"Are they truly human?"
"That's for you to say. They certainly seemed to have the usual number of fingers and toes and nipples and things. I kept some tissue samples when they passed out the monkey meat afterwards, as well as some old bones. Here."
"Thanks. How delightful." Perpetua placed the fragments into an autodoc.
"Somebody's got to do the job. And this-" Ginger produced some different tissue-"is a sample of the local Jotoki. Better analyze that too.
"And there are these." Ginger's clawtip stirred the metal fragments spread on the table.
"Smelted, refined, tempered metal."
"Yes. Smart. I'd like to have seen the heads better, but the brain cases looked big. I did get a look at a female's pelvis during the feast, and the birth canal looked big enough for a big-brained head to pass. As far as I know human anatomy, it didn't look unusual. It tasted like ordinary monkey meat. It had a fetus but I couldn't get a good look at that in time."
"…I see."
"Are you unwell?"
"No. Excuse me; I forget sometimes… This helmet: it ought to fit a human head. More than that…there's something about it I can't put my finger on. Anything else?"
"I think I've told you most of it, the tunnels and traps and so forth. There were only two kz’eerkti females killed. Maybe that was just chance, but it suggests most of their fighters are male, which suggests moderate sexual dimorphism. What else…We passed a sign just after we crossed the river. I memorized it. Let me see-yes. It was like this." He copied some marks onto an old-fashioned pad. "Hunt Master said kz’eerkti used it for marking their territory."
"Hmm, it looks like writing… Why not just zap them from space, or nuke them?"
"If they were going to do that, they should have done it right at the beginning. As a race, we don't like admitting it when we've got a problem. You must have noticed. Further, if too many young males survived there would be a higher level of endemic civil war for territory, especially now without the space war to draw them off. Civil war and generational blood feuds are endemic at a fairly low level anyway, but without a high death rate from other causes-such as hunting-among the young it would escalate. It's an acceptable loss rate, especially without the space war. But I'll tell you something else: There's something odd about Hunt Master. It took me a while to work out what, because it's something you find only relatively rarely among kzinti, but now I'm sure of it: He's a crook."
"As you say, rare in kzinti. Or so all my reading tells me."
"All successful nonviolent crime depends on the manipulation of appearances. That's what he's doing. I think he got a couple of kzinti killed deliberately-adults and kits. No honorable trainer, no matter how lethal and ruthless as a trainer, would do that when leading them in the face of an enemy. You see the difference between the two situations?"
Perpetua nodded.
"My ziirgrah sense isn't comparable to telepathy, but it's pretty good."
"Then why don't the local kzinti see it?"
"Maybe they don't know what to look for. Weathered old kzintoshi like Hunt Master-tough and hard-bitten even by kzinti standards-tend to be limited in imagination, but almost icons of propriety."
"And another thing. Even if it's not a question of space-based lasers, why not just push in with modern weapons and take the kz’eerkti territory?"
"You feel how hot it is, this far south? I imagine that's why Warrgh-Churrg is content to let Estate Manager run this place while he lives it up in his northern palace. As a marquis he should be living on and dominating the borders personally-the responsibility of guarding them goes with the title. But we're really past the edge of the temperature range which kzinti like. Not too much further south the trees give way to the savannah and then hot desert and mountains. With this planet's small axial tilt seasons hardly exist and south of here it's always hot. The slow rotation accentuates the heat during the day. Further south again and you're in unending tropic rain and steam. Conditions as horrible for kzinti as you can get.
"Kzinti don't want the badlands when there's ample land in the higher latitudes with a cooler climate. Besides, deserts don't breed enough game or support big-bodied prey. Who wants to eat rodents or telepath food?
"Also, we have here a fairly plainly defined frontier. Further west the river broadens into swamps and deltas which kzinti also don't like, and then on to the sea, which they have very little interest in. With three moons you get hypertides often enough to make building near the sea unattractive anyway, and at low tide there are vast shallows, too shallow to navigate with a sea ship, right out to the continental shelf… Odd, that. The river should have cut a very deep channel through the shallows by now…
"Further east, where the aquifer that gives birth to the headwaters of this river rises, the frontier peters out into mountains and desert, of no use to anyone.
"Of course, the kzin could attack anywhere if they were fighting a war of extermination, whether on foot or with mechanized forces, but that's not their purpose. But basically, as I said, it suits them to keep the kz’eerkti for sport and training. Hunt Master said something to the effect that life would be boring without them… Apart from the fact that he'd be out of a job-hunting and getting paid for it!-that any kzintosh would envy.
"The kz’eerkti tunnels puzzle me, though. Hunt Master said a nuclear strike would poison the surrounding land. But you could smash them effectively enough in other ways. Drop heavy conventional bombs on them, for example, or scatter mines at the entrances. You wouldn't even need smart munitions, let alone advanced weapons like disintegrators or walking doomsday dolls. Holding back like that doesn't fit in with kzinti ruthlessness toward an enemy.
"But it does fit in with the pattern of kzinti behavior toward game species on other worlds: We're not bad conservationists, actually, especially where good hunt-beasts are concerned. Better than you've been, as I read Earth history-but of course you can eat anything you find, so why would you bother?
"And it fits with what seems to be an immutable in hunting cultures: When you're dealing with a clever, hardy prey species in difficult hunts, a prey species capable of retaliation, a kind of empathy often develops between hunter and prey. Some of the terms Hunt Master was using for the kz’eerkti have a color of affection about them, the kind a kzintosh in benign mood might use for his naughty kittens. You may have noticed Warrgh-Churrg had some stuffed kz’eerkti specimens as well as heads mounted on his walls?"
"I could hardly help noticing. I didn't get a close look, though."
"Probably beasts considered noble-hard to kill, or somehow courageous Ya nar Kzinti. Further, I gather there's occasionally something like a tacit, informal truce between kzinti and kz’eerkti. You'd probably die if you bet your life on it, but I gather from Hunt Master there are times when both species are a little less aggressive toward each other. That's the liver of what puzzles me: Toleration is not a kzinti trait. We conserve species, and we know dead slaves fetch no food and work no factories, but we don't stand any nonsense.
"The mechanics of it I don't understand. And I may be wrong anyway. It's hard to interpret the nuances of body language and ear twitches in a strange culture."
"You say the kzinti don't want a lot of Kzrral because it's got a lousy climate. Surely with modern engineering they could change a lot of the climate, or build large-scale habitats?"
"At this stage it's not worth the effort and expense, not with the present population, and land for all the nobility. Most of those on the hunt had only partial names, indicating there isn't much difficulty in becoming at least a modest landowner. Kzinti government and administration are pretty sketchy on any planet. We don't like paying taxes, and without a lot of slave labor we're not much good at large-scale cooperative projects except war-and you've shown us we could be a lot better at that.