Knowing this, as he returned to the port and took a shuttle to orbit, brought back the necessary feeling of isolation. He would not be human much longer. Things would be easier if he had very little to regret losing.
Insertion. The hulk of the kzin cruiser, its gravity polarizer destroyed by the kzin crew to keep it out of human hands, was propelled by a NEO mass-driver down the solar gravity well to graze the orbital path of Venus, piloted by the two Belter women to the diffuse outer reaches of the asteroids, there set adrift with the bodies of Telepath and the other unknown kzin restored to the places where they would have died. The Belters would take a small cargo craft back home.
Halloran would ride an even smaller lifeboat from War Loot toward the kzin fleet. He might or might not be picked up, depending on how hungry the kzin strategists were for information about the loss.
The fleet might or might not be in a good position; it might be mounting another year-long attack against Saturn's moons, on the opposite side of the sun; it might be moving inward for a massive blow against Earth. With the gravity polarizers, the kzin vessels were faster and far more maneuverable than any human ships.
And there could be more than one Beet.
The confined interior of the cargo vessel gave none of its three occupants much privacy. To compensate, they seldom spoke to each other. At the end of a week, Halloran began to get depressed, and it took him another week to express himself to his companions.
While Henrietta Olsen buried herself in reading when she wasn't tending the computers, Kelly Ysyvry spent much of her time apparently doing nothing. Eyes open, blinking every few seconds, she would stare at a bulkhead for hours at a stretch. This depressed Halloran further. Were all Belters so inner directed? If they were, then what just God would place him in the company of Belters during his last few weeks as a human being?
He finally approached Olsen with something more than polite words to punctuate the silence. A kzin wouldn't have to put up with this, he thought. Kzinti females were subsapient, morons incapable of speech. That would have its advantages, Halloran thought half jokingly.
Women frightened him. He knew too much about what they thought of him.
"I suppose lack of conversation is one way of staying sane," he said.
Olsen looked up from her page projector and blinked. "Flatlanders talk all the time?"
"No," Halloran admitted. "But they talk."
"We talk," Olsen said, returning to her reading. "When we want to, or need to."
"I need to talk," Halloran said.
Olsen put her book down. Perversely guilty, Halloran asked what she had been reading.
"Montagu, The Man Who Never Was," she replied.
"What's it about?"
"It's ancient history," she said. "Forbidden stuff. Twentieth century. During the Second World War remember that?"
"I'm educated," he said. As much as such obscene subjects had been taught in school. Pacific Grove had been progressive.
"The Allies dressed up a corpse in one of their uniforms and gave him a courier's bag with false information. Then they dumped him where he could be picked up by the Axis."
Halloran gawped for a moment. "Sounds grim."
"I doubt the corpse minded."
"And I'm the corpse?"
Olsen grinned. "You don't fit the profile at all. You're not The Man Who Never Was. You're one of those soldiers trained to speak the enemy's language and dropped behind the lines in the enemy's uniforms to wreak havoc."
"Why are you so interested in World War Two?"
"Fits our times. This stuff used to be pornography or whatever the equivalent is for literature about violence and destruction, and they'd send you to the Psychists if they caught you with it. Now it's available anywhere. Psychological refitting. Still, the thought of…" She shook her head. "Killing. Even thinking like one of they’re so ready to kill…"
Ysyvry broke her meditation by blinking three times in quick succession and turned pointedly to face Halloran.
"To the normal person of a few years ago, what you've become would be unspeakably disgusting."
"And what about now?"
"It's necessity," Ysyvry said. That word again. "We're no better than you. We're all soldiers now. Killers."
"So we're too ashamed to speak to each other?"
"We didn't know you wanted to talk," Olsen said.
Throughout his life, even as insensitive as he had tried to become, he had been amazed at how others, especially women, could be so ignorant of their fellows. "I'll probably be dead in a month," he said.
"So you want sympathy?" Olsen said, wide-eyed "The Man Who Would be Kzin wants sympathy? Such bad technique…"
"Forget it," Halloran said, feeling his stomach twist
"We learned a lot about you,' Ysyvry continued "What you might do in a moment of weakness, how you had once been a troublemaker, using your abilities to fool people… Belters value ingenuity and independence, but we also value respect. Simple politeness."
Halloran felt a deep void open up beneath him. "I was young when I did those things." His eyes filled with tears. "Tanj it, I'm sacrificing myself for my people, and you treat me as if I'm a bleeping dog turd!"
"Yeah,' Olsen said, turning away. "We don't like flatlanders, anyway, and… I suppose we're not used to this whole war thing. We've had friends die. We'd just as soon it all went away. Even you."
"So," Ysyvry said, taking a deep breath. "Tell us about yourself. You studied music?"
The turnabout startled him. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve. "Yes. Concentrating on Josef Haydn."
"Play us something," Olsen suggested, reaching into a hidden corner slot to pull out a portable music keyboard he hadn't known the ship carried. "Haydn Glenn Miller, Sting, anything classical."
For the merest instant, he had the impulse to become Halloran-Kzin. Instead, he took the keyboard and stared at the black and white arrangement. Then he played the first movement of Sonata Number 40 in E Flat, a familiar piece for him. Ysyvry and Olsen listened intently.
As he lightly completed the last few bars, Halloran closed his eyes and imagined the portraits of Haydn, powdered wig and all. He glanced at the Belter pilots from the corners of his eyes.
Ysyvry flinched and Olsen released a small squeak of surprise. He lifted his fingers from the keyboard and rotated to face them.
"Stop that," Olsen requested, obviously impressed.
Halloran dropped the illusion.
"That was beautiful," Ysyvry said.
"I'm human after all, even if I am a flatlander, no?"
'We'll give you that much," Olsen said. "You can look like anything you want to?"
"I'd rather talk about the music," Halloran said, adjusting tones on the musicomp to mimic harpsichord.
"We've never seen a kzin up close, for real,"
Ysyvry said. The expression on their faces was grimly anticipatory: Come on, scare us.
"I'm not a freak."
"So we've already established that much," Olsen said. "But you're a bit of a show-off, aren't you?"
"And a mind-reader," Ysyvry said.
He had deliberately avoided looking into their thoughts. Nobility of purpose.
"Perfect companion for a long voyage," Olsen added. "You can be whatever, whomever you want to be." Their expressions had become almost salacious. Now Halloran was sorry he had ever initiated conversation. How much of this was teasing, how much actual cruelty?
Or were they simply testing his stability before insertion?
"You'd like to see a kzin?" he asked quietly.
"We'd like to see Fixer-of-Weapons," Ysyvry affirmed. "We were told you'd need to test the illusion before we release the hulk and your lifeship."
"It's a bit early we still have two hundred hours." "All the more time to turn back if you don't convince us," Olsen said.
"It's not just a hat I can put on and take off."
He glanced between them, finding little apparent sympathy. Belters were polite, individualistic, but not the most socially adept of people. No wonder their mainstay on long voyages was silence. "I won't wear Fixer-of-Weapons unless I become him."