Man-Kzin Wars XIII-ARC (8 page)

Despite himself, he found he was listening—not merely hearing—for the first time.

At that moment, a siren went off. So did all but the emergency lighting and power to the medical monitors. Dr. Anixter’s smile returned and she began to speak very quickly, her voice hushed.

“We should have a moment’s privacy. You doubtless think your only value to us is a source of information, but we’ve already learned a great deal. Miffy—I mean Otto—is becoming impatient. I have heard rumors that kzinti consider torture dishonorable—although I’ve heard other stories, about humans being eaten piece by piece while kept alive, that make me wonder. Whatever your interpretation, many humans don’t view torture of an enemy as wrong. If you work with me, we may be able to save you from that, but . . .”

The lights came back up. The door to the corridor slid open, bringing the shrieking sound of the siren closer. Two men in battle armor, holding guns, came rushing in.

“Dr. Anixter, are you all right?”

“I’m fine. What is that racket?”

“Something went . . .”

The soldier stopped. Looked at the kzin. Obviously decided not to speak in front of him.

“Ask Otto Bismarck.”

“You may report to him that I’m fine and so is my patient,” she replied. “The lights dimmed, but the kzin is no longer dependant on life support. Thanks to Otto Bismarck’s forethought, his restraints are quite primitive, nothing that could be affected by a power outage.”

“Will you leave now?”

She rose, nodding. “I think so. I think trying to begin physical therapy after this break in routine would be impractical. I could tranq him again, but repeated doses in a short time would defeat the purpose of making him stronger.”

Without another glance at the kzin, she departed. She did not return that day nor the next, giving the patient a great deal of time to think over his options.

* * *

Jenni knew she’d been taking a risk when she’d altered the station’s power systems, but she’d had to do something to permit her to say a few words to the kzin without Miffy hearing. She thought she’d been quite clever in how she’d worked it. Futzing one of Miffy’s own bugs so that not only would power be cut, but any bugs with independent power sources would also be messed up had been very neat. And how could Miffy complain without admitting how extensively this facility was bugged?

She sighed contentedly. The funny thing about Miffy was that although he had hired her for her intellect, he actually thought of her as rather stupid. She supposed this was because he had bought into the stereotype of the absent-minded professor, maybe because he worked with specialists of various types who really didn’t know much beyond their own field.

However, Dr. Jennifer Anixter, M.D., Ph.D. (this last so many times over that all the B.A.s and M.A.s had been discarded as superfluous), was a generalist. How could she be otherwise when she was studying something that—until the advent of the kzinti—even she had not known existed?

Savoring her minor triumph over the snoopers, Jenni walked back to her lab. If her kzinti patient persisted in attempting to commit suicide, she supposed she’d have no choice but to let him. The other option was to hand him over to Miffy for torture. She couldn’t do that. The reason wasn’t just that she felt such an act would be a violation of her Hippocratic oath to do no harm. Quite simply, she didn’t like Miffy.

There was a lust for dominance in the man from Intelligence that stank. True, the kzinti had beaten humans in battle over and over again. The kzinti had destroyed or looted human ships, making slaves or food animals of those humans they captured. She understood that humanity needed an edge or they were going to end up just another slave race. But what Miffy wanted was something more than an edge, something more than victory. He wanted to get one up on the Patriarchy personally. If he got the opportunity, he’d do something just to show himself as better than her patient.

She didn’t know what she’d do about the problem of Miffy in the long term. First her kzin had to be gotten healthy. The rest must come later.

* * *

The next time his arm was unbound, the kzin didn’t take a swipe at Jenni or, more importantly, at himself. Dutifully, he exercised the muscles, then permitted the arm to be restrapped, and exercised the other arm. There were more exercises for the legs.

After three days—far more quickly than anyone else thought wise—Jenni decided to let the kzin get up and try walking. He still wasn’t speaking to her, but she kept chattering at him anyway.

“We have a full machine shop here,” she said, trundling in before her a gigantic walking frame, “and I had one of the machinists put this together for you. Your upper body simply isn’t strong enough for you to use crutches.”

She grinned impishly at him. “Anyhow, Otto was worried you’d use the crutches for clubs. This walker is heavy—and bulky—enough that you’d have trouble lifting it.”

The kzin had answered Jenni’s grin with one of his own, showing a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth. For a moment, Jenni was delighted. Then she noticed that his hackles had risen and his ears were folding tight.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make you feel defensive. Funny, funny . . . Big, mean you reacting because little me shows you my flat, boring omnivore teeth. Really, I wonder that enough kzinti survive to adulthood for you to put armies into the field.”

He glowered at her. Defiantly, she gave him a closed-lipped smile.

“I have an idea,” she said. “Maybe you’d feel less defensive if you could talk to someone. Since you won’t admit you know Interworld, well, then, I’ll teach it to you. After all, it’s possible I’m wrong about your linguistic capabilities.”

“However, first we need to get you on your feet. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to call in Roscoe and Theophilus. They’re going to help you stand upright. You, in turn, are not going to bite or claw either of them. I suspect you’re actually going to need to put your full concentration into balancing. You’ve been on your tail—quite literally—for . . .”

She’d been about to say how long, then caught herself. “For quite a while.”

Getting the kzin to his feet was easier than anyone but Jenni herself had expected. Even her medical staff tended to think of the kzin as a sort of furry human—when they weren’t thinking of him as a monster.

Jenni didn’t make either of those mistakes. She thought of the kzin as what he was—an alien, descended from a race of predators, from a culture where even a show of teeth was considered a challenge that could lead to a fight to the death. Such a species would not survive very long if its members did not heal fast and cleanly.

Still, Jenni permitted the others to think she was as surprised as they were. Best Otto did not realize how much closer to recovery the kzin was. She wasn’t really lying. Certainly the kzin had been able to stand, but he was still weak—she couldn’t resist the image—as a kitten. Certainly, he was far weaker than he himself had expected to be. His fingers had curled very tightly on the handgrips of the walker and he had shuffled forward as carefully as any geriatric case deprived of his float-chair.

While they walked, Jenni had started very simple vocabulary lessons, focusing on concrete nouns such as “door” and “floor.” She avoided names. From the minimal information that had been gathered from humans who had escaped the kzinti and from the kzinti themselves, Names were a complex matter within kzinti culture.

She wondered by what name or title her patient thought of himself, wished she could ask, but knew that he would never reply. That would mean admitting how much he actually understood.

This first walking/language lesson session had not lasted long. The kzin had seemed relieved to get back into the hospital bed. The next day, he had to be hurting, but unlike a human patient who would probably have complained, he was evidently eager to try again.

And so it went. Eventually, even the guards didn’t immediately tense when the gigantic orange-furred, black-striped creature went by, his pink, hairless tail twitching with the effort involved in every step. This was foolish, of course, because the kzin was far stronger and more mobile than he’d been on that first day he’d teetered to his feet, but humans were like that. The familiar was far less terrifying than the strange.

Perhaps the kzinti are wiser than we,
Jenni mused as she walked alongside her patient, his only escort, for as she had pointed out to Otto, why should they put more humans at risk?
Kzinti do not forget what bared teeth mean, nor that an enemy is an enemy. Perhaps they are wiser. Perhaps . . .

She did not fool herself into thinking that familiarity alone had led to this reduced attention to her patient when out and about. There was another reason the sight of a kzin shuffling behind a gigantic walker did not attract as much attention as before. Something had changed at the base. Something new had been brought in and captured the attention and enthusiasm of Miffy and his cohorts.

Jenni had managed to gather only fragmented rumors, but from what she could piece together from these, she thought the new prize might be the wreck of a kzinti ship.

* * *

The kzin found himself looking forward to his daily physical therapy sessions. He knew he should not. Getting stronger and healthier was the last thing he should desire in this place where there was no hope for escape. As long as he was unwell, he was in Dr. Anixter’s custody. After he was well, she would have little excuse not to turn him over to the human she sometimes referred to as Otto Bismarck, but more frequently (although never when the man was present) as “Miffy.”

The kzin wondered at the significance of these different names, but he did not ask. To do so would be to give away how much he understood. Already, he had grown to fear his own eagerness to talk. Dr. Anixter’s language lessons had robbed him of the excuse to not speak at all.

She had explained to him that although human mouths and throats often had difficulty shaping the rasps and gutturals of the Heroes’ Tongue, humans had learned that kzinti could easily master Interworld. She framed this as a compliment, praise of the kzinti race’s greater abilities. However, the captive soon realized that her words were also a warning that he should not resist these lessons.

On the evening following the deliciously memorable day she had taught him the words for “meat,” “steak,” “chicken,” and “fish,” her assistant, Roscoe, had used these words when arranging for the evening meal. When the kzin refused to use any of the words for more specific types, settling on “meat,” instead of giving him the hot steak that had been usual to this point, Roscoe served him fish—cold fish at that.

The kzin did not need the lesson spelled out twice. At the first meal of the day, he requested “steak.” At lunch, he was given the choice of “chicken” or “fish.” Neither was his preference, but he selected chicken, since this, at least, was usually served warm. Later, a similar procedure was used to get him to employ adjectives such as “hot,” “warm,” and “cold” or “large” and “small.”

It wasn’t that the kzin could be led so easily by his belly. He admitted to himself that he hated being taken as stupid, even as brain damaged, as Roscoe had suggested more than once. For all they fought among themselves, kzinti were social creatures and this particular kzin (Human Technologies Specialist, if he ever would have given the title that was the closest he had to a Name) was not immune to needing praise.

Subconsciously, plump, soft little Dr. Jennifer (Jenni) Anixter was filling the place in the kzin’s mental landscape where more usually his father or war leader or ship’s captain would fit. He could stonewall the others, but her approval or disapproval was becoming essential to his mental health.

He knew he was entering dangerous territory, that he should try again to take his life, but, alone among the humans, Dr. Anixter was the only one who never seemed to forget that he was a danger to himself as well as to others. When he was permitted the freedom of his hospital room/cell, she demonstrated to him how quickly the chamber could be flooded with a gaseous form of the same tranquilizer she had used on him before.

“Someone is always watching on the monitor,” she said, smiling her gentle, closed-lipped smile. “They know I’ll have their heads if anything happens to you. Understand?”

Pretending to understand only part, and that mostly from the physical demonstration, not the words, the kzin nodded.

He found himself deeply impressed. In situations where a reprimand was exacted, kzinti supervisors usually settled for taking an ear. Dr. Anixter must be more ferocious than he had thought if she insisted on an entire head.

* * *

Jenni had just returned from one of her long walks with the kzin when Otto Bismarck knocked at the door of her office. Even as she admitted him, she assessed the information he had wordlessly given her.

He came to my office rather than summoning me to his, so he wants something from me. However, he did not call ahead for an appointment, nor did he wait long after my return. The one shows that he expected me to admit him. The other . . . Impatience, perhaps? Or is it something more subtle? A signal that he does not think anything I have to do would be more important than seeing him?

Motioning her visitor to a chair, she took a long pull on the drink bulb Theophilus always had waiting for her on her return. Today’s choice was hot cocoa, no doubt an acknowledgment that her walk had been through some of the longer internal tunnels cut into the asteroid in which this base was made, areas that while not cold were not precisely warm either.

“Hello, Otto,” she said. “What may I do for you?”

She wondered if Miffy was conscious of the subtle distinction in her use of “may” rather than “can.” She swallowed a laugh. She was always like this after a session with the kzin, hyperconscious of the many meanings of words and actions, of messages that went beyond mere dictionary definitions.

The kzin tended to be highly literal in his use of words. Was this a reflection of how kzinti thought or was it his effort to hide that he knew a great deal more Interworld than she had “taught” him?