Choosing Names: Man-Kzin Wars VIII Larry Niven (fantasy novels to read txt) 📖

“You know what has happened,” I said. It was not a question and needed no answer.

We were silent for a time, but each mind was assimilating what had flowed to it from the other. The motor snarled and rippled and purred behind us. A long time passed as the two bruised minds recovered. I think we both slept at some time. As in a dream, I rose at last and wandered to the barge’s trophy-drier and preserved Weapon’s Officer’s ears for my belt. Selina watched me.

“Do you still feel a duty to warn Earth?” I asked her at last.

She knew from my mind now the fragment of human speech that Zraar-Admiral had ordered me to memorize in a time that suddenly seemed long ago.

“It seems the Angel’s Pencil has done that already,” Selina said. “I wish I did not think it so likely that it will be disbelieved. But if they disbelieved the Angel’s Pencil, they will come to know that Happy Gatherer has disappeared in the same part of Space. We never answered their last signal. Let them make of that what they will.”

Selina thought of Earth and of her brother, guarding and herding gangs of children through the strange human museum, her brother with a secret collection hoarded as a Kzinrett might hoard playthings. A collection with a purpose I now began to understand truly for the first time. Crumbling pages of forbidden books and “military” paraphernalia.

A secret history—or set of false legends—of Earth that the government had banned. “Banned” was a strange concept (Or was it so strange? How much of Kzin’s own history was in the control of the Priests and Conservors?). But was this brother a secret rebel against the dominant humans? Both he and Selina thought of something called the Military Fantasy: a forbidden cult that suggested the humans had once been something very different to what their histories told. I followed this a little way, some of it over ground I had previously guessed out for myself. Many of Selina’s own thoughts were not clear on the matter, but when her thought combined with mine a picture emerged.

Then, perhaps because I had touched the image of her brother in her mind, I felt her thoughts flare with something almost Kzin-like: Your destiny is upon you! Rouse them! Rouse the silly sheep before the tigers spring!

Sheep? Brainless quadruped grass-eaters, I saw. Herds of them had once been husbanded by monkeys for food or to make clothing from their fur. They were almost displaced on Earth now. A few were reared as delicacies and others were kept on hunting preserves called zoos, but these latter were not hunted. Humans came simply to watch them. Strange. Strange.

And tigers? What were they? Merrower! There was an image there! Kzin, and something else. Fangs, and leaping and eyes like fire. The images became conflicting. But the overwhelming impression was unambiguous: I knew what she thought of tigers.

Or did I? For in the images of blood and death and fangs and slashing claws, all the splendid rampant slaying, there was a strange claw-point of something else that Selina herself was hardly aware of, to do with my attempts to console her for the death of Rick, something that contained the words: “poor creature!”

What did this mean? Did it matter? Why?

And other thoughts: I know their reaction will be disbelief, denial . . . And then panic? Gangs of humans swarming through hive-like cities . . . and screaming in terror and then . . . and then, perhaps . . .

Overwhelming all again came the image of the sheltered sheepfold and the tiger leaping from the stars. But even if the sheep were roused, what could they do? Then I thought of Tracker, and the wound blazing in the side of Gutting Claw.

And another Kzin-like thought leapt in Selina’s mind, perhaps triggered by own. A leap against Fate, a thought that in the Heroes’ Tongue might have been expressed in the God-Defying Tense itself: The launching lasers! In the human system were giant laser-cannon used for boosting the launch of reaction-drive Space-craft, some on the planet nearest the sun of the human home-system, a few on the human home-world and its moon, some in the human-settled belt of asteroids and the moons of the outer gas-giants. And then another thought, Kzin-like but of a different kind: they are obsolete. They are being phased out and not replaced! Time! Time! Will there be time?

And then: Nothing I can do.

For an instant she tried to keep these thoughts from me, knowing it was futile. In any case, what did it matter now, driving into black Space, death behind us and death, surely, before us?

That took my thoughts back to Gutting Claw, and Weeow-Captain on the bridge, in command, determined now to make an end of the Angel’s Pencil straight away, once and for all, without toying with it.

The Angel’s Pencil!

If Selina and I conferred, it was at a level too high and at a speed too fast to record. From her mind came the radio frequencies used by the human ship.

And then I cast my mind back to the Claw, and knew what Weeow-Captain planned.

Angel’s Pencil

 “Explosions. And Big Cat is moving at a tangent.” Crouched over the makeshift weapons console, Jim Davis shook his head as if trying to clear it. The autodoc was good, but it was not intended to keep a man keyed to this pitch for so long.

“What does it mean?”

Steve Weaver made a gesture of incomprehension. “I can only guess . . . somebody else is fighting them.”

“It can’t be one of our ships. Nothing human. Not against that maneuverability.”

“Were you expecting a human ship? Why do you think there were anti-missiles on that ship we struck? They were expecting attack from . . . something else. Something worse than they are, perhaps. Something higher on the food-chain.”

“Steve! Steve! Jim!” Sue Bhang leapt to the console. “There’s a message coming through!”

Fingers flickered at keyboards. The comscreen lit. A picture rolled, slowed,