forward in a desperate bound. Spots rose out of the underbrush almost at its feet and lunged for the exposed throat, fastening himself with clawed hands and feet to the big animal and sinking his fangs into its throat. Blood bubbled between his teeth, hot and salty and spicy across his tongue, but he concentrated on squeezing his jaws shut. Air wheezed through the punctured windpipe and he gave a grunt of triumph as it closed beneath the bone- cracking pressure of his grip. Suffocation killed the prey, when you got a good throat-hold. The animal collapsed by the forelegs, then went over on its side with a thump as Bigs arrived and threw his massive form against its hindquarters. A few seconds more and it kicked and died.
They crouched for a moment, panting, forepaw-hands on the warm body. The soft night echoed to the throbbing killscream of triumph, and then they settled down to the enjoyable task of butchering and eating. Spots cuffed affectionately at his sibling as they ripped open the body cavity and squabbled over hearts-gagrumphers had two, one major and one secondary, like most Wunderland higher life-forms-and liver. It was a big beast, twice the weight of an adult male kzin, half a human ton, hut they made an appreciable dint in it, before feeling replete enough to pile the remainder in torn-off segments of hide; it would be fresh enough to eat for a couple of days. With the chore done they could lie at leisure, cracking bones for marrow with rocks and the hilts of their w'tsai- knives, nibbling at treats of organ and tripe, grooming the blood and bits out of each other’s fur.
“it is well, it is well,” Bigs crooned, working over the hard-to-reach places at the back of his sibling’s neck. It was amazing where the blood got to, when you stuck your head into the prey’s abdominal cavity.
“It is well,” Spots confirmed, yawning cavernously. “If I never eat synthetic protein again, it will be far too soon. Nothing is lacking but ice cream, or some bourbon with milk.”
“Your pride-mate provides,” Bigs announced, unslinging a canteen and two fiat dishes that collapsed against it, “The bourbon, at least”
A throaty purr resounded from both throats. This is how the Fanged God meant kzinti to live, Spots thought The night was bright to their sight, full of interesting scents; a gratifying hush of terror was only gradually wearing off, as the native life reacted to the mar of hunting kzin.
It was how kzin had lived, for scores of scores of millennia, on the savannahs and in the jungles of Kzin itself. The scent of his brother was rich and comforting with their common blood, So had young warriors lived in the wandering years, cast out by their fathers and the home pride. They grouped together in the wastelands, brothers and half-brothers and cousins, growing strong in comradeship and skill, until they could raid the settled bands for females of their own-or even displace their fathers and become lords in their own right. From those bonds sprang the pride and the clan, foundations of kzinti culture. So had the Heroic Race lived through the long slow rise to sentience, through all the endless hunting time. Before iron and fire, before the first ranches. Long, long before the Jotoki came from space, with their two-edged gifts of technology and education to hire orange-furred mercenaries.
“I scent a path that might have been,” Spots mused, over a second drink. “If the Jotok had never come to Kzin-home, would we ever have been more than wandering hunters, with castle-dwelling ranchers as the height of our civilization? My liver trembles with ambiguity-perhaps that would have been best?”
“And miss the Endless Hunt?” his more conventional sibling retorted. “The flesh of these excellent gagrumphers?”
“The Endless Hunt is endless time spent in spaceships and habitats, living on synthetic meat, never feeling wind in your fur,” Spots replied. They had both done tours of duty offplanet during the war, and served longer in fortresses on the surface that might as well have been battlecraft. “And living among aliens.”
“The Fanged God created them to serve us,” Bigs said reasonably, rolling onto his back in the gesture of relaxed trust and looking at Spots upside-down. “Thus freeing the Heroes for the honorable path of war.”
“So said the Conservors of the Patriarchal Past,” Spots said, with a sardonic wave of his bat-wing ears. “You will note that there are few of them around. We lost this war.”
Bigs’s posture grew slightly rigid. “My nose is dry with worry,” he said, in an attempt at lightness. “Our impoverished but noble line is about to be disgraced with a Kdaptist.”
“Lick your nose, kshat-hunter; I do not yet imagine that God created Man in His image. Kdapt-Preacher I have seen; he is of great liver, but rattlebrain as a kit. As a kzinrett. His experiences in the war…“
Bigs nodded wisely. “Yet I will not challenge him claw-to-claw,” he said.
Spots snorted, lips flapping against his teeth; the self-proclaimed prophet had made many converts among the remaining kzinti in the Alpha Centauri system. It was soothing to the self-esteem to blame defeat on God, Who was the ultimate Victor in every life. He had made even more with an uninterrupted series of personal victories in death-duels; his belt was like a dried-flesh kilt with the ear trophies he had garnered since proclaiming his mission. Luckily, he had also proclaimed his intention of voyaging to Kzin itself and trying to convert the Patriarch. The Rut would deal with him in due course, one assumed.
“Yet still, we lost.”
“We have suffered a setback,” Bigs replied stubbornly, scratching his belly. “It was unfair-the Outsiders intervened.”
Spots twitched tail. The mysterious Outsiders had sold the hyperdrive to the human colonists of We Made It; it was still a matter of furious controversy among the Wunderland survivors whether the Fifth Fleet so painfully accumulated by the late, great Chuut-Riit would have overwhelmed the human homeworld. Neither species would have stumbled on the hyperdrive themselves, he thought, despite knowing some such thing had been made by the ancient thrint and tnuctipun. It was so… unlikely.
“Unfair,” Bigs repeated.
“As the great Kztarr-Shuru said, fairness is the concept of those whose leap rams their nose into a stone wall. They open their eyes and complain. Four fleets were destroyed by the monkeys,” Spots said meditatively, likewise scratching. The salt of blood made for a pleasantly itching skin; his belly was drum-tight with fresh meat he had killed with his own teeth and claws, an intensely satisfying feeling. “Even when they had no tradition of war I have studied them.”
“Too much, my brother,” Rigs said, rolling over onto his stomach to talk seriously. “Even as you speak too much with the Jonah-monkey.”
“The Jonah-monkey is a warrior,” Spots said sharply. “He has saved our honor… not to mention our lives.”
“For its own monkey purposes,” Bigs grumbled, holding down a legbone with both hands and gnawing. The tough bone grated and chipped beneath his fangs. “Remember, in the end, there can be only Dominance toward such as it.”
Spots rose and stretched, one limb at a time, his tongue curling pinkly. “When we are not paupers living on enemy territory…“ he said, and rippled his fur in a shrug at the sharp scent of annoyance from his sibling. It faded; it was difficult for any young kzintosh to maintain anger on a full belly after a kill. “We should return to their camp. As Jonah said, the old one will have difficulty setting a decent pace-he needs his rest.”
“Hrrraweo. Journeying with humans! Their cremated meats..
Spots joined in the shudder. “Yet we may hunt-we have not eaten so well since the war ended.”
“Truth.” Bigs looked around at the minor scavengers, already congregating for the scraps. “Yet in my inmost liver, I feel we are now such as these.”
With a sigh, they slid off into the friendly night, back toward the human campfire.
CHAPTER TEN
“ID cards? We don’ need no ID cards! We don’ need no stinkin’ ID cards!”
The bandit chief struck his fist on the table and snarled; the jugs of drink jumped, and one flask of sake fell. The porcelain was ancient and priceless, an heirloom from Earth; one of the black-clad attendants had crossed the room to catch it before it had time to travel half the distance to the floor. Scalding-hot rice wine cascaded across his wrists and forearms, but there was no tremor in them as he set it reverently back in place, bowed, and stepped smoothly to his guard position along the wall. Shigehero Hirose spared him the indignity of sending him to the autodoc; repairs could be made at any time, but an opportunity to demonstrate true loyalty-and to accumulate gin-was more rare.
