06-Known Space Read online

  Fingers flickered at keyboards. The comscreen lit. A picture rolled, slowed, stabilized. A human woman, haggard, eyes huge in black, sunken pits, clad only in the torn scraps and under-strappings of a Spacesuit. And behind her one of the felinoids, huge and alive.

  “Who are you?”

  The woman and the felinoid were in a small compartment, obviously in a cat Space-ship. The fittings and design they could see were cat not human. Panels behind her head showed stars. The reply came quickly. Either she was very close or she had anticipated the question.

  “I am Selina Guthlac of the Happy Gatherer. There is no time to talk. Fire your Kzin missiles now! Jettison them! They are slaved to the Kzin battleship’s computer. It can detonate them whenever the enemy wishes! Inside your own hull! Do it! Do it!”

  Steve and Jim stared at each other in horror. They had been braced for a battle against odds since the huge pursuer had been detected, but not for this. The comscreen shouted at them again:

  “Do it! Do it now!”

  Her voice propelled Steve’s hand to the firing button. Jim snatched it away.

  “Don’t! You see she’s a prisoner! The cat is forcing her to say that. You can see she’s been tortured.”

  The face on the screen was still speaking.

  “This is an ally. We escaped in a boat from the Kzinti ship. Listen to me!

  The felinoid’s lips moved. It spoke in a hard, grating English:

  “Zelina zpealcz trruth. My wurrd az my honorr.”

  Then again the woman spoke.

  “This is a Kzin Telepath. We read your thoughts. You think we want to disarm you. But we can prove we are your allies. We have struck a blow against the enemy. See! This is our escape!”

  The screen rolled again. There was film of a ship, apparently an oversized version of the one Angel’s Pencil had encountered, burning with internal fires and spewing wreckage into Space.

  “It means nothing,” said Jim. “It could be a virtual reality simulation.”

  “Jim!” Sue held her voice as low and steady as she might, “There is some activity beginning in those missiles.”

  On the control-panel that had been fastened to the Pencil’s main console lights were glowing. Green lights, the alien color for danger. That panel had been taken from the alien ship, as had the missiles it controlled.

  “The missiles are arming themselves!”

  Jim Davis stabbed the firing button. The Pencil lurched violently as, eight upon eight, the missiles fired. Propelled by Kzin gravity-planers that left no chive-flame, they were invisible from the viewing ports.

  “Now we’re disarmed.” There was no question of using the ramscoop as a weapon unless an enemy with suitable physiology flew into it. Its conical field covered a vast area of Space, but it projected ahead of the ship. The laser, intended to beam messages back to the Solar System, could only be adjusted within a narrow cone behind them. The small attitude jets and gyros could be disregarded as measured against the total, inertialess, mobility of a ship powered by Kzin gravity-planer.

  There was a heavy, fearful silence in the control-room. Then black visors crashed down over the ports. Across the gulf of Space, blue-white spheres were swelling like new suns.

  “Where are you?” Steve asked the screen. “We’ll take you aboard.”

  “No time for that. The Claw is coming. And it thinks you are clawless now.

  “We are. When we armed ourselves with those missiles, we gave ourselves hope and courage.”

  “No. You are not clawless and it is time to fight. Your laser is still a weapon... wait!”

  The watchers in the Angel’s Pencil saw her turn to the felinoid. Something without words was taking place between them. The bulk of the Kzinti battleship was returning a bigger echo on the radar screens now, almost directly behind them. There too was a smaller echo, a little closer and to the Galactic north-west. Then the screen spoke again.

  “Are they in range of your laser yet? We do not believe they know this frequency or that they could translate these transmissions.”

  “Extreme range for damaging their hull-material, I think. We tested it on wreckage from the other ship.”

  “No good. The Kzinti fight each other a good deal. They attack head-on and they expect to take enemy... slashes... head-on. The bow of Gutting Claw is designed against beams as well as bombs. It is mirror-finished and in battle other mirrors and dust projectors are deployed. It is made of super-hardened materials and has super-conductors to lose heat. This is a capital unit, not a scout-ship.”

  “The Pencil’s laser is Tanj big. Bigger than they might expect.”

  “Hit the bow and you might burn through eventually, if they kept still for you. But it would take more time than you have. And there would be beams and missiles coming the other way. The sides and the damaged area are less well-protected but you cannot maneuver to attack them. Be thankful she can launch no fighters from the boat-deck yet. Your best chance is to hit the Command Bridge or the center of the damage in the side if they are presented. But they are small targets and they do not present when Claw is head-on.

  “What can we do?”

  “Keep your laser on the target but do not fire yet. You must let her get closer. And we must make her turn.”

  Admiral’s Barge

  There was Gutting Claw. With radar, infra-red and sense enhancers and my own senses guiding me I could find the hull now. The human ship was no problem to find on the end of its vast column of exhausted hydrogen.

  The vented material that Claw had trailed like a bloodstain had tapered away. The hull was cooler with fires under control, and the hangar area had been sealed off. The motors were undamaged, and the weapons capacity was still colossal.

  Time moved slowly. But the Selina’s chatter with the Writing Stick humans became instantaneous as the distance between us decreased.

  The barge’s computer and weapons-systems could not be over-ridden from Gutting Claw. It had been the Admiral’s own. I armed a fusion-missile and fired it at the Claw. Beams and anti-missiles converged on it and destroyed it. Another. It got no closer. I sent a stream of ball-bearings at the Claw. Its meteor defenses could cope with that but it took up more computer capacity. They must have identified the signature of the barge’s motor now. They had some idea of who was attacking them. Rage on the bridge was moving out of control.

  The blind noseless fools! Never to think what an enemy a Telepath might make! They had no conception that I was reading the minds of Weeow-Captain and the whole bridge and attack-team! It was easy after the minds of aliens. They might have felt pain in their brains—I had no time for the subtle dance—but the Claw’s lifesystem was still full of noxious fumes which would explain that.

  Weeow-Captain’s rage engulfed him now. I punched up the visual comlink to Claw’s bridge. He saw me. He would not understand Telepath insults, so I did my best with ordinary Kzintosh ones. But coming from a Telepath at all, they must have been shattering.

  “Eat vegetable matter from the dung of the Sthondat that ch’rowled your mother! You seek only to ch’rowl the female monkey!” I snarled at him. “Where is Weapons Officer, you wonder? His cinders float in Space, but see, his ears hang from Telepath’s belt! And from my belt hangs the path to the monkey home-worlds! Try to take them if you dare! Come and fight me! Fight Telepath, if you dare, Coward-Captain!”

  The screen went blank as Weeow-Captain leapt at it. He had less control than Zraar-Admiral. My last picture was of his fangs. And Gutting Claw was turning towards us. I was already breaking contact. No Telepath could long stand that intensity of rage and hatred tearing directly at his own mind. I sent the rest of my missiles on their way. If some by chance got through the battleship’s defenses, so much the better. But no missiles or beams were fired back at us yet. Weeow-Captain still wanted us alive.

  Gutting Claw and the human ship were much less than a light-second apart now. One flash of thought to Selina, one command from me, one word from her. Gutting Claw
had turned its bow away from the human ship now, and had at that moment no attention to spare for it. The loss of Zraar-Admiral and many other officers was like a brain-wound for it.

  There were the Claw’s missiles! I fired our anti-missiles. They would probably stop the first wave, but the first wave only. The humans would have to be quick.

  In the darkness of Space ahead and a little below us a green nova-like light flared, impossibly bright. Then there was another light-spot in space, another incandescent green star.

  Cutting Claw was hit side on. I felt it in my mind as the laser hit the bridge, then it began a slow slicing move into the hull. But it still took armored bulkheads and the massive bulk of the main gravity-engines and their containment-fields long seconds to melt. I had told them Tracker had been far more lightly built. It was moving out of the laser’s field: the green star that was Gutting Claw faded. Then the ravaged containment-fields failed and it exploded.

  There was agony in my head. It was the Death. I had burned my brain too much. But when I died Selina would lose all my knowledge of piloting the barge. Honor demanded I get her to her fellow-monkeys... fellow-humans.

  Green light flashing! A missile fired from the Claw in its last seconds still alive and heading towards us.

  I had to leap again, to trigger our remaining anti-missiles. A huge, blinding explosion, too close. The stars spun, the meteor-defenses activated. There was an indescribable sound as something hit the bulk of the gravity-motor behind us. I thought that bulk had saved us but then came the dreadful howl of air escaping from an hull-puncture. I struggled with a meteor-patch. On the dials lights and wave-bands were showing engine malfunction. Power would be gone in a few heat-beats. Think quickly! From Selina’s mind I snatched what no Kzin astrogator trained on gravity-motors would have had ready enough: a knowledge of inertial forces sufficient to turn the barge with the last of its power and align its course towards the human ship.

  I had done what I could. My claws slipped on the control panel. I saw them tearing strips from it as my muscles began to convulse. Then pain... pain...

  “I think your cat is dying,” said Steve Weaver. As he saw her face he added: “I can’t be sure. I’m only a human doctor.”

  The human and Kzin seals could not interface, of course, but four of the Angel’s Pencil’s crew had crossed in suits.

  There had been embraces, greetings, some explanations between the humans. Telepath lay on the floor of the barge, not curled like a sleeping cat, but with his limbs sprawled out, violet eyes a quarter open, unseeing, breathing irregularly.

  Selina stared at the Pencil’s crew around her. Her movements were like the twitches of a cornered and desperate feline. A hunted animal, thought Steve.

  “Yes,” said Selina, “Dying with withdrawal from addiction, perhaps from burn-out. But that is not all.

  “Kzin normally have no guilt about killing each other, if requirements of honor have been met. Young males kill each other often. Death-duels are a recognized way of advancement. Telepath has been trying to convince himself that he owed nothing by way of comradeship or had any other obligation to the crew of Gutting Claw, who had treated him like dirt. He loved and feared the Admiral, but it was not by his hand that the Admiral died, even if he had set up the situation. But he is not quite convincing himself. The tragedy of all Telepaths: too complex and vulnerable to be a Kzin, psychically damaged and then forced into a life that worsens all that damage. He’s always been neurotic and now he’s going mad. He’ll die unless I can save him.”

  Let it die, then, thought Jim. Another cat less in the Universe.

  “He’s been trying to shield me from what he is going through. That is weakening him also. He feels an obligation to me. Once they accept them the Kzin take their obligations seriously.”

  “Well, what can you do?” asked Steve. “I can’t treat it. Nor can our autodoc.”

  “There’s a doc here. Put him in that. He’s beyond resisting if you lift him. If I stay in touch with him, whether I’m here on in the Pencil I feel... I don’t know... After all, we owe him something. But...”—There were tears again suddenly on the sunken skin below her eyes—”I’d rather like to get aboard a monk… a human ship again.”

  I was Telepath. I was in the medical unit of Zraar-Admiral’s barge. It was a scene of wide cold plains. The grass tall so a hunter must stand of hind legs to see above it, even a hunter used to growing on all fours. Scrabbling slopes of red sandstone, of scree, of red ironstone. There were distant mountains and somehow there were also forests, with leaping arboreal animals. Cliffs. Ironstone walls. I knew I was looking at a planet I had never seen: Old Kzin, as it had once been.

  But now tunnel after tunnel was opening to me, opening and expanding to flash away. I saw scene after scene in a lattice-work.

  Barer landscapes, stony heath. The strange landscape of dreams, clearer than I had seen it before. It was a great plain I wandered now. Alone? Or was someone with me? Zraar-Admiral? Karan? Selina? Gullied stone now, rock ridges, red under a red sky. Deeper gullies, rising about me, turning to caves, to tunnels...

  Karan? Karan? Was she here? I felt her presence surely.

  Recognition like a membrane tearing! I saw the blackness of the birthing burrow. And then a sudden light and what seemed a memory of the Harem. Karan was with me, grooming me as I played and kicked with my tiny, clumsy feet. I felt her tongue rasping at my fur. Then the grooming stopped and I lay back, full of contentment. The last contentment I would know.

  I was small, small, my fur still spotted. We were alone, with the female kit, my sister, asleep. Karan’s belly and teats swollen with her next pregnancy. Then I knew my last day with her had come, and I tried to cling to her.

  And then the scene changed to madness! The dream of an addict in withdrawal! For it was a dream of Karan speaking to me, and speaking to me not in the Female Tongue, but in the kitten’s version of the Heroes’ Tongue itself! The tongue no Kzinrett spoke!

  But did I imagine now, or remember? Karan’s eyes shone above me huge and luminous as moons.

  “Remember! Remember! Brave little spotted Kzin. I will plant a memory of words with little hope, but I must bury that memory in your mind deep, deep.

  “Telepath they may make you, if you live. Little do they guess. Certain kittens they will test for Telepath talents. Rare kittens. What if they tested the mothers of those kittens? And the mothers of those few mothers?

  “The few, the few... But the enduring. Not quite every line of female brains did the priesthood kill. Not yet. But soon. The speechless, mindless Kzinrett is the Kzinrett that lives and breeds. Each generation we, the secret, secret Others, grow rarer. Remember, though you do not understand my words.

  “Someday you may find a sapient female. If fortune lets that happen, let that trigger your memory of these words. For a Telepath and a sapient female could do great things together...”

  Karan’s tongue rough on my fur again. A purring in her throat so loud I could barely hear the words she chanted.

  “A great secret. The greatest of all. And each of we few must plant it deep at the bottom of a few poor minds, hoping against all knowledge that one day it will shoot.

  “The priesthood bred Kzinretti to be brood-animals before ever the first Jotok ship landed upon Kzin and our kind leapt into the stars, as they bred Kzintosh to be Heroes that laid worlds waste. Conquest, Empire, world upon world. And the Kzin becoming a race to smash itself at last, as it smashes all else. So small is our hope that we can save It, and the Telepaths and their war so poor and flawed a weapon. No more can I say but: Remember, when the time is right, that the way of the Eternal Hunt is not the only way. So small a word to whisper! So poor a hope! And yet, as we may, we keep alive a tiny flame, we tend a tiny seed.”

  Seed? Tend a seed of vegetable? Who spoke of tending seeds. Our herbivorous slaves and prey-animals tended seeds. And yet—why did this image not sicken me as It should? The dream-voice of Karan again, chanting as she purred
to me in her rippling throat.

  “I cannot prophesy. Hunt in the glades of sleep. Remember...”

  Karan’s eyes filling my eyes with their light. And I falling into sleep, my face against her fur for the last time. for indeed they came to take me to the crèche and the training-ground that day.

  It was imagination, not memory! For no Kzinrett used that tongue. A mad dream. And yet I wondered, as the scene changed.

  Telepath alone.

  The blue-gold sky of the human world. Green vegetation and that blue above.

  Telepath within a human dwelling, and knowing it for what it was. There was a smell of charred meat and a smell of the partially-burnt eggs of some flying creature. A day fixed in Selina’s memory, the day she too had left for a training crèche, something called an Advanced Astrophysics Institute.

  A human speaking: ‘I know we’ll be proud of you. We’ve stiff with pride for you already. I know you wanted to do biology first, but keep that as a second string for your fiddle. You’re like your brother—each has brains enough for two.”

  An old female human. Mother of Selina, I knew. And now came a single certainty in one part of my mind, one doubt dissolved: as I knew that I moved not in real-time or real-Space, so at one level at least I knew the things I was experiencing to be only monster-images of wandering imagination, not memory from Selina’s mind or my own. For the presence of an impossible animal made this that I saw, even on a human world, impossible: it appeared as if, curled and asleep upon the old human’s legs, stroked by the old human, there had been a goblin-creature like a tiny Kzin.

  What tortuous symbol was this from Telepath’s sick brain? But it proved that the scene had no reality Bridge to Selina or no, this scene could not be from her memory And as this vision was unreal, the delusion of a poor addict’s mind lost in the tunnels, so the earlier scene must be dream and delusion too. There were no tiny goblin-creatures in the shape of Kzin, so Karan had never spoken to her kitten save in the few soft words of the Female Tongue. And Karan knew no other than those few soft words.

  Then Telepath alone once more, Telepath stumbling over a rocky landscape, the pale tunnels ghostly and transparent, and then the pale tunnels fading, a dark stalker, whose shape could not be told, appearing and disappearing. I felt my mind dissolving, and knew I had at last seen the approach of the Shadow, the End and Last Despair that First Telepath had warned me would come like this.