"What is happening?" asked Bursar in his high, cracked voice.
"Be silent, old fool!" A scream from Orderly, whose nerves had, it seemed, become unequal to the strain. "Sthondat-begotten!" (One, and especially if one was Nameless, did not insult any Conservor, ever.) "Let us strive to hear!"
"Insolence!" Conservors were awesome in their self-control, but such words from such a being were too much. Bursar reared up as if he had been struck a physical blow.
Orderly screamed and leapt. But if Bursar was ancient and nearly blind, his wtsai was swift. The two orange bodies rolled across the floor, slashing and shrieking. The terrified human servants leapt (creditable leaps for humans) onto the top of the refrigeration unit and clung there as the claws and mono-molecular-edged steel blades whirled. One of the kzinti Computer Experts, abstracted and slow of reflex for a kzin, was struck. He grabbed his wtsai with a scream and leapt into the fray.
Raargh-Sergeant would not normally have interfered in a duel—kzintosh traded insults knowing the consequences—but this was pointless madness, and triggered by no real injury but by an explosion of unbearable tension. And every Hero was needed at his post. He kicked at the great bulks, knocking them apart. Bleeding from several deep gashes (kzinti arterial and venous blood varied in color between purple and orange), they staggered apart. Computer Expert was down, curled round a belly wound that Raargh-Sergeant saw at once was too deep. Still, as a fighter he was little loss.
Two hard swift blows of his prosthetic arm knocked the wtsais from the grips of the other two. He was aware of Lesser-Sergeant and First-Corporal at his side, their own wtsais levelled. Discipline is still holding, he thought. Once I would have swum into that fight with a scream and leap of my own. Or am I getting too old on top of everything else?
"No more. I decree Honor is satisfied. There are enemies enough for us all outside the gate without Heroes killing Heroes today."
They glared at him for a moment and then their eyes seemed to clear. Perhaps the sheer physical weakness and general exhaustion of all those present were what saved the situation. He felt Lesser-Sergeant and Corporal relax at his side as the tension ebbed. They too lowered their wtsais. Lesser-Sergeant, with two human bullets and a half-heeled ratchet-knife wound in one knee, still shedding bone, had made a standing leap the entire length of the Mess to attend him. A useful companion, Lesser-Sergeant, he thought, he moves fast and keeps his head. May I call him friend? Corporal too. I need kzintosh like that now, and so do all our kind need them on this God-forsaken day. He remembered them both in the Battle of the Hohe Kalkstein, and was grateful now, as he had been then, that he had them at his side. He saw too that the youngster was there. He had placed himself before Raargh-Sergeant's right leg, where he would have been a nuisance and hindrance if Raargh-Sergeant had had to leap, but which was also the place a warrior-son traditionally stood to defend an Honored Sire in closed-room combat. Where my own son would have stood, he thought. Had he survived he would have been old enough to be a useful warrior now.
"Junior Doctor, attend to them."
That would be a challenging task for Junior Doctor in his present condition, but he could contrive something. Computer Expert at least knew enough of Duty to die quietly, without sound effects to further demoralize or inflame the others or appeals for painkillers or medication from their limited stock to be wasted on him. Conservor was chanting the rites over him.
"Humans!" He ordered the shivering slaves, "Clean!" The sooner the smell of kzinti blood was out of the air the better. The air was filled with the frustrated emotions of a duel cut short. He saw that one of Bursar's fangs was snapped, and Orderly's arm hung useless, a tendon cut. One dead and one less sound limb between us, when we have too few to go around already. At this rate the monkeys need but hold back and let us finish ourselves off. I wonder what they mean to do?
If I were a monkey, what would I do now? he thought, and the answer came instantly: Kill us. It was so obvious as not to need debate. But the monkeys were strange. Even after two generations plus of occupation and after Chuut-Riit had ordered a systematic study of them, late in the war, they had remained full of oddities. The few kzin on Wunderland who had developed relationships with monk—with humans, as games partners, as co-investigators of scientific or technological problems, or computer experts, had tended to be oddities themselves. The sort who died young unless some special talent made them worth preserving. Some kzin had complained of the increasing survival and even rudimentary prestige of those whom the monkeys described as komputerr-nirrrds, itself yet another monkey loan-phrase which on Ka'ashi had entered the Heroes' Tongue.
Now the humans, instead of proceeding to extermination, had offered a cease-fire.
Well, he thought again, we, or rather our grandfathers, offered them a cease-fire when we conquered this planet. Let a lot of them go, to carry the news of us back to Sol System. We wanted slaves and food, and we didn't want to smash up an industrialized infrastructure. Is that how they think of us now? Slaves and food?
He remembered that some feral humans had made a point of eating kzin flesh, but when captured and examined had revealed that they had done it as a gesture only and did not really like the taste.
Apparently we mistook things from the first. We wanted Sol to know the
