The Man-Kzin Wars 06

Chapter 9

(2436 A.D.)

Because Hwass-Hwasschoaw was on Wunderland, he had not dared bring with him his masks of human hide- there had been no secure place to conceal them on the tiny shuttle craft from Tigertown, staffed as it was by kzin hating animals. That made difficult any communion with God.

Kdapt’s forms had to be observed rigorously.

Hwass went into retreat above the cluttered electronics workshop in a room that was often used for secret meetings by Munchen’s Kdaptists. He meditated in this claustrophobic space built to human size. How was a devout kzin to appeal to a Bearded God who had given the Patriarch thousands of years of victory-but who thwarted every kzinti attack on His newly discovered tree-climbing pets? Noseplugs attached, he fasted alone in darkness among the salvaged junk, thinking.

Where was the logic behind God’s bias?

Hwass, a noble of the Patriarch’s Eye, was here in a crumbling slum while they were being resurrected in prosperity all about him. Strange. God never interfered with a kzin who made an ill decision; such a kzin was respected as a noble intelligence and allowed to grow wise-or to die-by living the consequences of his decisions. Not so with humans. Why?

A master crafter, Hwass reasoned, only interferes in his creation when it is moving away of his intention. A mechanic repairs only after his machine begins to fail. A potter touches clay only when he sees imperfection. God was an artisan. When he ceased admiring the beauty of His work, how did He choose to interfere?

In all of God’s universal masterwork, the man-beasts, molded in God’s perfect image, seemed to be the only imperfection that disturbed God. God interfered ceaselessly for human salvation. Let a man-beast make a mistake, and God rushed in to save him. God’s simians might lie and cheat and beat their females, they might run in battle-but He was always saving them. Let a man make a lethal decision, and God invited him to be born again. Some divine author was not allowing the men to lose no matter how iniquitous their behavior. Saved from blunders, mankind was never allowed to grow wise… as a kzin became wise through the blunders of his youth.

It was told by men that they had mightily offended their God by eating vegetables from the tree of knowledge. Perhaps God’s purpose in saving the man-beasts was to keep them in their animal state-naive, innocent, lacking in wisdom. What better way to cage an animal from knowledge than to save him from the consequences of his acts?

Hwass was beginning to understand. The sins of men caused God pain; He interfered to put things right. Men tore down His work wantonly; God rebuilt their homes. While God demanded bravery and discipline and honesty of His kzin because he respected them, He spoiled His simians out of love. In their writings did not men see Him as one who raged at their sins but who was always merciful? Was not this Bearded God obsessed with the salvation of those He had created in His image? There, that was the path to His liver!

Understanding salvation was the key to understanding God. And the Son of God was the key to salvation. Kdaptist rigor had found the way. His mighty frame stirred in the attic, shaking spiders into their cracks. Through His Son, Hwass could reach God.

Clandeboye had planted on Hwass a homing device no more sophisticated than those the ARM used to map the wanderings of criminals. In the Munchen workshop he showed his legless electronics Hero how to remove it and how to plant it on a young Kdaptist of the correct height and color who was to proceed to a safe house farther south-and stay there until Hwass returned.

He chose a time before the rising of Beta, in the dark of the night, to slip from the back of a truck into the forest outside of Munchen, intending to place himself far from any city The holy quest for the Son of God began as a kind of reverse hunt, avoiding everything, loping quickly, silently, tirelessly, always out of sight and smell-hiding himself by day, moving by night and by the pale ardor of Beta-until he was totally beyond human habitation. The journey was endless joy. Many times he broke his trail so that it could never be followed. It was joy to hunt the Son of God.

Each evening the quetzbirds gargled on their night hunt. They hunted only when Alpha had set but were most active when brilliant Beta dominated the night sky of stars. Once he saw one on a log munching a luminescent fungus, its brilliant feathers eerily glowing. The smell of the bird and the tang of broken fungus was a forest poem. How could he ever give this up again for civilization?

On the third day he sniffed the smoke of a human bonfire and thought he might have found the Son. He smelled burning oak from Earth, mixed with slightly green bundlestick. Fresh meat on the fire was too hot and charring blood was ablaze. He could detect human sweat and sourbeer, a background of spicy insect pheromones, moist soil. But long before he was close enough to see his prey he smelled its female scent. Not the Son of God. Avoiding the woman, he came to a steep slope that overlooked the stars. He reveled in the stars, then plunged on, silently swift.

At dawn he found a grassy meadow being grazed by a small herd of six-legged sprinters, hardly taller than the grass itself. He was tempted and hungry but he did not attack. This was a religious mission and hunger drove a keener spirit. Now he was well beyond the boundaries of human settlement. It made the hunt venturesome because his prey was a man. Beta was now the only star in the dawn sky.

Two days later, still deliberately fasting, eating only the odd rodent, ravenous, he found his first spoor, fish skins by a stream. By that evening, at Alpha-set, he had located the cabin, its log walls twice the length of a man, made from thin logs one man could haul and notch. The roof was pond reeds. Best of all was the smell of male. Hwass had saturated his orange fur in pond muck for the sake of invisibility. He could have attacked the recluse and killed him then-deadly claws against an ancient hunting rifle- but for religious reasons it was necessary to capture the Son of God alive.

He waited. Animals moved in the forest, breaking twigs. Insects whistled and sprayed the air with their mating scents. A Terran squirrel warned the forest with indignant quarreling. Hwass remained silent, his thin, wing-like ears extended, listening for the man to settle in for sleep, nose relishing the night air, waiting. But he had to act before Beta-rise.

Darkness. Wide pupils. The human stirrings ceased. Time to act. Only the cloud-diffused starlight and his flared nostrils guided him noiselessly across the lightless moor. It was so dark he had to finger-feel his way across the logs to find the opening. Carefully his mind measured the inside of the dwelling so that his strike might be quick and accurate.

Hwass reached an arm deep into the open-shuttered window.

Rudely he dragged the naked man through the opening with a hand tightly closed over the man’s mouth. “Hey now, easy does it,” mmmphed the struggling hermit. But the kzin was trussing his prey before the victim was fully awake. Surprise over, adrenaline surging, the Lamb of God fought with a silent clawing ferocity until he could no longer move at all. Immobile, his mouth free, he snapped, “I didn’t do it I’m not responsible! Gimme my clothes!” He glanced furtively at bear-black ghosts spread over a nearby bush. His patched shirt and utility trousers were molded from forever fabric, frayed beyond the bounds of forever, now recovering from awash and clubbing by the stream’s shore. They were valuable to him.

“You iss Son of God,” Hwass answered gently, relieved that he had indeed captured a male. If it had been a female he would have had to put it back, or to kill it for the sake of silence.

“Hey, you’ve got the wrong man!” came a desperate croak.

“No. You iss His perfect Son.”

“Not me. My grandfather came to Wunderkind to get away from that mouth-flap.”

“Your Grandfather iss everywhere at all and once,” said the kzin. “He iss with you now. You iss holy.”

“Tell Myrtle. To her I’m teufel. Already I’ve skipped out on two wives. I’m a mean cantankerous no-good who likes to fish and to rot in the woods by myself Peaceful like.”

“I iss captured God’s Son,” Hwass hissed threateningly, a theologian daring to be contradicted.

The hermit was surprised that kzin were still loose in the woods after sixteen years. This one had gone crazy after all that time. Still, the panic in him forced him to argue. The cantankerous wife-deserter said the first inane thing that came to his head. “My teeth are rotten. You can’t believe the Son of God would be plagued by rotten teeth,” he suggested hopefully.

“All male mens iss the Son of God, teeth or no. You iss the Son of God I hunt. Men’s Bible iss say that the Son of God may be found anywhere in any disguise, even in dungeon. Matthew 25:40.”

“Finagle save me!”

Hwass hissed. “Finagle iss atheist devil-beast. Cannot touch Son of God.”

The hermit took a moment to consider screaming at the top of his lungs-but there was no one to hear. With his arms tied to his sides, his only weapon was reason. “Whatever you want, you’ve got. Tell me and I’ll give it to you. I’ll kiss the ground you pee on.”

“You iss the true-form.”

“What does that mean?”

“You iss beautiful and iss shape in the image of God.”

“My mother used to stare at me like that.”

“Not to talk of mother. The mother of the Son iss soulless animal!”

“Does that mean you’re not a Catholic?”

“Tonight we converse only importantly with Father of Son.”

The old hermit was beginning to feel sarcastic. “Hey Dad!” he shouted over his shoulder. “Company!”

“Silence!” Hwass snarled. “Serious matters iss upon us. Your Father iss stressed at sins of all humankinds, men’s lying, deceit, vanity cowardice, and dishonorable scheming as you mens iss talk out of two sides of your head! Mens iss the greatest sinner of all sentients. A great sorrow.

He has at your sinning in His liver and iss wish to help you mens, all too much, for you iss been made in true-form of God. He weeps at men’s deviations from true path. He wishes to help you to path of righteousness. He iss obsessed with helping you. Sorrow iss pain to bear- even for one who iss God. He iss so filled with crazy driving sorrow fixating His attention that He iss neglect His other kittens. This you iss will correct.”

“Riiight!”

“You iss now to lay God’s liver to its ease.”

“If you’ll untie me, I’ll gladly go to my knees and pray to God fervently. Say your prayer and I’ll say it with you. I’m praying already”

“You iss not pray. You iss take all mens sins to your soul with courage of true warrior, thus relieving God of His grief for mens. You iss be guilty for all sins. You iss accept all punishment. You iss forgive all mens their transgressions, wipe them clean with your suffering and make God glad again. This iss duty I require of Son of God.”

While the trussed Son of God peered helplessly into the gloom, the devout kzin used his torch to fella straight tree. Flaking muck flickered on slick fur. The giant cut his log into two parts. He notched them and lashed together a sturdy cross. He measured the man’s arm span while the man pleaded hysterically, now aware of his fate. Holes were drilled at the right place on the crossbeam. Holes were drilled in his wrists which carefully avoided all major arteries and veins. The kzin used ironwood pegs to secure the Son of God to the cross and raised him to the night, higher than a kzin’s eye. It began to rain.

In the pouring rain, Hwass cheerfully cut and built two smaller crosses which he erected to the right and left of the crucified Son of God, one for the invisible Grandfather and the other to call God to the scene so that He would know He was wanted. When the clouds began to clear, Beta was rising through the misty frees and the hermit, in the first delirium of his pain, could actually see his enemy sitting on the wet moor weaving-what was it? a basket?

Hwass-Hwasschoaw was weaving a human mask of pliant bark to replace the mask of human skin he had not been able to bring with him. Basket weaving was one of the skills he had ordered his father’s slaves to teach him as a youth. His patriarch had not allowed him to observe a slave without learning how to do all that the slave was doing. Once he had killed one of his father’s metal-working slaves for refusing to teach him the art of variable alloying. His father commended his act by sharing in the bloody meal-even though he had lost a valuable properly.

It was predestined from birth that Hwass was to become Patriarch’s-Eye, an unmentionable name he was to carry in priority to all other social names he might be known by. Eyes sometimes led quiet lives of observance. Sometimes their lives became livery affairs of survival by wit where even the most impractical skill might be the key to survival. His father had ordered him to learn everything.

While he wove, he recalled his father’s words. “A master who cannot do what his slaves do has become like an unskilled animal. A kzin is owned by his slaves if they are more clever than he.” His father was born on W’kkai of the Kzin aristocracy, nominally a member of the W’kkai aristocracy, but more of Kzin than of W’kkai. He had only contempt for the W’kkai habit of letting their slaves be the custodians of their gestalt.

He did not have to kill his father’s basket weavers for they were enthusiastic in teaching him all they knew. The mask shaped up nicely. The skin was finely woven with shaped cheekbones and cleft chin and protruding eyebrows. The eyes were of stream-polished quartz. The hair was of fine plant fiber which he pounded clean while the Son of God was dying with his awful burden of sin.

Day came and night, and the pallor of Beta, and the dawn of Alpha. In his delirium the hermit was taken to a ghostly remembrance of Munchen in the spring of a year when Beta was an evening star. It cast shadows the length of Karl-Jorge Avenue and set the steel steeple of St. Joachim’s cathedral a shimmer against a purpling sky. Some kind of Mass was gathering, and his grandfather, whom he loved far more than his father, was holding on to his hand with the kind of vigor that adults use to protect children from Calvinists, nearby kzin, and other evils.

The hermit was remembering this now because as a child this was the first time he had ever seen a statue-man nailed in agony to a cross. The cross was larger than life-size and it rose above the massive entrance to St. Joachim’s. He had not asked his grandfather about it but his grandfather had sensed his consternation and volunteered an explanation.

“Son. Don’t be scared. The kzinti don’t do that to people. Crucifixion is peculiarly Christian-the kzinti have only been here nine years; they haven’t had the time to be reborn again. Give them fifty years to convert and then we’ll get some real atrocities.”

The Son of God had not spoken for a day. Now, suddenly awakened to the present by his vision, oblivious of his pain, he shouted wildly down at his kzin. “You reborn?”

“Ratcats iss live eleven lives?” The giant’s ears waggled in amusement as he used a monkey’s demeaning term for kzinti. He meant nine, but Hwass had never managed to master decimal mathematics. He got it garbled when he converted from base eight

“Born once of mother! Born twice of Christ!” shouted the hermit in explanation.

The kzin remained puzzled.

“Finagle’s censored balls! Are you a Christian convert? I’m trying to explain to myself what you’re doing! Crucifixion is a Christian sacrifice!”

“I iss Kdaptist,” explained Hwass patiently to his victim.

The hermit’s sight was wavering again. He followed his grandfather’s eyes to the St. Joachim cross of his hallucination. His dry lips were raving. “My grandfather warned me about people like you!” he screamed at the kzin. Then he was gone again into delirium and vision and revelation.

“Christians!” his grandfather was lecturing with a booming voice that traveled all the way from Munchen to the Wunderland backlands, “they delegate their wrong-doing to Christ who suffers for them in proxy ‘Let Christ do the suffering,’ that’s their motto. ‘Let Christ be punished in my place.’ Christ earns God’s grace the hard way, and all they have to do is drink Christ’s blood and eat His flesh on Sunday. Christians acquire God’s grace secondhand. For this service they are grateful and worship him. Been a popular sales pitch for thousands of years. Christians are the ones who get indignant when they get nailed to a cross; they think God’s been falling down on His job and hire a lawyer to sue Him.”

High on his cross the hermit was in a rage of indignation. He wasn’t Christ! It wasn’t his job! Why should he have to suffer? It was sacrilege!

Below, Hwass was busy honing a theological point. Since God had granted to these animals the gift of superluminal communication, surely their awfulest sins had the superluminal ability to fly from all the realms of man, here, to the poultice Hwass had made from the body of the Son of God.

Hwass had completed his mask. Wearing it, he was permitted to gaze directly into the eyes of the Son of God. He smelled the fear and the agony. The true face was tormented in pam. Sometimes the pain was so great that the Son fainted but then he would slump and choke, unable to fill his lungs, and had to awaken, to stiffen his legs so that he could breathe. The sacrifice was working. The sins of mankind were arriving, a new one with each gasp and groan, and with them the punishment that went with sin. Kdapt had truly mastered the nature of the simian form and mind.

St. Joachim’s was gone but the grandfather had brought with him a spinning Munchen hotel, made shabby by the fist of the kzinti occupation, horribly fuzzed by the delirium. Grandpa was trying to convince his grandson not to abandon his first wife. The guy could be a bore! What did it matter so many years too late? Cindy-belle was bones under a kzin factory. You can’t go back. Finagle, what did all that matter when a kzin had you nailed to a cross? Die. I want to die.

“You can blame Cindy-belle all you want, son, for your own incompetence. It’s a painless way to go, top off all your sins on to her, to make her guilty, to attribute to her the source of your own stupidities. That will make you feel good. You’ll be absolved. You’ll be saved-for the moment. But Finagle knows it won’t do you any good in the long run. Your sins aren’t transferable. In the long run you get nailed to your own cross. Christ never saved a single soul but his own.”

Shut up, old man! The universe wasn’t supposed to be literal.

The grandfather held tightly to his grandson’s hand and they were back in Munchen with the painted wooden Christ. “He wanted to take on the world’s sins. He wanted to suffer in your place, and he suffered. But he didn’t save anyone. A sin is something even Jesus can’t take from you. A sin is something you can’t give away. You can’t even run away from it.”

Shut up. Let me die. He was dying of regret. I could be with Cindy-belle now, and the boy grown up, and my mad kzin would have found someone else, some other sinner. Too soon old; too late wise. Why didn’t the raving old ghost just shut up!

From parched lips almost too stiff to speak, he asked for water. If the damn ratcat had read the Bible, like he claimed, he’d hold up a rag soaked in vinegar. The man fainted. He woke. He found a cup of stream water in front of his face… attached to a pole that went all the way down there to a crazy kzin wearing the outsized mask of a man’s face. Why water and not vinegar? Did the rat kzin want him alive to suffer longer? He smiled through cracked lips. He was warm and cozy. Pain was its own anesthetic. He was floating. Still, he wanted the water and slurped at it awkwardly. The water revived him but he wished it hadn’t because his grandfather was still chattering away. That damn old man was never going to give him any peace; somber advice right up to the end. They were having beer in a trunkshuppen in wartime Munchen.

“The road you’re taking, son, running away from your wife, letting father handle it-that leads nowhere but to death. No matter where you run, son, all you’ll find there is your own deathbed, and the faster you run, the quicker you’ll get there.”

The cantankerous hermit was choking again. This time he was grown-up and at the end of his life. When he tried to stiffen, his legs refused to obey. He couldn’t breathe with limp legs and he couldn’t talk his legs into helping him. He was pleading with his legs to raise his body when he blacked out.

The kzin was watching intently.

At the exact moment of death the man-beasts would all be saved, at least temporarily. Every man, across all the realms of men, would be in a state of grace. Their suffering would die as the Son died. And God would no longer be distracted by the pain emanating from their multiple true-shapes.

He prayed. Grant the Bearded God tranquility! The Great God’s Patriarchal courage and bravery and strength were about to be restored by the sacrifice of His Son. Rejuvenated, He would be alert and ready to listen to all who called upon Him, not just the whining of His favorites.

The body on the cross slumped, convulsed, was still. Hwass turned to the smaller cross, God’s antenna. Now! The mask respecting the true-form was firmly upon his muzzle. He composed himself. In the air were the songs of heaven and the smells of glory. His hunter’s senses felt the full attention of God. He delivered only one request, a resonant, powerful request, carefully phrased in the purrs of the Dominated Tense of the Hero’s Tongue:

“Mighty Patriarch, Son of the Grandfather, and Father of the Son,” he began formally, “the aroma of Your piss emanates from every star. As Your feces was dropped into the mud of Earth to bring forth the true-shape, I throw my soul to the mud of Kzin to bring forth loyalty to God’s purpose. Obedient children I promise You.”

Hwass was remembering a lost life on the sheep estates of Wunderland. “A fanged dog may be ugly in Your eyes. An untamed dog may kill sheep. But a fanged dog who has been bred to the faith is a shepherd.”

Then he made his plea. “Place in my loyal claws the hypershunt drive so that my brave kzinti may move freely to their destiny! Let us guide Your true-shaped children. We will discipline their behavior! In the whole of the galaxy, You command no greater race than the race of Heroes. Use us. I ask no more.”

After a respectful silence, Hwass-Hwasschoaw feasted upon the body of the Son of God so that he might share in the grace of the true-form, as God had commanded in Matthew 26:26, and drank of the blood, all of it, which was shed for the remission of sins as commanded in Matthew 26:27-28.