“I require nothing of you. I only wish to ask you a few questions.”
You lie! thought the kzin, enraged, his lips twitching as he tried to suppress a smile.
Brobding nudged his companion. “You are being unnecessarily polite.”
Yankee retorted, “I’m allowed to be polite to a kzin- especially when he is so much bigger than I am.”
“The tense is wrong. Interworld is deficient in tenses. So far as a kzin is concerned, the direct tense is the only ‘tense’ it has. I’ll explain to you later.” What Brobding meant to say, and what he was not going to say in front of a kzin, was that politeness required the use of the Dominant/Dominated Tenses, and since the humans were the victors, they would only be able to speak insults while Hwass, who was the defeated, would be restricted to the groveling politenesses. He could see that Yankee was lost. “Recall, my friend, that politeness in the Direct Tense is a form of lying.” Yankee paled.
Brobding Shaeffer turned his attention casually to their kzin host to smooth the conversation. “My companion was using an idiom that you do not understand. Humans have been lying for so long that we have standard lies which everyone understands. Since the second meaning of such a lie is known, it is no longer a lie.” The crashlander had the kzin’s full attention. “Let me illustrate. When my companion said that he required nothing of you, he was using an idiom to tell you that if you do not answer his questions, he will never allow you passage to Kzinhome.”
Hwass calmed at this clear truth and his claws, which he had kept hidden, were retracting naturally. “You iss already promised me the passage. Now you retract your promise. You iss without honor.”
The crashlander spat out a phrase in the Hero’s Tongue which roughly translated as, ‘The victor has room to roam.” Then he resumed in Interworld, “I believe the basic nature of the promise remains intact. Answering my companion’s questions may taste like leaves but there will be no trickery in them. Am I correct, Yankee?”
“My questions do not form a conundrum prison. They are answerable by an honorable kzin. Is it not true that an honorable warrior will not abandon his warrior mate in battle? Some of our warriors feel the same. I seek information about a fallen comrade.”
“I iss not the God who iss seeing every fallen warrior.”
“But you were a member of the Third Black Pride at the time of the Battle of Wunderland?”
“I be.”
“And the Third Black Pride captured prisoners.”
“We capture prisoners. All iss destroyed when our Pride iss destroyed. I not know details.”
“But there were survivors. You, for instance.”
“I not know details. You iss recall that the climax of battle occurs as I iss the unconscious companion of my laser-fried companions, and furthermore iss dying in damaged spacesuit. I not recover consciousness until weeks beyond the battle ending.”
“The Third Black Pride was the first to capture a prisoner-long before the Pride left its station to reinforce Traat-Admiral.”
“The records iss destroyed.”
“Not all of them,” insisted Yankee. “We are still piecing together records from your burnt-out hulks. The old codes are no longer secure. Your security officers did an excellent job of sending sensitive information to computer heaven, but not all ghosts make it to heaven. I am interested in your first prisoner.”
“Yess, I iss remember her much well.” Hwass was thinking furiously as he talked. They were not interested in the prisoner; she was the one captured with a more-or-less intact hypershunt three-man scout ship. They were interested in the fate of their ship.
Yankee interrupted. “You just used the word ‘her.’ Kzin tend to make mistakes with that word. Are you talking about a female prisoner?”
“Yess. I remember such detail much well. We iss all astonished that humans try use females in combat role.”
“What was her name?”
“I iss not remember such detail like that.”
“Was it ‘Nora Argamentine’?”
“I iss not know”
“What became of her?”
As long as this monkey was asking only about the female, Hwass was willing to answer. “She iss be destroyed in the battle.” Along with the hyperdrive scoutship, alas.
“But you have no personal knowledge of that?”
“No.”
“What happened to her after she was captured?”
“Chuut-Riit established the unit to study animal behavior. She is put in thralldom to animal-trainer who iss been given authority conduct behavior research.”
“Ship-based, or on Wunderland?”
“Ship-based. That iss why I say she iss destroyed. All kzin ships iss destroyed in battle. None does surrendered.” He spoke with pride.
“But you have no personal knowledge of this?”
“How iss I know such thing? I iss critical wounded before battle iss taken to disastrous end.”
“To what ship was she assigned? Our records are complete on the fate of every one of your warships. We can determine her fate.”
“Our Third Pride has large mother ship”-large enough to hold the hyperdrive scout in her maintenance womb. “Trainer-of-Slaves worked from there. I iss not recall its title.”
“Was it a…“ Yankee paused. He was thinking “drydock,” but there was no equivalent word in the Hero’s Tongue. The continents of Kzin were all linked by narrow shallow seas and the kzin had evidently gone to space before they had a strong seagoing tradition. Eighty percent of their space naval terms were not related in any way to basic kzinti sea lore, and did not obey the normal rules of kzinti grammar, showing strong fossil evidence that the kzin had been taught their spacefaring skills by an alien race. “Was it a ship used to overhaul other ships?”
“Yess. This be mother ship.”
Yankee called up a word on his infocomp and showed it to Brobding. “Could you by to pronounce this for me?”
“Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch,” said the crashlander in his best growling-hiss.
“Was it that ship?”
“Yess.”
“No such ship has ever been recovered.” Yankee posed the statement as a question.
“Bitch warcraft ordered to battle-zone.”
“It never arrived,” Yankee insisted.
The mind of Hwass raced. This was news. Then Trainer-of-Slaves had actually carried through on his determination to take the hyperdrive scout back into the Patriarchy! He couldn’t have done that, of course. He was under arrest and in suspended animation, if he had, he deserved a full name. Could his captain have disobeyed orders and revived Trainer? Probably not. That old Hero had never had an original thought in his life.
Mystery. That’s what this monkey was tracking down. Now Hwass was interested! Was a hypershunt motor actually in possession of the Patriarch? That changed everything. He felt a curious elation.
“I iss help you. Then you iss help me go Kzin?”
“It’s a deal.”
Chapter 7
(2436 A.D.)
The landscape could have been anywhere in the universe and nowhere. A triple-cross rose out of the swirling fog at dawn. It was an illusion, of course, built within a tiny chapel inside a distant corner of Tigertown. The bulk of a kzin warrior purred his supplications to the triple-cross. He wore a mask of steam-stretched human skin. The mask was all bushy eyebrows, scowl, and beard, its human face too large because it was there to hide a kzin’s muzzle.
The purring words, couched in the Dominated Tense, were for the invisible Grandfather on the left, to the Father offstage on the right, and to the Son in the middle. They were exactly those words prescribed by the teachings of Kdapt. The mask honored the true shape of God and made Hwass-Hwasschoaw bold in his thanks for the fortune of the day. He was dedicating himself to the goal of finding the lost hyperspace shunt.
An interesting challenge. Hwass had contacts within the kzin community that no human could match. Clandeboye had access to hyperwave communication and hypershunt transportation and to the naval records of the humans. Neither man nor kzin could succeed without the other, yet at the same time each dared not help the other. It was a puzzle subtle enough to intrigue a W’kkai Conundrum Priest.