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

Sin. Death in Sin. My Hero won’t let me talk English. Write secret dictionary of Hero-English words. Mnemonic trick. Clever me. Clever Nora. Clever is pretty word. Can read English. Practice. Practice day and night. Easy talk Hero, talk in spits and snarls. Hard speak English. Write English because I practice. Practice. Nora is clever. Now I copy some of words I save.

inkwell pocket shepherd’s pie microscope ultramarine harmonize plumbing joystick windmill insect crawl cornfield tired never-never land tip-of-tongue tanj…

The Nora-beast paced through her palazzo and always when she came to the great circular rug she followed the design around in circles because that seemed to focus her thinking. She was concentrating. She wore trousers. It was something she wouldn’t give up. A narrow-faced girl, nakedly furless, followed behind her closely, sporadically complaining in the Female Tongue.

The furry woman did not forget the girl, and sometimes stroked the child’s hair, but she was busy and concentrating. What she wanted was on the tip of her tongue but it wouldn’t come. Simple Heroic words got in the way. She had to concentrate.

She gave up for a while and ate a meal. She fed the girl. She cleaned up the kitchen. She toured the palazzo to spruce up the rooms. Then she returned to her single-minded concentration.

It started with a hiss.

She knew that much. Finally a broad grin of triumph crossed her face, dimpling her cheeks. She said the word aloud, relishing the sounds, all three syllables! The word did indeed begin with a hiss! She knew it! She repeated the English word over and over again so that she might learn it faster than she forgot it.

When she was sure of her mastery she went to the little niche and took out the book from among the pretty baubles. She opened the book to a fresh page, not looking at the writing because the words no longer meant anything to her and she had a hard time pronouncing them. She knew they were words just like the hissing-staccato words of Her Hero.

She picked up the stylus and wrote her word very carefully, eighteen times, pronouncing it each time with a smile. She knew exactly what it represented. She had the picture in her head. It was important because it wasn’t a Heroic word. Then she hid the book and hid the stylus. It was the last entry she ever made in her journal.

She couldn’t stop smiling. No kzinrret ever smiled like that; it wasn’t part of the hardwiring of their brains to do so. She waited impatiently for Her Hero to arrive. He always came to lie in her bed with her, stroking her fur, making her feel cozy.

When she heard him at the entrance, heard the airlock cycling, she began to mumble to herself. This time she didn’t greet him. She waited coyly for him to come into the stone room with the round rug. She waited until he was right beside her before she turned to him and said her word straight to his face, grinning happily in her victory.

“Centipede,” she said, hissing it out. She had the image clearly in her mind, a tiny centipede furry with legs, legs, legs.

* * *

For twelve years the crew of the Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch stayed among the ruins of Hssin, living alternately on the ship and in the buildings they had refurbished. The kzin’s Jotoki slaves rebuilt the body of the Shark. The secrets of its hyperdrive motor came less quickly. Without a UNSN operations and repair manual, puzzles that should have been solved in days, took years.

Trainer-of-Slaves learned how to impregnate the Nora-female with sperm extracted from the bodies of his previous experiments. He was delighted to discover that he could always arrange to give her a normal birth of one son and one daughter. Jacin died of a brain seizure. Nora never forgot her and the memory made her fiercely protective of her own twins. She loved Her Hero but she did not trust him with children.

In that twelve years of exile the refugees from Alpha Centauri had to hide from one patrolling UNSN vessel. Two kzin ships arrived and fled, and one unsuspecting kzin flotilla coming into Hssin—probably not even aware that a superluminal war was happening—ran into a UNSN ambush while decelerating. They were wiped out to the last kzin, as a cautious Bitch later determined.

The final tests of the refurbished Shark took three months. Trainer-of-Slaves was not aware that the war was already over.

CHAPTER 28

(2435 A.D.)

On the fourth dropout from hyperspace, W’kkai-sun was the brightest star in the heavens, two light-days away. It was fifteen light-years from here to Hssin, and they had made it in a miraculous forty-four days. The Empire of the Patriarch would never be the same. They had reached mighty W’kkai!

Trainer-of-Slaves paused for a moment to consider the event. Fifty-eight years ago, bargaining among the rumor-laden bazaars of this illustrious star-system, the great Chuut-Riit had first sniffed the scent of the man-beast and laid his plans for the Patriarch’s Glory. In that same year, inside the humble Fortress Walls of Hssin, the runt of Hamarr’s new litter had been given the name Short-Son of Chiirr-Nig. Nobody had expected him to live—except his protective mother.

From W’kkai it had taken Chuut-Riit’s caravan nineteen years to reach the outpost Hssin. From Hssin it had taken Short-Son of Chiirr-Nig fifty-eight years to reach the legendary W’kkai—by means of a short cut of forty-four days at the end.

In the meantime how had the warriors of Riit and Nig fared? Chuut-Riit was dead, his sons dead, his entourage slaughtered. Chiirr-Nig, who had chosen to stay at Hssin and breed sons, was dead. His brothers were fried corpses circling Man-sun or dead at Ka’ashi. His “warrior” sons had died in the Fourth Fleet or found valiant martyrdom during that final valiant cataclysm at Ka’ashi-suns.

One son had survived. Only one. The runt, the short-son, the eater-of-grass. The coward. The lowly Trainer-of-Slaves. The survivor.

The Nora-beast beside him was suckling