better of it and within a day or two he would pay up, with his reminder of the red-furred kzin with one leg natural and the other prosthetic. But I never saw such a creature in Thoma’stown. The Lord Vaemar-Riit came by on an inspection once to ceremonially open the new school and clinic extensions, accompanied by Professors Nils and Leonie Rykerman, a beautiful woman with golden hair who was pointed out to me as Dimity Carmody herself, and Rarrgh-Hero, who has a prosthetic arm and eye. I noticed our Captain kept well out of sight while they were here. Nobody said anything about him, but that did not surprise me. It’s Wunderlanders’ way to mind our own business, human or kzin.
Still, the Lord Vaemar spoke to me, and asked me about my schoolwork. He spoke rather longer with Marthar, but I suppose that was to be expected. “Remember you are my envoy here,” I understood him say to her. The Judge and Rarrgh-Hero, I noticed, greeted each other like old acquaintances. “You seized your chances with both paws, I see,” I heard Rarrgh-Hero say. “The chance that you gave me,” the Judge replied. “I do not forget that I owe you a life.” I wondered what they referred to. I left them with the Judge proudly showing Rarrgh the giant chessboard and pieces one of the kzin had carved for the little park beside the town square. Most kzin adore chess, though they have given the pieces their own names. They are liable to smash them when they lose, but consider it a point of honor to make new ones, better than the old.
Most of our regulars at the inn were afraid of the Captain, though I think he enjoyed their fear. He was fierce and overbearing to a degree. He didn’t actually do anything violent, but he seemed to radiate menace. It gave me some faint shadow of a notion of how kzin must have appeared to humans during the Occupation, dread overlords, the humblest of whom had the power of life or death over any human. It made me realize the work Vaemar, The Rykermanns and others, kzin and human, had done to enable the two species to share a planet and live together, even if only in a few pockets like our village.
Of an evening, the Captain would recline on a footch we had for kzin visitors at the back of the room and drink his rum, and then he would tell stories, space stories, to the assembled crowd, stories to make the blood run cold. Of men and kzin in combat and in uneasy alliance, of both being spaced, ejected as exploded corpses into hard vacuum, with their lungs spewed out of their mouths (eating a Christmas tree); of planetfall on worlds that had atmospheres of corrosive poison, on others where his comrades had fallen in hundreds, victims of what he called the green rot; of monsters that had fought armed kzin to a standstill. Some of the young men actually seemed to admire him, and pointed out that a man-kzin alliance would make our kinds unbeatable if we ever encountered another foe. A couple of the younger kzin, still with traces of their kitten spots, listened too, and remarked proudly that he was the kind who made the name of kzin feared on countless worlds, until the sheriff took them aside for what he called a “talking to.” What this consisted of I do not know, but they returned severely chastened, and we heard no more of such talk.
He spoke of beings with two heads; of others (or were they the same?) with voices like sirens or mermaids, hauntingly beautiful and seductive; of warfare in space between every possible combination of man, kzin and alien. He told of rebellious Jotok, and of battles against the Chunquen and rumors of wars with other alien beings—mythical, perhaps—on the other side of the vast, irregular globe of space that was the Patriarchy, of relics of the ancient slavers; it occurred to me that an ARM agent might have picked up a good deal of useful information about the far-flung Kzin Empire from his ramblings, though how much of them were true was another matter.
He did have some discretion: he did not speak of the Occupation. At first I thought it was almost certain he had been involved, but Marthar suggested to me that perhaps he had kept away from Wunderland when it was called Ka’ashi and Chuut-Riit, Lord Vaemar’s Sire, had ruled it on behalf of the Patriarchy. None of the men in the village remembered him from those days, but that did not prove anything; it was a long time ago and he would have been much younger then. Once the Judge spoke to me privately about his concern that the old pirate might stir up the kzin-human hatred that he and others had worked to eliminate in the village, but it did not seem to happen. Some of the men even seemed to enjoy his blood-curdling insults, his stories and his almost equally frightening rum-fueled good fellowship.
And he would sing, a gruff crooning voice that was half purr and which didn’t seem to fit him, in some kzin patois, a dialect which only a few of us understood (the ordinary kzin languages are difficult enough). One night, Marthar had come to help in the bar, and she told me the song was about death and treachery and horrible things that she didn’t want to talk about. I’d already worked out that much for myself! And he made the whole company sing it too, with little or no comprehension, but every one of them stumbling through it as loud as they could, for fear the captain would take it out on any who held back. Mother thought he would lose us every customer we had, but strange to say, the company got bigger than ever before. People like to be frightened a bit, and they would talk about it to each other, and so strangers came from all over the town to see our resident pirate-kzin (as we described him to ourselves). A deputy stuck his head in once or twice, looked around and vanished again. So long as it was only words, they didn’t seem to care.
Once, when he was walking in the wild country outside the town walls, I accompanied him. It was as well he was there because we were attacked by a small troop of lesslocks. It could have been worse. It could have been Morlocks, driven out of the great caves of the High Kalkstein, though they were normally nocturnal on the surface. It was the first time I saw him in action with wtsai and cutlass, and it was breathtaking. He produced another knife, which he had concealed somewhere, and tossed it to me, with a cry of, “Now, Peter, young Kz’zeerkt, warrior, show them what a Man can do!” A blade flashing in each hand, too fast for my eyes to follow, he leapt on them, roaring. It was all over in a few minutes. I have heard it said that in hand-to-hand combat without beam or projectile weapons, one kzin was the equal of about forty fit men, and nothing I saw that day disproved that. When the slaughter was over, he seemed calmer and happier, even somehow more youthful. I had killed one of them, and he remarked jovially it was a pity I did not have an ear-ring of my own. He roared with laughter at a piece of lesslock I found dangling, wobbling from the brim of my hat.
There was another thing I found out about him: he openly despised Kdaptists. We had been told at school that in the last days of the Occupation, when the human counter-attacks from Sol had been beginning to bite on the kzin military machine, a strange set of religious beliefs called Kdaptism had made an appearance among some kzin. It owed its origin to the shocking, blasphemous realization, after the ecstatic joy of finding a species actually prepared to give them a fight, that this time, impossibly, blasphemously, the kzin might actually be defeated. The God, it was said, loved his humans, and gave them luck, whereas he honored his sons the kzin by giving them respect. Its baseline belief was that the God (precisely which god—the fanged or the bearded—it did not seem entirely clear), was coming to favor humans.
It had quickly split into several factions. Some, the high Kdaptists, saw the future as lying in cooperating with humans; others, the low Kdaptists, hoped to fool the God into granting them victory by dressing in garments made of human skin, and carrying out religious rites, which they had forced humans to teach them, with vessels made of human bone.
The K’daptists fought among themselves until Lord Vaemar and his followers and the Free Wunderland and UNSN forces imposed peace. Mind you, I never heard of a kzin trying to ingratiate himself with humans by falsely claiming allegiance to K’daptism. kzin don’t lie. At least, I thought then that kzin didn’t lie, and certainly most don’t, though some are capable of twisting the truth, particularly when talking to an enemy. Now and then when we talked, our conversation drifted into metaphysical areas, but it was plain that in his long, battle-scarred life, pity and mercy had played a negligible part. Whether he had voyaged with cut-throats of unusual brutality, or whether that had been standard behavior for kzin during the war, I was unsure.
Several of the men of the village had remarked how much most of the ordinary kzin on Wunderland had changed since those days, though of course the only ones we saw much of were those who had chosen to live with men in the village, or in the country nearby. The kzin remaining on Wunderland were not the very fiercest warriors—that was why they had survived—but any Kzin is fierce enough. There were, as I said, hold-out bands in the wild country. Wunderland, after all, was a whole world, much bigger than Mars, partially grown with forests and jungles as well as boasting ranges of hills, and there was no lack of refuges and hidingplaces.
Doctor Lemoine was in the neighborhood visiting some local woman with a liver condition, so he explained, and had gone into the parlor after taking a dinner from my mother, with a kindly “Thank-ee Mistress Cartwright, your servant, ma’am!” in his cold, clear voice. There he smoked a pipe and, in his neat, white lace and smart black suit, was a great contrast, with the old pirate-kzin in the corner, who had ragged fur and many belts and ear-rings so disarranged and multi-colored. The local tobacco crop was very fine and most human people, men and women, smoked cigars, so the long pipe of Doctor Lemoine was something of an oddity. Kzin seldom, and intelligent kzinretti never smoked cigars, possibly for fear of setting fire to their whiskers, and most claimed that the smell of tobacco disgusted them, so the Captain wrinkled his considerable nose, but took an interest in the pipe.
“And what be that contrivance, human? A machine for making a stink?” the captain asked truculently.
“It is a way of smoking tobacco that keeps the taste away from my palate and yet allows me to savor the scent of burning aromatic leaves,” the Doctor explained with good humor. “They contain a little of the stimulant nicotine. It is known that small amounts of nicotine reduce certain common mental sicknesses, particularly neurosis and schizophrenia. There are minor carcinogenic side effects, but they are easily treated these days.”
“So you would all go mad if you didn’t sniff on a burning weed,” the captain sneered.
“Some of us humans are prone to overlearning; you can mark us by the way we talk, a tendency to gabble too fast,” the Doctor explained comfortably. “Sometimes this can get out of hand, the overlearning, not the gabbling, and we learn something which isn’t so. And then we spread it around among others of our kind, transmitted much like a physical disease, a virus or bacterium. More of a problem in big cities, and we have only one real city after what happened to Neue Dresden, and München is not overbig. But it afflicted some cultures on Old Earth a few centuries ago, with odd neuroses running rampant. So no, I don’t fear adopting a neurosis or being attracted to some cult, I just like the smell. It is also addictive, I confess. You should try it.”
“I’ve more than enough bad habits,” the Captain growled. A small enough joke, but coming from him, it sounded funnier than perhaps it was.
“Indeed you have, and your drinking too much rum is one of them,” the Doctor told him. “I can see from your eyes and tell from your voice and manner that you are far into choler, and it is affecting your maintenance drugs.”
“What business is that of yours, monkey?” the Captain demanded.
“I’m a medical man, and have a duty to point out bad habits and their consequences. Maybe you should take up smoking, it might relax your choler. Although it may exacerbate your heart condition, so perhaps better not.”
“What heart condition?” roared the kzin, bounding to his feet and towering over the Doctor in one stride. His claws extended and his jaws opened wide to show those great, curving incisors. My heart jumped within me as I watched.
“Why, the condition that you most clearly suffer from, and which may necessitate surgery if you persist in drinking rum every night. That’s if we can get treatment to you in time.” The Doctor looked up calmly, not the least overawed by the huge animal. “Not to mention the risk of blood clots which will lay you low. At least take some regular asprin to thin your blood, or you’ll have a stroke within the year. Were you a human, your face would be purple and I’d give you less than six months unless you went in for a major reaming out of your arterial system. And cut down on the rum. I would guess that you need the rum to sleep, but the dependence is not good. Surely a Hero like you appreciates that. And your liver must be like an old black boot.”
The Captain slumped and retreated. “Aarrgh, what would ye know of what troubles me, of what keeps me from sleep?”
“What in humans we would call a guilty conscience, at a guess. Bad memories, no doubt. Your brain is structured much like that of human beings. Two hemispheres joined by a corpus callosum, a dominant verbal one and a subdominant one where the ideas come from. And memories are thrown up, fears are transmitted from it and give you dreams. Bad dreams, I should judge. Alcohol is a powerful depressant and you drink enough for a fleet. Kzin and excessive alcohol don’t mix well, and most of you have the sense to know it.”
“Bad dreams,” muttered the Captain, returning to his footch. “Aye, bad enough, I grant ye. And I’ve reason for them. But the future haunts me more than the past, human. ’Tes what the morrow may bring plagues me.” He threw himself down and went back to his rum.
“Kzin have had very little concept of mercy, compassion or remorse,” said the Doctor to me quietly. “Whatever he has done . . . well, it must have been pretty bad, that it should trouble him so. Or his fears for the future are terrible indeed.”
Doctor Lemoine came back a few nights later to hear the gruesome stories and the strange wild song. He sat at the back and didn’t join in the singing, but smoked his pipe and listened carefully. The Captain usually took it hard when anyone refused to join in the caterwauling, and roared at them, but he ignored the Doctor. They seemed to have some sort of uneasy truce. There was no doubt that the Doctor saw the Captain as a ruffian or worse, and I could not doubt that he was right to think so. He would tolerate a ruffian if the latter kept his behavior within the Doctor’s capacious bounds. But there was steel in the Doctor that the Captain acknowledged, if reluctantly, and he never tried to compel the Doctor to his will as he did almost everyone else. I doubt he was aware that the Doctor had fought in the resistance, and more than that, had been decorated with the Centauri Cross.
1 For the previous history of Jorg von Thoma see His Sergeant’s Honor in Man-Kzin Wars IX.