They wandered through the trees together until they came to a meadow of green, streaked with the rushes of a small stream’s swamp, their bulbs open to the sun, storing energy for the long night. Mellow Yellow muttered and kicked at the grass. “Different kind of grass here than on Hssin. When I was your age, I once ate the grass on Hssin. Tastes terrible!”
“You never! Hshumpfss! Grass. Yeach!”
“When I was your age, I wasn’t as brave as you are.”
Monkeyshine loved compliments like that. Grinning, he attacked Mellow Yellow with an immediate grand leap and a punch to the belly. The kzin had to fling him to the grass-gently. It didn’t stop the boy-beast. He rolled to an erect position and was attacking again the instant his feet hit the turf Mellow Yellow had to take a real fighting crouch to protect himself They hissed and spat at each other, circling, charging, whacking, kicking. The kzin kept at the sparring longer than he usually did with this slave, but he was angry and it felt good. The boy was bleeding from scratches but still he fought without letup, the grin wide across his furless face.
Finally Mellow Yellow had had enough, but the monkey hadn’t-so he just stood there and let the boy try to tackle him, shaking the child away with spasms of his leg. “What kind of nonsense is this?” he growled. “Where did you get your warrior’s liver?”
“Long-Reach said my mother was a warrior. That’s not true, is it?”
“It shouldn’t be! Females don’t fight well!”
“Unless you poke them!” said Monkeyshine happily, who had practice at poking.
“Well, there’s that. Then you have to run like a herd of sthondats are after you!”
“Long-Reach told me to save you,” said Monkeyshine gravely.
“My Long-Reach has been a faithful valet. You did well. The Patriarchy is the better for it.”
Hwass-Hwasschoaw was no longer angry when they got back. He had another mad scheme of conquest to propose. They would attack and capture a human ship- another long argument that would end in frayed tempers, thought Grraf-Nig. He had no choice but to listen. Hwass was a font of leaps. In the middle of a leap he was so impatient that he would begin a new leap. Sometimes he would jump from the most serious of discussions to a lecture on the latest fashions. While debating a favorite plot (that might cost them their lives if misplanned) he could suddenly begin an arcane discourse broadly covering the finest points of religion-or of sheep ranching on Wunderland. He held the strange belief that God was manifest in the shape of the man-beasts. With his philosophical training Grraf-Nig was wryly sure that Hwass could have proved that God was manifest in the shape of a sheep.
Slyly Hwass began by mentioning the research on the human nervous system that Grraf-Nig had done as Trainer-of-Slaves, costing the lives of hundreds of experimental animals imported from the Wunderkind orphanages. “Among your discoveries there was a nerve gas that will disable a human immediately and then kill him by inhibiting the transmission of neural impulses.”
“Several of them. But the discovery was not mine. I got the formula from a human disc that came to Wunderland with the first slowboat in the luggage of a beast hunted by the ARM.”
“It could kill the crew of a ship before they could defend themselves?”
“In principle. On a larger ship such as the Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch the same weapon, using a slightly slower-acting gas that attacks the kzinti neural system, was not as effective.”
“You planned that attack” said Hwass grimly, “and your slaves executed the plan on your instructions. It was successful.”
“Yes.” Grraf-Nig did not dare reveal that his slaves had also done the planning.
“So it can be done.”
“I wouldn’t advise trying it in a larger ship.”
“Then will attract and ambush a small human ship.” This was going to be a long hunt, thought Grraf-Nig. He’d have to track his energetic prey with probing questions that would tire until finally, in the end, Hwass understood the stupidity of his latest scheme. “And if we appear in sartorial splendor at Si-Kish’s manor, he will be delighted to give us ships to ambush some UNSN patrol?”
“You think of me as an impractical dreamer. But you have also seen my practical talents. There is no lock that can stop my fingers. Did I not reach into a Conundrum Cell and pick you out, a feat that has never before been done in the entire history of W’kkai? I have the old navy in my livery. Why do you think Si-Kish is building his new navy from the ground up? The old navy is full of old kzin loyal to the legitimate Patriarch. A covert ride to the edge of the singularity can be arranged as a routine patrol.”
“And from there it is only a matter of inviting ourselves to tea in the monkeys’ mess?”
Hwass grinned with a battle eagerness. The grin did not challenge or offend Grraf-Nig because the eyes of this malevolent kzin were directed inward at some internal vision. “I know a Major Yankee Clandeboye who will be only too willing to bring us our ship and welcome us inside so that we may take it as a prize of war”
Chapter 18
(2438 A.D.)
Chloe Blumenhandler had joined the Young Woman’s Auxiliary on her seventeenth birthday. A significant sector of Wunderland society believed in early military training for the young and there were dozens of semi-military corps, militias, stellar scouts, rangers, and young guardians. It wasn’t just an underlying unease about the kzin that fostered these groups.
Wunderland’s culture had been founded on a sense of profound interstellar isolation from its root stock. Then… Warriors descending from the empty black. Subjugation for a people who had left Sol honoring their freedom more than comfort. Loss of land. Confiscation of property relatives, children. Terror. Taxes. Death. Running like a fox in the hunting parks. Soul-breaking work in slave camps with strange imported slave races. And Outsiders selling military might. Wunderland had suffered a fundamental reality shock.
No parents want their children to be as naive as they once were when they were young. And so the older generation founded quasi-military groups and inducted their children-building bard-won wisdom into institutions that couldn’t forget “Will our children be ready for them?” Were there others out there?
Chloe was not interested in a military career. She had grown up in a military family without a mother. Her babysitters had been petty officers and sometimes burly marine sergeants. Her fantasies were about a landholder’s castle on Wunderkind, or a run-down artist’s studio in a twenty-second-century ranch house on the French Somme. (She’d walked through a virtual seventeenth-century French house and didn’t like the plumbing.)
In her dreams she fell in love with Wunderkind statesmen, or crashlander explorers, or Jinxian scientists or deep space artists. In one of her recurring fantasies she lived with a musician who worked with his instruments in a great house on Plateau at the void edge of Mount Lookitthat overlooking the Long Fall River where it broke out into the tallest waterfall in Known Space. The man with a view.
Flatlanders both repelled and fascinated her. Earth was so crowded! It was like Tiamat turned into a whole planet! And flatlanders had such odd jobs-like reconstructing ancient Portuguese caravels dredged up from a watery Pacific grave. Her best flatlander fantasy was filled with the laughing Romans and Italians of a rosy Naples where the sun was always setting on a golden bay; she was one of a saucy menagerie of teen-aged girls held prisoner by a gay old Neapolitan classics scholar who was a sexual athlete and wit. The fantasy had lasted her a delicious week until she got bored with Italian men and moved on to the Chinese Imperial Court.