kzinretti. He put me there. That scares the shit out of me.
Day 21
Today My Hero took me out into the City of Sin to show me what my UNSN colleagues have done. He cobbled together an atmosphere suit for me, awkward but serviceable. I wouldn't want to take it into space.
General Whatzisname was right. War is hell. Parts of the city around the power station are utterly devastated. That kind of annihilation is so complete that the horror is muted and melted into a dissonant abstract sculpture.
It is the least damaged parts of Sin that give me the heebiejeebies. The preserved corpses make it a museum of horror.
I flashed on Earth, vividly. I once walked over an American Civil War battlefield. It was only a pile of well- tended mounds that might once have been trenches if you exercised your imagination. The thousands of corpses spread over that field disappeared without a trace within months five centuries before I was born. I suspect that the trenches had collapsed within a year, by then already overgrown with weeds.
Here there are no weeds. Here the corpses remain, freeze-dried and pickled in the gases of Sin. How long will it take to banish the horror? Sin does have an active atmosphere. Eventually I suspect that drifting dust will sanitize this speck of man-kzin history.
I can't describe how strange it was for me to walk through the gloom of the Chirr-Nig household with my giant Hero, trying to imagine how a kzin patriarch ran all that, trying to imagine My Hero as a kit. He showed me the very spot where his father murdered his son, the half-brother of my power-driven master. In this one walk I saw a greater range of kzin emotion than I knew existed. He introduced me to his father, quite formally, still frozen in the rictus agony of suffocation, trying to reach his oxygen mask. The evidence of a total surprise attack is everywhere.
Long ago My Hero gave his mother the funeral rites. His father he won't touch.
We took a long walk in the old Jotok Run, climbing down through a hole in the roof. Why did My Hero want to show me the very spot where he met Long-Reach? He stayed there lost in contemplation and then he showed me all the trails that Long-Reach had once shown him. I can't imagine what it was like with smells and breezes, with waving leaves and baby Jotoki crawling out of the marshes. All I saw was a petrified forest from hell. When you stand in the light of R'hshssira you know you are in hell.
Why does he want to show me this when he is going to erase it all from my mind, and then erase my ability even to put it into poetry?
Day 62
Brunhilde died today. That rat-tailed Seventh Son-of-a-Ghoul wanted to eat her! God knows we are short of fresh meat. I had to pull a fit. There is a strange power in being a kzinrett. I can rage at him without triggering his anger. He just gives me what I want. We cremated her. I put the ashes in a delicate little box, carved and inlaid, once owned by a noble kzinrett of the very palazzo that is now mine. The box must have been given as a gift by some male.
Day 63
There is only so much power in rage. My Hero does not always give me what I want. He won't strike me, but when I cross some line, he just becomes stubborn: kindly stubborn, amused stubborn, arrogantly stubborn, angrily stubborn, passively stubborn—implacable, in other words. (I keep words like implacable on a list so I won't forget them. My list is hidden with the trinkets that no kzintosh must see.)
What did we fight about? A subject dear to me: The Second Phase of his attack on my brain. He's going to start chipping away at my ability to process language. I think I'm in for another 'operation.' He can black me out with his gismo that runs the gland implants in my brain. When I start remembering again there will be a blank of unknown length. I'll never know whether or not I've had an operation.
He isn't going to do brain surgery. He's going to set up a disassembler and hardwire reorganizer. Neural networks resist such changes so the whole effect will be a transition rather than a discontinuity.
He says it is safe. He says that the language processing ability was added last to the functions of the human brain and so is the easiest to disconnect. He says I don't need language to think with. Of course, I won't be able to communicate what I'm thinking to anyone else and won't be able to tap into anyone else's thoughts, but I'll be able to think! Great! Isolated is what I'll be. And I'll start to hoard trinkets or something.
My Hero swears by the Fanged God and his mother's nipples that he isn't the Wild Leaper that he was in his youth when he did all those botched experiments on helpless orphans. He's checked out what he intends to do to me on the model of the human brain that he built out of the genetic codes he took from the autodoc. He says he built that model so he wouldn't have to risk hurting me! I'm having apoplexy! (Hurrah! Yesterday I tried all day to remember the word 'apoplexy'! Is that the way to spell it?)
Sometimes I love the bastard as a kind of strange friend of fate, but I'd kill My Hero if I could. I would! I would! He says that's why I must change, so I won't hate him enough to kill him, so I won't be intelligent enough to figure out a way to kill him. He doesn't understand that I only plot to kill him to save myself! He doesn't understand that we could be friends. Yes, I'm some kind of possession. I'm to be a slave.
I can't kill him. If I did kill him, his Jotoki would kill me quick as a flash. I could kill them, too. Great. Me and epileptic Jacin up against the universe.
My Hero actually patted me on the head, the paternalistic… Poor me, what he's doing is working, I can't even remember my naval vocabulary and I used to be able to curse with the best of them!
“Now, now,” he said. “Changing our personality is very difficult. I tried for many years on myself and despaired often, but still I persevered and triumphed. You will, too.” He thinks of female intelligence as a disease that can be cured.
I think about murder! That is, when I'm not crying.
Jacin follows me around all the time. She won't leave me. She crawls into my bed when I'm asleep. If she knows I want to be alone, she hides behind my back so I won't see her. I've found her under my pillow. I've found her behind my curtains.
Day 243
How can I tell him?
My intelligence is all I have. My language is my way of seeing a greater world. There must be mercy somewhere in that heart of his??????? I try to remember Earth. I no longer know if Ceres is in New York or San Francisco.
After Day 479, Argamentine's day headings become incoherent, and sometimes are missing altogether. The following is one of the last journal entries.
Day is a pretty word. Night and day.
He told me I will talk boo words. I know that is clump which kzinrett can talk. I tried remember Earth. I saw cornfields. I saw a red scarf. Cornfield cornfield cornfield cornfield ears of yellow corn, red scarf red scarf red scarf around neck, but remember only facts. Earth is 4.3 light years from Wunderland. Earth whirls in space. Whirl pretty word. Cornfield cornfield cornfield.
Remember sight of Earth from space. Earth is blue with clouds. Pretty Earth.
Sin I remember. House in Sin. Death in Sin. My Hero won't let me talk English. Write secret dictionary of Hero-English words. Mnemonic trick. Clever me. Clever Nora. Clever is pretty word. Can read English. Practice. Practice day and night. Easy talk Hero, talk in spits and snarls. Hard speak English. Write English because I practice. Practice. Nora is clever. Now I copy some of words I save. inkwell pocket shepherd's pie microscope ultramarine harmonize plumbing joystick windmill insect crawl cornfield tired never-never land tip-of-tongue tanj…
The Nora-beast paced through her palazzo and always when she came to the great circular rug she followed the design around in circles because that seemed to focus her thinking. She was concentrating. She wore trousers. It was something she wouldn't give up. A narrow-faced girl, nakedly furless, followed behind her closely, sporadically complaining in the Female Tongue.
