the field generators to make sure they could provide a stable ramscoop field. He seemed pleased when he learned that this could be done from the Command Deck and that he would have a reprieve from freefall for a few days.
We had arrived back at my quarters when the remnants of today’s juju headache let me know that I should tell him everything about the upcoming tests. So I reminded him that all of the kzinti would have to be onboard Obler’s Paradox when I did the tests since their ship couldn’t shield them from the deadly effects of the magnetic field generated by the Bussard field generators. He looked at me closely when I told him this; perhaps he thought I might have tried to hold back such information. But why bother? Fritz would have just read it from my thoughts when I was getting ready to run the tests. Still, there was something strange about the way he looked at me, like maybe I was more than just a potential meal on the hoof.
“You are becoming a worthy slave. The Patriarchy will reward you.”
I looked straight into his eyes and could read his irritation at my arrogance in, his body language. But I didn’t care. “Yas shu, massa. Serving yous what ah likes doing best.” I wondered if he, or Fritz, could catch the insult in my words. I guess not. He let me live.
The door clicked shut and my medicine timer chimed before Slave Master could respond to my arrogance and insult. Time for my pills and food, followed by more time spent reviewing the data files. Worthy slave Indeed, I snorted as I dry swallowed five of Tom’s pills. Whatever they were, they were working. I felt better, or at least different, than I had ever felt before. But Fritz had hit me hard today with his mind reading tricks and I was really tired. I thought I’d lie down and rest for a few minutes before eating. Before I spent more time thinking about my hatred for the kzinti.
I awoke hours later unrefreshed and more tired than when I had laid down. But at least my headache had faded away. I knew there were things I should do, but I couldn’t remember them. I knew I had to prepare for something, but I couldn’t think of what it was. I wanted… I wanted this to be over. Hell, I wanted to be anywhere but here; even the bottom of a hole looked good from here. I punched an order into the autochef while I walked over to the ‘fresher to throw some water on my face in hopes that that would help clear the fuzz from my mind. It didn’t.
The autochef chimed and a handmeal popped out of the dispenser. But more important, a mug of steaming coffee accompanied it. I was ravenous as I bit into the handmeal. Then I stopped. A bacon, lettuce and tomato handmeal without the bacon? I had expected this but was still annoyed.
The meal took the edge off my discomfort but I was frustrated because right after eating was when I most missed my pipe. It had always helped me to relax and focus my thoughts. But the limited medical resources of a colony world could not be spared for the preventive doctoring that such a nonessential vice required. I had been forced either to give up my pipe or give up the stars. I chose the stars.
Then I remembered just what it was we had found out in the stars. Not our dreams but nightmares from our violent past. Contact with the kzinti had taken all the dreams of my youth, all the hopes of what we might find out in the stars, and made them a bitter taste in my mouth. What was the value of dreams, if reality was nothing but a nightmare?
I wanted to lash out and give back to the kzinti some of the pain that they had given me when they stole my dreams. But I couldn’t. Generations of socialization and chemical adjustment by psychists and autodocs had removed the violent streak from humanity. So I did the one thing I could do. I reviewed the data file from our first meeting with the kzinti. Feeding my anger, feeding my hate and looking for a way to solve our problem.
As I reached for the “on” button of the data display unit I noticed my vial of medicine. I couldn’t remember if I had taken them the last time my timer had chimed. What the hell, they were making me feel good. Taking more couldn’t hurt. I swallowed five of the pills with a coffee chaser while the memory plastic desk and chair extruded themselves from the wall, then I settled down to study the kzinti and the forgotten art of war.
I watched in numb horror as the now familiar images ran before my eyes. I fast forwarded through the initial confusion of the arrival of the kzinti, then slowed the pace of the images to focus on what they did and how they had done it. I studied how they aimed their weapons, carefully, not indiscriminately, making sure that each shot killed its target. I saw how they were confused by freefall. Some quickly learned to brace themselves when firing their weapons, while others never learned and went tumbling away in dramatic proof of Newton’s law of action and reaction.
I carefully studied their actions when the kzinti entered the Command Deck of the Paradox. I could recognize each and every one of their ugly faces. It was the largest one, Churl-Captain, who was first into the Command Deck. He was the one who had killed Jennifer. And just behind him came Slave Master, who disemboweled Chi Lin and then shot Joel Peltron through the face as his hands danced over the navigation board.
No matter what form my revenge took, I knew I would find something special for Slave Master. For the fear he had made me live under for the past week and for what he had done to my friends on that fateful day. I would be sure that whatever I did to him would be painful and very final. I trembled-either from fear or anticipation, I didn’t know which-as I envisioned killing that tiger that dared to walk like a man.
The violence of my thoughts frightened me. I knew if I got in an autodoc now I’d be out cold for weeks as its systems filled my blood with chemical agents designed to bring my violent impulses under control, to make me a safe and well balanced member of society But right now I didn’t want to be balanced, well or otherwise. I didn’t want to be nonviolent. Right now I wanted to take back my ship and my future from those star-stalking tigers. By any means necessary.
I didn’t want to watch the aftermath of the slaughter on the Command Deck, so I switched to an exterior view of our ship on that fateful day. There was the kzinti boarding craft, sticking to Obler’s Paradox like an obscene growth. Hovering a few hundred feet away was another similar craft. I watched in delight as the magnetic fields from the Bussard generators grabbed that second ship and flung it away from the crew section. I knew that the kzinti craft was being drawn into our field generators but I didn’t care. I knew that the magnetic fields were killing the rat-cat crew of that ship and watched in perverse fascination as that ship slammed into the Bussard field generators at the rear of Obler’s Paradox. The destruction to a part of our ship was a small price to pay for the death of those damned invaders. The kzinti in that ship were dead and the damage of their passing was already fixed. Yes, it was a small price to pay.
Watching these images reinforced the unfamiliar feelings of anger and revenge that were racing through my mind. My body quivered with the unspent energy of my desire to strike back at the kzinti. I had never experienced anything like these feelings. I was surprised by my lack of fear over my unchecked desire to strike out at the kzinti. My mind knew that the smallest kzinti outweighed me by over two hundred fifty pounds. But my body didn’t care.
I felt myself tremble with frustration because try as I might I couldn’t think of any way to strike back at the kzinti without dying instantly. I felt desperation and depression because I knew there wasn’t anything I could do to change our fate. We were the product of millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of civilization and yet it all came down to this. Outsiders with technology far beyond ours could take away our future and there was nothing we could do about it. In frustration I turned back to the data display console and had it show me the latest images of what the kzinti had been doing.
It was easy to have the computer find the images of the kzinti using the frame-differencing algorithms used for data compression. In places where no kzinti had ventured, the successive frames showed no differences and the computer ignored them. But let a kzinti come into the scene, then the image matrices changed and the computer recorded the sequential pictures. It was trivial to keep a log of where the kzinti were. I found Slave Master and Fritz had gone to their quarters, though I wasn’t sure what they were doing there, since there weren’t any autocams in the private spaces. Shit Head was patrolling the corridor outside my room, but it looked like he was walking away to check out other parts of the ship. Good. I didn’t like him lurking around outside my cabin. One Ear-how did he lose his left ear?-was patrolling the corridors outside the transfer lock to the freefall section of the ship.
I didn’t expect to find any other kzinti on the ship at this time, since they kept to a roughly human diurnal cycle and most of them spent their “nights” back on their own ship. I guess it smelled better to them or maybe it was because our doors and other equipment were too small for their comfort. The normal complement of kzinti during the evening was just Slave Master, Fritz and two guards. Very seldom did I find other kzinti on the Paradox after the day’s work had been completed. But the computer was flashing an indication that one of the autocams in the freefall section was detecting a change in its image matrix. I tapped a key and the autocam from inside Coldsleep
