“Our Third Pride has large mother ship”-large enough to hold the hyperdrive scout in her maintenance womb. “Trainer-of-Slaves worked from there. I iss not recall its title.”
“Was it a…“ Yankee paused. He was thinking “drydock,” but there was no equivalent word in the Hero’s Tongue. The continents of Kzin were all linked by narrow shallow seas and the kzin had evidently gone to space before they had a strong seagoing tradition. Eighty percent of their space naval terms were not related in any way to basic kzinti sea lore, and did not obey the normal rules of kzinti grammar, showing strong fossil evidence that the kzin had been taught their spacefaring skills by an alien race. “Was it a ship used to overhaul other ships?”
“Yess. This be mother ship.”
Yankee called up a word on his infocomp and showed it to Brobding. “Could you by to pronounce this for me?”
“Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch,” said the crashlander in his best growling-hiss.
“Was it that ship?”
“Yess.”
“No such ship has ever been recovered.” Yankee posed the statement as a question.
“Bitch warcraft ordered to battle-zone.”
“It never arrived,” Yankee insisted.
The mind of Hwass raced. This was news. Then Trainer-of-Slaves had actually carried through on his determination to take the hyperdrive scout back into the Patriarchy! He couldn’t have done that, of course. He was under arrest and in suspended animation, if he had, he deserved a full name. Could his captain have disobeyed orders and revived Trainer? Probably not. That old Hero had never had an original thought in his life.
Mystery. That’s what this monkey was tracking down. Now Hwass was interested! Was a hypershunt motor actually in possession of the Patriarch? That changed everything. He felt a curious elation.
“I iss help you. Then you iss help me go Kzin?”
“It’s a deal.”
Chapter 7
(2436 A.D.)
The landscape could have been anywhere in the universe and nowhere. A triple-cross rose out of the swirling fog at dawn. It was an illusion, of course, built within a tiny chapel inside a distant corner of Tigertown. The bulk of a kzin warrior purred his supplications to the triple-cross. He wore a mask of steam-stretched human skin. The mask was all bushy eyebrows, scowl, and beard, its human face too large because it was there to hide a kzin’s muzzle.
The purring words, couched in the Dominated Tense, were for the invisible Grandfather on the left, to the Father offstage on the right, and to the Son in the middle. They were exactly those words prescribed by the teachings of Kdapt. The mask honored the true shape of God and made Hwass-Hwasschoaw bold in his thanks for the fortune of the day. He was dedicating himself to the goal of finding the lost hyperspace shunt.
An interesting challenge. Hwass had contacts within the kzin community that no human could match. Clandeboye had access to hyperwave communication and hypershunt transportation and to the naval records of the humans. Neither man nor kzin could succeed without the other, yet at the same time each dared not help the other. It was a puzzle subtle enough to intrigue a W’kkai Conundrum Priest.
In the days that followed, he prowled Tigertown, trying to find any surviving crew member of the Nesting- Slashtooth-Bitch at the time of the battle. Not a trace. Then he began to put together a compendium of stories about Trainer-of-Slaves, who had disgraced himself by insisting, probably correctly, that the human scoutship Shark should immediately be shipped back to the naval yards of Kzin. Hwass had not known the slave master at all, and was aware of him only because he was a favorite of Grraf-Hromfi, the Dominant of Chuut-Riit’s Third Pride. By now Hwass was very curious about this nameless barbarian from Hssin.
He used his new authority with the simian navy to obtain a restricted visit to Aarku of Beta Centauri where Trainer-of-Slaves had been stationed as a slave breeder before being assigned to the Third Pride. He was evidently a superior trainer of the nasty Jotok slaves. But Aarku had been more than a slave factory Aarku was still used to maintain kzinti-equipped vessels of the Serpent Swarm. The technicians were all kzin and many of them had known Trainer.
Hundreds of wrecked kzinti battle craft were beached on Aarku. It was a mine of information about how kzinti weapons performed against their human counterparts. He had time here to expand on the Wunderland Battle analysis he intended, someday, to deliver to the Patriarch. If he could not deliver the message in person, then his sons or grandsons would. While Clandeboye was using him, he was using Clandeboye.
He spent much of his time at Aarku setting up a Kdaptist cell. The kzin salvagers had found a desiccated man-beast in the wreckage of one of the ships and Hwass showed them how to skin the corpse so that its leather could be used to form masks for their Kdaptist services. Carved, the beast’s bones made excellent altar pieces and candelabra.
Through his contacts on Aarku he learned that most of Trainer’s surviving associates were on Wunderland. That was convenient. Hwass was granted a second restricted travel pass. From Aarku, he went to Wunderkind. No Kdaptist had more freedom of movement to spread the word.
Hwass’s questioning around the kzinti tenements of Munchen fed him many tales. Trainer had achieved a reputation in the animal world through a devotion to the chemistry of the human brain. The simians had mawkishly converted an orphanage, which once supplied some of his experimental subjects, into a memorial commemorating the martyred children, hundreds of them, each child’s name engraved into an eternium plaque. Kzinti documents were on display, some in Trainer-of-Slaves’s compact dots-and-comma style. Descriptive drawings of brain operations, Trainer’s bad poetry, the skull-clamps from basement test rooms, the saws and micro-fluid taps were all there.
The collectors of the memorabilia for this holocaust museum had been thorough. But Hwass (cynically wearing a black ribbon of contrition so that he could gain admittance) noticed one item that he was sure the humans didn’t understand. It was labeled as a little three-dimensional puzzle used by Trainer-of-Slaves to amuse himself while long experiments were in progress. But it wasn’t that at all. Hwass-Hwasschoaw, whose patrilinial ancestry was rooted in W’kkai, recognized it as a wooden puzzle built by the Conundrum Priests. But it was much more than that to a Patriarch’s Eye. It was a covert datastore.
Hwass shopped around in the back streets of Munchen until he found a real Conundrum Puzzle in a curiosity and antique shop. He repolished it to duplicate the sheen of the other, then returned to the museum and switched the two. The locks on the display cases were human-primitive. From the engraved markings on the original he traced it to a now legless kzin who had originally given the device to Trainer-of-Slaves as a present of respect for a problem solved.
The crippled warrior restored obsolete kzin electronic devices for a living-hundreds of thousands of them were still in circulation. He had no trouble in reading the datastore. The solution to the puzzle itself was the codekey. The database proved to be an encyclopedic compendium of the neurochemistry of the human nervous system bought by the lives of slaves and orphans. Interestingly, among the poisons were micro-dose gases that would stop a human nervous system instantly but not affect a kzin at all.
From his malfunctioning gravitic chair, Trainer’s friend shared a wealth of stories about his polyvalent comrade and thus it was revealed to Hwass that this Trainer-of-Slaves had excellent credentials in gravitic maintenance and, even though he was not qualified as an engineer, he was more knowledgeable of gravitic mathematics than his duties required.
The extensive discussion provided fresh meat for Hwass’s speculative chewing. Trainer knew chemistry and gravitics-an unusual technical versatility. Difficult problems never seemed to bother him. Where another ship’s captain might be baffled by hyperdrive mechanics, Trainer would be inclined, at the least, to try to restore the function of a misbehaving hypershunt motor. Had he succeeded?
Did he have the courage? That was always important Grraf-Hromfi’s youngest son had survived the battle and told stories of how Trainer-of-Slaves had served as an instructor for Grraf-Hromfi’s kits and had even killed several
