movement of a hill. Another trap, and evidently the morlock's dying shriek had triggered it. Cleverer than we thought. He leaped aside, into the short tunnel leading to the morlock den. Not quite quickly enough. A section of stalactite the width of a tree trunk fell across him, pinning his legs and the lower part of his body. He struggled to push it clear, but even in that gravity it weighed too much. Fortunately the ends were held on other rocks. It pinned him down but did not crush him. The dust cleared. He was unsure if he had lost consciousness, or if he had taken a fatal blow to the skull. He lay completely still, his fur lifting and lowering minutely to compensate for the movement of his breathing. His surface blood vessels contracted. A heat sensor would have picked him up, but a motion detector might not have. A corpse in the rubble.
The short tunnel seemed partially blocked by fallen rocks, but the banks of this chamber were so honeycombed with holes there might be any number of other entrances. The injured kzinrett youngster was mewling where he had left it. Could it help him? No, even if it could understand him its injuries were plainly disabling.
Ziirgah, developed for stalking, was very little use to a non-telepath in a situation like this. Too many stressed and desperate minds nearby reduced its simple impressions to confusion, and it was better blocked out.
There was a scrabbling sound from one tunnel. The morlocks were returning. Nothing for it but to lie still and hope to kill a few when they came within reach of his claws. They would probably draw back then and stone him to death. It would be painful and undignified. He would never have a Name or a line. The Fanged God would have no use for a son who had not died as a Hero should, on the attack. Death loomed huge and dark as he waited there, like the Emptiness of Space. I am afraid, he suddenly realized. The realization was more terrible than the fear itself. He would go to the Fanged God not merely with the shameful death of helpless prey in a trap, but a coward. There was the glow of a lamp. But morlocks had no lamps. Then he saw the scrabbling creature. It was not a morlock but a human. It approached the young kzinrett and bent over it.
Unable to control himself further, he snarled a challenge. The human jumped away, a weapon flashing into its hands as it vanished behind a rock.
The kitten was crying out now, in the nursery tongue.
'Come back! Pain! Pain! Help me!'
The human cried back. But it was speaking the nursery version of the kzin tongue too. He recognized its voice as that of a female.
'Be still! Try not to move. Help will come!'
Sergeant was amazed. He had been raised by human slaves in his Sire's house, and he knew some humans understood and even spoke the simpler kzin tongues, the soft sounds and small vocabularies of females and kittens. He knew-it was part of their alienness-that human females were sapient. But why did this human speak to a young kzinrett?
He had regained control of himself now. If he could not move he could speak.
'What are you doing?' He spoke in the slaves' patois, a combination of the female and the nursery tongues plus some Heroic and Wunderlander words and constructions.
She approached him cautiously, weapon raised. But he was plainly trapped and helpless. That, presumably, was why she did not fire. The sounds of fighting in the main chamber seemed to have stopped, and he wondered what that meant.
'Some of us have been caring for this one,' she answered. She spoke in Wunderlander, the human tongue, which he like many Ka'ashi-born kzintosh understood but found hard to speak. She turned the lamp to a greater brightness, inspecting him.
'Light keep morlocks away,' he said in the patois.
'No, their eyes are for twilight zones. Bright lights, they close eyes. I was a research student once.' If this monkey is talking she is not killing me, he thought. Keep her talking. He remembered how, as a kit, he had learned to wheedle sugary cakes and other favors from his human nurse-slave. Wheedling had been better than claws, from which her predecessors had simply learned to flee.
'Why you feed small one?' he asked.
'Some of us began caring for her before morlocks attacked,' she replied.
'Why? You are ferals.'
'There were feral children. Human and kzin. They had set up a camp in the caves… together. Most of them, human and kzinti, were much younger than this one. It would have been impossible otherwise.' That was certainly true, he thought. It seemed impossible enough anyway. Young kzin kittens might play with strange species till they decided it was time to try their teeth and claws on them, but kzin adolescents of either sex were ferocious, predatory, and xenophobic far beyond even adult kzintosh. The only regard they gave other life-forms was as links on their food chain and their value as sport. That was especially true of the males after a little training. But evidently something very odd had happened here. 'This one, and that dead human, both older, seem to have held them together,' the female man continued. 'She is a young kzinrett only but she seemed to have some… instinct I do not understand. She is special. We found out too late. The morlocks carried them off and when we followed, she and he were all that was left. Then there was more fighting and we lost them.'
'Why you feed small one?' he repeated.
'Have I not explained?'
'No. She is kzin, you are monkey.'
'I don't know. It is a thing some humans do. Evidently it is a thing some kzin may do too.'
She will eat monkey-meat one day.'
'We have our own sense of honor… some of us.'
'Wire is honor?'
'Wire is war. Is war too hard for kzintosh?'
Sergeant checked his convulsive effort to throw off the rock and leap with the thought that perhaps the monkey was deliberately trying to madden him with the insult. He would not oblige. He remembered one of Chuut-Riit's lectures: 'You think you understand them, and find you do not. You think you do not understand them, and find you do. They are full of paradoxes, but with a few generations of proper culling, this will be a most useful species.' He thought upon what it had said:
'Ferals? Human cubs and kzin kittens? Together?'
The human looked at him. This time he detected something complex in the emotions emanating from it, but it was as if he had passed some kind of test. It reminded him of the feelings of old Kiirg-Greater-Sergeant when he survived his recruit training.
'How close together I do not know. They were in the same part of the cave system. But morlocks got them anyway. They will be back soon.'
'Lift this rock off me!'
'I cannot. And if I could, it would not be wise.'
'I fight morlocks. Morlocks eat you.'
'You would eat us too.'
That was certainly true.
'Give me your word that you will not fight me and I will not eat you now,' he said. 'We need to fight morlocks.'
'Better for me to kill one kzin than an eight-squared of morlocks. And morlocks are victims like humans. They fight invaders of their world.'
He had no idea what the word 'victims' meant but he saw the human's military logic. Indeed he appreciated it. Arguing with a monkey! he thought. Still, I must get this creature to be of use. My duty is to return to my Heroes.
'Kill me and they kill you,' he replied. 'Break legs like kitten, like monkey.'
'Instead of kzin killing us? What difference does it make?'
The voice reminded him again of old nurse-slave, and he repeated something it had once said. 'Live to fight another day.' It was not an argument that would affect most kzintosh, but he thought he knew something of human psychology. He thought of something else, but it was difficult to say it without giving the impression that he was trying to beg for his life. Better a thousand times to die at the hands of a monkey than that a monkey should think that. She was raising the beam rifle.
'Kzin remember,' he said.
