Man-Kzin Wars XI, Hal Colbatch [story books to read .txt] 📗

to Jinx. That had been just barely too early to be Brennan's work, so the sabotage must have been by puppeteers. She couldn't fault their decision—a telepathic human breeder with a Slaver's memories was dangerous.

"It smells good," was the first thing he said. He was surprised, as well he might be.

"Yes, this has a good recycler. Let's get you familiarized with the ship's controls."

"Now?"

"You surely don't want to be around when I start scattering radioactive thallium. And this area's going to be submerged by then anyway, because I have to melt the icecaps. Now, move along before I have to get the broom."

He didn't understand that, fortunately for his dignity, but he moved along.

"The planer will develop two and twenty sixty-fourths 512s of a Kzin gravity. I've made up some wargame programs to add to the entertainment supplies, and the ship's autodoc is a lot better than your ship had. Tell the Patriarch you stole it from human experimenters, and he'll have to give you at least a partial Name. Damaged data files in the computer will support your claim. Don't go anywhere but Kzin with this ship. If this ship attacks any human settlement I will blow up Kzin's sun."

"How?" he demanded, incredulous at last.

Peace looked at him. "I am not about to tell a kzin how to blow up a sun," she said. A porous tube of a ton of lithium, extruded through the hilt of a variable-sword to half a million miles' length, filled with another ton of lithium, to be placed in stasis in its turn. The end of the wire thrust into a star's core, the central wire's stasis shut down, and fusion propagates violently up the tube to the hilt, spraying fusing plasma out the pores. The shock disconnects the tube's stasis power supply, and a channel of fusion convects heat out of the core and fuel in. Until he asked, she'd been bluffing. "This panel controls the ionizing laser for the ram's fuel—" she continued.

* * *

Something had been wrong with him. Possibly all his life. He had accepted the word of his father, his clan priest, and the Patriarch's Voice without ever questioning them; and now this thing, this Fury called Human Victory, that had shown them all to be fools merely by existing, was telling him to accept its word without question too. Ftah.

From now on he would question what he'd been taught. That, at least, Peace had taught him correctly. No doubt that was against the God's orders, Peace having been created to protect humans. Well, eat God.

Come to think of it, there was a human religion that claimed to do just that. If there was anything to human religion—and, given this creature's existence, it should at least be considered—God didn't sound too bright. There was the tuft of an idea there.

A hand like a knotted branch took hold of his muzzle and turned his head. "What was the last thing I said?" Peace asked him.

Manexpert glared at the liberty, then said, "If I shut down the synchrotron oscillation in the fusion pinch for more than a few minutes of my subjective time, the ship will stop generating the ultraviolet laser beam for long enough to begin encountering nonionized matter, and the ram field may not deflect all of it quickly enough. That's probably what happened to the Evita Peron on the way to Wunderland. Am I listening to you."

Peace nodded once, said, "All right," and continued the instructions.

It finally said, "Any questions?"

"Is all this knowledge in the computer too?" Manexpert asked.

"Yes."

"Good. What would be a good Name?"

Peace's hands, almost incessantly busy, dropped to its sides. It blinked and said, "I have no idea. You could take the Name of somebody famous, that you'd like people to associate you with."

After considering what he'd learned here, and what he'd already known of human practices, Manexpert decided to say, "Thank you."

* * *

After the ship was out of the atmosphere, Peace contacted her assistants and said, "Okay, he's been released back into the wild, you can knock it off."

"He didn't even get to see me," complained Technology Officer over the channel. "I had a squeak and everything."

"You wouldn't have had much effect after Gnyr-Captain's performance," said Power Officer. "He sounded like Hroft-Riit's haunted axe!" He laughed softly.

"I always liked that play," Gnyr-Captain admitted, pleased.

"Okay, you guys, I didn't splice your brains back together so you could do dramatic reviews. I need that free-association on kzinti life more than ever now: the altered body chemistry works, and his paranoia is developing nicely. He's already got a plan, so the next Kzinti War is going to be kzinti fighting each other, and it should be the last. But I'll have to understand kzinti culture better than I do to keep the civil war from sterilizing the planet," Peace said.

"We're on it, we're on it," said Gnyr-Captain. "You just work on restoring us to normal appearance, stealing some females, and finding a planet where we can settle down."

"And terraforming this one just a trifle," Peace said in dry tones.

"In your free time," Gnyr-Captain replied, magnanimous and deadpan.

"Ftah," said Peace, quite well for somebody with no lips. In fact she was amused; she was undoubtedly the first to discover that the slavering predators who'd been humanity's bogeymen for centuries were, in fact, a race of utterly stagestruck hams. The gaslighting wouldn't have gone nearly so well without them—it had been a chance remark by Gnyr-Captain about Manexpert deserving a Name that had inspired it in the first place. She congratulated herself yet again for the idea of reviving their brains with the telepathic region removed; they were remarkably reasonable without it.

* * *

Manexpert's brain seethed with growing convictions. Kzinti were losing their will to fight, but they'd fight one more War if there was a real chance of winning. He thought he knew how to gain that chance: trick God into supporting them.

It would involve remaking the basis of Kzin's culture. So be it. He would