Man-Kzin Wars IV by Larry Niven (best novels to read for students txt) 📕

puzzling questions about human brain function. He didn’t know how he would have survived if his incurably curious Jotoki weren’t taking so much of the load off his mind. Sometimes all he had to do was ask a question, and one of his Jotoki would experiment with an orphan and come up with the answer. They had more patience than a kzin.

Trainer-of-Slaves knew he had been with the Third Black Pride for too long when their antenna began to receive news of the gigantic battles in the Man-system. He had been at this post almost ten years. The battles that were juicing up Wunderkzin livers were themselves more than four years dead. Of course, with light-speed messages it never seemed that way. If a space battle lasted a month, it still took a month to play out—four years after the fact.

The Fourth and Fifth Black Prides were stationed up ahead, listening, too. The Third Black Pride was behind Alpha Centauri as the last backup. The Prides frantically compared messages, filling in the transmission gaps, but they were all light-days apart, and it took days for the final compilation to be authenticated by the communications officers.

None of the news surprised Grraf-Hromfi. Stoically he repressed his rage. But Trainer-of-Slaves was surprised.

The Blood of Heroes was destroyed on the eleventh day. Vaporized. Trainer, tired from following every new bulletin, was stunned by the heroic death of his best friend. Four years ago. His ancestors were whispering. It was as if he had been living four unearned years. I’m a ghost, he thought, but that was silly. He felt pathos. Then the kzin anger took him. He wanted to fight, and there was no one to fight. He wanted monkey ears on his belt. But they had Ssis-Captain’s ears on their belt.

Something about these humans that he did not understand. He went to his cages in a foul mood.

“Hey, Dr. Moreau,” jeered a female with long black hair, “when do you sew on my wolf’s head?”

“Svelda! Clean up your cage!” he snarled with his best animal pronunciation. It was just a matter of feeding the suction nozzle.

“You come any closer and you get shit in your fur!”

His mouth was twitching over his fangs. “Be careful. I’m in a vile mood.”

“That’s news to me? What do I care? What have I got to lose? Kill me!”

He purred to disguise his ire. “I’ll give you ice cream if you clean up your cage.”

She was weeping. “You’ve mucked around in my brain so often I can’t think straight. Ice cream! Do you understand anything? Open the cage door and I’ll kill you. Do you know what happens to a woman when you cut up her brain? All the emotions come out! She loses control. She becomes an animal.” She held onto the bars and snarled at him, gnashing her teeth.

The orphan children in the adjoining cages began to wail. They were so much easier to manage than these political ferals.

So—another failure; she was still capable of connected reason and the only obvious result of the experiment had been to produce a state of constant, poorly controlled rage. These man-females clung to their reason even after drastic surgery. And when he was able to delete their intelligence they showed grave, and sometimes startlingly weird behavior deficits.

Once he had tried to eliminate curiosity and had produced instead an idiot who compulsively asked questions with no interest at all in the answers. Another experiment in intelligence reduction had produced a perfectly rational woman with a deadly lack of common sense. He had tried for docility, using the autodoc’s knowledge of human brain chemistry, and achieved only passivity leading him to the discovery that there wasn’t much difference between passivity and sloth. Passivity neutralized intelligence, but it neutralized everything else of importance, too. Docility, on the other hand, seemed to require intelligence if a kzin was to get any use out of it.

He was still missing some essential key.

“You like ice cream,” he stated firmly, hoping to motivate the Svelda-female toward cleanliness.

“Suck it up your nose!”

Was that a reasonable statement? Borderline. He wanted to make her happy so that she would clean her cage and stop disturbing the other animals. Ice cream wasn’t going to work. Perhaps she could no longer understand the concept of ice cream? If reason was failing, he should try something emotional—a kzinrret always responded to emotion. What would she respond to since she did not like him? since she was fixed at rage? Victory? He thought about that.

Victory was very emotional; it stirred the purring vibrations. Kzin and animal alike all relished victory. “At this moment your race is happy and I am bereaved,” he said.

“Happy?” she shrieked. “A finger in your eye! That would make me happy!” She rattled her cage some more and snarled some more. “Gottdamn Urin-Pelz! You stink! Urin-Pelz! Take a bath!” When he tried to reach in his hand, unclawed, to give her a soothing pet, she snapped at his black fingertips.

A remarkable display. Svelda had come to him shy and quiet and properly propitiative. He had been delighted into thinking that very little modification of her mind would be necessary. But his surgery had evidently de-inhibited a whole layer of vicious instinct. Puzzling. Reluctantly he dismissed his latest theory about human brain function.

How far could she still reason at the abstract level? She was having trouble connecting victory with joy. He enunciated his animal call imitations more carefully as if he were talking to his mother. “You monkeys have done grave damage to our fleet attacking Sol. Noble warriors have died valiantly. That is why you are happy and I am bereaved.”

“Sol?” The beast began to weep hysterically. Another singular transformation. “The Solarians took you out…”—the sobs were racking her body—“you Rattekatze father-suckers?” she asked between sobs. “At Sol?”

“Another fleet will be sent.”

He was observing that the she-animal’s brain damage was extensive. All the emotions seemed to be operating at once, uncoordinated. Tears of grief were streaming down the furless