The furry woman did not forget the girl, and sometimes stroked the child's hair, but she was busy and concentrating. What she wanted was on the tip of her tongue but it wouldn't come. Simple Heroic words got in the way. She had to concentrate.
She gave up for a while and ate a meal. She fed the girl. She cleaned up the kitchen. She toured the palazzo to spruce up the rooms. Then she returned to her single-minded concentration.
It started with a hiss.
She knew that much. Finally a broad grin of triumph crossed her face, dimpling her cheeks. She said the word aloud, relishing the sounds, all three syllables! The word did indeed begin with a hiss! She knew it! She repeated the English word over and over again so that she might learn it faster than she forgot it.
When she was sure of her mastery she went to the little niche and took out the book from among the pretty baubles. She opened the book to a fresh page, not looking at the writing because the words no longer meant anything to her and she had a hard time pronouncing them. She knew they were words just like the hissing-staccato words of Her Hero.
She picked up the stylus and wrote her word very carefully, eighteen times, pronouncing it each time with a smile. She knew exactly what it represented. She had the picture in her head. It was important because it wasn't a Heroic word. Then she hid the book and hid the stylus. It was the last entry she ever made in her journal.
She couldn't stop smiling. No kzinrett ever smiled like that; it wasn't part of the hardwiring of their brains to do so. She waited impatiently for Her Hero to arrive. He always came to lie in her bed with her, stroking her fur, making her feel cozy.
When she heard him at the entrance, heard the airlock cycling, she began to mumble to herself. This time she didn't greet him. She waited coyly for him to come into the stone room with the round rug. She waited until he was right beside her before she turned to him and said her word straight to his face, grinning happily in her victory.
“Centipede”, she said, hissing it out. She had the image clearly in her mind, a tiny centipede furry with legs, legs, legs.
…
For twelve years the crew of the
Trainer-of-Slaves learned how to impregnate the Nora-female with sperm extracted from the bodies of his previous experiments. He was delighted to discover that he could always arrange to give her a normal birth of one son and one daughter. Jacin died of a brain seizure. Nora never forgot her and the memory made her fiercely protective of her own twins. She loved Her Hero but she did not trust him with children.
In that twelve years of exile the refugees from Alpha Centauri had to hide from one patrolling UNSN vessel. Two kzin ships arrived and fled, and one unsuspecting kzin flotilla coming into Hssin probably not even aware that a superluminal war was happening ran into a UNSN ambush while decelerating. They were wiped out to the last kzin, as a cautious
The final tests of the refurbished
CHAPTER 28
(2435 A.D.)
On the fourth dropout from hyperspace, W'kkai-sun was the brightest star in the heavens, two light-days away. It was fifteen light-years from here to Hssin, and they had made it in a miraculous forty-four days. The Empire of the Patriarch would never be the same. They had reached mighty W'kkai!
Trainer-of-Slaves paused for a moment to consider the event. Fifty-eight years ago, bargaining among the rumor-laden bazaars of this illustrious star-system, the great Chuut-Riit had first sniffed the scent of the manbeast and laid his plans for the Patriarch's Glory. In that same year, inside the humble Fortress Walls of Hssin, the runt of Hamarr's new litter had been given the name Short-Son of Chirr-Nig. Nobody had expected him to live except his protective mother.
From W'kkai it had taken Chuut-Riit's caravan nineteen years to reach the outpost Hssin. From Hssin it had taken Short-Son of Chirr-Nig fifty-eight years to reach the legendary W'kkai by means of a short cut of forty-four days at the end.
In the meantime how had the warriors of Riit and Nig fared? Chuut-Riit was dead, his sons dead, his entourage slaughtered. Chirr-Nig, who had chosen to stay at Hssin and breed sons, was dead. His brothers were fried corpses circling Man-sun or dead at Ka'ashi. His 'warrior' sons had died in the Fourth Fleet or found valiant martyrdom during that final valiant cataclysm at Ka'ashi-suns.
One son had survived. Only one. The runt, the short-son, the eater-of-grass. The coward. The lowly Trainer-of-Slaves. The survivor.
The Nora-beast beside him was suckling her third pair of twins at milk-swollen breasts, fascinated by the heavens as she always was. She didn't like the shutters that were in place during hyperspatial travel, or the dim electric glow of the cabin. Her dimples told him that she was excited—that her world had opened up again.
There was a slight hint of human urine on Nora's fur—the boy's soaker needed to be changed again. The baby girl suddenly opened up her eyes for a burp, then closed them and went back to her obsessive sucking. She was going to grow up to be a beauty. She ought to be very marketable as a breeder if he could manage her verbal development to peak at 500 words.
The softly furred female was thinking that she had been very patient with her Mellow-Yellow, but enough was enough! Ex-Lieutenant Argamentine wanted her big room back. With its colors and furs and its baby beds. Where were her other babies? It made her uncomfortable to see them frozen in the hold. They didn't move—
Bad Mellow-Yellow! He'd kept them all cooped far too long in his silly ship. Poor Long-Reach, funny Long- Reach, with no place to put his arms back there. The return of the stars was welcome but big old Mellow-Yellow had tricked her before with those. It didn't necessarily mean they were home. “We home?” asked Nora in the elementary hiss-spits of the Female Tongue. She no longer remembered any English at all.
The kzin warrior spent a day scanning the sky. He was looking for the gravitic pulse of a UNSN ship, worried that they might have inflicted on W'kkai the same horrible fate they had delivered to Hssin. It wasn't likely. That was why he had picked W'kkai. The UNSN ships could outflank the worlds of the Patriarchy. They could lay siege to whole systems. They could disrupt trade. But siege wasn't conquest. W'kkai-system had the resources to resist siege for a dozen generations!
His sensors detected only kzin.
He was moving in on the system using the same careful plan that he had extracted from Lieutenant Argamentine's mind, the same maneuver she had been using to close in on a hostile Alpha Centauri.
They jumped in, one light-day closer. It took Long-Reach half an hour to phase in the motor for that jump and fifteen minutes to arc through hyperspace.
W'kkai! Trainer-of-Slaves was already dream-seeing his noble household. He saw the stone walls. There would be a vast Jotok Run out back, bigger than the whole Run on Hssin had ever been. He had some nice little bungalows in mind for the man-slaves. They'd need a common dormitory, too. Monkeys were communal animals.
And the palazzo for his kzinretti: that would be a marvel of carved red sandstone and tall wrought iron walkways to let the light in, W'kkai style all laid out with cool inner corridors, and mazed plazas for the chasing and leaping games. He could almost smell the perfume of kzinrett fur. To stock his harem he'd be able to walk into the most noble of households carved woods, tapestries, trophies, ancient heirlooms and take his pick of their favorite daughters.
Still nothing but the electromagnetic hubbub of a thriving civilization, and the characteristic gravitic signature of polarizer-driven interplanetary commerce.
Another jump, and then he knew they were near a military base.
