Man-Kzin Wars XIV by Larry Niven Page B

armed men could find that village and take all that gold without having to do much digging at all, at all. Some people couldn’t abide work. He shrugged. No point in telling them the village was well armed. He remembered a psychopath in the early days of the Occupation, maddened by everything, a really nasty piece of work, who had enjoyed killing orphaned children. A kzin had decided the children were the Patriarch’s property. What had happened to the man had not been pleasant. This man, and his accomplices too, were the sort of people Wunderland would be better off without.
    “I wouldn’t know. Like I said, I don’t want to get ate.”
    This wasn’t quite true. The trader had spent some time yarning and exchanging gossip with the men and women and the odd kzin who had come in from the village. And he had heard of the judge. Judge Tom, the Law East of the Ranges. He sounded a tough cookie.

    “Dimity Carmody says that you have a lovely, simple mind,” Vaemar told the abbot. He nodded.
    “Yes, I do have a simple mind,” he admitted. “But it has taken me many years to get it that way. I think she was born with one, lucky girl.”
    “She said that in a better world, you might yourself have been a mathematician. She said you have the hunger for transcendence which is the mark.”
    “She would know. I have never seen myself that way. I feel myself to be too muddled, too confused. Still, it could be worse. I could be like so many people, who are so muddled and confused they haven’t even noticed they are muddled and confused. I give thanks to God that He has shown me something of the extent of my muddle and confusion. Just enough to see it and not so much as to make me despair. And now you have some questions about politics, I think.”
    “Yes, some quite basic ones. For a start, why are there two political parties? What is special about two?” Vaemar was puzzled. He was stretched out before a roaring fire, polishing his ear-ring, while the abbot was sitting in a chair close by.
    “I believe there was some mathematics developed about a century ago to consider that question, but it has puzzled others before you,” the abbot told him. He went on and started to sing in an artificial deep voice:

    “ I often think it’s comical, Fa la la, Fa la la,
    “That every boy and every girl that’s born into this world alive ,
    “ Is either a little liberal, or else a little conservative.
    “ Fa, la, la. ”
    The abbot looked quizically at Vaemar, who was astonished by what seemed to be unusual frivolity, even by human standards, and explained:
    “That was written in the last part of the nineteenth century, so you are hardly the first person to find it puzzling. Gilbert’s guardsman did too. It has something to do with stability. You see, human beings have a good share of herd genes. Ninety-eight percent of our genes we have in common with chimpanzees, and about seventy percent we share with cows. And rather more with wolves. We have an impulse towards the collective. We also have an impulse towards hierarchical power structures, as do you kzin. We also have some who are individuals with a strong wish for freedom. These things are written inside us, and we all have something of them. In our various cultures, some of those impulses are expressed more freely than others, and get buttressed by memes.
    “A political party is a coalition of memes, and these can change. For example, in Gilbert’s time, conservatives were generally much more collectivist and hierarchical, and the liberals much more individualist. In our day it is nearly the other way around, the conservatives are more inclined to individualism, the liberals are more collectivist. Of course, a coalition of individualists can be formed, but they tend to argue with each other rather a lot, so they are underrepresented in the political system. The individualists in the present conservative party are perhaps less individual and more hierarchical than those who