Trainer had upped the room temperature in deference to the female's furless skin. He had tattooed a dots and comma identification on her arm so that he wouldn't mix her up with the other animals. Delicate probes were already embedded in her brain, measuring transmitter chemical activity, mapping the neural circuits involved in sensory input, monitoring blood flow, measuring neural activity changes as basic emotions were chemically switched on and off. He needed to get a paws-on feel for the brain structures he had extracted from the autodoc.
But he hovered around his experiment nervously. He didn't want her to die of shock while he was still so unsure of the human performance envelope. He had special catfish ice cream to give her when the data gathering was over in appreciation for her discomfort.
In time he would learn how to erase her inquiring mind while retaining her ability to bear children and perform her sexual functions. He wasn't yet quite sure what would be the best use for the males. If he was to domesticate them as work animals, he would need a different approach than if they were to be domesticated for food.
Thus the years went by uneventfully. Experiments on slaves. Biochemistry studies. Neural map deciphering. Polarizer maintenance. A bit of fighter acrobatics in exchange for a fast repair job. Another lethal fight with one of Hromfi's sons; another ear for his belt. More lectures on strategy. An embarrassing incident with one of Hromfi's coy daughters, fortunately in the dark. Gunnery practice. More Jotoki to train. More questions to answer. Another round of brain experiments.
His most productive line of research came after he deciphered the autodoc records which gave him the switching codes that horned neural growth on and off. He found it useful to know under what conditions human neurons could be made to reproduce or to bud-off new neurons. It fascinated him when he found that he could cause dendritic sprouting.
That was only one of the enthusiasms for which his kzin impatience got him into trouble. He was wildly hoping to astonish his peers by fabricating a genius slave- but when he increased the number of neural connections in a man-male's brain by an order of magnitude he succeeded merely in killing off his animal. Depressing.
Occasionally excitement broke through the drudgery of incremental scientific advance. Yiao-Captain visited, his fervor so persuasive that the Pride actually moved their great antenna forty degrees away from Man-sun to observe some sort of freak gamma source.
The wonder never lasted. Always they returned to the monotony. Yes, he was having solid if exasperatingly slow success with his experiments but the work was so tedious! Yes, he was getting so expert that he could recycle most of his man-animals through many brain operations before they died but the finicky detail work constantly left him on the edge of rage. He wasn't sure that he could have gone through it all if it wasn't for Chuut-Riit's promise of a name. Thank the Fanged God for the high spots that broke the ennui.
There was that second vacation on Wunderland when he was able to set up steady arrangements to restock his cages from an orphanage he couldn't just pirate experimental animals out of the war factories without the risk of a duel with some touchy kzin manager. Criminals and political prisoners were too much in demand for the hunts.
His Jotoki kept his mind busy. Sometimes it was a racy card game. One of his Jotok discovered a mathematical theorem that was not in any data-link. Another of his slaves did an excellent project on the biochemistry of pain- accelerated learning in humans. That cleared up a whole lot of puzzling questions about human brain function. He didn't know how he would have survived if his incurably curious Jotoki weren't taking so much of the load off his mind. Sometimes all he had to do was ask a question, and one of his Jotoki would experiment with an orphan and come up with the answer. They had more patience than a kzin.
Trainer-of-Slaves knew he had been with the Third Black Pride for too long when their antenna began to receive news of the gigantic battles in the Man-system. He had been at this post almost ten years. The battles that were juicing up Wunderkzin livers were themselves more than four years dead. Of course, with light-speed messages it never seemed that way. If a space battle lasted a month, it still took a month to play out four years after the fact.
The Fourth and Fifth Black Prides were stationed up ahead, listening, too. The Third Black Pride was behind Alpha Centauri as the last backup. The Prides frantically compared messages, filling in the transmission gaps, but they were all light-days apart, and it took days for the final compilation to be authenticated by the communications officers.
None of the news surprised Grraf-Hromfi. Stoically he repressed his rage. But Trainer-of-Slaves was surprised.
The Blood of Heroes was destroyed on the eleventh day. Vaporized. Trainer, tired from following every new bulletin, was stunned by the heroic death of his best friend. Four years ago. His ancestors were whispering. It was as if he had been living four unearned years. I'm a ghost, he thought, but that was silly. He felt pathos. Then the kzin anger took him. He wanted to fight, and there was no one to fight. He wanted monkey ears on his belt. But they had Ssis-Captain's ears on their belt.
Something about these humans that he did not understand. He went to his cages in a foul mood.
'Hey, Dr. Moreau,' jeered a female with long black hair, 'when do you sew on my wolfs head?'
'Svelda! Clean up your cage!' he snarled with his best animal pronunciation. It was just a matter of feeding the suction nozzle.
'You come any closer and you get shit in your fur!'
His mouth was twitching over his fangs. 'Be careful. I'm in a vile mood.'
'That's news to me? What do I care? What have I got to lose? Kill me!'
He purred to disguise his ire. 'I'll give you ice cream if you clean up your cage.'
She was weeping. 'You've mucked around in my brain so often I can't think straight. Ice cream! Do you understand anything? Open the cage door and I'll kill you. Do you know what happens to a woman when you cut up her brain? All the emotions come out! She loses control. She becomes an animal.' She held onto the bars and snarled at him, gnashing her teeth.
The orphan children in the adjoining cages began to wail. They were so much easier to manage than these political ferals.
So another failure; she was still capable of connected reason and the only obvious result of the experiment had been to produce a state of constant, poorly controlled rage. These man-females clung to their reason even after drastic surgery. And when he was able to delete their intelligence they showed grave, and sometimes startlingly weird behavior deficits.
Once he had tried to eliminate curiosity and had produced instead an idiot who compulsively asked questions with no interest at all in the answers. Another experiment in intelligence reduction had produced a perfectly rational woman with a deadly lack of common sense. He had tried for docility, using the autodoc's knowledge of human brain chemistry, and achieved only passivity leading him to the discovery that there wasn't much difference between passivity and sloth. Passivity neutralized intelligence, but it neutralized everything else of importance, too. Docility, on the other hand, seemed to require intelligence if a kzin was to get any use out of it.
He was still missing some essential key. 'You like ice cream,' he stated firmly, hoping to motivate the Svelda- female toward cleanliness.
'Suck it up your nose!'
Was that a reasonable statement? Borderline. He wanted to make her happy so that she would clean her cage and stop disturbing the other animals. Ice cream wasn't going to work. Perhaps she could no longer understand the concept of ice cream? If reason was failing, he should try something emotional a kzinrett always responded to emotion. What would she respond to since she did not like him? since she was fixed at rage? Victory? He thought about that.
Victory was very emotional; it stirred the purring vibrations. Kzin and animal alike all relished victory. 'At this moment your race is happy and I am bereaved,' he said.
'Happy?' she shrieked. 'A finger in your eye! That would make me happy!' She rattled her cage some more and snarled some more. 'Gottdamn Urin-Pelz! You stink! Urin-Pelz! Take a bath!'
When he tried to reach in his hand, unclawed, to give her a soothing pet, she snapped at his black fingertips.
A remarkable display. Svelda had come to him shy and quiet and properly propitiative. He had been delighted into thinking that very little modification of her mind would be necessary. But his surgery had evidently de-inhibited a whole layer of vicious instinct. Puzzling. Reluctantly he dismissed his latest theory about human brain
