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

paranoid afterthought than as a serious line of defense. He had been reading too much Chuut-Riit who believed in covering low-probability events.

The Nora-beast insisted on wearing clothes, to her downfall. He had tried to argue her out of it, to reach her sensibilities by creating virtual images for her eyes of elephants in sombreros and boleros, of newts in weskits, of giraffes in middies, of yaks in yoke skirts, but she had only laughed until her curls shook and told him that she had been brought up on books in which animals wore clothes. Obscene! Imagine having to unbutton a vatach’s vest before devouring him!

When Trainer lost the argument he had simply booby-trapped her trousers to release a nerve poison into her skin if she ever came too close to electromagnetic triggers in certain vital installations.

Lying beside her was a lethal firebomb. Where had she obtained the oxidizer? From the air! Trainer-of-Slaves growled in disgust at his oversight. “What would a monkey do with a harem of these creatures?” How did the males survive?

That incident decided Trainer. Her memories had to go. She was already clamped to the operating table when she recovered consciousness.

“We’re still here. I goofed,” she said sadly, near tears.

If she’d been kzin, she would have earned a partial name as a break-out artist. “Forget it,” he growled. “The Alabama was designed not to sink.”

“Are the kids all right?” Now she was crying. The three cage- and brain-damaged orphans were her responsibility. She didn’t know whether she was a mother or a UNSN Lieutenant.

“Long-Reach is in there teaching them how to play cards.”

“Louie won’t be able to learn. You hurt him. He can’t concentrate.”

Trainer-of-Slaves was unmoved. He had grown up in a society with a high kit mortality rate. The younglings died routinely by violence and neglect. There were always more where they came from. Suffering was the way to Heroism.

“You’re going to hurt me now, too, aren’t you? You’re going to carve me up? Make a drooling idiot out of me?”

She was afraid. He had an unnatural compassion in his liver for that combination, fear and bravery. “I’m going to sew a tail on your backside,” he growl-hissed. It was his way of trying to crack a joke.

She came out of the operation with artificial gland implants in her brain. She didn’t feel any different. Her mind was clear. She was still driven to destroy the Shark. She still hated kzin.

Trainer-of-Slaves had been spending his spare time away from the Shark completing his mathematical model of the human brain. It wasn’t all that difficult. The data-link did most of the work. All he had to do was enter the special human conditions (taken from the autodoc and his experiments) into the generalized model that kzin physiologists had developed eons ago to cover diverse organic brains—Jotok, Kzin, kdatlyno, Chunquen, etc. They were all different and they were all the same.

Memory erasure was a delicate matter. Memories were all interrelated like a giant n-dimensional crossword puzzle. No memory could be erased without snipping out pieces of a myriad of other memories. And the erased memory could always be reconstructed by “filling in” the empty puzzle blanks. The reconstruction went on automatically by the mere act of using the remaining memories. The missing pieces were “interpolated” during recall. If the erasure had been caused by wetware destruction, the “interpolated” information was simply stored elsewhere.

Organic brains, having evolved over hundreds of millions of years of deadly struggle, were systems designed to military specs. They could take great damage with minimal degradation of performance. No single location vital for system operation. And efficient redundancy insured that even heavy losses of data were recoverable.

That meant that Trainer couldn’t erase the whole of the Nora-beast’s memory at once without killing her. What he could do was set up a steady degradation of memory that didn’t overwhelm the general homeostatic balance. He could alternately shrink and accelerate the dendritic root growth of her neurons, disconnect and randomly reconnect. He could arbitrarily change the strength of the synaptic coefficients. He could switch on or off the machinery that converted short-term memory into long term memory.

He could turn on or off specific neural receptor sites in a way that unbalanced her brain so that it had to compensate with rapid neural learning. He could chemically accelerate learning by up to a factor of twenty, a dangerous game which if continued caused a kind of self-reference that left the mind fixated upon one event. Rapid learning overwrote old memories faster than they could be reconstituted.

The brain normally learned in spurts. Neural disequilibrium induced by failure turned learning on until a new equilibrium state was reached. Success turned learning off. Constant learning degraded old memories without ever giving them time to reintegrate into a new equilibrium state.

The Wunderland autodoc had taught Trainer-of-Slaves another neat trick. Using a carrier pseudo-virus, he could induce a neuron to suicide by budding. The bud killed its parent upon detaching but the bud then either reproduced itself (under one kind of stimulus) or began to sprout an axon (under a second stimulus). If the neural attachment sites were active, the axon would sprout dendrites and hardwire itself into the brain. That was another way of nondestructively degrading old memories.

The fur-growing gland he had implanted was only a whim.

He was not yet ready to tackle the disassembly and rewiring of her language processor. One leap at a time.

When the Nora-female recuperated he had an ice cream party for her in her rebuilt palazzo. Probably it was still not “monkey-proof” but it was the best he could do. The major improvement was a removable barricade across the nursery, so that she could get some peace from the little monsters if she wanted it. Louie was indeed impulsively destructive. The girls were all right. They fought each other like two kzinti in a tournament ring, and each was jealous of the attention that the Nora-beast gave the other. Brunhilde would die in a few years of