Even with the incongruous wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses, giving him an appearance something like a tiger that had eaten an old-time gangster, he was looking a great deal better. In fact, apart from his small size, he looked like a healthy kzin. Indeed, I did not recognize him at first. He was leading a well-grown kit with buttons on its claws. One of the orphans, I guessed. I remarked that I was pleased to see him looking so well.
“It is the new drugs, the human drugs,” he said. “I am under a life-debt to you and your kind, Professor.”
“If that is so, I am under one to you,” I told him. “Let us say the scales balance.”
“Have you got a few moments?” he asked me. “There is something I would share with you.”
The Lindenbaum café was not far away. It had footch couches for kzin now. I wondered what the prewar students would have made of it. Not a good idea to think that way. It raised too many ghosts.
“As a matter of fact, it was to see you that I came here,” he said. “You remember Herr von Kleist?”
“Yes.” I nearly said “Of course,” but one who is powerfully conditioned never says anything that might be interpreted as rudeness to a kzin, even a small and apparently friendly one. Feeble telepath or not, he could have dismantled a tiger without undue trouble.
“And Herr Thompson?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“Would you be interested in knowing why they died? And Herr Morris?”
“Certainly. I have often wondered.”
“Herr Thompson, before he died, prepared a package,” he said. “It was star-locked.”
That meant it could only be opened when the stars had moved to a certain position in the sky. Generally an attempt to force it resulted in the destruction of its contents. The kzinti had got the technology, like many others, from one of the scientific races they had conquered in the past. They had invented very little of their own.
“He gave it to you?”
“No indeed, to another monk…human. He, in turn, fled Munchen to join the Resistance and left it with a third human, what you call an ‘attorney.’ I remember you explaining those terms to us.”
“Yes.”
“I could follow all this easily enough. I had read Herr Thompson’s mind, and from that I read the minds of the other human and the attorney.”
“Did you tell the Patriarch’s authorities?”
“No.”
“May I ask why?” I would not have dared put such a question, save that I felt he was inviting it.
“What have they ever done for me, except make me a wreck and rob me of my strength and pride? But I bided my time. When the Ramscoop Raid came, the attorney’s offices were in one of many buildings reduced to rubble. I let Herr Morris wreak part of my vengeance for me. He did more than I expected. Much later, after I was released from the assessment camp, after I had seen you, I found the package-I had read the attorney’s mind and knew where it was stored. He was dead and had no further use for it. I took it and kept it.
“I did not know how long it would be before the star-lock allowed the package to be opened-centuries, perhaps. At last I had an idea, a very simple one, which the ingenious beings who invented the star-lock could not have anticipated, though perhaps Herr Thompson should have. I took it to the planetarium.”
“As simple as that!”
“As simple as that. I opened it. It contained, as I had suspected, a message, which I read. By then, the kzin were overthrown on this planet. I kept it for some time, unsure what to do with it. Recently I decided to give it to you…”
“Thank you.”
“I had thought it might contain a treasure, or the guide to one. I warn you, it does not.”
There must be something about humans and locked boxes. I felt an absurd sense of disappointment.
He was wearing a garment over his fur like a vest with pockets-purely utility. From one of these he produced some sheets of paper.
“This is what it contained,” he said.
I read:
There is not much time to explain. I wish it to be known, by my descendants at least, that I am not a maniacal killer. And I am not a traitor. I have killed von Kleist for the benefit of the human race. Now I must kill myself, to avoid the Telepath’s probing and Kzin torture, both of which would reveal the truth and make what I have done pointless. By the time this is opened it should not matter. Things will have been settled one way or another. I hope it will allow my name to be restored.
I tried to subvert the Kzin with stories of human prowess.
I begged von Kleist to see reason, but he dug in his heels through sheer stubbornness. He was determined to put Moby Dick on the kzin reading list. An academic dedicated to his studies.
He claimed, when I pressed him, it would give them a better understanding of human courage and determination. I told him that many of them might have trouble telling fact from fiction, but it made no impression. He called it a great classic.
Yes, a great classic that might destroy us all. For what is its message, to a kzin reader? That the whale wins in the end, in spite of all Ahab’s effort and sacrifice. THAT HUMANS CAN BE DEFEATED, THAT HUMAN BRAVERY AND DETERMINATION ARE NOT ENOUGH FOR SUCCESS, that we are but monkeys that batter our lives away in a futile quest for vengeance upon a brainless fish. And the fish wins. Its message of human despair and nihilism would work its way through the kzin fleet. It would hearten the enemy.
That is what, even now, the von Kleists will never understand. For them, ideas and consequences exist in different universes. The power of words to create or destroy. I suggested Churchill’s wartime speeches. He said they were not literature, which it was his job to teach. He would have spread poison through the Patriarch’s weapons, made the death of every human who had died fighting the kzin seem as meaningless as Ahab’s, for the sake of teaching literature. If they understood it was fiction, that would be worse, for the very knowledge that a human would write such a fiction would increase their contempt for the human race, and their confidence in themselves.
My motive has been to help the human race survive. Care for my family.
I dialed my flashlight to high power and focused it on the paper. As it crumbled to ashes I asked: “Do you know what happened to his family?”
“No,” he said. We both knew there was a good chance they were dead. But I could advertise for them.
“So what are you doing now?”
“I am still at the orphanage. I teach the orphans reading and writing. What you and the other professors taught me.”
“Not Moby Dick, I trust.”
“No, that would contain quite the wrong lesson. My favorite is called The Magic Pudding: ‘We much prefer to chew / the steak and kidney stew…’ Giving you this has rid me of a burden. There was another page, giving details of where he had hidden a cache of diamonds, industrial diamonds, that he had salvaged from a bombed factory at the time of the first kzin landings. Leonie will be able to use them, for the orphanage is always short of funds. There are young kzin in it who might have grown up like me. Farewell, Professor. Drink blood and tear cattle into gobbets!”
He left. Seeing me alone, the human waiter sought my order. I drank a glass of wine to Thompson’s memory.
LIONS ON THE BEACH
by Alex Hernandez