Leonie was a patient, dedicated woman, and had established understandings-friendships even-with some kzin, not least Rarrgh, the Senechal of Vaemar-Riit, prince of the kzin on liberated Wunderland, while Orlando, Vaemar’s eldest son, regarded her with fierce possessiveness.
Very few humans knew more of kzin psychology (if that was the term for it), and she and Rarrgh had saved one another’s lives-indeed, that was how they had met. But though she was relatively used to dealing with kzin, including young kzin, she found Marmalade a handful.
The problem was not the usual one among young male kzin of wild, reckless bravery and aggression. Marmalade was a coward. Not merely cautious as Vaemar-Riit sometimes was (and as he had tried to teach Orlando to be), but obsessively, unreasoningly fearful. It was probably something to do with his aborted telepath conditioning, allowing him to feel empathy for other creatures’ minds, but not how to control or use this faculty. His mind had been opened for telepath training but not trained further, and fear had run wild in it. It might also be because he had the typical telepath’s physical weakness, which marked him out in the rough-and-tumble of the other kittens’ play and hunts. Some cowardly kzin compensated for their condition with cunning, but Marmalade had no particularly large ration of that.
When he had been taken sailing on Wunderland’s seas, in the boisterous low-gravity waves, he had clung to the boat’s mast with all four limbs, shivering with fear. When the orphanage kits were taken for a brief excursion into sub-orbital space, he had been found trying to hide from the rollcall, and during the flight he had disappeared, to be found crouched under a bunk, flooding the cabin with fear-pheromones.
He was not only afraid of real dangers, like lightning storms and flash floods, or animals like the poison-fanged Beam’s Beasts or tigrepards, or the crocodilians and other carnivores of nearby Grossgeister Swamp such fears would have been more than bad enough in the eyes of a real kzin, even a humble noncombatant, but Marmalade was frightened also of innocuous things like noise, crowds and strangers.
Leonie had soon realized that Marmalade was a problem. He had to be kept separate from the other kittens, who would have made short work of him if they had been given the chance. To turn him out to make his own way on Wunderland would have been an equally certain death sentence. His very “name,” ridiculous and meaningless, would be taken as a deadly insult to a kzin of real Name should he encounter one. Not only were there kzin at large, there were also fanatically anti-kzin humans, survivors of the Occupation, who, peace treaty or not, would attack any kzin they found alone and vulnerable-looking. In the orphanage he was kept in a sort of protective custody, in one of the isolation units, but plainly this state could not go on for ever.
There was no point in Leonie even asking the kzinti she knew well, like Rarrgh or Vaemar, for advice. They, she knew, would simply consider him a disgrace to the Heroes’ species. Vaemar might live as a modern, Wunderkzin prince, but he was not as advanced as all that. Rarrgh and she had an odd bond and a strong one between them, dating back to the day he had received his Name, but he was an old senior sergeant of the Patriarch’s armed forces, and the motto of senior sergeants of all races tended to be: “There are no excuses for anything!”
They might give him a chance to prove his worth in a death-duel, but she would not bet on it, and anyway, weak and slow as he was, he would be bound to lose. Leonie herself could beat him in the practice arena, wearing heavily padded protective clothing, for he did not know how to even try to fight. And it was a rough rule of thumb that in hand-to-hand combat, a real kzin was the equal of about forty humans. That was not a guess. That kill-ratio had actually been achieved many a time, though of course guns tended to equalize things. (Specially trained Jinxians, the heaviest bipeds in known space after the full-grown male kzinti, might do better with long-practiced scientific kicks and blows, but only, it was understood, at the cost of their own lives. They would get in one strike and no more.)
Anyway, Marmalade was neither fighting kzin nor telepath. He had no other special gifts that would justify his continued existence, even in Wunderkzin society, even as a mere noncombatant. His stooped gait, hunched shoulders and scuffling feet proclaimed “weakling” and “victim.” Fortunately for him, “coward” was less easy to recognize, simply because among kzinti of all classes it was so rare. And yet, there was something about him that touched Leonie. Perhaps it was the fact that she had seen him trying to be brave.
“You’re not thinking of making a monk out of a kzin, are you?” Nils asked her. “Even a kzin like Marmalade. The abbot is a kind old man, but I can’t see that he’d stand for it.”
“No,” said Leonie, “not a monk.”
It was reading the old classic Brideshead Revisited that gave her a clue to the solution. “Listen to this,” she told Nils: “Monasteries, it says here, often had a few odd hangers-on who don’t fit into either the monastic order or the world.”
“Yes, I know there are a couple like that at Circle Bay. Old men the Occupation drove crazy, most of them. Drunk half the time.”
“Why not Marmalade? He could be useful without having to take any vows or anything. I know he’s weak for a kzin, but he’s still stronger than any human except maybe a male Jinxian. And he speaks Wunderlander.”
“What could he do?
“Plenty. In the book, the man who can’t do anything else becomes a sort of under-porter. He could do odd jobs.”
Kzin intelligence is baffling to humans. They could solve problems brilliantly, and most of them, if put to it, could be quite inventive mechanically, but they had strange blind spots. It was because of those blind spots that the wars lasted long enough for humans to get the hyperdrive. Having a kzin about the place, especially a kzin as docile as Marmalade, might be quite useful, not to mention the fact that his mere presence would be an effective deterrent to human thieves or outlaws, of which post-war Wunderland had more than its share.
The abbot, when the suggestion was put to him, was happy enough to take him in, providing the government supplied him with kzin infantry rations and other upkeep and he left the monastery’s animals alone, except for herding them if necessary.
One of the monastery’s main efforts was to build human-kzin cooperation, and this looked like a good opportunity to advance it. The abbot, turning the matter over in his mind, foresaw generations of monks going out all over the planet, and beyond, remembering the kzin as a quaint, harmless character who had been part of their novice days. It was perhaps overly optimistic of him, but the abbot was by nature an optimist. Anyway, he was pleased to do a favor to the Rykermanns, two of the greatest heroes of the Resistance, and with a degree of official power. A hut was found for Marmalade and he settled down to an undemanding life: fetching and carrying, placing and changing flowers in the monastery chapel and the Abbot’s study, moving furniture and farming implements, and, when he had overcome his timidity over them, tending the infant Jotok in their breeding ponds. There were even a few lines about it in the news.
Nils Rykermann, as a member of the Legislature, held a weekly “surgery” to hear constituents’ problems. A few days after they had left Marmalade at the monastery, he had two unusual visitors.
There was nothing unusual about their being unusual. There were plenty of odd types on Wunderland, but these were something new to him: a human and a kzin, both old, small and withered-looking, the human with a long white beard, and a wise, kindly face, the kzin with white fur on his muzzle and about his ragged ears. Nils found himself warming to the old man. There was something intrinsically good projected even in the deep, thoughtful timbre of his voice. Otherwise, the white hair at least gave them a curiously similar look. Wunderland had had a long period under the Occupation when geriatric drugs had been available only to high-ranking collaborationists and Resistance leaders like Nils and Leonie, and it was plain that the old man had not been one who had qualified to receive them. They carried a bundle.