The Man-Kzin Wars 05

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“He’s not human,” Jonah gasped, flopping down on a rock and watching Hans swing along up the mountainside.

Bigs rolled a baleful eye at him as he lay prone in the track, twitching expressive eyebrows; Spots carefully poured water from a plastic container over his body, from head to the base of his tail. Then he trudged down to the small stream and poured several more over his own head before returning to repeat the process with his brother: Both kzin were panting, their tongues lolling, the palms of their hands and feet and their tails oozing sweat. Those were the only ways kzinti had to shed excess heat; Kzin was a cooler planet than Earth or Wunderland. Besides…

“If-” Spots stopped, thrust his muzzle into the plastic container and lapped down a torrent “- if I remember my instructors, you monk-hrrreaow, you Men evolved into omnivores by taking to running down your prey in long chases.”

“Think so,” Jonah replied.

His feet hurt, and he felt dizzy from the amount he’d sweated. A swallow from his canteen to wash down salt tablets, and he poured more on a neckerchief and wiped his face and neck. The hollow where they had halted was shady at least, big gum trees and whipsticks, but the steep rock to either side concentrated the sunlight, and it was humid as well. The air hummed and buzzed with insects, drawn to sweat, landing and biting and stinging. The human ignored them; there was no relief until they made camp and set up the sonics-and those had to be turned low or the sensitive ears of the kzin found them unbearable in frequencies humans could not hear.

“Well, we Heroes evolved from stalk-and-leap hunters!” Spot snapped. Literally: his jaws closed on the word with a wet clomp. “Of course we don’t shed heat as well. We don’t chase prey that escapes our ambush! We never needed to! We developed brains cunning enough to catch meat without following it for days!”

There was a teeth-gritting whine in the kzin’s voice. Bigs was in worse shape, heavier and thicker-pelted; he simply lay with his tongue hanging out on the ground. Jonah nodded wordlessly, stumbling down to the stream and refilling his canteen. He had never had the slightest interest in chasing prey of any sort, except kzinti Vengeful Slasher-class fighters during the War-and that could be done in the decent comfort of a crashcouch, right next to a good food synthesizer and autodoc. Fighting in space was war for gentlemen: either you won or you died, usually quickly, and you did it in climate-conditioned comfort. There had been a couple of boarding actions when the Fourth Fleet was smashed, but even those had been done in space armor.

He shuddered slightly, swallowing hard. There had been tubing in the meat last night.

The water looked cool and inviting as he dipped his head once more. The pebbles in the bottom were unusual-he noticed the dull glitter of them through the rippling water, and idly lifted a handful. Heat, he thought, and threw them skipping across the surface. One struck a shovel lashed to the pack-saddle of a mule, startling the animal out of its torpor and into a brief bucking frenzy. The sound of pebble on steel was a dull, metallic clunk…

“Wait a minute,” Jonah whispered. He scrabbled at his belt for the sample spectroscope and scooped again for more pebbles; his hands were trembling as he shoved one into the trap of the instrument and flicked the activator. “Platinum!” he yelled. The kzinti unfurled their ears to maximum, like pink radar dishes. “54% platinum, by Finagle’s ghost!”

Jonah Matthieson bad been a rockjack, an asteroid prospector, in the brief intervals of peace in Sol System; the methods in that were a great deal more mechanized, but he knew what was valuable. He scrabbled in the streambed, then tore back to his mules for the pan. Pebbles and heavy sand washed out as he swirled the water and flicked off the lighter material. Readings glowed as he jammed more samples into the scanner: 57%, 72%, an incredible 88%. His stomach ached with the tension as he worked his way upstream; Bigs and Spot were following, howl-spitting at each other in the Hero’s Tongue. At last he thought to call Hans. The Sol-Belter was still fumbling with the belt radio when the old man came up, leading his mules and looking nearly as phlegmatic.

“Ja,” he said calmly. “Platinum all right. Nice heavy concentration.” He took the pipe out of his mouth to spit aside. “Worthless.”

Spot gave an ululating howl, jaws open at the sky. Bigs collapsed again, this time into the stream with only his eyebrows and black nostrils showing; his tail waved pink in the water, and little fish-analogues came to nibble at it. Jonah felt an overwhelming urge to break the spectroscope over the Wunderlander’s head, and then a sick almost-headache at the back of his neck.

“It’s a perfectly good industrial metal!” he protested, slogging to the bank of the stream and sitting down on a wet rock. A kermitoid croaked and thrashed away through the spiny underbrush. “It’s used for everything from chemical synthesis to doping crystal fusion cores. Back in the Sol Belt, it was the first thing we looked for.”

“Ja, so useful the kzinti hauled seven or eight asteroids from the Swarm to near-Wunderland orbit as reserves, back during the Fifth Fleet buildup,” Hans nodded. “Still a lot of it left, We need something valuable but not so valuable they thought to get a supply set up,” he went on. “Gold, hafnium, something like that. Well,” he went on, “rest-period’s over. Got to get a move on if we want to get anything done.”

Spots and Bigs whined. So did Jonah.

“Give me two,” Spots said, throwing two cards into the pile.

Jonah dealt, watching the kzin across the campfire narrowly. His scent was calm-he had long since learned to recognize the gingery smell of kzinti excitement-but that could simply be control enough to keep it down below the stun-your-nostrils level humans could recognize. Bigs seemed to be watching him intently, ears out and fur fluffed up around his face. Spots’s tail was held rigidly and quivering just slightly at the tip…

“Fold,” he decided. Nobody else wanted more cards.

Spots flapped his ears, and his eyebrows twitched. “See you and raise you three.”

Three krona, to the humans; the brothers were playing each other for kzinretti, of which they both had more than they wanted, due to the surplus after most of the kzintosh-male kzin-in the system died. Evidently numbers in the harem were a status matter for kzinti. -

“See you,” Bigs said in Wunderlander: “And smell you, you vatch-in-the-grass,” he muttered under his breath in the Hero’s Tongue, in the Mocking Tense.

“And two,” Hans added. He puffed ostentatiously on his pipe, and the two kzin closed their nostrils in an exaggerated gesture. Their huge golden eyes caught the firelight occasionally, silver disks in the darkness.

Well, it z pretty foul, Jonah conceded. On the other hand, Hans was sitting downwind.

“Call.” Bigs’s tail was quivering visibly.

Spots sighed and let his ears droop. “Three queens,” he said, flipping his hand upright.

Bigs lunged and snapped close to his nose. “I thought you were bluffing!” he said, throwing down his pair of tens.

“You should have listened to the Conservors and learned to control the juices of your liver,” Spots said sanctimoniously, purring slightly and letting the tip of his tongue show through his teeth. The pelt rose around his neck, and his whiskers worked back and forth; he licked a wrist and smoothed them back. “That is fifteen kzinretti you owe me- my selection, remember.”

“Sorry, fellers,” Hans laughed. “That’s fifteen krona you three owe me.” He turned up his hand; three aces.

Spots shrieked, sending the mules snorting and pulling on their curb chains out at the edge of sight. Bigs waved his ears and thumped his tail back and forth, flapping his lips against his fangs in derision.

“Now whose liver is overheated?” he said, then stretched and yawned. “You have first watch.”

Spots stalked off into the night, ears folded away and tail a rigid pink length behind him.

“I think even Hans is getting tired,” Jonah said over his shoulder.

Then he raised the cutting bar and slashed again at the thick, matted vegetation ahead of him. It was almost all native, with the cinnamon scent of Wunderlander growth; the local varieties seemed to run mostly to thorns and silica-rich stems, though. The cutting bar was a thin-film of diamond sandwiched between vacuum-deposited layers of single-crystal iron, and it should have gone through vegetation with scarcely more effort than air. Two of the teeth had broken off on rocks, and the matted stems pulled irritatingly at his wrist.

Spots scarcely bothered to flap his ears; Bigs was morosely silent again. Last night he had even turned down the evening poker game, a very bad sign.

“Your mm,” the human wheezed.

Bigs squeezed past him and began chopping methodically. From the way his lips moved and the slight murrling sounds from his chest; he was fantasizing each bush as an enemy to be killed. Hans was to their right and a thousand meters upslope, up in the open. Hotter up there, no shade, but at least there was some wind, a little air The olive gloom around Jonah seemed as airless as the bottom of the sea; sweat clung and curdled, drying in the creases of his body, chafing at the small sores the thorns had left on his arms and face. Even the tough synthetic of his clothing was starting to give way, and the zitragor leather of his boots had begun to wear thin in a place or two. He was leaner by about ten kilos than he had been at the beginning of the trip, and tough as the strip of dried meat he chewed at mechanically as he marched. The kzinti had lost weight too, and their pelts were so matted with tangles and burrs that even their obsessive nightly grooming could scarcely keep pace.

So much for the mighty hunters, he thought snidely. That was a little unfair; whatever their instincts, Wunderland kzin were the descendants of space travelers. Their immediate ancestors came from Hssin, a sealed-habitat colony on a world with poisonous atmosphere. Spots and Bigs had hunted in their father’s preserves, but their home environment was as artificial as any human’s.

“I begin to dream of talcum powder and blowdriers,” Spots said unexpectedly. Bigs grunted. “And of kzinretti. My palazzo will be in chaos.”

Jonah grunted in his turn. Thinking about women was a bad idea out here; easier for a kzin, since their responses were so conditioned on smell. They turned upslope to avoid an outcrop of granite and emerged blinking onto the steep brushy slopes of the bill; they were in an interior depression of the Jotuns, with eroded volcanic peaks on all sides, and it focused the summer heat like a lens. Wearily they all sank to the ground, letting the mules browse for a moment. The kzin had taken to wearing conical straw, hats the humans wove for them, and now they fanned their dangling tongues. Jonah shook his canteen and decided half-full was still enough to warrant a drink; he sipped at the water, letting each drop soak into his tissues. Far above a contrail streaked across the sky, some vacationer in an aircar off to the beaches of Heleigoland Island. Sitting under an umbrella, sipping at drinks with fruit in them. Watching girls diving into the surf…

“There’s not much point in going on,” he said wearily. It was only the thought of retracing his steps that had kept him from saying it until now. Going forward with some hope was bad enough; going back with none was unbearable. “We’ve got those tigripard hides, that’ll cover most of our expenses. We could sell the gear.”

Bigs was lost in his brooding. “I begin to think you are correct, Jonah-human,” his sibling said sadly. “My nose is dry with worry at what will befall our households-but still, we-”

Hans jumped down from a boulder near them. “Ready to give up, are we? The valiant Heroes, the UN Navy hotshot?” He cackled laughter, his ancient leathery face crinkling. “You’re so stupid you don’t know a fortune when you’re standing on one. You’re so stupid you’d shit on a plate and call it steak!” The Wunderlander was practically dancing around his bewildered companions. “Jonah, you’re sitting down, you’ve got your thinking apparatus jammed on money-can’t you tell when you’re rubbing your cheeks on wealth?”

“Something hit so hard the planet splashed,” Hans said, leaning on his pick.

They had been working up the side of the hill, following the gullies and taking samples. The gold was patchy, but the deposits caught in folds and ripples in the ground were increasingly rich. Off to their left a waterfall stretched down the surface of a cliff; a thread-thin line of silver against the pink granite rock; where it struck down in the valley bottom an explosion of mist blossomed, amid a great circle of whipstick and jacaranda trees, with tall silver-gums towering over all. Ahead the slope was jagged and eroded, soft crumbly rock and clay streaked with bright mineral colors, The scent of the scrub under their feet was dry and intense, like a perpetual almost-sneeze, cut occasionally by a drift of cooler air and mist from the falls. Kermitoids peeped and croaked, and a red-tailed hawk dove down the slope after a rabbit and then rose with the struggling beast in its claws, skree-skree as it flapped off heavily toward the cliffs.

“Ja, big astrobleme-way, way back. Punched right through the crust Wunderland’s got slow continental drift, you know, ja? Starts and stops. This made a hotspot, kept burning through every time the crust moved across it. The whole line of the Jotuns, east-to-west across the Aeserheimer Continent is here because of it

– this is the active part. Erosion… that’s why you get pockets of metallic’s here. None very big, but by Herr Gott, they’re rich.”

“Where do we dig?” Spots asked. He was drooling slightly, always a sign of impatience in a kzin.

“Not down here,” Hans said; the beatific smile still quirked at the edges of his mouth. “No, no use digging down here. Oh, there’s gold, but we need water to set up the ripple membranes and get it out” He used the haft of his pick as a pointer. “Up there. We can cut a furrow ‘cross the hillside from the creek.”

“Tanj,” Jonah said, measuring distances. Trivial by spatial terms, but he’d acquired a whole new perspective on “kilometer” since he started spending so much time dirtside. “That’s quite a job, without any equipment.”

“We’ve got cutter bars and thirty kilometers of mono-filament,” Hans said cheerfully. “My brains, and you three for strong backs and simple minds, plus four mules. That’s plenty of equipment for what we’ll need.”

“There ain’t no justice,” Jonah muttered, dragging a forearm across his face. Still, it wasn’t much harder than the contracting job, and promised to pay a good deal better.

“You said it, son. You said it,” Hans chuckled.

“Hrreeeaaaww” Bigs groaned, rising from all fours with a gut-straining effort; their flexible spines made a straight lift harder for a kzin than for a man. The timber across his shoulders was ten meters long, and even on Wunderland it weighed three times his body mass. The other three hauled on the cable rigged over a wood-frame block and tackle, and the long gum-tree timber rose slowly in swaying jerks until it settled into the predug hole with a rush and stood nearly upright, vibrating. The two kzin took turns bracing it upright and hammering rocks into the hole to hold it so. Three more of equal size stretched in a line across the gully; up on the lip the humans returned to slicing other trunks into square-cut troughs with the cutter bars. When the line of supports was complete, they would swing the troughs out and lash them to the poles with monofilament.

“We’re doing the slave’s part of this,” Rigs complained to his brother, as they climbed down the boulders to where the next upright waited to be dragged up to its hole.

“Suck sthondat excrement,” Spots said.

They set themselves on either side of the massive timber and braced themselves, securing a good hold on the oozing slab-cut timber with their claws. The sharp medicinal scent of eucalyptus sap was over-whelming.

“Strike!”

The kzin heaved in unison, lifting the end of the beam and running it half a dozen steps upslope before letting it fall.

“It’s the heavy lifting,” Bigs went on, as they rested for a second, panting. His tongue worked on nose and whiskers, reaching almost to his tufted eyebrows. “They slice planks off trees, we carry the trunks.”

“We are larger and stronger,” Spots pointed out reasonably. He had tied a wad of cloth over his head and soaked it in water; now he patted at it, and runnels fanned down his neck and muzzle, plastering the fur to his skin. Mud streaked his legs and the paler-colored pelt of his belly. “If the monkeys were hauling these trunks, they would go very slowly-or we would have to take more time to rig a dragway with a winch and tackle.”

“Hrrrr. Then we should get more of the gold,” Bigs went on. “Now-strike.”

They moved the log another dozen meters. This time they dropped it next to a rock-pool full of water and crouched to lap up a drink; instinctively, their muzzles rose every second or two to scan the surroundings.

“We contributed less than a quarter of the capital, yet we are to have equal shares,” Spots replied. “You would complain if a monkey brought you a zianya with its muzzle already taped.”

Bigs yawned enormously and licked his lips. “Zianya

– ah, the first mouthful, full of fear-juices! With dipping sauce and grashti on the side.” He paused. “Yet I would complain if a monkey brought one. It is disgraceful to be dependent upon them.”

“Silence, fool. You did not complain when they were our slaves-and we were even more dependent on them then! Ready-strike.”

This rush carried them to the line of supports, where the next hole waited.

“You are a whisker-splitter,” Bigs said, unlimbering his cutting bar They had dropped the thigh-thick end of the log across a boulder, leaving it at comfortable chest height. With four swift strokes he trimmed the hard wood to a point.

“Besides,” Spots continued, raising his voice slightly from the other end of the log, where he belayed a loop of cable to a hole punched through the wood. “There are probably no zianyas closer than Hssin.”

They whined; zianyas were a homeworld beast, and they had never flourished in the ecology of Wunderland, unlike many other kzinti animals. Before the human hyperdrive armada arrived some kzin estates had specialized in rearing them, coaxing them to reproduce and investing in expensive gravity-polarizer sheds to rear them under homeworld gravity, 1.55 of Earth’s. Most of those had been smashed in the fighting, or confiscated in the aftermath of liberation, and the markets were vanished now that kzinti were few and poor in a human-ruled Wunderland.

“Reason enough to shake the dust of this world from our paws,” Bigs went on. “Push-slowly, slowly.”

Spots heaved with a steady pressure on the smaller end of the log, as his brother guided the point to the lip of the hole. As he did, his ears waggled ostentatiously.

“Yes-I can see us prostrating ourselves before the Patriarch’s Cushion. ‘Admittedly we did surrender to the omnivores and obey them; nevertheless we long to have Full Names and be permitted to maintain the noble-sized households we, the penniless refugees, have brought.’ Aha! The Patriarch’s liver overflows with kin-feeling for us! His pelt stands on end with joy at our scent! With his own hands, he serves us tuna ice cream. He awards us Names; he allows us possession of every one of our kzinretti; he grants us vast estates on the extremely expensive savannahs of Homeworld…”

His lips flapped derisively against his teeth in imitation of a kzinti snore; you dreamer, it implied. “We could not even afford passage to kzinti space without human help.”

“That may change,” Bigs said, grimly sliding out his claws. Long silvery needles against the black leather of his hands. “That may change…”

“Not without gold,” Spots replied. He took the end of the cable in his mouth and climbed the wall of the canyon with a bounding four-footed rush; kzinti had evolved hands to help them climb rocks.

“Next one ready!” he called, dropping back into Wunderlander. Jonah and Hans straightened; the older man groaned, kneading his hands into the small of his back. “Reave this to the block line.”