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

parts of the moon quite bearable, if not downright comfortable. (Who cares that in a million years or so that gas giant would have cooled to the point to where it could no longer help keep the moon warm. Let the people of 1,957,811 AD worry about that problem.)

But what interested us Belters wasn’t that moon, but the extensive family of rocks circling Vega. Analysis of the ramrobot’s data showed that they were a rich combination of ice, rock, metal and carbon compounds. The stuff of life. Let the Flatlanders have what was at the bottom of that moon’s well; we Belters would have no problem carving out a civilization from the rich rocks surrounding Vega.

Well, at least that was the plan. But something seemed wrong and I didn’t think it was just the imaginings of my coldsleep-addled brain. If we had really arrived at Vega IVb, then the Med-Center should have been filled with glassine coffins being thawed out by the ship’s autodocs. I couldn’t see clearly, but I could tell that my coffin was the only one in the room.

With a click the restraints that had been holding my arms and legs in place retracted and I held my hands in front of my face. Their nails were long and clean. The pale pinkness of my skin surprised me, but then coldsleep wasn’t meant to be like dozing under a tropical sun. My face and scalp were itching and I touched my hand to my face to scratch but pulled it away in shock. Hair. On my face. On the side of my head. I had always worn my Belter’s crest trimmed short, but now it was lost in the confusion of fresh hair covering my head. How could this be? Hair doesn’t grow when your body is a corpsicle held at liquid nitrogen temperatures. When did my head have the time to become covered by a ragged stubble of hair?

By now the glassine cover of the autodoc had become clear of its condensation and I recognized the familiar equipment of the Med-Center with Tom McCavity standing over me, watching the autodoc’s readouts. Tom was an n-th generation Lunie with ancestors going back to the founding of Hovestraydt City, but he had emigrated to the Belt because he thought cis-lunar space was too crowded. He kept his Belter’s crest of black hair cropped short so as to not accentuate his almost seven foot height. (But then he was always a bit self-conscious about being short by Lunie standards.) But now his hair was thickly laced with gray and his movements were slow and deliberate. My god, he was so old. As a crew member he would have spent much of the voyage standing watch. Einstein might let us slow time, but we couldn’t stop it. Tom had grown old slowly while I had agelessly slept my way to the stars.

The cover of the autodoc began to slide out of the way, the sounds and scents of the Med-Center washed over me unfiltered. What was it that smelled like sweaty grass? I tried to get up, but Tom put his hand on my chest.

“Take it easy, Ib. Your body isn’t up to the demands your head is making.” Tom’s bedside manner was firm but reasonable. Even without his restraining hand I would have found it difficult to get up at that moment.

“There’s lots we have to talk about and not much time.” Tom’s blue-gray eyes focused on me briefly and then darted around the room nervously. I tried to speak but couldn’t.

“Drink this,” Tom said. “It’s got stimulants and electrolytes. You’ll need it.” He lifted a squeeze bottle of juice and held it to my mouth while I sucked the fluid through the tube. The moisture helped free my throat.

“What happened? The others . . . where . . .”

“Still in coldsleep. There’s been a problem.” Tom tried to continue but a sound at the door stopped him and focused all of my attention on the other side of the room. The source of the sweaty grass and ginger scent was now obvious. Coming through the door was a creature that walked upright but looked like a cross between a tiger and a gorilla. (I remembered seeing both at the holozoo at Confinement Asteroid when I took my sister there in ’57.) It must have been close to eight feet tall with long arms that ended in hands with four digits and a naked rat-tail twitching behind it. The creature was wearing rough-hewn clothing that looked like leather. Metal shapes with handles, ugly but vaguely familiar and sized for overly large hands, hung from a belt at its waist. As it looked at me I had the distinct impression that I knew what a frozen meal felt like when it got popped out of a microwave cooker.

A second creature came through the door and then a third. This last one was different. Smaller and unkempt. The others walked, no, make that strode, with an upright posture that bespoke an unquestioned belief in their authority. But this one? He (she? it?) walked slowly, hesitatingly, and with a slumped posture that screamed fear. The others had long orange-brown fur with variegated patterns of stripes that showed the obvious effects of frequent grooming. This one, his fur looked as unkempt as the unwelcome hair that covered my head. And his eyes. They were—sleepy? No, maybe not sleepy, but definitely strange.

The large one that had entered the Med-Center first turned to the others and snarled something that sounded like a group of gravel-throated cats having a fight. The others made hissing and spitting cat sounds back and damned if they somehow didn’t make them come out sounding deferential as they surrounded the autodoc. Tom was pressed against the side of the ’doc, trembling. The second creature, whose face had distinctive asymmetric stripes and dark markings around his eyes, looked down at me and then did the one thing I would have never expected. He spoke, in hard