by Larry Niven
Her eyes snapped open so fast, Locklear thought they should have clicked audibly. She made motions like someone waving cobwebs aside, mewing in a way that he found pathetic, and then she fully noticed the little man standing near, and she screamed and leaped. That leap carried her to the top of a nearby container, away from him, cowering, eyes wide, ear umbrellas folded flat.
He remembered not to grin as he asked, “Is this my thanks for bringing you back?”
She blinked. “You (something, something) a devil, then?”
He denied it, pointing to the scores of other kzin around her, admitting he had found them this way.
If curiosity killed cats, this one would have died then and there. She remained crouched and wary, her eyes flickering around as she formed more questions. Her speech was barely understandable. She used a form of verbal negation utterly new to him, and some familiar words were longer the way she pronounced them. The general linguistic rule was that abstract ideas first enter a lexicon as several words, later shortened by the impatient.
Probably her longer words were primitive forms; God only knew how long she had been in stasis! He told her who he was, but that did not reduce her wary hostility much. She had never heard of men. Nor of any intelligent race other than kzinti. Nor, for that matter, of spaceflight. But she was remarkably quick to absorb new ideas, and from Locklear’s demeanor she realized all too soon that he, in fact, was scared spitless of her. That was the point when she came down off that container like a leopard from a limb, snatched his handaxe while he hesitated, and poked him in the gut with its haft.
It appeared, after all, that Locklear had revived a very, very old-fashioned female.
“You (something or other) captive,” she sizzled, unsheathing a set of shining claws from her fingers as if to remind him of their potency. She turned a bit away from him then, looking sideways at him. “Do you have sex?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed again before he intuited her meaning. Her first move was to gain control, her second to establish sex roles. A bright female; yeah, that’s about what an ethologist should expect…“Humans have two sexes just as kzinti do,” he said, “and I am male, and I won’t submit as your captive. You people eat captives. You’re not all that much bigger than I am, and this lance is sharp. I’m your benefactor. Ask yourself why I didn’t spear you for lunch before you awoke.”
“If you could eat me, I could eat you,” she said. “Why do you cut words short?”
Bewildering changes of pace but always practical, he thought. Oh yes, an exceedingly bright female. “I speak modern Kzinti,” he explained. “One day we may learn how many thousands of years you have been asleep.” He enjoyed the almost human widening of her yellow eyes, and went on doggedly. “Since I have honorably waked you from what might have been a permanent sleep, I ask this: what does your honor suggest?”
“That I (something) clothes,” she said. “And owe you a favor, if nakedness is what you want.”
“It’s cold for me, too.” He’d left his food outside but was wearing the jacket, and took it off. “I’ll trade this for the axe.”
She took it, studying it with distaste, and eventually tied its sleeves like an apron to hide her mammaries. It could not have warmed her much. His question was half disbelief: “That’s it? Now you’re clothed?”
“As (something) of the (something) always do,” she said. “Do you have a special name?”
He told her, and she managed “Rockear.” Her own name, she said, was (something fiendishly tough for humans to manage), and he smiled, “I’ll call you ‘Miss Kitty.’”
“If it pleases you,” she said, and something in the way that phrase rolled out gave him pause.
He leaned the shamboo lance aside and tucked the axe into his belt. “We must try to understand each other better,” he said. “We are not on your homeworld, but I think it is a very close approximation. A kind of incomplete zoo. Why don’t we swap stories outside where it’s warm?”
She agreed, still wary but no longer hostile, with a glance of something like satisfaction toward the massive kzin male rotating in the next container. And then they strolled outside into the wilderness of Kzersatz which, for some reason, forced thin mewling miaows from her. It had never occurred to Locklear that a kzin could weep.
As near as Locklear could understand, Miss Kitty’s emotions were partly relief that she had lived to see her yellow fields and jungles again, and partly grief when she contemplated the loneliness she now faced. I don’t count, he thought. But if I expect to get her help, I’d best see that I do count.
Everybody thinks his own dialect is superior, Locklear decided. Miss Kitty fumed at his brief forms of Kzinti, and he winced at her ancient elaborations, as they walked to the nearest stream. She had a temper, too, teaching him genteel curses as her bare feet encountered thorns. She seemed fascinated by his account of the kzin expansion, and that of humans, and others as well through the galaxy. She even accepted his description of the planet Zoo though she did not seem to understand it.
She accepted his story so readily, in fact, that he hit on an intuition. “Has it occurred to you that I might be lying?”
“Your talk is offensive,” she flared. “My benefactor a criminal? No. Is it common among your kind?”
“More than among yours,” he admitted, “but I have no reason to lie to you. Sorry,” he added, seeing her react again. Kzinti don’t flare up at that word today; maybe all cusswords have to be replaced as they weaken from overuse. Then he told her how man and kzin got along between wars, and ended by admitting it looked as if another war was brewing, which was why he had been abandoned here.
She looked around her. “Is Zoo your doing, or ours?”
“Neither. I think it must have been done by a race we know very little about: Outsiders, we call them. No one knows how many years they have traveled space, but very, very long. They live without air, without much heat. Just beyond the wall that surrounds Kzersatz, I have seen airless corridors with the cold darkness of space and dapples of light. They would be quite comfortable there.”
“I do not think I like them.”
Then he laughed, and had to explain how the display of his teeth was the opposite of anger.
“Those teeth could not support much anger,” she replied, her small pink ear umbrellas winking down and up. He learned that this was her version of a smile.
Finally, when they had taken their fill of water, they returned as Miss Kitty told her tale. She had been trained as a palace prret; a servant and casual concubine of the mighty during the reign of Rrawlrit Eight and Three. Locklear said that the “Rrit” suffix meant high position among modern kzinti, and she made a sound very like a human sniff. Rrawlrit was the arrogant son of an arrogant son, and so on. He liked his females, lots of them, especially young ones. “I was (something) than most,” she said, her four-digited hand slicing the air at her ear height.
“Petite, small?”
“Yes. Also smart. Also famous for my appearance,” she added without the slightest show of modesty. She glanced at him as though judging which haunch might be tastiest. “Are you famous for yours?”
“Uh—not that I know of.”
“But not unattractive?”
He slid a hand across his face, feeling its stubble. “I am considered petite, and by some as, uh, attractive.” Two or three are “some.” Not much, but some…
“With a suit of fur you would be (something),” she said, with that ear-waggle, and he quickly asked about palace life because he damned well did not want to know what that final word of hers had meant. It made him nervous as hell. Yeah, but what did it mean? Mud-ugly? Handsome? Tasty? Listen to the lady, idiot, and quit suspecting what you’re suspecting.
She had been raised in a culture in which females occasionally ran a regency, and in which males fought duels over the argument as to whether females were their intellectual equals. Most thought not. Miss Kitty thought so, and proved it, rising to palace prominence with her backside, as she put it
.
“You mean you were no better than you should be,” he commented.
“What does that mean?”
“I haven’t the foggiest idea, just an old phrase.” She was still waiting, and her aspect was not benign. “Uh, it means nobody could expect you to do any better.”
She nodded slowly, delighting him as she adopted one of the human gestures he’d been using. I did too well to suit the males jealous of my power, Rockear. They convinced the regent that I was conspiring with other palace prrets to gain equality for our sex.
“And were you?”
She arched her back with pride. “Yes. Does that offend you?”
“No. Would you care if it did?”
“It would make things difficult, Rockear. You must understand that I loathe, admire, hate, desire kzintosh male kzin. I fought for equality because it was common knowledge that some were planning to breed kzinrett, females, to be no better than pets.”
“I hate to tell you this, Miss Kitty, but they’ve done it.”
“Already?”
“I don’t know how long it took, but—” He paused, and then told her the worst. Long before man and kzin first met, their females had been bred into brainless docility. Even if Miss Kitty found modern sisters, they would be of no help to her.
She fought the urge to weep again, strangling her miaows with soft snarls of rage.
Locklear turned away, aware that she did not want to seem vulnerable, and consulted his wristcomp’s encyclopedia. The earliest kzin history made reference to the downfall of a Rrawlrit the fifty-seventh—Seven Eights and One, and he gasped at what that told him. “Don’t feel too bad, Miss Kitty,” he said at last. “That was at least forty thousand years ago; do you understand eight to the fifth power?”
“It is very, very many,” she said in a choked voice.
“It’s been more years than that since you were brought here. How did you get here, anyhow?”
“They executed several of us. My last memory was of grappling with the lord high executioner, carrying him over the precipice into the sacred lagoon with me. I could not swim with those heavy chains around my ankles, but I remember trying. I hope he drowned,” she said, eyes slitted. “Sex with him had always been my most hated chore.”
A small flag began to wave in Locklear’s head; he furled it for further reference. “So you were trying to swim. Then?”
“Then suddenly I was lying naked with a very strange creature staring at me,” she said with that ear-wink, and a sharp talon pointed almost playfully at him. “Do not think ill of me because I reacted in fright.”
He shook his head, and had to explain what that meant, and it became a short course in subtle nuances for each of them. Miss Kitty, it seemed, proved an old dictum about downtrodden groups: they became highly expert at reading body language, and at developing secret signals among themselves. It was not Locklear’s fault that he was constantly, and completely unaware, sending messages that she misread.
But already, she was adapting to his gestures as he had to her language. “Of all the kzinti I could have taken from stasis, I got you,” he chuckled finally, and because her glance was quizzical, he told a gallant half-lie: “I went for the prettiest, and got the smartest.”
“And the hungriest,” she said. “Perhaps I should hunt something for us.”
He reminded her that there was nothing to hunt. “You can help me choose animals to release here. Meanwhile, you can have this,” he added, offering her the kzinti rations.
The sun faded on schedule, and he dined on tuberberries while she devoured an entire brick of meat. She amazed him by popping a few tuberberries for dessert. When he asked her about it, she replied that certainly kzinti ate vegetables in her time; why should they not?
“Males want only meat,” he shrugged.
“They would,” she snarled. “In my day, some select warriors did the same. They claimed it made them ferocious and that eaters of vegetation were mere kshauvat, dumb herbivores; we prret claimed their diet just made them hopelessly aggressive.”
“The word’s been shortened to kshat now,” he mused. “It’s a favorite cussword of theirs. At least you don’t have to start eating the animals in stasis to stay alive. That’s the good news; the bad news is that the warriors who left me here may return at any time. What will you do then?”
“That depends on how accurate your words have been,” she said cagily.
“And if I’m telling the plain truth?”
Her ears smiled for her: “Take up my war where I left it,” she said.
Locklear felt his control slipping when Miss Kitty refused to wait before releasing most of the vatach. They were nocturnal with easily-spotted burrows, she insisted, and yes, they bred fast—but she pointed to specimens of a winged critter in stasis and said they would control the vatach very nicely if the need arose. By now he realized that this kzin female wasn’t above trying to vamp him; and when that failed, a show of fang and talon would succeed.
He showed her how to open the cages only after she threatened him, and watched as she grasped waking vatach by their legs, quickly releasing them to the darkness outside. No need to release the (something) yet, she said; Locklear called the winged beasts “batowls.” “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he grumbled. “I’d stop you if I could do it without a fight.”
“You would wait forever,” she retorted. “I know the animals of my world better than you do, and soon we may need a lot of them for food.”
“Not so many; there’s just the two of us.”
The cat-eyes regarded him shrewdly. “Not for long,” she said, and dropped her bombshell. “I recognized a friend of mine in one of those cages.”
Locklear felt an icy needle down his spine. “A male?”
“Certainly not. Five of us were executed for the same offense, and at least one of them is here with us. Perhaps those Outsiders of yours collected us all as we sank in that stinking water.”
“Not my Outsiders,” he objected. “Listen, for all we know they’re monitoring us, so be careful how you fiddle with their setup here.”
She marched him to the kzin cages and purred her pleasure on recognizing two females, both prret like herself, both imposingly large for Locklear’s taste. She placed a furry hand on one cage, enjoying the moment. “I could release you now, my sister in struggle,” she said softly. “But I think I shall wait. Yes, I think it is best,” she said to Locklear, turning away. “These two have been here a long time, and they will keep until—”
“Until you have everything under your control?”
“True,” she said. “But you need not fear, Rockear. You are an ally, and you know too many things we must know. And besides,” she added, rubbing against him sensuously, “you are (something).”
There was that same word again, t’rralap or some such, and now he was sure, with sinking heart, that it meant “cute.” He didn’t feel cute; he was beginning to feel like a Pomeranian on a short leash.
More by touch than anything else, they gathered bundles of grass for a bower at the cave entrance, and Miss Kitty showed no reluctance in falling asleep next to him, curled becomingly into a buzzing ball of fur. But when he moved away, she moved too, until they were touching again. He knew beyond doubt that if he moved too far in the direction of his lance and axe, she would be fully awake and suspicious as hell.
And she’d call my bluff, and I don’t want to kill her, he thought, settling his head against her furry shoulder. Even if I could, which is doubtful, I’m no longer master of all I survey. In fact, now I have a mistress of sorts, and I’m not too sure what kind of mistress she has in mind. They used to have a word for what I’m thinking. Maybe Miss Kitty doesn’t care who or what she diddles; hell, she was a palace courtesan, doing it with males she hated. She thinks I’m t’rralap. Yeah, that’s me, Locklear, Miss Kitty’s trollop; and what the hell can I do about it? I wish there were some way I could get her back in that stasis cage…And then he fell asleep.
<
br /> To Locklear’s intense relief, Miss Kitty seemed uninterested in the remaining cages on the following morning. They foraged for breakfast and he hid his astonishment as she taught him a dozen tricks in an hour. The root bulb of one spiny shrub tasted like an apple; the seed pods of some weeds were delicious; and she produced a tiny blaze by rapidly pounding an innocent-looking nutmeat between two stones. It occurred to him that nuts contained great amounts of energy. A pile of these firenuts, he reflected, might be turned into a weapon…
Feeding hunks of dry brush to the fire, she announced that those root bulbs baked nicely in coals. “If we can find clay, I can fire a few pottery dishes and cups, Rockear. It was part of my training, and I intend to have everything in domestic order before we wake those two.”
“And what if a kzin ship returns and spots that smoke?”
That was a risk they must take, she said. Some woods burned more cleanly than others. He argued that they should at least build their fires far from the cave, and while they were at it, the cave entrance might be better disguised. She agreed, impressed with his strategy, and then went down on all-fours to inspect the dirt near a dry-wash. As he admired her lithe movements, she shook her head in an almost human gesture. “No good for clay.”
“It’s not important.”
“It is vitally important!” Now she wheeled upright, impressive and fearsome. “Rockear, if any kzintosh return here, we must be ready. For that, we must have the help of others—the two prret. And believe me, they will be helpful only if they see us as their (something).”
She explained that the word meant, roughly, “paired household leaders.” The basic requirements of a household, to a kzin female, included sleeping bowers—easily come by—and enough pottery for that household. A male kzin needed one more thing, she said, her eyes slitting: a wtsai.
“You mean one of those knives they all wear?”
“Yes. And you must have one in your belt.” From the waggle of her ears, he decided she was amused by her next statement: “It is a—badge, of sorts. The edge is usually sharp but I cannot allow that, and the tip must be dull. I will show you why later.”
