“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 meows 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 Rraw’rit Eight and Three. Locklear said that the “Riit” suffix meant high position among modern kzinti, and she made a sound very like a human sniff. Rraw’rit 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.”

“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 Rraw’rit 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?

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