“On the other claw, our yellow devil is probably the only hyperspace pilot on all of W’kkai. Do you know what happened to his ship?”
Monkeyshine shook his head warily.
The Patriarch’s Eye had infiltrated the Conundrum Priests many Patriarchs ago. The Eye had in its secret archives a complete simulation of the Conundrum Prisons with one flaw-the pieces were only shown in their closed configuration. One of the Eye’s planted acolytes, now a feeble old priest who carved wood, was still there. He was able to tell them in which puzzle Conundrum-Prisoner was bound, but had neither the way nor the puzzler’s skill to liberate him.
In the basement of the reclusive fortress, by the glow of a giant tri-D screen, the best minds of the local Patriarch’s Eye pondered the innards of the prison. They could slice right into Grraf-Nig’s cell and see its workings, which was more than Grraf-Nig could do, but that did not help-it was still a conundrum. The Conundrum Priests devoted their lives to puzzle making. There were simple ones for the education of kits. There were puzzles to expand the mind and tame the emotions. There were puzzles that were works of art, and puzzles to hold valuables. All ranges of difficulty. But the Priest’s masterpieces were their prisons. Each cell had a solution that would free its prisoner. The solution was always too difficult to find.
The cell could be opened from the inside onto the plateau. No guard was stationed there to stop an escapee. Any prisoner who could so escape was deemed to have used his intellect in a way that erased all sin. That didn’t help conspirators who wanted to break into the cell to free a friend.
The cell could be opened from the outside by the warden-into an armed camp of fierce warriors who considered that cheating at puzzles was the most heinous of capital crimes.
Hwass-Hwasschoaw was considering brute-force entry. The model showed crawl spaces between the moving parts, all too small for a kzin but not too small for a half-grown human slave. Monkeyshine was even at the screen showing them bravery how he could squiggle in here and scrunch around that. In principle they could just melt a hole down to Grraf-Nig, lift him out, and run like a thrintun was after them.
In practice the cell was built around multiple potential energy wells of various depth, each holding its puzzle pieces. The shallow wells, the easiest ones to trigger with a shove or a pull or a kick, had the bad habit of triggering the collapse of the cell. Avalanche as art form. The prisoner would be squashed by tons of rock. Brute force would never be “clever” enough to trigger the sequence of events that would open the cell.
Back they went to trying to solve the conundrum. Hwass’s mates were from W’kkai. They had been solving Conundrum Puzzles all their lives. It was an addiction. It worked off rage. It whiled away the time as the evening snow melted in the dawn light. And though brute force entrance was the only rational solution to their problem, they couldn’t figure out how to make brute force work without killing their kzin, so every time they tried-and failed-they were seduced by the thought that, somehow, if they were clever enough they could solve the conundrum together. Just one more try and they’d have it.
Monkeyshine brought refreshments to his bleary-eyed masters. Just out of curiosity, because he had been pretending for so long to be the great warrior who saved Mellow Yellow, he said, “Why don’t we glue it all together?” He knew the difference between being and pretending and knew that pretending was safe because pretending didn’t kill you. But he had already saved Mellow Yellow a thousand times in sixty-four different ways by pretending and Mellow Yellow was still inside a puzzle and Monkeyshine still didn’t know what flaws might lurk in his pretend-plans. He wanted someone to tell him-and there were no Jotoki to ask.
Hwass-Hwasschoaw came awake. One of the Eyes began to explain to Monkeyshine why you couldn’t glue together the pieces of a Conundrum Prison. “Of course you can glue the pieces!” Hwass shouted.
At sunset, before the night of their covert strike, Monkeyshine was taken to a chapel. Hwass had already told him how to give homage to the God of the True Shape. It was better that he prayed, and not Hwass, because man-beasts possessed the True Shape. While candles flickered over the three crosses, he prayed to the Grandfather and the Father and the Son for the Revival of the Patriarchy, for a kzin victory; he prayed for them to find the lost hypershunt motor of the Shark. Fervently he prayed for the salvation of Mellow Yellow. And just in case, though not aloud, he prayed to the Fanged God, who looked like a kzin, that he might become a great warrior and do honor to the Patriarch on this evening’s adventure.
It was night, before the coming of the snow. Six kzinti and one slave dropped down onto the plateau silently in black uniforms, elegantly styled in the W’kkai fashion. An ominous machine floated out of their truck on its gravity lifters, moving into position like a giant carnivorous leech.
The leech whirred, flickers of light where its teeth gripped the ground. Bubbling lava frothed and snapped behind the guard rims. With an animal cry the machine leech rose into the air-a flash of heat-and aside to discard a basaltic core gripped in its claws. It leaped back to the attack. It cut, rose, burped, and attacked, again and again to cutout its cylindrical nest. A spinning arm lining the hole with insulation.
Then almost gently, it took Monkeyshine and inserted him in the nest, food for whatever was down there. It was warm. Even the insulation was hot. A tank came after him, with hose. He had goggles that showed him every shape he would meet and where he should crawl. He lugged the tank behind him, took out the spray-wand and filled up cracks. He was scared. He got stuck Warriors had to do silly things. It was better being a slave. He sprayed and sprayed and found more cracks and went back for another tank and got lost and sprayed and wiggled and cried and crawled out into the night air where he shivered.
The Heroes ate lunch. The cement, his kzin friends told him, had to set.
Under an overcast sky, they rebuilt the eating mouth, positioning it to bore an even larger plug-kzin-sized. They cut straight into the prison. An insulated elevator went down, waited, rose again with a puff of vapor-and out came Mellow Yellow. Monkeyshine’s friends didn’t seem scared-their ears were wiggling. Quickly they returned most of the cores to the hole, covering it roughly with turf and a few of the kzin-high bushes that clung to the wind-swept plateau. They piled into the truck, pulling Monkeyshine inside with a jerk, and just dropped over the cliffs edge and skedaddled.
The boy watched Mellow Yellow, his face pressed hardly more than a hand’s breadth apart from the fangs of his old master. Whiskers twitched, fan ears were wilted. He seemed dazed. The boy wanted to touch this only warrior who had ever sparred 4th him. He didn’t dare. “It was my idea to glue the pieces of the puzzle so they wouldn’t crush you,” he said shyly.
Mellow Yellow didn’t come out of his daze. He just licked the dirt off Monkeyshine’s face.
Hwass sat on some hard machinery and teased his newfound interstellar pilot “You’ve got a racket. You don’t have to be a warrior. You just sit around in your hotel and wait for your well-trained slaves to come around and curry the knots out of your fur.” He nudged the shining-faced Monkeyshine.
The boy was proud. It was good to be a warrior. Of course, it was no fun being a human warrior. He was having such a hard time keeping a grin off his face.
Chapter 17
(2438 A.D.)
Back at the Eye’s safe retreat, Hwass-Hwasschoaw was not pleased when he learned about the fate of the Shark. On the spot he invented a fur-raising plot to recapture the Shark by surprise and brute force.
“No!” growled Grraf-Nig, prowling around the stone ramparts. For the first time he was really comprehending that he was free and he wanted no part of another flawed adventure. “There’s nothing you can do now to stop Si-Kish. We don’t need the Shark. It is all in my head. We have to get my head to Kzin.”
“The Shark is our transportation, you sthondat ganglion!” spat Hwass.
How did one teach cunning patience? “We will have to wait until Si-Kish has equipped his fleet with production hypershunts, then by cunning get ourselves to Kzin. Are you fresh from your mother’s womb, needing the glop
