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

or refurbished. The desk had never been cleaned and when Short-Son tried to clean it, the edges and pockets still stained his hands.

The superstructure seemed to have been designed by Jotoki; they could swing from platform to platform with ease—trees were their natural medium—but it seemed to shake under kzin weight and frustrate his attempts at climbing. He didn’t like to look down. His ever-present Jotok companion always watched him patiently with one eye, other eyes on handholds and general surveillance.

The language he had to learn drove him crazy. It was a corruption of the Hero’s Tongue that didn’t hiss or rumble, but flowed and chirped. Worse, the expressiveness of the Hero’s Tongue had been disemboweled—there were no more insults, the military idiom was gone, the mollifications and flattery were gone. What remained was a utilitarian ability to describe, to point, to anticipate. With a language like that, a slave wouldn’t even be able to think about revolt—but it was annoyingly bland for a kzin to speak.

However, learning the patois gave Short-Son the first power he had ever had. If he asked a question of any of the Jotok who worked for him, the slave would stop working and explain very carefully whatever he wanted to know. Nobody teased him. Nobody insulted him. Nobody told him that a warrior didn’t need to know that. He didn’t have to phrase his questions to flatter, or worry that they might insult. He just got answers. If he grinned, he got answers quickly.

So absorbed was he in learning the craftsmanship of gravitics and puzzling over the theory and mathematics of it, that he forgot the games that young warriors play, forgot that they were still hunting him down. They almost found him. After one of his shifts at the motoryard, while he was hurrying toward the shops that served the local factories, his mind occupied with the remembered taste of a vatach snack he was about to buy, he spotted a member of Puller-of-Noses’s pride, waiting, watching, seeming to be busy doing nothing while he lounged beside the empty cages outside of the meat shop.

Short-Son backed up, fear driving him to return to his dim little desk on the vast floor of the motoryard. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t stay here. He couldn’t leave. He chose instead to go up—the yard maintained a grassland park up there for their kzin workers. It was empty at this hour, but the tall grass soothed him and he had an overview of the shops and the giant freight elevators that rose to the surface. He stayed here under the artificial light, repressing the growlings of his hunger, waiting, waiting until he was sure his enemy was gone. Then he sneaked back home to his father’s compound, ashamed.

It didn’t matter. He was sent with a crew into space to install new drives in a Hunting Prowler that had recently come in from Kzrrosh on its way to Wunderland to join the armada forming against the monkeys. It was his first time in space. And it was the first time he had ever seen a Hunting Prowler whole. Nothing of the experience was familiar, the deep space armor that constrained him, the sled that was bringing him closer, the bulky Jotok armor that extended his slaves’ reach by a full metallic hand.

The spheroidal warship was one of the smaller kzin naval killers. Short-Son’s chief slave pointed out a larger battleship in the far distance, a red dot moving in the light of R’hshssira, but their Hunting Prowler, close as it was, seemed far more formidable, studded with weapon pods, sensor booms, control domes, drive field ribs, and boat bays with a shuttle drifting alongside. Still, for the moment it was helpless—its motor was gone, the new one still held in the claws of the shuttle, uninstalled.

Hssin rolled beneath them, clotted red, like another giant battleship. It was more than illusion. From Hssin, Wunderland had been conquered. Hssin still attracted warcraft from ever more distant regions of the Patriarchy as the news of the monkeys spread at the unhurried pace of light. The kzin fought their battles that way. Reinforcements arrived for a generation after the battle was won. Sometimes they were needed, sometimes not. In this case the latecoming Conquest Warriors were needed, for the star-swinging monkeys still owned unconquered systems.

Under the stars, maneuvering the giant gravitic motor into this lethal ship of conquest, Short-Son first thought that perhaps he too might be able to join the armada being thrown against Man-sun. His power gave him the illusion that he was a real warrior. It felt very good. With magnetic boots on the hull of the kzin ship, his ship, he could look up and imagine what it would be like to destroy the ships of men.

But the very same day he returned from space, the watcher for the pride of Puller-of-Noses was there, waiting patiently by the meat shop, waiting for him. He had thought that the glory of space had reformed him. He had given the power to travel between the stars to a valiant ship of prey, juggled that monstrous motor in his own arms! Didn’t that give him the power to crush all fear? to become a warrior?

Yet it took only a second sighting of the watcher to trigger all the cowardice he had ever known. It meant that they had found him. Fear! An image of himself that he had brought from space, crumbled. He was no kzin who could carry a star engine on his shoulder—he had been no more than an insect carrying a stone. How to save himself?

Again he retreated back into the motoryard and climbed. It was all he could think of now, waiting them out a second time, hiding. Tomorrow he would think of some better plan. It was a miserable feeling. He stepped out onto the roof into the still tall grass. Why didn’t they leave him alone?

Only when the grass moved did he realize his terrible