Patriarch's Telepath lay curled in the sun beside the clock, lying on a polarizer-lofted prrstet and tended by two silent Kdatlyno. His body was wasted, muscles melted away and fur thinned by the toxic side effects of the sthondat drug. His eyes were huge in his shrunken face, seeming to stare at nothing as he lay there. Other telepaths entered the mind-trance only when the drug was on them, but Patriarch's Telepath seemed to never leave it. A thin strand of drool stretched from his lips to the prrstet and his breath came with obvious difficulty. To Pouncer he seemed to be dying, but he always seemed to be dying and perhaps death would have been a release from the strange and painful reality he inhabited.
“Approach me, First-Son-of-Meerz-Rrit.”
An involuntary shudder ran through Pouncer as the crippled kzin turned his vacant gaze on him. He stepped forward, not wanting his inward hesitancy to show. Not that I can hide it from him. Patriarch's Telepath was blind, Pouncer knew, but he didn't need eyes to see more than most could ever dream of.
“You will be Patriarch.” Telepath said it flatly, as if it were already fact. His voice was low and rasping.
“Yes, Telepath.”
“We are here to learn if you are worthy to assume that role. You will be tested.”
“Of course, Telepath.”
“Are you ready?”
“Yes.” No!
“You are far from ready.” Patriarch's Telepath examined him through blind eyes. “You may recall the Black Priest's test. This test is more difficult.”
“I was just a kitten then.” Pouncer remembered the huge black-furred figure, his mother's anxiety as he was taken away.
“You are a kitten now. Nevertheless events overtake us. There are tremendous forces at play. The future holds chaos.”
“What forces?” It could only have to do with the Great Pride Circle. There would be ample intrigue there, as the Prides jockeyed for position and status, but Telepath's words hinted at something weightier than the order of precedence. “Does my father know?”
“I am sworn to serve your father. Sometimes the best service is silence. I am doing all I can for him. Right now I will test you.”
“I am…” He stopped. It was said Patriarch's Telepath could not help knowing a mind in his presence if he tried. Why say anything at all? “Let us begin then.” Even as he wondered what form the test would take, the world disappeared and he was alone in a void that had not even the solidity of darkness. He was vaguely aware of his knees buckling beneath him, and then even that touchstone was gone. He flailed wildly, managed to knock his head, and pain flared momentarily, a beacon of reality in the endless nothing.
Panic gripped him and he struck himself again, deliberately and harder this time, but the pain was less and he felt himself drifting away, losing himself. He fought down the urge to slam his head against the ground. There was a limit to how much pain he could inflict on himself, and he knew it wouldn't be enough to save his sanity.
Fear is death.
He couldn't feel himself breathing, and the drowning terror gripped him.
Fear is death. He felt as if he were already dead. I must be calm, he told himself, but he had nothing on which to anchor his awareness and the raging animal at the back of his brain screamed in inarticulate terror.
Fear is death. He repeated the phrase like a prayer while panic savaged reason in his mind. He fought it like a physical thing. Rage is death. But it was all he had to fight the panic with. Rage and terror fought in his mind like wild beasts while his awareness cowered and struggled feebly to make itself felt.
His brain spun and there was no sight, no sound, no smell, no touch. His body was gone and he was dead. More than dead, he was—erased—his very being utterly obliterated; he had never been and never would be, and the universe was vast and empty and uncaring and the nameless horror that dwelled at its center reached out for him and plucked the fragile thread of his ego from his shriveled mind and cast it into that vastness to drift forever screaming, and he yearned for oblivion to end the infinite nothingingness. The warmth and intimacy of simple death would be welcome beside it.
And in that moment he realized he was free. The emotions at war within him were not him. He could not suppress them, but they did not control him. Death could not bring fear, could not bring rage. Death could only bring release, and it welcomed him into its close embrace, and consciousness faded to nothing.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of fellowship.
The UNSN battleship Crusader dropped out of hyperspace and drifted. Captain Ayla Cherenkova looked out into the star-dusted night, watching as the scene slowly rotated in the transpax. She was hoping to pick up 61 Ursae Majoris, Kzinhome's star. From this distance it would be a brilliant flare, powerful enough to cast shadows, easy to find. If she was on the command bridge she would have known whether Crusader's rotation would bring it into view, because she would have known Crusader's orientation.
But she was not on the command bridge, she was in the targeting control blister, observing over the shoulder of the gunnery officer as a passenger. Crusader's weapons systems were powered up, but if she was seriously expecting a fight Cherenkova would have been required to be in the crash position in her stateroom. It wasn't an arrangement she was comfortable with and it rankled, not for the first time on the voyage. Trying to find their destination star was just a distraction to quell her desire to be on the bridge. Crusader already had a captain. She didn't need two.
After half an hour of searching she gave up. If Kzinhome's star was in her field of view, she couldn't pick it out. She was just about to turn away from the window when a kzinti battleship appeared out of nowhere and halted, decelerating from who knew what velocity to zero relative in an eyeblink. The gunnery officer was strapped into his combat couch, but Cherenkova jumped backward reflexively, although if the maneuver had turned into a collision the reaction wouldn't have saved her from two million metric tons of warship coming through the transpax windows at some hundreds of meters per second. She picked herself up off the floor and looked at the alien warcraft. She was not five hundred meters away, bristling with weapons and absolutely stationary, velocity vector completely killed with respect to Crusader. The kzinti captain had tremendous faith in his navigation computer.
Cherenkova allowed herself a wry smile. It may be the ratcat has tremendous faith in his pilot. It wasn't beyond the kzinti to do a precision approach on manual. They might even see it as a point of honor.
“It's huge.” Major Quacy Tskombe had come up behind her, tall, broad shouldered, dark complexioned in an age where social mobility had blenderized most racial markers. He was intelligent and articulate as well; his refined surface made him well suited for a diplomatic mission, though his eyes hinted at dangerous depths to his character. She was used to military men, but war in space was not ground combat, and the difference showed in the way he moved, as lithe and powerful as a kzin, a lethal force restrained by will. He was undeniably attractive — more than that, he was intriguing—but Cherenkova carefully avoided showing even the slightest hint of interest. A liaison would be a pleasant diversion for the duration of their mission, but the mission itself was too important to muddy the interpersonal waters with sex.