The Man-Kzin Wars 01 Read Online Free PDF

satisfy everyone, we must allocate. Alpha Centauri-Wunderland, parts of the Serpent Swarm-alone among human dwelling places, suffered kzin occupation, almost half a century of it. Alpha Centaurian men and women endured, or waged guerrilla warfare from remote and desolate bases, until the liberation. Who would question their dedication to our species as a whole?
    At least, it was an obvious symbolism to make them the host folk of the Commission; and Tiamat, not yet into its postwar decline, was a natural choice for the seat.
    “ G ood evening," replied Dorcas Glengarry Saxtorph. The headwaiter had immediately identified her as being from the Solar System and greeted her in English. “ I was to meet Professor Tregennis. The reservation may be in the name of Laurinda. Brozik." You didn't just walk into the Star Well; it was small and expensive .
    Very briefly, his smoothness failed him and he let his gaze linger. Ten years after the end of the war, when outworlders had become a substantial fraction of the patronage, she was nonetheless a striking sight. A Belter, 185 centimeters in height, slender to the point of leanness, she was not in that respect different from those who had inhabited the Swarm for generations. However, you seldom met features so severely classic, fair-skinned, with large green eyes under arching brows. The molding of her head was emphasized by the Sol-Belter style, scalp depilated except for a crest of mahogany hair that in her case swept halfway down her back. A shimmery gray gown folded and refolded itself around carriage and gestures which, even for a person of spacer ancestry, were extraordinarily precise.
    The headwaiter regained professionalism. “ A h, yes, of course, madame." Dorcas didn't show her forty Earthyears much, but nobody would take her for a girl. “ T his way, please. ”
    The tables were arranged around a sunken transparency, ten meters across, which gave on the surface of Tiamat and thus the sky beyond. Nonreflecting, in the dim interior light it seemed indeed a well of night which the stars crowded, slowly streaming. The table Dorcas reached was on the bottom tier, with a view directly down into infinity. A glowlamp on it cast softness over cloth, silver, ceramic, and the two people already seated. Arthur Tregennis rose, courtly as ever. A Plateaunian of Crew descent, the astrophysicist stood as tall as she did and still more slim, practically skeletal. He had the flared hook nose and high cheekbones of his kindred; the long nail on his left little finger proclaimed him an aristocrat of his planet, never subject to manual labor. Dorcas sometimes wondered why he kept that affectation, when he admitted to having sympathized with the democrats and their revolution, 33 years ago. Habit, perhaps. Otherwise he was an unassuming old fellow .
    “ W elcome, my lady," he said. His English was rather flat. Since the advent of hyperdrive and hyperwave, he'd been to so many scientific conferences, or in voice-to-voice contact with colleagues, that native accent seemed to have worn off – except, maybe, when he was with his own folk on top of Mount Lookitthat. “ A h, is Robert detained?"
    “ I 'm afraid so," Dorcas let the waiter seat her. She'd reacquired a little sophistication since the war. “ H e had a nasty encounter, and the aftermath is still retro on him. He told me to come alone, give you his regrets, and bring back whatever word you have for us .
    “ O h, dear," Laurinda Brozik whispered. “ H e's all right, isn't he?" The English of Tregennis' graduate student was harder for Dorcas to follow than his. It was from We Made It .
    The young woman was not a typical Crashlander-is there any such thing as a typical anything?-but she could not have been mistaken for a person from anywhere else. Likewise tall and finely sculptured, she seemed attenuated, arachnodactylic, somehow both awkward and eerily graceful, as if about to go into a contortion such as her race was capable of She