Man-Kzin Wars V by Larry Niven (people reading books txt) 📕

remained to show. Now it was simply a slender, 200-meter-long spindle hastily fitted out with inertial thrusters, regenerative weapons, sensors and controls, sleeping cocoons and energy pods, and a massive hyperdrive engine, assigned a small scratch crew, and pressed into blockade-and-reconnaissance service—although the Navy preferred to say "deep-space survey."

As to who was right in the debate, Jook or Gambiel, and whether the Patriarchy was indeed ready for another fight, Jared Cuiller wasn't even trying to decide anymore. About the mass of the approaching body, the navigator probably knew more than Daff Gambiel. But about the warmaking capabilities of the Patriarchy, Cuiller would trust the weapons officer's instincts over Hugh Jook's. After all, the Jinxian had trained to take on the kzinti hand-to-hand.

But, then, maybe in this debate the more relaxed Jook was right. Gambiel's Hellflare tattoo might be making him too eager for a fight. Cuiller tried to place himself in the mental state of a human male who had prepared most of his adult life for just one battle. To pit his entire strength in one synaptic burst against 200 kilograms of angry catflesh tipped with ten-centimeter claws. That would put unique stresses on anyone's body and mind. After all, could a man be truly at ease knowing exactly how, if not when, he will die?

But, then, the tactical computers at HQ did back up Gambiel's version. Jook was being too simplistic in thinking that the last war had cured the kzinti of their natural instincts. The universe was a perpetual challenge to the kzin psyche, pure and simple. It was there to be stalked and seized. And perhaps this time they would practice a more subtle form of stalking and less outright seizing.

No, Cuiller sighed, neither of his crewmen had the final answer. Nor, probably, did the technical experts at Naval HQ. And Cuiller himself didn't, either. He was just going to follow fleet orders and see.

* * *

Nyawk-Captain dreamed of monkeys and his fingers twitched. He hung in the control cradle at his leading station aboard Cat's Paw. The interior spaces of the former Scream of Vengeance-class interceptor were eaten up with extra ship's stores and a station cradle for a third kzin. So the crew members had no private space to themselves at all and only a cruelly limited area where they could loosen their limbs—one at a time, in rotation. Otherwise they ate and slept while plugged into their panels. And dreamed there, too.

For most kzinti, if their dreams ever crossed the sweat-scent of human flesh or their minds played on the shallow softness of a human face, the experience was pleasurable. Then breath quickened, the tail twitched, ears fanned out, fingers and toes splayed slightly, and the tips of razor claws peeked involuntarily from behind black pads.

But when the monkeys danced in Nyawk-Captain's dreams, his breath stopped, his tail went stiff and his fingers curled nervously, anchoring his bulk into the crash couch. Nyawk-Captain—reputed to be the best fighter pilot of his generation—in his secret dreams was terrified.

Years ago, during Most Recent War, he had been Tactician aboard a much larger vessel. His duties there had once required him to be present when Telepath peeled the brain of a human prisoner. This specimen also served as Tactician aboard his own human ship, although he had his own name, too. Chatterjee. While Telepath gnawed at the edges of Chatterjee's awareness, seeking the plan of an expected attack, the human had thrown up unrelated memories and concepts as a screen. And Telepath had reported them faithfully. One of these memories—or perhaps it was simply an evasion—concerned a person called Hanuman.

This Hanuman was either a clan chief or a god, depending. Chatterjee did not make the distinction clear. Hanuman spoke and moved as a full-grown person, and yet he had a sense of morality more suited to a kzitten. He told lies and untrue stories for amusement. He played tricks on his enemies in battle, dodged their arrows, and routinely ambushed them instead of engaging them openly and honorably. Then he danced and laughed when they were discomfited.

From Chatterjee's telling, filtered through Telepath's own awareness, it was uncertain that Hanuman was even, in fact, a human Being. One part of him was otherness: pre-human or perhaps proto-human. Chatterjee sometimes called him a "monkey." Monkeys, it seemed, had no true adulthood but lived and danced as lively, happy, cruel children all their lives. They screamed and threw things. They told lies, stole from each other, taunted their peers and inferiors, and made a joke of anything they could not desecrate or steal. They ate fruit out of the trees or the flesh of their dead, and copulated with great frenzy at any time.

These monkeys depicted an aspect of personal behavior that stayed in Tactician's, later Nyawk-Captain's, mind long after this Chatterjee was dead. Any creatures that could waste such a huge fraction of their lifetimes in frivolous, carefree, and even disgusting activities—and not die of them—must be very powerful indeed and have brain capacity to spare. They must be devastating.

This Hanuman, whom Chatterjee had revered as either leader or god, a man or a monkey, embodied for Nyawk-Captain all that was creative, lively, resourceful, and awful about the humans. This god had no fighting skills worth mentioning but instead defeated all his enemies by trickery. Low, unworthy—and devastating.

The interrogation incident had driven another nail of fear home into Nyawk-Captain's brain. While this Chatterjee was a full human, he considered himself different from those around him, even from his shipmates. He thought of himself as "Hindu-human," and seemed to be more Hindu than human in the shape of his life and thoughts.

Nyawk-Captain tried to imagine sapient beings who could endure diverging breeds and varieties—Hindu, Chinese, Belter, Lunatic, Russky, American, Wunderlander, Englishman, Jinxian—and not fight each other down to a single pride governed by a single patriarchic family! The fact that so many could live and work together, without continual killings, spoke to Nyawk-Captain of great inner resources, huge mental