Larry Niven - Choosing Names

“But those first words. ‘They don’t fight.’ No weapons. That was the Telepath.”

“Then the Telepath was deceived.”

“Urrr.”

I shrank further into the submissive position, not meeting those stares. Telepaths, whatever else might be wrong with us, did not make factual mistakes in collecting data, any more than a hunter mistook a prey when it was plainly before his eyes.

Sometimes Telepaths could get things out of context, or be overwhelmed by the alienness of prey minds. Yet the Telepath in Tracker had spoken with absolute certainty. “No weapons” did not admit of context errors. All Telepaths searched, unceasingly, for allies in our own war. In any case, reading alien minds was part of our training and the Telepath in a lead scout was specialized in alien animal contact. Thoughts flowed about me, some tinged with disquiet. If we were despised, we were also taken for granted as an infallible weapon. Can this enemy beat Telepaths? It was the worst part of our lot to have our minds open to the secret fears of Heroes, but now those were my thoughts also.

Urrr.

Five long fingers. On the cunning and trickery of wild kz’eerkti many tales and legends turned, from the admonitory to the obscene. Some kz’eerkti breeds used stones as missiles and sticks as tools. Some could ambush Heroes in forest hunts.

Bad, that hand-print in Space, as the wreckage of a destroyed Kzinti ship fell in endless darkness before us. Traps, deceptions. In any event, for better or worse, a Space-travelling enemy we knew nothing of.

“Dominant One, there is more. Later, another cell in the recorder was activated. Possibly by aliens sacking the ship.”

Gibbering and gabbling. Kz’eerkti gibbered and gabbled, when they had played tricks on Heroes, or when they pelted Heroes with fruit or excrement from the branches of tall forest trees, ready to scamper away through the branches when the Heroes concerned began to slash the tree-trunks down or climb them.

“Record this for yourself, Telepath,” Feared Zraar-Admiral said. “It may be useful when we meet this prey. AT, translate it. You will allow Telepath to assist you.”

I know now what it said.

“Energy discharge now.”

“It looks inert.”

“Look at the meter: there’s movement there. We should get out. We’ve done what we came to do.”

“Yes, we should get out! I don’t mean just back to the Pencil. You know that ship could not have been alone.”

“I have thought of it. However I admit there were once a few seconds when I stopped thinking about it. That was quite a pleasant sensation, I recall.”

“There may be more cats coming here. I mean here. We’ve picked up other emissions from the hull. Maybe calling them. They could be here… now. Those first headaches the cats may have caused—I had another not long ago. Milder, though, but there.”

“I had one too. Jim said several people did. I put it down to strain.”

“Or some cat probe. At extreme range now but coming closer? Some mind-weapon?”

“Tanj! Do you have to think of things like that? We’ve had nightmares enough since this all began… Anyway, we still have a job to do… There’s a light flashing on that control surface.”

“There’s a Tanj light flashing in my mind. And it’s the biggest warning light there is. Run! Run now!”

“It doesn’t look like a weapon…”

“I say run! Aren’t we in a bad enough state already?”

“We’ve got to get every scrap of knowledge we can. We’ve got to keep transmitting to Earth. Keeping the transmission going is more important than our lives.”

“Can we do that if another warship full of cats jumps us? They may not be so obliging as to leave themselves in the way of our drive next time. Or several ships? These things must be co-operative, with organization. We’ve got the motor, the weapons, the bodies. Enough to keep us busy for years. It’s crazy to wait for them…”

Jabber.

“Weeow-Captain, you may fall the crew out from Battle-stations. Remain closed up at Defense-stations.”

“We have the direction of Tracker’s drift. We track it back. There must be spoor, and Tracker has given us a sign. They did not die in vain. Urn… a light-pressure drive powered by incomplete hydrogen fusion. They use an electromagnetic ramscoop to get their own hydrogen from space…”

A sudden rush of understanding.

A trail of burnt hydrogen!

“You may howl for the dead, and you may howl vengeance for our companions in the Hunt. But no heroes are to die in the mourning. And no death-duels till further notice. No station is to be uncrewed.”

Happy Gatherer

Paul van Barrow waited for the hubbub to die away, waving for quiet with a smile. His responsibilities as leader of the Happy Gatherer expedition tended to make him pompous and even stuffy at times, but he was as excited as any now. There were several projects running on the ship, and a score of impressively multi-skilled people on board. Happy Gatherer was a big ship, hired not purpose-built, but they made a crowd in the room.

“The gravity anomalies are still inexplicable. If they really are Outsiders, they may have some gravity control. There’s another thing.”—He pointed to a projected diagram, a wedge-ended ovoid—“that ship has a sort of streamlining, as if it can land and take off through an atmosphere from a planetary surface. And it’s big. I think that’s also evidence of gravity-control.”

Signals to trustees? The thought crossed several minds. An instruction transmitted now would reach the stock-market in about eight years’ time.

“We signed undertakings,” Paul reminded them, “About windfall profits from new knowledge.”

It had been one of the ways finance for the expedition had been raised.

“If we can understand this new knowledge,” said Henry Nakamura. There was a note of caution in his voice.

“People that intelligent should be good teachers.”

“Are you certain, Paul?” Rosalind Huang’s voice had an odd edge to it. Her eyes seemed somehow unnaturally large under her red-black pattern of hair. She needs reassurance, Rick Chew realized. What’s wrong? This is a great moment. He stepped in.

“If these are signals, we will translate them. It’s difficult, certainly, but that’s only to be expected.”

“A new bunch of careers when we get back,” said Michael Patrick, “There will be a stream of PhDs rolling down conveyor belts.”

“Not only with the language. We’ve probably just set up a dozen new academic industries. Meanwhile, we should have identified some keys, but we haven’t.”

Michael laughed. He had an easy, infectious laugh in almost any situation. Although some thought he did not always take things quite seriously enough, the crew owed him a lot. He had shown a gift, during the long flight, for taking the sting out of almost every problem with some joke. “So we’ve underestimated the difficulties. We’ve plenty of time, and so, surely, have they.”

“Rick,” said Selina Guthlac, “Aren’t we making a questionable assumption?”

“We can’t expect the translating to be easy, but if their language has consistent rules—and surely it must— we will translate it in the end.” The Neuronetic lattices on and in the ship were Lambda Platform. Their cell-connections were beyond counting.

Selina worried Rick. The crew and their successful interaction were his responsibility, and Selina seemed at times to be what another age might have called a misfit. And he had met her brother. Scrawny owlishness in him was in her a hint of watchfulness which reminded one that owls were hunters. Arthur Guthlac’s undirected nervous energy was in her concentrated accomplishment. Like all in the Happy Gatherer she was a winner. Selina had won her way into Space with the sufferance sometimes accorded genius. Arthur had given up any idea of belonging. She could adopt protective coloration and be accepted by most of the crew, nearly all the time. But interdependence in such a situation was virtually total, and, as on Earth, too many eccentricities stacked up.