Man-Kzin Wars IV by Larry Niven (graded readers .txt) 📗

a forbidden corridor on his second elbows; a shoulder eye was following an insect with great puzzlement.

Another eye caught the appearance of Trainer. “Master. What is?”

“An insect. Probably from Wunderland, and wondering how it got here.”

“Alive or machine?”

“It’s organic, like you or me.”

That took Trainer-of-Slaves into a discussion of the differences between the reproductive cycle of life and automated factory production.

His Jotok charge wanted to know if machines were “made up” in the imagination.

“Of course.”

“By us?” He meant intelligent life, including kzinti.

“Of course!”

The Jotok scratched his undermouth and wondered about the mind that had made up the “assembly book” for kzin.

They had to retire to the arboretum to handle that one, Trainer-of-Slaves gently bringing the virescent insect with him. Mellow-Yellow gave his lecture on evolution to a rapt audience.

“How did I evolve?”

And there they were, right up against Jotok history.

One time when he was playing cards with Long-Reach they were discussing the marvelous estate they would have together after the conquest of Man-home. Long-Reach asked him about the forests of Earth.

“How different could they be from the forests in Hssin?” countered Trainer, looking through his hand for the ace of clubs.

“Will the Conquest burn them to charcoal?”

And there they were, right up against the subject of military strategy. Conversation was spherical—no matter whether one headed north, south, east, or west to avoid a subject, one always navigated right into it.

CHAPTER 17

(2404–2409 A.D.)

Over the years Grraf-Hromfi honed his force, expanded it. The shipyards of the Serpent’s Swarm were busy. Gradually, he acquired the warcraft he needed to bring the Third Black Pride up to strength. He ran the Pride as if it were actually in place above Man-sun. Perhaps his Heroes spied on the Wunderland Admiralty for fun, but they listened to the fading broadcasts of the Fourth Fleet with disciplined seriousness.

Once they received their floating drydock, the duties of Trainer-of-Slaves multiplied. Grraf-Hromfi did not trust the monkey workmanship of any Alpha Centauri-built ship or weapons system. He had his maintenance staff check everything, sometimes rebuilding to tighter specifications. It was exhausting work for Trainer. By necessity he learned the customs of the naval architect. Eventually he just gave up, found ways to delay the overhauling—and trained more Jotoki to do the work for him.

At other times there was no real activity at all. He filed reports and played cards. He sniffed for trouble. During one of those lulls he learned to fly a Scream-of-Vengeance fighter. That was safer than dreaming about Grraf-Hromfi’s harem. Dreams about kzinrretti tended to fill idle moments. Sometimes he was back in the Chiirr-Nig household on Hssin, in the study, with his mother’s loyal head in his lap, scratching her forehead. He regretted having to sell his sex-demon, Jriingh.

It was natural for a kzinti to want a household. But Trainer couldn’t understand why he wanted sons, not after he’d had to teach the Terrible-Sons of Hromfi. Nor was it moral for a coward to pass on his traits to sons who would disgrace the Patriarchy. Nevertheless he wanted sons. He supposed that his real sons were the Jotoki he took on during their fixation phase.

Sons challenged their fathers to physical combat. His many Jotoki “sons” wore him out by a different kind of challenge. The curiosity of a pestering Jotok in transition demanded that Trainer keep learning. It wasn’t that he needed to learn. It wasn’t that he was curious. He never asked a question whose answer didn’t have a solidly rank smell. But he hated not to have a ready retort when a slave asked a stupid question like, “What is the minimum size of the universe?” The answer to a question like that not only didn’t have a smell—it couldn’t even be seen or heard.

Long-Reach started it all by telling four of his young apprentice polarizer mechanics about the black dwarf R’hshssira. It would collapse forever without fusing its hydrogen because it only had seven-eighths of the mass needed for ignition. But R’hshssira would still have a finite radius when there was no longer any radiation pressure pushing out from within.

The four youthful Jotoki had been learning gravity polarizer mechanics together under the supervision of Long-Reach and Creepy. That was twenty freshly curious brains in concert in teams of five-to-a-body. To rebuild and tune a polarizer one did not need to master unified field theory, but such practical constraints never appealed to an eager transient.

The “terrible four” roughed out the calculation that gave them the minimum diameter of a white dwarf star as a function of its mass. They didn’t do nova mechanics—that was beyond their youthful abilities, but they did work out the mass range and size at which neutron stars existed. For each mass they could calculate a number for the diameter of the neutron star.

Masses large enough to collapse behind a light barrier were more difficult. Before those calculations were done, one of their brains infected all the others with the burningly important question, “If the whole universe collapsed, what would be its minimum diameter?”

Mellow-Yellow tried to give them a practical kzin answer. “The universe is expanding.”

But all four Jotoki (twenty voices) wouldn’t let him get away with that. Tuning polarizers was practical. This was recreation. What if the universe was contracting?

Data-link texts on gravity shouldn’t be allowed. Worse, gravity polarizers were constructed all too elegantly. They should have flashing lights and be built along the lines of a W’kkai wooden puzzle. Then his Jotoki would be kept too busy to go off onto one of their wild chases.

Alas! Let it slip that the polarizer worked with negative space curvature and immediately they were delving into the tensor equations. From there insanity was only questions away. What is the difference between negative and positive curvature? Since positive curvature is common—and that means everything attracts everything else—why isn’t the universe imploding? When will it start to implode? If the universe imploded, how small would it get? Tell us, Mellow-Yellow!

Thank the Fanged God that Long-Reach and Creepy and Joker had