“You’d better be sure you’ve got ample bargaining power before you sit down to bargain with me,” Early warned.
“Oh, exactly, my dear General. Which is why, as you will have noticed, I’m not bargaining with you now.”
Unexpectedly, Early laughed; it was a deep rich sound, thick as chocolate. “You aren’t, are you?” He took another sip of the brandy. “Well, in that case-perhaps you could expand on the remark you made at dinner, about local performance techniques and classical Meddelhoffer?”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“He’s not human,” Jonah gasped, flopping down on a rock and watching Hans swing along up the mountainside.
Bigs rolled a baleful eye at him as he lay prone in the track, twitching expressive eyebrows; Spots carefully poured water from a plastic container over his body, from head to the base of his tail. Then he trudged down to the small stream and poured several more over his own head before returning to repeat the process with his brother: Both kzin were panting, their tongues lolling, the palms of their hands and feet and their tails oozing sweat. Those were the only ways kzinti had to shed excess heat; Kzin was a cooler planet than Earth or Wunderland. Besides…
“If-” Spots stopped, thrust his muzzle into the plastic container and lapped down a torrent “- if I remember my instructors, you monk-hrrreaow, you Men evolved into omnivores by taking to running down your prey in long chases.”
“Think so,” Jonah replied.
His feet hurt, and he felt dizzy from the amount he’d sweated. A swallow from his canteen to wash down salt tablets, and he poured more on a neckerchief and wiped his face and neck. The hollow where they had halted was shady at least, big gum trees and whipsticks, but the steep rock to either side concentrated the sunlight, and it was humid as well. The air hummed and buzzed with insects, drawn to sweat, landing and biting and stinging. The human ignored them; there was no relief until they made camp and set up the sonics-and those had to be turned low or the sensitive ears of the kzin found them unbearable in frequencies humans could not hear.
“Well, we Heroes evolved from stalk-and-leap hunters!” Spot snapped. Literally: his jaws closed on the word with a wet clomp. “Of course we don’t shed heat as well. We don’t chase prey that escapes our ambush! We never needed to! We developed brains cunning enough to catch meat without following it for days!”
There was a teeth-gritting whine in the kzin’s voice. Bigs was in worse shape, heavier and thicker-pelted; he simply lay with his tongue hanging out on the ground. Jonah nodded wordlessly, stumbling down to the stream and refilling his canteen. He had never had the slightest interest in chasing prey of any sort, except kzinti Vengeful Slasher-class fighters during the War-and that could be done in the decent comfort of a crashcouch, right next to a good food synthesizer and autodoc. Fighting in space was war for gentlemen: either you won or you died, usually quickly, and you did it in climate-conditioned comfort. There had been a couple of boarding actions when the Fourth Fleet was smashed, but even those had been done in space armor.
He shuddered slightly, swallowing hard. There had been tubing in the meat last night.
The water looked cool and inviting as he dipped his head once more. The pebbles in the bottom were unusual-he noticed the dull glitter of them through the rippling water, and idly lifted a handful. Heat, he thought, and threw them skipping across the surface. One struck a shovel lashed to the pack-saddle of a mule, startling the animal out of its torpor and into a brief bucking frenzy. The sound of pebble on steel was a dull, metallic clunk…
“Wait a minute,” Jonah whispered. He scrabbled at his belt for the sample spectroscope and scooped again for more pebbles; his hands were trembling as he shoved one into the trap of the instrument and flicked the activator. “Platinum!” he yelled. The kzinti unfurled their ears to maximum, like pink radar dishes. “54% platinum, by Finagle’s ghost!”
Jonah Matthieson bad been a rockjack, an asteroid prospector, in the brief intervals of peace in Sol System; the methods in that were a great deal more mechanized, but he knew what was valuable. He scrabbled in the streambed, then tore back to his mules for the pan. Pebbles and heavy sand washed out as he swirled the water and flicked off the lighter material. Readings glowed as he jammed more samples into the scanner: 57%, 72%, an incredible 88%. His stomach ached with the tension as he worked his way upstream; Bigs and Spot were following, howl-spitting at each other in the Hero’s Tongue. At last he thought to call Hans. The Sol-Belter was still fumbling with the belt radio when the old man came up, leading his mules and looking nearly as phlegmatic.
“Ja,” he said calmly. “Platinum all right. Nice heavy concentration.” He took the pipe out of his mouth to spit aside. “Worthless.”
Spot gave an ululating howl, jaws open at the sky. Bigs collapsed again, this time into the stream with only his eyebrows and black nostrils showing; his tail waved pink in the water, and little fish-analogues came to nibble at it. Jonah felt an overwhelming urge to break the spectroscope over the Wunderlander’s head, and then a sick almost-headache at the back of his neck.
“It’s a perfectly good industrial metal!” he protested, slogging to the bank of the stream and sitting down on a wet rock. A kermitoid croaked and thrashed away through the spiny underbrush. “It’s used for everything from chemical synthesis to doping crystal fusion cores. Back in the Sol Belt, it was the first thing we looked for.”
“Ja, so useful the kzinti hauled seven or eight asteroids from the Swarm to near-Wunderland orbit as reserves, back during the Fifth Fleet buildup,” Hans nodded. “Still a lot of it left, We need something valuable but not so valuable they thought to get a supply set up,” he went on. “Gold, hafnium, something like that. Well,” he went on, “rest-period’s over. Got to get a move on if we want to get anything done.”
Spots and Bigs whined. So did Jonah.
“Give me two,” Spots said, throwing two cards into the pile.
Jonah dealt, watching the kzin across the campfire narrowly. His scent was calm-he had long since learned to recognize the gingery smell of kzinti excitement-but that could simply be control enough to keep it down below the stun-your-nostrils level humans could recognize. Bigs seemed to be watching him intently, ears out and fur fluffed up around his face. Spots’s tail was held rigidly and quivering just slightly at the tip…
“Fold,” he decided. Nobody else wanted more cards.
Spots flapped his ears, and his eyebrows twitched. “See you and raise you three.”
Three krona, to the humans; the brothers were playing each other for kzinretti, of which they both had more than they wanted, due to the surplus after most of the kzintosh-male kzin-in the system died. Evidently numbers in the harem were a status matter for kzinti. -
“See you,” Bigs said in Wunderlander: “And smell you, you vatch-in-the-grass,” he muttered under his breath in the Hero’s Tongue, in the Mocking Tense.
“And two,” Hans added. He puffed ostentatiously on his pipe, and the two kzin closed their nostrils in an exaggerated gesture. Their huge golden eyes caught the firelight occasionally, silver disks in the darkness.
Well, it z pretty foul, Jonah conceded. On the other hand, Hans was sitting downwind.
“Call.” Bigs’s tail was quivering visibly.
Spots sighed and let his ears droop. “Three queens,” he said, flipping his hand upright.
Bigs lunged and snapped close to his nose. “I thought you were bluffing!” he said, throwing down his pair of tens.
“You should have listened to the Conservors and learned to control the juices of your liver,” Spots said sanctimoniously, purring slightly and letting the tip of his tongue show through his teeth. The pelt rose around his neck, and his whiskers worked back and forth; he licked a wrist and smoothed them back. “That is fifteen kzinretti you owe me- my selection, remember.”