The guards left. That meant that Si-Kish held the naked kzin’s fighting ability in contempt. Not a wise decision—but no W’kkaikzin could imagine physical power without its trappings. They needed some sobering time on the frontier where kzin lives were cavalierly squandered on the most trivial points of honor—and prisoners never behaved with humility. Nevertheless the nameless one waited for his new name which would contain his fate. If it was something like “Walking-Dead” he was doomed. He hoped it wouldn’t be as awful as “Grass-Eater.”
“I am not as angry with you as some of our lesser nobles.”
He’s keeping me suspended.
Si-Kish was arranging his collar lace, not yet deeming to notice the nameless one. “You have been useful to W’kkai. In fact, I admire your loyalty to the present Patriarch, whose slothful ways have brought us so much failure. You honor our heroic traditions. I will not insult your honor by suggesting that your loyalty is misplaced. In my view it is the Patriarchy which must survive—not the Patriarch. When the son sees himself as a more able warrior than the father it is his duty to challenge his sire. This principle is the foundation of the continual renewal of the Patriarchy.”
Si-Kish turned and the naked kzin knew that he was about to receive his new name—and fate. “We may need you again, Conundrum-Prisoner. My physicists have not yet wholly mastered their hunt through hyperspace. They say they no longer need you—but I don’t believe them. If we have more questions, you may volunteer your answers. If volunteering doesn’t appeal to you, telepathy might. Perhaps even the hot needle of inquiry.”
“Thank you for the name,” said Conundrum-Prisoner. His sarcasm was muted by the requirements of the Dominated Tense. So… they were delivering him to the Conundrum Priests for safekeeping.
Nobody had ever told Monkeyshine that as the eldest male he was bound by a special responsibility to his kin. It seemed like it was something he had always known from the time back on Hssin when he had saved mother and siblings by understanding a faulty atmosphere-lock mechanism that was baffling his frantic mother while their lives lay in forfeit to noxious gases—kzin master and Jotoki mechanics being absent at the time.
Mellow Yellow was often gone on trips, but why was there a new master? W’kkai was shock after shock. Get used to it, learn the new ways, feel safe—and then boom, a new shock. It had seemed so easy when he was young and there were so few of them living in their little world and skittering from bubble to bubble, from ship to shored-up ruin. Then the worst omen of doom had been a grumble in the air machine.
W’kkai was so vast! Space was so tiny! He still relished his memory of the day he had discovered that the sky wasn’t a roof. He had had to lie down on the ground and pile bricks on his stomach as high as he could to understand that it was just the weight of the air that kept the air in! Weird. But vastness meant that too much was happening.
He was always toilet training a baby or rescuing a young brother from a ditch or stealing fruit for his mother. Sometimes he was too interested in fun and forgot about his duties. Furlessface got her head stuck between boards and had been crying for half a workshift before he found her. She was so dumb! He felt guilty but a man had to have fun sometimes. There was too much work to do. It wasn’t easy being a slave. He wanted real clothes like a W’kkaikzin!
Kzinti constantly grumbled about the laziness of their slaves. Slaves were too indolent to survive by themselves. They had to be “induced” to work for their survival by a watchful eye. It was true. Monkeyshine avoided work with careful cunning which mostly meant when he was beyond observation. On W’kkai he had to learn new ways of avoiding work, mainly because there were so many more kzin overseers, none of them as easygoing as his mother’s Mellow Yellow.
It was a game. If he got caught, he worked very very hard. If no one was looking he didn’t work at all. He liked the long W’kkai nights. They were cool and no one could see him. Oh joy! The stars peeked out to announce the night before the clouds came. He liked the night insects because they were big and some had glowy segments on their bellies!
For now, two things made work-avoidance tolerably easy. The kzin were used to servants like the Jotoki for which they had hundreds of generations of training experience. Mellow Yellow had been a trainer of slaves, specializing in the Jotoki, and knew of dozens of machines and thousands of virtual-world training modes that would shape a Jotok to almost any skill. But for monkeys there were no training artifacts. And the kzinti weren’t patient with eyeball-to-eyeball training. When a kzin caught him idle, he respectfully asked for immediate training, and that was usually that.
He had painfully figured it out for himself during his sly wanderings about the estate. He couldn’t explain these ideas to his brothers. The slave language he knew was too simple to express such complicated ruminations. He understood what he was thinking but there was no way to share these thoughts by the method of saying. His was a special duty because if he failed, then doom would befall his monkey family. Fun got in the way of his serious thinking, but he could always make it up while he worked.
The best job was currying kzinretti. Sthondat thigh-bones, were they dumb!
Instinctively, he never broached his tortuous questions to any kzin, not even lord Grraf Nig—who was his teacher, his master and defender, his peculiar friend who had tussled and played with him since he was an infant. He dared to call his kzin lord “Mellow Yellow,” a bite’s distance from those carnivorous, flesh-odored teeth, but nothing in kzindom would have induced Monkeyshine to tease that mighty machine of flesh with images of monkeys who lolled about on kzin-hide rugs and fanned themselves with kzin ears. Such amusing thoughts had to be locked in absolute privacy.
In the course of his serving duties, he had overheard kzintosh boasting about the deeds of conquering Heroes, but the slave races appeared in the stories only as stilted background to the glory of kzin victories. Only the kzin had a history.
Monkeyshine would never have thought to share his curiosity with his mother though he chatted with her in monologue mode often. She, being female, did not have the wits to tell him of her origins. His father, who could, he supposed was dead. He assumed that monkeys, unlike Jotoki, did have fathers because Mellow Yellow addressed him and his brothers in the male tense and referred to his mother and her daughters in the same female tense with which he spoke of his kzinretti wives.
Of course, he wasn’t older than his befuddled sister, who was just as tall as he was, but she didn’t count as a partner in responsibility because she couldn’t think, could hardly make herself understood in the limited hisses and purrs of her tiny vocabulary. He had to protect her all the time; it was annoying. His brothers were of little help—after all, they were only babies and they had to contend with their twin sisters who were really stupid brats.
He adored his mother. She wasn’t very bright either, and he had to protect her, too, as well as all of his siblings. But she was bigger than he was and quicker and it made Monkeyshine grin when she caught him being foolish. With the grip of her powerful hand she could restrain his greatest enthusiasm. She always grinned back at him—but would never let go until he started to think about the careless thing he was doing.
That was his greatest puzzle: she was so dumb, how did she always know when he was being dangerously stupid? Such a mystery impressed him. He could be ferociously fond of his mother, especially when he was assisting her during her frequent child bearing, and had to chase away her five-legged Jotoki midwives. What did they know about childbearing? They crawled out of ponds, whatever a pond was.