subtle form of stalking and less outright seizing.
No, Cuiller sighed, neither of his crewmen had the final answer. Nor, probably, did the technical experts at Naval HQ. And Cuiller himself didn’t, either. He was just going to follow fleet orders and see.
Nyawk-Captain dreamed of monkeys and his fingers twitched. He hung in the control cradle at his leading station aboard Cat’s Paw. The interior spaces of the former Scream of Vengeance-class interceptor were eaten up with extra ship’s stores and a station cradle for a third kzin. So the crew members had no private space to themselves at all and only a cruelly limited area where they could loosen their limbs-one at a time, in rotation. Otherwise they ate and slept while plugged into their panels. And dreamed there, too.
For most kzinti, if their dreams ever crossed the sweat-scent of human flesh or their minds played on the shallow softness of a human face, the experience was pleasurable. Then breath quickened, the tail twitched, ears fanned out, fingers and toes splayed slightly, and the tips of razor claws peeked involuntarily from behind black pads.
But when the monkeys danced in Nyawk-Captain’s dreams, his breath stopped, his tail went stiff and his fingers curled nervously, anchoring his bulk into the crash couch. Nyawk-Captain-reputed to be the best fighter pilot of his generation-in his secret dreams was terrified.
Years ago, during Most Recent War, he had been Tactician aboard a much larger vessel. His duties there had once required him to be present when Telepath peeled the brain of a human prisoner. This specimen also served as Tactician aboard his own human ship, although he had his own name, too. Chatterjee. While Telepath gnawed at the edges of Chatterjee’s awareness, seeking the plan of an expected attack, the human had thrown up unrelated memories and concepts as a screen. And Telepath had reported them faithfully. One of these memories-or perhaps it was simply an evasion-concerned a person called Hanuman.
This Hanuman was either a clan chief or a god, depending. Chatterjee did not make the distinction clear. Hanuman spoke and moved as a full-grown person, and yet he had a sense of morality more suited to a kzitten. He told lies and untrue stories for amusement. He played tricks on his enemies in battle, dodged their arrows, and routinely ambushed them instead of engaging them openly and honorably. Then he danced and laughed when they were discomfited.
From Chatterjee’s telling, filtered through Telepath’s own awareness, it was uncertain that Hanuman was even, in fact, a human Being. One part of him was otherness: pre-human or perhaps protohuman. Chatterjee sometimes called him a “monkey.” Monkeys, it seemed, had no true adulthood but lived and danced as lively, happy, cruel children all their lives. They screamed and threw things. They told lies, stole from each other, taunted their peers and inferiors, and made a joke of anything they could not desecrate or steal. They ate fruit out of the trees or the flesh of their dead, and copulated with great frenzy at any time.
These monkeys depicted an aspect of personal behavior that stayed in Tactician’s, later Nyawk-Captain’s, mind long after this Chatterjee was dead. Any creatures that could waste such a huge fraction of their lifetimes in frivolous, carefree, and even disgusting activities-and not die of them-must be very powerful indeed and have brain capacity to spare. They must be devastating.
This Hanuman, whom Chatterjee had revered as either leader or god, a man or a monkey, embodied for Nyawk-Captain all that was creative, lively, resourceful, and awful about the humans. This god had no fighting skills worth mentioning but instead defeated all his enemies by trickery. Low, unworthy-and devastating.
The interrogation incident had driven another nail of fear home into Nyawk-Captain’s brain. While this Chatterjee was a full human, he considered himself different from those around him, even from his shipmates. He thought of himself as “Hindu-human,” and seemed to be more Hindu than human in the shape of his life and thoughts.
Nyawk-Captain tried to imagine sapient beings who could endure diverging breeds and varieties-Hindu, Chinese, Belter, Lunatic, Russky, American, Wunderlander, Englishman, Jinxian-and not fight each other down to a single pride governed by a single patriarchic family! The fact that so many could live and work together, without continual killings, spoke to Nyawk-Captain of great inner resources, huge mental agility, varying strengths. Perhaps the humans had grown so cunning through learning to deal with the differences among themselves. Frightening thought! A race that did not need enemies to fight and test itself against, because it provided its own.
In Nyawk-Captain’s dreams, the monkeys danced and chattered, and he trembled.
The fifty-eighth day, and twenty light-years beyond Known Space…
“…not put your butts in the ‘cycler!”
Sarah Krater’s soprano voice rang out, echoing off hard surfaces of the ship’s interior and rising toward an unpleasant screech. From the context of her complaint, Jared Cuiller could identify without effort both her location and the object of her wrath. Callisto’s communications officer, linguist, and fourth crew member had cornered Hugh Jook in the cocoon that was fitted out for the combination ship’s head and recycler unit.
“Now, Sally,” the Wunderlander’s voice began in his usual, joking defense. “I’ve told you a dozen times that cocasoli is a perfectly harmless alkaloid derivative, which the ‘cycler absorbs completely. The carrier is a totally organic fiber which is likewise converted. You can’t be tasting it.”
“Wrong!” she barked. “It makes lime gel taste like wet leaves.”
“Then the machinery must be a tad out of adjustment.”
“I checked. It isn’t. If you would just not put your butts down the can -“
Which was where that conversation had started, Cuiller thought. It looked like time for him to intervene officially. The captain unhooked from the forward control yoke and exchanged glances with Gambiel, who was strapped in beside him.
“Better you than me,” the Jinxian said quietly.
Cuiller did not reply. But he took a leisurely pace, choosing his handholds carefully, as he worked his way downship.
Four people should not be asked to seal themselves in a glass bottle and venture beyond the magnetosphere of a G-type sun, he told himself. They should not have to hurl themselves through a dimension of the universe that had no dimension. And even though they dropped out of hyperdrive regularly to examine new systems, prepare charts, and leave probes, four people should not have to go for months with no other distractions than they could devise for themselves inside a crammed hull.
But four people was optimal minimum crew size, or so the Bureau of Personnel had ruled. Four was the minimum of personality variations, sleep cycles, pairs of hands, and skill levels required for an extended patrol A crew of four has the available brain capacity and viewpoints to interact as a population. And when disagreements arose, as now, four allowed for a referee, a judge and jury, or even an innocent bystander.
Four was the optimal minimum-if, Cuiller reminded himself; you had the right four.
It took a lot, Cuiller knew, to break through Jook’s easygoing persona. But even as a failed aristocrat, the Wunderlander had developed habits and tastes certain to bring out the worst side of people who had not enjoyed parallel advantages. Like Sarah Krater, who had been brought up under the strict air disciplines of a Belter mining cooperative. She would react instinctively against anyone who wanted to burn fibers and chemicals in the open, and draw the residue into his lungs, just for the psychological effects, no matter how harmless the substances under discussion.
Rather than change his behavior to suit her, Jook had simply adopted a light and laughing tone. His personal defense mechanism was to let others go their own way, and he only asked the same of them in return. Nothing seemed to bother him too much. And the navigator did have his good points. Jook was levelheaded and philosophical, with a bent for mathematics and ship propulsion technologies.
Krater, by contrast, was touchy and aggressive. A perfectionist in her work, she was always finicky about her personal surroundings and was quick to note the shortcomings of others. That sort of tightass was out of character for a trained xenobiologist. Perhaps greater perspective did not, as Cuiller had once thought, provide for greater tolerance. But then, Belters could be strange. She was also ambitious and, from her first day aboard had made clear that she did not intend to stay with “this bucket of a patrol ship” for very long. Krater wanted a command of her own, and to get that she would have to transfer aboard a bigger vessel and begin working her way up into the command structure. As Callisto had no formal wardroom and was not going in any direction that would win ship and crew much distinction -at least, not on a peacetime patrol-Krater’s frustrated ambitions spilled over into her personal contacts.
Double that frustration once she had learned that both Cuiller and Jook had served on those bigger ships and then been rotated down to Callisto. She was begin-fling to realize that accidents can happen in a Navy career,
