Choosing Names: Man-Kzin Wars VIII by Larry Niven (the best books to read TXT) 📗

was an ecological niche which often led to rudimentary tool-using. Intelligent beings were generally somewhat alike and also generally edible. Slaver-students thought the Ancients had spread common primitive life-forms through much of the Galaxy. But this on the screens represented more than rudimentary tool-using.

“I believe the same type of apes killed Tracker. The drives are similar. Omnivores with five fingers like the print . . . The species has established itself in considerable numbers in one star-system apart from its original one, and in smaller colonies further away, using reaction drives. They have hibernation . . .” We Telepaths were expected to understand alien sciences, religious, societies, languages and technologies as well as alien thoughts.

But several inhabited worlds! A Vengeance-Hunt had become a promise of Conquest Glorious! The hunters’ minds were volcanic.

“They send messages to us. They call their ship the . . .” I had trouble translating. Successful Plant-Eater was how it came out.

But Tracker hung in every mind. Tracker and the great swathe of exhausted hydrogen which we had been following.

“What weapons do they have?”

“None, Feared Zraar-Admiral. These creatures have never fought. I find nothing of weapons, hardly a concept of war, save in one female mind. Even there it is vague.” I paused, then spoke again, all around knowing as I spoke that I repeated the words of dead Tracker’s Telepath: “They have only kitchen-knives.”

“Feared Zraar-Admiral,” said Alien Technologies, “how could such a race have evolved a theory of ballistics?”

“Ballistics or no, we see them in Space,” said Student of Particles. “There is a danger of weapons! I care not what the addict says.”

“There is also the Paradox,” said Zraar-Admiral, “Do not forget it ever.”

Zraar-Admiral had killed enemies in plenty on the ground as the Heroes’ battle-legions over-ran worlds, or fought each other, with claw, fang, Wtsai and occasionally with beam or fusion-bomb. Not all those battles had been easy, for a true Hero attacked—on the ground or anywhere else—without too much reckoning of the odds. On one planet with wide oceans the locals had had sea-ships hidden under water, armed with missiles with multiple warheads. Heroes died before our Students of Particles developed a heat-induction ray that boiled the seas. Tracker had had such a ray. And there were vague stories that came slowly from distant parts of a widespread Empire of other things . . . But Zraar-Admiral had never joined battle against aliens in Space.

Perhaps he never would. The war between the Slavers and their Tnuctipun slaves that wiped out intelligent life in the galaxy billions of years previously might be the only full-scale war of species that would ever be fought in the deeps between the stars, save for the far-distant, almost legendary, Time of Glory when the Jotok had been overthrown. The few races encountered in the Hunt that had interplanetary and poor weapons were hardly substitutes. There was a legend of a Feral Jotok Fleet which had escaped when the Kzin rose, but in centuries no trace of it had been found . . .

The fighting against other Kzin was controlled. Struggles of Kzinti Houses Noble produced exhilaration and bloodshed in plenty and the ambitions of young Heroes for names and territory made for a number of outlaws, rebels and pirates. There was always dueling. Zraar-Admiral had owed his first advancement to his dueling prowess and his trophy-hoard contained an impressive number of ears, but fights between Kzin, in the training arena, the hunting preserve, or even in full-scale military action, were not the Conquest Glorious or The Day. Gutting Claw’s destiny, he felt, was unfulfilled. Like the whole Navy’s. Like his own.

Some priests said Space-faring warrior aliens were a fantasy like intelligent females, a self-evidently heretical denial of the natural order of things. The Jotok alone had been created by the Fanged God to give Heroes access to gravity-motors and High-Tech weapons without shameful dilution of our own warrior culture. But for Zraar-Admiral life with no possibility of The Day, the Triumph Supreme, presented a prospect of doleful dullness. The Battle-Drum on the bridge showed the Navy’s view. It had never yet been struck, and for one thing only would Zraar-Admiral strike it.

Alien Technologies Officer suspected dimly the struggle between Priesthood and Military, between religious doctrine and the claims of honor which the Battle-Drum symbolized. I, whom he disdained to notice, knew more than he about the ideas that made him. But instincts less acute than mine would have told him how dangerous a path his thoughts and words might start down. AT shifted to safer ground, keeping matters purely technical.

My report, Zraar-Admiral realized as I did, duplicated Tracker’s recorder. An alien enemy with no weapons or knowledge of weapons, and Tracker sliced by a claw of light. If the enemy deceived Telepaths there was real, and for Zraar-Admiral thrilling, danger. For me the prospect was less thrilling.

Happy Gatherer

“There was a signal coming from Earth,” said Paul, “but I’ve put it on record and left all channels clear for our friends. Whatever it is, it will have to wait on this.”

“The headaches . . . do you think . . .?” Anna left the words unfinished.

“Attempts at direct mind contact? It’s the kind of thing one might expect in advanced beings. If so, we’re not equipped to cope. I know telepathic ability was a factor in the selection of some of us, but we haven’t enough of it.”

“So what do we do?”

“I’m unhappy. What if they decide that we are too alien for them to communicate with and leave? We can’t follow. I don’t think we can just sit here and wait for them to make the next move. What a disaster if they decided we were a waste of time and vanished!”

“Would they, after all this effort?” Paul asked. “That ship is big. Really big. It must have cost them energy to bring it here to meet us.” He was instilling confidence. “Look, there are scientists on that ship, people with minds like ours, or better, who look at problems the same way. They’ll adjust to us. Perhaps they expected to recognize us. Now