The Man-Kzin Wars 01

been just as complicated, once, and she was probably the only functioning expert in known space on the customs of ancient kzinrett. “We'll pretend, then, up to a point. Try and make that point, ah, not too pointed.”

“Like your w'tsai,” she retorted. “I will try not to make your face change color.”

“Please,” he said fervently, and suggested that he might find the material for a w'tsai inside the cave while she sought a deposit of clay.

She bounded away on all-fours with the lope of a hunting leopard, his jacket a somehow poignant touch as it flapped against her lean belly.

When he looked back from the cave entrance, she was a tiny dot two kilometers distant, coursing along a shallow creekbed. “Maybe you won't lie, and I've got no other ally,” he said to the swift saffron dot. “But you're not above misdirection with your own kind. I'll remember that.”

* * *

Locklear cursed as he failed to locate any kind of tool chest or lab implements in those inner corridors. But he blessed his grooming tool when the tip of its pincer handle fitted screwheads in the cage that had held Miss Kitty prisoner for so long. He puzzled for minutes before he learned to turn screwheads a quarter-turn, release pressure to let the screwheads emerge, then another quarter-turn, and so on, nine times each. He felt quickening excitement as the cage cover detached, felt it stronger when he disassembled the base and realized its metal sheeting was probably one of a myriad stainless steel alloys. The diamond coating on his nailfile proved the sheet was no indestructible substance. It was thin enough to flex, even to be dented by a whack against an adjoining cage. It might take awhile, but he would soon have his w'tsai blade.

And two other devices now lay before him, ludicrously far advanced beyond an ornamental knife. The gravity polarizer's main bulk was a doughnut of ceramic and metal. Its switch, and that of the stasis field, both were energized by the sliding cage floor he had disassembled. The switches worked just as well with fingertip pressure. They boasted separate energy sources which Locklear dared not assault; anything that worked for forty thousand years without harming the creatures near it would be more sophisticated than any fumble-fingered mechanic.

Using the glasslike cage as a test load, he learned which of the two switches flung the load into the air. The other, then, had to operate the stasis field — and both devices had simple internal levers for adjustments. When he learned how to stop the cage from spinning, and then how to make it hover only a hand's breadth above the device or to force it against the ceiling until it creaked, he was ecstatic. Then he energized the stasis switch with a chill of gooseflesh. Any prying paws into those devices would not pry for long, unless someone knew about that inconspicuous switch. Rockear could see no interconnects between the stasis generator and the polarizer, but both were detachable. If he could get that polarizer outside. Locklear strode out of the cave laughing. It would be the damnedest vehicle ever, but its technologies would be wholly appropriate. He hid the device in nearby grass; the less his ally knew about such things, the more freedom he would have to pursue them.

Miss Kitty returned in late afternoon with a sopping mass of clay wrapped in greenish yellow palm leaves. The clay was poor quality, she said, but it would have to serve — and why was he battering that piece of metal with his stone axe?

If she knew a better way to cut off a w'tsai-sized strip of steel than bending it back and forth, he replied, he'd love to hear it. Bickering like an old married couple, they sat near the cave mouth until dark and pursued their separate stone-age tasks. Locklear, whose hand calluses were still forming, had to admit that she had been wonderfully trained for domestic chores; under those quick four-digited hands of hers, rolled coils of clay soon became shallow bowls with thin sides, so nearly perfect they might have been turned on a potter's wheel. By now he was calling her “Kit,” and she seemed genuinely pleased when he praised her work. Ah, she said, but wait until the pieces were sun-dried to leather hardness; then she would make the bowls lovely with talon- etched decoration. He objected that decoration took time. She replied curtly that kzinrett did not live for utility alone.

He helped pull flat fibers from the stalks of palm leaves, which she began to weave into a mat. “For bedding,” he asked? “Certainly not, she said imperiously; “for the clothing which modesty required of kzinrett.” He pursued it: “Would they really care all that much with only a human to see them?” “A human male,” she reminded him; if she considered him worthy of mating, the others would see him as a male first, and a non-kzin second. He was half amused but more than a little uneasy as they bedded down, she curled slightly facing away, he crowded close at her insistence, “For companionship,” as she put it.

Their last exchange that night implied a difference between the rigorously truthful male kzin and their females. “Kit, you can't tell the others we're mated unless we are.”

“I can ignore their questions and let them draw their own conclusions,” she said sleepily.

“Aren't you blurring that fine line between half-truths and, uh, non-truths?”

“I do not intend to discuss it further,” she said, and soon was purring in sleep with the faint growl of a predator.

* * *

He needed two more days, and a repair of the handaxe, before he got that jagged slice of steel pounded and, with abrasive stones, ground into something resembling a blade. Meanwhile, Kit built her open-fired kiln of stones in a ravine some distance from the cave, ranging widely with that leopard lope of hers to gather firewood. Locklear was glad of her absence; it gave him time to finish a laminated shamboo handle for his blade, bound with thread, and to collect the thickest poles of shamboo he could find. The blade was sharp enough to trim the poles quickly, and tough enough to hold an edge.

He was tying crosspieces with plaited fiber to bind thick shamboo poles into a slender raft when, on the third day of those labors, he felt a presence behind him. Whirling, he brandished his blade. “Oh,” he said, and lowered the w'tsai. “Sorry, Kit. I keep worrying about the return of those kzintosh.”

She was not amused. “Give it to me,” she said, thrusting her hand out.

“The hell I will. I need this thing.”

“I can see that it is too sharp.”

“I need it sharp.”

“I am sure you do. I need it dull.” Her gesture for the blade was more than impatient.

Half straightening into a crouch, he brought the blade up again, eyes narrowed. “Well, by God, I've had about all your whims I can take. You want it? Come and get it.”

She made a sound that was deeper than a purr, putting his hackles up, and went to all-fours, her furry tail-tip flicking as she began to pace around him. She was a lovely sight. She scared Locklear silly. “When I take it, I will hurt you,” she warned.

“If you take it,” he said, turning to face her, moving the w'tsai in what he hoped was an unpredictable pattern. Dammit, I can't back down now. A puncture wound might be fatal to her, so I've got to slash lightly. Or maybe he wouldn't have to, when she saw he meant business.

But he did have to. She screamed and leaped toward his left, her own left hand sweeping out at his arm. He skipped aside and then felt her tail lash against his shins like a curled rope. He stumbled and whirled as she was twisting to repeat the charge, and by sheer chance his blade nicked her tail as she whisked it away from his vicinity.

She stood erect, holding her tail in her hands, eyes wide and accusing. “You— you insulted my tail,” she snarled.

“Damn tootin',” he said between his teeth.

With arms folded, she turned her back on him, her tail curled protectively at her backside. “You have no respect,” she said, and because it seemed she was going to leave, he dropped the blade and stood up, and realized too late just how much peripheral vision a kzin boasted. She spun and was on him in an instant, her hands gripping his wrists, and hurled them both to the grass, bringing those terrible ripping foot talons up to his stomach. They lay that way for perhaps three seconds. “Drop the w'tsai,” she growled, her mouth near his throat. Locklear had not been sure until now whether a very small female kzin had more muscular strength than he. The answer was not just awfully encouraging.

He could feel sharp needles piercing the skin at his stomach, kneading, releasing, piercing; a reminder that