by Larry Niven
Not a black hole or a dark star, but a star in a counter-universe. Human physicists had discovered the possible existence of shadow mass in the late twentieth century—Halloran remembered that much from his physics classes. The enormously powerful superstring theory of particles implied shadow mass pretty much as the kzinti entry described it. None had been detected…
Who would have thought the Earth was so near to a ghost star?
And now, Kfraksha-Admiral was recommending what the kzinti had heretofore forbidden—close approach to a ghost star to gain a gravitational advantage. The kzinti ships would appear, to human monopole detectors, to be leaving the system—retreating, although slowly. Then the fleet would decelerate and discard its monopoles, sending them on the same outward course, and swing around the ghost star, gaining speed from the star’s angular momentum. No fusion drives would be used, so as not to alarm human sentries. Slowly, the fleet would swing back into the solar system, and within a kzinti year, attack the worlds of men. Undetected, unsuspected, the kzinti fleet could end the war then and there. The monopoles would be within retrieval distance.
And all it would require was a little kzinti patience, a rare virtue indeed.
Someone scratched softly at the ID plate on his hatch. Halloran did not assume the Fixer persona, but projected the Fixer image, before answering. The hatch opened a safe crack, and Halloran saw the baleful, rheumy eye of Telepath peering in.
“I have bested you already,” the Fixer image growled. “You wish to challenge for a shameful rematch?” Not something Fixer need grant in any case, now that his status was established.
“I have a problem which I must soon bring to the attention of Kfraksha-Admiral,” Telepath said, with the edge of a despicable whimper.
“Why come to me?”
“You are the problem. I hear sounds from you. I remember things from you. And I have dreams in which you appear, but not as you are now … sometimes I am you. I am the lowest, but I am important to this fleet, especially with the death of War Loot’s Telepath. I am the last Telepath in the fleet. My health is important—”
“Yes, yes! What do you want?”
“Have you been taking the telepath drug?”
“No.”
“I can tell … you speak truth, yet you hide something.”
The kzin could not now deeply read Halloran without making an effort, but Halloran was “leaking.” Just as he had never been able to quell his “intuition,” he could not stop this basic hemorrhage of mental contents. The kzin’s drug-weakened mind was there to receive, perhaps more vulnerable because the subconscious trickle of sensation and memory was alien to it.
“I hide nothing. Go away,” the Fixer-image demanded harshly.
“Questions first. What is an ‘Esterhazy’? What are these sounds I hear, and what is a ‘Haydn’? Why do I feel emotions which have no names?”
The kzin’s pronunciation was not precise, but it was close enough. “I do not know. Go away.”
Halloran began to close the door, but Telepath wailed and stuck his leathery digits into the crack. Halloran instinctively stopped the hatch to prevent damage. A kzin would not have…
“I cannot see Kfraksha-Admiral. I am the lowest … but I feel danger! We are approaching very great danger. My shields are weakening and my sensitivity increases even with lower doses of the drug… Do you know where we are going? I can feel this danger deep, in a place my addiction has only lightly touched… Others feel it too. There is restlessness. I must report what I feel! Tell the commander—”
Cringing, Halloran pressed the lever and the door continued to close. Telepath screamed and pulled out his digits in time to avoid losing more than a tip and one sheathed claw.
That did it. Halloran began to shake uncontrollably. Sobbing, he buried his face in his hands. Death seemed very immediate, and pain, and brutality. He had stepped into the lion’s den. The lions were closing in, and he was weakening. He had never faced anything so horrible before. The kzinti were insane. They had no softer feelings, nothing but war and destruction and conquest…
And yet, within him there were fragments of Fixer-of-Weapons to tell him differently. There was courage, incredible strength, great vitality.
“Not enough,” he whispered, removing his face from his hands. Not enough to redeem them, certainly, and not enough to make him feel any less revulsion. If he could, he would wipe all kzinti out of existence. If he could just expand his mind enough, reach out across time and space to the distant homeworld of kzin, touch them with a deadliness…
The main problem with a talent like Halloran’s was hubris. Aspiring to god-like ascendancy over others, even kzinti. That way lay more certain madness.
A kzin wouldn’t think that way, Halloran knew. A kzin would scream and leap upon a tool of power like that. “Kzin have it easier,” he muttered.
Time to marshal his resources. How long could he stay alive on the kzinti flagship?
If he assumed the Fixer persona, no more than three days. They would still be rounding the ghost star…
If he somehow managed to take control of the ship and could be Halloran all the time, he might last much longer. And to what end?
To bring the Sons Contend With Bloody Fangs back to human space? That would be useful, but not terribly important—the kzinti would have discarded their gravity polarizers. Human engineers had already studied the hulk of War Loot, not substantially different from Sons Contend.
But he wanted to survive. On that Halloran and Fixer-Halloran were agreed. He could feel survival as a clean, metallic necessity, cutting him off from all other considerations. The Belter pilots and their initiation… Coming to an understanding of sorts with his father. Early’s wish-list. What he knew about kzinti…
That could be transmitted back. He did not need to survive to deliver that. But such a transmission would take time, a debriefing of weeks would be invaluable.
Survival.
Simple life.
To win.
Thorough shit or not, Halloran valued his miserable life.
Perhaps I’m weak, like Telepath. Sympathetic. Particularly towards myself.
But the summing up was clear and unavoidable. The best thing he could do would be to find some way to inactivate at least this ship, and perhaps the whole kzinti fleet. Grandiose scheme. At the very top of Early’s wish-list. All else by the wayside.
And he could not do it by going on a rampage. He had to be smarter than the kzinti; he had to show how humans, with all their love of life and self-sympathy, could beat the self-confident, savage invaders.
No more being Fixer. Time to use Fixer as a front, and be a complete, fully aware Halloran.
* * *
Telepath whimpered in his sleep. There was no one near to hear him in this corridor; disgust could be as effective as status and fear in securing privacy.
Hands were lifting him. Huge hands, tearing him away from Mother’s side. His own hands were tiny, so tiny as he clung with all four limbs to Mother’s fur.
She was growling, screaming at the males with the Y-shaped poles who pinned her to the wicker mats, lashing out at them as they laughed and dodged. Hate and fury stank through the dark air of the hut.
“Maaaa!” he screamed. “Maaaa!”
The hands bore him up, crushed him against a muscular side that smelled of leather and metal and kzintosh, male kzin.
They will eat me, they will eat me! cried instinct. He lashed out with needle-sharp baby claws, and the booming voice above him laughed and swore, holding the wriggling bundle out at arm’s length.
“This one has spirit,” the Voice said.
“Puny,” another replied dismissively. “I will not rear it. Send it to the creche.”
They carried him out into the bright sunlight, and he blinked against the pain of it. Fangs loomed above him, and he hissed and spat; a hand pushed meat into his mouth. It was good, warm and bloody; he tore loose chunks and bolted them, ears still folded down. From the ot
her enclosures came the growls and screams of females frightened by the scent of loss, and behind him his mother gave one howl of grief after another.
Telepath half-woke, grunting and startling, pink bat-ears flaring wide as he took in the familiar subliminal noises of pumps and ventilators.
He was laughing, walking across the quadrangle. Faces turned toward him
—naked faces?—
Mouths turning to round O shapes of shock.
—Flat mouths? Flat teeth?—
Students and teachers were turning toward him, and he knew they saw the headmaster, buck-naked and priapically erect. He laughed and waved again, thinking how Old Man Velasquez would explain this—
Telepath struggled. Something struck him on the nose and he started upright, pink tongue reflexively washing at the source of the welcome, welcome pain. The horror of the nightmare slipped away, too alien to comprehend with the waking mind.
“Silence, sthondat-sucker!” Third Gunner snarled, aiming a kick that thudded drumlike on Telepath’s ribs. Another harness-buckle was in one hand, ready to throw. “Stop screaming in your sleep!”
Telepath widened his ears and flattened his fur in propitiation as he crouched; Third Gunner was not a great intellect, but he was enormous and touchy even for a young kzin. After a moment the hulking shape turned and padded off down the corridor to his own doss, grumbling and twitching his whiskers. The smaller kzin sank down again to his thin pallet, curling into a fetal ball and covering his nose with his hands, wrapping his tail around the whole bundle of misery. He quivered, his matted fur wrinkling in odd patterns, and forced his eyes to close.
I must sleep, he thought. His fingers twitched toward the pouch with his drug, but that only made things worse. I must sleep; my health is important to the fleet. Unless he was rested he could not read minds on command. Without that, he was useless and therefore dead, and Telepath did not want to die.
But if he slept, he dreamed. For the last four sleeps the dreams of his kittenhood had been almost welcome. Eerie combinations of sound plucked at the corners of his mind as he dozed, as precise as mathematics but carrying overtones of feelings that were not his—
He jerked awake again. Mother, he thought, through a haze of fatigue. I want my mother.
The alienness of the dreams no longer frightened him so much.
What was really terrifying was the feeling he was beginning to understand them…
* * *
Halloran flexed and raised his hands, crouching and growling. Technician’s-Assistant stepped aside at the junction of the two corridors, but Fire-Control-Technician retracted his ears and snarled, dropping his lower jaw toward his chest. Aide-to-Commanders had gone down on his belly, crawling aside. Beside the disguised human Chief-Operations-Officer bulked out his fur and responded in kind.
Sure looks different without Fixer, Halloran thought as he sidled around the confrontation.
The kzinti were almost muzzle-to-muzzle, roaring at each other in tones that set the metal around them to vibrating in sympathy; thin black lips curled back from wet half-inch fangs, and the ruffled fur turned their bodies into bristling sausage shapes. The black-leather shapes of their four-fingered hands were almost skeletal, the long claws shining like curves of liquid jet. Dim orange-red light made Halloran squint and peer. The walls here in this section of officer country were covered with holographic murals; a necessity, since kzinti were very vulnerable to sensory deprivation. Twisted thorny orange vegetation crawled across shattered rock under a lowering sky the color of powdered brickdust, and in the foreground two Kzinti had overturned something that looked like a giant spiked turtle with a bone club for a tail. They were burying their muzzles in its belly, ripping out long stretches of intestine.
Abruptly, the two high-ranking kzin stepped back and let their fur fall into normal position, walking past each other as if nothing had happened.
Nothing did, a ghost of Fixer said at the back of Halloran’s head; the thin psychic voice was mildly puzzled. Normal courtesy. Passing by without playing at challenge would be an insult, showing contempt for one not worthy of interest. Real challenge would be against regulations, now.
Chief-Operations-Officer scratched at the ID plate on the commander’s door, releasing Kfraksha-Admiral’s coded scent. A muffled growl answered.
Kfraksha-Admiral was seated at his desk, worrying the flesh off a heavy bone held down with his hands. A long shred of tendon came off as he snapped his head back and forth, and his jaws made a wet clop sound as he bolted it.
“Is all proceeding according to plan?” he asked.
“Yes, Dominant One,” Chief-Operations-Officer said humbly.
“Then why are you taking up my valuable time?” Kfraksha-Admiral screamed, extending his claws.
“Abasement,” Chief-Operations-Officer said. He flattened to the floor in formal mode; the others joined him. “The jettisoning of the monopoles and gravity polarizer components has proceeded according to your plans. There are problems.”
“Describe them.”
“A much higher than normal rate of replacement for all solid-state electronic components, Kfraksha-Admiral,” the engineer said. “Computers and control systems particularly. Increasing as a function of our approach to the ghost star. Also personnel problems.”
Kfraksha-Admiral’s whiskers and fur moved in patterns that meant lively curiosity; discipline was the problem any Kzin commander would anticipate, although perhaps not so soon.
“Mutiny?” he said almost eagerly.
“No. Increased rates of impromptu dueling, sometimes against regulations. Allegations of murderous intent unsupported by evidence. Superstitions. Several cases of catatonia and insanity leading to liquidation by superiors. Suicides. Also rumors.”
“Hrrrr!” Kfraksha-Admiral said. Suicide was an admission of cowardice, and very rare.
Time to fish or be bait, Halloran decided.
Gently, he probed at the consciousness of the kzin, feeling the three-things-at-once sensation of indecision. Kfraksha-Admiral knew something of why the Patriarchy forbade mention of the phenomenon; because the Conservors of the Ancestral Past couldn’t figure out what was involved. Inexplicable and repeated bad luck, usually; the kzin was feeling his fur try to bristle. Kzinti believed in luck, as firmly as they believed in games theory. Eternal shame for Kfraksha-Admiral if he turned back now. His cunning suggested aborting the mission; an unwary male would never have become a fleet commander. Gut feeling warred with it; even for a kzin, Kfraksha-Admiral was aggressive; otherwise he could never have achieved or held his position.
Shame, Halloran whispered, ever so gently. It was not difficult. Easier than it had ever been before, and now he felt justified.
Eternal disgrace for retreating, his mind intruded softly. Two years of futility already. Defeat by plant-eaters. Sickening images of unpointed grinding teeth chewing roots. Endless challenges. A commander turned cautious had a line of potential rivals light-years long, waiting for stand-down from Active Status. Kzin were extremely territorial; modern kzin had transferred the instinct from physical position to rank.
Glory if we win. More glory for great dangers overcome. Conquest Hero Kfraksha-Admiral—no Kfraksha-Tchee, a full name, unimaginable wealth, planetary systems of slaves with a fully industrialized society. Many sons. Generations to worship my memory.
The commander’s ears unfolded as he relaxed, decisions made. “This is a perilous course. Notify Flashing Claws”—a Swift Hunter-class courier, lightly armed but lavishly equipped with drive and fuel—“to stand by on constant datalink.” The Patriarchy would know what happened. “The fleet will proceed as planned. Slingshot formation, with Sons Contend With Bloody Fangs occupying the innermost trajectory.”
That would put the flagship at the point of the roughly conical formation the fleet was to assume, the troopships with their loads of infantry would be at the rear. “Redouble training schedules. Increase rations.” Well-fed kzin were more amenable to discip
line. And—“Rumors of what?”
“That we approach the Darkstar of Ill-Omen, Dominant One.”
Kfraksha-Admiral leaned forward, his claws prickling at the files of printout on his desk. “That was confidential information!” He glared steadily at Chief-Operations-Officer, extreme discourtesy among carnivores. The subordinate extended hands and ears, with an aura of sullenness.
“I have told no one of the nature of the object we approach,” he said. Few kzinti would trouble to prod and poke for information not immediately useful, either. “The ship and squadron commanders have been informed, so have the senior staff.”
“Hrrr. Chirrru. You—” a jerk of the tail towards Aide-to-Commanders. “Fetch me Telepath.”
* * *
Halloran slumped down on the mat in his quarters, head cradled in his hands, fighting to control his nausea. Murphy, don’t tell me I’m developing an allergy to kzin, he thought, holding his shaking hands out before him. The mottled spots were probably some deficiency disease, or his immune system might be giving up under the strain of ingesting all these not-quite-earthlike proteins. He belched acid, swallowed past a painfully dry throat, remembering his last meeting with his father. A kzin ship was like the real Arizona desert, and it was sucking the moisture out of his tissues, no matter how much he drank. A dry cold, though. It held down the soupy smell of dried rancid sweat that surrounded him; that had nearly given him away half a dozen times.
A sharp pain thrilled up one finger. Halloran looked down and found he had been absently stropping non-existent claws on the panel of corklike material set next to the pallet. A broken fingernail was bent back halfway. He prodded it back into place, shuddering, tied one of the antiseptic pads around it and secured it with a strip of cloth before he lowered himself with painful slowness to his back. Slow salt-heavy tears filled the corners of his eyes and ran painfully down the chapped skin of his face.
It was easier to be Fixer. Fixer did not hurt. Fixer was not lonely. Fixer did not feel guilt; shame, perhaps, but never guilt.