I was small, small, my fur still spotted. We were alone, with the female kit, my sister, asleep. Karan’s belly and teats swollen with her next pregnancy. Then I knew my last day with her had come, and I tried to cling to her.
And then the scene changed to madness! The dream of an addict in withdrawal! For it was a dream of Karan speaking to me, and speaking to me not in the Female Tongue, but in the kitten’s version of the Heroes’ Tongue itself! The tongue no Kzinrett spoke!
But did I imagine now, or remember? Karan’s eyes shone above me huge and luminous as moons.
“Remember! Remember! Brave little spotted Kzin. I will plant a memory of words with little hope, but I must bury that memory in your mind deep, deep.
“Telepath they may make you, if you live. Little do they guess. Certain kittens they will test for Telepath talents. Rare kittens. What if they tested the mothers of those kittens? And the mothers of those few mothers?
“The few, the few… But the enduring. Not quite every line of female brains did the priesthood kill. Not yet. But soon. The speechless, mindless Kzinrett is the Kzinrett that lives and breeds. Each generation we, the secret, secret Others, grow rarer. Remember, though you do not understand my words.
“Someday you may find a sapient female. If fortune lets that happen, let that trigger your memory of these words. For a Telepath and a sapient female could do great things together…”
Karan’s tongue rough on my fur again. A purring in her throat so loud I could barely hear the words she chanted.
“A great secret. The greatest of all. And each of we few must plant it deep at the bottom of a few poor minds, hoping against all knowledge that one day it will shoot.
“The priesthood bred Kzinretti to be brood-animals before ever the first Jotok ship landed upon Kzin and our kind leapt into the stars, as they bred Kzintosh to be Heroes that laid worlds waste. Conquest, Empire, world upon world. And the Kzin becoming a race to smash itself at last, as it smashes all else. So small is our hope that we can save It, and the Telepaths and their war so poor and flawed a weapon. No more can I say but: Remember, when the time is right, that the way of the Eternal Hunt is not the only way. So small a word to whisper! So poor a hope! And yet, as we may, we keep alive a tiny flame, we tend a tiny seed.”
Seed? Tend a seed of vegetable? Who spoke of tending seeds. Our herbivorous slaves and prey-animals tended seeds. And yet-why did this image not sicken me as It should? The dream-voice of Karan again, chanting as she purred to me in her rippling throat.
“I cannot prophesy. Hunt in the glades of sleep. Remember…”
Karan’s eyes filling my eyes with their light. And I falling into sleep, my face against her fur for the last time. for indeed they came to take me to the creche and the training-ground that day.
It was imagination, not memory! For no Kzinrett used that tongue. A mad dream. And yet I wondered, as the scene changed.
Telepath alone.
The blue-gold sky of the human world. Green vegetation and that blue above.
Telepath within a human dwelling, and knowing it for what it was. There was a smell of charred meat and a smell of the partially-burnt eggs of some flying creature. A day fixed in Selina’s memory, the day she too had left for a training creche, something called an Advanced Astrophysics Institute.
A human speaking: ‘I know we’ll be proud of you. We’ve stiff with pride for you already. I know you wanted to do biology first, but keep that as a second string for your fiddle. You’re like your brother-each has brains enough for two.”
An old female human. Mother of Selina, I knew. And now came a single certainty in one part of my mind, one doubt dissolved: as I knew that I moved not in real-time or real-Space, so at one level at least I knew the things I was experiencing to be only monster-images of wandering imagination, not memory from Selina’s mind or my own. For the presence of an impossible animal made this that I saw, even on a human world, impossible: it appeared as if, curled and asleep upon the old human’s legs, stroked by the old human, there had been a goblin- creature like a tiny Kzin.
What tortuous symbol was this from Telepath’s sick brain? But it proved that the scene had no reality Bridge to Selina or no, this scene could not be from her memory And as this vision was unreal, the delusion of a poor addict’s mind lost in the tunnels, so the earlier scene must be dream and delusion too. There were no tiny goblin- creatures in the shape of Kzin, so Karan had never spoken to her kitten save in the few soft words of the Female Tongue. And Karan knew no other than those few soft words.
Then Telepath alone once more, Telepath stumbling over a rocky landscape, the pale tunnels ghostly and transparent, and then the pale tunnels fading, a dark stalker, whose shape could not be told, appearing and disappearing. I felt my mind dissolving, and knew I had at last seen the approach of the Shadow, the End and Last Despair that First Telepath had warned me would come like this.
I cried out for help. To First Telepath, to Karan, to Zraar-Admiral, to Selina.
An empty space, and then arches like a high-roofed cave. Naked sky A gigantic face. I fell into the position of supplication. It was the God. Fanged, rampant, come for Telepath’s soul, and Telepath was not the warrior to fittingly defy Him. Or was it the Fanged God. The face seemed to shimmer, and was bearded like the face of the human god? Fanged God or Bearded God, or somehow… both?
I mewed like a kitten. Stars whirled about me, and Gutting Claw exploded.
Angel’s Pencil
“And those females? It’s obvious what he loaded them for.”
“Wouldn’t you, in his position?”
“Give you a continent to breed cats on? Selina, are you insane? A colony of Kzin to attack our colony the moment they’ve got the numbers?”
“Hear me out.” Selina half rose, as the senior crew of the Angel’s Pencil fell silent about her. “Telepath is highly abnormal. You can see that. If he lives-and he may not-he has a chance of being the first of his kind even allowed to breed. What he breeds may be something quite new.
“The Kzinretti are unintelligent. They can do nothing to educate their children In any real sense. I can. I know Telepath’s mind, and I know that no other human can come close to the knowledge of the Kzinti that I have. Dammit, I doubt many Kzin know as much about the Kzinti as I do! Few but the Telepaths have a multi-leveled picture of their own make-up, and the Telepaths have it only flickeringly and without proper context.
“I think I can guide such a colony. You can keep watch on it-put a satellite above it with camera, sensors, weapons. If I fail and it becomes a threat, you’ll know in good time. You can help me guard it, guide it, trade with it, maybe. Visit it before aggression and xenophobia can take hold in the culture. Of course I can’t give guarantees. If necessary you can discipline it and if necessary you can wipe it out. Obviously with the Kzin in space the human colony must be on a war-footing always. But here we have a chance to create a Kzin society as it ought to be.”
“A chance to play god, you mean? I don’t like that idea.”
“What else are you going to do? Kill them here and now? Helpless prisoners? One of whom you owe? A desperately sick Telepath and two females in hibernation? Isn’t that playing god, too? I am offering the human race an asset. No-one else has it to offer.”
“If Earth is conquered by the… Kzin, what good will having a few tame cats do?”
“Almost certainly no good at all. But then nothing will matter anyway, unless anything from the more distant colonies can flee further into Space. And I do not think the Kzin will find Earth as easy a conquest as Zraar-Admiral imagined. Unarmed and surprised as we were, we have met them twice and beaten them twice already…“ Her voice trailed off. She suddenly understood what Telepath had meant when he spoke of the wrong cave at last.
“I think it is likely the war will be long. I suppose there will be prisoners taken, but I doubt Earth can deal with Kzin prisoners. That’s another reason Telepath and the females are precious.”
“Your motives sound very patriotic, Selina. But is that all your agenda? It comes down to breeding Kzin?
“To breeding Kzin you can talk to,” she corrected him.
“Is that really an asset?”
“It could be a bigger asset than you can imagine. Not only for this colony… There can be interchange between the two kinds right from the start. Humans will have the advantage of numbers, and Telepath’s children will not be
