Choosing Names: Man-Kzin Wars VIII (Man-Kzin Wars Series Book 8) Read online

  Zraar-Admiral twitched his tail and his ears contracted. He merrowered thoughtfully. “Urrr. Her Captain did not have a name.”

  “He was of good record,” Weeow-Captain said. “A brave and competent officer though he died nameless.”

  “Yes.” Feared Zraar-Admiral still had only a partial name himself. Had name-desire betrayed the scout-cruiser’s Captain into folly? Then Zraar-Admiral’s mind was again an unscalable crag. But an alien Space-faring race that fought! Light-years from any star! No aliens had so far been discovered—at least by what we knew of the Eternal Hunt—with more than interplanetary flight and with vestigial weapons systems. By the time lower races got into interplanetary space they had become soft and weak, had lost honor and warrior skills.

  But the Dream of the Day! Those thoughts were not new, nor strange, nor secret: We need a worthy enemy!

  The minds and the odors of the bridge-staff were pouring out messages. Enemies now had the booty of Kzin weaponry and drive-technology to add to whatever demon-arts they already owned. If they eluded radar and Telepaths, they might be targeting Gutting Claw at this moment. Or, beyond reach of my mind or Zraar-Admiral’s weapons, they might be assembling a Fleet.

  A Tech spoke urgently.

  “Sire, we’ve got something out of their bridge recorder. We’re stitching it through now. It’s only a few words.”

  A new voice spoke.

  “Keep all your weapons ready to fire but don’t use them unless I give the order . . .”

  “That’s the Captain.”

  Hissing interference, then the same ghost-voice.

  “What kind of weapons do they have?”

  Another ghost answered. A Telepath deep in the World of the Eleventh Sense, strained and bewildered. I caught no secret vibrations inserted for the benefit of a Brother Telepath, nothing of the code we had developed for our own war.

  “. . . a light-pressure drive powered by incomplete hydrogen fusion. They use an electromagnetic ramscoop to get their own hydrogen from space . . .”

  Zraar-Admiral stopped the record for a moment. All thought alike. That was no Kzin ship the ghosts spoke of. Such a drive was not even on the same path as Kzin technology. The ghosts spoke again.

  There was a blur. Something in the Captain’s voice that I could not make out, then the Telepath.

  “. . . not even a knife or a club. Wait, they’ve got cooking knives. But that’s all they use them for. They don’t fight.”

  “They don’t fight?”

  “No, Sir, they don’t expect us to fight either. The idea has occurred to three of them and each has dismissed it from his mind.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know, Sir. It’s a science they use, or a religion. I don’t understand . . . I don’t . . .”

  A scrambled shriek, then a voice identified as Tracker’s Alien Technology’s Officer: “Sir, they couldn’t have any big weapons. There isn’t room . . .”

  There was more interference, then a spitting scream in the Battle Imperative from the Captain: “WEAPONS OFFICER! Burn . . .”

  There the recording ended, in mirror-surfaced fused metal.

  Zraar-Admiral and his officers stood silent for a moment. Zraar-Admiral’s testicles were still in the relaxed position and his tail and whiskers did not stir now. An old red-sandstone statue. His tongue flicked out for a moment across the tips of his fangs. Then Weeow-Captain spoke.

  “But those first words. ‘They don’t fight.’ No weapons. That was the Telepath.”

  “Then the Telepath was deceived.”

  “Urrr.”

  I shrank further into the submissive position, not meeting those stares. Telepaths, whatever else might be wrong with us, did not make factual mistakes in collecting data, any more than a hunter mistook a prey when it was plainly before his eyes.

  Sometimes Telepaths could get things out of context, or be overwhelmed by the alienness of prey minds. Yet the Telepath in Tracker had spoken with absolute certainty. “No weapons” did not admit of context errors. All Telepaths searched, unceasingly, for allies in our own war. In any case, reading alien minds was part of our training and the Telepath in a lead scout was specialized in alien animal contact. Thoughts flowed about me, some tinged with disquiet. If we were despised, we were also taken for granted as an infallible weapon. Can this enemy beat Telepaths? It was the worst part of our lot to have our minds open to the secret fears of Heroes, but now those were my thoughts also. Urrr.

  Five long fingers. On the cunning and trickery of wild kz’eerkti many tales and legends turned, from the admonitory to the obscene. Some kz’eerkti breeds used stones as missiles and sticks as tools. Some could ambush Heroes in forest hunts.

  Bad, that hand-print in Space, as the wreckage of a destroyed Kzinti ship fell in endless darkness before us. Traps, deceptions. In any event, for better or worse, a Space-travelling enemy we knew nothing of.

  “Dominant One, there is more. Later, another cell in the recorder was activated. Possibly by aliens sacking the ship.”

  Gibbering and gabbling. Kz’eerkti gibbered and gabbled, when they had played tricks on Heroes, or when they pelted Heroes with fruit or excrement from the branches of tall forest trees, ready to scamper away through the branches when the Heroes concerned began to slash the tree-trunks down or climb them.

  “Record this for yourself, Telepath,” Feared Zraar-Admiral said. “It may be useful when we meet this prey. AT, translate it. You will allow Telepath to assist you.”

  I know now what it said.

  * * *

  “Energy discharge now.”

  “It looks inert.”

  “Look at the meter: there’s movement there. We should get out. We’ve done what we came to do.”

  “Yes, we should get out! I don’t mean just back to the Pencil. You know that ship could not have been alone.”

  “I have thought of it. However I admit there were once a few seconds when I stopped thinking about it. That was quite a pleasant sensation, I recall.”

  “There may be more cats coming here. I mean here. We’ve picked up other emissions from the hull. Maybe calling them. They could be here . . . now. Those first headaches the cats may have caused—I had another not long ago. Milder, though, but there.”

  “I had one too. Jim said several people did. I put it down to strain.

  “Or some cat probe. At extreme range now but coming closer? Some mind-weapon?”

  “Tanj! Do you have to think of things like that? We’ve had nightmares enough since this all began . . . Anyway, we still have a job to do . . . There’s a light flashing on that control surface.”

  “There’s a Tanj light flashing in my mind. And it’s the biggest warning light there is. Run! Run now!”

  “It doesn’t look like a weapon . . .”

  “I say run! Aren’t we in a bad enough state already?”

  “We’ve got to get every scrap of knowledge we can. We’ve got to keep transmitting to Earth. Keeping the transmission going is more important than our lives.”

  “Can we do that if another warship full of cats jumps us? They may not be so obliging as to leave themselves in the way of our drive next time. Or several ships? These things must be co-operative, with organization. We’ve got the motor, the weapons, the bodies. Enough to keep us busy for years. It’s crazy to wait for them . . .”

  * * *

  Jabber.

  “Weeow-Captain, you may fall the crew out from Battle-stations. Remain closed up at Defense-stations.

  “We have the direction of Tracker’s drift. We track it back. There must be spoor, and Tracker has given us a sign. They did not die in vain. Urrr . . . a light-pressure drive powered by incomplete hydrogen fusion. They use an electromagnetic ramscoop to get their own hydrogen from space . . .”

  A sudden rush of understanding.

  A trail of burnt hydrogen!

  “You may howl for the dead, and you may howl vengeance for our companions in the Hunt. But no heroes are t
o die in the mourning. And no death-duels till further notice. No station is to be uncrewed.”

  Happy Gatherer

  Paul van Barrow waited for the hubbub to die away, waving for quiet with a smile. His responsibilities as leader of the Happy Gatherer expedition tended to make him pompous and even stuffy at times, but he was as excited as any now. There were several projects running on the ship, and a score of impressively multi-skilled people on board. Happy Gatherer was a big ship, hired not purpose-built, but they made a crowd in the room.

  “The gravity anomalies are still inexplicable. If they really are Outsiders, they may have some gravity control. There’s another thing.”—He pointed to a projected diagram, a wedge-ended ovoid—“that ship has a sort of streamlining, as if it can land and take off through an atmosphere from a planetary surface. And it’s big. I think that’s also evidence of gravity-control.”

  Signals to trustees? The thought crossed several minds. An instruction transmitted now would reach the stock-market in about eight years’ time.

  “We signed undertakings,” Paul reminded them, “About windfall profits from new knowledge.”

  It had been one of the ways finance for the expedition had been raised.

  “If we can understand this new knowledge,” said Henry Nakamura. There was a note of caution in his voice.

  “People that intelligent should be good teachers.”

  “Are you certain, Paul?” Rosalind Huang’s voice had an odd edge to it. Her eyes seemed somehow unnaturally large under her red-black pattern of hair. She needs reassurance, Rick Chew realized. What’s wrong? This is a great moment. He stepped in.

  “If these are signals, we will translate them. It’s difficult, certainly, but that’s only to be expected.”

  “A new bunch of careers when we get back,” said Michael Patrick, “There will be a stream of PhDs rolling down conveyor belts.”

  “Not only with the language. We’ve probably just set up a dozen new academic industries. Meanwhile, we should have identified some keys, but we haven’t.”

  Michael laughed. He had an easy, infectious laugh in almost any situation. Although some thought he did not always take things quite seriously enough, the crew owed him a lot. He had shown a gift, during the long flight, for taking the sting out of almost every problem with some joke. “So we’ve underestimated the difficulties. We’ve plenty of time, and so, surely, have they.”

  “Rick,” said Selina Guthlac, “Aren’t we making a questionable assumption?”

  “We can’t expect the translating to be easy, but if their language has consistent rules—and surely it must—we will translate it in the end.” The Neuronetic lattices on and in the ship were Lambda Platform. Their cell-connections were beyond counting.

  Selina worried Rick. The crew and their successful interaction were his responsibility, and Selina seemed at times to be what another age might have called a misfit. And he had met her brother. Scrawny owlishness in him was in her a hint of watchfulness which reminded one that owls were hunters. Arthur Guthlac’s undirected nervous energy was in her concentrated accomplishment. Like all in the Happy Gatherer she was a winner. Selina had won her way into Space with the sufferance sometimes accorded genius. Arthur had given up any idea of belonging. She could adopt protective coloration and be accepted by most of the crew, nearly all the time. But interdependence in such a situation was virtually total, and, as on Earth, too many eccentricities stacked up.

  Now she spoke carefully, tasting the words and disliking them as she used them: “What if they do not want to communicate with us? What if they deliberately disguise their speech? Deliberately make it impossible for anyone else to translate it?”

  No-one asked the obvious question: “Why?” But here and there expressions began to change.

  “Selina!” Peter Brown laughed, “What have you been reading?”

  She flinched for a second. Beneath its innocent surface, the question might have dangerous implications. Then she came back at them.

  “Another thing: you said the alien ship is big. Look at the scale. It’s not big, it’s gigantic! And the shape—that might not be for atmosphere entry, it might be to reduce surface area. Why do you think they would want to do that?”

  No one answered for a long moment. Then Peter asked:

  “What about the Angel’s Pencil? Have there been any messages?”

  “None we’ve heard.” The colony ship to Epsilon Eridani would have passed through this quadrant, but in the interstellar distances no-one had seriously expected to intercept messages from it. Its big com-laser would be tight-beamed back to Earth or the Belt.

  “I suggest we all assemble at the end of each watch for updates.” The crew of the Happy Gatherer dispersed reluctantly, with many lingering glances at the screens. Peter called Rick and Paul aside.

  Selina had comfortable quarters, decorated with a number of personal touches. In Space “personal space” was a necessity not a luxury. There was a transparent case of simulated glass and wood on the shelf, a small grey-painted object within. The model recalled a shared life of the mind light-years away. A reminder too of the dangers the old sea-voyagers and traders of Earth had faced in primitive craft. A good-luck charm, perhaps? Something else? She looked at it as she had many times in the past, but HMS Nelson told her nothing more.

  The door signaled a visitor. Rick entered.

  “Why did you say that?” He asked her without preliminaries, “About alien messages being made untranslatable deliberately.”

  “I hardly know.” She already regretted her previous words, and their inevitable implications. The intimacy of a long voyage could lull one into self-betrayal.

  “Selina, I don’t agree with what Peter’s been saying . . .”

  “Why, what has he been saying? Or can I guess?”

  “I don’t want to be hypercritical, and I’m sure that’s not his intention either. Or anyone’s. Paul has always defended you, you know. And sometimes Peter says things a little before he’s thought them through, perhaps.

  “I’m not suggesting you need conditioning or anything like that, but have you thought of having your psych profile redone, just as a precaution. It would be entirely voluntary.”

  “No.”

  “Suppose there was some chemical imbalance.”

  “The doc would notify me and correct it when I have my next check-up. In fact, and as you know, I would never have got past the selection board carrying anything like that. But Rick, both the selection board then and the doc now are of the opinion that I am sane.” His self-assurance was a goad to her. She realized she had never liked or respected this smug, complacent, always unsurprising, somehow herbivorous man. Like Paul, only worse, she thought. Well, it’s not surprising. There was always a chance we might meet Outsiders. The same board chose both of them as the best representatives of the human race . . . what an error it made when it also chose me!

  “Are you sure you’re happy?” It was a weighty question as he asked it. This was a culture that took happiness and its pursuit more seriously than any in history.

  “What’s it to you?”

  He was hurt by her words. “We are a team. You know that.”

  “Thank you, Rick. You’ve possibly seen my profile as you are in charge of crew records. Since one of my jobs is Space navigation, I have studied something of Space-flight. Since I am also, as you are doubtless also aware, particularly as we have discussed it a number of times, a natural scientist, I do know something about human body and brain chemistry.” She paused, measured him with her eyes and added, “And they may have gravity control.”

  Part of Selina’s problem in socializing may have been connected to the fact that she lived in a culture most of whose members had little concept of sarcasm or irony. These people did not insult each other, and it took Rick Chew a little while to work out what she meant.

  “I’m only thinking of you,” he told her at last. “Anyone who can’t get on with people shouldn’t be here.�
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  “Shall I get off and walk home, then?”

  He flinched.

  Something hurt her. She sensed that the atmosphere of conflict was not only alien to him, it was painful. She sought for words to calm the situation.

  “I think you’re tense, Selina,” Rick said, “Perhaps a little current stimulation would help you relax.”

  He backed away, raising his hands against the murderous rage blazing in her face. He distinctly saw the beginning of a striking motion before she checked it. She spoke as he had never heard anyone speak before.

  “My father was a current addict. He cured himself. I was with him. I saw him cure himself. Have you any idea what that means? Do you know how many current addicts have ever cured themselves? Do you know the price they have to pay?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” Rick was doubly distressed at giving and receiving pain now.

  “Don’t you ever, ever, say that again, do you hear!”

  Selina had dropped into a half crouch. She glared into Rick’s face, now working with signs of consternation, for a long moment without speaking. It was a glare which a generation experienced in such things might have called murderous. Mumbling apologies, he shook his head in bewilderment and left.

  How would he behave, how would any of them behave, her thought began to form, how would any of them look if . . . if at that moment . . .

  A headache. Stress perhaps. The autodoc had outlets in each crew member’s rooms and Selina quickly inserted her fingers for chemical analysis.

  Gutting Claw

  I fell onto my forelimbs as I crossed the bridge. Zraar-Admiral would have to calculate how much more I could take. It was not my place to comment on this, but to report.

  “Dominant One, the enemy know nothing of Tracker. They know a little of the Ancients, but of no other thinking life in Space. They have no clear aims except to gather data about anomalous radio and gravity events and other useless knowledge. But they are kz’eerkti.”

  “What radio and gravity events?”