"When are you going to be ready?" he asked Halloran.
"Ready for what?" Halloran asked.
"Insertion."
Halloran, fully understanding the Colonel's meaning, inspected the women roguishly.
"I'm confused," he said, smiling.
"What he means," Ysyvry said, "is that we're all impatient, and you've been the stumbling block throughout this mission."
"What is she?" Halloran asked Early.
"We are the plunger of your syringe," Henrietta Olsen answered. "We're Belter pilots. We've been getting special training in the kzinti hulk."
"Pleased to meet you," Halloran said. He glanced back at the hatch to the cell airlock. "Fixer-of-Weapons will be dead within a week. I can't learn any more from him. So… I'm ready for a test."
Early stared at him. Halloran knew the Colonel was restraining an urge to ask him, Are you sure?, after having displayed such impatience.
"How do you know Fixer-of-Weapons will die?" the black man said.
Halloran's smile stiffened. He disliked being challenged. "Because if I were him, and part of me is, I would have reached my limit."
"It hasn't been an easy assignment," the cultural scientist commented.
"Easier for us than Fixer-of-Weapons," Halloran said, smirking inwardly as the scientist winced.
There would be many problems, of course. Halloran would never be as strong as a kzin, and if there were any sort of combat, he would quickly lost…
Halloran, among the kzinti, thinking himself a kzin, would have to carefully preprogram himself to avoid such dangerous situations, to keep a low profile concomitant with his status, whatever that might be. That would be difficult. A high-status kzin had retainers, sons, flunkies, to handle status-challenges; many of the retainers picked carefully for a combination of dim wits and excellent reflexes. An officer with recognized rank could not be challenged while on a warship, punishments for trying included blinding, castration, and execution of all descendants all more terrible than mere death to a kzin. Nameless ratings could duel as they pleased, provided they had a senior's permission… and Halloran-Kzin would be outside the rank structure, with no protector.
Fixer-Halloran, when he returned to the kzinti fleet, would likely find all suitable billets on other vessels filled. To regain his position and keep face among his fellows, he could not simply "fit in" and be docile. But there were more ways than open combat to gain social status.
The kzinti social structure was delicately tuned, though how delicately perhaps not even the kzinti understood. Halloran could wreak his own kind of havoc and none would suspect him of anything but overweening ambition.
All of this, he knew, would have to be accomplished in less than three hundred hours: just twelve days. His body would be worn out by that time. Bad diet all meat, and raw at that, though digestible, with little chance for supplements of the vitamins a human needed and the life of a kzin did not produce; mental strain; luck running out.
He did not expect to return.
Halloran's hope was that his death would come in the capture or destruction of one or more kzinti ships.
The chance for such a victory, however negligible it might be in the overall strategy of the war, was easily worth one's life, certainly his own life.
The truth was, Halloran thought he was a thorough shit, not of much use to anyone in the long run, a petty dilettante with an unlikely ability, more a handicap than an asset.
Self-sacrifice would give him a peculiar satisfaction: See, I'm not so bad.
Nobility of purpose.
And something deeper: to actually be a kzin. A kzin could be all the things Halloran had trained himself not to be, and not feel guilty about it. Dominant. Vicious. Competitive.
Kzinti were allowed to have fun.
The short broadcast good-byes to his friends and relatives on Earth, as yet un-assailed by kzinti: His father, now one hundred and twenty, he was able to say farewell to; but his grandfather, a Struldbrug and still one of the foremost collectors of Norman Rockwell art and memorabilia, was unavailable.
He disliked his father, yet respected him, and loved his grandfather, but felt a kind of contempt for the man s sentimental passion.
His grandfather's answering service did not know where the oldest living Halloran was. That brought on a sharp tinge of disappointment, against which he quickly raised a shield of aloofness. For a moment, a very young Lawrence Larry had surfaced, wanting, desperately needing to see Grandpa. And there was no room for such active sub-personalities, not with Fixer-of-Weapons filling much of his cranium. Or so he told himself, drowning the disappointment as an old farmer might have discarded a sack of unwanted kittens.
Halloran met his father on the family estate at the cap of Arcosanti Two in Arizona. The man barely looked fifty and was with his fifth wife, who was older than Halloran but only by five or ten years. The sky was gorgeous robin's egg at the horizon and lapis overhead and the green desert spread for ten kilometers around in a network of canals and recreational sluices. Arcosanti Two prided itself on its ecological balance, but in fact the city had taken a wide tract of Arizona desert and made it into something else entirely, something in which bobbing lizards and roadrunners would soon go crazy or die. Halloran felt just as much out of place on the broad open-air portico at two kilometers above sea level. Infrared heaters kept the high autumn chill away.
"I'm volunteering for a slowboat," Halloran told his father.
"I thought they'd been suspended," said Rose Petal, the new wife, a very attractive natural blond with oriental features. "I mean, all that expense, and we're bound to lose them to the, mmm, outsiders…" She looked slightly embarrassed; even after nearly a decade, the words war and enemy still carried a strong flavor of obscenity to most Earthers.
"There's one going out in a few weeks, a private venture. No announcements. Tacit government support; if we survive, they send more."
"That does not sound like my son," Halloran Sr. ventured.
When I tried to assert myself, you told me it was wrong. When I didn't, you despised me. Thanks, Dad.
"I think it is wonderful," Rose Petal said. "Whether characteristic or not."
"It's a way out from under family," Halloran Jr. said with a little smile.
"That sounds like my son. Though I'd be much more impressed if you were doing something to help your own people…"
"Colonization," Halloran Jr. interjected, leaving the word to stand on its own.
"More directly" Halloran Sr. finished.
"Can't keep all our eggs in one basket," his son continued, amused by arguing a case denied by his own actions. So tell him.
But that wasn't possible. Halloran Jr. knew his father too well; a fine entrepreneur, but no keeper of secrets. In truth, his father, despite the aggressive attitude, was even more unsuited to a world of war and discipline than his son.
"That's not what you're doing," Halloran Sr. said. Rose Petal stood by, wisely keeping out from this point on.
"That's what I'm saying I'm doing."
His father gave him a peculiar look then, and Halloran Jr. felt a brief moment of camaraderie and shared secrets. He has a little bit of the touch too, doesn't he? He knows. Not consciously, but…
He's proud.
Against his own expectations for the meeting and farewell, Halloran left Arcosanti Two, his father, and Rose Petal, feeling he might have more to lose than he had guessed, and more to learn about things very close to him. He left feeling good.
He hadn't parted from his father with positive feelings in at least ten years.
There were no longer lovers or good friends to take leave of. He had stripped himself of these social accoutrements over the last five years. It was difficult to have friends who couldn't lie to you, and he always felt guilty with women. How could he know he hadn't influenced them subconsciously?