From the compartment below them the boat suddenly screamed. Vaemar and Swirl-Stripes leapt back down the steps. Their beam rifles fired, but for an instant only. Their reflected beams hit the water, flashing it into live steam. Had they depressed the triggers an instant longer, the kzinti would have broiled themselves. There were two explosions, ear-crackingly loud in that confined space. Something hit Vaemar and knocked him backwards across the door-sill. Swirl-Stripes screamed and charged through the water. Then whatever it was had gone.
Vaemar rose cautiously. The rifle had been torn from his claws and he was, he knew, lucky not to have lost digits as well. Its bulk had saved him, but its charge-regulator was smashed. Something had hit it hard. One rifle was useless.
Not only one rifle. Hugo's strakkaker was in two pieces, and one of his arms hung broken. Anne strapped the arm with an expanding mini-splint and applied a pain-killer, but he was plainly out of any fighting for a time.
The others covering him, Vaemar examined the companionway. The bulkhead some distance behind him gleamed raw with the impact of a new missile. The missile itself was still sizzling in the water. It was nothing but a blob of metal, but could have been—must have been—a bullet from a real “rifle”—a hunting rifle such as both kzin and humans used both to practice marksmanship and to kill game without the disintegrating effects of a strakkaker or a military beamer.
Toby was gone and the boat's brain and computer terminal had been smashed. The brain, Vaemar thought, was not much loss, but the computer would have been valuable. Other gear was gone too, including food, spare ammunition, the telephones and the motion-detector.
“It wasn't Toby,” said Hugo. “I'm sure it wasn't Toby.” He looked up at Vaemar with drugged, still pain-filled eyes. “Upon my name as my word, I pledge, it was not him. Whatever it was has taken him…”
“We go on,” said Vaemar. No human, whatever their knowledge of kzin body-language, would have argued with him. They returned to the chamber of dead kzinti.
There were open doors leading to dark companionways. Beams of light down them showed nothing. There were also closed doors. Molds and plants growing on them suggested they had been shut a long time, presumably ever since the ship had come down.
Hugo pointed to one: around the handle it was clean and shining. A panel of colored lights beside the handle showed its lock was alive.
“Open it!” ordered Vaemar. There was a chance the lock was not actually engaged.
Anne pulled on the handle, uselessly. Swirl-Stripes tried, also without result. Without the code for the lock neither human nor kzin muscular strength was going to move it.
They had the beam-guns, but Vaemar thought their lasers would have no effect on the door before their charges burnt out. It would be stupid to fire them at the wall. Partly to give himself time to think, but largely because decorum demanded it, he ordered the kzinti's bodies cut down and their remaining limbs suitably composed. Briefly but pointedly, he urinated on them, offering them the mark of one who bore the blood of Chuut-Riit and the Patriarch. No need to carry their mutilated bodies into the light of day. They would lie with the bones of other kzinti here, in this brave ship. It was not too bad a spot. Or it would not be once they had been most comprehensively avenged, of course. He remembered a stanza from one of his favorite human poems, “The Ballad of the White Horse”:
Lift not my head from bloody ground,
Bear not my body home;
For all the Earth is Roman Earth,
And I shall die in Rome.
They had been hung on meat-hooks such as were common in any kzinti dead-meat locker. There were other hooks with strips of dried stuff hanging from them. Rosalind collected some samples for further analysis. He wondered whether to leave a couple to watch the door while he led the rest on to investigate the other companionways. No, all military training spoke against dividing a small force, especially in the face of an enemy whose deadliness was now plain.
Brief, cautious forays into the other companionways revealed nothing. His companions might be his soldiers, but they were also his fellow-students, and he had a consciousness of his responsibility to them along with his lust for vengeance and battle. To go, leaving some unknown behind that locked door, seemed a bad idea, as well as violating all kzin instincts and precepts of honor. To sit tight and wait upon the enemy to make the next move seemed a bad idea also. Anyway, it was a good idea to eat, but not in the presence of these dead. Off one of the companionways was another room, empty and relatively dry. They retired there and ate and drank. The small blocks of compressed food from their belt-pouches did not need preparation and in a situation like this humans and kzinti could eat together. It was, however, a very unsatisfying meal. It provided energy but would hardly assuage kzin hunger-pangs much. They should, Vaemar thought, have made sure they had a proper meal earlier. He filed the thought away for next time.
What would Honored Sire do? Vaemar wondered. Or Honored Step-Sire? He also thought of the cleverest humans he knew—Colonel Cumpston, or Professor Rykermann, or Brigadier Guthlac, or the abbot. Even the manretti—Dimity with whom he talked long and who beat him at chess, or Leonie, whose adventures in the caves with Honored Step-Sire Raargh when he received his rank and Name he had often been told about. This compartment seemed at first a good place to wait. It had but a single door. But it would be dark eventually. That meant less to the night-eyed kzinti than to the humans, but it would still be a disadvantage in dealing with the unknown. And the single door meant there was no line of retreat.
Vaemar's ears twitched violently at a sound. Motioning the others to stillness, he moved silently to the door and into the companionway, in a stalking crouch with his stomach-fur brushing the deck. He leapt. There was the sound of a hissing, spitting struggle. The others burst out behind him, weapons levelled. Vaemar was holding a kzinrett.
“Be still!” he hissed at her in the Female Tongue.
“Be still yourself!” she replied, and not in the Female Tongue, but in the Heroes' Tongue, in the tense of equals. “Release me! I am not an enemy.”
Vaemar was nonplussed. The Heroes' Tongue, with its complex tenses and extensive technical vocabulary, was far beyond females' comprehension. And what female, even if she had the intellectual equipment to do so, would speak to any kzintosh in the tense of equals?
His surprise made him forget for a moment their whole position. Then he saw how thin she was, how tensely she held her body. Her great eyes were violent-edged and wild. But one kzinrett, alone, could hardly be a threat. He released his hold on her. She stood poised to run or fight. He gestured to Swirl-Stripes and the humans. “These… companions,” he said. He gestured more explicitly: “Humans,” he said, “you know?”
“Yes,” she said. “I know.”
He saw that she was older than he, but not old. She would have been at the end of adolescence when the human hyperdrive armada swept in to reconquer Wunderland a decade before. She would have spent her formative years with humans as her slaves and prey. If she was the daughter of a noble—and most kzinti had been the sons and daughters of nobles—she might have been cared for by a gloved, padded and otherwise protected human nurse. But her vestigial female mind was unlikely to see humans today as sapients and companions. He would have to be careful.
“My name is Karan,” she said. She looked at him as if the information might convey something significant.
A quite common female name. What was not common was for a female to enunciate it in a clear and grammatical sentence. There were things about her eyes, her whole posture, that were not normal. Then her eyes narrowed. Vaemar knew that she was seeing his ear-tattoos. A kzinrett of upper-normal female intelligence might dimly know them as betokening Quality.
“Riit!” she said. Swirl-Stripes, he saw, jumped a little at the word. Even the humans, whose childhood had been under the kzin Occupation, knew it. He picked up the glandular responses. But there was no awe or reverence in her voice. She spoke, and all his senses r
einforced this impression, like one recognizing and challenging an enemy.
“My name is Vaemar,” he said. It was “name,” not “Name.” Some odd scrap of memory recalled to him a sentence from a literature course: “His sensitive ear detected the capitals.” Then he added: “I am a student.” He realized as he said it that such a word could have no meaning to her. Or could it? She had recognized the ear-tattoos.
“I also hunt killers of kzinti,” he told her, still in the soft, simple syllables of the Female Tongue. “Who has killed Heroes and kzinretti here?”
“You do not know? You are bold to stick your nose into a cave where you know nothing.”
Clear, grammatical sentences. Imagery. Abstract conceptualization.
A kzinrett telling a Hero he knew nothing! Vaemar felt bewilderment and rage in almost equal proportions. He fought both down. Living with Raargh and among humans had taught him self-control. It had also instilled in him a determination that, however he died, it would not be of culture-shock. But this was something he felt he must handle alone as far as he could. He ordered Swirl-Stripes and the humans to guard the entrances to the corridors. Then he turned back to her.
“No,” he said, and not in the Female Tongue this time. “I do not know. But that is why we are here in arms.”
“'We'…” she repeated. She looked the kzinti and the backs of humans up and down. She seemed, whatever else, to take this in without surprise.
“We are no longer at war with humans on this world,” he told her, slipping into a more complicated vocabulary before he realized it. “And they are no longer our slaves. We work together.”
“I worked with humans before you were born,” she replied. Then she added, “I am small enough to hide in the ducting. You kzintosh are not. If you do not wish to be like those”—she gestured in the direction of the flayed corpses—“by the time the sun goes down, I suggest we are far away. You will take me with you.”
How exactly we are going to get away is another matter, he thought. Aloud he said: “You tell me nothing. Who are the enemies we have come to destroy?”
“Enemies you kzintosh have destroyed already. The Jotok.”
“I do not understand. Say on!”
“There were adult Jotok in this ship when it came down, serving as slave-mechanics. Most died. But enough survived to breed. The whole ship here in the swamp could have been designed as a giant nursery for Jotok—full of sheltered, water-filled compartments and with unlimited food that could be fetched from close by.”
“But adult Jotok were decorous slaves!”
“Only to their trainers, and those to whom they bonded when young.”
Vaemar had read and been told of the Jotok but, except perhaps in those barely-remembered days as a kitten at the palace, he had never seen a live one. Many kzinti had had Jotok slaves, but those that survived the fighting on Wunderland had been killed by their masters at the time of the Liberation as part of the general destruction of military assets. Kzin Heroes going out to die would not leave their slaves for victorious humans. He knew, however, that wild Jotok could be savage. Hunting them was a favorite sport on kzin worlds—they were generally a far better challenge than unarmed humans and other monkeys—and even relatively small artificial habitats had boasted Jotok-runs.
“These Jotoki masters had died or abandoned them,” Karan went on, “and the new generation had known no masters. They had no teachers but their own masterless adults, who had no loyalties to any living kzintosh. Kzinti had eaten their kind, without a thought. Now they eat kzinti. And humans, and any other prey, large or small.”
“Then why are you alive?” asked Vaemar. The question of how she, with her female mind, could understand these things and speak of them clearly and fluently was another matter.
“I have burrows here. Compartments with no openings for a large Jotok to enter, save doors I can close and guard. I keep ahead of them and so far I have survived.”
“How did you get here?”
“Does it matter now?”
“Yes. I am dealing with the unknown, and if possible I must see the background of events before I move. I take it we are in no immediate danger.”
“Not for a short time. Most of the big Jotok swim far when hunting. The smaller ones are hiding from us now, apart from the guards they have to keep us in. But when the others return…”
“There is another thing I do not understand,” said Vaemar.
“I know.”
“Yes, you know. You are not an ordinary kzinrett.”
“I told you my name is Karan,” she replied.
“Yes.”
“Were we on a world of the Patriarch, young Riit, I would die under torture before I said more. And I will say no more of that now.”
“You are a sapient female. That is plain.”
She glared at him silently, teeth bared and claws extended. But all the kzinti had claws extended here. “For some, a few, who bear that name…” She stopped. “I have said too much,” she hissed at length.
“Or not enough.”
“My mother taught me a little of our secrets before she died in fighting. I ran from my Sire's house. I was a feral kitten. I met feral human kittens. There were caves.”
I am remembering, thought Vaemar. Raargh's story of how he got his Name.
“We lived in the great caves, until the night-stalkers killed most of us and captured me. They killed the human who was with me, and they broke my legs and left me for meat.”
“And a Hero with a human female freed you?”
“Yes! How do you know?”
“That Hero is my Honored Step-Sire, Raargh. I have heard his stories. The female human was Leonie.” This kzinrett would have been hardly out of childhood then. Had she been any older he doubted any human kit would have survived her company long, sapient or not. Adolescent kzinti of both sexes, on kzin-colonized Ka'ashi, had not been notable for their tolerance of humans or for interspecies diplomatic skills.
“Yes, Leonie-human. Heroes came then, and I was taken into the household of Hroarh-Officer.”
“Hroarh-Officer! My Honored Step-Sire Raargh's old commander! I have met him.”
“He lives?”
“Yes.”
Her ears moved in a strange expression. “When my legs were mended, he was gracious enough to take me into his household, and then into his harem.”
“He has no use for a harem now,” said Vaemar.
“That I know. I was with him while he lay shattered. I stanched the bleeding though he screamed at me to let him die. I told him it was his duty to live, his duty to our kind. I had never spoken to him in the Heroes' Tongue before, let alone given him commands…
“It was a strange time. We lay together in the wreckage and I comforted him and talked with him. It was not humans that had maimed him so, you know. It was in the fighting between the followers of Traat-Admiral and Ktrodni-Stkaa, before the humans landed. And I revealed to him the secret that I was tired of keeping. That some on this world knew already. That I was one of the Secret Others… the females whose brains were not killed.”
“I knew nothing of this,” said Vaemar.
“No, Riit. And perhaps I should kill you now to keep that secret. But this is no longer a kzinti world. And I am hungry to speak.”
Vaemar called to the others, “Any movement?” There seemed to be nothing. All were alert. The sighting dots of the weapons moved back and forth in the darkness of the corridors, running over mold, dark metal, and, farther down some passages, rippling water that might conceal an armed, approaching enemy. Swirl-Stripes fired the beam rifle at this, flashing it into steam, but it was a precaution only and he could not keep the trigger depressed for more than an instant. Vaemar told him to cease. More, or closer, live steam would broil them, and as it was the clouds from these momentary bursts were highly inconvenient, especially when they were striving to see. This closes about me, thought Vaemar. And then again: What would honored Sire, and Honored Step-Sire do? And
then: Seek knowledge. Seek more knowledge. He waited for the air to clear and returned to the kzinrett.
“Tell me more.”
“I kept Hroarh-Officer alive, and stopped him killing himself until aid arrived. The other kzinretti had yammered and fled when the fighting started. I stayed with him while they gave him some sort of field-surgery. It gave him help, I think, to hold my fingers then. We talked long in that time. He became the first kzintosh I did not hate.
“And later I stayed to make sure he did not die. Then there were the human landings, and he commanded his troops from a cart in the battles that followed until few were left alive. Wounded and maimed, nearly all, kept for garrison duties, though there were fewer garrisons each hour. He even taught me a little skill with weapons then, for we did not know what the days might bring, and he had accepted what I was. Finally he told me: 'Go, Karan, I know now my duty is to live. Let me be an example: if I can live, so can Raargh-Sergeant with his one arm and eye and these other half-Heroes of mine. But we must let the monkeys give us every chance to die in battle first, taking as many of them as we may with us to present to the Fanged God. You must hide yourself and survive. I will keep your secret. You are free,” he said, “No longer the property of this useless half-kzintosh. But remember the Hero I once was.”
“You were loyal to your Hero,” said Vaemar. Strange linkings of fate. If she saved Hroarh-Officer and he in turn did not let Raargh Hero die, then I owe this strange kzinrett Raargh Hero's life. Which means I owe her my own life too. Well, let us see how long we shall keep our lives.
“I hardly know what I was loyal to,” she told him. “Many memories. Warring drives. Why should I love the patriarchy that enslaved all females and blanked the minds of nearly all? Robbed them of more than life? Oh, we of the Secret Others know how it was done, more or less. The stories have been handed down. There were humans I had met—the Leonie Manrret in the caves was one—who were more kind to me than my own kind. Yet Hroarh-Officer was truly my Hero, and I am kzinti too. He lives, you say?”
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