Cathouse
Page 22
“Grace Agostinho’s beauty is all on the outside. And there’s a girl hiding somewhere on Newduvai that those deserters never did catch. In a few years she’ll be—well, you’ll meet her someday.” Locklear put an arm around Ruth’s waist and grinned. “The truth is, Ruth thinks I’m pretty funny-looking, but some things you can learn to overlook.”
At the clearing, Ruth hopped from the pinnace first. “Ruth will fix place nice, like before,” she promised, and walked to the cabin.
“She’s learning Interworld fast,” Locklear said proudly. “Her telepathy helps—in a lot of ways. Scarface, do you realize that her people may be the most tremendous discovery of modern times? And the irony of it! The empathy these people share probably helped isolate them from the modern humans that came from their own gene pool. Yet their kind of empathy might be the only viable future for us.” He sighed and stepped to the turf. “Sometimes I wonder whether I want to be found.”
Standing beside the pinnace, they gazed at the Anthony Wayne. Scarface said, “With that warship, you could do the finding.”
Locklear assessed the longing in the face of the big kzin. “I know how you feel about piloting, Scarface. But you must accept that I can’t let you have any craft more advanced than your scooter back on Kzersatz.”
“But—surely, the pinnace or my own lifeboat?”
“You see that?” Locklear pointed toward the forest.
Scarface looked dutifully away, then back, and when he saw the sidearm pointing at his breast, a look of terrible loss crossed his face. “I see that I will never understand you,” he growled, clasping his hands behind his head. “And I see that you still doubt my honor.”
Locklear forced him to lean against the pinnace, arms behind his back, and secured his hands with binder tape. “Sorry, but I have to do this,” he said. “Now get back in the pinnace. I’m taking you to Kzersatz.”
“But I would have—”
“Don’t say it,” Locklear demanded. “Don’t tell me what you want, and don’t remind me of your honor, goddammit! Look here, I know you don’t lie. And what if the next ship here is another kzin ship? You won’t lie to them either, your bloody honor won’t let you. They’ll find you sitting pretty on Kzersatz, right?”
Teetering off-balance as he climbed into the pinnace without using his arms, Scarface still glowered. But after a moment he admitted, “Correct.”
“They won’t court-martial you, Scarface. Because a lying, sneaking monkey pulled a gun on you, tied you up, and sent you back to prison. I’m telling you here and now, I see Kzersatz as a prison and every tabby on this planet will be locked up there for the duration of the war!” With that, Locklear sealed the canopy and made a quick check of the console readouts. He reached across to adjust the inertia-reel harness of his companion, then shrugged into his own. “You have no choice, and no tabby telepath can ever claim you did. Now do you understand?”
The big kzin was looking below as the forest dropped away, but Locklear could see his ears forming the kzin equivalent of a smile. “No wonder you win wars,” said Scarface.
Published separately in
The Man-Kzin Wars and Man-Kzin Wars II—
NOW AVAILABLE IN A SINGLE VOLUME!
Carroll Locklear was up to his ears in Kzinti. He hadn’t planned it that way; what sane human would want to be trapped cheek by furry jowl with a bunch of homicidal bearcats? But when he was taken prisoner, somehow the subject of Locklear’s likes and dislikes never came up, and now he finds himself stranded on a planet of prehistoric Kzinti. To survive he must find common cause, if not with the males then with the females of that antique species….
a novel of
The Man-Kzin Wars