“True,” she realized, suddenly admiring his plan. “He won't be traveling for a few months yet.”
“I have to get back in condition anyway, and practice with my lift belt, so the pressure suit first, I think.”
“First we eat.”
“I'm not hungry.”
“Don't make me cut up your meat for you.”
That look of dismayed amusement returned. Corky shut up.
Less than a day later he was gone. Peace had gotten a tissue sample in the course of fitting the suit, and was telomerizing some cells when Buckminster found her. “You let him go,” the kzin said.
“Had to.”
“Are those his cells? Are you cloning him?”
“Yes and no.”
“What does that mean?”
“Yes, they are, and no, I'm not. I'd been planning to provide infertile women of good character with viable ova containing my original gene pattern, suitably modified to meet local fertility laws, and large trust funds. I had enough for one or two Peace Corbens per human world. Now, though, I'm adding his genes to the recipe. The paranoia can be retained as a recessive, and there'll be more variety in their appearance.”
“You're having children with him, you mean.”
“Near as I can.”
“Why?”
Peace looked up at him. “Same reason I had to let him go. He's a good father, Buckminster. Whether he believes it or not—he's a very good father.”
Harvey Mossbauer's family had been killed and eaten during the Fourth Man-Kzin War. Many years after the truce and after a good deal of monomaniacal preparation, Mossbauer had landed alone and armed on Kzin. He had killed four kzinti males and set off a bomb in the harem of the Patriarch before the guards managed to kill him… The stuffed skin was so scarred that you had to look twice to tell its species; but in the House of the Patriarch's Past it was on a tall pedestal with a hullmetal plaque, and there was nothing around it but floor…
It's safer to eat white arsenic than human meat.
The Hunting Park
Larry Niven
October 20, 2899 CE
“Why do they call you 'white hunter'?”
I smiled but didn't grin. “It's anyone from somewhere else who conducts hunting for sport in Africa. I was born in Confinement Asteroid and raised in Ceres and Tahiti.” He was wondering about my skin, of course. The parts he could see, hands and face, are jet black, from moderately black American ancestry subjected to three decades of raw sunlight in space and in the islands.
“Odd,” said the kzin, but he waved a big furry hand, claws sheathed, dismissing the subject. Waldo had ordered hot milk with black rum; he slurped noisily. I'd ordered the same. He asked, “Why is it taking so long to arrange a safari?”
“First rule is, everything takes forever when you're gearing up. When you're out in the field, everything interesting happens before you can blink. That's when you find out what you forgot to take.”
We studied each other. Waldo was big for a kzin, maybe five hundred pounds, maybe eight feet four or five inches tall. No chairs here could hold him; he squatted in a cleared space in a corner of the restaurant. His fur was marmalade, with a darker stripe diagonally down his chest and abdomen that followed four long runnels of scar tissue, and a shorter scar, also darkly outlined, that just missed his left eye and ear. A thong around his neck held a few leathery scraps: dried ears, I presumed. He kept his claws sheathed as carefully as I kept my lips closed. You don't show your teeth to a kzin.
I hadn't volunteered for this. What sane person would? It was October of 2899 CE; I'd hoped to celebrate my fiftieth birthday next year, when the century turned. I planned to quit the safari business and write.
Then again, who could turn this down? They were paying twice the going rate in Interworld stars, but that was nothing compared to the publicity value. I was wearing some recording gear. We'd have the whole safari on tape, right up to my death, if it broke that way, and my daughters would hold the rights. If I lived, I'd have a tale worth writing.
Waldo was examining Legal Entity Bruce Bianci Bannett, a tall, long-headed black human male forty-nine years old, with yellow tattoos around the eyes and ears that make me look just a bit like a leopard. I guessed what else he was looking for, and I said, “I don't have any really gaudy scars except for the tattoos. It's because I'm careful.”
“I should be glad of that. LE Bannett, our permissions still haven't come through, and I see no kind of a caravan forming.”
“We'll have our permissions.” This trip I wouldn't even need bribes; the United Nations had spoken. “I'm having trouble getting bearers.”
“Offer more money?”
“Money isn't as powerful an argument here in Nairobi. I think they've lived too long with governments that can just snatch it away. They're all a combination of socialist and bandit. A good story, that's a lure, but a man only needs one fortune and one good story.”
“But traveling with… there are four of you? With four kzinti, that's bad enough. You're not using guns?”
“No, not on a hunt. On a hunt we use only the w'tsai. You, though, you'll take a gun?”
“Several.”
“Do not shoot another hunter's prey,” Waldo told me.
“My point was, bearers would usually count on all of us, me or any of my clients, to shoot a, say, a leopard before he gets to the bearers. But there's only one of me, and you—you can't throw a w'tsai, can you?”
Again Waldo waved sheathed claws: a shrug.
“So it's not even a spear. I've hunted with natives who use spears. They have a point. A spear doesn't jam. So my bearers would risk you not being fast enough to save them, plus anything you might do in a rage because you missed your prey.”
“But we have these,” Waldo said, and I saw his claws, three or four inches long, exposed only for a moment. “Not just the w'tsai.”
“What do you want out of this, Waldo?”
“Wave Rider and Long Tracks and I, we are brothers,” Waldo said, “part of Starsieve's crew. Starsieve seeks treasures of the cosmos using ship's instruments. I operate the waldos, of course, the little hand-and-jaw-guided robots. It can be very dull work. We seek an adventure out of the ordinary here on Earth. Kashtiyee-First has been our teacher and First Officer under Prisst-Captain. Both would gain honor if we three gained partial names.”
Names are important to kzinti. Most bear only the names of their professions. “Would this—”
“It would help. A hero's hunt is the story that defines him.”
“What do you want to kill?”
“What have you got?” he asked.
“Not much. The Greater Africa government is solid Green. They tell me what they can spare. Some species are grown beyond the limits of the Refuge.” I fished my sectry out of my pocket and tapped at it, summoning the current list, just in case it had changed in the past two hours. Sure enough— “Cape buffalo is off the list. If a Cape buffalo charges you, you hope you can duck. Elephants are out, of course. We can have a lion… or all the leopards we want. Crocs don't offer much of a trophy, but again—”
“Why are the, rrr, Greens so free with leopards?”
“We used to think leopards were scarce, even endangered. They're not. They're just shy, and really well camouflaged, and they're everywhere. If a lion turns to human prey, he's generally got a reason. Maybe he's hurt his mouth and can't hunt anything difficult. But a leopard, he kills for fun. Antelope, zebra, man, woman, whatever turns up,” I babbled, and suddenly realized— “Of course none of that might apply to kzinti.”
“What are the rules for kzinti?”
“Nobody's got the vaguest idea. We might not catch anything. Your scent might drive them all away.” Waldo didn't smell unpleasant; just really different. “Or bring everything in from miles around. Kzinti have never hunted on Earth.”