He didn’t know whether he was grown-up or not. He felt big and it seemed like he knew everything but he kept growing. A kzin male was about twice as large as a kzinrett. If he was going to grow up twice as large as his mother he had a long way to go. He wasn’t even as big as she was yet. When he got bigger, the work would be easier.
Things began to get stranger. He was currying a kzinrett one morning and her fur was standing on end in anger. She snarled at him and he was afraid of her but she seemed to like his attentions. There were hissing matches in the harem. It got worse every day until the harem was in an uproar. All the alliances between the kzinretti were changing. He found one of them digging a den in the hillside.
Monkeyshine was proud of the way he got along with Mellow Yellow’s females. He could understand their gestures and their moods, when they wanted to be groomed, when they wanted to play, and when they wanted to be left alone. He knew what gifts to bring them—pretty stones and colored leaves—and he could understand their talk—talk and even chatter with them while he played. So he took the trouble to find out what was wrong.
Their new master smelled peculiar and they were afraid he was going to eat their kits. What had happened to Mellow Yellow? Why was the new master beginning to reorganize the slave quarters?
It was just curiosity and caution that was driving him toward answers—until Long-Reach returned from somewhere in an almost catatonic state, only one of his arms articulate. Then the boy’s curiosity became an intense case of anxiety. His Jotoki friends abandoned him to babble hysterically in their tree huts. Only Joker crawled down to comfort Monkeyshine and all he would say was that something terrible had happened to Mellow Yellow. He couldn’t say more; he didn’t have a calm arm.
For the next thirty hours Monkeyshine did not let his family out of sight. He watched his mother and made all sorts of excuses to help her while she worked. He herded his sisters. He kept his brothers out of trouble and as much out of sight of any kzin as possible.
Nightfall on W’kkai is a slow dimming and it takes forever for the darkness to overlay the land, but at first-darkness a Jotoki delegation called Monkeyshine into the tree huts for a council. He had never before been treated with such respect. Monkeyshine was a child at that unique stage in human development where he was observant enough to notice the richness of his universe yet wise enough to understand that he knew nothing.
To him the Jotoki were the fonts of all wisdom. Mellow Yellow was too busy to answer his questions, though Monkeyshine knew how to bring out the father in him for a sparring match, a thing he wouldn’t have dared do with any other kzin. Mellow Yellow’s kzin retainers thought only of work and not why “washers” were round. The Jotoki, on the other hand, knew everything about how machines worked and were only too willing to take them apart to show you why a washer had to be round. They could make a ship fly between the stars—and that awed Monkeyshine. He had only two arms and it made him feel like an inferior slave.
In the trees, the Jotoki crowd were very serious about their council. Nervously munching leaves that one arm stuffed into his underside mouth, and talking through the lungs of his others arms, Long-Reach told him that Mellow Yellow was in confinement. “We have a new master who owns all.”
The other Jotoki keened their distress and the five shoulder eyes of each one of them stared at Monkeyshine. He looked at the eyes glinting in the night lights and uneasily glanced back at Long-Reach—and then at his toes. He knew they wanted something. “Why is he confined?”
“He is a warrior.”
That, of course, was supposed to explain everything. Fighting was warriors’ work and some fights were lost and others won. Monkeyshine was not satisfied with the explanation. Warring led to honorable death, not to confinement. “Warriors die!” he said disdainfully.
“No.” Long-Reach was collectively sad. “Sometimes warriors are confined after a loss. Mellow Yellow has been confined before. Then it is the duty of another warrior to free him.”
“A warrior must free him,” said one of Creeps arms. “We insist,” reiterated Creepy’s thinnest arm.
Monkeyshine was aware that his friends were setting him up. There had a message for him to deliver to some great warrior kzin. “I’ll get lost,” he replied defensively. “I’ve hardly been off the estate.”
“A great warrior freed him during the Battle of Wunderland,” intoned Long-Reach, his five voices resonating together.
“Will his friend help him now?” Monkeyshine asked slyly, hoping to stay out of the discussion.
“No. But it is the duty of the son of a crippled warrior to carry on his father’s purpose.”
Monkeyshine giggled. Slaves would be beaten even for talking like that. “Is this Hero son aware of his father’s noble cause?” If such a warrior was just a few hours away, he might be able to sneak a message through at night to tell him of Grraf-Nig’s dire need. Monkeyshine was scared already just thinking about it even if he was good at sneaking. And then he thought of his dim-witted mother. What would they all do without Mellow Yellow? The situation was desperate. “I’m only a little boy!” He was crying.
“You are the son of a warrior!” Long-Reach insisted sonorously in a collective voice that was followed by a squeaking from the most sympathetic of Long-Reach’s arms in defiance of the other four. “Leave him alone! He’s not a warrior yet.”
“I’m not Mellow Yellow’s son!” lamented Monkeyshine, only now wakening to the purpose of this cabal. “I only spar with him! It’s pretend!”
“You come of a warrior race,” said Long-Reach gently. Were they hinting about his unknown father?
“Was my father a warrior?” The mere thought terrified him.
“We know nothing of your father. Your mother was a great warrior.”
Monkeyshine rebelled. That again. They had hinted at such foolishness before, in their multiple babblings. He’s angry. “My mother is my foolish mother!” he shouted.
“Your mother killed thirteen kzin warriors,” came a slow melodious reply.
The other Jotoki had folded up their stalklike limbs to protect their heads and were sitting defensively on their undermouths, arm-lungs fixed in the mode that allowed soft breathing but silenced the voice. The remembrance of the horrible crime gripped the council and only one tiny voice had the courage to justify it. “She was saving Mellow Yellow… from confinement,” it piped.
Monkeyshine was just as frightened by the tale as his hosts.
They told the story in bits and pieces, sharing the details to share the guilt, exaggerating to impress the boy. The account wasn’t always coherent for it was told in a slave language poorly designed to discuss revolt and war strategy. They had to make up words and string words together and build explanations around their compound words to define them. They had to make analogies to machines and slave work. They had to tell this to an eight-year-old-boy who had only half the language abilities of a human adult. Totally unaware of the human developmental cycle, they thought of Monkeyshine as the full intellectual equal of the Lieutenant Nora Argamentine they had once known.
They had once convinced the kzinti war captive to lead a rebellion against the crew of the Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch to save their master, and they were fully convinced that they could do the same now. Guilt and horror had long suppressed their memories of the mutiny. Now it was necessary to save their master again and they argued and squabbled back and forth, arm to arm, Jotok to Jotok, to revive the details so that Monkeyshine might profit from them. Nora’s warrior deeds seemed clear to them—but they argued long and hotly about how she had planned her campaign. Military strategy was still a mystery to them. What they couldn’t understand they expected Monkeyshine to understand for them because he was of a warrior race.