cohabitation with two major stars. There were vast gaps in the Swarm where no asteroid could survive without being pumped into another orbit.
To view the Wunderland on which he had expected to serve, Trainer-of-Slaves had to tune up the base's electronic telescope and blot out the blinding spear of Alpha Centauri A. His unit was stationed about as far away from its forests and grasslands and mountains as they could be sent, dashing his dreams of loping over the surface of a planet under an open sky.
War was war. Each warrior had his own emplacement and his own fight. Trainer's fatalistic companions had a saying that even the rocks around Centauri B had their duties. His duties were to turn out slaves for the engine rooms of the Fourth Fleet. The conditions in the hastily prefabricated tunnels were appalling. He was stuck with his smelly Jotok cages, with his wire-mesh runs and masses of Jotok babies crawling all over each other without enough space and never enough wind to carry away the smell. Hssin seemed like paradise.
A berth on the Fourth Fleet began to seem more and more desirable. He began to dream about Manhome. If he couldn't have Wunderland, then why not Earth? Earth, too, had winds and an open sky. The winds had fascinating names culled from Wunderland libraries. Nor’easter. The icy candela of the Andes Mountains. Trade winds. The dry Chinook wind that blew down the slopes of the Rocky Mountains after depositing all its moisture on the western slopes. Mediterranean sirocco. Whirlwind. Tempest.
Trainer-of-Slaves began to take a personal interest in the fate of the Fourth Fleet. He was too busy with Jotoki, and too far away from the center, to face politics from a crouch. But he followed Chuut-Riit's duels and celebrated every win. The locals were resisting the economic burden of preparing a new fleet. They made loud claims about the ferocity with which the Third Fleet would slash the Solar System, though that battle must already have been fought and won or lost.
Chuut-Riit was adamant that the burden continue. It was, he told his Heroes, the Patriarch's policy that in any war a backup fleet was always in preparation to follow a battle-fleet, no matter how sure the battlefleet's victory. That was the only way a slow-motion interstellar crusade could be fought. Better to send expensive reinforcements to a victory won years ago than penniless faith-in-victory to a defeat. The kzin had a saying, “Don't count your fingers when your claws are sheathed.”
Alpha Centauri B was a favored space for Fourth Fleet maneuvers. As a result, Trainer-of-Slaves met many gung-ho captains who had driven their gravitic polarizers past normal specifications and needed urgent maintenance. They liked him because his crews did a good job. They also liked him because he served Jotok meat and that was a treat hard to come by.
Ssis-Captain took a special liking to Trainer-of-Slaves. They shared an avid interest in Earth. It was he who introduced card-tricks to Trainer's slaves. The monkeys used a peculiar set of plastic symbols, five plus an octal of cards in a suit, with four suits. The Captain never ceased to flap his ears while Long-Reach did his five-handed shuffle, rotating half the deck clockwise and the other half counterclockwise while sitting on his mouth. He didn't like to play poker with Long-Reach, though, because the Jotok always took the pot.
On one run in from the A star, Ssis-Captain brought in some Wunderland musical instruments and they put together a combo, a rather cacophonous effort. Creepy managed the twelve string banjo with three hands, Long- Reach played the drums and did harmony with all five lungs, while Joker handled the cymbals and xylophone. Trainer-of-Slaves did his imitations of Heroic Poetry on the kazoo.
“I've got to have you animals on the
“The Arc de Triomphe is in Moscow,” corrected Trainer-of-Slaves righteously.
“You must be wrong. The red monkeys not out of that war early. I distinctly remember that the Arc de Triomphe was built by French-beasts to honor the victory of their Kaiser at Berlin. The High French Conquest Commandant Hitler marched under it with his whole army when he defeated the Huns. I've seen the daguerreotype!”
On another trip Ssis-Captain smuggled in a Kzinrett inside an old polarizer housing. She was a beauty with a luminous red sheen to her fur and streaks of tan in her nose, but she wasn't at all pleased with the ride and studied them both from sulky, undecided eyes.
“Jriingh, meet your new mounter.”
“My hero,” she purred.
Trainer-of-Slaves was horrified. “You stole an illustrious one's wife? Or worse, a daughter?”
Ssis-Captain's ears flapped while he rumbled in his throat. “He gave her to me. She's a little terror. She spits and hisses at his wives and fights with them. She kept chasing his favorite off into the woods of his estate where he couldn't find her. She boxes the heads of his daughters and tries to take his sons down under the bridge.”
“An ideal mother for great fighting Heroes!”
“It didn't work that way. All her sons got killed as kits in rage-fights. Crazy, the lot of them. Her mate backhand-cuffed her often enough, without profit, but he's too soft-clawed to kill her. I reasoned that you and I could solve his problem.”
“Do you suppose the man-beastesses give their males as much trouble as ours?”
“Worse! A manrret is smart enough to pick the lock on her door!”
Jriingh stepped gracefully from the polarizer housing, haughtily exploring her new abode, sniffing warily. She was half the size of a male kzin and probably twice as agile. She snapped up a baby Jotok that had escaped from its wire run, and swallowed five arms in one bite and then peered into the smelly tank, pondering ways to catch more.
“She's being boarded on the
“Against regs. You'll have to keep her.”
“It's against regs to keep her here, too.”
Trainer-of-Slaves was beginning to feel angry.
“Hr-r, yet you do have the space, a corner somewhere with a lock and key.”
“But I won't be able to keep her pheromones out of the air!”
“You won't have to. That's the whole beauty of this sally.”
“I'm supposed to give this little hissing terror the run of the place?!”
“It's not a problem. She likes males. She just doesn't like females. Fix up a room. Give her some nice things. We'll run a beneath-the-grass pride to keep her happy. Let her keep your feet warm. We need a beneath-the-grass pride out here—card-tricks, music war stories, ch'rowl. Do you think a Conservor will come here and give you a lecture on the One True Way of Honor and the nature of the Furry God?”
Trainer-of-Slaves settled into himself giving way just a little. He was not used to such camaraderie and he liked it. Yes, he wanted to conquer Earth with this warrior and own a huge hunting preserve in the Amazon next to France with hundreds of pink, tailless slaves tending to his animals. Of course, Long-Reach would always be his top slave.
For two years High Conquest Commander Chuut-Riit had been caught in the snare of a painful power struggle. Then the first news from Man-sun burst from the Tightbeams, 4.3 years after the fact: the Kzin had dealt a great surprise victory in the first skirmish. The Third Fleet was positioning itself for battle.
Wunderland kzinti forgot all else. Even Chuut-Riit paused. Infighting died. The Radio-Operators became the Heroes of the Moment, drifting in space at the instruments of their huge antennae pointed at Mansun.
The good news did not last.
By the end of the month the extent of the disaster was evident. Trainer-of-Slaves was outraged at the man- beasts. Kzinti became morose. They grinned more often, thoughts of monkeys on their minds. And Chuut-Riit's situation changed dramatically. There was no longer any question that he was Governor of Alpha Centauri. There was no longer any opposition to his design for the Fourth Fleet, or to his date of launching.
Trainer put in for a transfer to the Blood cuff Heroes.
CHAPTER 12
(2402 A.D.)
