Man-Kzin Wars IV by Larry Niven (graded readers .txt) 📗

out of the Serpent’s Swarm so that some nights were aglow with falling stars. A major strike every few million years had left Wunderland’s lifeforms permanently poised for adaptation. The navy that had defended Wunderland from the Conquering Heroes had consisted mainly of a Meteoroid Guard unit.

Gerning Base was created by kzin who loved to hunt; the actual station that monitored the high atmosphere for thousands of kilometers around to detect feral spacecraft seemed more of an afterthought. Some cunning kzin had his eye on this area, anticipating the time when honor and heroism would earn him the right to a full name. In the meantime he was serving Chuut-Riit’s purposes.

Detector-Analyst was a local kzin from a background that gave him a Hssin heritage, though he had never been to R’hshssira. He gave Trainer-of-Slaves special consideration out of curiosity for the planet of his patriarchs. Ssis-Captain grumbled at all this talk about a place he had passed through while in hibernation and kept interrupting to turn the conversation into a lighter vein.

Jokes: “How do you stop a monkey from running around in circles? Nail his other foot to the floor.”

Zoology: was a Wunderland tigripard faster than a Kzin krrach-sherrek? Or only more cunning?

Better than he liked stalking through the forest, Ssis liked to sit in the lodge on the carved logs, supping fermented milk. The political intrigue was all in the lodge. He speculated with Trainer about the identity of the ambitious kzin who was “pissing around the borders of this territory,” looking for a noble name so that he might found a household here. They decided it must be Yiao-Captain.

Yiao-Captain was an unlikely candidate. He was as short as Trainer and as slight, not the kind one would expect to dominate a fight, but he had a cautious cunning to him—and an energy—that would make any challenge to his honor dangerous. But it was his ambition that struck them both.

Trainer-of-Slaves first sniffed around its edges when he was invited to share a kill with four of the local kzin. The kill was a forest herbivore, headless, and carved in places that facilitated sundering, the fresh blood still running into the table-gutters where a spout delivered it to a bloodbowl. The tang of bloodscent was overpowering. On a sidetable stood green homeblown bottles of the local akvavit, ready to mix with the blood.

Trainer learned in conversation that the akvavit had been seized in Gerning for unpaid taxes and its distiller’s daughter sold into factory slavery at Valburg. The normal procedure was for the indigenous Herrenmann to handle such details but the kzin purposefully audited estates and villages when taxes seemed low and found simple ways to encourage ardent taxpaying. After all, the taxes were set at fair levels.

The conversation changed from such mundane topics when Yiao-Captain arrived to rip off a hunk of meat for his own fangs. He dominated the conversation with his enthusiasms. He added fire to the tinder-dry debate over Chuut-Riit’s Logistical Preparation as the Rey to Victory In War. He provoked insults and countered them with witty insults of his own that both needled and defused. When he tired of that, he turned the collective attention of his coterie to tales of adventure.

Adventure, to Yiao-Captain, meant astronomy. His haunch of herbivore held motionless, he stopped eating while the sputtering of the Hero’s Tongue quickened to an almost battle intensity. To know the stars! There were rumors of strange beings who lived in the depths of space, rumors of ancient empires that had casually abandoned tools upon the ice of comets long before any of the giant stars of the constellations had yet flamed to life.

Hr-roghk! The hints! The spoor untracked! Starseeds that spawned at the galaxy’s very edge. Where did they come from? Where did they go? Mysteries! What were those moon caves deep in the outer planetary gloom around red dwarfs? Caves so ancient they must have been carved by disintegrator beams? Wealth! Honor!

Then silence to let all this sink in while Yiao-Captain noisily stripped his morsel. He left, reminded of duty by some new passion. The conversation drifted back to kzinrret jokes, to who had just received a name, to the honor duel between Electronic-Systems-Upkeep and Builder-of-Walls, the spike on yesterday’s scope, the taste of space rations. And finally, finally, the tongue-wagging licked around that most degenerate bone of speculation—fleet rivalries; who would reach Man-sun first?

Days of hunting brought Trainer-of-Slaves and Detector-Analyst together in a friendship broader than the commonality of Hssin. They often went out at dawn without Ssis. Detector had been hunting in the woods around Gerning since the opening of the base, and knew the ways and the smells of the forest. He knew the waterholes and the places where a tigripard might be found stalking its own prey.

The aroma of Wunderland, the expanse, the open skies, an evening standing on the beach by the sea—all of this overwhelmed Trainer with joy. He had been a hunter himself, moving daily out into the Hssin Jotok Run to cull the wild Jotok or lure a transient into slavery, or measure the salinity of the marshes where the Jotok larvae wriggled among the reeds. He had thought the Jotok Run a capacious relief from the cramped city, but this! This Wunderland went on forever!

Once the hunting through the woods took them as far as the Korsness estate. Trainer saw from the hill Yiao-Captain helping a man-beast and his child move a fallen tree from the main road. He went to help the Captain. It seemed like a political thing to do—ingratiating himself with this officer could only prove useful. But why was he moving a tree when there were so many slaves and machines?

“Rrrr, we have welcome help,” purred Yiao-Captain to the tiny child who had been trying to lift the tree at its center.

Trainer recognized the larger of the tame animals as the local king of beasts. He couldn’t tell one monkey from the other but this one was tall for a