The Man-Kzin Wars 04

by Larry Niven

  His grandfather's answering service did not know where the oldest living Halloran was. That brought on a sharp tinge of disappointment, against which he quickly raised a shield of aloofness. For a moment, a very young Lawrence Larry had surfaced, wanting, desperately needing to see Grandpa. And there was no room for such active sub-personalities, not with Fixer-of-Weapons filling much of his cranium. Or so he told himself, drowning the disappointment as an old farmer might have discarded a sack of unwanted kittens.

  Halloran met his father on the family estate at the cap of Arcosanti Two in Arizona. The man barely looked fifty and was with his fifth wife, who was older than Halloran but only by five or ten years. The sky was gorgeous robin's egg at the horizon and lapis overhead and the green desert spread for ten kilometers around in a network of canals and recreational sluices. Arcosanti Two prided itself on its ecological balance, but in fact the city had taken a wide tract of Arizona desert and made it into something else entirely, something in which bobbing lizards and roadrunners would soon go crazy or die. Halloran felt just as much out of place on the broad open-air portico at two kilometers above sea level. Infrared heaters kept the high autumn chill away.

  "I'm volunteering for a slowboat," Halloran told his father.

  "I thought they'd been suspended," said Rose Petal, the new wife, a very attractive natural blond with oriental features. "I mean, all that expense, and we're bound to lose them to the, mmm, outsiders..." She looked slightly embarrassed; even after nearly a decade, the words war and enemy still carried a strong flavor of obscenity to most Earthers.

  "There's one going out in a few weeks, a private venture. No announcements. Tacit government support; if we survive, they send more."

  "That does not sound like my son," Halloran Sr. ventured.

  When I tried to assert myself, you told me it was wrong. When I didn't, you despised me. Thanks, Dad.

  "I think it is wonderful," Rose Petal said. "Whether characteristic or not."

  "It's a way out from under family," Halloran Jr. said with a little smile.

  "That sounds like my son. Though I'd be much more impressed if you were doing something to help your own people..."

  "Colonization," Halloran Jr. interjected, leaving the word to stand on its own.

  "More directly" Halloran Sr. finished.

  "Can't keep all our eggs in one basket," his son continued, amused by arguing a case denied by his own actions. So tell him.

  But that wasn't possible. Halloran Jr. knew his father too well; a fine entrepreneur, but no keeper of secrets. In truth, his father, despite the aggressive attitude, was even more unsuited to a world of war and discipline than his son.

  "That's not what you're doing," Halloran Sr. said. Rose Petal stood by, wisely keeping out from this point on.

  "That's what I'm saying I'm doing."

  His father gave him a peculiar look then, and Halloran Jr. felt a brief moment of camaraderie and shared secrets. He has a little bit of the touch too, doesn't he? He knows. Not consciously, but...

  He's proud.

  Against his own expectations for the meeting and farewell, Halloran left Arcosanti Two, his father, and Rose Petal, feeling he might have more to lose than he had guessed, and more to learn about things very close to him. He left feeling good.

  He hadn't parted from his father with positive feelings in at least ten years.

  There were no longer lovers or good friends to take leave of. He had stripped himself of these social accoutrements over the last five years. It was difficult to have friends who couldn't lie to you, and he always felt guilty with women. How could he know he hadn't influenced them subconsciously?

  Knowing this, as he returned to the port and took a shuttle to orbit, brought back the necessary feeling of isolation. He would not be human much longer. Things would be easier if he had very little to regret losing.

  Insertion. The hulk of the kzin cruiser, its gravity polarizer destroyed by the kzin crew to keep it out of human hands, was propelled by a NEO mass-driver down the solar gravity well to graze the orbital path of Venus, piloted by the two Belter women to the diffuse outer reaches of the asteroids, there set adrift with the bodies of Telepath and the other unknown kzin restored to the places where they would have died. The Belters would take a small cargo craft back home.

  Halloran would ride an even smaller lifeboat from War Loot toward the kzin fleet. He might or might not be picked up, depending on how hungry the kzin strategists were for information about the loss.

  The fleet might or might not be in a good position; it might be mounting another year-long attack against Saturn's moons, on the opposite side of the sun; it might be moving inward for a massive blow against Earth. With the gravity polarizers, the kzin vessels were faster and far more maneuverable than any human ships.

  And there could be more than one Beet.

  The confined interior of the cargo vessel gave none of its three occupants much privacy. To compensate, they seldom spoke to each other. At the end of a week, Halloran began to get depressed, and it took him another week to express himself to his companions.

  While Henrietta Olsen buried herself in reading when she wasn't tending the computers, Kelly Ysyvry spent much of her time apparently doing nothing. Eyes open, blinking every few seconds, she would stare at a bulkhead for hours at a stretch. This depressed Halloran further. Were all Belters so inner directed? If they were, then what just God would place him in the company of Belters during his last few weeks as a human being?

  He finally approached Olsen with something more than polite words to punctuate the silence. A kzin wouldn't have to put up with this, he thought. Kzinti females were subsapient, morons incapable of speech. That would have its advantages, Halloran thought half jokingly.

  Women frightened him. He knew too much about what they thought of him.

  "I suppose lack of conversation is one way of staying sane," he said.

  Olsen looked up from her page projector and blinked. "Flatlanders talk all the time?"

  "No," Halloran admitted. "But they talk."

  "We talk," Olsen said, returning to her reading. "When we want to, or need to."

  "I need to talk," Halloran said.

  Olsen put her book down. Perversely guilty, Halloran asked what she had been reading.

  "Montagu, The Man Who Never Was," she replied.

  "What's it about?"

  "It's ancient history," she said. "Forbidden stuff. Twentieth century. During the Second World War remember that?"

  "I'm educated," he said. As much as such obscene subjects had been taught in school. Pacific Grove had been progressive.

  "The Allies dressed up a corpse in one of their uniforms and gave him a courier's bag with false information. Then they dumped him where he could be picked up by the Axis."

  Halloran gawped for a moment. "Sounds grim."

  "I doubt the corpse minded."

  "And I'm the corpse?"

  Olsen grinned. "You don't fit the profile at all. You're not The Man Who Never Was. You're one of those soldiers trained to speak the enemy's language and dropped behind the lines in the enemy's uniforms to wreak havoc."

  "Why are you so interested in World War Two?"

  "Fits our times. This stuff used to be pornography or whatever the equivalent is for literature about violence and destruction, and they'd send you to the Psychists if they caught you with it. Now it's available anywhere. Psychological refitting. Still, the thought of..." She shook her head. "Killing. Even thinking like one of they’re so ready to kill..."

  Ysyvry broke her meditation by blinking three times in quick succession and turned pointedly to face Halloran.

  "To the normal person of a few years ago, what you've become would be unspeakably disgusting."

  "And what about now?"

  "It's necessity," Ysyvry said. That word again. "We're no better than you. We're all soldiers now. Killers."

  "So we're too ashamed to speak to each other?"

  "We didn't k
now you wanted to talk," Olsen said.

  Throughout his life, even as insensitive as he had tried to become, he had been amazed at how others, especially women, could be so ignorant of their fellows. "I'll probably be dead in a month," he said.

  "So you want sympathy?" Olsen said, wide-eyed "The Man Who Would be Kzin wants sympathy? Such bad technique..."

  "Forget it," Halloran said, feeling his stomach twist

  "We learned a lot about you,' Ysyvry continued "What you might do in a moment of weakness, how you had once been a troublemaker, using your abilities to fool people ... Belters value ingenuity and independence, but we also value respect. Simple politeness."

  Halloran felt a deep void open up beneath him. "I was young when I did those things." His eyes filled with tears. "Tanj it, I'm sacrificing myself for my people, and you treat me as if I'm a bleeping dog turd!"

  "Yeah,' Olsen said, turning away. "We don't like flatlanders, anyway, and... I suppose we're not used to this whole war thing. We've had friends die. We'd just as soon it all went away. Even you."

  "So," Ysyvry said, taking a deep breath. "Tell us about yourself. You studied music?"

  The turnabout startled him. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve. "Yes. Concentrating on Josef Haydn."

  "Play us something," Olsen suggested, reaching into a hidden corner slot to pull out a portable music keyboard he hadn't known the ship carried. "Haydn Glenn Miller, Sting, anything classical."

  For the merest instant, he had the impulse to become Halloran-Kzin. Instead, he took the keyboard and stared at the black and white arrangement. Then he played the first movement of Sonata Number 40 in E Flat, a familiar piece for him. Ysyvry and Olsen listened intently.

  As he lightly completed the last few bars, Halloran closed his eyes and imagined the portraits of Haydn, powdered wig and all. He glanced at the Belter pilots from the corners of his eyes.

  Ysyvry flinched and Olsen released a small squeak of surprise. He lifted his fingers from the keyboard and rotated to face them.

  "Stop that," Olsen requested, obviously impressed.

  Halloran dropped the illusion.

  "That was beautiful," Ysyvry said.

  "I'm human after all, even if I am a flatlander, no?"

  'We'll give you that much," Olsen said. "You can look like anything you want to?"

  "I'd rather talk about the music," Halloran said, adjusting tones on the musicomp to mimic harpsichord.

  "We've never seen a kzin up close, for real,"

  Ysyvry said. The expression on their faces was grimly anticipatory: Come on, scare us.

  "I'm not a freak."

  "So we've already established that much," Olsen said. "But you're a bit of a show-off, aren't you?"

  "And a mind-reader," Ysyvry said.

  He had deliberately avoided looking into their thoughts. Nobility of purpose.

  "Perfect companion for a long voyage," Olsen added. "You can be whatever, whomever you want to be." Their expressions had become almost salacious. Now Halloran was sorry he had ever initiated conversation. How much of this was teasing, how much actual cruelty?

  Or were they simply testing his stability before insertion?

  "You'd like to see a kzin?" he asked quietly.

  "We'd like to see Fixer-of-Weapons," Ysyvry affirmed. "We were told you'd need to test the illusion before we release the hulk and your lifeship."

  "It's a bit early we still have two hundred hours." "All the more time to turn back if you don't convince us," Olsen said.

  "It's not just a hat I can put on and take off."

  He glanced between them, finding little apparent sympathy. Belters were polite, individualistic, but not the most socially adept of people. No wonder their mainstay on long voyages was silence. "I won't wear Fixer-of-Weapons unless I become him."

  "You won't consciously know you're human?"

  Halloran shook his head. "I'd rather not have the dichotomy to deal with. I'll be too busy with other activities.""

  "So the kzinti will think you're one of them, and... will you?"

  "I will be Fixer-of-Weapons, or as close as I can become," Halloran said.

  "Then you're worse than the fake soldiers in World War II," Olsen commented dryly. "Show us," Ysyvry said, over her companion's words.

  Halloran tapped his fingers on the edge of the keyboard for a few seconds. He could show them Halloran-Kzin the generic kzin he had manufactured from Fixer-of-Weapon’s memories. That would not be difficult.

  "No," he said. "You've implied that there's something wrong, somehow, in what I'm going to do. And you're right. I only volunteered to do this sort of thing because we're desperate. But it's not a game. I'm no freak, and I'm not going to provide a sideshow for a couple of bored and crass Belters."

  He tapped out the serenade from Haydn's string quartet Opus 3 number 5.

  Ysyvry smiled: "All right, Mr. Halloran. Looks like the UNSN made a good choice-- not that they had much choice."

  "I don't need your respect, either," Halloran said, a little surprised at how deeply he had been hurt. I thought I was way beyond that.

  "What she's saying," Olsen elaborated, "is that we were asked to isolate you, and harass you a little. See if you're as much of a show-off as your records indicate you might be."

  "Fine," Halloran said. "Now it's back to the silence?"

  "No," Ysyvry said. "The music is beautiful. We'd appreciate your playing more for us."

  Halloran swore under his breath and shook his head.

  "Nobody said it would be easy, being a hero... did they?" Ysyvry asked.

  "I'm no hero," Halloran said.

  "I think you have the makings for one," Olsen told him, regarding him steadily with her clear green eyes. "Whatever kind of bastard you were on Earth. Really."

  Will a flatlander ever understand Belters k They were so mercurial, strong, and more than a little arrogant. Perhaps that was because space left so little room for niceties.

  "If you accept it," Ysyvry said, "we've decided we'll make you an honorary Belter."

  Halloran stopped playing.

  "Please accept," Olsen said, not wheedling or even trying to placate; a simple, polite request.

  "Okay," Halloran said.

  "Good," Ysyvry said. "I think you'll like the ceremony."

  He did, though it made him realize even more deeply how much he had to lost...

  And why do I have to die before people start treating me decently?

  The Belter pilots dropped the hulk a hundred and three hours after his induction into the ranks. They cut loose the kzin lifeship, with Halloran inside, five hours later, and then turned a shielded ion drive against their orbital path to drop inward and lose themselves in the Belt.

  There were beacons on the lifeship, but no sensors. In the kzinti fleet, rescue of survivors was strictly at the discretion of the commanding officers. Halloran entered the digitized odor-signature and serial number of Fixer-of-Weapons into the beacon's transmitter and sat back to wait.

  The lifeship had a month's supplies for an individual kzin. What few supplements he dared to carry, all consumable, would be gone in a week, and his time would start running out from that moment.

  Still, Halloran half hoped he would not be found. He almost preferred the thought of failure to the prospect of carrying out his mission. It would be an ordeal. The worst thing that had ever happened to him. His greatest challenge in a relatively peaceful lifetime.

  For a few days, he nursed dark thoughts about manifest destiny, the possibility that the kzinti really were the destined rulers of interstellar space, and that he was simply blowing against a hurricane.

  Then came a signal from the kzinti fleet. Fixer-of-Weapons was still of some value. He was going to be rescued.

  "Bullshit," Halloran said, grinning and hugging his arms tightly around himself. "Bullshit, bullshit bullshit!"

  Now he was really afraid.

  Wherever you are, whether in the crowded asteroid belt or beyond the furthest r
eaches of Pluto, space appears the same. Facing away from the sun negligible anyway past the Belt he same vista of indecipherable immensity presents itself. You say, yes, I know those are stars, and those are galaxies, and nebulae; I know there is life out there, and strangeness, and incident and death and change. But to the eye, and the animal mind, the universe is a flat tapestry sprinkled with meaningless points of fire. Nothing meaningful can emerge from such a tapestry.

  The approach of a ship from the beautiful flat darkness and cold is itself a miracle of high order. The animal mind asks, Where did it come from?

  Halloran, essentially two beings in one body, watched the kzinti dreadnought with two reactions. As Fixer-of-Weapons, now seating himself in the center of Halloran's mind, the ship a rough-textured spire with an X cross at the "bow" was both rescue and challenge.

  Fixer-of-Weapons had lost his status. He would have to struggle to regain his position, perhaps wheedle permission to challenge and supplant a Chief Weapons Officer and Alien Technologies Officer. He hoped and Halloran prayed that the positions on the rescue ship were held by one kzin, not two.

  The battleship would pick up his lifeship within an hour. In that time, Halloran adjusted the personality that would mask his own.

  Halloran would exist in a preprogrammed slumber, to emerge only at certain key points of his plan. Fixer-of-Weapons would project continuously, aware and active, but with limitations; he would not challenge another kzin to physical combat, and he would flee at an opportune moment (if any came) if so challenged.

  Halloran did not have a kzin's shining black claws or vicious fangs. He could project images of these to other kzinti, but they had only a limited effectiveness in action. For a moment, a kzin might think himself slashed by Fixer-of-Weapon’s claws (although Halloran did not know how strong the stigmata effect was with kzinti), but that moment would pass. Halloran did not think he could convince a kzin to die...

  He had never done such a thing with people. Exploring those aspects of his abilities had been too horrifying to contemplate. If he was pushed to such a test, and succeeded, he would destroy himself rather than return to Earth. Or so he thought, not...