Jokes: "How do you stop a monkey from running around in circles? Nail his other foot to the floor."
Zoology: was a Wunderland tigripard faster than a Kzin Krrach-Sherek? Or only more cunning?
Better than he liked stalking through the forest, Ssis liked to sit in the lodge on the carved logs, supping fermented milk. The political intrigue was all in the lodge. He speculated with Trainer about the identity of the ambitious kzin who was "pissing around the borders of this territory," looking for a noble name so that he might found a household here. They decided it must be Yiao-Captain.
Yiao-Captain was an unlikely candidate. He was as short as Trainer and as slight, not the kind one would expect to dominate a fight, but he had a cautious cunning to him and an energy that would make any challenge to his honor dangerous. But it was his ambition that struck them both.
Trainer-of-Slaves first sniffed around its edges when he was invited to share a kill with four of the local kzin. The kill was a forest herbivore, headless, and carved in places that facilitated sundering, the fresh blood still running into the table-gutters where a spout delivered it to a bloodbowl. The tang of bloodscent was overpowering. On a sidetable stood green homeblown bottles of the local akvavit, ready to mix with the blood.
Trainer learned in conversation that the akvavit had been seized in Gerning for unpaid taxes and its distiller's daughter sold into factory slavery at Valburg. The normal procedure was for the indigenous Herrenmann to handle such details but the kzin purposefully audited estates and villages when taxes seemed low and found simple ways to encourage ardent taxpaying. After all, the taxes were set at fair levels.
The conversation changed from such mundane topics when Yiao-Captain arrived to rip off a hunk of meat for his own fangs. He dominated the conversation with his enthusiasms. He added fire to the tinderdry debate over Chuut-Riits Logistical Preparation as the Rey to Victory In War. He provoked insults and countered them with witty insults of his own that both needled and defused. When he tired of that, he turned the collective attention of his coterie to tales of adventure.
Adventure, to Yiao-Captain, meant astronomy. His haunch of herbivore held motionless, he stopped eating while the sputtering of the Hero's Tongue quickened to an almost battle intensity. To know the stars! There were rumors of strange beings who lived in the depths of space, rumors of ancient empires that had casually abandoned tools upon the ice of comets long before any of the giant stars of the constellations had yet flamed to life.
Hr-roghk! The hints! The spoor untracked! Starseeds that spawned at the galaxy's very edge. Where did they come from? Where did they go? Mysteries! What were those moon caves deep in the outer planetary gloom around red dwarfs? Caves so ancient they must have been carved by disintegrator beams? Wealth! Honor!
Then silence to let all this sink in while Yiao-Captain noisily stripped his morsel. He left, reminded of duty by some new passion. The conversation drifted back to kzinrett jokes, to who had-just received a name, to the honor duel between Electronic-Systems Upkeep and Builder-of-Walls, the spike on yesterday's scope, the taste of space rations. And finally, finally, the tongue-wagging licked around that most degenerate bone of speculation fleet rivalries; who would reach Man-sun first?
Days of hunting brought Trainer-of-Slaves and Detector-Analyst together in a friendship broader than the commonality of Hssin. They often went out at dawn without Ssis. Detector had been hunting in the woods around Gerning since the opening of the base, and knew the ways and the smells of the forest. He knew the waterholes and the places where a tigripard might be found stalking its own prey.
The aroma of Wunderland, the expanse, the open skies, an evening standing on the beach by the sea all of this overwhelmed Trainer with joy. He had been a hunter himself, moving daily out into the Hssin Jotok Run to cull the wild Jotok or lure a transient into slavery, or measure the salinity of the marshes where the Jotok larvae wriggled among the reeds. He had thought the Jotok Run a capacious relief from the cramped city, but this!
This Wunderland went on forever!
Once the hunting the woods took them as far as the Korsness estate. Trainer saw from the hill Yiao-Captain helping a man-beast and his child move a fallen tree from the main road. He went to help the Captain. It seemed like a political thing to do ingratiating himself with this officer could only prove useful. But why was he moving a tree when there were so many slaves and machines?
"Rrrr, we have welcome help," purred Yiao-Captain to the tiny child who had been trying to lift the tree at its center.
Trainer recognized the larger of the tame animals as the local king of beasts. He couldn't tell one monkey from the other but this one was tall for a man, with a hideous hooked nose. Unfairly, he had an unearned name, Peter Nordbo, but that was the way of the monkeys who did not know the value of a name.
"You're big," said the Herrenmann's child to the new kzin. "What's your name?"
Trainer-of-Slaves could hardly understand beast talk, and he knew the child would not understand his. He had not yet grasped enough words in the slave language to translate his name. But Long-Reach's name for him was an easy translation.. "Mellow-Yellow," he said. Those two words he did know. He added stiffly, "You are Short-Son of Nordbo."
The boy cocked his ear. "I'm Ib Nordbo, ehrenvoll Yellow." He put his three-year-old back to the tree. "Push!"
After the two kzin had carried the log to the roadside with token help from their human vassals, the child found a nest of petal-pickers that had been disturbed by their activities, the tiny scaled creatures dashing grief-stricken around their paper home. Ib Nordbo, not the least bit afraid of the kzin, took Trainer by the paw and made him stoop to his haunches while he explained the social life of petal-pickers with three year old seriousness.
Peter Nordbo watched his son anxiously while Yiao emitted a purr to reassure his vassal. Trainer-of-Slaves listened intently to everything Ib told him, even understanding some of it. He was fascinated. The man-beasts he had seen were very badly organized into slavehood. There had to be a better way. Learning animal psychology by direct communication with their young was a source of important clues to domestication.
Mellow-Yellow let a petal-picker climb onto his stick waving its long front legs. Ib laughed. "They like roses. I feed them roses but it makes them sick." And he got up and staggered around for Trainer like a petal-picker drunk on the alien essence of rose.
"Do you have petal-pickers on Kzin?" asked the child curiously.
"Never… been… Kzin-home," Trainer struggled with the language.
"I go to Kzin," Ib pointed at himself. "I will tell the Patriarch to be nice."
Peter Nordbo had been licking his lips. He hastily picked up his son who was as much of a chatterbox as his young wife Hulda. "Maman wishes you for nap time."
"Not" The boy struggled.
"Sir," apologized Nordbo, "he is young yet to learn the proper forms of respect."
Kzinti have a soft spot in their liver for sons who struggle. Yiao-Captain nodded his mane. "If ever I reach Kzin-home, I will deliver the katzchen's message with great respect to the Patriarch."
Only days later Yiao-Captain appeared at the lodge with his Nordbo Herrenrnann, violating all protocol. loin and beast came there to play some sort of mangame. Bored with fleet gossip, Trainer-of-Slaves tried to follow the moves and the logic of the game. It was played out on an octal by octal board, with stationary combat pieces. There seemed to be no action, no attack. The pieces stood there, sometimes without moving for minutes. One piece was moved at a time, to some trivial advantage. Sometimes, very gently, a piece would be set aside.
Yiao-Captain seemed fascinated by the game; his eyes never left the pieces. He asked questions roughly, and would cuff Herrenmann Nordbo as if he were a son, and he would purr happily when he captured a piece. But the stationary nature of the game obviously took its toll. When beast-Nordbo spent too much time on his moves, the Captain would pace restlessly, and if his opponent, even then, had not moved, he would stand towering over the small slave and impatiently suggest what the next move should be.