Images began to shift in staccato rhythm. Yankee had no clear idea of why the camera moved to look where it did, except that the glances were quick and purposeful as if Hwass was clicking down a checksheet of his own devising. He hastened through the few sealed rooms, checking this and checking that. He was memorizing detail that he wasn’t sure his human masters would give him a second chance to see. Finally he just stopped in the middle of examining a row of machine tools. They could not see his face—but they could hear his voice. “You iss defeated, Major Yankee Clandeboye. They iss gone. The Shark’s motor iss has be here but iss gone.”
Yankee switched his mike back to the frigate. He got the comm officer. “Send a message by hyperwave directly to General Fry, Sol, Gibraltar Base.” (They had dropped off a hyperwave buoy outside of R’hshssira singularity and could communicate with it electromagnetically. It would take longer for the message to reach the buoy than to travel the 5.3 light years from R’hshssira to Sol.)
“Quote: ‘The Shark has been delivered to the Patriarchy.’ Unquote.”
The captain came on line. “What’s this? What have you got?”
“No details yet.”
“What’s the verification?”
“None. Hwass just told us and he seems sure. Get that message off! I don’t want him deciding that we know too much. He might think we’re all worth killing to keep the news quiet. We can send the rest later as it comes in. I told you, I don’t trust that kzin.”
“There’s such a thing as overcaution,” the captain chided.
“Captain, why does a man have tits?”
“You got me, Yankee. Why?”
“Just in case.”
Later that day, Yankee’s team began its painstaking assessment of the find.
On a separate floor, below the main working area that Trainer-of-Slaves had salvaged for himself, Yankee discovered a suite of luxurious apartments with its own airlock and life support. It had been repaired. Once inside he recognized it for what it had once been in the heyday of Hssin’s power—the harem quarters of some consequential kzin.
The interior was all stone (or structurally enhanced stone) of abnormally large proportions even for a kzin dwelling. Spaciousness meant power and wealth—and a full name. On the floor was a tapestry-like rug, round as the world, woven with scenes of the hunt: here a kzin stalking through the orange grass, there a magnificent kzin head between the leaves of a forest. And everywhere the brilliant colors of animals of the hunt, fleeing, hushed, flying, hiding in the branches. The rug was cuddly soft. It was just right for games of coy chase and play.
There were no hanging weapons or trophies, yet it was a male’s hail. Carved into the eastern wall, an august glyph glorified some noble family a dozen kzinti in profile, the faces of conquerors. An arched niche held a crotch of polished wood, half tree, half tale of nature transformed by sculptor’s power. Next to the niche a floor-to-ceiling tapestry cut a narrow window into the gray stone to a colorful landscape on some unconquered planet of fantastic imagination. A final touch to the male decor might have been lithe kzinretti moving through the hail to entertain and serve.
An arched entrance at the back of the hail led to the living quarters of individual kzinretti: kitchens, birthing chambers, nurseries for the kits and Yankee couldn’t guess what-all. There was no trace that a whole harem might have died here. Its most recent occupants had been human. The auburn hairs in the rug were of Lieutenant Argamentine’s genotype. He remembered the way she used to pull at a curl of that hair when she was agitated. Damn, damn, damn.
In the tunnels and caves shaped for romping kits they found a box of crudely made toys, alien—perhaps a kzin’s idea (a Jotok’s idea?) of what a human child would play with—perhaps leftovers from an earlier time. The only food stocks in the kitchen were formulated for a human child. Somebody had manufactured a stack of diapers. One of the leather-bound picture books wore not only the tooth marks of a kzinrett but what looked like the practice scribbles of a two-year-old child. There were enough organic bits and pieces to establish that Argamentine was the mother of the children. They didn’t seem to have a common father. Frozen sperm from Wunderland?
The discards from the machine shop, hundreds of them, were all attempts to duplicate the same hypershunt part. Yankee took samples to the frigate’s engineer who tested them and had a good laugh.
“Does he know what he’s doing?” asked Yankee.
“Can’t tell. He might be trying random variations to see what works, but I doubt it. That’s like having random variations in a quantum effect chip and expecting the hundredth one to be a fully operational computer. I suspect he knows what he’s doing but is working at the outer limits of his equipment.”
Yankee was still having to grasp the implications of a functional hyperdrive in the claws of the Patriarchy. “It seems he made one that was good enough.”
“Maybe not. The specs are tough. Maybe they took one jump and they are stuck out there in interstellar space freezing to death. I rebuilt a motor once and it checked out perfect. Died on the first jump, though. The navy never would have found us if our hyperwave had gone, too.”
Yankee kept going back to the kzinretti palazzo. He was looking for something that didn’t seem to be there. He brooded about his cousin. She wasn’t the type to just live in a place. She needed people. If you locked her up, she’d go to the phones. If you cut the phone lines, she’d chat on the net. If you took away her infocomp she’d start to write letters. Yankee still had her letters from that boarding school she had attended after her dad got killed at Ceres. She’d meet a little old lady in the grocery and start up a conversation about the brands of coffee—and remember three months later to send the little old lady a birthday card. He was sure General Fry had love letters from her tucked away somewhere.
She had a pen. There were those scribbles in the picture book, done by one of her babies who was sure to have been imitating mother. Yankee knew that Nora couldn’t escape the temptations that came from owning a pen.
He was tearing up a fur rug in one of the least likely of the kzinretti rooms looking for a hiding place when his back pocket got caught in loose molding. While unhooking himself, a panel slipped open—just a crack. He pounced. What he found amazed him. It was a kzinrett-built hiding place, something a dog might have made for bones if a dog had hands. Inside was mostly a vulgar collection of baubles, charming. A three-year-old might have prized them. Sitting with the gewgaws was one of the small kzinretti picture books. He opened it, and there, written across the pictures in Nora’s fine hand, was a diary.
She had no one to talk to, so she was talking to herself. Almost the first thing he saw when he flipped through the pages was the capitalized. “THIS IS MY MEMORY.” He back-skipped and read, “Nora-From-My-Future, if you are reading this over and do not understand it, I am writing it because my memory is going.”
He was too impatient to wait until he got back to the inflatable command center so he sat on the rug in the great hail of the palazzo and read straight through starting from the first page where her writing squiggled around the picture, seeking white space.
Chapter 14
The kzin, bare in his yellow-orange fur, was escorted by armed guards into the chambers of Si-Kish, who was admiring his raiment in a gold-tinted minor, his tail motionless. The nameless prisoner noticed the lean tail. Ornamented—with a miniature silver mace. That son-of-a-vegetable can probably use it, too. With lashing swiftness. He glanced at the furniture of this splendarium, lit by diffuse skylight. All of it looked too fragile to make a good hand weapon and too far away to grab.