Man-Kzin Wars III by Larry Niven (good short books TXT) 📕

Her grasp of practical things was akin to Dorcas’, Saxtorph thought. “When did the ship leave?” he asked.

“It was— Now I am forgetting your calendar. It was ten Earth-years before liberation.”

“And whatever messages she’d sent back were wiped from the databases at that time, and whatever kzinti knew the content died fighting. She never returned, and after the liberation no word came from her.”

“The general explanation was—is—that it and the crew perished.” In bitterness, Tyra added, “Fortunately, they say.”

“But if she did not, then she probably got news of the defeat. A beam cycled through the volume of her possible trajectories could be read across several light-years, and wasn’t in a direction humans would likely search. What then would her captain do?” Saxtorph addressed his beer. “Never mind for now. I’d be speculating far in advance of the facts. You say you have come upon some new ones?”

“Old ones.” Her voice dropped low. “Thirty years old.”

He waited.

She folded her hands on the table, looked at him straight across it, and said, “A few months ago, Mother died. She was never well since Father left. As surrogate Landholder, she was not really able to cope with the dreadful task. She did her best, I grew up seeing how she struggled, but she had not his skills, or his special relationship with a ranking kzin, or just his physical strength. So she . . . yielded . . . more than he had done. This caused her to be called a collaborator, when the kzinti were safely gone, and retrospectively it blackened Father’s name worse, but—she was let go, to live out her life on what property the court had no legal right to take away from us. It is productive, and Ib found a good supervisor, so she was not in poverty. Nor wealthy. But how alone! We did what we could, Ib and I and her true friends, but it was not much, and never could we restore Father to her. She was brave, kept busy, and . . . dwindled. Her death was peaceful. I closed her eyes. The physician’s verdict was general debility leading to cardiac failure.

“Ib has his duties, while I can set my own working hours. Therefore it was I who remained at Korsness, to make arrangements and put things in order. I went through the database, the papers, the remembrances— And at the bottom of a drawer, under layers of his clothes that she had kept, I found Father’s last notebook from the observatory.”

Air whistled in between Saxtorph’s teeth. “Including the data on that thing? Jesus Kristi! Didn’t he know how dangerous it was for his family to have?”

“He may have forgotten, in his emotional storm. I think likelier, however, he hid it there himself. No human would have reason to go through that drawer for many years. He knew Mother would not empty it.”

“M-m, yah. And if nothing made them suspicious, the kzinti wouldn’t search the house. Beneath their dignity, pawing through monkey stuff. And they never have managed to understand how humans feel about their families. Yah. Nordbo, your dad, he may very well have left those notes as a kind of heritage; because if you’ve given me a proper account of him, and I believe you have, then he had not given up the hope of freedom at last for his people.”

A couple of fresh tears trembled on her lashes but went no farther. “You understand,” she whispered.

Enthusiasm leaped in him. “Well, what did the book say?”

“I did not know at once. It took reviewing of science from school days. I dared not ask anybody else. It could be—undesirable.”

Okay, Saxtorph thought, if he turned out to have been a traitor after all, why not suppress the information? What harm, at this late date? I don’t suppose it’d have changed your love of him and his memory. You’re that kind of person.

“What he found,” Tyra said, “was a radiation source in Tigripardus.” Most constellations bear the same names at Alpha Centauri as at Sol—four and a third light-years being a distance minuscule in the enormousness of the galaxy—but certain changes around the line between them have been inevitable. “It was faint, requiring a sensitive detector, and would have gone unnoticed had he not happened to study that exact part of the sky. This was in the course of a systematic, years-long search for small anomalies. They might indicate stray monopoles, or antimatter concentrations, or other such peculiarities, which in turn might give clues about the evolution of the whole— But I explain too much, no?

“The radiation seemed to be from a point source. It consisted of extremely high-energy gamma rays. The spectrum suggested particles were being formed and annihilated. This indicated an extraordinary energy density. With access to the automated monitors the kzinti kept throughout this system, Father quickly got the parallax. The object was about five light-years away. That meant the radiation at the source was fantastically intense. I can show you the figures later, if you wish.”

“I do,” Saxtorph breathed. “Oh, I do.”

“He checked through the astronomical databases, too,” she went on. “Archival material from Sol, and studies made here before the war, showed nothing. This was a new thing, a few years old at most.”

“And since then, evidently, it’s turned off.”

“Yes. As I told you, Ib got a Navy observer to look at the area, on a pretext. Nothing unusual.”

“Curiouser and curiouser. Any idea what it might be, or have been?”

“I am a layman. My guesses are worthless.”

“Don’t be humble. I’m not. Hm-m-m . . . No, this is premature, at least till I’ve seen those numbers. Clearly, Yiao-Captain guessed at potentialities that made it worth taking a close look, and persuaded his superiors.”

Saxtorph clutched the handle of his mug and stared down as if it were an oracular well. “Ten years plus, either way,” he muttered. “That’s what I’d estimate trip time as, from what I recall of the Swift Hunter class and know about kzinti style. Sparing even a single ship and crew for twenty-odd years, when