What was it that God seemed to desire most?
Chapter 8
(2436 A.D.)
The lord called Grraf-Nig was out for a solitary hunt on his W’kkai estate, naked in his fur, seeking a little relaxation while he tried to make order out of what he was up against one of his more adventurous wives, in estrus, had been following him at a discreet distance, watching his every move with cool yellow eyes, patiently waiting for his attentions. She was the daughter of his most powerful W’kkai sponsor, Si-Kish the High Admiral. He let her tag along, but ignored her, his alertness elsewhere. The pungent scent of a zianya distracted him into a marvelous chase up along the rocky crests, where he trapped the animal in a ravine, killing the beast after one sudden leap while it tried to escape. His blood lust satiated, he had time to climb the talus to the top of his world.
His year and a half on W’kkai had been exhilarating, yet Grraf-Nig felt deceived.
He had been swept into direct contact with the best philosophers and tool makers. He merely had to grope aloud with a question and a work force appeared with tools to master the answer. He was flown across continents to hunt with W’kkai’s best mathematicians who gloriously tore apart the fabric of the universe while they tore apart their meat by the light of all-night campfires. He had been flown to space often, where a whole shielded laboratory was being built to study hyperspace. He had been given females and honors and servants to manage his estate-but he had been deceived.
At first the sashes and clasps and pinned-on ruffles of W’kkai clothing had intrigued him-now they felt like a straitjacket. He was often close to killing his valet. His servants were spies. His closest associates were guardians. If his co-workers spoke the truth they also told him only what the W’kkai patriarchs wished him to know.
The brilliantly slow sunset was worth watching from high on these ridges, though it hardly seemed natural standing here on broken shale, exposed to the sky, without pressure walls to protect him, without even the walls of a ravine to hold in the air. He had lived in space too long ever to adjust to a planet. But the orange play of light on the scudding clouds was a worthy battleground for his imagination. Aboriginal plains kzinti could have evolved their protective coloring hunting among such clouds.
The sunset would bring night. He shuddered. The weather here was harder to get used to than his overstocked harem.
W’kkai was too close to its K2 sun. Tidal friction had slowed W’kkai’s rotation until there were only two seasons-seventy-nine hours of light and seventy-nine hours of night. The huge sun broiled them by day, steaming them in their fur, sapping the energy of the hunt. After dark a cloud cover formed and the rains came, dumping heat into the atmosphere, retarding nighttime cooling. Even so there was a skin of ice on the puddles at dawn and, sometimes, snow.
Orange W’kkaisun seemed to have twice the diameter of Alpha Centauri as seen from Wunderland, but it was not nearly as immense to behold or as red as R’hshssira, the brown dwarf that had warmed Grraf-Nig when he was the young Trainer-of-Slaves. Why, amidst the luxury of his own estate, should he suddenly be nostalgic for the tiny hellworld of Hssin, for the hunting caves of its Jotok Run where he had taken refuge as a nameless hunted kit?
A furless tail lashed.
He was aware of his wife’s overpowering attraction, the beauty of her black fingers clinging to the red rock below him, but instead of responding, he threw to her the remains of the zianya. She must have been hungry for she ripped into it with a coy glance of thanks. He did not move to her; he talked to her instead, coaxing her closer, knowing she would not comprehend an iota of what he said. Because he did not have to make her understand, he omitted the inflected growls and hisses, the spices and smells of language, hearing them only in his mind’s ear He rambled, dredging up memories he would not have bared before a male.
How to tell her that out there alone with only slaves he had dreamed of his own harem of lovelies? He had dreamed of her. He lapsed into the simple patois of gestures and grunts that a female could respond to. “Love you. Lust your fingers,” was all he could manage within her vocabulary. It was not enough. His wives were a burden; he had been without females too long in the wretched emptiness of space ever to get used to the attention they required.
One almost had to be raised as the spoiled son of a W’kkai lord to have the energy to deal with female demands.
Her response to his musings, obviously cast in her direction, came as a tilt of the head and a raunchy smell from the erect fur of her haunches. A female always understood something but never what was meant. Absently he turned his great orange-yellow head out over the ridge and the bushes that clung there in the wind. He flapped his fan-like ears. He spoke forcefully to the God of Air and Wind and Smell. “With my own eyes I found the W’kkai star in the firmament and dreamed, wishing myself here.” His voice chose for its message the Mocking Tense with which the Hero’s Tongue derided victims.
First he had escaped from Hssin to Wunderkind, joining the armada of Chuut-Riit. Then after the disastrous Battle of Wunderland, after slinking back to Hssin at less than light speed with a captured UNSN scout, he had scrabbled through its war-smashed ruins for twelve years, talking to ghosts-like he talked to his wives now- repairing the damaged hyperdrive unit, despairing of a second chance to escape gloomy R’hshssira, rejoicing when the opportunity came. Rejoicing when he reached fabled W’kkai.
That which is possessed is never as important as that which is lacking. Had it always been thus? In brief reverie he flashed on a peaceful hunt through the forested caves and domes of Hssin’s Jotok Run, a day he could never have again. He remembered his passion to escape the claustrophobic horror that had once been his birth world, but the memory no longer carried passion. It only reminded him of a smelly UNSN cabin stuffed with slaves and a cantankerous hypershunt motor and the irony of picking W’kkai as his destination. Nothing was easy.
The trouble he had taken to get himself transferred from that prison to this prison!
The warrior Grraf-Nig was more and more certain that the Lords of W’kkai were holding him as a guest prisoner-and didn’t want him to know about it. He had tested his hypothesis delicately, in ways too subtle for his enemies to detect. Grraf-Nig had expected better-he had expected adulation, exposed throats even-but he had arrived here with mere slaves, with Jotoki and human slaves, not a warrior among them, and so he should have anticipated an unpleasant fate. No matter that he had also arrived with an extraordinary prize of was; one of the humans’ fearsome spacedrives that shunted their ships through hyperspace.
It wasn’t enough. To the W’kkaikzin he was Trainer-of-Slaves, though they did not dare call him that to his face. His claws unsheathed. He suspected that once his stolen machine had been duplicated by W’kkai’s naturalists and engineers, he would be no more than chopped zianya liver, an outcast kzin who had wandered into the wrong hunting park. W’kkai was not his territory. He had no territory.
Hssin was irretrievably gone.
His mouth twitched to show his fangs while he recalled how Hssin had been destroyed by the raping monkeys. He owed it to those tree apes to blacken the stars with a fleet that would convert every human warren into a hunting park. But his plan was going awry.
The W’kkai thought it would be their fleet breaking the blockade and humbling mankind. Well and good- but they also thought it would be their grand fleet which would humble the present Patriarch. They thought a reinvigorated Patriarchy would rise from the grass of W’kkai. They were dreaming a monopoly of hyperdrive power. He could taste it he could smell it. They were dreaming of dominance for W’kkai. There it was, a raw wound: the need to dominate, coexistent with the necessity to submit-the bane of all kzinti.