The Man-Kzin Wars 04

dreaming. He strapped her into a mock-up of the Shark's cockpit and fed her dreaming- mind virtual images of combat conditions in which she was being attacked by kzin warcraft. Winning kept up her interest in the dreams and reduced her anxiety.

While she was dreaming, he read off her motor responses. That told him what she was doing to counter the images he was feeding to her eyes. From that he learned the combat characteristics of the Shark. For one thing, he discovered that phasing into hyperspace took half an hour to set up. For another thing, he learned that the Shark had only been captured because of an engine malfunction.

All this while Trainer-of-Slaves was studying his female as an evolutionary curiosity. In a bisexual animal, the rational female was clearly an unwanted trait for domestication. If kzinti were to husband properly obedient human slaves and the Nora-beast was not properly obedient child-animal care would have to be divorced from male-child teaching. With second, third, and fourth, etc., voices from the harem subverting the patriarch's word, a household would disintegrate into chaos. Monkey society must be shifting around like the surface of a quake-world!

He explained all this to Nora, but she was just as stubborn as Grraf-Hromfi's sons while she sat under her canopy, arguing back with inappropriate aggressiveness for a female. She didn't know how to listen. It was proof that females couldn't use the gift of language even when it was given to them.

In idle moments, when the analysis of the hyperdrive motor had exhausted him, he toyed with hypothetical ways of using ch’rowl-some engineering to cure the man-females of male language skills. The daydreams went nowhere because such a neat answer probably wasn't practical.

The kzin solution, which was genetic, wouldn't work.

During Heroic reproduction the male egg combined with the female egg to form a doubled nucleus. The kzincode-groups, not unlike human chromosomes, were then distributed, leaving the super-eye to divide into two fertile male and female eggs which then migrated to the kzinretti pouch in pairs, a litter always containing an even number of kits, half kzintosh, half kzinrett.

Reproduction wasn't all that dissimilar among monkeys but there were unfortunate differences. The nuclei of kzincells were more complicated than those of mancells, containing three distinct kinds of protein coding, sexual, major-group, and lumpy-constellation.

The kzincode-strands that determined kzinsex were enormous, four times as large as any strand in the major kzincode-group, and several octals larger than any member of the lumpy kzincode-constellation. In male cells the kzintosh-strand appeared twice, while in female cells a dominant kzintosh-strand was lord over the single kzinrett-strand, the latter acting to edit physical size and repress language in the female who carried it.

It would be difficult to genetically engineer male sex dominance in the man-beasts because with these animals it was the female who carried the twinned sex chromosome! A perverse reversal of the normal situation. Given their genetic makeup one might well wonder how male monkeys, balding and hemophiliac, came to be intelligent! Worse, the male and female sex-chromosomes of the man-beast were normal-sized, the male chromosome runtish, even, and unlike the kzintosh-strand or the kzinrett-strand, were not major canters of developmental switching.

In any event, Trainer-of-Slaves wasn't in a hurry to destroy the Nora-beast's intelligence. As a younger, more reckless researcher his haste had ruined many promising experiments. Think before you leap.

Intelligence had many facets, and it was disastrous to confuse its parts, to destroy one thing when you thought you were destroying another. It was better to be patient, to alter only small pieces of her mind at a time and then carefully observe the incremental change as a guidepost to the next change.

Several months into their journey, the Lieutenant actually did try to destroy the ship. She used furniture parts to escape. She assembled a makeshift gas mask to keep herself conscious during the breakout, and she headed straight for the ship's vital parts through an air conditioner she'd learned about from the Jotok at the time of the mutiny. She had memorized the ship too well!

He found her unconscious. She had been stopped by a whimsical trap he had set up more as a paranoid afterthought than as a serious line of defense. He had been reading too much Chuut-Riit who believed in covering low-probability events.

The Nora-beast insisted on wearing clothes, to her downfall. He had tried to argue her out of it, to reach her sensibilities by creating virtual images for her eyes of elephants in sombreros and boleros, of newts in weskits, of giraffes in middies, of yaks in yoke skirts, but she had only laughed until her curls shook and told him that she had been brought up on books in which animals wore clothes. Obscene! Imagine having to unbutton a vatach's vest before devouring him!

When Trainer lost the argument he had simply booby-trapped her trousers to release a nerve poison into her skin if she ever came too close to electromagnetic triggers in certain vital installations.

Lying beside her was a lethal firebomb. Where had she obtained the oxidizer? From the air! Trainer-of-Slaves growled in disgust at his oversight. “What would a monkey do with a harem of these creatures?” How did the males survive?

That incident decided Trainer. Her memories had to go. She was already clamped to the operating table when she recovered consciousness.

“We're still here. I goofed,” she said sadly, near tears.

If she'd been kzin, she would have earned a partial name as a break-out artist. “Forget it,” he growled. “The Alabama was designed not to sink.”

“Are the kids all right?” Now she was crying. The three cage- and brain-damaged orphans were her responsibility. She didn't know whether she was a mother or a UNSN Lieutenant.

“Long-Reach is in their teaching them how to play cards.”

“Louie won't be able to learn. You hurt him. He can't concentrate.”

Trainer-of-Slaves was unmoved. He had grown up in a society with a high kit mortality rate. The younglings died routinely by violence and neglect. There were always more where they came from. Suffering was the way to Heroism.

“You're going to hurt me now, too, aren't you? You're going to carve me up? Make a drooling idiot out of me?”

She was afraid. He had an unnatural compassion in his liver for that combination, fear and bravery. “I'm going to sew a tail on your backside,” he growl-hissed. It was his way of trying to crack a joke.

She came out of the operation with artificial gland implants in her brain. She didn't feel any different. Her mind was clear. She was still driven to destroy the Shark. She still hated kzin.

Trainer-of-Slaves had been spending his spare time away from the Shark completing his mathematical model of the human brain. It wasn't all that difficult. The data-link did most of the work. All he had to do was enter the special human conditions (taken from the autodoc and his experiments) into the generalized model that kzin physiologists had developed eons ago to cover diverse organic brains Jotok, Kzin, kdatlyno, Chunquen, etc. They were all different and they were all the same.

Memory erasure was a delicate matter.

Memories were all interrelated like a giant e-dimensional crossword puzzle. No memory could be erased without snipping out pieces of a myriad of other memories. And the erased memory could always be reconstructed by 'filling in' the empty puzzle blanks. The reconstruction went on automatically by the mere act of using the remaining memories. The missing pieces were 'interpolated' during recall. If the erasure had been caused by wetware destruction, the 'interpolated' information was simply stored elsewhere.

Organic brains, having evolved over hundreds of millions of years of deadly struggle, were systems designed to military specs. They could take great damage with minimal degradation of performance. No single location vital for system operation. And efficient redundancy insured that even heavy losses of data were recoverable.

That meant that Trainer couldn't erase the whole of the Nora-beast's memory at once without killing her. What he could do was set up a steady degradation of memory that didn't overwhelm the general homeostatic balance. He could alternately shrink and accelerate the dendritic root growth of her neurons, disconnect and randomly reconnect. He could arbitrarily change the strength of the synaptic coefficients. He could switch on or off the machinery that converted short-term memory into long term memory.

He could tune on or off specific neural receptor sites in a way that unbalanced her brain so that it had to compensate with rapid neural learning. He could chemically accelerate learning by up to a factor of twenty, a dangerous game which if continued caused a kind of self-reference that left the mind fixated upon one event. Rapid