Man-Kzin Wars XIV by Larry Niven Read Free Book Online Page B

committee. They will have several candidates, I daresay, and the selection committee will interview all of them. I shall have to explain rather a lot of things to you.”
    “So there is hope for me. The selection committee may reject me,” Vaemar reflected out loud.
    “They might be that stupid. I don’t think so, but it is possible. It depends on the alternatives. You will, of course, do your best to get selected.”
    “Yes, of course,” Vaemar said without any enthusiasm. And he would indeed have to do his best, any less would be dishonorable. Whatever doing his best might mean.
    “What is it that makes this urgent?” Vaemar asked.
    The abbot looked up at the silent stars. “Many small things. And just possibly one big thing. You know I have many sources of information, some not perhaps as reliable as others. And urgent is a word with many nuances.”
    “I do not understand you,” Vaemar told him.
    The abbot sighed. “There are some hints, some fragments which I have pieced together. I may be wrong. I hope I am.”
    “Go on.”
    “I have some reason to think there may be something out there. Further along the spiral arm. Something coming this way. You know, of the few sentient species in the galaxy that we have ever recorded, the thing I notice is how much we share. We can understand in some limited way what sort of things drive us. All men are brothers. Well, cousins at least, and we know this from genetics. But it goes deeper than that. You and I are very different in our genetics, but the universe has shaped us, and we have responded in ways which although different show striking similarities. We are both made up of star-stuff, both evolved in the Goldilocks Zone through similar sets of fantastic improbabilities. We both understand what truth and honor and justice mean, and they are important to both of us. You have your Fanged God, and we our Bearded God, but they might almost be two faces of the same entity. Both of them demand truth, honor and justice of us.”
    “But your Bearded God also demands that you love your enemy,” the kzin rumbled softly. “And the Fanged God does not.”
    “True,” Boniface admitted.
    “Perhaps the Fanged God feared such a dreadful weapon being loosed in the universe.”
    The abbot’s eyes lit. “Ah. You have seen that. Good. All the same, our response to the demands made upon us makes us almost brothers. And brothers, of course, fight and squabble with each other. But there may be something outside which is very different from all the species we know. Something terrible, something which threatens us all. And something which neither man nor kzin separately could face. It has been hinted to me that there is some sort of plan to forge a deeper alliance between our species, and perhaps others. Perhaps both our gods want that, and something acts for both of them. Perhaps because one day, perhaps a thousand years from now, we shall have to meet something so terrible that only a melding of the traditions of our people can hope to overcome it. The odds against our ships first encountering each other in the way they did were long indeed.”
    “How stupid our telepaths were then, to discover you had no weapons but kitchen knives, and to miss entirely that your chief religious symbol was an instrument of torture!”
    The abbot nodded to concede the point and then went back to his own. “Who knows what lies in wait for us, further up the spiral arm? You know how we got the hyperdrive: a race that lives in deep space—a race we knew nothing of—contacted our colony at Jinx and sold the colonists a manual. You know the size of space. Beyond your ability to imagine, or mine. Can that have been blind chance? I have heard a theory—no, less than a theory, a fingertip feeling—that our wars have been made by others, in order to forge in that flame some power that may be needed one day to defend truth and honor and justice and perhaps, yes, even love, and save them from something