a rationally structured org, he could get something done. It seemed like everything that had to be done was being done out of channels if it got done at all.
General Fry was a master at that. He didn’t even have a command at Starbase but he was essentially acting as its staffing officer from distant Gibraltar-quietly pulling out the men from Barnard who weren’t wanted here, or didn’t jibe with Starbase’s aggressive philosophy, and as quietly arranging for the inflow of people who were inclined to take the Patriarchy as a real threat. Yankee had learned a few tricks from his mentor. He was already making tough hardware decisions-and hardware wasn’t even part of his training duties. And there was Tam who didn’t even know that he was doing the work of a chief of staff’s adjutant.
The strain of thinking was sometimes physically exhausting. Yankee stopped pacing. He flopped into his chair, confronting Tam’s electronic glyphs. Unbelievable, the number of things that had to be done just to position mankind against a new assault. In a dream world he would have real power to assign names to the boxes on the wall! They were job descriptions and jobs had to be carried out by men, didn’t they?
The dream took on a life of its own. Reverie transported his spirit to Sol, where, in a fanciful office as the biggest black gorilla at ARM, he made endless profound decisions. He put Blumenhandler in charge of patrols. Jay Mazzetta became his top trouble-shooter. Fry was, of course, chief of staff. It was a pleasant power fantasy Names for his mythical duty roster came like the flow of a bursting dam.
The shock of that brought him back to Starbase. The dream had been an astonishing exercise of his imagination. He hadn’t realized just how many competent people he knew. When had that happened? That old bastard Fry had been doing things to him.
He peered into his past. One must look back to have the wisdom to look forward. What had Fry seen in him, a misfit who was challenging every petty mind with words, even fists? What exactly had Fry done to transform him into a man who felt comfortable with the people who did the real work of the world? It was a bit of a puzzle.
A liberating idea was forming in Yankee’s head as he continued to stare at Tam’s chart. Why not set up a General Staff-In-Exile and really get ready for the Patriarch’s next move. What had the sergeant said to the soldier who found himself recruited into an incompetent army? “Complaining will only kill you-fast; start recruiting your own good men!”
Chloe was now very pregnant. One of her more devious schemes involved deceiving her obstetrician. She planned it very carefully without Nora’s help. Nora wasn’t very good with lists and lying. She thought of the idea when Nora started to plan for the birth in her own way- everything they’d need, water for washing the baby, swaddling clothes, makeshift tools to cut and tie the cord.
“How does she know these things?” Chloe asked in bed with Yankee that night “I can’t believe it. Look. What do you think this is?”
“It looks like a piece of wood.” He pinched it. “Hardwood.”
“It’s for me to bite on when I’m in labor! She made me test it.”
“What’s so surprising about that?”
“She doesn’t remember anything about Earth!”
“Her kzin taught her.”
“Those male-centered strutters! What would they know about women?”
“He was a professional slave trainer, remember. In her dairy Nora thought he wanted to set up a business breeding human slaves. He taught her everything she’d need to know to teach her daughters how to bear healthy babies.”
“You’re joking! A kzin?”
“Who do you think was Nora’s midwife? According to our xenologists, kzinti males are wiser about birthing than human males. Their females bear and nourish, even protect. The males have to handle the emergencies and the cultural transmission. Fathering one’s male kits is a very serious business.”
“They are warriors who go off to war and abandon their young!”
“Chloe. You were pregnant. I abandoned you to go off on a wild military cloak-and-dagger adventure to W’kkai that some young firebrand could have done just as well. If the kzin had killed me, you would have born our child and probably done a very good job of raising the tyke, teaching, nourishing. That’s human society. Men have abandoned women all through history-and the women have raised their children. Why do you think, willy-nilly, that kzin society works the same?”
“They’re warriors! They run off to battle the minute they hear a shot fired!”
“You’re anthropomorphizing.”
“What?”
“Seeing man in kzin. Think about this. In a kzin warship there is no age barrier to service. If a kzin cannot find a baby-sitter for his sons, or a creche, or a brother to take care of them, he takes them to battle with him. They fight-just like the four-year-old son of one of your farmer ancestors milked the cows.”
“Child labor on a warship? That’s horrible!”
“Think about this. Suppose a kzin leaves or sells a wife. Suppose she runs away. Suppose a mightier kzin is attracted to her and takes her by force. Who gets the kits? Always, always, always the father. Suppose he is killed or goes to prison or abandons his kits. The male who takes over the family of a kzinrett who is left with young kits kills her male offspring. That is hell on the patriarchal line of any kzin who doesn’t have very strong fathering genes. Now a monkey like me, I can sow my wild oats, abandon my woman and know that some other man will bring up my kid, or she will.”
Chloe switched on the night light. She rose in the bed like a Valkyrie who had chosen a warrior about to die. “You wouldn’t do that to me!”
“I already have. I have a boy on Earth, about your age. He was raised by another man-successfully, so far as I know”
She was shocked, “You never told me.”
He smiled wanly. “You never told me about the first boy you seduced when you were thirteen.”
“You ratcat!” She smashed a pillow down on his face.
“Mumflpuf,” he said.
She lifted the pillow off because she wanted to hear the rest of the story ‘Well?” she said.
“It’s a long story I’ll tell you someday. It was war. The kzinti were at our gates. Who knew? The next fleet might be the end of the human race. The hyperdrive was new I had a chance at a deep space attack, maybe farther than any man had ever gone. It seemed like the thing to do.”
“You just abandoned him?”
“Chloe, I never got back to Earth. The mail to 59 Virginis is very slow.”
When the first of the labor pangs came to Chloe, she sneaked up to Nora’s apartment. She was worried about the one-way mirrors so she began to pile couches and different pieces of furniture into a cave with a crooked entrance, Nora helped. (She thought she knew what was going on. At Mellow Yellow’s estate on W’kkai she had seen some of his kzinretti go into a nesting frenzy) Chloe had no intention of depending upon Nora. Nora might be a mother. She might have been trained by a kzin midwife-shudder-but Chloe had read books. She had her infocomp loaded with obstetric advice, with its comm ready to call out. In case. And she had a flashlight.
She crawled into her cave and began to deliver the baby. It was a strange sort of bonding gift that she wanted to give to Nora. Besides, she was curious about what it had been like to give birth in a kzinrett nest deep in the plundered city of Hssin, poisonous gases swirling outside, protected only by makeshift seals and a refurbished life-support machine, with no human company for light-years. It took hours. After nearly biting through her hardwood chip, she was beginning to decide that she was crazy.
The baby came out with a plop, and Nora knew what to do faster than Chloe could remember what she had read. The baby cried to fill its lungs. Nora tied off the umbilical cord while Chloe was looking up the right picture in her infocomp. They washed her tiny body in temperate water. And there she lay cuddled in swaddling clothes, a sleepy, exhausted baby girl. They watched her by flashlight in the cave of furniture, two grinning women.
