Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - VIII - Choosing Names

by Larry Niven, Hal Colebatch, Jean Lamb, Paul Chafe, Warren W. James

  “Dominant One, these Space-kz’eerkti may be tricky, certainly. Many of their artifacts are clever, and though I am too lowly to understand such matters in full, AT tells me their boat’s computers are more versatile than our own. Their connectivity is such that they have pattern-recognition and other machine-reasoning capabilities which our own computers, however fast, have not achieved—indeed we have never attempted to achieve it. Those properties could confer great advantages, military and medical…”—We took military medicine seriously—“Perhaps it is because they are used to looking down from tree-tops and therefore perceive relationships differently to Heroes who once hunted on plains. We have kept one of their programmers, also one of their navigators. It is a female, but in each case I feel there may be useful knowledge still to be extracted.”

  “Merrower. Say nothing yet of this to any other.” Feared Zraar-Admiral did not need to use the Menacing tense to me. “In any event,” he went on, “their flavor may be a reason to husband them. I am inclined to keep a pair to breed from. Or would tissue be enough?” (The Dominant One would not, of course, be an expert in such an unHeroic matter as cellular biology). “Anyway, there ought to be plenty more of them soon. You may pace, Telepath,” he added graciously, “if it will aid your thoughts.”

  “And third, Dominant One,” I continued, “We learn the monkeys who destroyed Tracker are now warning ‘Earth’ of our presence. That is their home planet.” I felt his conflicting emotions at the thought of the Earth-monkeys’ impotent terror when that warning was received.

  Then suddenly he spun, whirling upon me so that I jumped back, fearing that he was about to attack me. “TELEPATH!”

  I rolled belly upward in total submission. “Dominant One, have I offended?”

  “Telepath, repeat to me those first words. Translate EXACTLY.”

  “Dominant One, the words were: ‘They may not be so obliging as to leave themselves in the way of our drive next time’.”

  “Do you see the implications of that?” His eyes and mind were flaring at me.

  “Only what I have said, Dominant One.”

  “Stupid. Urrr.” But he gave me an absent-minded grooming lick, and now I could feel the pleasure from his mind. He felt he was the first to see something wonderful. Slaver dropped onto my face from the tips of his splendid fangs.

  “They speak of ‘Next Time’!” he churred. “Feeble as they are, those monkeys think of giving us a fight!

  “Remember, too, those other monkey-words: ‘Keeping the transmission going is more important than our lives.’ What does that tell us about them?…No, perhaps that is not a question for Telepath to answer.”

  Feared Zraar-Admiral stretched his claws. “We have followed spoor into long grass. Telepath, you are loyal…”

  “Dominant One!” Fear! Did he suspect my commission from Honored Maaug-Riit? Did he suspect the Telepaths’ War? Did he suspect that Rilla and Niza…

  “Remember it. You have brains. Of all the Telepaths I have encountered, you are the closest to a warrior.”

  And where are those other Telepaths now? I thought. Zraar-Admiral had much of benign mood about him at that moment, but with danger always, always. Did he seek to cozen me into games with the family of the Patriarch?

  “A reaction-drive…Urrr,” he churred more thoughtfully. “It is a clumsy makeshift but I do not like aliens having any weapons we lack. Heroes have died in the hunt when a fleeing prey kicked them with hard sharp hooves. Tell Alien Technologies Officer and Weapons Officer to look into the matter. If it is of truly dangerous potential, then they must find out everything about it. Perhaps we can duplicate the principle and better it with our own drive…Tell Weeow-Captain in generalities only if he asks.” A new weapon-principle, if it works, may be valuable, he was thinking, and I do not know yet where Weeow-Captain may fit into all this new order that may come about it. I hope he will remain my loyal Flag-Captain and friend, but for the moment…

  Alone, I took further thought, probed other minds. Waking and sleeping times passed. There were minds whose rhythms I followed. Zraar-Admiral’s speculations…At last there came a certain time for sleep when, as the ship grew quieter and most minds around me grew still, I knew I had to move, to try to leap the chasm I had contemplated in fear so long.

  I went to the cabin where one of the last monkeys was confined.

  “You female.” Pronunciation was impaired by the construction of its speaking apparatus as well as by its fangs.

  “Yes,” said Selina, staring up from the corner where she crouched. “I am female.”

  It was the one which had most often watched her, had pointed out the sanitary arrangements and thrown her food. It was smaller than the other felinoid monsters, not much more than seven feet high, and thinner. The lines of jaw and muzzle were thinner too, adding, with the large eyes and ears, a hint of lynx to the tiger face.

  The words were grating and slurred, but she made them out. It was saying: “You are astrogator in the Happy Gatherer. Sapient are females of your species.”

  The first thought that penetrated her fog of terror was: Give it a human larynx and mouth and it would be speaking good English.

  The second thought was: It is sick. She somehow knew the other creatures she had seen were normal. It all sorts of ways, its violet-edged eyes, its posture, its odor, this creature was not normal.

  She found her brain was racing. She could analyze her own observations of the nightmare thing. She felt clear-headed, too. It was as if what had never made any sense to her before did so now. I felt the universe was out to get us and I was right. If she could do nothing else, she could grit her teeth and clench her fists.

  She had slept when she could, sometimes with dreams of Earth. Sometimes of childhood, sunlight and the sea she had loved, sometimes darker dreams of the deforming torture she and her brother had endured as her father fought current-addiction, the last sight of Easter Island as the shuttle soared towards the Happy Gatherer to depart after years of preparation. In some dreams loomed the statues of Easter Island which, she had been told, some people had once believed were made by wise and benevolent beings from the stars.

  Sometimes it was the moment their world ended: when, the alien ship looming huge before them, autoshields slammed down over the faceplates of their helmets and they saw the Happy Gatherer disappear in a pale-blue glare. Nightmares of the demons, and Rosalind torn apart under their helpless stares. The distant human voices and cries she had heard since. Fewer of them as time went on. Loneliness as bad as terror. In any event it was in the cage of demons that she always awoke.

  Several times she had suffered the blinding headaches which she was sure now were induced by the creatures. And now one spoke to her. In English.

  She found she was largely beyond surprise. Aspects of the nightmares were compartmentalized from the waking reality. She stood, and forced herself to face the thing.

  “Who are you?”

  “Telepath. I have no name.”

  “Telepath? You mean…mind-reader?”

  “Yes. Be calm. I know, despite posture, you do not challenge me.”

  “Is that how you know our language?”

  “Yes. But time is urgent.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Speech with you.”

  “I don’t mean that. What does your…race…want? Why have you done this to us?”

  “Conquest.” For Telepath, it was a statement of the obvious.

  “I understand.” No surprise now. She stared up into the tired, sunken eyes.

  “I not reading your mind now,” it said, “But for a time I remember thoughts also language. I do not want to read your mind now. We Telepaths not live long and overuse of talent not help.”

  We Telepaths…I have no name. Yes, this thing is different to the others. An outcast? Why?

  Because it is a Telepath!

  I know that! How do I know it?

  “So what do you want now? I mean you as an individual. Why do yo
u come to me?”

  The felinoid almost swayed. Its ears contracted. Its tail rose and fell. It twitched and tried to groom.

  “Help.” The voice was low. “Help me.”

  She fought down an urge to laugh wildly. “Help you? What do you mean?”

  “Escape. I prisoner as you. Do you not wish to escape? To live?”

  “Live?”

  “Yes. Alternative is death for both. Even if you male your kind have not fighters’ privileges of surrender or honorable death. In soon real-time you eaten. Your species is palatable and non-toxic. Feared Zraar-Admiral toyed with keeping pair to breed but decided many monkeys available soon. Keep tissue-samples. And soon I am burned out. Each new waking I dread first symptoms. Of our two fates, yours I would prefer. I do not know how much time we have—either of us. Zraar-Admiral and other officers have found monkeymeat tasty…I have not been allowed any of course.”

  None of that sank in at once. Then it did.

  Selina had decided some time before that she had no chance of getting out alive, though she had blurred the details of her likely end. She had visited zoos on Earth, and, with visual enhancers, had seen captive tigers tearing at meat, held safely on spacious islands surrounded by water and electronic barriers. She had floated in a silent airship over the African Continental Park and seen lions kill. Now she remembered red blood, and muscle and yellow fat pulled away from red and white bones, rib-cages opening like fans, great yellow teeth and bloody muscles buried in the body-cavity of prey.

  She had seen holos and dioramas of ancient sabre-tooths at her brother’s museum, where children and adults screamed with delighted horror: the leaping bulk of the Smilodon, the replica leopard dragging the limp body of a hairy hominid, streaming blood, along a tree-branch, the cat’s huge upper incisors fitting neatly into the hominid’s conveniently-spaced eye-sockets, cranial vault fitting with equal neatness between the cat’s jaws and held firmly by the lower incisors driven through the skull’s occiput.

  There had been a skeletal reconstruction of that, with Pleistocene remains from the Swartkrans Cave in southern Africa, showing how neat were the punctures of the leopard’s lower fangs in the back of the hominid’s skull, two holes to match those natural cavities the eye-sockets made for the upper fangs…the gnawed skull dropped or rolled into the cave for fossil-hunters, so many hominid bones dropped into it that they formed a geological deposit called breccia…her mind was jerking about what faced her…Rosalind torn and flapping on the deck, Paul gone? Rick? All the rest? The rest? All the Happy Gatherer’s tight-knit crew? Her mind spun into a desperate loop, turning away from that unbearable question.

  And she had her deeply-encoded biological inheritance. She did not need to know consciously of the war of great cats and hominids on the African savannah that had impelled her ancestors towards intelligence. The creature staring down at her was the embodiment of terror. Even without the drug, Telepath felt something of the effort with which she controlled herself.

  For the first time, a Kzin looked upon a human with admiration.

  She breathed heavily, and wiped the sweat from her eyes and from her body. Her next question was as brisk and businesslike as she could make it.

  “Where do we go?”

  “Steal boat. There is one chance now that may never come again for us. It is Lord Chmeee’s leap, I know, but we face certain destruction here.”

  She found an odd lucidity. The prospect of being eaten concentrated the mind.

  “Your people are hunters. They would pursue us, would they not?”

  “That is part of plan. We must make them care for a mad and therefore useless Telepath and a monkey to pursue, but pursue wrong way. Monkeys on Kzin planets have tricks. You are a monkey. You must trick them.”

  “What do you think our chances are?”

  “Perhaps one in eight to fourth or fifth power. But random mathematics not my field…Does contortion of your muzzle signify anger? Or fear?”

  “No. Amusement, of a sort.”

  “I remember. Urrr. But not Heroic for leaping one to calculate odds.”

  She was silent. She noticed again the endless ripping-cloth sound that vibrated ceaselessly throughout the ship.

  “How can I believe you.” She was full of fear as she asked this question—somehow she knew (a flash of thought: how do I know) that to question the honor of this creature might be a deadly insult. But Telepath answered calmly.

  “I could give you my name as my word if my kind ever had names. But name or no name, it is dishonorable to lie except as…as…you have no word for it. I have so little honor I do not wish to lose any. And you are not going to get a better deal.”

  “Where do we actually escape to? Have you thought of that?”

  “I told you, this is our only chance. We escape to your monkeyship, of course.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Your Winged Undying Shining…The Angel’s Pencil…We are following it.”

  Winged Undying Shining Monkey’s Writing Stick! Yes! Suddenly an image flashed from her mind to mine. I saw our target at last.

  A “colony ship”, carrying a crew and many embryos to a planet circling a star named something like “Fifth of the River.”

  A thin cylinder, circled by a halo.

  The halo was the lifesystem in which the monkeys traveled, spinning to mimic gravity with centrifugal force. The cylinder housed the drive…and the laser.

  A reaction-drive, as I had known. Small attitude-jets and gyros. But so cumbersome, hard to turn! Defense of such a thing would be hopeless!

  But then, to fight Gutting Claw in conventional battle was not my plan.

  To reassure the Selina-monkey further, I gave it back (gave her back. I reminded myself it was female) the Space-suit which had been taken during examination. It was badly torn, but the creature seemed eager for it, and hastily put it on its body. In its damaged state it seemed quite useless, but of course all females love decorating themselves. She seemed more composed then.

  “Why are you taking me?” she asked.

  “I will need you to talk to the Writing Stick monkeys of course. Tell them that Telepath is a useful companion and will help them remain alive. That is the prime reason, but there are others also. I have read Astrogator’s mind recently. I know as much of guiding a vessel in space as Astrogator, but I will forget. The knowledge Telepaths take from other minds cannot stay with us without a…bridge. And I only need to forget a little of astrogation procedures—questions for the computer—to be lost beyond all recovery I will need you then.”

  “Or do you just want me to eat for yourself. Spare provisions perhaps?”

  “I could not eat you personally, unless I was in hunger frenzy. Perhaps not even then. I have read your mind too deeply. It would be like eating myself. My condition has many disadvantages, one is inhibition in that area. We have too much…empathy. Unfortunately, this does not diminish with time. There is an effect. Besides, there are plenty of rations. There are provisions in all boats, and I have identified extra stores and prepared them for loading.

  “Also, it is generally desirable to have a zzrow graff…useful companion.

  “Yours was a sea-faring race before it took to the stars, I know. When Alien Technologies Officer and I examined this”—I gave it the thing we had taken from the suit—“we were baffled by its function. It was shaped something like a weapon. Yet once, when I was reading your mind as softly as I might, I discovered it was a small replica of an ancient ship. I do not know why you have it, but I thought perhaps…”

  “A gift from my brother.”

  New vistas of alien thought were opened to me. I felt new images from this monkey’s mind—of blue monkey home-world oceans, wider than those of Kzin, oceans which the monkeys had crossed for trade or even in order to stimulate some alien sense of pleasure, oceans they had voluntarily swum in and which they had written poetry about. Creatures lived in those oceans and I even caught a taste of them that stiffened
my whiskers.

  How alien these aliens were! And yet…the gift from the brother—would a Hero give a Kzinrett sister a gift? Yes, perhaps, when they were young. Bright shiny ornaments young Kzinretts liked. Heroes could feel affection for sisters they had spent kittenhood with, and Heroes could and should treasure mementos of great deeds and give gifts to those they cared for. Heroes who grew up in the households of Noble Sires, as I did not. But no Kzinrett crewed a Space-ship: the vocabulary of the Female tongue was perhaps eight to the power of three words.

  The brother had been a museum guard. That was more strangeness. On Kzin Museum Guard was a task for certain old and honored warriors, perhaps heroically disabled in battle, supervised by the Conservors’ mystic order.

  These creatures had not a warrior among them, nor, it seemed to me, a real notion of honor, yet they had museums. It made no sense. What would they display in such places? I extracted images of museums weirdly perverted—displaying not relics of battle but of games, of dances, of the origins of monkeydom and the animal forms that had preceded their own dominance.

  Or was there something else? A hint of something secret deeply buried? The model had been preserved as a curio not for associations of honor or glory but for the sake of its age alone. Its name meant nothing to the Selina. A mere sound.

  Like their other names that were not names. They gave them to objects, to ships, as we gave names to the vessels of our own Space-fleets.

  Names in such a context mattered to Heroes. If not a fine and splendid description of function and purpose, full of poetry, like Rampant Slayer or Conqueror’s Fang, the names of Kzinti ships commemorated the names of great Heroes of the past like Chmeee or the Lord Dragga-Skrull who lost a forelimb, nostrils and eye before leading his force to death and imperishable glory gutting a superior fleet of the Jotok when Heroes rose against them and leapt into Space at the dawn of the Eternal Hunt.