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

His silence bothered me. “Well, am I okay?”

Tom picked his words carefully. “You’re not really recovered from the effects of coldsleep, but you’re getting better.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “Those drugs you gave me leave me feeling . . . I don’t know . . . strange. Like I’ve never felt before.” I was more than a little worried. No one ever willingly endured the effects of drugs and medical treatment without the constant attention of an autodoc. I wouldn’t have felt less secure if Tom had been treating me by chanting and throwing powders into an open fire.

“Trust me. You’ll soon be as normal as two million years of evolution can make you. But just to be sure, I want you to start talking three pills every eight hours.”

If he thought that comment was going to make me feel better he was wrong. But I decided to just let it go. Tom looked at his wristchrono. “Slave Master doesn’t trust us. I’ve stayed here longer than I was supposed to. I can’t stay any longer.” He packed up his medkit and prepared to leave. “Ib, just keep taking your medicine. You’ll be back to normal soon.”

I smiled weakly as the door opened and there was the kzinti guard standing outside. Tom smiled at me and then turned to leave. The kzinti guard hardly looked at me before he closed the door.

* * *

The next day started with my dual failure to find either the energy for personal grooming or a satisfactory meatless breakfast. There was nothing to do except wait for the inevitable arrival of Slave Master and Fritz.

The wait gave me time to think about our captors. They were a curious mixture of advanced technology and primitive values. So much for the idea that scientific advances lead directly to advances in ethics. And it was obvious that they were completely unfamiliar with things that every Belter and Lunie understood instinctively. Perhaps the kzinti had been using their advanced technologies for such a long time that they’d forgotten about the nuances of living on a spacecraft like the Paradox.

My thinking about our captors was interrupted when Slave Master arrived alone at my room. Had something happened to Fritz? One could only hope. Slave Master stood towering in the open doorway looking at me.

“Continue ship work,” he said. It was not a question.

“Sure. Where’s your little friend?”

Slave Master said nothing, but just lifted a small chrome box to his mouth and growled into it. Scratchy growls answered him from the box and then the now-familiar feeling of Fritz splitting my head apart returned. Damn that mother-auditing Fritz! If I ever got my hands on him . . . The chrome box in Slave Master’s hand growled again and the large kzinti looked at me and made another cat sound into the box before he put it back into a pouch on his belt.

“You work now.”

You had to give him credit. He was a cat of few words. “I work yes. Today we start repairs.”

Slave Master interrupted. “Not ‘we.’ You. Heroes do not do slave work.”

Who was I to argue with him? I went to work.

The most important problem to solve was fixing the damage to the Bussard field generators because the thrust of the engine would depend on the size and power of the magnetic field feeding it ionized hydrogen. If I couldn’t get enough field generators back on line, then we wouldn’t have the thrust to carry the kzinti ship to Vega and then, I was sure, Slave Master, or more likely his captain, would make sure that I didn’t have to worry about anything else. Everything depended on my actually getting outside and fixing those field generators. If possible.

I headed for the non-spinning section of the ship. Slave Master didn’t say anything, he just followed me, his eyes boring holes in the back of my head. When we reached the transition lock he hesitated before getting in with me. The ladder “up” to the non-spinning section of the ship stretched above our head. We could have used the lift, but why make it easy for the kzinti? And anyway, I needed the exercise. I indicated that we had to go up the ladder and he followed me.

The rungs on the ladder were spaced conveniently for humans, but the kzinti’s long arms were constantly faced with the choice of making tiny little reaches or making big stretches. I hoped this was making his arms and legs get cramped. As we rose “up” the ladder I could feel our weight decreasing and I glanced below me to watch the kzinti climbing behind me. His face was tight and his eyes focused on me like I was to blame for centrifugal force and its disorienting cousin, coriolis force. Tough.

By the time we had reached the rotational axis of the spinning section we were floating in a good approximation of freefall. The transfer hub connected to the non-spinning part of the ship was ringed by the four tubeways that formed the spokes going to the toroidal crew section and shared the slow rotation of that part of the ship. A large hatchway opened into the freefall parts of the ship, but the view was a bit disorienting, since the transfer hub was slowly rotating and the freefall section wasn’t.

I grabbed a handhold on the wall and watched Slave Master get his bearings. I might not be able to read his body language exactly, but I could tell he was uncomfortable. Great. Serves him right for being where he wasn’t wanted. I indicated a corridor through the open hatchway.

“We’ve got to go to the Telepresence Operations Center. It’s this way. Next to the cargo lock.” Slave Master said nothing. Looked like freefall had gotten the cat’s tongue.

We floated down the corridor until we went past one of the coldsleep chambers where fifty of our two hundred colonists floated in cryogenic stasis. I looked in through the frost covered window in the air-tight door. The individual coldsleep coffins were