"My ears ripple when I watch you sitting down to excrete. One-mouth better than two."
"Long-Reach, your ears don't ripple. Your ears are in your wrists."
"Ripple? Ripple?" Big(arm) rose so that its eye could look at the resonance cups on its wrist which analyzed sound.
Trainer-of-Slaves rippled his ears to demonstrate. He was genuinely amused. "That's what I do when I tell a joke. How do I know when you are telling a joke?"
"Joke?"
"Some other day!"
Trainer-of-Slaves needed to sleep so Long-Reach hooked himself to a wall rack and slept himself, with only freckled(arm) awake and watching the door. Freckled(arm) had things to mull over but that was difficult with sleep-silence on four channels.
Thinking did not go rapidly without question answers from other-arms. But questions were themselves interesting. What had happened to the forest? Why did the absence of trees make floors flat? What was glass? How could something invisible resist the push of a hand? How was R'hshssira attached to its ceiling? Did all worlds have different colored lamps?
There were more questions in the morning when Mellow-Yellow led Long-Reach to a cavern full of weird shapes and vines that swallowed eyes and arms. The giant carnivore was there with the smell of leafeater flesh on his breath. Frightening.
"You won't be able to put him in the machine they panic when their arms are constrained and his vocabulary isn't big enough so that an explanation will register. We'll have to shoot him up with trazine. First, we'll let him watch a Jotok come out of the trainer unharmed."
Long-Reach stayed as near his yellow companion as he could get. They put him too close to a big leafeater like himself who was suspended in mid-air, his arms in thick sleeves, with vines coming out of the caps over his eyes. His limbs convulsed as if he were running and flying among the trees but he wasn't going anywhere. Terrifying.
The big kzin unhooked the eyes. The sleeves came off. While the beast was being liberated, three of Long-Reach's brains came to the simultaneous conclusion that he was going to become the replacement. Three arms started to back off and couldn't move.
"The trazine won't harm you. Be gone within heartbeats." They were putting him into the sleeves and he couldn't resist. His eyes had retracted to their armored state in a reflex at the shock of paralysis, but he could not keep them closed while the giant popped out each eye in turn and stuck them into caps. He was blind and paralyzed. Was this the death he had been avoiding all his life?
All of his minds went into escape mode. But before he could even think of escape… suddenly… he was transported to a forest. There was a precision smoothness to each detail and no smell. He had not passed through any walls or doors. Did one die and go to an odorless forest? He still couldn't move, but his thumbs were wrapped around branches and he wasn't falling. He saw no kzinti. When the paralysis wore off, he took the chance and ran; he zipped through the trees like flying, barely touching a branch before he was reaching for another.
The Landmarks were unfamiliar and there were no odor clues. The trees were too tall. When he climbed as high as he could go there were no ceiling lamps. White moss floated overhead where the roof should have been. Nothing he did seemed to orient him, even his acceleration senses were subtly contradicting his eyes and the feel of his skin. He couldn't backtrack because the world changed behind him as it passed out of sight what was behind was as unknown as what was in front. It was wrong.
A lake appeared through the trees, larger than any lake he had ever seen, biker than it had any right to be. He skittered among broad branches that had been able to reach outward along the shoreline, afraid to let the lake out of sight lest it disappear. High above the beach he paused.
His tree developed a lung-slit and spoke. "I am a tree."
Startled, he leaped into another tree, nearly missing it. "Nice leap," said a bird who had been watching hunt.
He was gaping at the tree (with three eyes) and the bird (with two eyes). How many different kinds of worlds were there? asked freckled( arm) frantically. After a while Long-Reach got used to it. The world patiently gave him lessons in speech with the same image-sound codes as Mellow-Yellow had used. Stones talked. Stumps talked. Animals talked. It was very disconcerting.
The predicable’s had shifted. And not to be able to predict meant danger. Hide and meditate upon the consequences. Idly fast(arm) plucked some berries in their leaf-cones and shoved them up into the undermouth to placate hunger. But there was nothing for Long-Reach to chew on. Shock. In this world food was going to be a problem. Too many problems.
"Eat me," said a leaf.
He tried. It was only a strong taste, still nothing to chew on.
"Bitter," said the leaf which had miraculously regrown. "Eat me again."
He did so. It tasted like the caps of marsh-reed, or even seed-berries, but again there was nothing to chew on.
"Sweet," said the everlasting leaf. "Eat me again."
Right now he wanted Mellow-Yellow. "Trainer-of-Slaves!" he bellowed.
His call produced an immediate twilight, fading into a night darker than the deepest cavern.
Beside him, Mellow-Yellow appeared slowly, like a ceiling lamp at dawn, without casting any light into the darkness. The carnivore's image was too sharp, too orange, and flickered a little. A furry hand reached out and touched the eye of big(arm). Then weirdly with only one eye he was back where he had started; Mellow-Yellow was the right color, the giant kzin was beside him and so was all the machinery in the cavern. His selves jumped to look through big(arm)'s eye.
Long-Reach could now feel his arms in their tight trap. Panic. Death… he began to struggle.
The giant kzin backed off but Mellow-Yellow efficiently freed the capped eyes and removed the constraints. Long-Reach walked away, miffed, with only freckled(arm) watching the big yellow trickster curiously.
"Joke," said Trainer-of-Slaves.
"You have brains where your intestines should bet" sulked Long-Reach, who had begun to assimilate his anatomy lessons. "Joke," he added, having no intention of insulting a carnivore.
But for the rest of the day he refused to speak. At night while Mellow-Yellow slept, his minds debated what they had seen. The whole event reeked of danger. Hide, said all of his instincts. And yet the curiosity was overpowering! Talking freest Moving through wallet Seeing different worlds with each eye The wonder of it!
At the first sign that Mellow-Yellow was awake, he herded him toward the door. "More joke," he said.
During his second session in the confinement rig he learned numbers and image symbols for numbers. Released, he enthusiastically counted everything still amazed that the region between three and many could be divided up endlessly into distinct parts, that no matter how high he counted, there was one more. He counted kzin, he counted lamps, and he counted the leaves he ate, one by one because freckled( arm) wanted to know how many leaves it took to stop hunger.
The virtual worlds of the confinement rig were of two kinds. The moment he tired of one, he was shifted to the other. There were the work worlds where he learned practical mathematics and the art of maintaining machines and proper ways of addressing his kzin masters. There were the play worlds of forest and dungeon where natural law changed whimsically, sometimes in frightful ways, sometimes amusingly. When capricious play taxed his minds, a shift to the tuning of gravitic force fields was a relief; when tedious machining drove him to singing mental tunes in harmony, a shills to the free world of play was pleasure.
Time blurred. He saw less and less of Mellow-Yellow, yet the hours he spent with his kzin companion were rich in conversation.
Trainer-of-Slaves admitted that Jotok-Tender was a hard taskmaster while Long-Reach taught his friend geometry and how to disassemble machines. Once they couldn't reassemble a machine because the slave hadn't got that far in his lessons. For that sin Jotok-Tender had them both scrubbing floors together.