In the tunnels and caves shaped for romping kits they found a box of crudely made toys, alien-perhaps a kzin’s idea (a Jotok’s idea?) of what a human child would play with-perhaps leftovers from an earlier time. The only food stocks in the kitchen were formulated for a human child. Somebody had manufactured a stack of diapers. One of the leather-bound picture books wore not only the tooth marks of a kzinrett but what looked like the practice scribbles of a two-year-old child. There were enough organic bits and pieces to establish that Argamentine was the mother of the children. They didn’t seem to have a common father. Frozen sperm from Wunderland?
The discards from the machine shop, hundreds of them, were all attempts to duplicate the same hypershunt part. Yankee took samples to the frigate’s engineer who tested them and had a good laugh.
“Does he know what he’s doing?” asked Yankee.
“Can’t tell. He might be trying random variations to see what works, but I doubt it. That’s like having random variations in a quantum effect chip and expecting the hundredth one to be a fully operational computer. I suspect he knows what he’s doing but is working at the outer limits of his equipment.”
Yankee was still having to grasp the implications of a functional hyperdrive in the claws of the Patriarchy. “It seems he made one that was good enough.”
“Maybe not. The specs are tough. Maybe they took one jump and they are stuck out there in interstellar space freezing to death. I rebuilt a motor once and it checked out perfect. Died on the first jump, though. The navy never would have found us if our hyperwave had gone, too.”
Yankee kept going back to the kzinretti palazzo. He was looking for something that didn’t seem to be there. He brooded about his cousin. She wasn’t the type to just live in a place. She needed people. If you locked her up, she’d go to the phones. If you cut the phone lines, she’d chat on the net. If you took away her infocomp she’d start to write letters. Yankee still had her letters from that boarding school she had attended after her dad got killed at Ceres. She’d meet a little old lady in the grocery and start up a conversation about the brands of coffee-and remember three months later to send the little old lady a birthday card. He was sure General Fry had love letters from her tucked away somewhere.
She had a pen. There were those scribbles in the picture book, done by one of her babies who was sure to have been imitating mother. Yankee knew that Nora couldn’t escape the temptations that came from owning a pen.
He was tearing up a fur rug in one of the least likely of the kzinretti rooms looking for a biding place when his back pocket got caught in loose molding. While unhooking himself, a panel slipped open-just a crack. He pounced. What he found amazed him. It was a kzinrett-built hiding place, something a dog might have made for bones if a dog had hands. Inside was mostly a vulgar collection of baubles, charming. A three-year-old might have prized them. Sitting with the gewgaws was one of the small kzinretti picture books. He opened it, and there, written across the pictures in Nora’s fine hand, was a diary.
She had no one to talk to, so she was talking to herself. Almost the first thing he saw when he flipped through the pages was the capitalized. ‘THIS IS MY MEMORY.” He back-skipped and read, “Nora-From-My-Future, if you are reading this over and do not understand it, I am writing it because my memory is going.”
He was too impatient to wait until he got back to the inflatable command center so he sat on the rug in the great hail of the palazzo and read straight through starting from the first page where her writing squiggled around the picture, seeking white space.
Chapter 14
(2437 A.D.)
The kzin, bare in his yellow-orange fur, was escorted by armed guards into the chambers of Si-Kish, who was admiring his raiment in a gold-tinted minor, his tail motionless. The nameless prisoner noticed the lean tail. Ornamented-with a miniature silver mace. That son-of-a-vegetable can probably use it, too. With lashing swiftness. He glanced at the furniture of this splendarium, lit by diffuse skylight. All of it looked too fragile to make a good band weapon and too far away to grab.
The guards left. That meant that Si-Kish held the naked kzin’s fighting ability in contempt. Not a wise decision- but no W’kkaikzin could imagine physical power without its trappings. They needed some sobering time on the frontier where kzin lives were cavalierly squandered on the most trivial points of honor-and prisoners never behaved with humility. Nevertheless the nameless one waited for his new name which would contain his fate. If it was something like “Walking-Dead” he was doomed. He hoped it wouldn’t be as awful as “Grass-Eater.”
“I am not as angry with you as some of our lesser nobles.”
He’s keeping me suspended.
Si-Kish was arranging his collar lace, not yet deeming to notice the nameless one. “You have been useful to W’kkai. In fact, I admire your loyalty to the present Patriarch, whose slothful ways have brought us so much failure.
You honor our heroic traditions. I will not insult your honor by suggesting that your loyalty is misplaced. In my view it is the Patriarchy which must survive-not the Patriarch. When the son sees himself as a more able warrior than the father it is his duty to challenge his sire. This principle is the foundation of the continual renewal of the Patriarchy”
Si-Kish turned and the naked kzin knew that he was about to receive his new name-and fate. “We may need you again, Conundrum-Prisoner. My physicists have not yet wholly mastered their hunt through hyperspace. They say they no longer need you-but I don’t believe them. If we have more questions, you may volunteer your answers. If volunteering doesn’t appeal to you, telepathy might. Perhaps even the hot needle of inquiry.”
“Thank you for the name,” said Conundrum-Prisoner. His sarcasm was muted by the requirements of the Dominated Tense. So… they were delivering him to the Conundrum Priests for safekeeping.
Nobody had ever told Monkeyshine that as the eldest male he was bound by a special responsibility to his kin. It seemed like it was something he had always known from the time back on Hssin when he had saved mother and siblings by understanding a faulty atmosphere-lock mechanism that was baffling his frantic mother while their lives lay in forfeit to noxious gases-kzin master and Jotoki mechanics being absent at the time.
Mellow Yellow was often gone on trips, but why was there a new master? W’kkai was shock after shock. Get used to it, learn the new ways, feel safe-and then boom, a new shock. It had seemed so easy when he was young and there were so few of them living in their little world and skittering from bubble to bubble, from ship to shored-up ruin. Then the worst omen of doom had been a grumble in the air machine.
W’kkai was so vast! Space was so tiny! He still relished his memory of the day he had discovered that the sky wasn’t a roof. He had had to lie down on the ground and pile bricks on his stomach as high as he could to understand that it was just the weight of the air that kept the air in! Weird. But vastness meant that too much was happening.
He was always toilet training a baby or rescuing a young brother from a ditch or stealing fruit for his mother. Sometimes he was too interested in fun and forgot about his duties. Furlessface got her head stuck between boards and had been crying for half a workshift before he found her. She was so dumb! He felt guilty but a man had to have fun sometimes. There was too much work to do. It wasn’t easy being a slave. He wanted real clothes like a W’kkaikzin!
Kzinti constantly grumbled about the laziness of their slaves. Slaves were too indolent to survive by themselves. They had to be “induced” to work for their survival by a watchful eye. It was true. Monkeyshine avoided work with careful cunning which mostly meant when he was beyond observation. On W’kkai he had to learn new ways of avoiding work, mainly because there were so many more kzin overseers, none of them as easygoing as his mother’s Mellow Yellow.
It was a game. If he got caught, he worked very very hard. If no one was looking he didn’t work at all. He liked the long W’kkai nights. They were cool and no one could see him. Oh joy! The stars peeked out to announce the night before the clouds came. He liked the night insects because they were big and some had glowy segments on their bellies!
