She gave a peculiar, tearful smile. 'No Hero,' she said. 'But there was more to it than that. After the building collapsed he was under the burning, smoldering, wreckage for a long time. There were other priorities in damage-control and rescue. While he was there the zeitungers got to him. They had been in the cellarage there, too, like your rats. Whether they could reach him physically to tear what was left of his flesh I don't know. But they tore his mind, for days. You can imagine that, now.'
I could. Not the cruelest human being, I thought, who had experienced the zeitungers could but feel a throb of pity for this creature of a pitiless species. This wreck of a kzin and I had something in common, I thought.
'The effect, as far as I can tell, on human and kzin minds is parallel,' Gale said. 'What do kzinti fear? Many things, secretly. But to fail as Heroes perhaps most of all.'
Even, perhaps, those far-off dreams of glory were something this lowly kzin and Arthur Guthlac the museum guard had shared.
'They lodged their poison deep in his mind,' she went on. 'He was there with them too long. And you see the state he was already in.' Kzinti, even non-telepaths, had that rudimentary telepathic sense more acute than that of nearly all humans. More receptive. I had no difficulty understanding that a prolonged zeitunger attack, setting up patterns and paths in the brain, would be a different matter to the brief one I had endured. And the zeitungers themselves would presumably then have been filled with animal fear and panic. I tried briefly to imagine an unremitting zeitunger attack if one was already desperately injured and mutilated, blind, trapped, alone, helpless, in agony, hour after hour as fire crept closer. After a very short time I stopped doing that. Again, as I stopped shaking, the wan ghost of a smile crossed her strained face. This Wunderland woman was at least as tall as me, and our eyes were level. 'Unlike your case,' she said, 'there was no treatment.' Our faces moved together and I found myself kissing her again, gently, tenderly.
'Yet that,' she went on after a moment, 'may be another reason he struggles to live. To die of such shame and despair would be a victory for the zeitungers.'
'Why has he had no modern treatment since?' I asked. 'For anything? Body or mind?'
'Treatment? How?'
I did not understand everything yet, but I wanted to be gentle with her. At least some of my ghastlier and more grotesque fears and suspicions about her and this kzin seemed wrong. I put my arms around her and stroked her hair and after a moment she rested her head on my shoulder, hiding her face against me.
'I know an old kzintosh warrior, Raargh, who has many wounds from the war,' I told her. 'One arm and one eye are not his own, and his knees are metal. His scars are honored and honorable among the kzinti. There are kzintoshi with sons'-was I babbling a little now?-'who point them to the likes of Raargh as Heroes to emulate. But he had his wounds in battle.'
'Then he is fortunate among the kzinti. This one they would despise. Or so he believes.'
'But your kzin could have a better life,' I told her. 'Far better. There is good surgery. Transplants, prostheses, quick nerve, bone and tissue-growth are available now. For kzinti as well as humans. His mind, too, perhaps. There are facilities…
'Raargh lives well enough, even as kzinti count such things,' I went on. 'In hunts he pulls down game with his prosthetic arm and his artificial eye allows him to see in the dark.' When I thought of Raargh I knew again that I felt rather more warmly to him than to most of the creatures. I remembered certain things that had happened in the caves. 'He has adopted a youngster who is his pride and joy and I think he is getting more sons of his own.'
'In the city hospitals, perhaps, and for the Herrenmanner and their clients, there is such treatment,' she replied, raising her eyes. 'What money do we have for that?' I remembered what a backwoods part of Wunderland this was.
'And who would help a kzin?' she added after a moment, with genuine puzzlement in her voice. 'The kzinti have no power. On this planet they are destroyed. And I was no collaborator. I did my part to destroy them.'
'It costs nothing,' I said. 'Part of the terms we offered the kzinti on this planet when we made peace was that their wounded would be treated.'
I saw her face change.
'I did not know that!' Her face lit so that she looked a different person. Then it fell again. 'But how would we get there?'
Explaining the new political situation in the cities would have taken a long time. I owed this deformed kzin little enough, thinking of what the kzinti had done to me and mine. But I owed Gale. If she had done nothing but save me from the zeitungers, I would have owed her. Anyway, she was a beautiful and desirable woman and, it seemed, an innocent one. And if I felt dawning love for her, along with desire, I suppose I also wanted to impress her. I took the identity-disk from my neck and passed it to her, my fingers twining round hers as I did so-a strange situation for lovers to be courting!
'You see my rank? I am a brigadier general attached to the UNSN general staff. At present on leave. But I can arrange transport for him… and you.'
I had become embarrassed by my earlier behavior. Now I was embarrassed by her reaction to my words. She went down on her knees and clasped my own. She kissed my hands, where the previous night she had kissed my lips. Her face was like a light of joy. I raised her to her feet and, holding her, walked with her to the window. Together we looked out. The lightning flashes were definitely further away now, the rain was thinning and, I guessed, the floods would subside quickly. I accepted all that she said, but one question remained.
'I still don't understand,' I told her. 'A kzin. An enemy. An invader of this planet who would have enslaved and destroyed us all. Yes, his burns and injuries are terrible. But why do you care for him so?'
There were sounds behind us. The mutilated kzin shuffled slowly into the room again. Evidently it had decided to face me, with courage of a kind that I hoped I would never need, though it still held its paws as if to try to hide what was left of its head from my sight. But it looked less horrible now. It made some gestures to Gale that she plainly understood.
She went to a dresser and took a bottle that I recognized: bourbon, something both species drank. She took two glasses for us and another bowl that she put in front of the kzin, pouring a little into each.
'I will explain to him,' she said. 'Things must be explained to him carefully.'
'But first,' she said, 'we usually drink a toast each night.' And then, raising her glass, 'To my children.'
Following her example, I drank. The kzin, manipulating its trumpet with difficulty between its paws, dipped it into its bowl and sucked.
Without words I understood, and I saw that she knew I understood.
'Yes,' she said. 'He held up the building while they escaped.'
Larry Niven
The Man-Kzin Wars 11
Grossgeister Swamp
Hal Colebatch
Wunderland, 2430 a.d.
The kzin lapped noisily, then raised its head and looked into the eyes of the Abbot of Circle Bay Monastery. The kzin was young and its ear tattoos betokened the highest nobility. The abbot was small and elderly.
'This is excellent brandy, Father,' the kzin remarked. His Wunderlander had only intermittent nonhuman accent. 'My Honored Step-Sire Raargh Hero told me not to miss it.'
'I am glad, Vaemar, My Son-within-these-walls. We try to mitigate the austerities of the field-naturalist's life.'
'I don't know if I'm really entitled to be called that,' Vaemar said, putting down the empty bowl. 'I'm only a student.'
'These are the statistics we've compiled,' said the abbot, extracting a memory brick from his computer and passing it to Vaemar. 'What we know of human use of the swamp since the first landings on this planet. I hope it's helpful.'
They crossed the garth to the car parked in the meadow just beyond the monastery gates. A few crumbling fragments of walls, overgrown with multicolored vegetation, were the only traces of the refugee camp that had stood there at the time of Liberation ten years before. What had been a refuse-filled ditch then was now an ornamental moat with floating plants. A couple of monks were tending the fish-ponds that joined with it. 'There are the monkeys!' remarked the abbot. It was an old joke between then, dating from Vaemar's confusion over
