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

I survived because I could feel their fear. They perceived me as a return of terror and Old Night into what had been their paradise. I was a looming nightmare of fangs and claws.” Again he felt his interrogator’s amusement. He shouted, “I had their respect!”

More calmly, then, “Before they brought in more prisoners, something else was happening to me. One like myself loses his sense of self very easily. Can you understand this? The Keepers do not inject us until we are old enough to breed. We must not breed, but we must develop a sense of who we are, while we can, before the flow of others’ thoughts can drown us. Truly, for our own defense, telepaths should always have had names!”

His listener shrugged. He didn’t care.

That galled Telepath. He said, “I have told you nothing yet that can help you. Will you give me a name?”

“Certainly.”

So easy? But within his murky thoughts he seemed to mean it. Telepath said, “Well, then. Locked within my mind, somewhat protected from the physical horror of withdrawal, I came to know myself. To know that there is a self in here.” The kzin thumped his ribs above the liver. It seemed his listener understood.

“The next attack on Sol System was by another bandit group on the Patriarchy’s borders. I think Pareet’s Pride learned nothing from Gutfoot’s Horde, if any of us escaped to tell tales at all. Pareet’s fleet plunged into Sol System just as we did. Like us they found industrial lasers and flying slag where their telepaths, and ours, had found slothful minds at peace with each other and themselves. To the moon came four Heroes, variously injured.

“Understand, to be captured and imprisoned alive was the earmark of these four. I call them Heroes, but they were not. Neither were they telepaths nor users of Sthondat lymph. They outmassed me by nearly double.

“I was not to mingle with them. Our human captors feared we would share secrets. A double wall of iron bars set an eight-meter gap between us. We must gesticulate and shout at each other, so that our words and posture-language may be recorded against a time when our speech will be known.

“Of course I shouted greeting. For a quarter-year I was closed within my mind, knowing myself, doubting the reality of anything else. Now kzinti had come, but I couldn’t penetrate their skulls! I shouted, and they didn’t answer.

“One rarely moved and never spoke. The human doctors took better care of him than his companions did. In the end he died. One had lost most of his left leg, and he didn’t move much even in the low gravity. One, big and burly and belligerent, had no ears at all. The last battle had flayed him; he was pink skin over half his body. He stood at the bars and glared hate at me. The fourth bore a broad slash of white fur around the eyes. He looked healthy, and he studied me, though our captors would not have noticed.

“A mealtime passed before he spoke. ‘I am White Mask, rank of Strategist. I have what you need.’

“They knew me for what I was, of course. I need not ask what he meant. I asked, ‘How?’

“ ‘I only had an instant,’ he said. ‘I took what was close at hand.’ There was nothing in his hands except steel bars, and I wondered where he could have concealed any tool at all. ‘We know too little of these prey-who-would-fight. One of your kind could tell us more of them, if he does not die! So, I have what will heal you, and be glad we came in time!’

“In time? Eleven years taking Sthondat extract, then a quarter-year without! I’d be dead without my captors’ medical machines. Now my body was beginning to recover from eleven years of abuse!

“But I said only, ‘We are observed,’ and then, ‘We are studied.’

“White Mask turned to the earless one and rasped a command.

“Earless screamed and lashed out. The one-legged one snatched at the dying one’s ankle and scuttled backward on all threes while the others fought.

“Those two were clumsy, unused to low gravity. They fought more in the air than on the ground, and every blow threw them apart. Earless was massive and powerful, but twice White Mask trapped him in the air and battered him like a slashball. A flurry of blow-and-kick put them between the windows and One Leg, and that was when One Leg threw something to me.

“It was what I expected, a small zip bag, half empty. We had no pouches, of course, so I hid it in my mouth, betting that it was watertight. I waited for feeding time.

“Food arrived in pouches; bowls were not suited for the moon’s low gravity. The pouches came on a conveyer line. No human would come near any kzin without a good deal of care. I positioned my dinner pouch to hide the zip bag, looked in and found Sthondat lymph preparation. I swallowed less than a normal dose, then lay down. After so long I didn’t know how it might affect me.

“The thoughts of the others flowed into me, intrusive, disorienting. No human was near me, not yet, but I shared my mind with four warriors. They were not of rank to be given names, and they had fallen away from using military designations. They had been humiliated in battle, and here in their presence was a smaller, weaker kzin.

“White Mask had learned strategy as a child, in role-playing games, and won adolescent fights by forethought more than strength. He saw that I was a tool they might use to free themselves, and he tried to force that view on the others. They had worked this out together, the fight to cover a thrown package. But Ear Eater kept forgetting.

“Ear Eater had made his reputation before a victim’s father beat him and chewed off his ears. He wanted only to reach me. His claws would tear his lost pride out