She settled to the cage bottom and slid out, and Locklear stood well away, axe in one hand, lance in the other, trying to look as if he had no intention of using either. His Adam's apple bobbed as the female began to uncoil from her fetal position.
Her eyes snapped open so fast, Locklear thought they should have clicked audibly. She made motions like someone waving cobwebs aside, mewing in a way that he found pathetic, and then she fully noticed the little man standing near, and she screamed and leaped. That leap carried her to the top of a nearby container, away from him, cowering, eyes wide, ear umbrellas folded flat.
He remembered not to grin as he asked, “Is this my thanks for bringing you back?”
She blinked. “You (something, something) a devil, then?”
He denied it, pointing to the scores of other kzin around her, admitting he had found them this way.
If curiosity killed cats, this one would have died then and there. She remained crouched and wary, her eyes flickering around as she formed more questions. Her speech was barely understandable. She used a form of verbal negation utterly new to him, and some familiar words were longer the way she pronounced them. The general linguistic rule was that abstract ideas first enter a lexicon as several words, later shortened by the impatient.
Probably her longer words were primitive forms; God only knew how long she had been in stasis! He told her who he was, but that did not reduce her wary hostility much. She had never heard of men. Nor of any intelligent race other than kzinti. Nor, for that matter, of spaceflight. But she was remarkably quick to absorb new ideas, and from Locklear's demeanor she realized all too soon that he, in fact, was scared spitless of her. That was the point when she came down off that container like a leopard from a limb, snatched his handaxe while he hesitated, and poked him in the gut with its haft.
It appeared, after all, that Locklear had revived a very, very old-fashioned female.
“You (something or other) captive,” she sizzled, unsheathing a set of shining claws from her fingers as if to remind him of their potency. She turned a bit away from him then, looking sideways at him. “Do you have sex?”
His Adam's apple bobbed again before he intuited her meaning. Her first move was to gain control, her second to establish sex roles. A bright female; yeah, that's about what an ethologist should expect… “Humans have two sexes just as kzinti do,” he said, “and I am male, and I won't submit as your captive. You people eat captives. You're not all that much bigger than I am, and this lance is sharp. I'm your benefactor. Ask yourself why I didn't spear you for lunch before you awoke.”
“If you could eat me, I could eat you,” she said. “Why do you cut words short?”
Bewildering changes of pace but always practical, he thought. Oh yes, an exceedingly bright female. “I speak modern Kzinti,” he explained. “One day we may learn how many thousands of years you have been asleep.” He enjoyed the almost human widening of her yellow eyes, and went on doggedly. “Since I have honorably waked you from what might have been a permanent sleep, I ask this: what does your honor suggest?”
“That I (something) clothes,” she said. “And owe you a favor, if nakedness is what you want.”
“It's cold for me, too.” He'd left his food outside but was wearing the jacket, and took it off . “I'll trade this for the axe.”
She took it, studying it with distaste, and eventually tied its sleeves like an apron to hide her mammaries. It could not have warmed her much. His question was half disbelief: “That's it? Now you're clothed?”
“As (something) of the (something) always do,” she said. “Do you have a special name?”
He told her, and she managed “Rockear.” Her own name, she said, was (something fiendishly tough for humans to manage), and he smiled, “I'll call you 'Miss Kitty.'”
“If it pleases you,” she said, and something in the way that phrase rolled out gave him pause.
He leaned the shamboo lance aside and tucked the axe into his belt. “We must try to understand each other better,” he said. “We are not on your homeworld, but I think it is a very close approximation. A kind of incomplete zoo. Why don't we swap stories outside where it's warm?”
She agreed, still wary but no longer hostile, with a glance of something like satisfaction toward the massive kzin male rotating in the next container. And then they strolled outside into the wilderness of Kzersatz which, for some reason, forced thin mewling meows from her. It had never occurred to Locklear that a kzin could weep.
As near as Locklear could understand, Miss Kitty's emotions were partly relief that she had lived to see her yellow fields and jungles again, and partly grief when she contemplated the loneliness she now faced. I don't count, he thought. But if I expect to get her help, I'd best see that I do count.
Everybody thinks his own dialect is superior, Locklear decided. Miss Kitty fumed at his brief forms of Kzinti, and he winced at her ancient elaborations, as they walked to the nearest stream. She had a temper, too, teaching him genteel curses as her bare feet encountered thorns. She seemed fascinated by his account of the kzin expansion, and that of humans, and others as well through the galaxy. She even accepted his description of the planet Zoo though she did not seem to understand it.
She accepted his story so readily, in fact, that he hit on an intuition. “Has it occurred to you that I might be lying?”
“Your talk is offensive,” she flared. “My benefactor a criminal? No. Is it common among your kind?”
“More than among yours,” he admitted, “but I have no reason to lie to you. Sorry,” he added, seeing her react again. Kzinti don't flare up at that word today; maybe all cusswords have to be replaced as they weaken from overuse. Then he told her how man and kzin got along between wars, and ended by admitting it looked as if another war was brewing, which was why he had been abandoned here.
She looked around her. “Is Zoo your doing, or ours?”
“Neither. I think it must have been done by a race we know very little about: Outsiders, we call them. No one knows how many years they have traveled space, but very, very long. They live without air, without much heat. Just beyond the wall that surrounds Kzersatz, I have seen airless corridors with the cold darkness of space and dapples of light. They would be quite comfortable there.”
“I do not think I like them.”
Then he laughed, and had to explain how the display of his teeth was the opposite of anger.
“Those teeth could not support much anger,” she replied, her small pink ear umbrellas winking down and up. He learned that this was her version of a smile.
Finally, when they had taken their fill of water, they returned as Miss Kitty told her tale. She had been trained as a palace prret; a servant and casual concubine of the mighty during the reign of Rraw’rit Eight and Three. Locklear said that the “Riit” suffix meant high position among modern kzinti, and she made a sound very like a human sniff. Rraw’rit was the arrogant son of an arrogant son, and so on. He liked his females, lots of them, especially young ones. “I was (something) than most,” she said, her four digited hand slicing the air at her ear height.
“Petite, small?”
“Yes. Also smart. Also famous for my appearance,” she added without the slightest show of modesty. She glanced at him as though judging which haunch might be tastiest. “Are you famous for yours?”
“Uh— not that I know.”
“But not unattractive?”
He slid a hand across his face, feeling its stubble. “I am considered petite, and by some as, uh, attractive.” Two or three are “some.” Not much, but some…