The smell of sex hung in the air like mist and young nameless warriors lurked about the lobby avoiding eye contact with each other. His ears twitched as he met Iggy Larsson, the large, barrel-shaped human in charge of this outfit. If you considered your average human to be a monkey, Larsson was a silverback gorilla.
“Bobcat!” The human flashed him a lascivious smile full of blunt, plant-crunching teeth, “We got some new merchandise brought over from Kzin itself!”
“Foliage must quake in terror at the sight of those incisors,” Bobcat snarled acidly.
Larsson slapped his back in a rude show of familiarity and the kzin’s ears fell flat on his head, then rose slowly with well-practiced restrained ire. He clamped down his mind, not wanting to sully it with what passed for Larsson’s thoughts. “Before you do your thing, I need to show you something I think Yearrl-Captain would be very interested in.”
A slow clicking noise in Bobcat’s throat began to announce his growing frustration, but he allowed the corpulent human to lead him into a small room housing a single orange female and a small, utterly black kit still suckling. All the frayed fur on Bobcat’s wiry frame flattened in horror. “I thought you euthanized all kittens born here?”
“Oh we do, except for a few females to replenish our stock, but something is different about this dusky little runt. At first, I thought it was the shock of his color. I’ve never seen a melanistic kzin before, but I just can’t bring myself to put it down. I wanted to know if it’s got some telepathic juju mucking with my brain. That’s where you come in.”
Larsson harshly grabbed the measly kitten by the scruff of his neck and lifted him up for the kzin’s inspection. The dull female made no attempt to rip the human’s arm off, so Bobcat guessed she was sedated. The telepath grudgingly loosened his mental grip and permitted a swift sweep of the kit. A low-grade telepathic cry emanated from this tiny nugget of neutron star, repeating the same reflexive message like an emergency distress beacon: protect me. Care for me. Love me.
Bobcat tore himself away and walked out of the cramped, suffocating room, “Yes, he’s got telepathic potential.”
“I knew it!” Larsson absently tossed the kitten back at his mother.
Bobcat’s nostrils flared and the long-denied scent of estrous pheromones entered his body, grounding him in the material world. He tried to control his arousal in front of the leering human. “I’m going to do now what I came here to do!” he roared as his mind went blank.
The old telepath bounded like a fresh kitten down the hall and into a gaudy room unsuccessfully made up to look like a palatial harem chamber. He pounced on the three females anxiously pacing the room. Something buried deep in the back of his mind understood that these little freedoms allowed him by Yearrl-Captain were as much a part of his imprisonment as his addiction to the sthondat drug. At the moment though, he didn’t care.
Hours of painful clawing and biting ensued, but he savagely took each of the kzinretti like a hot-blooded warrior conquers planets. No, whole systems!
When the females were all soundly vanquished, Bobcat lay on the large fur-covered waterbed surrounded by the sweaty bodies of the females. The bed gently rocked back and forth with the rhythm of their panting. He thought lazily of the kitten and its primal, drilling petition. He imagined the kit all grown up: a drug-sick wraith aboard some ship, pitch black as a tear in the hull. The crew would not be able to ignore him as they do the rest of us. Their hatred would be sharper. I should kill him now, he thought. First Telepath should have killed me in the crèche instead of training me. The tight hold on his mind slowly melted away with the drowsy warmth of the kzinretti and the swirling sthondat drug still in his system. He brushed against three distinctly female, quietly desperate minds filled with thoughts he found all too familiar.
Bobcat leapt out of bed, ears erect, small numb of a tail thrashing and he glared at the complex females like a trapped animal. “You’re sentient?” he whispered in the Heroes’ Tongue.
No answer. They only clustered around themselves for protection. Cautiously, he walked over to the small case buried in the clothes he had carelessly strewn about the room, took out a syringe and pushed the intimate needle into the crook of his arm. The hit was instantaneous. Tentatively, he scanned their thoughts again and noticed they were thinking neither in the Heroes’ Tongue nor in the limited females’ tongue. They spoke a sort of primitive cousin of the Heroes’ Tongue. A more precise scan revealed that they were taken from a remote, underdeveloped region of Kzinhome. He felt their longing for a dense blond jungle nestled between majestic mountains. The priesthood that cultivated meekness in females had never tampered with their bloodline.
After decades of mastering the humans’ monotonous grunts, he easily learned the rich and rumbling tongue clearly birthed by a kzin larynx, “Can you understand me?” he asked. He knew metaphysically that they could, but he still disbelieved it.
Fear and hope flared in them like a triple star system cascading into a super nova. The psychic blast charred his soul into a black silhouette. He desperately tried to shield himself from the torrent of their minds. Most telepaths are weakened by their rampant empathy, but Bobcat had learned early on to shut his mind like a clenched jaw. It was a trick that allowed him to do some of the more hands-on jobs of his career as Devourer’s Telepath, but now he was paying it back with interest. He profoundly understood their oppression; after all, was he not a despised slave himself?
After a short time one of them, the gorgeous golden one, Raxa, unaccustomed to speaking out loud, hissed, “Yes.”
“Will you help us?” another female, with blue crystalline eyes, Xast, growled pleadingly, and for the first time in his long and miserable life, Bobcat saw himself as they saw him, not as cripple or a man-eater, but as a Hero.
His knees buckled and he collapsed onto all fours. “I will,” he spat and braced himself for another annihilating wave of hope.
Bobcat fled the emotional singularity created by the psychic kitten and cogent females. Larsson yelled out to him, “I took the liberty of calling Yearrl-Captain and he wants that kitten, said he’ll transfer payment when it’s on his ship.”
Bobcat hurried down the street. His mind whirled. He needed to ground himself, sink his teeth into something warm and bloody, something solid. He noticed another old kzinti building, dots and commas above the doorway read SERENGETI: AUTHENTIC EARTH GAME. Hunger welled up as the effects of his last shot of sthondat extract slowly drained from his system. He would never be allowed in the public hunting park, so he ducked inside the eatery.
The place was deserted except for two local kzintoshi hunched over the gleaming red carcass of an animal no longer recognizable. Bobcat entered a feeding stall and punched up something called a zebra.
Escape was the only option. Take the kitten and the sentient kzinretti and go. There was only one place in all the universe a tattered old telepath with his stolen harem could go. He had grown up with the legends. He needed help of course. Bobcat used the ebbing traces of his telepathic power and unlocked all the remaining blocks and compartments he had so meticulously put up around his mind. It was easy after the onslaught at the Temple of Sekhmet.
He instantly caught an image of the ARM Agent who had been tracking him, a dark young woman, though of course, youth could be deceptive with these humans. She wore the blue uniform of Canyon police, but her true employers were the UN back in the Sol system. Her hair and eyes were black streaked with violet, a cosmetic allusion to her flatlander past. She was all muscle, with enough body fat to make her absolutely delicious. He sent her an image of Serengeti and asked her to join him for dinner. Then, he sat and meditated on his predicament.