by Larry Niven
This female was perfectible. No hurry. It was a long journey home.
CHAPTER 25
(2420–2423 A.D.)
The Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch was sluggish but her cruising velocity was as high as any large kzin warship. Three and a half years was the estimated trip-time to Hssin, which was 2.6 light-years from Alpha Centauri. Detection was unlikely even though they might now be traveling through hyperdrive infested space. Hssin lay 5.6 light-years to the north of Man-sun. Nobody could patrol that much volume any more than an acorn could patrol an ocean.
He was going to have problems with his female. Keeping experimental animals caged was expedient, but a cage would not do for slave breeding and he was anxious to begin his breeding program. He had a sufficiency of frozen sperm. He probably did need to do more experimentation, but without a source of experimental animals, that was no longer an option. He’d have to use what he already knew.
But if he gave the Nora-beast the breeding room a female needed, even built her a kzinrret palazzo with enough space for her children, he was leaping into trouble. He picked the larger of the crew dormitories for her, but left her in her cage while he refitted the room—think before you leap!
The original dorm layout was not sabotage-proof. If he were building an ordinary palazzo, that would not matter. But he knew very well that she was dedicated to destroying the Shark—and would give her life to do so. Next on her priority list was killing the one kzin she’d missed when she’d used his Jotoki against the Patriarchy. Feral intelligence in a female was a captivating nuisance. He dare not underestimate her.
The walls he had his Jotoki armor-plate. He built in monitors to watch her for dangerous behavior. They weren’t the most intelligent of monitors but they probably wouldn’t gas her too frequently if she was careful.
When her chambers were ready, he took her for a visit. She was wearing clothes again, he noted disapprovingly. They weren’t decorative but they did cover her tail-like baldness.
“I like it,” Nora said laconically. “It reminds me of the Alabama. The munitions room.”
“The Alabama?”
“You wouldn’t know the war. The USN Alabama was a seagoing battleship with a steelclad munitions room that could take an internal explosion—hopefully without sinking the ship.”
He listened and then ran her words through his vocoder to make sure of what he’d heard. Dangerous memories. For all he knew, she could make high explosives out of paper and spit. Her memories would have to be replaced, and her emotions would have to be altered, and her facility with language crippled. While she had her memories and her full repertoire of skills, she was dangerous. Perhaps he could add some aesthetically pleasing fur. Then he would be able to relax and enjoy her.
In the meantime he needed her memories.
To please the Nora-beast he let her design the furniture for herself and the children.
“You’re going to let me have whatever I want?” She looked at him with a whimsical smile that he knew was amusement, but which he couldn’t help but read as a subliminal warning of attack. Her fingers were twirling with that long curl of hers.
“No weapons,” he admonished.
“I want a big stuffed pillow that I can flop into.”
His mind worked on that one. How could a pillow be turned into a weapon to kill him when he least suspected it? This was a nerve-racking game. He imagined himself being smothered. His mind’s eye watched her soaking the stuffings in nitric acid to make high explosive, while she wove a noose out of the shredded covering. None of the scenes were plausible. “All right,” he said.
He was astonished at the ornate furniture she designed. A bed with a satin roof and adjustable gravity? Golden man-babies with wings, dancing on the headboard? He grumbled but had his Jotoki make them for her, scrounging substitutes for satin and wood. They had to reprogram the weavers and the plastic molders.
The time went quickly because there was so much to do. Deciphering the superluminal drive was top priority. Trainer-of-Slaves couldn’t be reckless with the device, couldn’t test it to destruction because it was the only one he had. He developed a two-pronged approach.
(1) Analysis. Isolate the sub-units. Attempt to craft a duplicate of the subunit. Test. The Bitch was a repair facility that could make any part in the kzin arsenal. He practically owned a prototype factory and he had the slave power to utilize it.
(2) Explore the military memories of Lieutenant Nora Argamentine.
Trainer-of-Slaves had had many years with his experimental animals to determine that human memory was very plastic, approximately five times as plastic as the kzin memory.
Torture could get at gross detail quickly, but it didn’t work well with nuances. Every time a human memory was recalled, it was altered in some way. If the memory was recalled to relieve pain—while the brain was saturated in the chemical stew brought on by agony—the memory trace was drastically mutated. Torture gradually obliterated the nuances it was meant to recover. He had to veto the use of torture.
Slowly, he worked out other methods.
Trainer-of-Slaves got his best results with Lieutenant Argamentine when he doped her into a sleep state from which she couldn’t waken, but in which she remained on the verge of dreaming. He strapped her into a mock-up of the Shark’s cockpit and fed her dreaming-mind virtual images of combat conditions in which she was being attacked by kzin warcraft. Winning kept up her interest in the dreams and reduced her anxiety.
While she was dreaming, he read off her motor responses. That told him what she was doing to counter the images he was feeding to her eyes. From that he learned the combat characteristics of the Shark. For one thing, he discovered that phasing into hyperspace took half an hour to set up. For another thing, he learned that the Shark had only been captured because of an engine malfunction.
All this while Trainer-of-Slaves was studying his female as an evolutionary curiosity. In a bisexual animal, the rational female was clearly an unwanted trait for domestication. If kzinti were to husband properly obedient human slaves—and the Nora-beast was not properly obedient—child-animal care would have to be divorced from male-child teaching. With second, third, and fourth, etc., voices from the harem subverting the patriarch’s word, a household would disintegrate into chaos. Monkey society must be shifting around like the surface of a quake-world!
He explained all this to Nora, but she was just as stubborn as Grraf-Hromfi’s sons while she sat under her canopy, arguing back with inappropriate aggressiveness for a female. She didn’t know how to listen. It was proof that females couldn’t use the gift of language even when it was given to them.
In idle moments, when the analysis of the hyperdrive motor had exhausted him, he toyed with hypothetical ways of using chromosome engineering to cure the man-females of male language skills. The daydreams went nowhere because such a neat answer probably wasn’t practical.
The kzin solution, which was genetic, wouldn’t work.
During Heroic reproduction the male egg combined with the female egg to form a doubled nucleus. The kzincode-groups, not unlike human chromosomes, were then distributed, leaving the super-egg to divide into two fertile male and female eggs which then migrated to the kzinrret’s pouch in pairs, a litter always containing an even number of kits, half kzintosh, half kzinrret.
Reproduction wasn’t all that dissimilar among monkeys but there were unfortunate differences. The nuclei of kzincells were more complicated than those of mancells, containing three distinct kinds of protein coding, sexual, major-group, and lumpy-constellation.
The kzincode-strands that determined kzinsex were enormous, four times as large as any strand in the major kzincode-group, and several octals larger than any member of the lumpy kzincode-constellation. In male cells the kzintosh-strand appeared twice, while in female cells a dominant kzintosh-strand was lord over the single kzinrret-strand, the latter acting to edit physical size and repress language in the female who carried it.
It would
be difficult to genetically engineer male sex dominance in the man-beasts because with these animals it was the female who carried the twinned sex chromosome! A perverse reversal of the normal situation. Given their genetic makeup one might well wonder how male monkeys, balding and hemophiliac, came to be intelligent! Worse, the male and female sex-chromosomes of the man-beast were normal-sized, the male chromosome runtish, even, and unlike the kzintosh-strand or the kzinrret-strand, were not major centers of developmental switching.
In any event, Trainer-of-Slaves wasn’t in a hurry to destroy the Nora-beast’s intelligence. As a younger, more reckless researcher his haste had ruined many promising experiments. Think before you leap.
Intelligence had many facets, and it was disastrous to confuse its parts, to destroy one thing when you thought you were destroying another. It was better to be patient, to alter only small pieces of her mind at a time—and then carefully observe the incremental change as a guidepost to the next change.
Several months into their journey, the Lieutenant actually did try to destroy the ship. She used furniture parts to escape. She assembled a makeshift gas mask to keep herself conscious during the breakout, and she headed straight for the ship’s vital parts through an air conditioner she’d learned about from the Jotoki at the time of the mutiny. She had memorized the ship too well!
He found her unconscious. She had been stopped by a whimsical trap he had set up more as a paranoid afterthought than as a serious line of defense. He had been reading too much Chuut-Riit who believed in covering low-probability events.
The Nora-beast insisted on wearing clothes, to her downfall. He had tried to argue her out of it, to reach her sensibilities by creating virtual images for her eyes of elephants in sombreros and boleros, of newts in weskits, of giraffes in middies, of yaks in yoke skirts, but she had only laughed until her curls shook and told him that she had been brought up on books in which animals wore clothes. Obscene! Imagine having to unbutton a vatach’s vest before devouring him!
When Trainer lost the argument he had simply booby-trapped her trousers to release a nerve poison into her skin if she ever came too close to electromagnetic triggers in certain vital installations.
Lying beside her was a lethal firebomb. Where had she obtained the oxidizer? From the air! Trainer-of-Slaves growled in disgust at his oversight. “What would a monkey do with a harem of these creatures?” How did the males survive?
That incident decided Trainer. Her memories had to go. She was already clamped to the operating table when she recovered consciousness.
“We’re still here. I goofed,” she said sadly, near tears.
If she’d been kzin, she would have earned a partial name as a break-out artist. “Forget it,” he growled. “The Alabama was designed not to sink.”
“Are the kids all right?” Now she was crying. The three cage- and brain-damaged orphans were her responsibility. She didn’t know whether she was a mother or a UNSN Lieutenant.
“Long-Reach is in there teaching them how to play cards.”
“Louie won’t be able to learn. You hurt him. He can’t concentrate.”
Trainer-of-Slaves was unmoved. He had grown up in a society with a high kit mortality rate. The younglings died routinely by violence and neglect. There were always more where they came from. Suffering was the way to Heroism.
“You’re going to hurt me now, too, aren’t you? You’re going to carve me up? Make a drooling idiot out of me?”
She was afraid. He had an unnatural compassion in his liver for that combination, fear and bravery. “I’m going to sew a tail on your backside,” he growl-hissed. It was his way of trying to crack a joke.
She came out of the operation with artificial gland implants in her brain. She didn’t feel any different. Her mind was clear. She was still driven to destroy the Shark. She still hated kzin.
Trainer-of-Slaves had been spending his spare time away from the Shark completing his mathematical model of the human brain. It wasn’t all that difficult. The data-link did most of the work. All he had to do was enter the special human conditions (taken from the autodoc and his experiments) into the generalized model that kzin physiologists had developed eons ago to cover diverse organic brains—Jotok, Kzin, kdatlyno, Chunquen, etc. They were all different and they were all the same.
Memory erasure was a delicate matter. Memories were all interrelated like a giant n-dimensional crossword puzzle. No memory could be erased without snipping out pieces of a myriad of other memories. And the erased memory could always be reconstructed by “filling in” the empty puzzle blanks. The reconstruction went on automatically by the mere act of using the remaining memories. The missing pieces were “interpolated” during recall. If the erasure had been caused by wetware destruction, the “interpolated” information was simply stored elsewhere.
Organic brains, having evolved over hundreds of millions of years of deadly struggle, were systems designed to military specs. They could take great damage with minimal degradation of performance. No single location vital for system operation. And efficient redundancy insured that even heavy losses of data were recoverable.
That meant that Trainer couldn’t erase the whole of the Nora-beast’s memory at once without killing her. What he could do was set up a steady degradation of memory that didn’t overwhelm the general homeostatic balance. He could alternately shrink and accelerate the dendritic root growth of her neurons, disconnect and randomly reconnect. He could arbitrarily change the strength of the synaptic coefficients. He could switch on or off the machinery that converted short-term memory into long term memory.
He could turn on or off specific neural receptor sites in a way that unbalanced her brain so that it had to compensate with rapid neural learning. He could chemically accelerate learning by up to a factor of twenty, a dangerous game which if continued caused a kind of self-reference that left the mind fixated upon one event. Rapid learning overwrote old memories faster than they could be reconstituted.
The brain normally learned in spurts. Neural disequilibrium induced by failure turned learning on until a new equilibrium state was reached. Success turned learning off. Constant learning degraded old memories without ever giving them time to reintegrate into a new equilibrium state.
The Wunderland autodoc had taught Trainer-of-Slaves another neat trick. Using a carrier pseudo-virus, he could induce a neuron to suicide by budding. The bud killed its parent upon detaching but the bud then either reproduced itself (under one kind of stimulus) or began to sprout an axon (under a second stimulus). If the neural attachment sites were active, the axon would sprout dendrites and hardwire itself into the brain. That was another way of nondestructively degrading old memories.
The fur-growing gland he had implanted was only a whim.
He was not yet ready to tackle the disassembly and rewiring of her language processor. One leap at a time.
When the Nora-female recuperated he had an ice cream party for her in her rebuilt palazzo. Probably it was still not “monkey-proof” but it was the best he could do. The major improvement was a removable barricade across the nursery, so that she could get some peace from the little monsters if she wanted it. Louie was indeed impulsively destructive. The girls were all right. They fought each other like two kzinti in a tournament ring, and each was jealous of the attention that the Nora-beast gave the other. Brunhilde would die in a few years of too many brain cells.
Long-Reach played with the children while Trainer-of-Slaves was lounging on the giant pillow eating his liver-and-kidney ice cream. He spoke to Nora, unable to keep his eyes off her face.
“Hrr-r. You are very precious to me. I want you alive. But the hyperdrive motor is even more precious. It is precious to the Patriarchy. If you try to escape again, I will kill you.”
“If I don’t kill you first.” She was picking out the purple berries and eating them before tasting her ice cream. She had dimples. It was the first time he noticed.
He grinned, trying hard to imitate
a human smile by forcing a curl to his lips. “Forget you ever said that.”
When they reached R’hshssira Nora’s fur was coming in nicely. She wore a lustrous pelt that had changed her from an ugly pink “tail” into a stunningly handsome animal. She could still argue fluently in English, after a fashion, between the pauses, and he hadn’t yet found a way to impregnate her with twins.
CHAPTER 26
(2423 A.D.)
Short-Son of Chiirr-Nig, alias Eater-of-Grass, alias Trainer-of-Slaves, was home and excited. Why did he love that hot stove, R’hshssira? What was Hssin to him? Why was he looking forward to wandering through the old Jotok Run and gossiping with Jotok-Tender?
He sat in the Command Center trying to read the instruments long before they got there. He was babysitting Louis for his Nora-female because the boy’s hostility was running her ragged and she needed a rest.
“Grrough! Stay away from that!” he commanded in slave patois. He whacked the boy, not too hard, and returned to his seat. “Come over here. I’ll have something to show you soon.” He was hoping to interest Louis in the stars. Younglings brought out the father in a kzin, no matter how badly they behaved, and this one was his only male.
The electromagnetic silence disturbed Trainer. Had his instrument gone dead?
Louis was already back into mischief, glancing warily at the kzin to see if he dared do what he really wanted to do. He decided that he could. The kzin was busy.
When the Bitch had maneuvered closer into the R’hshssira system, the electronic telescope confirmed the awful truth. Trainer-of-Slaves let out a wretched scream of anguish. Destruction. The man-ghouls had been here first! They had come and gone. There wasn’t a glimmer of any spacefaring. He howled and clawed the walls!
Louis dived under the astrogator’s desk, terrified, leaving the fragment of plastic wall-stripping half stuffed into the computer slot.
