Through thick gloves he tried to examine the delicate secretary by concentrated beamlight. Where had such pieces come from? No Wunderland cabinet maker had ever assembled anything like it! He pulled down his helmet scope and in magnification saw foamed metal! Plastic of the kind that appealed to kzinti engineers looking for lightweight and strength. Somehow the foam had been laid down in layers that came out like wood grain. The inlay pattern was an exuberant Flemish floral design. All of it must have been made in the Bitch’s machine shop. Still—the time! Ah, but on a subluminal voyage there was always time.
He well knew that his Nora was a con artist—but her magic was for men. How could it work on a kzin? He went to the bedposts. Nora wouldn’t have known how to carve like that in metal, nor had the patience, nor the models. They showed evidence of having been variable-form extruded, not carved. Probably from a 3D template based on Nora’s sketches. An alien mind had fleshed out the template. The animal bodies weren’t human, weren’t even of Earth. Less of Earth, even, than the gargoyles of the French cathedrals. Why would a kzin have done this for her? And at the same time held her in such a formidable brig? Whoever had built such a prison had both been terrified of Nora Argamentine and deeply under her spell.
It didn’t make sense. The Nora he knew would stand on a stool and scream if you brought a ratcat into the same room with her. For that matter, Yankee knew that if he ever had to face an armed kzin at anything less than a couple of light-minutes, he would stand on a stool and scream.
It got worse. The marines found the neural lab—almost stripped of its equipment, but not of its displays. The electronic records were gone. Yet conveniently near the operating table was a collected bundle of notes on what kzinti used for paper. The script was meticulous. This kzin jotted down real-time remarks during his experiments. His comments were in chronological order.
Back on the frigate their Wunderland kzinti specialist wasn’t optimistic about a translation. He had worked in the kzinti bureaucracy most of his adult life. “It’s technicalese. Even the technicalese of a standardized scientific language like English is hard to decode if you’re just a linguist. This is the Hero’s Tongue all right, and I can get the words and the dates and the sense of it—but the content of it is another matter. The chemical symbolism is all there—but we don’t really understand how they think about biochemistry. It’s like trying to read a scientific paper from Newton’s time. But the mere fact that we know it is chemistry and medicine gives us a leg up. We’ll figure out something. Don’t know how far we’ll get.”
The initial analysis did reveal that they were dealing with experiments on many different humans; one of them was Lieutenant Nora Argamentine. Her genetic makeup was on her military records—and whoever this kzin was he had been entering in his experiments genetic codes that belonged uniquely to Argamentine.
“Can you tell what he’s been trying to do to her?”
“Yeah, but I had to check it. Grow hair.”
“What?”
“He was adjusting her body to grow a full coat of fur. Don’t know the full outcome. The record ends suddenly, maybe when they left for Hssin.”
Yankee wasn’t ready for the surface just yet. The evidence was that kzin and slaves had abandoned ship for residence on Hssin, and Yankee needed to know all he could find before having to stalk them through the wreckage of a dead city. If Nora was still alive down there he didn’t want her killed as a hostage just because of failed preparations.
Yankee let Hwass-Hwasschoaw loose in the Bitch—with a marine and a robo—ant escort. And with an explosive charge attached to Hwass’s spinal cord at the point on his back which a kzin couldn’t reach with his hands. Some of Yankee’s men gently chided their boss for being paranoia. “Better paranoid than destroyed,” was his motto. He was honest with the kzin. “I don’t trust you.”
The kzin accepted such directness graciously. He had made an open bargain with Clandeboye that he was keeping faithfully. Yankee was under no illusions; he suspected that his kzin had an agenda beyond any bargain—Hwass was as much interested in the fate of the hypershunt motor as was the UNSN, though the subject was never mentioned. They talked about Nora Argamentine, a screen to cover their mutual interest in the Shark’s fate.
In his report Hwass claimed to have put together the sequence of events which had brought the Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch to Hssin, though the logs no longer existed. Yankee was surprised at the competence of the kzin’s observations. They were on a level that made him dangerous. The report was thorough, but the damn ratcat was assuming too much, Hwass seemed to be having a hard time with the idea of a slave revolt. Yankee was just having a hard time with the idea of five-limbed slaves.
He did some research. The ARM’s database didn’t have much on the Jotok.
They were born the size of minnows. The race lacked any kind of sexual conflict because when five minnow-arms wedded during their pond phase they were always of different sexes. Divorce to a fused Jotok was as unthinkable as divorcing a heart or a liver. During childhood they were scurrying, unthinking animals of no great bulk, surviving in their forested habitat more by the laws of large numbers than by their wits—like toads or fish, the prey of carnivores. Only adolescence brought on an endocrinal sea-change in their nervous system. Half-grown, they now had the bulk and the digestive capacity to support the development of their five networked brains.
(At this point Yankee noted wryly that human intelligence was limited by the pelvic size of the human female; until not so long ago the mother of a super-genius died in childbirth.) The Jotoki had no such limitation.
Left in the wild they never learned to talk but became very clever. The wild, unparented Jotok made a cunning forest foe and a tasty meal and for that reason was widely stocked in kzinti hunting parks. To talk they needed to be adopted by a speaking adult. How had it been in the eons before they became slaves of the kzin? Had an adult Jotok taken a walk in the forest and picked out a ripe teenager to become his bond servant? Was there still a free Jotok world out there among the stars? Within the Patriarchy it was only an adult kzin who was allowed to adopt a maturing Jotok.
The ARM researcher had left an open question at the end of his essay. Full-named kzin, who had their harems and their sons to raise, told glowing tales of Jotok hunts, how cleverly this animal evaded pursuit and how dangerous he could be. There were poems to the taste of fresh-caught Jotok. But these animals were plainly thought to make vicious, unreliable slaves. Yet kzinti who had been denied harems by their more aggressive rivals, who could afford not even a single female, were the ones who adopted and raised Jotoki as slaves, praising their virtues.
Yankee called upon Hwass for clarifications to his summary of events. This kzin’s command of English sometimes lacked clarity. He took for granted things that Yankee did not know. And perhaps he was being evasive about fine points.
“Let’s go over it from the beginning so that I can be sure I have it straight. We’ll concentrate on Nora and the slave revolt.”
Hwass began his exposition from an oblique angle, too shocked by his own discoveries to be direct. “Yess. I iss deduce captive Argamentine iss first kept in cages.”
“You kzin seem to have a cavalier way of treating your prisoners of war!” Yankee was angry but he was diplomat enough not to mention the torture or the experiments.
“She iss animal,” explained Hwass.
“She is an intelligent being, not an animal!” snapped Yankee, his rage getting the better of him.
“Many animal iss intelligent. Not right criterion. God iss created many kinds animals. Dumb animals. Smart animals. Foolish animals. Food animals. Unclean animals. Dishonest animals. All iss got place in God’s universe.”