The Landmarks were unfamiliar and there were no odor clues. The trees were too tall. When he climbed as high as he could go there were no ceiling lamps. White moss floated overhead where the roof should have been. Nothing he did seemed to orient him, even his acceleration senses were subtly contradicting his eyes and the feel of his skin. He couldn't backtrack because the world changed behind him as it passed out of sight what was behind was as unknown as what was in front. It was wrong.
A lake appeared through the trees, larger than any lake he had ever seen, biker than it had any right to be. He skittered among broad branches that had been able to reach outward along the shoreline, afraid to let the lake out of sight lest it disappear. High above the beach he paused.
His tree developed a lung-slit and spoke. 'I am a tree.'
Startled, he leaped into another tree, nearly missing it. 'Nice leap,' said a bird who had been watching hunt.
He was gaping at the tree (with three eyes) and the bird (with two eyes). How many different kinds of worlds were there? asked freckled( arm) frantically. After a while Long-Reach got used to it. The world patiently gave him lessons in speech with the same image-sound codes as Mellow-Yellow had used. Stones talked. Stumps talked. Animals talked. It was very disconcerting.
The predicable’s had shifted. And not to be able to predict meant danger. Hide and meditate upon the consequences. Idly fast(arm) plucked some berries in their leaf-cones and shoved them up into the undermouth to placate hunger. But there was nothing for Long-Reach to chew on. Shock. In this world food was going to be a problem. Too many problems.
'Eat me,' said a leaf.
He tried. It was only a strong taste, still nothing to chew on.
'Bitter,' said the leaf which had miraculously regrown. 'Eat me again.'
He did so. It tasted like the caps of marsh-reed, or even seed-berries, but again there was nothing to chew on.
'Sweet,' said the everlasting leaf. 'Eat me again.'
Right now he wanted Mellow-Yellow. 'Trainer-of-Slaves!' he bellowed.
His call produced an immediate twilight, fading into a night darker than the deepest cavern.
Beside him, Mellow-Yellow appeared slowly, like a ceiling lamp at dawn, without casting any light into the darkness. The carnivore's image was too sharp, too orange, and flickered a little. A furry hand reached out and touched the eye of big(arm). Then weirdly with only one eye he was back where he had started; Mellow-Yellow was the right color, the giant kzin was beside him and so was all the machinery in the cavern. His selves jumped to look through big(arm)'s eye.
Long-Reach could now feel his arms in their tight trap. Panic. Death… he began to struggle.
The giant kzin backed off but Mellow-Yellow efficiently freed the capped eyes and removed the constraints. Long-Reach walked away, miffed, with only freckled(arm) watching the big yellow trickster curiously.
'Joke,' said Trainer-of-Slaves.
'You have brains where your intestines should bet' sulked Long-Reach, who had begun to assimilate his anatomy lessons. 'Joke,' he added, having no intention of insulting a carnivore.
But for the rest of the day he refused to speak. At night while Mellow-Yellow slept, his minds debated what they had seen. The whole event reeked of danger. Hide, said all of his instincts. And yet the curiosity was overpowering! Talking freest Moving through wallet Seeing different worlds with each eye The wonder of it!
At the first sign that Mellow-Yellow was awake, he herded him toward the door. 'More joke,' he said.
During his second session in the confinement rig he learned numbers and image symbols for numbers. Released, he enthusiastically counted everything still amazed that the region between three and many could be divided up endlessly into distinct parts, that no matter how high he counted, there was one more. He counted kzin, he counted lamps, and he counted the leaves he ate, one by one because freckled( arm) wanted to know how many leaves it took to stop hunger.
The virtual worlds of the confinement rig were of two kinds. The moment he tired of one, he was shifted to the other. There were the work worlds where he learned practical mathematics and the art of maintaining machines and proper ways of addressing his kzin masters. There were the play worlds of forest and dungeon where natural law changed whimsically, sometimes in frightful ways, sometimes amusingly. When capricious play taxed his minds, a shift to the tuning of gravitic force fields was a relief; when tedious machining drove him to singing mental tunes in harmony, a shills to the free world of play was pleasure.
Time blurred. He saw less and less of Mellow-Yellow, yet the hours he spent with his kzin companion were rich in conversation.
Trainer-of-Slaves admitted that Jotok-Tender was a hard taskmaster while Long-Reach taught his friend geometry and how to disassemble machines. Once they couldn't reassemble a machine because the slave hadn't got that far in his lessons. For that sin Jotok-Tender had them both scrubbing floors together.
The best days were spent hunting. Long-Reach wore a special uniform of cloth that distinguished the slaves of Mellow-Yellow, green and red stripes, ruffles. They swept through the Jotok Run searching out new slaves, leisurely, with no special command to return. To the senses of Long-Reach, the familiar woods and ponds and rock faces of his youth were better than the virtual forests of the confinement rig. There was fresh forest odor and the trees didn't talk. The ceiling had lamps and the caves led only to the level below.
Long-Reach would flush the prey, knowing where the young gathered. Then Trainer-of-Slaves would seduce the youth while Long-Reach hid in the trees. The hunt was not always successful. The Jotok they stalked might prove large enough, yet still untouched by curiosity-hunger he'd have to be released until he matured. Or he might be wild, past his prime, good only for the dinner table, his intelligence lost to language, metamorphosed into cunning.
Trainer-of-Slaves kept the best of the Jotok captives for himself. Three became his personal retinue Long
Reach, Joker, and Creepy. The three had the usual training in mathematics, mechanics, and gravitic device maintenance. But they were also Mellow-Yellow's hunting companions. They noticed that he had enemies among the kzin, and chattered about the danger to him among themselves, covertly. Inevitably they became his bodyguards, the eyes who watched his back.
CHAPTER 8
(2396 A.D.)
The armada was arriving. Like all things in the Patriarchy, there was no great hurry.
First the swift Victory at S'Rawl fell out of space into orbit around Hssin. It disgorged no warriors, and made no diplomacy, but imperiously took over the duties of the local Orbit Command by Authority of the Patriarch. Traat-Admiral was acting as point-liaison for Chuut-Riit, Warrior Ambassador Extraordinary. The Admiral was under strict orders to dominate the local Kzinti from the moment of first contact they were considered to be fierce but not reliably obeisant.
An inner-world kzin, however territorial, was used to the formalisms of hierarchical command, but out here in the wilds a less disciplined breed of kzinti were notorious for the way they fought over and defended the spoils of their adventuring; crass in their willingness to defy a messenger of the Patriarch if he gave any appearance of weakness. The Patriarch was thirty years distant by lightbeam and forty years distant by ship.
The Hssin fleet might have responded arrogantly. The Conquest Heroes of Hssin were brothers of the Conquest Heroes of Wunderland. They could have ignored, or even ordered an attack on the Victory at S'Rawl after all, it was a mere command warcraft heavy with electronics but deficient in armaments. But would the Hssin household of Kasrriss-As have dared such disdain, knowing who was to follow Traat-Admiral?
No action was taken against the Victory at S'Rawl. Space traffic control was relinquished with grinless self- restraint.
Ships began to drift into the R'hshssira System in ones and twos, every few hours, over months, the transports with their time-suspended warriors, the warcraft, the auxiliaries all that Chuut-Riit had been able to exhort, to tempt, to command from five systems. No ship debarked a single warrior to Hssin, taking orbit instead in a great ring around red R'hshssira. To awe Hssin at a distance, that was Traat-Admiral's intention.
