Choosing Names: Man-Kzin Wars VIII

by Larry Niven

  The display flashed to an image of the Command Deck. There was Jennifer in the Captain’s chair, her Flatlander hair exploding out around her head like an organic nebula. She was hammering at the controls as if her fervor could make the systems activate faster. Next to her, Nathan Long with his close-cropped red hair and short beard was racing his hands over the command console, reconfiguring systems, bringing things on-line and doing everything he could to give Jennifer what she wanted. Chi Lin, a Belter with whom I’d shared more than a few drinks back at Heisenberg’s, was at the Engineer’s station running the systems check faster than was right for any normal human. Joel Peltron worked the navigation console flying through displays, entering data, calculating the maneuvers to accomplish whatever Jennifer had ordered. Such fervored activity was seldom seen in space. In any emergency you were either dead or you had plenty of time to work the problem. This was one of the rare exceptions to that rule.

  Then suddenly the door to the Command Deck blew inward with a cloud of smoke and debris. Orange-suited kzinti rushed in, their weapons drawn and pointing forward. Some of the kzinti were still disoriented by the freefall and they tumbled in rather than dove in, but there were too many of them and they were too determined. Their weapons spewed fire and smoke. Jennifer’s head exploded, coating her command chair with sickly red blood and masses of organic matter. Nathan tried to rise from his seat to fight back. Who knows what he was thinking, who among us had ever raised a fist in anger? (Answer: no one who could be cured by the autodocs. The ones who couldn’t were in the freezer banks back on Earth waiting for the psychists to come up with a cure for them.) Nathan never had a chance. He was cut in two by a long flat weapon wielded by one of the kzinti that went through him like a cutting laser goes through a fractured carbonaceous rock. The blood and ichor from the crew in the Command Deck filled the air with throbbing red spheres and quivering chunks of pink meat that only moments before had been my friends.

  I couldn’t take any more. I slammed my fist down on the display’s off button. I wanted to rush out and kill the kzinti. I wanted to feel their bones break under my hands. I wanted to watch as I ran a cutting laser through their assembled masses, to divide them and divide them again into smaller and smaller pieces. I wanted . . . I wanted . . .

  I wanted to be sick. I almost made it to the ’fresher.

  * * *

  I woke up sometime later. I didn’t remember getting myself into bed, but I must have somehow. I felt weak and chilled. The sour taste of my sickness coated my mouth and the scent of my vomit laced the smell of the room. It was an odor that the life support system could not easily get rid of. And by Goddard’s ghost, the ship designers had been working that problem for a long time. I rose and went to clean up. The ’fresher looked like it would need more cleaning than I would. But that could wait. For now, cold water on my face and mouthwash was what I needed.

  The timer chimed and I knew it was time for my medicine. I picked up the vial of pills that Tom had left for me and took a couple. I think I missed my earlier dose so I took another couple to compensate. The remnants of my dinner that were splashed over the ’fresher reminded me that dinner hadn’t done me much good. But I didn’t feel like eating, so I set about cleaning up the mess I made.

  I was ashamed of myself, for the thoughts I’d been feeling and for my desires to strike out and kill. Surely there had to be another way. All my life I’d been taught there was always an alternative to violence. I felt disappointment at myself for my inability to see any nonviolent ways to solve our problem. And my sadness for the friends I’d lost made me feel guilty for even being alive. By the time I’d finished cleaning up things I was past guilt and shame and was working myself well into self-pity. As I tossed the last of the soiled wash cloths into the clothing recycler I saw myself in the mirror. My head covered by a tangled mass of dirty brown hair, my Belter’s crest a mere patch of slightly longer and thicker hair. A ragged and unkempt beard covered my face. I looked a mess, but I didn’t care. Not now. Not after witnessing the senseless deaths of so many friends.

  There was a knock on the door. I knew it wasn’t the kzinti. They didn’t bother to knock. The door opened to show Tom standing outside holding his portable medkit with a kzinti I didn’t recognize standing behind him.

  “Ib, you okay?” said Tom. “I tried to get you over the intercom but you wouldn’t answer. It took me a while to convince Slave Master to let me check in on you.”

  “No. No, I’m not okay.” Tom came in, the kzinti stayed out, and I told him the short version of what happened and about my shame.

  “Don’t hold that against yourself. Your reaction to what happened was normal. I . . . I keep thinking there must have been something we could have done to prevent it.” Tom’s voice trembled, “We shouldn’t have let our hopes color our actions.”

  “They always do.” I paused. “Why the medkit?”

  He hesitated for a moment as if he was afraid of what to say next. “The medicine you’re taking can have some powerful side effects. You really shouldn’t take it without being in the autodoc, but Slave Master won’t let me do that. How about letting me check you out?”

  I didn’t complain as he attached the sensors from the medkit to my body He watched closely as the medkit began its diagnosis of my condition and then spoke softly. “Have you formed any conclusions about that disheveled kzinti?”

  “You mean the one who looks like a programmer?” Tom grimaced at my comment. Then I remembered his wife had been a programmer and a member of our crew. I didn’t want to think about what had happened to her. I answered his question. “I think Fritz is a telepath.”

  “Fritz?” Tom was taken aback for a moment then realized who I meant. “Oh, that’s what you’re calling him. I think of him as Argus, the creature from Greek mythology with a hundred eyes who saw everything. But yes, that was my conclusion also.”

  “I don’t think he’s always telepathic. It’s only after he takes a drug of some kind. I get a hell of a headache when he’s reading my mind but in a few hours it goes away and he can’t read my mind anymore.”

  “Those headaches near tore my head apart.” Tom watched the display of his medkit as it ran its diagnostics. “Then they stopped. I haven’t had that kind of headache in two weeks.”

  “Fritz stopped reading your mind?”

  “I think so. It’s not likely he does it for fun, is it? They probably think of me as harmless. Just a doctor. Couldn’t make a weapon even if I knew what it looked like. Then again, that telepath probably feels crippled when he’s inside my head. Those kzinti look like they could be quadrupeds as easily as bipeds. Being inside me must feel like he’s always off balance—”

  He appeared startled when the medkit started beeping, then he hit a few buttons and the beeping stopped. “Have you thought about what it means to deal with a telepath?” he said, looking up from the medkit.

  “No. That’s not a problem I’ve ever had before,” I answered.

  “When Argus reads your mind he can tell what you’re planning to do.”

  “Tanj! You’re right.” I paused to take that thought in, then continued. “Maybe I could get away from them. Hide out somewhere in the ship. They don’t know it as well as I do. Then I might be able to do something about our predicament.”

  “That wouldn’t work,” Tom continued. “Argus could read your mind, see the things you were seeing in real time and deduce where you were.”

  “Are you sure he could do that?”

  “I’m sure of it,” said Tom emphatically. “That’s how Slave Master learned our language. He had me look at things and Argus told him what I was thinking. It was a slow process but it worked. I’m just not sure how deep into our subconscious he can read or if he can only read the things we actively think about.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I pointed out. “Ever try and not think about something? You can’t do it. The act of trying to not think about something makes you think about it.”

 
; “You’ve got a point there,” agreed Tom.

  “I’ll have to act without planning and let Heisenberg take the consequences,” I concluded.

  “Don’t try that. You’re outclassed physically and numerically. If you do anything, you’re going to have to out think them.” The medkit beeped and Tom silently stared at the display. Thinking.

  His silence bothered me. “Well, am I okay?”

  Tom picked his words carefully. “You’re not really recovered from the effects of coldsleep, but you’re getting better.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “Those drugs you gave me leave me feeling . . . I don’t know . . . strange. Like I’ve never felt before.” I was more than a little worried. No one ever willingly endured the effects of drugs and medical treatment without the constant attention of an autodoc. I wouldn’t have felt less secure if Tom had been treating me by chanting and throwing powders into an open fire.

  “Trust me. You’ll soon be as normal as two million years of evolution can make you. But just to be sure, I want you to start talking three pills every eight hours.”

  If he thought that comment was going to make me feel better he was wrong. But I decided to just let it go. Tom looked at his wristchrono. “Slave Master doesn’t trust us. I’ve stayed here longer than I was supposed to. I can’t stay any longer.” He packed up his medkit and prepared to leave. “Ib, just keep taking your medicine. You’ll be back to normal soon.”

  I smiled weakly as the door opened and there was the kzinti guard standing outside. Tom smiled at me and then turned to leave. The kzinti guard hardly looked at me before he closed the door.

  * * *

  The next day started with my dual failure to find either the energy for personal grooming or a satisfactory meatless breakfast. There was nothing to do except wait for the inevitable arrival of Slave Master and Fritz.

  The wait gave me time to think about our captors. They were a curious mixture of advanced technology and primitive values. So much for the idea that scientific advances lead directly to advances in ethics. And it was obvious that they were completely unfamiliar with things that every Belter and Lunie understood instinctively. Perhaps the kzinti had been using their advanced technologies for such a long time that they’d forgotten about the nuances of living on a spacecraft like the Paradox.

  My thinking about our captors was interrupted when Slave Master arrived alone at my room. Had something happened to Fritz? One could only hope. Slave Master stood towering in the open doorway looking at me.

  “Continue ship work,” he said. It was not a question.

  “Sure. Where’s your little friend?”

  Slave Master said nothing, but just lifted a small chrome box to his mouth and growled into it. Scratchy growls answered him from the box and then the now-familiar feeling of Fritz splitting my head apart returned. Damn that mother-auditing Fritz! If I ever got my hands on him . . . The chrome box in Slave Master’s hand growled again and the large kzinti looked at me and made another cat sound into the box before he put it back into a pouch on his belt.

  “You work now.”

  You had to give him credit. He was a cat of few words. “I work yes. Today we start repairs.”

  Slave Master interrupted. “Not ‘we.’ You. Heroes do not do slave work.”

  Who was I to argue with him? I went to work.

  The most important problem to solve was fixing the damage to the Bussard field generators because the thrust of the engine would depend on the size and power of the magnetic field feeding it ionized hydrogen. If I couldn’t get enough field generators back on line, then we wouldn’t have the thrust to carry the kzinti ship to Vega and then, I was sure, Slave Master, or more likely his captain, would make sure that I didn’t have to worry about anything else. Everything depended on my actually getting outside and fixing those field generators. If possible.

  I headed for the non-spinning section of the ship. Slave Master didn’t say anything, he just followed me, his eyes boring holes in the back of my head. When we reached the transition lock he hesitated before getting in with me. The ladder “up” to the non-spinning section of the ship stretched above our head. We could have used the lift, but why make it easy for the kzinti? And anyway, I needed the exercise. I indicated that we had to go up the ladder and he followed me.

  The rungs on the ladder were spaced conveniently for humans, but the kzinti’s long arms were constantly faced with the choice of making tiny little reaches or making big stretches. I hoped this was making his arms and legs get cramped. As we rose “up” the ladder I could feel our weight decreasing and I glanced below me to watch the kzinti climbing behind me. His face was tight and his eyes focused on me like I was to blame for centrifugal force and its disorienting cousin, coriolis force. Tough.

  By the time we had reached the rotational axis of the spinning section we were floating in a good approximation of freefall. The transfer hub connected to the non-spinning part of the ship was ringed by the four tubeways that formed the spokes going to the toroidal crew section and shared the slow rotation of that part of the ship. A large hatchway opened into the freefall parts of the ship, but the view was a bit disorienting, since the transfer hub was slowly rotating and the freefall section wasn’t.

  I grabbed a handhold on the wall and watched Slave Master get his bearings. I might not be able to read his body language exactly, but I could tell he was uncomfortable. Great. Serves him right for being where he wasn’t wanted. I indicated a corridor through the open hatchway.

  “We’ve got to go to the Telepresence Operations Center. It’s this way. Next to the cargo lock.” Slave Master said nothing. Looked like freefall had gotten the cat’s tongue.

  We floated down the corridor until we went past one of the coldsleep chambers where fifty of our two hundred colonists floated in cryogenic stasis. I looked in through the frost covered window in the air-tight door. The individual coldsleep coffins were filled with liquid nitrogen and all the insulation in the world could not keep that cold from leaking out into the chamber. The lights in there were dim but I could see the banked rows of coffins. One on top of another, in neat rows and columns like an exercise in matrix math.

  Then I noticed holes in the array of coffins. Several were missing. No wait, over a dozen were missing. A thought tickled the back of my mind, but it was too outrageous to consider. Then I looked back at Slave Master who was looking into the coldsleep chamber longingly. Hungrily. Just as if the coldsleep vault held nothing more than a bunch of frozen dinners.

  I could learn to dislike the kzinti without much effort.

  The cargo lock was down the corridor and up a passageway. We drifted into the Cargo Lock Ready Room. The Telepresence Operations Center occupied one corner of the large and cluttered room, and Slave Master scanned the area with wary eyes as if he expected a trap. How he expected something like that was beyond me. My head was splitting from Fritz’s mind reading so he had to know I wasn’t planning anything. Maybe Slave Master was just naturally paranoid.

  Several different types of telepresence ’bots were racked on the wall of the ready room. I went over to an EVA workbot and tapped a self-diagnostic command into its keypad. While it ran through its self check I floated over to a locker and pulled out a full body VR suit. Slave Master never took his eyes off me and all the while one of his hands rested on the gun hanging from his belt and his other hand held the chrome communicator near his face. I tried to concentrate on what I was doing while growling sounds from the communicator reminded me that Fritz was telling Slave Master everything I saw and thought.

  The ’bot beeped its readiness as I finished putting on the VR bodysuit and pulled myself over to a VR workstation. A harness assembly provided straps to hold my body in place while leaving me complete freedom to twist my torso or move my arms and legs without having to worry about bumping into anything or swimming myself out into the airlock. The straps of the harness were a warm reassuring pressure around me as I slipped on the data gloves, the he
lmet and the foot sensors.

  Tapping the controls on the VR workstation I lowered the visor of my helmet without waiting to see if Slave Master had any comments and went full immersive with the ’bot. There was a moment of disorientation as my visual perspective changed. The view was so real that it was easy to forget that it was coming from the sensors of a telepresence ’bot and not directly from my own senses.

  My eyes were now close to the ground and I could see the ’bot’s spider-like legs stretching out in front of me. My legs felt the springiness of the ’bot’s legs as the force feedback loop activated the solenoids in my suit. I selected a walk cycle for the ’bot and moved my legs to control it, the eight legs of the ’bot moving in synchronization with each swing of my legs. I could feel the sticky sensation of the ’bot’s foot magnets sequentially activating and then releasing when its legs were raised. It was a strange yet reassuringly familiar sensation.

  I could see Slave Master off in the corner of the Cargo Lock Ready Room and my own body strapped to the VR workstation, its legs moving in a strange mimicry of the motion of the ’bot’s legs. I moved my hand and keyed a control for the cargo lock. The inner door swung open and the ’bot walked into the lock. The outer door cycled open as soon as the inner door closed and I was finally, in a virtual sense anyway, free of the ship.

  Seeing the stars from the outside of a ship never fails to fill me with awe and wonder. So many actinic points of light spread out between expanses of black nothingness. So many things waiting to be discovered. And then I remembered the kzinti. Tanj!

  The ’bot moved easily outside the ship; after all, that was what it was designed to do. It only took a few minutes for me to walk the ’bot from the side of the ship’s freefall module where the cargo lock was located to its base where the ship’s main truss was attached. Once there I grappled onto a transport dolly that could carry the ’bot all the way to the rear of the ship.