Ginger said, "I don't know it all, but there's a poem. About the siege of a base on an asteroid orbiting Proxima Centauri. A human wrote it." He half-closed his eyes and ears, and began to recite:
We served the deep-space radar guiding the giant laser guns:
We'd hold for fifteen days, or twenty at the most.
Hold! Manteufel told us, in that dark Hell past the suns!
Hold! His dying words: Let every Man die at his post!
We fought with desperate makeshifts, caught unprepared for war
Found death as we manned our weapons, death as we burned the dead.
Death at gunport and conduit, death at each airlock door,
Death from the Vengeful Slashers in the sky of black and red.
Handful that we were, we were Man in heart and limb
Strong with the strength of Men, to obey, command, endure!
Each of us fought as if hope for the garrison hung on only him,
Though the siege went on forever and it seemed our doom was sure.
But honor our kdaptist allies, and give the kdaptists their due!
Remember the valiant kdaptists, who fought by us, faithful and few,
Fought as the bravest among us, and slashed and burned and slew,
Where blood flowed under the blood-red sun, kdaptist blood flowed too!
Ginger trailed off, and said, "I don't remember everything, but I do know the end."
Saved by kdaptists, sing their praise,
Saved by the blessing of Heaven!
We couldn't have held for twenty days.
We held for ninety-seven.
Marcus Augustus cleared his throat. Then he cleared it again. "I must speak with you sometime soon, of Horatius," he said at last. "Excuse me a moment." He left the chamber, not wishing to show his face just now.
The translator had carried overtones very well indeed.
Ginger switched it off as Perpetua said, "Quick thinking."
"I got up and read some of their literature last night. Learning sets cost me sleep. How are we going to get them out of here?"
"The slaves, you mean?"
"The ones here too."
"The slaves?"
"All of them."
"What, every human on the planet?"
"It's the only way to free all the slaves," Ginger said reasonably. "Otherwise the kzinti and the patricians will just make more slaves."
"You're certifiable. There must be thousands."
"Probably about fifty thousand," Ginger estimated. "Certifiable as what?"
"Demented. Any psychist would recommend you for treatment at public expense. We might get one percent out on our ship if we packed them in in stasis, if we had a stasis field, which we don't."
"We'll need more ships, certainly," Ginger agreed.
"Stop agreeing with me when I'm arguing with you! Even," she said, breathing hard, "even if we had the ships, we've got no pilots, no fuel, no weapons, and no destination we could reach before we were caught! And we don't have the ships, and we don't have the money to get the ships!"
"It is possible these problems may be overcome," said a synthesized voice.
They both looked up. A Jotok was settled in the web of branches overhead, two tentacles holding an oblong metallic device that had clearly been repaired many times.
Marcus Augustus hadn't been surprised by their translator for very long, Ginger recalled. "What are you doing here?" he exclaimed, beginning to be offended.
"We live here," said the Jotok.
"I mean in this room!"
"So do we. We are Jinvaretsimok, senior archivist." The Jotok swung down by one tentacle and landed on the two free ones. "Tradition tells us that most problems are the result of insufficient money. This should not be the case here. If there are aspects of the problem that money cannot solve, perhaps something else will prove applicable. May we hear more about the circumstances?"
IX
Once they were back in the car, the first thing Perpetua said was, "Incredible."
"Having never spoken with Jotoki who have been free for the past nine centuries, I am in no position to judge," Ginger remarked. "At least now we know why they've never been found. I hope my sense of smell comes back. I wonder what those trees are?"
"Cedar," she said absently. "From Earth. Must have intended the wood as trade goods… I meant all that gold is incredible!"
"I suppose the Jotoki had to find something to keep themselves busy for nine hundred years," Ginger said.
"They certainly haven't been sitting on their hands," Perpetua said.
Ginger thought about it. "Yes they have," he finally said. "Where else could they?"
"It's a metaphor," she said.
"Oh." Ginger, like most Wunderkzin, understood metaphors, though many other kzinti simply found them annoying-a race which occasionally resorts to disembowelment in the course of reasoned debate has little motivation to search for subtle means of expression. "Would that be why Marcus Augustus warned me against garlic? An unusually obscure metaphor?"
"Garlic? When was this?"
"When you and Jinvaretsimok were talking about how to get hold of phase initiators."
"Garlic," she said, puzzled. "I have no idea. Maybe they've bred poisonous insects that attack anything that smells like it? They certainly had plenty of other schemes in the works!"
"Not that one," Ginger said positively. "The kz’eerkti on the hunt had been eating it, and so had the Jotoki. The local kzinti have actually developed a taste for the stuff." He blew out air through his mouth to expel the memory of the taste of a particularly concentrated mouthful.
"You never mentioned that."
"I noticed the details were troubling you. Arm yourself. The car is not going where I'm telling it to."
Perpetua leaped up to look out the windscreen, then got down and opened an access panel. Then she said, "There's something that's probably an autopilot override, and a transceiver, and a booby trap in case I try to remove them. I think somebody can hear us."
"Let me in there." Ginger got down and looked it over. It was a good booby trap. It wouldn't blow up the car; just the control circuitry, crashing them. "Well, this is hopeless," he said, picking up a pad to write her a note.
The car landed in the courtyard of Trrask-Rarr's castle-an almost traditional structure-and shut down. The troops standing by kept it covered, and Trrask-Rarr went to the hatch himself and opened it.
Trader was on the deck, using his w'tsai to hack frantically though a mass of seat restraints he'd evidently tried to make into a net. He seemed pretty well immobilized. Trrask-Rarr stepped in, amused, and the monkey appeared overhead, head down, and dropped a bomb on him.
It was a can of emergency patching foam, rigged to burst open; and, as it was designed to do, the foam stuck to everything it touched. Trrask-Rarr tried to take a swing at the monkey before the stuff could set, but Trader turned out not to be tangled, naturally, and whipped the webwork around Trrask-Rarr's arm and jerked it off course.
Trrask-Rarr inhaled deeply and held his breath until the foam went rigid-not long-then exhaled, disdaining to notice the yanks on his fur as he breathed.
The monkey dropped down, landing on its feet as they always seemed to do, and said, "Please excuse the poor hospitality." In formal Kzin. Not a bad accent, either. "We are still recovering from the interruption in our efforts to arrange the removal of all kz’eerkti from Kzrral."
It took Trrask-Rarr a moment to absorb this. He stopped planning the details of their vivisection and said, "I'm listening."
"May I offer our guest some solvent?" said Trader, putting Trrask-Rarr on the spot.
Soon, bound by hospitality and his honor, instead of the less-definitely-confining hull-repair material, Trrask-Rarr was brushing conditioner through his fur and taking in the most amazing scheme he'd ever heard. The monkey kept speaking without permission, but as Trrask-Rarr was now in the role of guest, and Trader didn't object, he treated this as if it were normal. A Jotok was brought in to remove the monitor and override, and worked as they discussed the plan.