No matter how much he tried, he couldn’t make sense of the wires and little boxes and mechanical linkages. He couldn’t even read the instruments or make the screens light up. He wanted Long-Reach to explain it all to him. Even Mellow Yellow would answer his questions. He didn’t understand anything! He was angry and had to control his rage like Mellow Yellow had shown him how to do in a fight. It was important that he not break anything. He knew that if he did, he would kill his family. He knew where he had to take them—but he didn’t know how!
The tears started to pool in his eyes and he had to shake them away. He couldn’t help himself. He was sobbing.
His mother lost interest in the face-fur. She glided over and put her arms around him. He tried to push her away, but he didn’t really want her to go. She was very stupid but she was good at comforting. He let her hold him and he sobbed.
Yankee completely understood the boy’s frustration. Yankee was trussed so tight that his feet had gradually gone to sleep. Tears came to his eyes, pooling in sympathy until the major was seeing from a watery world of blindness. He had been watching the boy, first with dread, then with admiration. The kid was a mechanical genius. It didn’t matter, of course. He didn’t know the codes. The ship was kzin-proof. No stranger could have piloted it. What was going to happen to them?
Nora was a soft focus blur holding her son’s head to her breasts and staring at Yankee. Gently she left her calmer son with soothing purrs. She came over to Yankee and stared into his eyes, perhaps bewildered that the water was coming out of them and not his penis. She touched a finger to his tears and tasted them. Then, with her tongue, she licked his eyes clear. The fear had returned to her face, but cunning fear. She was smiling. It wasn’t the kzin grin of ferocity—it was a human smile, dimples and all. This woman wanted something from the man she feared and she wasn’t sure she was going to get it so she poured on the charm.
She began to undo Yankee’s bonds with the intelligence of a mind that knows it can never ask for help. The boy, sober now, leaped in to stop her. She whacked him away with a snarl. Yankee, not yet free, watched in amazement as the boy began to plead with her in quick kzinti yappings. He could tell that she didn’t understand a single word her son was saying. Still she worked at the strapping. Alternately she smiled at Yankee and snarled like a kzin at her son.
The boy went off with his brothers and sisters to sulk. Yankee tested his legs. They were numb and painful when he tried to use their muscles. He didn’t need them in null-gee. He inspected the control panel—no damage at all. The boy hadn’t tried to be smarter than he was. Because of that he called him over to help in the job of reassembly. He smiled at the boy—human instinct was the only working language they had in common. The boy helped him fearfully but did not smile back.
“Hey, get us out of these cocoons,” complained Jay.
“Hold your horses!” Idioms survive forever in a language. Yankee powered up the hyperwave and called their pickup ship which had to be sitting out there somewhere less than a tenth of a light-year away. That had been prearranged. He made contact. The reply was excited, stellar reference points exchanged. They were on their way.
Now to tend to the boy. He set all the screens to run a game called Brick Bradford’s Shrinking Sphere. The screen put you inside a porous fractile sponge of incredible colors and shapes. Brick Bradford could float his sphere anywhere among the pores, and since each surface was also porous, he could penetrate any wall by shrinking into the finer sponge. The demonstration mesmerized the shaken child.
Yankee needed a name for the boy but asking for a name in the Hero’s Tongue was a very delicate matter of the proper protocol. If a kzin had a name, you took your life in your hand to ask him his profession. Yet if he had a profession, you were not even allowed the assumption that he might have earned a name. Who knew the proper protocol for a slave?
Yankee put on his headphones and consulted the ship’s translator. The machine gave vague advice. He tried anyway in his best hiss-and-spits. “You have the honor of speaking to Yankee-Clandeboye.” No use being modest. “And I shall need to speak with you.”
The boy wasn’t a warrior anymore. He looked at Yankee. “Kz’eerkttt,” he said timidly with a chopped glottal bray at the end. He had the voice of a confused slave who was unsure of his station in life or whether he still had a life. The machine seemed to think his whisper translated as, “the tricks of a monkey.”
Yankee couldn’t tell if that was a swear word in the Hero’s Tongue or the boy’s name, probably both. “Okay. We’ll call you Sir Monk Argamentine.” He took the boy’s hand and showed it how to wave fingers in the “command space” above the keyboard to move the screen viewpoint around inside the variegated sponge, and how he could shrink to pass into the pores of any wall. Yankee was giving him back a little bit of the control he’d lost. Monk might not be able to handle a hyperdrive—but he could fly a mathematical ship into the depths of fractile space.
Then Yankee unstrapped Jay and Beany, much to their relief. Lieutenant Nora Argamentine watched his every move. She’s very smart, he thought. She just negotiated the settlement of a lethal impasse. But she wasn’t the Nora he knew. It broke his heart.
Chapter 22
The UNSN Abraham Lincoln slipped slowly into its berth in orbit above the bleak surface of Barnard’s Starbase, the news of its arrival classified by the ARM. Chloe Blumenhandler sat with a very nervous General Lucas Fry in the reception area down-planet, watching the docking through the controller’s camera. She was very pregnant and had not seen her husband for seven months. Hyperspace travel was fast but not that fast-three days to cross a light-year. Fry had not seen Nora for eighteen years.
A phone chimed a few chords from Beethoven’s Fifth. “That’s me,” said Fry puffing out the comm from his belt infocomp. “Lucas here.” He listened for a second, then turned to Chloe. “It’s Yankee.” He switched on the sound. “Great operation! Smooth. We’re going to gild you and set you on top of the UN building!”
“Finagle hasn’t told you half of it! I’m just calling up to warn you. Nora isn’t going to recognize you when she sees you.”
“I know that,” said the general gruffly.
“It’s still a shock. I felt snubbed after all the trouble I’d taken to rescue her. I was outraged—just for a second. She used to do that to me when we were kids. She’d snub me when she was mad at me. I hated it.”
“Yah, well I’m made of sterner stuff than you flabby flatlanders. How is she?”
“Healthy as a kzin. We’re having a little trouble at the moment. She’s ripping off her clothes as fast as we can put her into them. Stubborn. She doesn’t like clothes. For the reception, we’re going to have to sew her into a jumpsuit.”
“Sounds like Nora.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Lucas. It’s not Nora. I’ve been with her for three months now. I don’t know who the hell she is!”
“Is the brain damage bad?”
Yankee changed the subject “I hear they brought in Dr. Hunker for her. Is he there?” Dr. Hunker was from the Institute of Knowledge on Jinx. He was the man on the boosterspice team who studied neural-aging reversal.