Man-Kzin Wars IX, Larry Niven [leveled readers TXT] 📗

I grunted. "Is it a victory I'm celebrating?"

"Hrrr. We have found the outlaw we sought and more besides. Several major criminal enterprises have been brought down and gutted. We have performed our duties well and with honor and our belts are heavy with trophies. It is a triumph worthy of our names."

I didn't answer directly; I asked a question. "How did you know to come through the wall like that?"

"How could I not know? My office echoes to your voice all day. I cannot close my ears tight enough to keep it out. For years I've been trying to get a privacy field." He growled deeply.

So much for soundproof sprayfoam.

"I owe you my life, you know."

He waved a paw dismissively. "You will repay that blood-debt when the situation arises. Now tell me why you choke on the meat of victory?"

"She offered me as much money as I cared to ask for. Of course, I couldn't take it."

"You are true to your honour."

"You don't understand. I loved her."

"I sympathize with your situation. Your species' reproductive arrangements are overcomplex. Such strong attachment to females can only lead to continuing tragedy."

"No, love is a continuing glory. She loved me too, she just loved . . . freedom . . . more. I would have gone with her in a second if she'd let me."

Hunter was staring at me, openly amazed. "You would have sacrificed your honour for the affections of this outlaw female?"

"It would have been a small price."

His ears flicked and his tail twitched as he tried to make sense of that. He gave it up and quaffed his drink resignedly. "Truly, I will never understand humans."

I had to laugh. I clapped him on the back and gestured for another round. "Neither will I, my friend, neither will I."

Fly-By-Night

Larry Niven

The windows in Odysseus had been skylights. The doors had become hatches. I ran down the corridor looking at numbers. Seven days we'd been waiting for aliens to appear in the ship's lobby, and nothing!

Nothing until now. I felt good. Excited. I ran full tilt, not from urgency but because I could. I'd expected to reach Home as frozen meat in one of these Ice Class cargo modules.

I reached 36, stooped and punched the steward's bell. Just as the door swung down, I remembered not to grin.

A nightmare answered.

It looked like an octopus underwater, except for the vest. At the roots of five eel's-tail segments, each four feet long, eyes looked up at me. We never see Jotoki often enough to get used to them. The limbs clung to a ladder that would cross the cabin ceiling when the gravity generators were on.

I said, "Legal Entity Paradoxical, I have urgent business with Legal Entity Fly-By-Night."

The Jotok started to say, "Business with my master—" when its master appeared below it on the ladder.

This was the nightmare I'd been expecting: five to six hundred pounds of orange and sienna fur, sienna commas marking the face, needle teeth just showing points, looking up at me out of a pit. Fly-By-Night wore a kind of rope vest, pockets all over it, and buttons or corks on the points of all ten of its finger claws.

"—is easily conducted in virtual fashion," the Jotok concluded.

What I'd been about to say went clean out of my head. I asked, "Why the buttons?"

Lips pulled back over a forest of carnivore teeth, LE Fly-By-Night demanded, "Who are you to question me?"

"Martin Wallace Graynor," I said. Conditioned reflex.

The reading I'd done suggested that a killing snarl would leave a kzin mute, able to express himself only by violence. Indeed, his lips wanted to retract, and it turned his Interworld speech mushy. "LE Graynor, by what authority do you interrogate me?"

My antic humor ran away with me. I patted my pockets elaborately. "Got it somewhere—"

"Shall we look for it?"

"I—"

"Written on your liver?"

"I have an idea. I could stop asking impertinent questions?"

"A neat solution." Silently the door swung up.

Ring.

The Jotok may well have been posing himself between me and his enraged master, who was still wearing buttons on his claws, and smiling. I said, "Don't kill me. The Captain has dire need of you and wishes that you will come to the main workstation in all haste."

The kzin leapt straight up with a half turn to get past the Jotok and pulled himself into the corridor. I did a pretty good backward jump myself.

Fly-By-Night asked, "Do you know why the Captain might make such a request?"

"I can guess. Haste is appropriate."

"Had you considered using the intercom, or virtual mail?"

"Captain Preiss may be afraid they can listen to our electronics."

"They?"

"Kzinti spacecraft. The Captain hopes you can identify them and help negotiate."

He stripped off the corks and dropped them in a pocket. His lips were all right now. "This main workstation, would it be a control room or bridge?"

"I'll guide you."

The Kzin was twisted over by some old injury. His balance was just a bit off. His furless pink tail lashed back and forth, for balance or for rage. The tip knocked both walls, toc toc toc. I'd be whipped bloody if I tried to walk beside him. I stayed ahead.

The Jotok trailed us well back from the tail. It wore a five-armhole vest with pockets. It used four limbs as legs. One it held stiff. I pictured a crippled Kzin buying a crippled Jotok . . . but Paradoxical had been agile enough climbing the ladder. I must have missed something.

The file on Jotoki said to call it they, but that just felt wrong.

"Piracy," the Kzin said, "would explain why everything is on its side."

"Yah. They burned out our thruster. The Captain had to spin us up with attitude jets."

"I don't know that weapon. Speak of the ship," he said. "One? Kzinti?"

"One ship popped up behind us and fired on us as it went past. It's a little smaller than Odysseus. Then a Kzin called us. Act of war, he said. Get the Captain to play that for you. He spoke Interworld . . . not as well as you." Fly-By-Night talked like he'd grown up around humans. Maybe