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

were approaching a rendezvous with either a dark, dead hulk of a star, or perhaps a black hole.

A hundred billion kilometers was still close to the solar neighborhood, as far as interstellar distances were concerned. That kzinti knew more about these regions than humans worried the sublimated Halloran. What other advantages would they gain?

The time had come for Halloran to examine what he had found. With his personality split in half, and locked into a kzin mentality, he might easily overlook something crucial to his mission.

In his quarters, with the door securely bolted, Halloran came to the surface. Seven days in the kzinti flagship had taken a terrible toll on him; in a small mirror, he saw himself almost cadaverous, his face deeply lined. Kzinti did not use water to groom themselves, and there were no taps in his private quarters—the aliens were descended from a pack-hunting desert carnivore, and had efficient metabolisms—so his skin and clothing would remain dirty. He took a medicinal towelette, used to treat minor scratches received during combats, and wiped as much of his face and hands clean as he could. The astringent solution in the towelette served to sharpen his wits. After so long in Fixer’s charge, there seemed little brilliance and fire left in Halloran himself.

And Fixer is just not very bright, he thought sourly. Think, monkey, think!

He looked old.

“Bleep that,” he murmured, and picked up the library pack. As Fixer, he had subliminally marked interesting passages in the kzinti records. Now he set out to learn what the ghost star was, and what he might expect in the next few hours, as they approached and parabolically orbited. A half-hour of inquiry, his eyes reddening under the strain of reading the kzinti script without Fixer’s intercession, brought no substantial progress.

“Ghost,” he muttered. “Specter. Spirit. Ancestors. A star known to ancestors? Not likely—they would have come on into the solar system and destroyed or enslaved us centuries ago … what the tanj is a ghost star?”

He queried the library on all concepts incorporating the words ghost, specter, ancestor, and other synonyms in the Hero’s Tongue. Another half-hour of concentrated and fruitless study, and he was ready to give up, when the projector displayed an entry. Specter Mass.

He cued the entry. A flagged warning came up; the symbol for shame-and-disgrace, a Patriarchal equivalent of Most Secret.

Fixer recoiled; Halloran had to intervene instantly to stop his hand before it halted the search. Curiosity was not a powerful drive for a kzin, and shame was a very effective deterrent.

A basic definition flashed up. “That mass created during the first instants of the universe, separated from kzinti space-time and detectable only by weak gravitational interaction. No light or other communication possible between the domain of specter mass and kzinti space-time.”

Halloran grinned for the first time in seven days. Now he had it—he could feel the solution coming. He cued more detail.

“Stellar masses of specter matter have been detected, but are rare. None has been found in living memory. These masses, in the specter domain, must be enormous, on the order of hundreds of masses of the sun”—the star of Kzin, more massive and a little cooler than Sol—“for their gravitational influence is on the order of .6 [base 8] Kzin suns. The physics of the specter domain must differ widely from our own. Legends warn against searching for ghost stars, though details are lost or forbidden by the Patriarchy.”

Not a black hole or a dark star, but a star in a counter-universe. Human physicists had discovered the possible existence of shadow mass in the late twentieth century—Halloran remembered that much from his physics classes. The enormously powerful superstring theory of particles implied shadow mass pretty much as the kzinti entry described it. None had been detected…

Who would have thought the Earth was so near to a ghost star?

And now, Kfraksha-Admiral was recommending what the kzinti had heretofore forbidden—close approach to a ghost star to gain a gravitational advantage. The kzinti ships would appear, to human monopole detectors, to be leaving the system—retreating, although slowly. Then the fleet would decelerate and discard its monopoles, sending them on the same outward course, and swing around the ghost star, gaining speed from the star’s angular momentum. No fusion drives would be used, so as not to alarm human sentries. Slowly, the fleet would swing back into the solar system, and within a kzinti year, attack the worlds of men. Undetected, unsuspected, the kzinti fleet could end the war then and there. The monopoles would be within retrieval distance.

And all it would require was a little kzinti patience, a rare virtue indeed.

Someone scratched softly at the ID plate on his hatch. Halloran did not assume the Fixer persona, but projected the Fixer image, before answering. The hatch opened a safe crack, and Halloran saw the baleful, rheumy eye of Telepath peering in.

“I have bested you already,” the Fixer image growled. “You wish to challenge for a shameful rematch?” Not something Fixer need grant in any case, now that his status was established.

“I have a problem which I must soon bring to the attention of Kfraksha-Admiral,” Telepath said, with the edge of a despicable whimper.

“Why come to me?”

“You are the problem. I hear sounds from you. I remember things from you. And I have dreams in which you appear, but not as you are now … sometimes I am you. I am the lowest, but I am important to this fleet, especially with the death of War Loot’s Telepath. I am the last Telepath in the fleet. My health is important—”

“Yes, yes! What do you want?”

“Have you been taking the telepath drug?”

“No.”

“I can tell … you speak truth, yet you hide something.”

The kzin could not now deeply read Halloran without making an effort, but Halloran was “leaking.” Just as he had never been able to quell his “intuition,” he could not stop this basic hemorrhage of mental contents. The kzin’s drug-weakened mind was there to receive, perhaps more vulnerable because the subconscious trickle