The monkeys referred to W’kkai’s trifling K2-star by catalog numbers BD+50° 1725, or HDraper-88230, or Gliese-380. Under those names there had been neither helpful listings of less-than-giant planets nor listings of nearby interstellar hazards—the humans were woefully ignorant about kzinspace. He’d had to fly blind on his near approach to W’kkaisun. But the human system was usable. He had already deduced that they cataloged Kzinsun as 61 Ursa Majoris. Its hyperspace coordinates were in the box and would be accurate enough even if the fine details were missing.
Then he sobered. Everything on W’kkai had been reduced to a fine art—even torture. A W’kkai dungeon was a Conundrum Puzzle that took a lifetime to solve. Its stones were sculpted by vow-sworn priests into shapes of beauty and balance and engineering. A finger might liberate you—or reshape your dungeon into a tinier cell or feed you to the fish.
Fighting his own kzinkind was worse than fighting humans. As a barbarian from Hssin he had been brought up to believe that W’kkai was one of the great centers of learning and wisdom. In fact it was parochial. The local lords were too far away from Kzin to share directly in the awesome power of the Patriarch, and too far away from the war to have been bloodied by any other battle than their petty internal duels.
The dangers inherent in escape came from W’kkai’s naval strength. He was a trained fighter pilot and knew what he was up against. It would be harder to evade the gravity-driven dreadnoughts of the W’kkaikzin than, after escape, to outmaneuver a lethargic superluminal ship whose monkeycrew had yet to master the tech of the gravitic polarizer. These UNSN treaty enforcers hovered outside the W’kkai system, beyond a spherical hyperbarrier generated by W’kkaisun’s mass, looking down at kzin military might from a height of three light-hours—like monkeys in a free throwing nuts at the prowling carnivores below. They had not dared come in toward W’kkaisun for a real fight.
Their silly blockade of military trade between the kzinti worlds was no big shake of the tail. A few kzinti hyperdrives could break it. The Procyon planet, the one that named itself by some incomprehensible human pun, could build starships for a millennium and still not have enough of a net to snatch each fish from the stream. Space was bigger than ignorant treaty-makers could dream.
Grraf-Nig did not doubt that, once beyond the hyperbarrier, he could slip past the monkeys. He was a veteran of deep space. Already, by himself, he had leapt halfway to the legendary world of Kzin. And he had done this, after the war was over, when the blockade was already in place. What was another fifteen light years? He could see Kzin from here, shining at magnitude 4, twelve degrees off galactic north, a proud hilt in the Constellation of Swords.
The trip had to be risked. There was no way around it. By the terms of the MacDonald-Rishshi Peace Treaty the humans insisted upon retaining control of all superluminal communications. The Patriarch, light years to the galactic north, would not yet even know that a hyperdrive ship had been captured. No human was likely to tell him.
Escape was a matter of timing. If he stole away before the physicists of W’kkai fully understood the nature of the hyperdrive shunt, and if, by unluck, the Patriarchy’s only working model was captured or destroyed on the way to Kzin, then his premature decision would have left the kzinti in thrall to the humans forever Patience. That was the lesson Chuut-Riit had taught. That was the lesson his name donor, Grraf-Hromfi, had tried to teach, and had not quite learned himself.
Timing. Too soon or too late. If he waited too long to carry his gift to the Patriarch, the W’kkai might become so strong as to be deluded into waging war by themselves. And that, too, would leave the kzinti in the thrall of victorious humans. There was no such thing anymore as a “local” war. W’kkai could attack human space, but the humans would simply bypass W’kkai and destroy a helpless Kzin. All kzinti worlds would have to be armed with the hyperdrive shunt. If Heroes were to undo their humiliation, as one pride they would have to hunt and kill the man-beasts and their women and their children.
And where was the pride that could command that kind of interstellar loyalty? Only the glorious Patriarchy!
Later, returned from the hunt, walking along the balcony of his mansion, Grraf-Nig watched one of his human slaves play with his younger brothers. The Lieutenant Nora-beast had proved to be excellent breeding stock. The way her sons showed their teeth to each other, a naive kzin might think they were about to attack but they were only laughing.
He was genuinely disappointed that he would have to leave them behind. Leaving his wives he didn’t mind, but good slaves were hard to come by. The older male-beast might have made just the right slave gift for the Patriarch. Life’s regrets!
Chapter 9
Because Hwass-Hwasschoaw was on Wunderland, he had not dared bring with him his masks of human hide—there had been no secure place to conceal them on the tiny shuttle craft from Tigertown, staffed as it was by kzin hating animals. That made difficult any communion with God.
Kdapt’s forms had to be observed rigorously.
Hwass went into retreat above the cluttered electronics workshop in a room that was often used for secret meetings by München’s Kdaptists. He meditated in this claustrophobic space built to human size. How was a devout kzin to appeal to a Bearded God who had given the Patriarch thousands of years of victory—but who thwarted every kzinti attack on His newly discovered tree-climbing pets? Noseplugs attached, he fasted alone in darkness among the salvaged junk, thinking.
Where was the logic behind God’s bias?
Hwass, a noble of the Patriarch’s Eye, was here in a crumbling slum while they were being resurrected in prosperity all about him. Strange. God never interfered with a kzin who made an ill decision; such a kzin was respected as a noble intelligence and allowed to grow wise—or to die—by living the consequences of his decisions. Not so with humans. Why?
A master crafter, Hwass reasoned, only interferes in his creation when it is moving away of his intention. A mechanic repairs only after his machine begins to fail. A potter touches clay only when he sees imperfection. God was an artisan. When he ceased admiring the beauty of His work, how did He choose to interfere?
In all of God’s universal masterwork, the man-beasts, molded in God’s perfect image, seemed to be the only imperfection that disturbed God. God interfered ceaselessly for human salvation. Let a man-beast make a mistake, and God rushed in to save him. God’s simians might lie and cheat and beat their females, they might run in battle—but He was always saving them. Let a man make a lethal decision, and God invited him to be born again. Some divine author was not allowing the men to lose no matter how iniquitous their behavior. Saved from blunders, mankind was never allowed to grow wise… as a kzin became wise through the blunders of his youth.
It was told by men that they had mightily offended their God by eating vegetables from the tree of knowledge. Perhaps God’s purpose in saving the man-beasts was to keep them in their animal state—naive, innocent, lacking in wisdom. What better way to cage an animal from knowledge than to save him from the consequences of his acts?
Hwass was beginning to understand. The sins of men caused God pain; He interfered to put things right. Men tore down His work wantonly; God rebuilt their homes. While God demanded bravery and discipline and honesty of His kzin because he respected them, He spoiled His simians out of love. In their writings did not men see Him as one who raged at their sins but who was always merciful? Was not this Bearded God obsessed with the salvation of those He had created in His image? There, that was the path to His liver!