The Man-Kzin Wars 09

by Larry Niven

  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.

  I said, "Some LE may have decided not to put a Kzin too close to human passengers. They put you two in a four-passenger suite and mounted it all the way around clockwise. My single and two doubles and the crew quarters and an autodoc are all widdershins(opposite)." That put the aliens' module right next to the lobby, not far apart at all, but the same fool must have sealed off access from the aliens' suite. Despite the Covenants, some people don't like giving civil rights to Kzinti.

  I'd best not say that. "We're the only other live passengers. The modules between are cargo, so these," I stamped on a door, "don't currently open on anything."

  "If you are not a ship's officer," the Kzin asked, "what is your place on the bridge?"

  I said, "Outbound Enterprises was getting ready to freeze me. Shashter cops pulled me out. They had questions regarding a murder."

  "Have you killed?" His ears flicked out like little pink fans. I had his interest.

  "I didn't kill Ander Smittarasheed. He took some cops down with him, and he'd killed an ARM agent. ARMs are-"

  "United Nations police and war arm, Sol system, but their influence spreads throughout human space."

  "Well, they couldn't question Smittarasheed, and I'd eaten dinner with him a few days earlier. I told them we met in Pacifica City at a water war game... anyway, I satisfied the law, they let me loose. I was just in time to board, and way too late to get myself frozen and into a cargo module. Outbound Enterprises upgraded me. Very generous.

  "So Milcenta and Jenna-my mate and child are frozen in one of these," I stamped on a door, "and I'm up here, flying First Class at Ice Class expense. My cabin's a closet, so we must be expected to spend most of our time in the lobby. In here." I pushed through.

  This trip there were two human crew, five human passengers and the aliens. The lobby would have been roomy for thrice that. Whorls of couches and tables covered a floor with considerable space above it for free fall dancing. That feature didn't generally get much use.

  An observation dome exposed half the sky. It opened now on a tremendous view of the Nursery Nebula.

  Under spin gravity, several booths and the wor
kstations had rolled up a wall. There was a big airlock. The workstations were two desk-and-couch modules in the middle.

  Hans and Hilde Van Zild were in one of the booths. Homers coming back from Fafnir, they held hands tightly and didn't talk. Recent events had them extremely twitchy. They were both over two hundred years old. I've known people in whom that didn't show, but in these it did.

  Their kids were hovering around the workstations watching the Captain and First Officer at work, asking questions that weren't being answered.

  We'd been given vac packs. More were distributed around the lobby and along the corridor. Most ships carry them. You wear it as a bulky fanny pack. If you pull a tab, or if it's armed and pressure drops to zero, it blows up into a refuge. Then you hope you can get into it and zip it shut before your blood boils. Heidi Van Zild looked around. "Oh, good! You brought them!" The little girl snatched up two more vac packs, ran two steps toward us and froze. The listing said Heidi was near forty. Her brother Nicolaus was thirty; the trip was his birthday present. Their parents must have had their development arrested. They looked the same age, ten years old or younger, bright smiles and sparkling eyes, hair cut identically in a golden cockatoo crest. It's an attitude, a lifestyle. You put off children until that second century is running out. Now they're precious. They'll live forever. Let them take their time growing up. Keep them awhile longer. Keep them pure. Give them a real education. Any mistake you make as a parent, there will be time to correct that too. When you reverse the procedure and allow them to reach puberty they'll be better at it.

  I know people who do that to kittens.

  Some of a child's rash courage is ignorance. By thirty it's gone. The little girl's smile was a rictus. Aliens were here for her entertainment; she would not willingly miss any part of the adventure, but she just couldn't make herself approach the Kzin or his octopus servant. The boy hadn't even tried. First Officer Quickpony finished what she'd been doing. She stood in haste, took the vacuum packs from Heidi and handed them to the aliens. "Fly-By-Night, thank you for coming. Thank you, Mart. You'd be Paradoxical?"

  The woman's body language invited a handshake, but the Jotok didn't. "Yes, we are Paradoxical, greatly pleased to meet you."

  The Kzin snarled a question in the Heroes' Tongue. Everybody's translators murmured in chorus, "Is this the bridge?"

  Quickpony said, "Bridge and lobby, they're the same space. You didn't know? We wondered why you never came around."

  "I was not told of this option. There is merit in the posture that one species should not see another eat or mate or use the recycle port. But, LE Quickpony, your security is a joke! Bridge and passengers and no barrier? When did you begin building ships this way?"

  Captain Preiss looked up. He said, "Software flies us. I can override, but I can disable the override. Hijackers can't affect that."

  "What of your current problem? Did you record the Kzin's demand?" The Captain spoke a command.

  A ghostly head and shoulders popped up on the holo-stage, pale orange but for two narrow, lofty black eyebrows. "I am Mee-rowreet. Call me Envoy. I speak for the Longest War."

  My translator murmured, "Mee-rowreet, profession, manages livestock in a hunting park. Longest War, Kzin term for evolution."

  The recording spoke Interworld, but with a strong accent and flat grammar. "We seek a fugitive. We have destroyed your gravity motors. We will board you following the Covenants sworn at Shasht at twenty-five naught five your dating. Obey, never interfere," the ghost head and voice grew blurred, "give us what we demand. You will all survive."

  "The signal was fuzzed out by distance," Captain Preiss said. "The ship came up from behind and passed us at two hundred KPS relative, twenty minutes after we dropped out of hyperdrive. It's ahead of us by two light-minutes, decelerated to match our speed."

  I said, speaking low, "Pleasemadam," alerting my pocket computer, "seek interstellar law, document Covenants of Shasht date twenty-five-oh-five. Run it."

  Fly-By-Night looked up into the dome. "Your intruder?"

  We were deep into the Nursery Nebula. All around were walls of tenuous interstellar dust lit from within. In murky secrecy, intersecting shock waves from old supernovae were collapsing the interstellar murk into hot whirlpools that would one day be stars and solar systems. Out of view below us, light pressure from something bright was blowing columns and streams of dust past us. It all took place in an environment tens of light-years across. Furious action seemed frozen in time.

  We had played at viewing the red whorl overhead. In IR you saw only the suns, paired protostars lit by gravitational collapse and the tritium flash, that had barely begun to burn. UV and X-ray showed violent flashes and plumes where planetesimals impacted, building planets. Neutrino radar showed structure forming within the new solar system.

  We could not yet make out the point mass that would bend our course into the Tao Gap and out into free space. Turnpoint Star was a neutron star a few miles across, the core left by a supernova. But stare long enough and you could make out an arc on the sky, the shock wave from that same stellar explosion, broken by dust clouds collapsing into stars.

  My seek system chimed. I listened to my wrist computer:

  At the end of the Fourth Man-Kzin War, the Human Space Trade Alliance annexed Shasht and renamed the planet Fafnir, though the long, rocky, barren continent kept its Heroes' Tongue name. The Covenants of Shasht were negotiated then. We were to refrain from booting Kzinti citizens off Fafnir. An easy choice: they prefer the continent, whereas humans prefer the coral islands. They were already expanding an interstellar seafood industry into Patriarchy space. In return, and having little choice, the Patriarch barred himself, his clan and all habitats under his command, all others to be considered outlaw, from various acts. Eating of human meat... willful destruction of habitats... biological weapons of certain types... killing of Legal Entities, that word defined by a long list of exclusions, a narrower definition than in most human laws.

  Futz, I wasn't a Legal Entity! Or I wouldn't be if they learned who I was.

  Quickpony projected a virtual lens on the dome. I'd finish listening later. The Kzinti ship and its boat, vastly magnified, showed black with the red whorl behind them. There was enough incident light to pick out some detail. For a bare instant we had seen the intruder coming up behind us, just as our drive juddered and died and left us floating. After it slowed to a relative stop, a boat had detached. The approaching boat blocked off part of the ship. Gamma rays impacting their magnetic shields made two arcs of soft white glow. Ship and boat bore the same glowing markings.

  The ship was moving just as we were, its drive off, falling through luminous murk toward Turnpoint Star at a tenth of lightspeed.

  First Officer Helm said, "Odysseus' security systems can deal with hijackers, but they're just not much use against an armed warship. Is that what we're seeing?"

  "I see a small warship designed for espionage and hunting. I don't know the make. My knowledge is too old. The name reads Sraff-zisht." My translator said, "Stealthy mating."

  Fly-By-Night continued, "Captain, I can't see, are there magnetic moorings on Sraff-zisht?"

  "No need. Those big magnets on the boat would lock to the ship's gamma ray shielding."

  "The boat is armed, the ship is not? There is no bay for the boat? Understood. Leave the boat in hiding among asteroids. Land an unarmed converted cargo ship on any civilized world. Yes?"

  "Speculative," Preiss said.

  "Do you recognize the weapon?"

  "No. I assume it's what burned out our thrusters... our gravity motors." I sat and dialed a cappuccino. The Kzin joined me, dwarfing the booth. I dialed another with double milk, thinking he ought to try it.

  The other passengers shrank back a little and waited. Any human being knows how to fear a Kzin.

  I said, speaking low, "Pleasemadam, seek Heroes' Tongue references, stealthy mating, literal, no reference to rape." There had to be a way to narrow that further. I guessed: "
Seek biological references only. Run it."

  Fly-By-Night tasted the cappuccino.

  Captain Preiss said, "Why would they be interested in us?"

  "In me. The boat is close." Fly-By-Night sipped again. "Do you know of the Angel's Pencil?"

  The Kzin was speaking Interworld as smoothly as if he'd grown up with the language. Some of us gaped. But his first words to me had been Interworld, after I startled and angered him... and he liked cappuccino.

  Fly-By-Night said, "Angel's Pencil was a slowboat, one of Sol system's slower-than-light colony craft. Four hundred years ago, Angel's Pencil sent word of our coming. Sol system was given years to prepare. My ancestor Shadow contrived to board Pencil after allying himself with a human captive, Selena Guthlac. He and she joined their crew."

  "That must have been one futz of a makeup job," Nicolaus Van Zild said.

  "He had to stoop and keep his ears folded, and depilate! Whose story is this, boy?" Nicolaus grinned. The Kzin said, "Angel's Pencil's crew had already destroyed Tracker. They later destroyed Gutting Claw, the first and second kills of the First War, not bad for a ship with no intended armaments. "Pencil was forced to pass through Patriarchy space before they found a world to settle. None of those ramscoop ships were easy to turn, and none were built for more than one voyage. We were ninety light-years from Earth. One hundred and six years had passed on Earth."

  I asked, "We?"

  "Gutting Claw's Telepath, later named Shadow, is our first sire. Pencil rescued six females from the Admiral's harem. Our species have lived together on Sheathclaws for three hundred years. We remained cut off. Any message laser aimed at human space would pass through the Patriarchy. We spoke with no sapient species, we did not even know of faster-than-light travel, until...”Fly-By-Night looked up.

  Stealthy-Mating's boat had arrived. We were looking directly into an obtrusively large electromagnetic weapon.

  Nicolaus asked, "Can you read minds?"

  "No, child. Some of us are good at guessing, but we don't have the drug. Where was I?" Fly-By-Night said, "They told me in the hospital after my first failed name quest. The universe had opened up-" He cut himself off as a furry face popped into hologram space in the workstation.