“You female.” Pronunciation was impaired by the construction of its speaking apparatus as well as by its fangs.
“Yes,” said Selina, staring up from the corner where she crouched. “I am female.”
It was the one which had most often watched her, had pointed out the sanitary arrangements and thrown her food. It was smaller than the other felinoid monsters, not much more than seven feet high, and thinner. The lines of jaw and muzzle were thinner too, adding, with the large eyes and ears, a hint of lynx to the tiger face.
The words were grating and slurred, but she made them out. It was saying: “You are astrogator in the Happy Gatherer. Sapient are females of your species.”
The first thought that penetrated her fog of terror was: Give it a human larynx and mouth and it would be speaking good English.
The second thought was: it is sick. She somehow knew the other creatures she had seen were normal. It all sorts of ways, its violet-edged eyes, its posture, its odor, this creature was not normal.
She found her brain was racing. She could analyze her own observations of the nightmare thing. She felt clear-headed, too. It was as if what had never made any sense to her before did so now. I felt the universe was out to get us and I was right. If she could do nothing else, she could grit her teeth and clench her fists.
She had slept when she could, sometimes with dreams of Earth. Sometimes of childhood, sunlight and the sea she had loved, sometimes darker dreams of the deforming torture she and her brother had endured as her father fought current-addiction, the last sight of Easter Island as the shuttle soared towards the Happy Gatherer to depart after years of preparation. In some dreams loomed the statues of Easter Island which, she had been told, some people had once believed were made by wise and benevolent beings from the stars.
Sometimes it was the moment their world ended: when, the alien ship looming huge before them, autoshields slammed down over the faceplates of their helmets and they saw the Happy Gatherer disappear in a pale-blue glare. Nightmares of the demons, and Rosalind torn apart under their helpless stares. The distant human voices and cries she had heard since. Fewer of them as time went on. Loneliness as bad as terror. In any event it was in the cage of demons that she always awoke.
Several times she had suffered the blinding headaches which she was sure now were induced by the creatures. And now one spoke to her. In English.
She found she was largely beyond surprise. Aspects of the nightmares were compartmentalized from the waking reality. She stood, and forced herself to face the thing.
“Who are you?”
“Telepath. I have no name.”
“Telepath? You mean… mind-reader?”
“Yes. Be calm. I know, despite posture, you do not challenge me.”
“Is that how you know our language?”
“Yes. But time is urgent.”
“What do you want?”
“Speech with you.”
“I don’t mean that. What does your… race… want? Why have you done this to us?”
“Conquest.” For Telepath, it was a statement of the obvious.
“I understand.” No surprise now. She stared up into the tired, sunken eyes.
“I not reading your mind now,” it said, “But for a time I remember thoughts also language. I do not want to read your mind now. We Telepaths not live long and overuse of talent not help.”
We Telepaths… I have no name. Yes, this thing is different to the others. An outcast? Why?
Because it is a Telepath!
I know that! How do I know it?
“So what do you want now? I mean you as an individual. Why do you come to me?”
The felinoid almost swayed. Its ears contracted. Its tail rose and fell. It twitched and tried to groom.
“Help.” The voice was low. “Help me.”
She fought down an urge to laugh wildly. “Help you? What do you mean?”
“Escape. I prisoner as you. Do you not wish to escape? To live?”
“Live?”
“Yes. Alternative is death for both. Even if you male your kind have not fighters’ privileges of surrender or honorable death. In soon real-time you eaten. Your species is palatable and non-toxic. Feared Zraar-Admiral toyed with keeping pair to breed but decided many monkeys available soon. Keep tissue-samples. And soon I am burned out. Each new waking I dread first symptoms. Of our two fates, yours I would prefer. I do not know how much time we have—either of us. Zraar-Admiral and other officers have found monkeymeat tasty… I have not been allowed any of course.”
None of that sank in at once. Then it did.
Selina had decided some time before that she had no chance of getting out alive, though she had blurred the details of her likely end. She had visited zoos on Earth, and, with visual enhancers, had seen captive tigers tearing at meat, held safely on spacious islands surrounded by water and electronic barriers. She had floated in a silent airship over the African Continental Park and seen lions kill. Now she remembered red blood, and muscle and yellow fat pulled away from red and white bones, rib-cages opening like fans, great yellow teeth and bloody muscles buried in the body-cavity of prey.
She had seen holos and dioramas of ancient sabre-tooths at her brother’s museum, where children and adults screamed with delighted horror: the leaping bulk of the Smilodon, the replica leopard dragging the limp body of a hairy hominid, streaming blood, along a tree-branch, the cat’s huge upper incisors fitting neatly into the hominid’s conveniently-spaced eye-sockets, cranial vault fitting with equal neatness between the cat’s jaws and held firmly by the lower incisors driven through the skull’s occiput.
There had been a skeletal reconstruction of that, with Pleistocene remains from the Swartkrans Cave in southern Africa, showing how neat were the punctures of the leopard’s lower fangs in the back of the hominid’s skull, two holes to match those natural cavities the eye-sockets made for the upper fangs… the gnawed skull dropped or rolled into the cave for fossil-hunters, so many hominid bones dropped into it that they formed a geological deposit called breccia… her mind was jerking about what faced her… Rosalind torn and flapping on the deck, Paul gone? Rick? All the rest? The rest? All the Happy Gatherer’s tight-knit crew? Her mind spun into a desperate loop, turning away from that unbearable question.
And she had her deeply-encoded biological inheritance. She did not need to know consciously of the war of great cats and hominids on the African savannah that had impelled her ancestors towards intelligence. The creature staring down at her was the embodiment of terror. Even without the drug, Telepath felt something of the effort with which she controlled herself.
For the first time, a Kzin looked upon a human with admiration.
She breathed heavily, and wiped the sweat from her eyes and from her body. Her next question was as brisk and businesslike as she could make it.
“Where do we go?”
“Steal boat. There is one chance now that may never come again for us. It is Lord Chmeee’s leap, I know, but we face certain destruction here.”
She found an odd lucidity. The prospect of being eaten concentrated the mind.
“Your people are hunters. They would pursue us, would they not?”
“That is part of plan. We must make them care for a mad and therefore useless Telepath and a monkey to pursue, but pursue wrong way. Monkeys on Kzin planets have tricks. You are a monkey. You must trick them.”
“What do you think our chances are?”
“Perhaps one in eight to fourth or fifth power. But random mathematics not my field… Does contortion of your muzzle signify anger? Or fear?”
“No. Amusement, of a sort.”
“I remember. Urrr. But not Heroic for leaping one to calculate odds.”