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 up 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 kzinrretti: 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 kzinrret 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.
He beamed out an identification code, so hoary in its use among the worlds of the Patriarchy that it was conjured in base twenty-five mathematics—which probably meant that it had been invented by the ancient Jotoki and learned by the kzin while they were still mercenaries. The code was a royal tail-pain to use. But changing standard regulations in a sublight empire could be impossibly complex.
The man-monkeys weren’t any different. He had often wondered why the navigation instruments in the Shark were calibrated to odd intervals of twenty-four and sixty, translated to base ten mathematics. It was a minor miracle that he’d been able to find W’kkai using them. The custom probably reflected something that the humans had inherited from their chimpanzee ancestors.
He wasn’t expecting a fast response to his signal. The Shark was eleven light-minutes from the nearest kzin military unit, well out of “leap first and ask questions later” range. He’d have to wait twenty-two minutes for a reply.
Eventually that reply arrived. “Kppukiss-Guardian speaking. Identification code incompatible with vessel type. You are putting out the neutrino profile of a UNSN ghostship. You are presently trespassing, I repeat, trespassing the defense sphere permitted to W’kkai by the MacDonald-Rishshi Peace Treaty of the 2433rd year honoring the torture of the Fanged Father, the Monkey Son, and the Unseen Grandfather.” The rest of the message was unstated but the menace was there—no truce existed inside the treaty perimeter. Good. That meant that they were within kzin controlled space.
Trainer-of-Slaves decided that now was the time to use a new name. Then he would never have to reveal his duty names—and no one could ever flaunt them to insult him. Self-promotion wasn’t unknown in the Patriarchy—if a Hero had the swinging-claw to make it stick. And this Hero’s swinging-claw moved faster than light!
“Lord Grraf-Nig acknowledging Kppukiss-Guardian. Grraf-Nig here. Grraf-Nig receiving.” In taking this name he was honoring his mentor, Grraf-Hromfi (out of affection) and his father, Chiirr-Nig (out of spite). For the rest of his life he intended to spread the wisdom of Grraf, and for the rest of his life he intended to be such a fulgent Nig that all other Nigs, especially his father, would fade from the sky.
His beamcast continued. “This servant of the Patriarch does indeed travel in a salvaged UNSN vessel, unfettered by the luminiferous bondage. We come from the wreckage of Ka’ashi-system and from the martyrdom of Hssin. Light will not yet have delivered its message of these distant woes to W’kkai, so you must only have heard the version spoken to you by the superluminal man-beasts who tell lies to suit the mood of their livers.
“Grraf-Nig’s desire is to settle upon the lush plains of W’kkai to breed a new
