For now, two things made work-avoidance tolerably easy. The kzin were used to servants like the Jotoki for which they had hundreds of generations of training experience. Mellow Yellow had been a trainer of slaves, specializing in the Jotoki, and knew of dozens of machines and thousands of virtual-world training modes that would shape a Jotok to almost any skill. But for monkeys there were no training artifacts. And the kzinti weren’t patient with eyeball-to-eyeball training. When a kzin caught him idle, he respectfully asked for immediate training, and that was usually that.
He had painfully figured it out for himself during his sly wanderings about the estate. He couldn’t explain these ideas to his brothers. The slave language he knew was too simple to express such complicated ruminations. He understood what he was thinking but there was no way to share these thoughts by the method of saying. His was a special duty because if he failed, then doom would befall his monkey family. Fun got in the way of his serious thinking, but he could always make it up while he worked.
The best job was currying kzinretti. Sthondat thigh-bones, were they dumb!
Instinctively, he never broached his tortuous questions to any kzin, not even lord Grraf Nig-who was his teacher, his master and defender, his peculiar friend who had tussled and played with him since he was an infant. He dared to call his kzin lord “Mellow Yellow,” a bite’s distance from those carnivorous, flesh-odored teeth, but nothing in kzindom would have induced Monkeyshine to tease that mighty machine of flesh with images of monkeys who lolled about on kzin-hide rugs and fanned themselves with kzin ears. Such amusing thoughts had to be locked in absolute privacy.
In the course of his serving duties, he had overheard kzintosh boasting about the deeds of conquering Heroes, but the slave races appeared in the stories only as stilted background to the glory of kzin victories. Only the kzin had a history.
Monkeyshine would never have thought to share his curiosity with his mother though he chatted with her in monologue mode often. She, being female, did not have the wits to tell him of her origins. His father, who could, he supposed was dead. He assumed that monkeys, unlike Jotoki, did have fathers because Mellow Yellow addressed him and his brothers in the male tense and referred to his mother and her daughters in the same female tense with which he spoke of his kzinretti wives.
Of course, he wasn’t older than his befuddled sister, who was just as tall as he was, but she didn’t count as a partner in responsibility because she couldn’t think, could hardly make herself understood in the limited hisses and purrs of her tiny vocabulary He had to protect her all the time; it was annoying. His brothers were of little help- after all, they were only babies and they had to contend with their twin sisters who were really stupid brats.
He adored his mother. She wasn’t very bright either, and he had to protect her, too, as well as all of his siblings. But she was bigger than he was and quicker and it made Monkeyshine grin when she caught him being foolish. With the grip of her powerful hand she could restrain his greatest enthusiasm. She always grinned back at him- but would never let go until he started to think about the careless thing he was doing.
That was his greatest puzzle: she was so dumb, how did she always know when he was being dangerously stupid? Such a mystery impressed him. He could be ferociously fond of his mother, especially when he was assisting her during her frequent child bearing, and had to chase away her five-legged Jotoki midwives. What did they know about childbearing? They crawled out of ponds, whatever a pond was.
He didn’t know whether he was grown-up or not. He felt big and it seemed like he knew everything but he kept growing. A kzin male was about twice as large as a kzinrett. If he was going to grow up twice as large as his mother he had a long way to go. He wasn’t even as big as she was yet. When he got bigger, the work would be easier.
Things began to get stranger. He was currying a kzinrett one morning and her fur was standing on end in anger. She snarled at him and he was afraid of her but she seemed to like his attentions. There were hissing matches in the harem. It got worse every day until the harem was in an uproar. All the alliances between the kzinretti were changing. He found one of them digging a den in the hillside.
Monkeyshine was proud of the way begot along with Mellow Yellow’s females. He could understand their gestures and their moods, when they wanted to be groomed, when they wanted to play, and when they wanted to be left alone. He knew what gifts to bring them-pretty stones and colored leaves-and he could understand their talk-talk and even chatter with them while he played. So he took the trouble to find out what was wrong.
Their new master smelled peculiar and they were afraid he was going to eat their kits. What had happened to Mellow Yellow? Why was the new master beginning to reorganize the slave quarters?
It was just curiosity and caution that was driving him toward answers-until Long-Reach returned from somewhere in an almost catatonic state, only one of his arms articulate. Then the boy’s curiosity became an intense case of anxiety. His Jotoki friends abandoned him to babble hysterically in their tree huts. Only Joker crawled down to comfort Monkeyshine and all he would say was that something terrible had happened to Mellow Yellow. He couldn’t say more; he didn’t have a calm arm.
For the next thirty hours Monkeyshine did not let his family out of sight. He watched his mother and made all sorts of excuses to help her while she worked. He herded his sisters. He kept his brothers out of trouble and as much out of sight of any kzin as possible.
Nightfall on W’kkai is a slow dimming and it takes forever for the darkness to overlay the land, but at first- darkness a Jotoki delegation called Monkeyshine into the tree huts for a council. He had never before been treated with such respect Monkeyshines a child at that unique stage in human development where he was observant enough to notice the richness of his universe yet wise enough to understand that he knew nothing.
To him the Jotoki were the fonts of all wisdom. Mellow Yellow was too busy to answer his questions, though Monkeyshine knew how to bring out the father in him for a sparring match, a thing he wouldn’t have dared do with any other lain. Mellow Yellow’s kzin retainers thought only of work and not why “washers” were round. The Jotoki, on the other hand, knew everything about how machines worked and were only too willing to take them apart to show you why a washer had to be round. They could make a ship fly between the stars-and that awed Monkeyshine. He had only two arms and it made him feel like an inferior slave.
In the trees, the Jotoki crowd were very serious about their council. Nervously munching leaves that one arm stuffed into his underside mouth, and talking through the lungs of his others arms, Long-Reach told him that Mellow Yellow was in confinement. “We have a new master who owns all.”
The other Jotoki keened their distress and the five shoulder eyes of each one of them stared at Monkeyshine. He looked at the eyes glinting in the night lights and uneasily glanced back at Long-Reach-and then at his toes, He knew they wanted something. “Why is he confined?”
“He is a warrior.”
That, of course, was supposed to explain everything. Fighting was warriors’ work and some fights were lost and others won. Monkeyshine was not satisfied with the explanation. Warring led to honorable death, not to confinement. “Warriors die!” he said disdainfully.
“No.” Long-Reach was collectively sad. “Sometimes warriors are confined after a loss. Mellow Yellow has been confined before. Then it is the duty of another warrior to free him.”
“A warrior must free him,” said one of Creeps arms. ‘We insist,” reiterated Creepy’s thinnest arm.
Monkeyshine was aware that his friends were setting him up. There had a message for him to deliver to some great warrior kzin. “I’ll get lost,” he replied defensively. “I’ve hardly been off the estate.”
“A great warrior freed him during the Battle of Wunderland,” intoned Long-Reach, his five voices resonating together.
“Will his friend help him now?” Monkeyshine asked slyly, hoping to stay out of the discussion.
“No. But it is the duty of the son of a crippled warrior to carryon his father’s purpose.”
Monkeyshine giggled. Slaves would be beaten even for talking like that. “Is this Hero son aware of his father’s noble cause?” if such a warrior was just a few hours away, he might be able to sneak a message through at night to tell him of Grraf-Nig’s dire need. Monkeyshine was scared already just thinking about it even if he was good at sneaking. And then he thought of his dim-witted mother. What would they all do without Mellow Yellow? The situation was desperate. “I’m only a little boy!” He was crying.
“You are the son of a warrior!” Long-Reach insisted sonorously in a collective voice that was followed by a squeaking from the most sympathetic of Long-Reach’s arms in defiance of the other four. “Leave him alone! He’s not a warrior yet.”
“I’m not Mellow Yellow’s son!” lamented Monkeyshine, only now wakening to the purpose of this cabal. “I only spar with him! It’s pretend!”
