well to suit the males jealous of my power, Rockear. They convinced the regent that I was conspiring with other palace prrets to gain equality for our sex.”
“And were you?”
She arched her back with pride. “Yes. Does that offend you?”
“No. Would you care if it did?”
“It would make things difficult, Rockear. You must understand that I loathe, admire, hate, desire kzintosh male kzin. I fought for equality because it was common knowledge that some were planning to breed kzinrett, females, to be no better than pets.”
“I hate to tell you this, Miss Kitty, but they’ve done it.”
“Already?”
“I don’t know how long it took, but—” He paused, and then told her the worst. Long before man and kzin first met, their females had been bred into brainless docility. Even if Miss Kitty found modern sisters, they would be of no help to her.
She fought the urge to weep again, strangling her miaows with soft snarls of rage.
Locklear turned away, aware that she did not want to seem vulnerable, and consulted his wristcomp’s encyclopedia. The earliest kzin history made reference to the downfall of a Rraw’rit the fifty-seventh Seven Eights and One, and he gasped at what that told him. “Don’t feel too bad, Miss Kitty,” he said at last. “That was at least forty thousand years ago; do you understand eight to the fifth power?”
“It is very, very many,” she said in a choked voice.
“It’s been more years than that since you were brought here. How did you get here, anyhow?”
“They executed several of us. My last memory was of grappling with the lord high executioner, carrying him over the precipice into the sacred lagoon with me. I could not swim with those heavy chains around my ankles, but I remember trying. I hope he drowned,” she said, eyes slitted. “Sex with him had always been my most hated chore.” A small flag began to wave in Locklear’s head; he furled it for further reference. “So you were trying to swim. Then?”
“Then suddenly I was lying naked with a very strange creature staring at me,” she said with that ear-wink, and a sharp talon pointed almost playfully at him. “Do not think ill of me because I reacted in fright.” He shook his head, and had to explain what that meant, and it became a short course in subtle nuances for each of them. Miss Kitty, it seemed, proved an old dictum about downtrodden groups: they became highly expert at reading body language, and at developing secret signals among themselves. It was not Locklear’s fault that he was constantly, and completely unaware, sending messages that she misread.
But already, she was adapting to his gestures as he had to her language. “Of all the kzinti I could have taken from stasis, I got you,” he chuckled finally, and because her glance was quizzical, he told a gallant half-lie: “I went for the prettiest, and got the smartest.”
“And the hungriest,” she said. “Perhaps I should hunt something for us.” He reminded her that there was nothing to hunt. “You can help me choose animals to release here. Meanwhile, you can have this,” he added, offering her the kzinti rations.
The sun faded on schedule, and he dined on tuberberries while she devoured an entire brick of meat. She amazed him by popping a few tuberberries for dessert. When he asked her about it, she replied that certainly kzinti ate vegetables in her time; why should they not?
“Males want only meat,” he shrugged.
“They would,” she snarled. “In my day, some select warriors did the same. They claimed it made them ferocious and that eaters of vegetation were mere kshativat, dumb herbivores; we prret claimed their diet just made them hopelessly aggressive.”
“The word’s been shortened to kshat now,” he mused. “It’s a favorite cussword of theirs. At least you don’t have to start eating the animals in stasis to stay alive. That’s the good news; the bad news is that the warriors who left me here may return at any time. What will you do then?”
“That depends on how accurate your words have been,” she said cagily.
“And if I’m telling the plain truth?”
Her ears smiled for her: “Take up my war where I left it,” she said.
Locklear felt his control slipping when Miss Kitty refused to wait before releasing most of the vatach. They were nocturnal with easily-spotted burrows, she insisted, and yes, they bred fast—but she pointed to specimens of a winged critter in stasis and said they would control the vatach very nicely if the need arose. By now he realized that this kzin female wasn’t above trying to vamp him; and when that failed, a show of fang and talon would succeed.
He showed her how to open the cages only after she threatened him, and watched as she grasped waking vatach by their legs, quickly releasing them to the darkness outside. No need to release the (something) yet, she said; Locklear called the winged beasts “batowls.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” he grumbled. “I’d stop you if I could do it without a fight.”
“You would wait forever,” she retorted. “I know the animals of my world better than you do, and soon we may need a lot of them for food.”
“Not so many; there’s just the two of us.”
The cat-eyes regarded him shrewdly. “Not for long,” she said, and dropped her bombshell. “I recognized a friend of mine in one of those cages.” Locklear felt an icy needle down his spine. “A male?”
“Certainly not. Five of us were executed for the same offense, and at least one of them is here with us. Perhaps those Outsiders of yours collected us all as we sank in that stinking water.”
“Not my Outsiders,” he objected. “Listen, for all we know they’re monitoring us, so be careful how you fiddle with their setup here.”
She marched him to the kzin cages and purred her pleasure on recognizing two females, both prret like herself, both imposingly large for Locklear’s taste. She placed a furry hand on one cage, enjoying the moment. “I could release you now, my sister in struggle,” she said softly. “But I think I shall wait. Yes, I think it is best,” she said to Locklear, turning away. “These two have been here a long time, and they will keep until—”
“Until you have everything under your control?”
“True,” she said. “But you need not fear, Rockear. You are an ally, and you know too many things we must know. And besides,” she added, rubbing against him sensuously, “you are (something).”
There was that same word again, t’rralap or some such, and now he was sure, with sinking heart, that it meant “cute.” He didn’t feel cute; he was beginning to feel like a Pomeranian on a short leash.
More by touch than anything else, they gathered bundles of grass for a bower at the cave entrance, and Miss Kitty showed no reluctance in falling asleep next to him, curled becomingly into a buzzing ball of fur. But when he moved away, she moved too, until they were touching again. He knew beyond doubt that if he moved too far in the direction of his lance and axe, she would be fully awake and suspicious as hell.
And she’d call my bluff, and I don’t want to kill her, he thought, settling his head against her furry shoulder. Even if I could, which is doubtful, I’m no longer master of all I survey. In fact, now I have a mistress of sorts, and I’m not too sure what kind of mistress she has in mind. They used to have a word for what I’m thinking. Maybe Miss Kitty doesn’t care who or what she diddles; hell, she was a palace courtesan, doing it with males she hated. She thinks I’m t’r-ralap. Yeah, that’s me, Locklear, Miss Kitty’s trollop; and what the hell can I do about it? I wish there were some way I could get her back in that stasis cage… And then he fell asleep.
To Locklear’s intense relief, Miss Kitty seemed uninterested in the remaining cages on the following morning. They foraged for breakfast and he hid his astonishment as she taught him a dozen tricks in an hour. The root bulb of one spiny shrub tasted like an apple; the seed pods of some weeds were delicious; and she produced a tiny blaze by rapidly pounding an innocent-looking nutmeat between two stones. It occurred to him that nuts contained great amounts of energy. A pile of these firenuts, he reflected, might be turned into a weapon…
Feeding hunks of dry brush to the fire, she announced that those root bulbs baked nicely in coals. “If we can find clay, I can fire a few pottery dishes and cups, Rockear. It was part of my training, and I intend to have everything in domestic order before we wake those two.”
“And what if a kzin ship returns and spots that smoke?”
That was a risk they must take, she said. Some woods burned more cleanly than others. He argued that they should at least build their fires far from the cave, and while they were at it, the cave entrance might be better disguised. She agreed, impressed with his strategy, and then went down on all-fours to inspect the dirt near a
