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

room for such active sub-personalities, not with Fixer-of-Weapons filling much of his cranium. Or so he told himself, drowning the disappointment as an old farmer might have discarded a sack of unwanted kittens.

Halloran met his father on the family estate at the cap of Arcosanti Two in Arizona. The man barely looked fifty and was with his fifth wife, who was older than Halloran but only by five or ten years. The sky was gorgeous robin’s egg at the horizon and lapis overhead and the green desert spread for ten kilometers around in a network of canals and recreational sluices. Arcosanti Two prided itself on its ecological balance, but in fact the city had taken a wide tract of Arizona desert and made it into something else entirely, something in which bobbing lizards and roadrunners would soon go crazy or die. Halloran felt just as much out of place on the broad open-air portico at two kilometers above sea level. Infrared heaters kept the high autumn chill away.

“I’m volunteering for a slowboat,” Halloran told his father.

“I thought they’d been suspended,” said Rose Petal, the new wife, a very attractive natural blond with oriental features. “I mean, all that expense, and we’re bound to lose them to the, mmm, outsiders…” She looked slightly embarrassed; even after nearly a decade, the words war and enemy still carried a strong flavor of obscenity to most Earthers.

“There’s one going out in a few weeks, a private venture. No announcements. Tacit government support; if we survive, they send more.”

“That does not sound like my son,” Halloran Sr. ventured.

When I tried to assert myself, you told me it was wrong. When I didn’t, you despised me. Thanks, Dad.

“I think it is wonderful,” Rose Petal said. “Whether characteristic or not.”

“It’s a way out from under family,” Halloran Jr. said with a little smile.

“That sounds like my son. Though I’d be much more impressed if you were doing something to help your own people…”

“Colonization,” Halloran Jr. interjected, leaving the word to stand on its own.

“More directly,” Halloran Sr. finished.

“Can’t keep all our eggs in one basket,” his son continued, amused by arguing a case denied by his own actions. So tell him.

But that wasn’t possible. Halloran Jr. knew his father too well; a fine entrepreneur, but no keeper of secrets. In truth, his father, despite the aggressive attitude, was even more unsuited to a world of war and discipline than his son.

“That’s not what you’re doing,” Halloran Sr. said. Rose Petal stood by, wisely keeping out from this point on.

“That’s what I’m saying I’m doing.”

His father gave him a peculiar look then, and Halloran Jr. felt a brief moment of camaraderie and shared secrets. He has a little bit of the touch too, doesn’t he? He knows. Not consciously, but…

He’s proud.

Against his own expectations for the meeting and farewell, Halloran left Arcosanti Two, his father, and Rose Petal, feeling he might have more to lose than he had guessed, and more to learn about things very close to him. He left feeling good.

He hadn’t parted from his father with positive feelings in at least ten years.

* * *

There were no longer lovers or good friends to take leave of. He had stripped himself of these social accoutrements over the last five years. It was difficult to have friends who couldn’t lie to you, and he always felt guilty with women. How could he know he hadn’t influenced them subconsciously? Knowing this, as he returned to the port and took a shuttle to orbit, brought back the necessary feeling of isolation. He would not be human much longer. Things would be easier if he had very little to regret losing.

* * *

Insertion. The hulk of the kzin cruiser, its gravity polarizer destroyed by the kzin crew to keep it out of human hands, was propelled by a NEO mass-driver down the solar gravity well to graze the orbital path of Venus, piloted by the two Belter women to the diffuse outer reaches of the asteroids, there set adrift with the bodies of Telepath and the other unknown kzin restored to the places where they would have died. The Belters would take a small cargo craft back home. Halloran would ride an even smaller lifeboat from War Loot toward the kzin fleet. He might or might not be picked up, depending on how hungry the kzin strategists were for information about the loss.

The fleet might or might not be in a good position; it might be mounting another year-long attack against Saturn’s moons, on the opposite side of the sun; it might be moving inward for a massive blow against Earth. With the gravity polarizers, the kzin vessels were faster and far more maneuverable than any human ships.

And there could be more than one fleet.

The confined interior of the cargo vessel gave none of its three occupants much privacy. To compensate, they seldom spoke to each other. At the end of a week, Halloran began to get depressed, and it took him another week to express himself to his companions.

While Henrietta Olsen buried herself in reading, when she wasn’t tending the computers, Kelly Ysyvry spent much of her time apparently doing nothing. Eyes open, blinking every few seconds, she would stare at a bulkhead for hours at a stretch. This depressed Halloran further. Were all Belters so inner-directed? If they were, then what just God would place him in the company of Belters during his last few weeks as a human being?

He finally approached Olsen with something more than polite words to punctuate the silence. A kzin wouldn’t have to put up with this, he thought. Kzinti females were subsapient, morons incapable of speech. That would have its advantages, Halloran thought half-jokingly.

Women frightened him. He knew too much about what they thought of him.

“I suppose lack of conversation is one way of staying sane,” he said.

Olsen looked up from her page projector and blinked. “Flatlanders talk all the time?”

“No,” Halloran admitted. “But they talk.”

“We talk,” Olsen said, returning to her