Man-Kzin Wars IV Larry Niven (ink ebook reader .txt) 📖

vapors she saw corncobs cooking in their husks in a bonfire. That didn’t seem right. It was too distant. She saw a starving man in a red shirt selling cow dung. Damn! She wanted to remember yesterday! What had happened to her?

She struggled to remember where she was, almost getting it and then forgetting. General Fry! A flash! That was the right clue! The sudden jubilation of knowing. But then it all went away. All she could remember about General Fry was being caught naked in a space-hammock with him by a laughing Colonel who wrapped them around and around in their netted prison.

But that was it! Revelation! Sobs of relief! She was at the hospital in Gibraltar Base and the Shark had blown up trying to jump to Alpha Centauri. She faded back into delirium with a desperate need to tell her baby sister that she was all right, and when she woke up again she was talking to General Fry, not sure that the conversation wasn’t a dream, trying to convince him that he should still let her go out to fight the kzinti.

The delirium went away. The autodoc became more real. She could feel herself healing. She slept normally. She knew her life signs were good. They would open the box and talk to her. General Fry loved her and he would be there when they opened the box, tenderness in his flinty old eyes. Maybe not. Maybe just a nurse.

When the box opened it was a kzin face staring down at her, tall, massive, hairy, fangs as large as the wolf’s in Little Red Riding Hood. It was the first kzin face she had ever seen. She still remembered nothing.

“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” the ratcat asked. “Ich spreche nicht sehr gut.”

Had the kzinti conquered Germany? Had the Fifth Invasion begun just as the Shark launched for Wunderland? She was still certain that she was in the Solar System.

The yellow-orange monster brought out a portable translator which began to recite the same phrase in many languages. Finally the cultured electronic voice asked, “What languages do you speak?”

“English,” she said.

“My English also is very nasty,” spat-hissed the kzin. “Might be machine help us. I learn English. You teach?”

“Thomas Alva Edison!” she swore in utter amazement.

“Brain injury,” he growled. “I am decorous and able veterinarian. Skilled with female brains.” His ears unfolded proudly. “Much experimentation. Fix all animals.”

He set the autodoc to raise her to a sitting position and then held out a dish for her, a stemmed sherbet glass with a spoon. Nora noticed that she was ravenously hungry. Her kzin continued to babble without making much sense. “Please be decorous slave and clean cage,” he said. He held a spoonful of his gift to her mouth.

It was vanilla ice cream flavored with chunks of fish.

CHAPTER 22

(2420 A.D.)

While Lieutenant Nora Argamentine recovered in the autodoc of the slave quarters, Hrith-Master-Officer maneuvered his Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch to pick up the wreck of the mystery scout. The floating drydock’s maximum acceleration capability was ten g’s, thus they took much longer to reach the scout than had the original fighting triad. After grappling the wreck into the repair hangar, Trainer-of-Slaves and his Jotoki mechanics began a meticulous study of the vehicle.

The structure of the engine made no immediate sense. Trainer didn’t expect it to. His first priority was to determine its function and limitations, his second, its manufacturability. Then, at leisure, he could reverse-deduce its operating principles with the aid of a team of physicists.

Long-Reach came up with a preliminary assessment of pieces that were clearly gravitic manipulators. That tended to confirm Trainer-of-Slaves’s suspicion that the monkeys were now building a sophisticated gravity polarizer that could travel very close to the speed of light, somehow bypassing the “blue-light” bleeding effect that limited all kzin drives.

Such a conclusion fitted the data. The peculiar pulse patterns observed at Man-sun and transmitted by the Patriarch’s Nose were five years old. They looked like a series of tests of a new vehicle. And here, 4.3 years after the completion of the tests, was one of the test vehicles on a test combat mission. Simple. Grraf-Hromfi’s fear-hope of faster-than-light magic was just that.

Non-scientists like Grraf-Hromfi, in spite of their admonitions to others, were always leaping to conclusions before they gave their science speculations deep thought. The rumors about an ancient lost civilization that had spanned the galaxy before the birth of the sky’s brightest stars provided just the kind of fantasy universe in which to dream of superluminal travel.

Spread the rumor that fossil relics survived on some wrinkled moon of a red star forty light-years thither and kzin, by the herds, would set upon an aimless life of wandering to track down the chimera. The older the empire, the grander its mysteries. The deader the empire, the greater the heights to which it must have risen. The Hero’s Tongue had a short word for such fantasies: the-forest-bush-with-leaves-that-smell-like-meat. Somewhere there were always kzinti hunting that bush.

Trainer made the rounds, feeding the naked children in the cages. His experimentation schedule had been destroyed by recent events, but animals had to be fed no matter what. Tired, he retreated to his cramped quarters, putting off Long-Reach, who wanted a game of cards.

He rubbed in the talcum to get at the dirt and smell. He worked the powder into his fur, and then massaged himself down with a good vacuum vibrator. That felt good! He found a hard pillow for his head, and stretched out on the bunk. Now for a liver-jolting virtual adventure to get away from life’s problems! He popped the goggles over his eyeballs with a little squirt of lubricant.

Would it be possible to find out what Grraf-Hromfi had been watching lately to get him so nervous about superluminal superstitions? The Lord’s access file was restricted, but that didn’t stop some shrewd guessing. Vocally, he keyed in “faster-than-light,” then, after some thought, “ancient empires.” He already knew that would give him more than a thousand titles, so