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

Hero has told me that I’ll always be able to learn as well as I do now, I just won’t be able to talk or think with words. He’s phasing out English and phasing in Heroic patois. Then he’s going to phase out the patois. Thanks a lot, buster!

He’s also phasing out the Earth. All the early parts of my life.

I try to remember Earth. I do not want to forget Earth. I remember my home town and the cornfields. I can see the afternoon sun on the church steeple. I know where I went to high school. I remember holding Benny’s wrist when he was trying to kiss me and fondle my breasts at the same time. It was in the gazebo behind the lilacs in the backyard of the Yankovich place. But I can’t for the life of me remember the name of my home town. How could I forget that?

Day 5

Sin is a wonderful moniker for this planet. That is as close as I can come to the hiss-rumblings that pass for its name in the Hero’s Tongue. It is an awful place.

I no longer have a hope of getting to the Shark. I can only pray that the UNSN finds it like they found Sin, then blows it to hell. Maybe My Hero will never fix the hyperdrive engine, but don’t count on that. He is obsessive about his work and the hyperdrive is always on his mind. Those five-armed mechanics of his are good. I think kzin science is much better than we supposed back on … dammit, I can’t even remember the name of my base. It begins with a J, I’m sure. It has the same name as the rock at the head of the Mediterranean Sea. Tomorrow I’ll remember.

I have no idea whether My Hero is a great scientist or only a mediocre one. I do know that the aids he has available to him terrify me. I’ve seen him tackle problems that make me chuckle. I relish the decade he’s going to spend beating his brains out—and then he just looks up the answer in that ding-bat of his, tailors the answer to his needs and zips on to the next problem. An answer might be buried in the work of some obscure kzin scholar who lived when the Romans were raping the … whoever the hell they were … and he can zero in on that answer faster than I can slurp a bowl of soup even if he starts with the wrong question. The ease with which he can search makes up for his lack of curiosity. God help us if they get the hyperdrive!

And then again maybe it doesn’t matter about the Shark. Nobody has a monopoly on science. My grandfather used to say that you can’t build a dike with a single brick. There … I should remember the name of my grandfather and I can’t. He had a white beard and a silver handled cane. Grandmother? Should I remember a grandmother? It is gaps like that which drive me wild.

Day 12

I’ve been neglecting my journal. Brunhilde has been sick. My Hero surprised me and ran off a simulation on his ding-bat’s human brain model and came up with some medicine that helps. He says it won’t work for long. Brunhilde doesn’t have a normal human brain anymore (he says). Something is running amok in there and doing irreversible haywiring. A side effect of the long ago experiment.

Day 17

I never thought a ratcat had a sense of beauty. But when My Hero looks at me I know he is seeing beauty. He didn’t used to see me as beautiful. On Earth, I remember Earth, they have stories about what happens to sailors who spend so much time away from their women. Am I starting to think My Hero is beautiful? He’s graceful. But I go cross-eyed when I look at him. After all these years, he still scares the shit out of me. I’m living in a palazzo for kzinrretti. He put me there. That scares the shit out of me.

Day 21

Today My Hero took me out into the City of Sin to show me what my UNSN colleagues have done. He cobbled together an atmosphere suit for me, awkward but serviceable. I wouldn’t want to take it into space.

General Whatzisname was right. War is hell. Parts of the city around the power station are utterly devastated. That kind of annihilation is so complete that the horror is muted and melted into a dissonant abstract sculpture.

It is the least damaged parts of Sin that give me the heebie-jeebies. The preserved corpses make it a museum of horror.

I flashed on Earth, vividly. I once walked over an American Civil War battlefield. It was only a pile of well-tended mounds that might once have been trenches if you exercised your imagination. The thousands of corpses spread over that field disappeared without a trace within months—five centuries before I was born. I suspect that the trenches had collapsed within a year, by then already overgrown with weeds.

Here there are no weeds. Here the corpses remain, freeze-dried and pickled in the gases of Sin. How long will it take to banish the horror? Sin does have an active atmosphere. Eventually I suspect that drifting dust will sanitize this speck of man-kzin history.

I can’t describe how strange it was for me to walk through the gloom of the Chiirr-Nig household with my giant Hero, trying to imagine how a kzin patriarch ran all that, trying to imagine My Hero as a kit. He showed me the very spot where his father murdered his son, the half-brother of my power-driven master. In this one walk I saw a greater range of kzin emotion than I knew existed. He introduced me to his father, quite formally, still frozen in the rictus agony of suffocation, trying to reach his oxygen mask. The evidence of a total surprise attack is everywhere.

Long ago