Man-Kzin Wars XIII-ARC (25 page)

“Well, maybe you don’t have access to enough of their homeworld’s species. We just might not have the samples that would show the natural progression which produced this mutation.” Boroshinsky nodded at Dieter’s insight, but did not look convinced. Dieter smiled. “But you don’t think that’s the answer.”

“No, I don’t.”

Selena turned back to look out over the preserve. On the ridgeline that rose up behind the forest, she saw a fleck of black-orange ascending its jagged protrusions, spiderlike. The movement was sure, swift, even a little frightening. “Wherever their hormonal equipment came from,” she breathed out slowly, “it seems to work pretty well.”

2405 BCE: Subject age—nine years

For the first time since they had brought Hap to her as a tiny black-orange puffball, Selena was scared, physically scared, to enter the same space that he was in.

He was no longer a little puffball now. Slightly more than two meters in height, Hap had also begun to fill out. His chest was deeper and wider and his haunches were so angular with muscle that they almost looked like a cubist’s rendering. And what she had to tell him was not likely to improve his already dubious mood. Dubious because it was impossible to know exactly how or what he felt anymore.

He looked up as she stepped down from the floater, eyed it closely. What was he looking for? A means of commandeering it and escaping? Whether the humans’ growing fear of him had pushed them over the line into carrying guns?

But all he said was, “
N’shyao
, Selena.”

“And hello to you, Hap. It seems like you’re not finding the bears too challenging anymore.” She managed not to look at the lump of savaged black fur and exposed flesh, from which Hap had already carved out a sizeable lunch for himself.

“No, they’re very slow. Maybe it’s time to move to one of the bigger species. Or the more aggressive ones.” He got up and stretched: the men in the floater sat up much straighter. Hap smiled, his mouth opening ever so slightly as he did; it was not a pleasant expression. “Now, as much as I am pleased to see you, Selena, this wasn’t one of our regularly scheduled visits. Which I’m sure are all part of a careful interval of observation or conditioning or whatever it is you’re doing with me.”

She shrugged. “Probably some of both, which is no different from what a parent does as they nurture a child’s process of maturation.”

Hap’s fur rippled sharply with amusement. “Now that was a great answer, Selena. And I suppose it’s true, too. But tell me: what’s gone wrong? Why are you out here now?”

Selena collected herself. “I’ve told you we have a female kzin in our keeping, as well.”

“Yes, of course. Not like I’d forget that fact.” He sat down, looked at her a long time. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“I—I’m afraid so, Hap.”

“Why? Didn’t she do all the tricks you asked?”

Selena forgot Hap’s physical size, blinded by the greater enormity of his callousness, his facetiousness. “That’s revolting in so many ways that I don’t know where to start.”

“Then don’t start. And while we’re on the topic of revolting, please spare me any claims of regret or commiseration. We kzinti are your lab animals, pure and simple. You just had to put one down. Oh, I know you probably get attached to some of them, but that comes with the job, doesn’t it?”

Selena stalked over to look him in the eye. “We didn’t put her down. Your own brother kzin did that.”

For a moment, Hap sat mute. Then, faster than she could really follow, he was on his feet, crouched, ears halfway back and quivering, mouth slightly open.

And Selena didn’t care. Instead she looked him up and down with an appraising glance: “And yes, they say he looked just about like that when he did it.”

Hap looked down at her, then looked away. “I’m not angry at you, Selena. I don’t know what I’m angry at, exactly. I just know that anything that happens to me—to us kzinti—is because of humans. You killed our mothers, you fight wars with our fathers, you brought us here, and you watch us grow. And measure and observe and make all sorts of guesses. We’re lab rats.”

“No. It’s not supposed to be that way. There have always been better intentions than that.”

He looked at her for a long moment, measuring. Then he sat. “Oh. So Dieter was telling the truth after all, last month.”

Selena had known that this encounter could go in many possible directions. But this surprise—that Dieter had obviously visited Hap last month, without authorization or escort—had not been on her list of anticipated outcomes. “What?” she said.

“Ah, so he never told you about visiting me? Well, so he kept his promise to keep it a secret. Another truth he told that I presumed was a lie.” For a split second, Hap might have looked guilty or wistful, but the expression was gone as quickly as it had arisen. “Dieter told me that most of you were hoping to allow me to go back to the kzinti. To function as a mediator, maybe.”

That son of a bitch of a meddling Wunderlander
—

“No, Selena, don’t be angry with him. In fact, right now, the fact that he shared that with me—and that it was the truth, and didn’t tell you about doing so—well, it makes me think that maybe you’re not all faithless after all.”

“You really think that? That humans are all faithless?”

“Well, why wouldn’t I? Yes, you’ve provided most of what you’ve promised, but what you’ve promised is only a tiny fraction of what I’ve requested. And why can’t you provide the rest?” He leaned back until he was supine. “Because I am the enemy, because I’m your prisoner.” His tone became extravagantly sarcastic. “If you let me out, who knows what havoc I might cause? What secrets I might learn?”

Selena nodded. “Right. Well, I can see coming out here was mistake. I’ll see you next week, Hap, as per the schedule.” She turned on her heel and made for the floater with a brisk step.

“Selena, wait.”

She paused, turned.

Hap was staring at her and she couldn’t read his eyes, not because they were guarded, but because the mix of emotions and impulses was so tangled and contradictory that it defied delineation. “I’d like to know what happened to the female. ‘Pretty,’ you called her, right?”

Selena folded her arms but did not reapproach. “That is correct.”

“And one of your researchers decided to see what would happen if she was put together with one of the other males, now that they are sexually mature.”

Selena felt her stern demeanor slip. Come to think of it, Hap was right: they were just lab rats, after all. At least that’s how Pyragy had acted: playing god with his specimens . . .

Hap’s voice was patient: “You didn’t approve.”

Selena shouted, thereby overriding what started as a choked sob. “Of course I didn’t approve! I fought him—the decision—every way I could.”

“But you weren’t in charge.”

“No. And the person who was normally in charge had a heart attack and was still recovering.”
Please, Mikhail: get better quickly, for your sake, for my sake, for Hap’s sake.
“So the decision rested with someone who is not involved in our work directly.”

“Ah. An
administrator
?”

She nodded, both at the word and the way he said it: with a healthy measure of parodic hauteur. “He gave the orders and I tried to get them overturned. But there wasn’t enough time. He wouldn’t wait.”

“Is he a . . . a . . .” Hap struggled for the word; although infinitely more mature than a human nine year old, he still had a lot of language learning to do. “. . . a sadist?”

“No.”
Although sometimes I wonder
. . . “He wasn’t motivated by sadism.”

Hap thought. “He was trying to use mating as a reward mechanism, then.”

Selena felt her mouth snap shut, stunned at the canny insight of the almost mature kzin before her. Yes, he might be young, but like all his breed, he learned quickly; he had to, if he was to survive. The kzin genotype did not breed many geniuses: the species was inherently unsuited to long periods of reflection. But the genotype also didn’t breed many idiots: in accord with the old axiom that there were two kinds of combatants, the quick and the dead, the kzinti survived by having quick reflexes, quick wits, or both.

Hap pushed for confirmation of his conjecture. “So it
was
an attempt at creating a new reward mechanism?”

Well, why not answer? Hap had figured it out on his own, anyway. “Yes. And I wouldn’t let him use
you
as the test subject. I had that much authority over the process, anyway.”

“Hmm. Perhaps I wouldn’t have killed her, either.” A sharp, territorial glint danced briefly through Hap’s eyes and was gone, or maybe just quickly concealed.

Selena sighed. “Perhaps not. Probably not. But if I had given him access to you, that would have just been the edge of the wedge. I could have lost control, might no longer have been able to—” She dragged to a halt, not knowing how to explain.

“You might not have been able to continue to protect me,” he finished for her.

Selena nodded. “I know it sounds absurd, that I have to protect you from a colleague who wants to give you the opportunity to mate. But—”

“No, actually, I can see it very clearly, Selena. I may not like the restrictions on my life—and I’m coming to see that you don’t, either—but you’ve been as consistent, and also as humane, as you can be in maintaining those constraints. But this administrator seems rash. Which I find odd: aren’t administrators supposed to be the more cautious persons in an organization, the ones who keep the workers from running off in all directions, acting without authorization?”

Selena smiled. “Yes. And he certainly does that. But—”

“But what?”

“He had very different ideas about how you were to be raised. Several of us, his lieutenants you might say, had to appeal to
his
superiors to keep him from treating you kzinti in . . . questionable ways.”

“Torture?”

“No. Well, yes, in a manner of speaking.”

Hap frowned, then his eyes opened wide. “Oh, I see: not bodily torture. Something mental. Or behavioral.”

“Behavioral.”

Hap thought a long time, his eyes half-lidded. Then he nodded: “He was the one who tried to make me eat cooked meat, wasn’t he?”

Selena gaped. “You remember that?”

“Of course I do. So it
was
him?”

Selena nodded.

“So the torture you are referring to: he wanted to—how would you say it?—humanize us?”

Selena sighed. “Something like that. But higher powers intervened shortly after you came to live with us.”

“And these higher powers are the ones who want to send me back to the kzinti as a mediator, as Dieter described?”

“Yes. But they aren’t really in charge of, of”—she almost said “the project” but stopped herself in time—“our actions. They only step in if something goes wrong.”

“So they’ll be stepping in, now.”

“Yes, in a very big way.” And would very probably do so by permanently removing Pyragy, a step that was at least five years overdue.

Hap nodded. “So I take it that this administrator introduced Pretty to the oldest male, the one who almost tore into me. What did you name him, by the way?”

Selena stumbled after a lie, gave up, closed her eyes as she spoke: “Cranky Cat. They named him Cranky Cat.”

When she opened her eyes, Hap’s fur was rippling, but his eyes were hard. Sardonic amusement was a kzin expression she was learning to identify quickly these days. “What a dignified name,” Hap slurred. “Although I have to admit it is accurate, too. So Cranky Cat didn’t like Pretty any more than he liked me.”

“No, he didn’t.” Selena shut her eyes. “It was a disaster. Because I was trying to do everything I could do to stop it, the administrator didn’t inform me when the introduction was taking place. I got a panicked call from the researcher who worked most closely with Pretty, but by the time I got there, it was too late.”

Selena tried to put the memory of the blood-spattered paddock out of her mind, couldn’t. “We knew that kzin mating was pretty rough by human standards. So the overseers didn’t know until it was too late that this was—well, way beyond that.” The tapes ran on endless loop in her memory: the frenzied thrashing of Pretty; the pinning paws of Cranky Cat, which, as he came close to completing the coupling, began crushing, piercing, slashing— “He was coupling and killing her at the same time. And when our people realized what was happening, and tried to intervene, he finished. Both acts.”

Hap’s voice buzzed with a suppressed snarl. “Why did he do it?”

Selena shrugged. “There’s no way to find out. Cranky Cat never learned how to speak: not our language, nor yours. He wouldn’t have anything to do with us. So we’ll never know why he did it. But if you want my gut reaction, Cranky Cat’s drives made him unable to resist the urge to copulate, even as his speciate aversion to us made him kill her.”

“And why would his hatred of humans prompt him to kill her? Because he couldn’t reach you?”

“No, he wasn’t symbolically killing us. It was because he could smell that she was our creature. And at a deep, primal level, he could not abide that. He didn’t think about what he did; he just did it.”

Hap continued to stare at her, unblinking. Then his tail switched fitfully and he rose, moving to sit alongside the mauled carcass that, two hours ago, had been a black bear. “Selena, I want to know your world. All of it.”

“Hap, you’ve figured out so much on your own, so you’ve got to know I don’t have the authority to make that promise.”

“I know that. But if you don’t convince them to let me know more about Earth, then how will I be able to help you later on? Knowing your language and your ways is not enough. The kzinti—the real kzinti—will ask me for my honest opinion, for what you would call my gut reaction, but which is better expressed in the Heroes’ Tongue as
grreeowm’m’hysh
. ‘Ancestral spine-whispers.’ If I do not know your world, I won’t be able to answer the questions that will make me useful to
them.
So they will ignore me.”

Selena shut her eyes tightly, finding herself required to reject the very appeal that she herself had made so many times to the board, and for precisely the same reasons. “I cannot let you out into our world. I’m not permitted to do so. And I know they won’t change their minds about that.”