“There!” Hunt Master leapt vertically, claws slashing at something like a huge black starfish in the bushes above.
“Speaking of Jotoki,” he remarked, disentangling himself from the pieces, “there was an old rogue. Ready to drop on us. Well, Jotok and monkey meat for all survivors tonight!”
IV
“Seven kz’eerkti dead at least,” said Ginger as he reentered the groundcar and closed the hatch, “and eleven kzinti—though eight were kits on their first hunt, and of course it's important to cull the unfit early. But from the kzinti point of view, not a very successful kill ratio. There might have been more kz’eerkti dead that the others carried away. But a successful night for Warrgh-Churrg.”
“How so?”
“One of the adult kzinti who died was a small landowner. He had an estate that borders on Warrgh-Churrg's and owed him money. Warrgh-Churrg will pick it up without trouble now. Plus the harem, of course, and the kits if he should happen to want them—and the deceased landowner's eldest kit was among the other dead. A fairly easy night's work for Warrgh-Churrg, letting the kz’eerkti expand his estates for him.”
“But a casualty ratio like that? There was nothing like it in the wars, even when human troops were well equipped. How do you account for it?” asked Perpetua. She had kept the car locked in Ginger's absence and herself crouched down inside it, well out of the sight and the attention of the guard—and especially of the furious wounded kzinti as they returned.
“The kzinti sought out the kz’eerkti on their own ground, as usual, and the kz’eerkti had well-prepared traps and ambushes—”
“As usual.”
“Tactless, Pet. These kz’eerkti were exceptionally tough with it. And the kits, also as usual, were overexcited, overeager and inexperienced.”
“And nobody told them?”
“Hunt Master believes there's no teacher like experience. Between you and me—which is a rather silly phrase in these circumstances—I think Hunt Master had directions to get a few knocked off. With modern life most affluent kzinti households grow up with too many male kits unless they are thinned out one way or another—and this helps thin out the slow and stupid, as well as the overeager who might grow up to be a nuisance by challenging their fathers. It's a rough and ready system, though. Among the kits who survived tonight were some I'd marked down as not the brightest.”
“It sounds a pretty unstable society.”
“It is, once you come to see it a certain way. Why do you think you humans keep winning wars? One reason my great-grandsire and a few others threw in their lot with humans after the Liberation was because they could see kzinti technology and culture were so grossly out of sync. We're barbarians with high technology, and we're lucky we didn't exterminate ourselves before space travel gave us elbow room.
“Perhaps you understand now something of what I was trying to explain before, about me. We Wunderkzin families are called the ultimate traitors to our species by the Patriarchy, but we believe we carry the best ultimate hope of our species' survival, because we see that hope as encompassing a society where half the male children don't have to be killed in the process of growing up; and where there are other ends in life beyond war and hunting. But I'm getting off the point.”
“I don't mind, it's all new to me still. I'm eating it up.”
Ginger curled his ears at her briefly, then said, “You omnivores have some disturbing turns of phrase. Anyway, Hunt Master limited the technology they used—with modern weapons and detection equipment it would have been a different story and no hunt at all. The kz’eerkti were tough for humans, and had resourcefulness and cooperation. And those Jotoki cooperating with them were very aggressive and well trained. They accounted for several of the young kzinti on their own. Also, they're good in trees; I think it was a Jotok that acted to create a diversion in the branches, to draw the hunt away from the human withdrawal. I've not known them to cooperate with another species before, apart from those specially trained by kzinti slave masters.”
“Kz’eerkti on Kzinhome don't speak, do they?”
“Not really. A variety of squeals and grunts. I guess if any evolved speech or intelligence in the past they would have been jumped on pretty quickly.”
“And yet these talk?”
“Oh, yes, no doubt about it! Damned cheek, some of it! I heard one of them calling me a—Well, I won't go into that.”
“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.”