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

“He’s been trying to shield me from what he is going through. That is weakening him also. He feels an obligation to me. Once they accept them the Kzin take their obligations seriously.”

“Well, what can you do?” asked Steve. “I can’t treat it. Nor can our autodoc.”

“There’s a doc here. Put him in that. He’s beyond resisting if you lift him. If I stay in touch with him, whether I’m here on in the Pencil I feel . . . I don’t know . . . After all, we owe him something. But . . .”—There were tears again suddenly on the sunken skin below her eyes—“I’d rather like to get aboard a monk . . . a human ship again.”

* * *

I was Telepath. I was in the medical unit of Zraar-Admiral’s barge. It was a scene of wide cold plains. The grass tall so a hunter must stand on hind legs to see above it, even a hunter used to going on all fours. Scrabbling slopes of red sandstone, of scree, of red ironstone. There were distant mountains and somehow there were also forests, with leaping arboreal animals. Cliffs. Ironstone walls. I knew I was looking at a planet I had never seen: Old Kzin, as it had once been.

But now tunnel after tunnel was opening to me, opening and expanding to flash away. I saw scene after scene in a lattice-work.

Barer landscapes, stony heath. The strange landscape of dreams, clearer than I had seen it before. It was a great plain I wandered now. Alone? Or was someone with me? Zraar-Admiral? Karan? Selina? Gullied stone now, rock ridges, red under a red sky. Deeper gullies, rising about me, turning to caves, to tunnels . . .

Karan? Karan? Was she here? I felt her presence surely.

Recognition like a membrane tearing! I saw the blackness of the birthing burrow. And then a sudden light and what seemed a memory of the Harem. Karan was with me, grooming me as I played and kicked with my tiny, clumsy feet. I felt her tongue rasping at my fur. Then the grooming stopped and I lay back, full of contentment. The last contentment I would know.

I was small, small, my fur still spotted. We were alone, with the female kit, my sister, asleep. Karan’s belly and teats swollen with her next pregnancy. Then I knew my last day with her had come, and I tried to cling to her.

And then the scene changed to madness! The dream of an addict in withdrawal! For it was a dream of Karan speaking to me, and speaking to me not in the Female Tongue, but in the kitten’s version of the Heroes’ Tongue itself! The tongue no Kzinrett spoke!

But did I imagine now, or remember? Karan’s eyes shone above me huge and luminous as moons.

“Remember! Remember! Brave little spotted Kzin. I will plant a memory of words with little hope, but I must bury that memory in your mind deep, deep.

“Telepath they may make you, if you live. Little do they guess. Certain kittens they will test for Telepath talents. Rare kittens. What if they tested the mothers of those kittens? And the mothers of those few mothers?

“The few, the few . . . But the enduring. Not quite every line of female brains did the priesthood kill. Not yet. But soon. The speechless, mindless Kzinrett is the Kzinrett that lives and breeds. Each generation we, the secret, secret Others, grow rarer. Remember, though you do not understand my words.

“Someday you may find a sapient female. If fortune lets that happen, let that trigger your memory of these words. For a Telepath and a sapient female could do great things together . . .”

Karan’s tongue rough on my fur again. A purring in her throat so loud I could barely hear the words she chanted.

“A great secret. The greatest of all. And each of we few must plant it deep at the bottom of a few poor minds, hoping against all knowledge that one day it will shoot.

“The priesthood bred Kzinretts to be brood-animals before ever the first Jotok ship landed upon Kzin and our kind leapt into the stars, as they bred Kzintosh to be Heroes that laid worlds waste. Conquest, Empire, world upon world. And the Kzin becoming a race to smash itself at last, as it smashes all else. So small is our hope that we can save it, and the Telepaths and their war so poor and flawed a weapon. No more can I say but: Remember, when the time is right, that the way of the Eternal Hunt is not the only way. So small a word to whisper! So poor a hope! And yet, as we may, we keep alive a tiny flame, we tend a tiny seed.”

Seed? Tend a seed of vegetable? Who spoke of tending seeds. Our herbivorous slaves and prey-animals tended seeds. And yet—why did this image not sicken me as it should? The dream-voice of Karan again, chanting as she purred to me in her rippling throat.

“I cannot prophesy. Hunt in the glades of sleep. Remember . . .”

Karan’s eyes filling my eyes with their light. And I falling into sleep, my face against her fur for the last time, for indeed they came to take me to the crèche and the training-ground that day.

It was imagination, not memory! For no Kzinrett used that tongue. A mad dream. And yet I wondered, as the scene changed.

Telepath alone.

The blue-gold sky of the human world. Green vegetation and that blue above.

Telepath within a human dwelling, and knowing it for what it was. There was a smell of charred meat and a smell of the partially-burnt eggs of some flying creature. A day fixed in Selina’s memory, the day she too had left for a training crèche, something called an Advanced Astrophysics Institute.

A human speaking: “I know we’ll be proud of you. We’re stiff with pride for you already. I know you wanted to do biology first, but keep that as a second string for your fiddle. You’re like your brother—each has brains