“You come of a warrior race,” said Long-Reach gently. Were they hinting about his unknown father? “Was my father a warrior?” The mere thought terrified him.
“We know nothing of your father. Your mother was a great warrior.
Monkeyshine rebelled. That again. They had hinted at such foolishness before, in their multiple babblings. He’s angry “My mother is my foolish mother!” he shouted.
“Your mother killed thirteen kzin warriors,” came a slow melodious reply.
The other Jotoki had folded up their stalklike limbs to protect their heads and were sitting defensively on their undermouths, arm-lungs fixed in the mode that allowed soft breathing but silenced the voice. The remembrance of the horrible crime gripped the council and only one tiny voice had the courage to justify it “She was saving Mellow Yellow… from confinement,” it piped.
Monkeyshine was just as frightened by the tale as his hosts.
They told the story in bits and pieces, sharing the details to share the guilt, exaggerating to impress the boy. The account wasn’t always coherent for it was told in a slave language poorly designed to discuss revolt and war strategy. They had to make up words and string words together and build explanations around their compound words to define them. They had to make analogies to machines and slave work. They had to tell this to an eight- year-old-boy who had only half the language abilities of a human adult. Totally unaware of the human developmental cycle, they thought of Monkeyshine as the full intellectual equal of the Lieutenant Nora Argamentine they had once known.
They had once convinced the kzinti war captive to lead a rebellion against the crew of the Nesting- Slashtooth-Bitch to save their master, and they were fully convinced that they could do the same now. Guilt and horror had long suppressed their memories of the mutiny. Now it was necessary to save their master again and they argued and squabbled back and forth, arm to arm, Jotok to Jotok, to revive the details so that Monkeyshine might profit from them. Nora’s warrior deeds seemed clear to them-but they argued long and hotly about how she had planned her campaign. Military strategy was still a mystery to them. What they couldn’t understand they expected Monkeyshine to understand for them because he was of a warrior race.
When Monkeyshine, in an effort to understand, pointed out his mother’s obvious mental failings, they spoke evasively of “wounds” or “injuries.” None of them dared tell Monkeyshine of their part in betraying her. After she had masterminded the destruction of the crew of the Bitch they had been afraid that she would also destroy their beloved master, too. Nor did they dare tell Monkeyshine of their collaboration while Mellow Yellow delicately destroyed Nora’s memories and her ability to manipulate language. To make her safe. To make her over into something he could understand.
The household learned that the name Grraf-Nig was never to be mentioned again. They learned from their authoritarian new master that their old master was being sent to the Conundrum Priests of the Rivals Range. They were told that they would have to work harder. A new factory to assemble delicate naval components was to be built on the estate.
I’m a slave; I’m a slave; I’m a slave, Monkeyshine kept telling himself. He treated his mother with a new respect when he came to curry her with his kzinretti brush. Grinning while he combed the knots out of her long auburn mane, he imagined that her kzin opponents had died of surprise when she growled. He curried her fur vigorously, the way she liked, never even wondering why female monkeys had fur and males didn’t that’s the way it had always been. He buried his head in her hair, afraid, hugging her.
He was not used to thinking of himself as a warrior. It was safer to be a slave. He’d have to be angry when he grinned. What would he do for claws? His teeth weren’t sharp. Something stubborn in him was resisting his Jotoki comrades. They were ready to rescue Mellow Yellow tomorrow. He wasn’t. He knew the difference between being and pretending. Being something could get you killed. Pretending let you repeat yourself. For now he was only willing to pretend to rescue Mellow Yellow.
Eight+One acolytes guided the naked kzin at pike point, pleased to have duty away from their studies. He would remain naked no matter how cold it got. They wore weavings of yellow and gold done in maze design. The claspings were a ring-puzzle and let the Fanged God help the acolyte who forgot the untwining sequence. Their tall headdresses of multiple heads made them bob and loom like the giants of mythology.
The tidal action of W’kkaisun kept the crust of W’kkai active even though that leisurely planet had a week-long day. There were plenty of mountains and upwelled plateaus. It was middle morning in the Rival’s Range but the evening’s snow still lay on the northern slopes. The steps to the Heart of Paradox were brilliant in the sunlight and wet with melting snow. Where was the entrance to this Temple carved high along the cliff? Even that was an enigma.
Conundrum-Prisoner could not see the roof of the Temple but it was the floor of the plateau. Conundrum Priests had carved there in the stone for millennia, building themselves a maze of prisons so wonderful that no warden ever needed keys. The balanced stones just closed around their victims. A finger’s push along the magic vectors would open the prison again, perhaps-or cause a rumbling that would close the cell down to the size of a coffin.
In the Temple they were led by a gray-furred warden, stooped, with a scar across his face that had removed half his nose. It wasn’t a corridor of cells they followed, it was a terrifying forest of stones and pillars and blocks and paving that had all the solidity of a master juggler’s climactic act at the Patriarch’s Palace. One looked around in desperation for the hand that was rushing around keeping it all from collapsing, but there was no such hand- only the occasional soft paving or pillar that swayed or monolith that swung down to block their way while it opened another. The Priests said it was earthquake proof.
Conundrum-Prisoner did not recognize his cell when they came upon it. It was like a field of cut stone, or some bizarre world from the eye of an electron microscope. It had been opened for him the day before. The acolytes gathered up the bones of the previous occupant. The warden pulled a hood over his head and wove it shut. All the prisoner heard was the slight whisperings and low rumble as the walls shifted and the plugs fell into place.
He tore at the hood with his claws, uselessly. Then he began to work at the lacings. Was this another kind of puzzle? Finally he smelled the slight odor of oxidation. The hood gradually disintegrated in strength until he could tear it off, and finally it turned to ash. The cell was ample, though of no sane geometric shape. There were openings, some of them large enough for a kzin to crawl into. Death traps. He could control light or darkness. He could control smell. He had a tap for liquid food. And he had a hose to wash away his excrement.
He thought of the cages in which he had kept the experimental monkeys procured from Wunderland for his studies of the man-beast’s nervous system.
He felt rage.
But the Conundrum Priests weren’t impressed by rage. Every item and action of their philosophy was designed to control rage. No amount of rage against these walls would move them by a claw’s breadth. Only reason would open them. The panicked reason of “try everything” wouldn’t work, either. There would be Sixty-four?One ways of moving those stones-and Sixty-four of them would collapse his cell to the volume of a coffin, and he’d die in some distorted pretzel shape.
He remembered a time of boredom when he had been stationed at Centauri’s Aarku base; he had found himself a W’kkai Conundrum Puzzle and stayed awake three clays and nights trying to solve it. It had driven him mad!
Now he was trapped in the puzzle. Controlling his rage was going to drive him mad. Restraining his reason was going to drive him mad. No matter how good his hypothesis about the geometry of his cell, he couldn’t test it with shove and push until all of the consequences had been reasoned out in his head. Madness, every alternative was madness! And there wasn’t even any grass to eat!
Conundrum-Prisoner was his name.
Chapter 15
