Still, even this could be; a parallelism among fauna on various worlds did not absolutely prove a common ancestry for its dominant species.
Jim noticed something also that was very interesting about Ro herself. Most of the animals responded happily when she spoke to them or petted them. Even those who did not—and she handled even the fiercest of them without hesitation—showed absolutely no hostility. The farthest they got from expressions of happiness at her attention was something like a lazy indifference.
Such as in the case of one large catlike creature—easily as big as a South American jaguar and somewhat resembling the jaguar in its spotted coat, although a heavy, horselike head spoiled the general picture. This catlike creature yawned and allowed itself to be petted but made no great effort to respond to Ro’s caresses. The apelike creature in the black hair, in contrast, sadly clung to her hand and gazed into her face as she spoke to it and stroked its head; but it made no other response.
Letting go of its hand at last—pulling away, in fact—Ro turned finally to Jim.
“Now you’ve seen them,” she said. “Maybe you’ll help me take care of them sometimes. They really should have more attention than I give them alone. Afuan forgets she has them for months on end… Oh, that won’t happen to you—” She interrupted herself suddenly. “You understand? You’re to perform for the Emperor when we get back to the Throne World. And as I say, you’re not an animal.”
“Thank you,” said Jim gravely.
She looked surprised, then laughed. She patted his arm in the gesture he was beginning to find customary on her part.
“Now,” she said, “you’ll want to get to your own quarters.”
Instantly they were in a room that they had not been in before. Like the room containing the pets, it had a glass wall window looking out on the beach and the ocean beyond, which, whether illusion or reality, rolled its surf within thirty feet of the glass wall itself.
“These will be your quarters,” said Ro. Jim looked around him. There was no sign of a door in any of the walls.
“Don’t you suppose,” he said, “you’d better tell this Wolfling how to get around from one room to the next?”
“To the next?” she echoed with a puzzled frown, and suddenly he realized that she had taken him literally. His mind seized on the implications of that.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I simply meant from this room to any other room. But—just for the fun of it—what is the room that’s just beyond that wall there?”
He pointed to the blank wall of the room opposite the one of glass overlooking the beach and the ocean.
She stared at the wall, frowned again, and finally shook her head.
“Why… I don’t know,” she said. “But what difference does it make? You go to all rooms the same way. So there’s really no difference. It doesn’t matter where in the ship they are.”
Jim filed this information mentally for future reference. “I should know how to get myself from room to room, though, shouldn’t I?” he asked.
“Oh,” she said, “I’m sorry. Of course, you don’t know. The ship runs everything. You have to tune in to the ship; then it’ll do anything you want.”
She lit up suddenly.
“Would you like to see what the rest of the ship looks like?” she asked. “I’ll take you around. Why don’t you get yourself settled in here, or unpack, or whatever you want to do; and I’ll come back in a little while. How soon should I come back?”
Jim mentioned a time in Empire units that was roughly the equivalent of fifteen minutes.
“Fine,” Ro said, smiling at him. “I’ll be right back when the time’s up.”
She vanished.
Left alone, Jim examined the room, which was furnished with hassocks and pillows of all size—much as the first room he had seen aboard ship, where he had met Ro. The one very large hassock, some four feet thick and eight feet in diameter, at one end of the room, he took to be the bed. At first there seemed nothing in the shape of a bathroom. But the moment this thought occurred to him a section of the wall obediently slid aside, and he found himself looking into a smaller room fitted out with a complete assortment of recognizable lavatory facilities, up to and including a swimming pool—and with several other articles of plumbing which seemed to make little sense. For example, there was one shallow, completely dry basin large enough for him to stretch out in.
He turned back to his main room and with a corner of his eye saw the door to the bathroom slide shut behind him. He picked up his two suitcases, put them on the bedlike hassock, and opened them. No sooner had he done so than another section of the wall opened, and he found himself looking into what might have been the closet if there had been any pole or clothes hangers in it.
Experimentally—he was beginning to get the hang of things aboard ship now—he tried to imagine his clothes as being hung up in the closet.
Obligingly, they were suddenly there—the only unusual part of their appearance and situation being that they hung as he had imagined them, but without any visible means of support, suspended vertically in midair as if held by invisible hangers from an invisible rod.
Jim nodded. He was about to think the closet closed again, when a second thought made him take the Scottish costume, complete with kilt and knife, from where it hung unsupported in midair, and change into it, placing his suit of lights in the closet in its place, where it hung invisibly supported with the rest of his clothes.
The closet closed, and Jim was just turning away from it when a visitor materialized in the center of his room. But it was not Ro. Instead, it was one of the male High-born—a man with onyx-white skin, at least seven feet tall.
“There you are, Wolfling,” the High-born said. “Come along. Mekon wants to see you.”
They were suddenly in a room which Jim had not been in before. It was rectangular and long, and they stood in about the middle of it. There were no other humans in the room. But at the far end, on a sort of pillow-strewn dais, there lay curled a feline similar in every respect to the one among Ro’s pets. It lifted its horse’s head at the sight of them in the room, and its eyes fastened upon Jim.
“Wait here,” said the High-born who had brought him. “Mekon will be with you in just a moment.”
The tall man vanished. Jim found himself left alone with the feline beast, which was now lazily rising to its feet, staring down the room at him.
Jim stood still, staring back.
The animal made a curious, whining sound—a sound almost ridiculously small to come from something obviously so physically powerful. Its short stub of a tufted tail began to jerk vertically up and down, stiffly. Its heavy head lowered until its lower jaw almost touched the floor of the dias, and its mouth gradually opened to reveal heavy, carnivorous teeth.
Still whining, it began slowly to move. Softly, almost delicately, it put one front paw down from the dais; and then the other. Slowly it began to move toward him, crouching and whining as it did. Its teeth were fully visible now, and as it approached, its whine grew in volume, until it was a sort of singing threat.
Jim waited, moving neither backward nor forward.
The animal came on. About a dozen yards from him it stopped and gradually crouched. Its tail was jerking like a metronome now, and the singing whine that came from its throat was filling the whole room.