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

My Hero gave his mother the funeral rites. His father he won’t touch.

We took a long walk in the old Jotok Run, climbing down through a hole in the roof. Why did My Hero want to show me the very spot where he met Long-Reach? He stayed there lost in contemplation and then he showed me all the trails that Long-Reach had once shown him. I can’t imagine what it was like with smells and breezes, with waving leaves and baby Jotoki crawling out of the marshes. All I saw was a petrified forest from hell. When you stand in the light of R’hshssira you know you are in hell.

Why does he want to show me this when he is going to erase it all from my mind, and then erase my ability even to put it into poetry?

Day 62

Brunhilde died today. That rat-tailed Seventh Son-of-a-Ghoul wanted to eat her! God knows we are short of fresh meat. I had to pull a fit. There is a strange power in being a kzinrret. I can rage at him without triggering his anger. He just gives me what I want. We cremated her. I put the ashes in a delicate little box, carved and inlaid, once owned by a noble kzinrret of the very palazzo that is now mine. The box must have been given as a gift by some male.

Day 63

There is only so much power in rage. My Hero does not always give me what I want. He won’t strike me, but when I cross some line, he just becomes stubborn: kindly stubborn, amused stubborn, arrogantly stubborn, angrily stubborn, passively stubborn—implacable, in other words. (I keep words like implacable on a list so I won’t forget them. My list is hidden with the trinkets that no kzintosh must see.)

What did we fight about? A subject dear to me: The Second Phase of his attack on my brain. He’s going to start chipping away at my ability to process language. I think I’m in for another “operation.” He can black me out with his gismo that runs the gland implants in my brain. When I start remembering again there will be a blank of unknown length. I’ll never know whether or not I’ve had an operation.

He isn’t going to do brain surgery. He’s going to set up a disassembler and hardwire reorganizer. Neural networks resist such changes so the whole effect will be a transition rather than a discontinuity.

He says it is safe. He says that the language processing ability was added last to the functions of the human brain and so is the easiest to disconnect. He says I don’t need language to think with. Of course, I won’t be able to communicate what I’m thinking to anyone else and won’t be able to tap into anyone else’s thoughts, but I’ll be able to think! Great! Isolated is what I’ll be. And I’ll start to hoard trinkets or something.

My Hero swears by the Fanged God and his mother’s nipples that he isn’t the Wild Leaper that he was in his youth when he did all those botched experiments on helpless orphans. He’s checked out what he intends to do to me on the model of the human brain that he built out of the genetic codes he took from the autodoc. He says he built that model so he wouldn’t have to risk hurting me! I’m having apoplexy! (Hurrah! Yesterday I tried all day to remember the word “apoplexy”! Is that the way to spell it?)

Sometimes I love the bastard as a kind of strange friend of fate, but I’d kill My Hero if I could. I would! I would! He says that’s why I must change, so I won’t hate him enough to kill him, so I won’t be intelligent enough to figure out a way to kill him. He doesn’t understand that I only plot to kill him to save myself! He doesn’t understand that we could be friends. Yes, I’m some kind of possession. I’m to be a slave.

I can’t kill him. If I did kill him, his Jotoki would kill me quick as a flash. I could kill them, too. Great. Me and epileptic Jacin up against the universe.

My Hero actually patted me on the head, the paternalistic… Poor me, what he’s doing is working, I can’t even remember my naval vocabulary and I used to be able to curse with the best of them!

“Now, now,” he said. “Changing our personality is very difficult. I tried for many years on myself and despaired often, but still I persevered and triumphed. You will, too.” He thinks of female intelligence as a disease that can be cured.

I think about murder! That is, when I’m not crying.

Jacin follows me around all the time. She won’t leave me. She crawls into my bed when I’m asleep. If she knows I want to be alone, she hides behind my back so I won’t see her. I’ve found her under my pillow. I’ve found her behind my curtains.

Day 243

How can I tell him?

My intelligence is all I have. My language is my way of seeing a greater world. There must be mercy somewhere in that heart of his??????? I try to remember Earth. I no longer know if Ceres is in New York or San Francisco.

After Day 479, Argamentine’s day headings become incoherent, and sometimes are missing altogether. The following is one of the last journal entries.

Day is a pretty word. Night and day.

He told me I will talk 500 words. I know that is clump which kzinrret can talk. I tried remember Earth. I saw cornfields. I saw a red scarf. Cornfield cornfield cornfield cornfield ears of yellow corn, red scarf red scarf red scarf around neck, but remember only facts. Earth is 4.3 light years from Wunderland. Earth whirls in space. Whirl pretty word. Cornfield cornfield cornfield. Remember sight of Earth from space. Earth is blue with clouds. Pretty Earth.

Sin I remember. House in