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

Further back the adults reclined against rocks, listening or talking quietly. New mothers would be there nursing kits, while other kzinrett supervised older newlings as they tussled in the sand. And somewhere out in the dark, four-or-eight of the young adults were hidden in the shadows, silently watching to protect the pride. Swift-Son had stood such watches himself, missing the comradeship of the fire but proud of the trust the pride put in him. The whole cycle of life was represented in the pride circle, each generation playing its role, then passing it to the next. Here mothers presented their newborn kits to the pride, here the young learned traditions from the old. Here the challenge duels were fought and the stories told. Here the dead were mourned and, so said the legends, here their spirits returned every year on their Name-day.

For a moment he paused, caught up in his fate. He was a legend now, a legend that had just begun to unfold—a fated warrior of Chraz-Mtell, and his yet-to-be saga would be heard at tale-tellings forever. He, Swift-Son, who was content to watch his brother claim a double-name; he, Silent Prowler, who preferred only the Hunter’s Moon for company; he would be Patriarch! Patriarch not only of Rritt-Pride but of the Great-Pride of the broad savannah, Patriarch of all the countless lands beyond that. He raked claws across the sky. Patriarch of the very stars!

A faint click of rock on rock twitched his ears to the sides to pinpoint the sound’s source. It was not repeated, but he had already recognized the heavy tread of Iron-Claw. He must be one of the watchers tonight. Swift-Son could hardly wait to relate the news of his adventure. Soon they would be together again, joking and sparring like old times. It was good to be home.

But first he must claim a Name. He rippled his ears and stood up, then strode boldly toward the pride-circle. Behind him a rustle of paws on grass warned that Iron-Claw was crouching for the kill should he prove unworthy. Elder Brother had never been stealthy enough to surprise Swift-Son. Let him crouch, he would not leap.

As he entered the circle of light, Pkrr-Rritt rose from his place of honor in the center of the gathering. “Rritt-Pride welcomes this stranger to our pride-circle and asks for news of Swift-Son.” The Patriarch intoned the tradition.

Swift-Son raised the alien weapon to his shoulder and fired over their heads, splitting the darkened sky with his thunder. The startled pride fled, even Iron-Claw and Pkrr-Rritt, leaving gratifying fear scents behind. He leapt to the center of the circle and screamed in triumph as a few of the braver ones took cover behind rocks and peeped out at him.

“Swift-Son is dead,” he scream-snarled the tradition into the night. “I am Chraz-Rritt!”

SLOWBOAT NIGHTMARE

Warren W. James

Copyright © 1998 by Warren W. James

Stark white cold. That was the first thing I noticed. That and the quiet sounds you learn to ignore while in space; the whisper of the air circulators, the hum from the electronic systems and the subsonic rumble of the drive. But there was something wrong with those sounds, like a chord with one note off-key.

The glassine shell of the autodoc was frosted over. I blinked my eyes wide open and saw nothing hut milky whiteness and someone moving haltingly outside the ’doc. I blinked some more and the milky shapelessness became individual strips of brightness on the ceiling.

My labored breathing puffed thin white clouds into the cold air as I felt a warm dry breeze start to blow into the autodoc. I became aware of the clean antiseptic smell of the autodoc’s interior, layered over with a stale metallic tang and a scent like that of sweaty grass mixed with ginger. My arms and legs were tingling, as if they had fallen asleep, while their muscles pulsed with the rhythmic contractions of electronically induced isometric exercises. I felt a sharp jerk and looked over to see a set of intravenous needles withdrawing themselves from my arm. How long had they been feeding me? Where was I? Sick or recovering from some accident? In some organlegger’s chop shop? My thoughts came as a jumble of memories and dreams. And then I remembered. The anticipation, the hopes, the dreamless sleep. I was on a starship bound for a colony world.

Would we find a world as perverse as the others the ramrobots had found? Like Mt. Lookitthat on Tau Ceti II, a sliver of inhabitable land on an otherwise uninhabitable world. Or a world where conditions were clement, but only for a few days out of the year, like what the Crashlanders found on Procyon IV.

For several hundred years humans had been sending unmanned interstellar probes, ramrobots, to find habitable environments in other star systems. And that they did. But showing true machine literal-mindedness, they couldn’t tell the difference between a habitable environment and a habitable world. As often as not, the worlds they found bore as much resemblance to their reports as the typical vacation destination resembled its tridee advertisements. Who knows how many colony ships finished their long interstellar trip with no way to return to Earth and only a marginal world to carve into a home. Would our voyage end differently?

Observations of Vega from the multi-kilometer fresnel lens telescopes at Persephone Station had indicated the existence of planets along with a large and densely populated disk of post-accretion debris. Those rocks had interested the Belt Science Commission enough to make them cough up half the UN Marks needed to send an unmanned probe to investigate further.

Ramrobot #124 had found that Vega’s fourth planet, a gas giant slightly larger than Jupiter, had a moon that was larger than Mars with a thicker atmosphere. The scientists thought it would be inhabitable, although a bit cold and dry. But being a young planetary system, the gas giant was still glowing brightly in the IR and that would make the sub-primary