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

It had been over eight hours since they had come to get me and they hadn’t let me have a chance to eat. I wondered what their physical limits were. I knew they didn’t care about mine, but I did. I looked directly at Slave Master.

“Slave Master. I have finished this part of the task. We must wait for the ship to answer my questions. It will take some time. May I eat before doing more work?”

Fritz saw the way I looked at Slave Master, cringed and moved away from the larger kzinti like he was afraid of what his response would be. What? Was it something I said? Slave Master looked me square in the eyes. “Slaves do not ask, they obey.”

I looked him back, square in his orange tinged brown eyes. “Well this slave won’t be able to obey much longer if he doesn’t get food.”

Angry ripples rolled through Slave Master’s thick muscles, but when it came to the kzinti everything they did looked angry. He growled something at Fritz who mewled something back. Now Fritz didn’t just look bedraggled, he looked positively frightened. And all the while he mewled at Slave Master his eyes were looking down, away from his superior’s face. I wonder what he said to Slave Master? The large kzinti eyed me hungrily. I hope he knew I was asking to be a diner, not dinner. Then it occurred to me, maybe my body language was saying things to contradict my words. I took a page from Fritz’s book, I averted my eyes to the floor.

“Slave Master. I could eat here. The autochef behind you could provide me with fruits and vegetables. I could serve you better if I could eat before working more.” I counted the red scuff marks on the decking while I waited for his answer.

I raised my eyes slightly when Slave Master starting talking and saw that both kzinti were shuddering, perhaps in revulsion. The large kzinti glared at me. “Heroes do not watch slaves debase themselves with slave food. Return to your den. You eat roots only there.”

Who was I to argue? We left.

* * *

The click of the door’s lock let me know that the kzinti didn’t trust me. So what? I didn’t trust them either. I walked over to the autochef and checked to see what it could make. It looked like it was going to be another meatless dinner so I made the best of it by ordering up spicy Bombay potatoes, ghobi sag, and a meatless vindaloo curry topped off by garlic naan bread, raita and chutney. I was glad the Flatlander company that had built this ramship had subsidiary offices in Newer Delhi. Flatlander food was the best there was and this, with the exception of the missing meat, was better than most shipfood.

In a few minutes the autochef beeped and I removed steaming trays of food from its interior. The scents made it easy to forget that the raw stock for this meal had been recycled through the crew innumerable times while Obler’s Paradox had flung itself through space toward Vega. I wanted to work while I ate so I tapped on a keypad and a memory plastic desk extruded itself from the wall.

The data display unit was buried in the wall above the freshly extruded desk. I sat down in front of it and started tapping on its keyboard. It was soon clear that I didn’t have the command passwords needed to use this device to control the ship’s systems from here, but I could use it to access the data records held in the ship’s computer. A few more minutes of work had the system pulling off archival records going back to our first encounter with the kzinti, including video feeds from various autocams.

I keyed a few more commands and was able to tell the computer to do a continuous scan of the current autocam outputs and store that information for later retrieval. I might not be able to do anything about the kzinti just yet, but now I’d know where they were and what they were doing.

That done, I started eating while the data display unit showed the archival records of humanity’s first contact with outsiders. The images played out just like Tom had described while the scent of garlic and garam masala wafted up from my plates.

The kzinti ship approached Obler’s Paradox at a high fraction of c and demonstrated unbelievable maneuvering capabilities. The numeric detail on the window next to the video feed looked like something from a tridee fiction. Accelerations like that should have flattened anything living and most things not. Surprisingly small, the ship was a compact orange sphere, with bumps, indentations and ugly cylindrical protrusions covering its surface. There weren’t any obvious exhaust ports for the drive, but then with something as advanced as they had, perhaps they didn’t need any. Covering much of its surface was writing that looked like a combination of scratches, commas and dashes that I imagined was the ship’s name.

I reviewed the hurried message that the crew had lasered back to Earth, knowing that it would not be read for several decades. Long after our problem was resolved, one way or the other. I ate the last of my spicy vindaloo—damn those mother-auditing kzinti for their theft of the meat from our storage lockers; I loved shrimp vindaloo—while I read the crew’s speculations about benevolent aliens and their hope for possible trade in knowledge and art. All of these said more about the crew than they would ever know. I paused the display while I finished my dinner, the image of the kzinti ship frozen against the stars while the minty yogurt of the raita cooled the spicy tingle of the vindaloo from my mouth. Then I restarted the program.

The images were from horrors long banished from human experience. Two small craft separated from the kzinti warship and moved at breathtaking speed to Obler’s