Man-Kzin Wars 9

by Larry Niven

  It occurred to me that I’d never seen a file listing “Artist” or “Musician” or “Gardener” as a profession on Tiamat. This airless rock was made fit for life with advanced technology and maintained by technologists. It exists solely to provide Alpha Centauri system with products of the very highest sophistication—products whose manufacture demands zero gravity or unlimited high vacuum or Gigawatts of solar power. There’s little room for someone not directly involved in survival—physical, economic or, since the kzinti came, military.

  Of course the best engineers saw their work as art, even as the best artists refined their skills to a science. Maybe in this totally technical atmosphere, it wasn’t surprising that people saw things through a technological lens. Idly, I punched up the work roster for the parks on the 1G level. Maybe I’d find at least a gardener.

  The roster was full of eco-engineers and environmental control technicians.

  I blanked the screen. It was a meaningless exercise. A rose was a rose, whether it was tended by gardeners or botanical techs. I had a feeling the difference was important, but it was too subtle to put my finger on. What’s in a name? Maybe nothing. What does it mean when a society insists on calling an artist a graphic designer?

  My mind was wandering. It was early morning and already I needed a break. I gave up trying to work and let my thoughts drift to Suze. She was beautiful, intelligent, sensuous, exciting, graceful, uninhibited, warm. Adjectives did her poor service. If I’d been able to find the words, I might have written a poem. Instead I called up her file again. When the computer screened it, I blew up the ID holo and dumped it to the printer.

  Dossier holos never do anyone justice but her radiance came through the bad image. She was wearing her characteristic high-energy smile. Her hair was longer when the holo was taken, a burnished auburn river flowing down over her shoulders. Her eyes were a dancing, sunny brown—lending just a hint of devilishness to her look.

  I froze, cold horror seeping along my spine. Unnoticed facts clicked into place and my thoughts locked into a paralyzed frenzy of revelation and denial. I sat and stared for a long time. Then I commed her apt.

  “Hi, what’s up?”

  I could hardly meet her gaze. I strove to keep my voice animated. “Care for brunch?”

  “Sure, when where?”

  “Meet me at the office and we’ll figure it out. Fifteen minutes?”

  “Give me thirty and you’ve got a deal.”

  “See you then.” She smiled her dazzling smile.

  I rang off and waited as the minutes dragged by. I had the shakes under control by the time she arrived; even so I still couldn’t bring myself to meet her gaze. Instead I tossed her the holoprint. She took it and stared at it uncomprehending for a moment. Then her face hardened. She dropped the holo and looked up. This time I forced myself to look her in the eyes. They were ice blue. Miranda Holtzman’s eyes were ice blue.

  Her voice was as cold as her gaze. “Now what?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Name a price, you’ll get it. I’ll just walk away.”

  “In counterfeit?”

  “In cash. Or credits if you like. You name it, you’ll get it.”

  I didn’t answer her directly. Instead I asked a question. “Why?”

  She turned my words around. “You tell me.”

  “You’re an Isolationist.”

  She nodded.

  “You’re a mining engineer. I’d guess that makes you their explosives expert. Something went off in your face. They can’t put you in hospital so you wind up with scars, and of course they have to get you a new set of eyes somewhere or you’re out of action.”

  “Wrong.” The bitterness in her voice ran deep. “I got my scars from the UN mining consortium just like I told you. They hand out defective equipment and when there’s an accident, it’s just too bad. All they care about is the damn production goals for the damn war. I was one of the lucky ones. Luckier than my parents.” I could see the rage cross her face at the memory. “That’s why I’m an Isolationist.”

  “And your eyes?”

  “I caught a laser bounce in a Provo raid.”

  “So you become the first beneficiary of the Isolationist transplant program.”

  “Not the first.”

  Of course not. “How did you expect to get past a retina scan?”

  She laughed. “I think you’ll find my file matches my prints. Someone forgot to update the holo—they’ll pay for that.”

  “And that night in the Inferno?”

  “I started going there as soon as I could see again. I knew you’d come after Weiss’s stupidity. You or someone like you.”

  A vague unease tugged at the edges of my awareness. She was volunteering information too easily, too calmly. I forced it down. “Weiss messed up?”

  “He couldn’t get all of Miranda in the freezer. The dolt dumped her body in the transport tunnel instead of getting rid of it properly.”

  “And the hub last night, that’s where you went from my apt.”

  She tipped an imaginary hat in reply, as if accepting a compliment. She was a professional. She took pride in her work.

  “There was some evidence. It’s not important now.”

  “And Klein?”

  “Just a go-between. He got in the way.”

  I had one more question. “Why Miranda?”

  “We needed a universal donor, and I’ve always wanted blue eyes.” She smiled, briefly.

  “Now what?”

  Her voice was as hard and cold as steel. “How much do you want?”

  My heart sank and I shook my head. “I can’t let you go.”

  Suddenly there was a gun in her hand, a jetpistol. Designed for zero-G combat, it had virtually no recoil. It fired miniature rockets designed to mushroom on impact. They would turn a living body into hamburger. It was almost totally silent, small enough to conceal easily and had no power source or metal to trigger security alarms. She had chosen her weapon well.

  “I don’t think you have a choice.” She smiled. She was right. The choice was hers and she’d already made it. Even so, I had to ask. “What about us?”

  She laughed, a short, explosive sound. “I liked you, Joel. It was fun, but now it’s time for me to leave.” She raised the jetpistol. Her expression held regret and finality. I wouldn’t beg, but my expression must have spoken for me. Perhaps she thought I was afraid of dying.

  I glanced at the stunner hanging on my patrol pack—two impossible meters away.

  She caught me looking and a smile played around the edges of her lips. I knew the expression. She was daring me to try.

  I held her gaze but I didn’t take the bait. “You can’t kill everyone who knows you’re here.”

  Her smile was as wide and predatory as any kzin’s. “Watch me.” The weapon’s bore looked as big as a cannon’s. Her finger tightened around the trigger.

  There was a piercing scream and the wall behind her exploded around two hundred and fifty kilos of kzin. She fired reflexively but I was already on my way to the floor. Even so, she would have got me if Hunter’s attack hadn’t ruined her aim. The rocket slug went past my ear with a nasty zzzwip, leaving an acrid trail of burned propellant. Another slug slammed into my computer, spraying shards of plastic and glass over my head. A second later it was followed by Suze and the kzin in a tangle of limbs. They hit the wall and bounced to the floor. The jetpistol sailed into a corner. She lay on the floor beneath him, returning his fanged snarl in kind. I had to admire her courage.

  I picked myself off the floor and shook off the ruins of my computer. The room was filling with startled clerks and cops from the outer office. As they disentangled Hunter and Suze, I retrieved the jetpistol and examined the thumbnail-sized hole it had left in the wall. On the other side was a crater the size of a serving platter. The outer office was showered in fragments of pulverized sprayfoam. Shattered remnants of my desk covered my office. I shuddered. It could have been the shattered remnants of
me.

  Hunter dusted himself off, scream-snarled and bounded out to work out the fight juices. Someone hauled Suze off to the tender mercies of the UN Intel interrogation section. When they were through raping her mind, she’d have nothing left to tell. I’d have rather seen her face Hunter claw to claw.

  When everyone was gone, I sat down at my desk. By reflex I pounded the switch, not registering its destruction. After that, I just sat; eventually I went home.

  Suze was in interrogation three days. Her trial should have been in the Swarm but the UN moved it to Wunderland so she could be made an example of. By the time the Goldskins were done with her the extradition paperwork was finished. I didn’t see her off. Instead, I asked a favor of Jocelyn Merral and watched from the hangar bay control deck as the guards escorted her to the ship that would take her to Wunderland and the ProvGov’s version of justice. She caught sight of me as they led her onto the ramp and stopped, looking up. The guards yanked her along, and she was gone.

  I kept watching out the window. I knew I wouldn’t see her again. I just didn’t want anyone to see my face.

  That evening I sat at the bar in the Ratskellar, drinking beer and brooding. Earlier I’d sat in my room, drinking vodka and playing with the safety on a jetpistol that should have been sealed in an evidence bag on its way to Wunderland. I didn’t decide life was worth living, I just couldn’t live with myself if I took the coward’s way out.

  Of course, if I did I wouldn’t have to. Alcohol doesn’t make for logical decision-making. It was enough that I’d left the weapon behind.

  The rockjack beside me suddenly left. His stool was taken by a huge orange hulk. Hunter-of-Outlaws ordered a liter of vodka and milk before speaking. “Humans have odd ways of celebrating victory.”

  I grunted. “Is it a victory I’m celebrating?”

  “Hrrr. We have found the outlaw we sought and more besides. Several major criminal enterprises have been brought down and gutted. We have performed our duties well and with honor and our belts are heavy with trophies. It is a triumph worthy of our names.”

  I didn’t answer directly; I asked a question. “How did you know to come through the wall like that?”

  “How could I not know? My office echoes to your voice all day. I cannot close my ears tight enough to keep it out. For years I’ve been trying to get a privacy field.” He growled deeply.

  So much for soundproof sprayfoam.

  “I owe you my life, you know.”

  He waved a paw dismissively. “You will repay that blood-debt when the situation arises. Now tell me why you choke on the meat of victory?”

  “She offered me as much money as I cared to ask for. Of course, I couldn’t take it.”

  “You are true to your honour.”

  “You don’t understand. I loved her.”

  “I sympathize with your situation. Your species’ reproductive arrangements are overcomplex. Such strong attachment to females can only lead to continuing tragedy.”

  “No, love is a continuing glory. She loved me too, she just loved…freedom…more. I would have gone with her in a second if she’d let me.”

  Hunter was staring at me, openly amazed. “You would have sacrificed your honour for the affections of this outlaw female?”

  “It would have been a small price.”

  His ears flicked and his tail twitched as he tried to make sense of that. He gave it up and quaffed his drink resignedly. “Truly, I will never understand humans.”

  I had to laugh. I clapped him on the back and gestured for another round. “Neither will I, my friend, neither will I.”

  FLY-BY-NIGHT

  Larry Niven

  The windows in Odysseus had been skylights. The doors had become hatches. I ran down the corridor looking at numbers. Seven days we’d been waiting for aliens to appear in the ship’s lobby, and nothing!

  Nothing until now. I felt good. Excited. I ran full tilt, not from urgency but because I could. I’d expected to reach Home as frozen meat in one of these Ice Class cargo modules.

  I reached 36, stooped and punched the steward’s bell. Just as the door swung down, I remembered not to grin.

  A nightmare answered.

  It looked like an octopus underwater, except for the vest. At the roots of five eel’s-tail segments, each four feet long, eyes looked up at me. We never see Jotoki often enough to get used to them. The limbs clung to a ladder that would cross the cabin ceiling when the gravity generators were on.

  I said, “Legal Entity Paradoxical, I have urgent business with Legal Entity Fly-By-Night.”

  The Jotok started to say, “Business with my master—” when its master appeared below it on the ladder.

  This was the nightmare I’d been expecting: five to six hundred pounds of orange and sienna fur, sienna commas marking the face, needle teeth just showing points, looking up at me out of a pit. Fly-By-Night wore a kind of rope vest, pockets all over it, and buttons or corks on the points of all ten of its finger claws.

  “—is easily conducted in virtual fashion,” the Jotok concluded.

  What I’d been about to say went clean out of my head. I asked, “Why the buttons?”

  Lips pulled back over a forest of carnivore teeth, LE Fly-By-Night demanded, “Who are you to question me?”

  “Martin Wallace Graynor,” I said. Conditioned reflex.

  The reading I’d done suggested that a killing snarl would leave a kzin mute, able to express himself only by violence. Indeed, his lips wanted to retract, and it turned his Interworld speech mushy. “LE Graynor, by what authority do you interrogate me?”

  My antic humor ran away with me. I patted my pockets elaborately. “Got it somewhere—”

  “Shall we look for it?”

  “I—”

  “Written on your liver?”

  “I have an idea. I could stop asking impertinent questions?”

  “A neat solution.” Silently the door swung up.

  Ring.

  The Jotok may well have been posing himself between me and his enraged master, who was still wearing buttons on his claws, and smiling. I said, “Don’t kill me. The Captain has dire need of you and wishes that you will come to the main workstation in all haste.”

  The kzin leapt straight up with a half turn to get past the Jotok and pulled himself into the corridor. I did a pretty good backward jump myself.

  Fly-By-Night asked, “Do you know why the Captain might make such a request?”

  “I can guess. Haste is appropriate.”

  “Had you considered using the intercom, or virtual mail?”

  “Captain Preiss may be afraid they can listen to our electronics.”

  “They?”

  “Kzinti spacecraft. The Captain hopes you can identify them and help negotiate.”

  He stripped off the corks and dropped them in a pocket. His lips were all right now. “This main workstation, would it be a control room or bridge?”

  “I’ll guide you.”

  The Kzin was twisted over by some old injury. His balance was just a bit off. His furless pink tail lashed back and forth, for balance or for rage. The tip knocked both walls, toc toc toc. I’d be whipped bloody if I tried to walk beside him. I stayed ahead.

  The Jotok trailed us well back from the tail. It wore a five-armhole vest with pockets. It used four limbs as legs. One it held stiff. I pictured a crippled Kzin buying a crippled Jotok…but Paradoxical had been agile enough climbing the ladder. I must have missed something.

  The file on Jotoki said to call it they, but that just felt wrong.

  “Piracy,” the Kzin said, “would explain why everything is on its side.”

  “Yah. They burned out our thruster. The Captain had to spin us up with attitude jets.”

  “I don’t know that weapon. Speak of the ship,” he said. “One? Kzinti?”

  “One ship popped up behind us and fired on us as it went past. It’s a little smaller than Odysseus. Then a Kzin called us. Act of war, he said. Get the Captain to
play that for you. He spoke Interworld…not as well as you.” Fly-By-Night talked like he’d grown up around humans. Maybe he was from Fafnir. “The ship stopped twenty million miles distant and sent a boat. That’s on its way here now. Our telescopes pick up markings in the Heroes’ Tongue. We can’t read them.”

  He said, “If we were traveling faster than light, we could not be intercepted. Did your Captain consider that?”

  “Better you should ask, why are we out of hyperdrive? LE Fly-By-Night, there is an extensive star-building region between Fafnir and Home. Going through the Tao Gap in Einstein space is easier than going around and gives us a wonderful view, but we’re in it now. Stuck. We can’t send a hyperwave help call, we can’t jump to hyperdrive, because there’s too much mass around us.”

  “Odysseus has no weapons,” the Kzin said.

  “I don’t have actual rank aboard Odysseus. I don’t know what weapons we have.” And I wouldn’t tell a Kzin.

  He said, “I learned that before I boarded. Odysseus is a modular cargo ship. Some of the modules are passenger cabins. Outbound Enterprises could mount weapons modules, but they never have. None of their other commuter ships are any better. The other ship, how is it armed?”

  “Looks like an archaic Kzinti warship, disarmed. Gun ports slagged and polished flat. We haven’t had a close look, but ships like that are all over known space since before I was born. Armed Kzinti wouldn’t be allowed to land. Whatever took out our gravity motors isn’t showing. It must be on the boat.”

  “Why is this corridor so long?”

  Odysseus was a fat disk with motors and tanks in the center, a corridor around the rim, slots outboard to moor staterooms and cargo modules. That shape makes it easy to spin up if something goes wrong with the motors…which was still common enough a century ago, when Odysseus was built.

  In the ship’s map display I’d seen stateroom modules widely separated, so I’d hacked the passenger manifest. That led me to read up on Kzinti and Jotoki. The first secret to tourism is, read everything.