Man-Kzin Wars XIII-ARC (52 page)

Both Hylo’s sock puppet heads bobbed up and down in silhouette, but did not make a sound.

“Don’t get your necks in a knot,” Flex said. “I’ve got something even better for you.”

“It would not go well with you to renege on our bargain,” said Hylo, composing herself. (At least Flex assumed Hylo was a female, based on the shimmering pitch of her alluring voice. If Hylo was male, Flex felt just a little bit dirty.)

“Trust me, when I tell you what I found, you’re not going to want the stasis box anymore.” Puppeteers were cowards, after all, and used humans to deal with dangerous species. For Finagle’s sake, Hylo would probably be afraid of its own silhouette.

He told Hylo about the stasis assembly line, and Zeno’s Roulette. “Not only can you make your own stasis boxes, there are ageless places to explore, if you can figure out how to get through. It’s impossible to place a value on that.”

After a pantomime of what looked like two weak-knuckled hand shadows consulting one another, Hylo could only agree. “What’s in the stasis box?” she asked.

“One very angry cat I call Schrödinger, because I haven’t made up my mind whether he lives or dies.”

Hylo appreciated that. “You know what I would do,” she said. “In any event, you may have the stasis box.”

“I’ll send you the data you need, and destroy all copies.”

“Then this is our last verbal communication. We have no more use for you.”

“Why not?” said Flex, not so much caring as curious.

“We no longer have enough stars to compensate you. Our budget is exceeded. Money aside, we find you to be motivated by sex and revenge. Both are now spent tools.”

Both unlikely, sex and revenge, Flex considered. But both me. Bothme. Jinxian puns were rancid enough without being one’s actual name. He harrumphed. Sex and revenge, love and money, whatever you called them, that was not him, not anymore. He had his revenge, but Annie was still gone. Maybe she could at least rest in peace now.

“Good-bye,” Flex said, thinking more like “good riddance.”

“I wish you well,” said Hylo. “What will you do, now that you have a tiger by the tail, and a pocketful of stars?”

Flex thought that over. A pocketful of stars. “Tabam,” he said.

Bound for the Promised Land

Alex Hernandez

Bobcat swaggered through the seedy Orange District of Canyon like a bloody victorious warrior. If his tail hadn’t been blown off in that Fanged God’s anus of a planet, Wunderland, it’d be swishing around proudly. This current intelligence-gathering campaign had yielded very little data of military value. Two domesticated kzintoshi had been appointed to the City Council as representatives of the burgeoning kzin population. Of slightly more interest, those two kzinti had suggested they open up the site of the stasis-enshrined Heroes buried beneath set magma, to tourism. Bobcat’s ears quivered and his stumpy tail darted around cheerfully as he imagined the Patriarchy attempting to free these savage warriors while on a guided tour of the lava fields, but he knew that was a bit farfetched.

More disturbingly, he had sensed another telepath, a human ARM Agent, poking around the fringes of his mind. They had chased each other through the white caves of thought, a monkey holding onto a tiger’s tail. The tiger was caught, but if the monkey let go, the tiger would snap it up. Little did the agent know that this particular tiger had no tail! Bobcat locked down and moved away. He hadn’t sensed her presence in quite a while.

Now he simply enjoyed the brisk walk. Despite the pointlessness of this specific mission, he loved Canyon. Something about this hostile planet, with its cratered and scarred auburn surface, spoke to him on a cellular level. Old, desolate Warhead had found a new life, as if the monumental disintegrator wound had become infected with glittering architectural encrustations, creating a strange human-kzin amalgam society. Sometimes in the still void between stars, he toyed with the dream of someday retiring to Canyon. That was not likely. He understood that he would be worked until his synapses sizzled and nothing remained but a drooling
kshat
. He only regretted that every time he visited this world he so admired, he betrayed it. Telepaths were by nature poetic; they relied too much on imagery and metaphor to process the intangible world of the mind, so the irony was not altogether lost on Bobcat.

He pushed the thought out of his head and continued to walk through the bright lights and salty smells of the old seaside district that predated the vertical urban sprawl. As
Devourer of Monkeys
’ Telepath, he was permitted a modicum of liberty, he had been Yearrl-Captain’s faithful servant since before the captain had a partial Name and his covert missions on other human-kzin worlds had made Yearrl rich and admired throughout the Patriarchy. There was a saying aboard the
Devourer
: when Yearrl bathes in blood, we all get splattered; and, in truth, as kzintoshi went, Yearrl-Captain was what humans would call a decent fellow. His Captain obliged him a few hours of leave after the operation, so Bobcat held his scruffy chin high, as if admiring the lavish balconies and clinging structures rising up the sheer cliff walls, and let the thoughts of the tall, spindly Canyonites wash over him in tune to the sound of the sea’s lazy surf. Where the true warriors on his ship saw an old, mangy half-kzintosh, humans saw a leaner, meaner version of their nightmares. His long-battered ego always appreciated these jaunts.

Bobcat stopped at an old kzin building made up in garish detail to look like an ancient human sanctuary. The flashing sign above the entrance read TEMPLE OF SEKHMET in Interworld. Inside, the walls were covered with vertical lines of primitive pictorial script and vulgar murals of stiff angular humans prostrating themselves before a kzinrett with the hairless body of a human female. Bobcat assumed the artist had never laid eyes on a true kzinrett as this representation had round, furry ears.

The smell of sex hung in the air like mist and young nameless warriors lurked about the lobby avoiding eye contact with each other. His ears twitched as he met Iggy Larsson, the large, barrel-shaped human in charge of this outfit. If you considered your average human to be a monkey, Larsson was a silverback gorilla.

“Bobcat!” The human flashed him a lascivious smile full of blunt, plant-crunching teeth, “We got some new merchandise brought over from Kzin itself!”

“Foliage must quake in terror at the sight of those incisors,” Bobcat snarled acidly.

Larsson slapped his back in a rude show of familiarity and the kzin’s ears fell flat on his head, then rose slowly with well-practiced restrained ire. He clamped down his mind, not wanting to sully it with what passed for Larsson’s thoughts. “Before you do your thing, I need to show you something I think Yearrl-Captain would be very interested in.”

A slow clicking noise in Bobcat’s throat began to announce his growing frustration, but he allowed the corpulent human to lead him into a small room housing a single orange female and a small, utterly black kit still suckling. All the frayed fur on Bobcat’s wiry frame flattened in horror. “I thought you euthanized all kittens born here?”

“Oh we do, except for a few females to replenish our stock, but something is different about this dusky little runt. At first, I thought it was the shock of his color. I’ve never seen a melanistic kzin before, but I just can’t bring myself to put it down. I wanted to know if it’s got some telepathic juju mucking with my brain. That’s where you come in.”

Larsson harshly grabbed the measly kitten by the scruff of his neck and lifted him up for the kzin’s inspection. The dull female made no attempt to rip the human’s arm off, so Bobcat guessed she was sedated. The telepath grudgingly loosened his mental grip and permitted a swift sweep of the kit. A low-grade telepathic cry emanated from this tiny nugget of neutron star, repeating the same reflexive message like an emergency distress beacon: protect me. Care for me.
Love
me.

Bobcat tore himself away and walked out of the cramped, suffocating room, “Yes, he’s got telepathic potential.”

“I knew it!” Larsson absently tossed the kitten back at his mother.

Bobcat’s nostrils flared and the long-denied scent of estrous pheromones entered his body, grounding him in the material world. He tried to control his arousal in front of the leering human. “I’m going to do now what I came here to do!” he roared as his mind went blank.

The old telepath bounded like a fresh kitten down the hall and into a gaudy room unsuccessfully made up to look like a palatial harem chamber. He pounced on the three females anxiously pacing the room. Something buried deep in the back of his mind understood that these little freedoms allowed him by Yearrl-Captain were as much a part of his imprisonment as his addiction to the
sthondat
drug. At the moment though, he didn’t care.

Hours of painful clawing and biting ensued, but he savagely took each of the kzinretti like a hot-blooded warrior conquers planets. No, whole systems!

When the females were all soundly vanquished, Bobcat lay on the large fur-covered waterbed surrounded by the sweaty bodies of the females. The bed gently rocked back and forth with the rhythm of their panting. He thought lazily of the kitten and its primal, drilling petition. He imagined the kit all grown up: a drug-sick wraith aboard some ship, pitch black as a tear in the hull. The crew would not be able to ignore him as they do the rest of us. Their hatred would be sharper.
I should kill him now,
he thought.
First Telepath should have killed me in the crèche instead of training me.
The tight hold on his mind slowly melted away with the drowsy warmth of the kzinretti and the swirling
sthondat
drug still in his system. He brushed against three distinctly female, quietly desperate minds filled with thoughts he found all too familiar.

Bobcat leapt out of bed, ears erect, small numb of a tail thrashing and he glared at the complex females like a trapped animal. “You’re sentient?” he whispered in the Heroes’ Tongue.

No answer. They only clustered around themselves for protection. Cautiously, he walked over to the small case buried in the clothes he had carelessly strewn about the room, took out a syringe and pushed the intimate needle into the crook of his arm. The hit was instantaneous. Tentatively, he scanned their thoughts again and noticed they were thinking neither in the Heroes’ Tongue nor in the limited females’ tongue. They spoke a sort of primitive cousin of the Heroes’ Tongue. A more precise scan revealed that they were taken from a remote, underdeveloped region of Kzinhome. He felt their longing for a dense blond jungle nestled between majestic mountains. The priesthood that cultivated meekness in females had never tampered with their bloodline.

After decades of mastering the humans’ monotonous grunts, he easily learned the rich and rumbling tongue clearly birthed by a kzin larynx, “Can you understand me?” he asked. He knew metaphysically that they could, but he still
disbelieved
it.

Fear and hope flared in them like a triple star system cascading into a super nova. The psychic blast charred his soul into a black silhouette. He desperately tried to shield himself from the torrent of their minds. Most telepaths are weakened by their rampant empathy, but Bobcat had learned early on to shut his mind like a clenched jaw. It was a trick that allowed him to do some of the more hands-on jobs of his career as
Devourer
’s Telepath, but now he was paying it back with interest. He profoundly understood their oppression; after all, was he not a despised slave himself?

After a short time one of them, the gorgeous golden one, Raxa, unaccustomed to speaking out loud, hissed, “Yes.”

“Will you help us?” another female, with blue crystalline eyes, Xast, growled pleadingly, and for the first time in his long and miserable life, Bobcat saw himself as they saw him, not as cripple or a man-eater, but as a Hero.

His knees buckled and he collapsed onto all fours. “I will,” he spat and braced himself for another annihilating wave of hope.

* * *

Bobcat fled the emotional singularity created by the psychic kitten and cogent females. Larsson yelled out to him, “I took the liberty of calling Yearrl-Captain and he wants that kitten, said he’ll transfer payment when it’s on his ship.”

Bobcat hurried down the street. His mind whirled. He needed to ground himself, sink his teeth into something warm and bloody, something solid. He noticed another old kzinti building, dots and commas above the doorway read SERENGETI: AUTHENTIC EARTH GAME. Hunger welled up as the effects of his last shot of
sthondat
extract slowly drained from his system. He would never be allowed in the public hunting park, so he ducked inside the eatery.

The place was deserted except for two local kzintoshi hunched over the gleaming red carcass of an animal no longer recognizable. Bobcat entered a feeding stall and punched up something called a zebra.

Escape was the only option. Take the kitten and the sentient kzinretti and go. There was only one place in all the universe a tattered old telepath with his stolen harem could go. He had grown up with the legends. He needed help of course. Bobcat used the ebbing traces of his telepathic power and unlocked all the remaining blocks and compartments he had so meticulously put up around his mind. It was easy after the onslaught at the Temple of Sekhmet.

He instantly caught an image of the ARM Agent who had been tracking him, a dark young woman, though of course, youth could be deceptive with these humans. She wore the blue uniform of Canyon police, but her true employers were the UN back in the Sol system. Her hair and eyes were black streaked with violet, a cosmetic allusion to her flatlander past. She was all muscle, with enough body fat to make her absolutely delicious. He sent her an image of Serengeti and asked her to join him for dinner. Then, he sat and meditated on his predicament.

Varsha Khan entered the restaurant and the metallic tang of blood and wet extraterrestrial fur hit her like a slap. She breathed through her mouth and surveyed the room. A smaller kzintosh with russet, black-spotted fur and large erect ears like the junk sails on ancient Chinese boats waved her over. Varsha approached cautiously. He had ruffs of longer hair on his cheeks ending in two points on either side of his chin. She also noticed he was more ragged than most kzintoshi, like a shabby old alley cat.