Chapter Three: East and West
General Dillon arrived within fifteen minutes in an aircar with half a dozen staff officers. Goddard was sent off to hospital, with his severed hand for company. Elain provided a detailed account of the incident, including the conversation. Dillon nodded. Then he told her to join them in the aircar and they took off heading along the Allegheny Plateau that ran along the ridge. They didn’t find any sign of the kzin. H’char’n was in hiding just above the origin of Kettle Creek, sleeping with one eye open throughout the day.
“He can’t have more than a general idea of where he is,” an officer said, “but he can smell towns from a distance. He’s near the end of the plateau, and if he has any kind of idea of the neighborhood, he’ll head north soon. Maybe he’ll go west of Westfield, maybe east; but he’s got to cross the Cowanesque River. And it ain’t much of a river hereabouts, but it’s a fair bet we’ll see him if he swims it. Though parts he’d be able to wade across. Unless he sees us watching. I don’t know how far they can swim underwater.”
“And then he’s in New York State and right for Buffalo,” another pointed out.
“Looks like we have two good chances, one at Niagara Falls if we miss him first time, the other at the Cowanesque,” Dillon ruminated. “Okay, here’s what we do. I want nets, wire nets; rope won’t hold him. Good solid wire nets, five meters square, and half a dozen of them. And we drop them on him, and we don’t miss. I want enough weight on the nets to hold him down until we can get a needle in him. I want dart guns loaded with enough tranquilizer to knock a Kodiak out for a fortnight. And sharpshooters in fliers. Fifty of them, with a hundred darts each.”
“You plan on taking him alive, sir?” Elain asked.
“Yup. If possible. Oh, I’ll have him blasted if it all fails, but this is an opportunity to get some intelligence. We’ve got us one of those kzin telepaths, and I aim to use him.”
“I can get a real time sat feed, sir. At least for some of the time. If he goes across in daytime we’ll be able to pick him up.”
Most satellites were looking out for incoming enemy ships, not down, but there were a few inspecting the planet. Not enough, as it turned out.
“Okay, requisition any that have a clear view of the area,” Dillon ordered. “And get them to scan the plateau too, see if they can track him. If he’s standing erect it will be damned near impossible, but if he’s on all fours we should be able to pick him up. We can see down to half a meter easy, even on the in-looking sats.”
“Sir, if we find him, can I be put down in front of him to ask him to surrender?” Elain asked. Dillon raised his eyebrows.
“You think he wouldn’t kill you?”
“I’m pretty sure of it, sir. I’ve met him once. I think he’s an honorable enemy, sir. He will kill in self-defense, but not wantonly. Look how he spared Goddard. And me.”
“Which goes to show that he knows altogether too much about human psychology. Even when he gets his hand back, Goddard will be ‘spreading alarm and despondency’ as they used to say. That kzin has converted an expensively trained operative into a minus factor for us.”
“Goddard should have been profiled more thoroughly before he ever got into this outfit. If the things he told me are true, he should never have been allowed this.” She touched the small badge on her chest.
Dillon looked at her. He rather approved of her courage, but nobody could tell from his face. He thought about it. It would get her credit and promotion if she brought it off, and promotion for people who deserved it was important; all too many got it who didn’t deserve it. On the other hand, the chance of her bringing it off was low in his judgment. He agreed with her about her survival prospects. If the kzin had wanted to kill her, he could have done it earlier.
“Okay. We’ll give it a go,” he told her. “You know how overstretched we are all around—including psych profiling. Okay. I understand you’re volunteering for a dangerous mission?”
“Yes sir.” Elain stuck to her guns.
“Very well, Captain. I don’t rate the chances of success very highly, but it would save time if it works.”
What he didn’t say was that even if it failed, having a clear view of the kzin would permit a backup of trapping him in the nets.
* * *
H’char’n sniffed warily. There was a human ahead of him, a female, and probably the one he had encountered yesterday. They seemed to have altogether too good an idea of where he was.
He broke cover, standing upright, and faced the manrett. She was just standing there.
“Please stop; I want to talk to you,” Elain shouted.
H’char’n stopped, not to listen to the manrett, but to look up into the sky. He could see nothing artificial, light clouds near the horizon, no sign of aircraft. Not even kzin eyes could detect a satellite in daytime.
He loped toward her. She was a danger, not because of who she was but because of what she represented, with altogether too much knowledge of his position.
“If you give yourself up, you will be well treated, I promise,” Elain called at him. He was within fifty meters now and closing.
H’char’n thought about it. It seemed a most unappealing idea, and besides he didn’t trust her. Her commanders must be elsewhere, perhaps watching the exchange, and they weren’t making any promises.
“I am enjoying freedom too much, little manrett,” he told her amiably. An ear flicked at her, which she recognized as roughly equivalent in kzin terms to a smile, or at least something close to humor. Then he was past her and running faster. It didn’t occur to him to attack her. She was not a threat as such. But he needed to get as far away as he could. And he should hide, for although the day was young, he would be even more visible as it progressed.
* * *
Dillon could see and hear what Elain could; she was carrying a small camera and microphone on her lapel, which was transmitting back to his aircraft, well out of direct line of sight.
“Well, that was interesting. Now go for him with the nets,” Dillon ordered. “I’ll pick up the captain.”
* * *
H’char’n turned sharp left and went down a grassy hillside at speed. There were trees not too far away, and he hoped that he would be harder to track underneath them. Then an aircraft flew overhead, and he dropped to all fours instinctively and ran.
The aircraft followed him and something fell from it, casting a shadow over him. He stopped dead, turned right and leapt a ten-meter jump. He glanced up and saw something like a big net falling to his side. The aircraft was a hundred meters up, too far to jump at it. He resumed his run for the trees. Another net dropped; they hadn’t realized that it cast a shadow. He evaded it easily. Something was shot at him from the aircraft, but missed by a few meters. Not an easy platform for accurate shooting. H’char’n had never been hunted before and found it quite zestful. He roared defiance, just once, and saved the rest of his breath for running. Another aircraft came into view ahead of him, and that too dropped a net, but he ran straight under it and was away before it fell to earth. A moment later and he was in the trees, and safe from nets at least. As soon as he was invisible to the aircraft, he turned in the small wood and headed north again.
That had been rather fun, really.
* * *
“The damned thing is unbelievably fast,” one of the men complained.
Dillon grunted. At least his men were learning something about kzin. “Surround that wood. I want men on the ground with dart guns; I want air support with nets. He’ll have trouble getting out of the wood without meeting us, and once we have him in the open then one of you might, just might, catch him in a net.”
* * *
They would, of course, surround the wood. So he had to get out of it, but how? Somehow he had to survive until dark, but they might send men into the wood before then. It was not a dense wood, and the trees were not big enough to support him to any height. He looked for a hiding place until darkness came. He inspected a lightning-blasted hollow tree, but decided that if troops came they would look in it first. Some sort of deception was needed.
He went back to where he had entered the wood. It was clear so far as he could tell, so he darted out and collected the closest of the nets they had tried to cast over him.
He dragged it back under cover, then cut off the weights which had been attached to the edges, and left them. He took the net back to where five trees stood close together, then climbed as far as he could, with the net over his shoulder. Not as high as he would like, but not immediately evident from the ground. He attached the edges and corners of the net to branches. He tore some small branches from other trees and placed them so the foliage did something to conceal the net. He found a larger branch and took that up too. Then he went hunting for food.
* * *
They were not quiet. The soldiers were only a few paces apart from each other, and they talked a lot. It was late afternoon and in a few hours it would be dark, so they didn’t have much time. They were armed, mostly with dart guns, large-bore rifles, but with hand blasters as well. They fingered their rifles with a good deal of caution, each one knowing that the darts would take a long time to work, and the shooter might well be dead by then. Their strength lay in their numbers; if half a dozen shot their darts all at once, the kzin might be too groggy to actually kill most of them. Or so they hoped. They were driving from the north, fairly sure that if the kzin broke out it would be toward them. The kzin didn’t break out.
“Maybe it’s already gotten through somehow,” one whispered to his neighbor. The neighbor grunted and focused his attention on what was in front of him, with occasional sideways glances. Even the birds were quiet, and the wind had dropped. They could hear their boots hitting the ground, and if they could hear them so could the kzin. Twigs broke underfoot like gunshots, which made everyone nervous.
They didn’t look up much, so it took them a long time to spot the net. Dillon was at the point of recalling them to try again tomorrow at first light when someone glanced up and saw a bit of the net showing. He spoke into his phone, and signaled a sergeant who had missed it. They gathered together underneath the net. It was plain enough when you knew to look for it. More and more of the soldiers gathered around the clump of trees, grins on some of the faces.
“Okay guys, I want everyone to put a dart through it. I guess we might kill the damned thing with tranquilizers, but better be safe than sorry. And stand by with blasters if he comes down fast. Go!”
Thirty men put a dart up into the net. There was a long silence.
“Jeez, we must have got him; maybe we knocked him out cold,” one said after a half minute had passed.
“You fancy goin’ up to have a look?” someone asked. “Maybe he lined the net with branches. Maybe we didn’t hit him at all.”
“Okay, Perkins, Underholt, get up those outer trees and try to lob some darts in from on top of him. He can’t be completely covered by branches,” the sergeant ordered.
It got slowly darker as the men climbed the trees. They were a lot lighter than H’char’n so could get higher, but the net bulged down and had foliage around it. They tried firing into it by shooting up and letting the darts come down, which led to some subdued cursing as some came down among the soldiers. One was hit in the shoulder, and collapsed instantly, and some of his squad rushed him off for medical attention.
“Call air support to try to get a look inside the net from above,” someone suggested. By now it was too dark for the aircraft to see much, but they sprayed darts in.
“Should be safe to go up and look now; nothing could still be awake and active after that lot. Perkins, Underholt, you’ve been up. Get into that net and if he’s not out cold, shoot every goddamned dart you’ve got into him. Tether yourselves to the outside trees; if all hell breaks loose, jump for it.”
Perkins and Underholt looked at each other and shrugged. Join the Army and climb trees. Oh well, it wasn’t dull, not with a killer up there. They climbed up slowly, both wishing quite independently that they’d brought torches, but nobody had thought to equip them with such things.
Eventually they stood in the net, and called out. “Nobody home,” Perkins called down.
“Just some logs. Pretty much full of darts.” Underholt agreed.
“Oh shit. He’s wasted a lot of our time. Get back down here guys. We’ve been out-thought. Time to pull out I reckon. It’s too damned dark to see him now anyway.”
* * *
H’char’n followed them as they withdrew, part of the way at least. Then he headed east until he cleared their line, and turned north. He’d been waiting in the hollow tree, and praying to the mist demons that they’d see the net before they found him. It seemed to have worked.
* * *
“There he is, cheeky bugger,” Dillon remarked. “He followed our men down, then skipped past them on the flank.”
They were watching the download from a spysat that had an infrared telescope. Unfortunately it wasn’t equipped to download in real time; it cached images and then fired them off to Washington half an hour later.
“At least we can see where he’s headed. North by nor’west.”
“Can we rejig the satellite software to give us real time images?” someone asked.
“Hardly worth the effort,” someone else answered. “The satellite isn’t due to get over the area again for another twelve hours, and we’ve got no fill-in. It’s the only one with IR capability.”
“Maybe we can get a microdrone close to him; he may not notice it if it’s small enough,” a suggestion came from yet another.
Dillon grunted. “If we could get a microdrone close we ought to be able to get a couple of aircars sitting on top of him and net him. Get me some aircars with good IR capability and go hunt him. From high enough so he can’t see them with his own built-in IR. I want continuous surveillance throughout the night or what’s left of it. We ought to be able to catch him soon; we know where he was half an hour ago.”
Things didn’t work out that way.
* * *
H’char’n had taken two stout branches with him. He had decided that the best chance he had was to hide up somewhere their animals couldn’t find him. And that meant covering his scent. He had gone into a stream and was trudging down in it. They might guess where he was headed but wouldn’t know when and where he had left it, if his idea worked.
After a few miles of wading through the stream which was only a foot deep and not very fast, he came within sight of some sort of farm. It wasn’t much of one, a barn about forty meters from a farmhouse of no great size, a darkness against a still dark sky. It would be dawn in about an hour, and there was nobody about. The only sound was the trickle of water and the wind in the grass. There was a faint scent of animal dung. The sky was cloudy, which meant he would not be seen from above.
The bank here was stony. Good.
He clambered up the bank using his poles like crutches, his hind paws on branches that he had cut off short from the main stick. So he looked rather odd, and it required care in balancing. Staying on the stony parts so as not to leave prints in turf, he tottered along laboriously toward the barn. It was locked, but a twist took the thing off the staples in the door, and he pushed it open. Inside his nose told him there were rodents. There was also an old, very rusty moving machine for dragging a plow, a lot of old hand tools, and a cement floor. He wasn’t going to be very comfortable, but comfort was not high on his list of wants. It looked as though the place hadn’t been used for some time, which was high on his list. He got down from his homemade stilts and looked around. There were old sacks, but his nose turned up at the idea of using them for lying on. Bare concrete would be much better. He went in and closed the door. It went back to being dark. This was good, the rodents wouldn’t see him until it was too late, and he was hungry still.
* * *
H’char’n stayed there for two days by which time he was very hungry, the supply of rodents having been exhausted long ago. It was on the third day that someone pushed the door open and peered in.
“Come out and show yourself, or I’ll blast you where you stand,” a voice said. It was, H’char’n judged, the voice of an old manrett, but there was no quaver in it. He relaxed; he’d been prepared to go down fighting soldiers, but this didn’t sound like one.
“I will not harm you,” he told it. A shape stood against the light: yes, an old manrett, straight and armed. But only with an old shotgun.
“Ha! I mayn’t be so kindly,” she told him. “Come out where I can see ya.”
H’char’n stepped forward, fast enough to take the barrel of the gun and point it at the roof. It went off, and he took the gun off the old woman whose eyes widened.
“Grief, what manner of creature are you?” she asked in disbelief, her eyes round.
“I’m a hero, a kzin. And I told you I will not harm you. I tell the truth.”
Her face hardened. “My son went down in the first battle for Ceres,” she said. “You’re one of the filthy scum that killed him.”
“I wasn’t at any of the battles of Ceres. These things happen in war. I mourn your loss. I have lost close ones, too.”
And he did. It was a conventional sort of thing to say to the father of a dead kzin, there being no point in saying anything to the mother, for the kzinretts could understand only a few words. Still, it seemed the right thing to say to this female. Somehow, if you could talk to them, you had some kind of connection with them, alien though they were. He mourned all those who had died and were still dying in this war. He had his duty of course, but the idea of fighting humans looked stupider the more of them he met. They would make useful allies, these men. And their females. Turning them into slaves would be a wicked waste, he thought, even if it were possible, which he rather doubted. This one was old, but she had courage. Even to be talking with a kzin nearly twice as tall as she was, and four times the mass, showed courage, and something else, something he couldn’t put a claw tip on.
“Ha, so ya says. Gimme a reason I shouldn’t scream until a soldja hears me. They been around these parts. They’re hunting you, ya know.” She finished triumphantly, looking up at him, square in the eye.
“I cannot give you a reason. Yes, I know I am hunted. And it is my duty to stay free for as long as I may. And besides, I have developed a taste for freedom. I have had more on Earth than ever in my life. Yours is a beautiful world, and you are a brave people. I would prefer to be at peace with you. Your people have much to teach us.”
She looked at him suspiciously. “Why should you be tryin’ to sweet-talk me?” she demanded.
“I do not know what that means,” H’char’n told her. “I just say what I think.”
There was something very simple and direct in the kzin’s talk that struck a chord.
“Ya sounds like ya might be tellin’ the truth,” she admitted. “There again, what would I know o’ you kayzin. I know ya be murderous devils with a taste for cruelty.”
“We say the same of you humans,” H’char’n told her. “You are the most dreadful species we have ever met in space. You fight like the Hell demons. If your son died, I have no doubt he took many kzin with him.”
“Better believe it,” she sneered. “We’re gonna beat your asses, trust me. ’Cos we ain’t gonna give in, not never, not nohow.”
Looking at her standing straight and meeting his eyes, H’char’n did believe her. It made fighting the humans look truly insane. The kzin would have to kill every last one of them, and he felt horror at the thought of wiping out any species, and it was a thousand times worse for an intelligent one. The kzin had never destroyed a species. Hunted them, enslaved them, yes; that forced the species to evolve, it was what the Fanged God had ordained. But there was something utterly obscene about destroying any species. The Fanged God wanted life in all its splendor and complexity, not sterility. Death for the individual, yes, but that was part of life. And he wasn’t at all sure these dreadful humans wouldn’t quite cheerfully wipe out the entire kzin race if they were given the chance.
“Well, kill me if ya gonna do it, ’cos it’s the on’y way ya gonna get away from here afore I calls the soldjas.” She jutted her chin at him and still held his eye.
“I cannot kill you. I can only ask you not to give me away. As one free being to another, I ask for what I need.”
“Why can ya not kill me? They says ya all murderous enough.”
Incredible, thought H’char’n. She was defying him with no trace of fear. No, he could smell fear there, but it was mastered by resolution.
“You are not a warrior,” he explained. “Nor are you a slave fit for the hunt. Some kzin might treat you as food. I am a warrior of the kzin and I cannot do these things. My code does not permit it.”
“So,” she mused. “So maybe we bin getting’ a whole lot o’ government propaganda. Wouldn’t surprise me none. We never got told ya got any sense of honor. But then, the government might not know what one of them is, havin’ none themselves. That’s the way o’ government. Maybe you have the same problem.”
H’char’n thought about it. “The Patriarch has honor. At least, we all believe he does. I think if he did not, we would kill him and find another who did. Honor is important to kzin. And courage.”
“Yeah. My son felt that way too. Maybe you and him ain’t so different in a weird kinda way,” she said. “And this here Patriarch. He’s some sort of emperor, I guess. Well, we ain’t had one o’ them for a while hereabouts. We ain’t big on emperors. Or kings. Same as emperors in a smaller kinda way, I guess. Still there’s different ways o’ doin’ things. Now we’re part o’ this here Euramerican Union; maybe we got a few kings and queens of our own tucked away some place, I shouldn’t wonder.” She sniffed. “Still, an’ all, mebbe a king with some sort of honor would be better than what we got at the moment. But lookee here, I got old bones, and standing in one place is bad for me. Come across inta the house and maybe I can brew ya some coffee.” She half turned away.
“Aren’t you going to call the soldiers?” he asked her. “If you are, I must run away now.”
She turned back and looked at him. “I was brung up to never pass up a chanst t’ learn new things, so I’ll give ya an hour’s notice afore I turns ya in t’ the government. I don’t much like the government, and you look straight enough t’ me. Maybe I will and maybe I won’t. We’ll talk and I’ll make up my mind about that.”
H’char’n followed her toward the house over hard gravel, and had to bend down low and turn sideways to get through the front door. There were barrels filled with earth he had to squeeze past, and some flowers grew out of them. Nobody back on Kzin-home had any idea what flowerz were for, perhaps he would find out. He took a deep breath and smelt the manrett and other things. He must prepare himself for coffee.
He hoped that wasn’t another name for pot’heen.
* * *
“Where the hell is he?” an officer fumed. “We’ve seen nothing of the damned beast for three days. Somehow he’s gone to ground. Are there any caves around these parts?”
“Even if he was hiding in a cave, he’d have to come out to hunt food,” another pointed out. “And we haven’t seen him do that.”
“Kzin can go for a long time without food if they have to. A week or more before they start getting weak and going mad, and a couple of days without water,” Dillon told them. “Also, I’d like to know if there any caves with bat populations.”
“Why?
“Protein source. He can evidently assimilate Earth proteins. If you find any such caves, or any likely-looking holes, don’t try to enter them, whatever your numbers. Post a guard some distance away from the entrance, a hundred meters at least, with weapons loaded with the tranquilizer darts we’ve given you fixed on it. Then, as the old song goes, ‘You just stand there lookin’ cute, an’ when somethin’ moves, you shoot.’”
Elain wondered. The kzin seemed to make friends awfully easily. She could understand why. Once you got over the sheer terror of a dangerous animal and made any sort of contact with him, he was a person. He was straight and strong and saw things as they were, and dealt with them. It was easy to admire him. And he seemed rather a tolerant and principled person. It was strange, but it was a lot easier to like him than some humans.
There was a poem she had picked up from other soldiers. “The Ballad of East and West”:
East is East and West is West,
And never the twain shall meet,
’Til Earth and Sky stand presently,
At God’s great Judgment Seat.
But there is neither East nor West,
Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face,
Tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!
Maybe it went further than even Kipling could have dreamt of, and one of them didn’t have to be a man. And maybe the kzin had done it again, and was holed up with some humans somewhere.
She thought about it. She decided it sounded just too ridiculous to say anything, so she didn’t.
* * *
The other one didn’t have to be a man either. It could be a woman. Mary Ellen Hendrix was a hundred and seventy-two, and tougher than many a man. She came face to face with a kzin, and she decided he was good people. Tough, self-reliant and straight as steel. People in the habit of telling the direct truth had no difficulty recognizing each other, even when one was ten feet tall, covered with fur, and had teeth that could bite through a bear. It was a bit of an eye-opener, but Mary Ellen liked having her eyes opened. She sat on a chair at her kitchen table while H’char’n lay on the floor holding, with some difficulty, a soup bowl doing duty as a coffee cup. He had drunk some of it, decided he didn’t like it and said so. But when she had suggested something else along the lines of soup, he had said he’d try to acquire a taste for the stuff. It was going to take a bit of acquiring, he thought. It smelled horrible too, although it didn’t smell like vegetables. It didn’t smell like anything he’d ever been near before.
“If ya gonna stay, ya gonna be hell t’ feed,” she told him. “I got some venison in the freezer, the deer around here is varmints and they come out of the wood and eat my flowers and veggies, dang their hides. My son, David, when he was a teenager, used to josh me and say ‘Hey, Mom, you can’t shoot Bambi!’ and I used to say ‘Just watch me!’, then I shot ’em. I shot one the other day and now it’s filling up my freezer, like I said.”
“I can hunt them for you,” H’char’n volunteered. “I will have to do it at night, so I am not seen. I prefer my food raw.”
“Yeah, that figures. I don’t have a bed to fit you, but ya can have the rumpus room tonight. A carpet will be more comfortable than the barn floor, I reckon. And I guess it’s like having a cat. You might scare off the rats; they’ve been a real nuisance, last two days.”
“That might be me,” H’char’n admitted. “There were a lot in the barn at first, and I snacked on them. But after a while they moved out. Maybe they moved here.”
Mary Ellen laughed. “Like enough, I guess. Let them move back to the barn.”
They each sipped their coffee, Mary Ellen appreciatively, H’char’n rather less so.
“There’s some wild mustangs around too. If you ate a couple I don’t suppose anyone would notice. Just stay away from Dobbo; he’s my only transport now the supply of gas has dried up. I hafta get him to pull the plow too, and the poor old thing’s not really up to it.”
“Maybe I could help you pull the plow,” H’char’n offered. “I am in your debt for the shelter, and I must meet my obligations somehow. But I would prefer to do it at night. Or if there is some other way I can help, I will.”
“Night would be a problem. Maybe late evening or early morning?”
H’char’n thought about it. “There is a risk I shall be seen, but it is not too great. I do not know how you join Dobbo to the plow, but I expect something could be arranged.”
* * *
“We have a satellite image that looks like we may have found him,” a technical officer reported. He showed the image to his superior with pride.
The officer looked at it then laughed. “That sure ain’t a kzin,” he said, amused. “Look, you can see the furrows and the plow, or at least their shadows. Must be an ox or something. I can’t imagine a kzin hauling a plow behind him. And you can see the shadow of some guy guiding the plow.”
The technical officer looked at it again. “Yeah,” he sighed. “My bad. Sorry.”
* * *
Most people fall back on stereotypes in their thinking; it saves pain. In the short run.