Choosing Names: Man-Kzin Wars VIII by Larry Niven (novels to read for beginners txt) 📕

and commander in our war, and he would have destroyed me. As for the rest, when had one of them given me a good word or a gesture of respect? They had treated me, one and all, as a despised tool to be used and broken. As a Sthondat-lymph addict. I had hated them all. And now I had slashed back.

There was no trace in any mind aboard Gutting Claw that they knew what had happened on the boat-deck. On the bridge the impacts of the missiles I had fired from the boat had registered unambiguously for what they were. Now Systems Controller and Alien Technologies Officer, with Zraar-Admiral’s orders forgotten and Weeow-Captain pre-occupied with damage-control, were fighting a death-duel to resolve the question of whether the enemy ship image had been real or not.

And still, as Heroes sealed red-hot doors shut with naked, charring hands, and, naked or in armor, advanced into holocausts with chemical fire-killers, as they leapt shrieking their battle-cries down corridors in lurid flame-lit darkness, and fought the demon-claws of hurricane winds that would drag them from the ship, as fire-storms hurled white-hot knife-edged debris, as clouds of choking fumes poured into the air-space of the bridge itself, as Weeow-Captain spat and roared his orders in the Battle Imperative (and wondered with a mixture of blazing ambition and a shameful touch of private grief and fear if he had succeeded to Supreme Command) Zraar-Admiral’s barge was fleeing at the full thrust of its motor. There was no eye upon it.

I realized slowly what I had done. I was racing into the darkness of empty Space, to a dim and uncertain goal—a weak ship of alien omnivores—and with a mighty enemy behind.

More than an enemy. Zraar-Admiral had made the location of the monkey home-worlds a Patriarch’s Secret, not merely hiding it in the computers but removing it from them. Now that secret, aboard Gutting Claw, had died with him and the Rick-monkey. I had hoped that with both vengeance and the defenseless monkey-worlds with all the rewards of a High Conquest beckoning, the warriors of Gutting Claw would give little heed to as useless an object as a mad Telepath. I had miscalculated: not only had my escape done immensely more damage than I had anticipated, but the Selina-monkey and I were now not worthless but were the only keepers of a secret beyond price. Further—the constant use of the Sthondat-drug in the last few days had clouded my mind so that I had been foolishly slow to see the implications of this—we were heading for the Writing Stick which was in any case Gutting Claw’s first-priority target.

Torture if we were re-captured would be one of the few things worse than burn-out. Heroes may despise torture for its own sake as an indulgence of the weak, but have no hesitation in using it either as condign punishment or to extract secrets. I knew the instruments, and had sometimes had to read the minds of torture victims. I felt my own fear like a solid thing. There was fear from the monkey’s mind, too, fear of fangs and claws, fear that was in some ways like my own.

Too like my own! And now I was aware of thought leaking not from Selina’s mind but to it: a leak that was broadening to a torrent. I felt-saw walls collapsing, a thing lunging out, growing between me and this female ape.

The fabric of the pale tunnels was suddenly tearing. My fear and Selina’s fear merging. I felt other things merging, too: I knew what it was to have a flat whiskerless face with tiny teeth, udders, a soft, boneless, vulnerable stomach, well-padded rounded tailless buttocks. And a name. Zraar-Admiral had wondered why their tails had been amputated. I now knew they had not had tails for millions of years. They did not live in trees. More than the idea of salt oceans now—the stinging cold of salt waves. Swimming in a tumbling green ocean under a blue sky lit by a yellow sun, wind drying salt-crystals on exposed skin, darting silver fish in the water, quick as viiritikii, yellow ground and green vegetation behind. Weird memories of human mating. Memories of human kittenhood . . . childhood.

More. Emotions which I had analyzed and reported previously had changed as if from two-dimensional to four-dimensional things. A nameless blend of loss and excitement at the sight of a blue and white planet dwindling into Space. I saw myself, saw Telepath, grown taller and more terrible than any warrior, and fear like a Wtsai of black ice in the liver—in the heart, and then Telepath again but changing.

The viewer and the instruments moved far away. And as I returned to them, I was not the same. Nwarrkaa Kishri Zaaarll . . . the Double Bridge of Demons.

It is a term of Telepaths’ Art, to describe an event that is not rare. It is particularly common when dealing with a subject that itself has some telepathic ability, latent or actualized: when the Single Bridge of Demons is erected, the Telepath loses his own identity and becomes the subject whose mind he has entered. With the Double Bridge the process is mutual but may be only partial for each party. Perhaps with the communality of our hopes and fears as a catalyst, that is what had happened here.

I had felt too much empathy with Selina before to regard her as prey, but Selina was truly in my mind now. Because I was Telepath I had never thought entirely like a Kzin. Now I no longer thought entirely like Telepath. There was a monkey—a human—in me too. I was reading the alien thoughts and feelings from experience.

The Bridge, once erected, is not completely broken while both of the two parties live.

I could now enter Selina’s mind without the Sthondat-drug.

And she could now enter my mind.

While both of the two parties live. I could end that in an instant, with one sweep of my claws. Yet I did not. Could not.