“He doesn't like cold feet?”
“But is it significant? Kzinti distrust too much comfort. We like luxury when we can take it, but are hostile to anything that might soften us. But as I was dodging arrows in the night out there I realized what one of the oddities at the spaceport was. The thing I was puzzling about immediately afterwards and couldn't quite get a fang into. We left footprints in the snow…”
“I remember! I was worried I'd get frostbite! But a slave has to know her place.”
“The point is, both when we went to the palace together and when I went to the banquet later, I saw human footprints without kzinti footprints beside them. Coming back to the ship after the banquet I saw one or two human slaves abroad, at night and unsupervised—and they didn't flee at the sight of me. Warrgh-Churrg has human house-slaves. We saw that. But he said almost nothing about it, despite the fact human slaves were the very subject of our conversation, and ostensibly the very point of my visit to this planet. I saw a couple at the banquet, too—they were carrying food and so forth, and I supposed they cleaned up afterwards—but none of the kzinti referred to them.
“Talk about humans as prey animals and sport, yes! Have human trophies on the walls. But to talk about humans as house slaves, as waiters, perhaps as errand-runners, as the cleaners of those trophies—a sort of tacit taboo. That's one of the oddities. Once or twice at the banquet human slaves came bearing meat to me and those near me, and what my ziirgrah picked up from my fellow guests was a faint suggestion of an emotion I've encountered in humans often enough but not with kzintoshi—embarrassment! That's something I've never encountered on a kzinti world before. Have you ever heard of an embarrassed kzin?”
“You're cats. I've never heard of an embarrassed cat of any kind. It's practically a contradiction in terms.”
“It's something to bite at. I feel there's meat there.”
“Uh-huh.” Perpetua was absorbed in her examination of the inscription and the helmet. “I'm certain this was writing. What's more, these characters are derived from West European letters!”
“So they are from Wunderland. Not a convergent native species.”
“That's right, but… this language isn't English, or Wunderlander.”
“Let me see. If these marks had been linked when new, then the characters… 'Nihil… proficiat… inimicus… '” Ginger spelled out the words carefully. Human and kzin shook head and ears in puzzlement. Perpetua turned to the helmet.
“What's this?” She pried at the rusted metal. A flake of something fell into her hand. “It's… paint?”
“Yes. And look at this piece.”
“What about it?”
“First of all, those are beads of glass. They have a sense of decoration. More than that, they have a technology for making glass. Glass is difficult. Oh, that's just the beginning. Look at this! Look closely now!”
“How did they do that? They have no smelters.”
“Haven't they? Hunt Master took it for granted they have them somewhere.”
“We're talking high-temperature metallurgy here, not a few molds in a charcoal fire to make bronze or something—though even that would be significant enough.”
“Maybe the Jotoki made it,” said Perpetua. “They had high technology. Their gravity motors got as close to the light-barrier as one can get without the hyperdrive shunt.” Ginger knotted his ears down in a gesture of puzzlement.
“You've got to train Jotoki young, practically from the time they're tadpoles. Feral Jotoki are feral forever. But human or Jotoki, if they had smelters, even primitive ones, kzinti satellites would detect the smoke plumes—for that matter, since practically all kzinti satellites have military capabilities and military sense enhancers, the heat sources would stick out like the Patriarch's testicles after a battle!”
“You're a kzin. You're allowed to say that?”
“It implies no disrespect, quite the reverse. But setting our cultural differences aside, I have the idea reinforced that these particular monkeys have more to them than meets the eye.”
“Did you get any idea how many there are?”
“Hunt Master says there are different troops, and he doesn't know how far south their territory extends. I doubt he's got the means to count them.”
“Would someone lend him a satellite?”
“If they were a major threat the high-tech response would be quick enough. As it is, who cares?”
“Could the monkey lands reach the equator? Maybe even into the southern hemisphere?”
“I doubt it. Near the equator it's too hot. The seas nearly boil. But they might extend a long way toward it. You monkeys are adaptable and sometimes tougher than you look.”
“This whole situation could pose us problems. We've got the bullion to buy individual unrepatriated slaves from individual owners and the ship to get them home. But this sounds like a much bigger business. It'll mean putting repatriation on an industrial basis.”
The autodoc beeped. Colored blocks appeared on its screen.
“Human DNA,” said Perpetua. “So these are runaway slaves, not a native species. In fact, I'm taking it closer… now this is odd, very odd.”
“What?”
“Look at that profile. What was the principal source of human slaves?”
“Wunderland, of course. They were shipping them out in herds—sorry; wholesale—during the occupation. Very few from other planets. There aren't many prisoners from space battles.”
“Exactly. And Wunderland was settled by a North European consortium with a few Japanese and South Africans. Of course the whole human race was getting pretty mixed up by that time, and racial profiling can be misleading in any case. But Wunderland DNA tends to be recognizable, simply as coming from a particular melting pot. Here, though, according to the templates a lot of this DNA profile is far less variegated. As if it's from a population that's been separate much longer than Wunderland. And I see Southern European—Iberian, Italian, a bit of North African; plus either Irish or very old Scots. And a surprisingly strong presence of something that the library shows looks close to old Welsh, but not quite.
“Certainly there are Celts and some Anglo-Saxons on Wunderland, but the rest are minority groups; and I doubt you'd ever find a DNA profile like this anywhere there. I've tested the fresh meat and the old bones—which are from several different individuals—and they're all about the same. This is a homogenous population, and it's significantly different from Wunderland's.”
“They are not from Wunderland?”
“Impossible. There's no Goth strain at all. Even the isolated, backwoods communities there are descended from people who came in the original slowboats, and the only colonists with no Goth ancestry were Japanese—which isn't even hinted here.”
“What about the slowboat that disappeared?”
Perpetua shook her head. “Lost Travelers' Day hasn't been observed rigorously since before the First War, but it's still marked on calendars—on the anniversary of the day Wunderland's telescopes saw the Evita Peron blow up.”
“What if that was faked?”
“Its colonists were descendants of North European refugees. There'd be Goth.”
“Oh. And what of the Jotoki?”
“The Jotoki do seem to be the same kind as on Wunderland, but you did say you find the same on practically every kzinti world.”
“Urrr… This helmet,” said Ginger. “You say there's something else about it?”