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

himself being smothered. His mind’s eye watched her soaking the stuffings in nitric acid to make high explosive, while she wove a noose out of the shredded covering. None of the scenes were plausible. “All right,” he said.

He was astonished at the ornate furniture she designed. A bed with a satin roof and adjustable gravity? Golden man-babies with wings, dancing on the headboard? He grumbled but had his Jotoki make them for her, scrounging substitutes for satin and wood. They had to reprogram the weavers and the plastic molders.

The time went quickly because there was so much to do. Deciphering the superluminal drive was top priority. Trainer-of-Slaves couldn’t be reckless with the device, couldn’t test it to destruction because it was the only one he had. He developed a two-pronged approach.

(1) Analysis. Isolate the sub-units. Attempt to craft a duplicate of the subunit. Test. The Bitch was a repair facility that could make any part in the kzin arsenal. He practically owned a prototype factory and he had the slave power to utilize it.

(2) Explore the military memories of Lieutenant Nora Argamentine.

Trainer-of-Slaves had had many years with his experimental animals to determine that human memory was very plastic, approximately five times as plastic as the kzin memory.

Torture could get at gross detail quickly, but it didn’t work well with nuances. Every time a human memory was recalled, it was altered in some way. If the memory was recalled to relieve pain—while the brain was saturated in the chemical stew brought on by agony—the memory trace was drastically mutated. Torture gradually obliterated the nuances it was meant to recover. He had to veto the use of torture.

Slowly, he worked out other methods.

Trainer-of-Slaves got his best results with Lieutenant Argamentine when he doped her into a sleep state from which she couldn’t waken, but in which she remained on the verge of dreaming. He strapped her into a mock-up of the Shark’s cockpit and fed her dreaming-mind virtual images of combat conditions in which she was being attacked by kzin warcraft. Winning kept up her interest in the dreams and reduced her anxiety.

While she was dreaming, he read off her motor responses. That told him what she was doing to counter the images he was feeding to her eyes. From that he learned the combat characteristics of the Shark. For one thing, he discovered that phasing into hyperspace took half an hour to set up. For another thing, he learned that the Shark had only been captured because of an engine malfunction.

All this while Trainer-of-Slaves was studying his female as an evolutionary curiosity. In a bisexual animal, the rational female was clearly an unwanted trait for domestication. If kzinti were to husband properly obedient human slaves—and the Nora-beast was not properly obedient—child-animal care would have to be divorced from male-child teaching. With second, third, and fourth, etc., voices from the harem subverting the patriarch’s word, a household would disintegrate into chaos. Monkey society must be shifting around like the surface of a quake-world!

He explained all this to Nora, but she was just as stubborn as Grraf-Hromfi’s sons while she sat under her canopy, arguing back with inappropriate aggressiveness for a female. She didn’t know how to listen. It was proof that females couldn’t use the gift of language even when it was given to them.

In idle moments, when the analysis of the hyperdrive motor had exhausted him, he toyed with hypothetical ways of using chromosome engineering to cure the man-females of male language skills. The daydreams went nowhere because such a neat answer probably wasn’t practical.

The kzin solution, which was genetic, wouldn’t work.

During Heroic reproduction the male egg combined with the female egg to form a doubled nucleus. The kzincode-groups, not unlike human chromosomes, were then distributed, leaving the super-egg to divide into two fertile male and female eggs which then migrated to the kzinrret’s pouch in pairs, a litter always containing an even number of kits, half kzintosh, half kzinrret.

Reproduction wasn’t all that dissimilar among monkeys but there were unfortunate differences. The nuclei of kzincells were more complicated than those of mancells, containing three distinct kinds of protein coding, sexual, major-group, and lumpy-constellation.

The kzincode-strands that determined kzinsex were enormous, four times as large as any strand in the major kzincode-group, and several octals larger than any member of the lumpy kzincode-constellation. In male cells the kzintosh-strand appeared twice, while in female cells a dominant kzintosh-strand was lord over the single kzinrret-strand, the latter acting to edit physical size and repress language in the female who carried it.

It would be difficult to genetically engineer male sex dominance in the man-beasts because with these animals it was the female who carried the twinned sex chromosome! A perverse reversal of the normal situation. Given their genetic makeup one might well wonder how male monkeys, balding and hemophiliac, came to be intelligent! Worse, the male and female sex-chromosomes of the man-beast were normal-sized, the male chromosome runtish, even, and unlike the kzintosh-strand or the kzinrret-strand, were not major centers of developmental switching.

In any event, Trainer-of-Slaves wasn’t in a hurry to destroy the Nora-beast’s intelligence. As a younger, more reckless researcher his haste had ruined many promising experiments. Think before you leap.

Intelligence had many facets, and it was disastrous to confuse its parts, to destroy one thing when you thought you were destroying another. It was better to be patient, to alter only small pieces of her mind at a time—and then carefully observe the incremental change as a guidepost to the next change.

Several months into their journey, the Lieutenant actually did try to destroy the ship. She used furniture parts to escape. She assembled a makeshift gas mask to keep herself conscious during the breakout, and she headed straight for the ship’s vital parts through an air conditioner she’d learned about from the Jotoki at the time of the mutiny. She had memorized the ship too well!

He found her unconscious. She had been stopped by a whimsical trap he had set up more as a