At the end of the seminar, Lucas Fry turned to Yankee. “Let’s sneak out. I’d like nothing better than to play some silly game with Nora. Is there a place where I can buy her a present? Is there anything she likes?”
Yankee took the general over to a friend’s house whose daughter fashioned jewelry as a hobby. “I can’t think of a thing she likes better than baubles.”
Lucas picked out a chain platinum headband inlaid with translucent stones from Starbase’s primary “Do you think she’ll like it?”
“She probably won’t wear it. She likes to squirrel away pretty things where she can dig them up and cherish them.”
“Well, women don’t wear their jewelry anyway. They keep all that stuff in boxes to show their girlfriends.” Fry bought the headband from the young girl with praise for her workmanship.
“That was a good speech you gave us,” said Yankee, gliding along the hallway and up the steel stairs. “You make a fine mentor.”
“That’s what Grand Viziers are for,” muttered the general gruffly. “It’s going to be touch and go. My biggest worry is Earth.”
“Why?”
“You’re a flatlander. You figure it out. I can’t. But we have to bring the mass of them over to our side. They’ve forgotten that there ever was a war. Amnesia. Only the colonies are preparing. But once the kzinti have the factories to churn out hypershunt motors they will be converging on every human world from all over the Patriarchy. Flatlander’s will have to take the brunt of the attack. Earth is the place with the population. It’s where we’ll have to find our cannon-fodder.”
“Do you think the ARM is behind the shut down of public debate?”
“Yah. For security reasons. Old habit. They can’t resist any ploy if it might stop people from thinking about war. Maybe you flatlanders were buying too many toy guns. Made them nervous. They reacted. But it is not just the ARM. It’s the flatlanders themselves. The ARM’S message has been assimilated into the culture. War is no longer even part of the idiom. Kzinti warriors have to be marching across Kansas before… Oh what the hell. I want to see Nora’s face when she sees my bauble. You don’t think she is afraid of me, do you?”
Yankee had all of his cousin’s old papers. Her high school yearbooks. Her many attempts at writing a diary. Her letters to her father. School essays. Drawings. Her photo album. Her anguished, and finally angry, exchange with the war department. Her patriotic newspaper essays that had been franchised for a while on the net. Drafts of the many love letters she wrote to boys. First drafts of letters never sent—embarrassments that she had neglected to erase. One of them was a mushy love letter to a certain Yankee Clandeboye. He had never known, from the way she treated him, that she had ever had a crush on him.
For no particular reason he began to organize this unsorted mess. They all hoped Nora might recover her use of words. She would never recover her memories. She would always be the woman who had grown up half-slave, half-kzinrett, born on Hssin. Those were the only memories she had. But maybe, if she ever learned to read and talk again, she might find an interest in these papers by the woman she once had been—like a granddaughter reading the musty diary of a heroic grandmother never known.
Gradually, as Yankee got involved, as memories reminded him of the charmer who had twiddled compulsively with the same strand of hair for all the years he had known her, he started to write about her. He had a need to organize his thoughts. He wanted other people to understand this heroine. It was a story that grew on him, built around her Hssin diaries.
Something that stirred inside him told him it was a way to talk to the flatlander soul.
He began his story while Lieutenant Nora Argamentine was living as a kzinrett in the dungeon of a wrecked interstellar fortress beside a dying star, totally dependent upon a kzin who thought that it was natural for females to tend their males and young without the aid of an independent self—a kzin who had the biotechnical power, and the inclination, to take away her mind so that she might more easily fit into his world and serve him.
He built the legend around her hidden diary. With each brain operation it became more urgent for her to record what she was afraid she was losing forever. Yankee lovingly annotated her entries with her pictures, with other things she had written, with his own personal memories. On far-off Hssin she’d wistfully remember a boy she had once known on Earth. Yankee would include her love letter to that boy in a fourteen-year-olds grammar.
Very carefully he wove through the book the saga of the hypershunt motor that had been captured at the Battle of Wunderland, and of Lieutenant Argamentine’s valiant attempts to destroy it. An almost successful mutiny. The killing of the kzinti crew. The last kzin. The recapture. The attempts to kill the last kzin. The failure. Her captor could have killed her but he found her useful, yet too dangerous to be left with a mind. Human heroes aren’t defined by their wins. A hero is the one who remains committed to principles. A hero is the one who never stops trying and never stops learning.
Why did Lieutenant Nora Argamentine try so hard to destroy that motor when she could have played it cool, been non-threatening, and perhaps saved her mind? Yankee hinted to his reader the chilling truth. Wasn’t it because she could see what a reverse-engineered hypershunt would mean to the Patriarchy? Had she seen the assembly lines on a hundred kzin worlds building a new and greater fleet to launch against Sol with all the resources of the Patriarchy behind it?
Her father died in the desperate days of the Ceres conflagration defending mankind against a fleet that had nearly brought the race to slavery—yet the enemy was only an adventurer’s ragtag knock-together manned by border barbarians whose resource base depended wholly upon the factories of Wunderland. In the next war light-lag would not protect Sol from a sluggish giant driven to anger by swarms of alien gnats who had penetrated its territory with impunity on wings that might be plucked out and turned to better use by warriors who knew what to do with such speeded reflexes.
To teach his readers how to see the man-kzin conflict with the eyes of Nora Argamentine, that was Yankee’s hope.
It was a mad project and he worked too hard on it, after his other duties. Sometimes a man just had to stop and go home.
“You’re late,” said Chloe, happy to see him. She was breast-feeding Val on the bed.
“Let me hold her.”
“After she’s fed, dummy.”
“How was your day?”
“I was with Nora and the kids again. Her boys are too much for me. They still don’t know what to make of a woman who can talk. Yankee,” she added sadly, “Nora isn’t getting better.”
“She might be.” He stripped and crawled under the covers. All he wanted was to close his eyes and sink his head deep into the pillow, but you lose wives you ignore. He reached a hand out and switched on the bedroom flatscreen, fiddling with it until it networked with his office.
He called up a picture that was an obvious brain scan.
“One of Dr. Hunker’s pictures. See the white fuzz inside that gray area? Let me contrast it in false color.” He made adjustments. “Those are baby neurons.”
“She’s going to talk?”
“Hunker doesn’t know, but he’s giving it his best shot. It will be easier with the girls because of their age.”
“Didn’t that kzin grow a lot of neurons in her head?”
“He sure did. He killed a lot, too. And played around with dendritic growth like a yo-yo. Hunker has studied Trainer-of-Slaves’ notes. He’s incorporating bits and pieces of kzin biotechnology into some of his tailor-made boosterspices.”