Man-Kzin Wars – XIII

PICK OF THE LITTER

2367 CE: Proxima Centauri System, Outer Belt

With the bright red disk of Proxima Centauri growing quickly in his forward screens, hn-Pilot rose from the kzin smallship’s co-pilot seat. He stretched as much as was possible for an eight-foot felinoid in a cramped cockpit.

The second helmsman-rr-Pilot, who was currently flying the tiny craft-sniffed deeply as his nominal commander twisted his spine to work out the kinks of a long immobile watch. “Boredom has its own scent, evidently.”

hn-Pilot stopped in mid-stretch: rr-Pilot’s undeniably accurate observation was also borderline insolence. But then again, hn-Pilot’s authority was borderline as well: neither had true Names, only differentiation-prefixes, and, therefore, his superiority in rank and seniority was marginal. They were also closely matched in height, weight, and speed, so neither one could be confident of victory in a formal challenge. rr-Pilot’s oblique challenge was, therefore, quite canny: without contesting hn-Pilot’s official command status, he signaled that he would not accept any matching assumptions regarding personal dominance.

hn-Pilot’s fur rippled faintly: the kzin expression of modest mirth or amusement. rr-Pilot was stalking his objective-status-with all the canny indirection that hn-Pilot would have used, had their situations been reversed. Which was good: aggressiveness was the hallmark of any worthy Hero. But, inversely, if hn-Pilot did not effectively respond to this subtle challenge, it would mean he was too docile: doubly so, since he was technically the commander of the smallship dubbed Incisor-Red.

hn-Pilot finished his interrupted stretch in a leisurely fashion and then stooped forward, resting his arms down on the back of rr-Pilot’s seat with a jarring thump. He tilted his weight forward; the seat shifted and squealed in protest.

He watched as rr-Pilot’s pink, white-ribbed, scalloped-edged ears half-folded back against this neck fur: annoyance, readiness to fight if further provoked. rr-Pilot asked, “Do you need to remain in that place?”

“Yes,” sighed hn-Pilot. “Yes, I do. I want to make sure you are performing your duties properly, rr-Pilot. That’s part of my job as commander.”

rr-Pilot’s ears retracted a millimeter more, quivering. “And are you quite satisfied with my performance?”

“It is too early to say. I haven’t completed observing you, yet.” hn-Pilot made the sardonic amusement clear in his voice. He saw rr-Pilot’s jaw sag open, the points of needle-like teeth showing: the kzin “smile” was a prelude to either combat, or at least, readiness to engage in it. hn-Pilot leaned even more of his weight into the chair, which groaned under his mass. “What? Do you disapprove of my command prerogatives? You’re not challenging me, are you, rr-Pilot?” Said in the mildest of tones, it was a sarcastic gauntlet waved in the air between them.

“I do not question your command, or its prerogatives. But your scent is overpowering, hn-Pilot.”

“As am I.” He felt rr-Pilot’s body tensing against that boast, but neither the circumstances nor his physical position made resistance prudent. Since the in-flight monitors were running, there would be plentiful evidence that he had initiated violence which could endanger the mission. And besides, rr-Pilot was seated, facing away from his commander, who was already on his feet, behind him, eyes and claws ready. rr-Pilot’s ears folded back fully, taut, then relaxed: he had found a mutually acceptable path out of the confrontation: “hn-Pilot, you might want to use some of your power to tell ms-Pilot of Incisor-Yellow to keep properly formed up on us: he is drifting wide, again.”

The comment not only defused their own tense situation, but was inarguably true: in the sensor scope, the blip signifying their brother craft was allowing the gap between them to widen. hn-Pilot toggled the ship-to-ship: “Incisor-Yellow, eyes on the trail! Do you sleep even as you stalk?”

ms-Pilot’s response was bored, but the blip indicating his ship began to close the distance: “Surely, this is not stalking. It seems to me that we are simply dragging our paws from one dry watering hole to another.”

Which hn-Pilot had to admit was a most adequate description of their current mission: to escort the human robot transport-Euclid’s Lasso-on its first post-invasion cycle from the main Centauri system to its distant trinary component Proxima, and back again. Why they were loping dutifully after this pointless, brainless beast of a hull was beyond hn-Pilot’s comprehension. It shipped food and other necessary supplies out to the sparse human population of the Proxima system; it returned with their marginal ore finds. So far as he could tell, the human miners of Proxima had a rather desperate paw-to-maw existence, and were strategically and economically insignificant due to both their poverty and astrographic position.

But that was hardly any of his concern. hn-Pilot, like the rest of his species, was of the opinion that there was nothing to be gained in trying to improve the productivity of slave races through intervention. Such intervention always-always-cost more than it was worth. This was the result of language barriers, of radically different approaches to similar problems, and of the inevitable resentment of the enslaved locals. But just as often, it was because those same locals knew their own systems better than the conquerors did. As long as the tribute required was paid promptly and in full, the slaves could use whatever methods worked best.

And so it was here. However, with the invasion now in its fifth month, the kzin were admittedly having more trouble than they had expected. When originally encountered in deep space, the humans had not only proven to be (mostly) leaf-eaters, but thoroughly unacquainted with the waging of war. Only later did it become evident that their societal ignorance of fighting and violence was a recent phenomenon, a consequence of three-century-old mandates promulgated by their government back in the Sol system.

But, for reasons of which hn-Pilot had no awareness, and in which he had less interest, these pacifistic lessons-despite having been imposed pervasively and powerfully by their homeworld-had been less completely embraced by the humans of Alpha Centauri. The humans of its one habitable planet, Wunderland, and the even less conformist Belter population that was densest on the much-modified planetoid, Tiamat, had all shown surprising will, innovation, and tenacity in their resistance to the kzin. However, their desperate attempts to hold back the Fleet were coming to an end, according to the routine updates hn-Pilot had been receiving. Tiamat had been thoroughly pacified now, and the belt known as the Serpent Swarm was secure enough that the Fleet no longer had to worry about surprise attacks upon its rear while pressing the offensive against the main world.

Apparently, the leaf-eaters had built their doomed defensive sphere around Wunderland in order to buy time to launch four generation ships-immense slower-than-light arks-that they were readying there. hn-Pilot did not understand that: only a tiny fraction of the system’s inhabitants would be able to flee on those craft. But evidently it was a project which held great significance for the humans: they had fought tenaciously for five months now. It was, therefore, obvious that they were capable of recalling much of the Warrior’s wisdom that they had forgotten. hn-Pilot and many, if not most, other kzin, took this as a mixed omen. It meant the humans had enough spine and courage to be a truly useful and self-directing slave race. But it also meant that they had a primal nature that, once awakened, remembered the bloody lessons of their evolutionary struggles. Although omnivores, they had nonetheless proven to be the apex predators of their own world. In consequence, they promised to be the most useful slave race in the kzin stable, but also the one in which lurked the greatest seeds of danger. They would have to be watched closely.

And hence, this largely pointless mission: to monitor the Euclid’s Lasso, even though it was simply a robot barge, riding its plume of fusion fire from the Serpent Swarm belt of the main system out to the binary. It began its journey by almost dancing into the gravitic clutches of Alpha Centauri B before the slingshot effect of sweeping close to that orange star’s mass sent it on its way with an extra boost, out into the cold and the dark. Accelerating for weeks, it finally reached eighteen percent the speed of light and then cut engines, coasting onward toward the small red dot that was its destination: Proxima Centauri. Where, four months later, it arrived after more weeks of counterboosting that slowed it just enough for rendezvous with the Proximans’ own intrasystem cycling robot ship. That smaller automated craft swung perpetually between the Proximans’ various cargo transfer points and a trajectory which enabled it to mate and exchange payloads with Euclid’s Lasso. After which, the bigger intersystem vessel began its return journey to Alpha Centauri, starting the same process all over again.

There were rumors that Fleet Command had considered sending a single missile at Euclid’s Lasso to terminate its journey to Proxima whose inhabitants would then have obligingly died off without the kzin having to lift a paw in further effort. But, probably because the leaders wanted kzin violence to be seen as deliberate rather than arbitrary, this path had not been chosen, and now hn-Pilot’s two ships were trailing along in the Lasso’s wake, ensuring that its contents, as well as their recipients, were benign. Initial intelligence had established that there was no military presence out at Proxima, and so there had been no reason to waste the resources or time journeying out to officially subjugate it. But now that complete investiture of the main system was imminent, the higher and the mightier had decided that the time had come for Proxima’s humans to meet, and make appropriate gestures of obeisance to, their new kzin masters.

rr-Pilot pointed at the Incisor-Yellow’s sensor blip. “Now he’s too close. He’s not going to earn a Name for piloting this way.”

hn-Pilot could not keep his fur from spasmodically rippling at the sardonic quip. Not only was ms-Pilot botching the simple job of staying in formation, but Names were not earned for simple tasks like piloting, any more than they were for running swiftly or shooting straight. Perhaps, if one were to pilot the Patriarch’s own cubs to safety through a swarm of enemy fighters, then, maybe, the honor and achievement would be great enough to earn a Name of one’s own. But the monotony of the daily routine reminded both of them just how far away they were from such glory. Worse still, since each smallship had two pilots, the kzin had been compelled to resort to differentiator-prefixes. These subvocal sounds distinguished one from another just as numbers might have. For the Pilots, rr-, ms-, zh-, and himself, hn-, nothing highlighted the lack of a personal Name so much as having to use these tags.

hn-Pilot watched as the second craft in his formation now drifted too close. “Incisor-Yellow, maintain the correct distance and attitude.”

There was no reply, but the blip moved back to the correct distance. Then, a hesitant message: “Incisor-Red, I am detecting some out-gassing from Lasso’s outer ring of cargo containers. Do you confirm?”

hn-Pilot glanced at the sensor plot, saw no gross abnormalities; he tightened the scan field while increasing resolution. Sure enough, there was a modest cloud of gas and minor debris vectoring away from the Lasso, the signatures emanating from each compass point of its round, head-on profile. hn-Pilot grunted, aimed the viewers at the closest sensor return, and increased the magnification to maximum.

He saw a diminishing puff of vapor and small parts-a metal plate, and possibly the cap-heads of several explosive bolts-rushing away down the sides of the Lasso. It was a strange visual effect: since the Lasso was counterboosting, the debris was already moving faster than the slowing ship from which it had been expelled, and so, as the detritus swept outward, it also “fell forward,” in the subjective parlance of both human and kzin’s spacefarers.

hn-Pilot toggled the ship-to-ship. “Incisor-Yellow, did you see what that rubbish was? Did something fail on the human craft?”

“I do not think so. The signatures were simultaneous and at perfectly equidistant intervals. In each case, it looked like a short explosive burst, and then modest debris. I could make out nothing more.”

Reducing the screen’s magnification, hn-Pilot stared suspiciously at the human craft. Its primary hull was an immense, central cylinder for large-volume cargo items. Its bow-currently facing Incisor-Red-also housed the guidance and robotic elements of the craft.

This main hull was ringed by tubular containers, giving it the appearance of being a baton girdled by a tightly packed bandolier of long metallic frankfurters. Loaded with smaller cargo items, these containers were detachable: the Proximan communities swapped tubes of ore for tubes loaded with comestibles and other essential trade goods. But having four of these containers malfunction simultaneously, and in a cruciform pattern, did not sound like an accident; it sounded like a prelude to-

“Sabotage!” yowled rr-Pilot as the sensor plot was suddenly choked with a spreading cone of small, dense signatures spraying out from each of the four ruptured tubes. However, at second glance, it was evident that this growing debris cloud was not really a cone: it was a funnel. And the only way to escape the junk rushing at them was-

hn-Pilot pointed urgently. “Get into the open space-there, at the center of the funnel.”

rr-Pilot growled, complied-and with one sharp jerk, they were in the eye of the scree-storm, unscathed. Incisor-Yellow was not so lucky: judging from the com-chatter and the hull’s now-wavering course, its portside gravitic polarizer drive had been damaged and the crew-section breached. The craft was losing atmosphere, and a piece of junk the size of a small ball-bearing had punctured the bridge, killing the co-pilot where he sat.

“What treachery is this?” rr-Pilot’s growl was low, with a hard, fast vibratory underbuzz: the sound of a barely suppressed kill instinct.

hn-Pilot was still trying to make sense of the ambush. Clearly, the humans had preprogrammed this event into Lasso’s automatic routines. But why here, so far inside the Proxima system? And why an explosion of junk, jetting out of the four containers that had obviously been sealed with illegal explosive bolts? To destroy the kzin escorts, yes, perhaps, but then why not ensure that the spread pattern would create a full cone of debris, rather than this empty-cored funnel? Simply moving to the hull’s lengthwise center-line had allowed the two kzin craft to escape the worst effects of the-

“hn-Pilot, there is more activity.”

He looked up at rr-Pilot’s tone: puzzlement edged with dread. The dense, encircling halo of debris was beginning to fall forward around them, but less quickly, according to the scanners. That meant that the Lasso had stopped counterboosting, and they were matching speed to maintain distance-but why was the human craft not continuing to decelerate?

The answer was in rr-Pilot’s next report: “Lasso is tumbling, commander.”

A tumble meant that the human ship’s engines were no longer slowing her, so the debris would stay with all the craft slightly longer, now, continuing to hem them in. Indeed, the human ship’s spin about its considerable longitudinal axis would ultimately bring it end-over-end, so that the fusion drive would be in a position to exert forward thrust.

Or, in other words, the drive’s exhaust plume would rotate straight back into the faces of the two debris-encircled kzin smallships.

hn-Pilot saw it before the others. “One-eighty tumble and counterboost-max gees! Now! Do it now!”

But as the last word left his wet, spittle-spraying mouth, the blinding blow-torch tail of the Lasso’s fusion drive completed its one-hundred-eighty degree spin: hn-Pilot watched a literally blinding sun rise swiftly into his viewscreen-

— a split second before he and every other object in the two-ship kzin escort were stripped down into subatomic particles by the shaft of blue-white radiance that shot almost fifty kilometers behind the Euclid’s Lasso.

By the time the inner hatch of the secret asteroid base finally opened, Dieter Armbrust presumed he would find himself staring down the muzzles of at least half a dozen recoilless assault rifles. What he found instead was a single, slim woman of indeterminate age and Far East Asian descent. “Welcome,” she said. “I am Miriam Yang.”

The thirty-year-old lieutenant from Neue Ingolstadt nodded. “Yes, ma’am. You were one of the two specialists I was told might have sent the request that was the catalyst for this mission.”

“Which you have carried out quite well, Herrenman Armbrust.”

Dieter was partly flattered, partly insulted. “I am not a Wunderlander aristocrat, Dr. Yang. I do have my degree from the Uni in Munchen, and I was educated in a private school. But I am not the child of a wealthy family.”

“No? Then I suppose you must be quite talented, to have received state assistance to attend a private school.”

“Actually, I was not the truly gifted one. That was my older brother, Wulf. He received a full scholarship to go to the private school from the time he was a bub. Which meant my parents were able to save enough to send me, also.”

Dr. Yang’s gaze was unblinking, assessing. “Since you were not born into the herrenman aristocracy, I doubt your parents could afford more than half the tuition.”

“Exactly half,” confirmed Dieter.

“So, the Colonial Branch of the Amalgamated Regional Militia has sent me a half-genius.” Yang’s momentarily impish expression became severe once again. “Would you like some tea?”

Dieter nodded and followed her gesture into an adjoining room.

Dieter had expected that Dr. Yang’s offer of tea had simply been an invitation to nothing more than a shared cup. But he had been mistaken. As he now redid his collar button, still stunned at the events of the preceding half-hour and the stamina of the much-older Miriam Yang, he cleared his throat.

She looked over at him: her face was composed, serene, maybe a bit defiant. “It has been a long time, for me.” Her tone was matter-of-fact. “And it may be much longer from here on.”

Dieter cleared his throat again. “Dr. Yang, about that tea-”

She seemed to laugh; it was a muted sound. “Of course. The tea has been steeping; I hope you like it strong.”

Right now, thought Dieter, the stronger the better. “Yes, Doctor.”

She proffered a delicate china teacup. “So. You have brought the supplies I requested?”

“Yes. And we deposited the disguised reentry vehicle at the specified coordinates in the Serpent Swarm.”

“It is encased in rock, to look like the other asteroids?”

“Yes.” Curiosity got the better of Dieter: “Is it a delivery vehicle? For dropping a warhead?”

“In a manner of speaking. More tea?”

Dieter had not realized that he had already drained his cup. “Yes, please.”

Yang spoke as she poured. “That was quite a clever trick you pulled on the kzinti escorting you. Was it your idea?”

“Partly.”

Yang obviously knew false modesty when she heard it. “Not just a half-genius, are you, Lieutenant?”

“I was never sufficiently bookish, Doctor.”

“Ah. A man of action.” She smiled at him, glanced so briefly at his muscular thighs that he almost missed it. “How was it that the kzin did not find you and your team’s habitation module within Lasso’s main cargo hull?”

“We were already underway by the time the escorts caught up with us. When the kzin took over facilities that handle the Lasso, the documentation there indicated that her cargo was routine.”

“And they believed that?”

Dieter shrugged. “Evidently. After all, they had little reason to fear a single automated transport. Just how much military gear could it carry? And what would it achieve out here?”

“So, the kzin approach problems head-on. And foresee threats in the same way.”

“Hmm. I suspect it’s their first inclination, but I also saw evidence that some of them can learn to be a bit more, well, devious. Particularly if they are forced to contend with human sneakiness on a daily basis.”

“Not surprising. Indeed, I was worried that they might simply eliminate Euclid’s Lasso outright.”

“I did not share your worry, Doctor. Judging from events in Serpent’s Swarm, the kzin mostly observe a hands-off policy when it comes to local economies, even before a formal surrender. They have a keen understanding that damage to infrastructure means a reduction of tribute. And since Lasso’s payload was already outbound by the time they caught up with her, they probably concluded that we had not had enough time to put a military cargo in her. They presumed it was business as usual.”

“A presumption which they will now realize was erroneous.”

“Well, they’ll know something went wrong, but those two kzin smallships did not get a signal off. And once we take Lasso outsystem to rendezvous with the generation ships launching from Wunderland, the kzin will never be sure of just what did go wrong, even if they come out here to investigate.”

“If there’s anyone left alive by the time they come out here, that is.”

Dieter swallowed and nodded. That had been the hardest part of approving the operation: knowing that it might very well condemn the population of Proxima Centauri to slow death. Because when Dieter and the rest of his team rode the Lasso out into the void between this system and Earth, how would the needs of Proxima be served? What would happen to the men, the women, the children? The children…

Dieter opened his eyes, belatedly realizing that he had closed them. Yang was staring at him intently. “It may not be so dire, Lieutenant. The kzin will want to know what happened out here, so they will probably come quickly. When they arrive, they will find no evidence that the locals were involved in foul play. Presuming that they will leave the fate of Proxima in human hands, either a new cycling vessel will be tasked to provide for the system, or it will be evacuated.”

“But we don’t know that’s what will happen.”

“None of us ever know what is going to happen, Lieutenant.”

“You seemed to, Doctor.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m referring to your research proposal, Doctor. An eighty-page experimental précis doesn’t get whipped together in three days. But that’s how much time elapsed between the first news of the kzin invasion and the time you sent the proposal insystem by tightbeam relay.”

“That is because it was already written. As you surmised. But that did not require any powers of prophesy on my part, Lieutenant, simply reasonable deduction.”

“Deduction based on what?”

“Why, on the first warnings of alien contact we received from Sol’s high-power lascom array. The news that the kzinti had almost destroyed one of our deep-space STL ships years ago provided me with enough information that I was able to construct a research program to help us win a war against them. In concept, at least.”

“So you designed a multi-tiered set of research initiatives based on those first sketchy reports from Angel’s Pencil?”

“Yes, that is exactly what I did. And you must take them to Earth. And must give the Amalgamated Regional Militia’s leadership the necessary information for maintaining communications with me.”

“Which is to be accomplished by-?”

“Reception and transmission on my end will be by phased arrays, with the individual components embedded on native rocks that have been adjusted to maintain absolute position in relation to each other during their orbit of Proxima.”

“And how do you intend to send your signals to Earth without the kzinti detecting you?”

“The components of the array will send separate, intermittent bursts, usually no more than a few per month. These will mimic the local background noise, except that the frequencies and wavelengths are rare, for this region of space. It should be undetectable as a message, since the time intervals between the signals will be hours, or even days. Now, tell me: how much longer until the slow boats at Wunderland are ready to launch?”

“A month, maybe five weeks before the general exodus begins. Lasso will be on its way now, so as to match their vector and velocity. Once we’ve rendezvoused, we’ll transfer our hab module and join everyone else for a long, cold nap as we return to Earth. At which point your plans can be put before the Amalgamated Regional Militia. Although I confess, I’m not exactly sure how to do that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Dr. Yang, how do I get the ARM brass to listen to me long enough to ensure that your rather expensive project is delivered to people with enough clearance, and enough clout, to make it happen?”

“You will give them my name. That will be enough.”

“Just your name?”

“Yes.” She filled their teacups again. “Have you ever wondered how it was that the ARM managed to exert so much control over weapons and technology development out here in Centauri?”

Dieter smiled. “I have indeed wondered about that, since ARM supposedly has no official presence out here.”

“Just so, Lieutenant. You see, ARM has no way of working unobtrusively in a frontier environment the way it does on Earth. Back there, the entire solar system is under constant observation, and since all technological innovation is actually technological evolution, ARM’s observers know what precursor innovations to look for. They simply preempt would-be inventors before they achieve their goal.”

Dieter nodded, understanding. “But out here in Centauri that model doesn’t work. The population is too dispersed, too disparate.”

Yang shrugged. “The preferred method here is to wait, to watch, and to intervene selectively and secretly.”

“So you are ARM.”

“As much as one can be, beyond the Sol System, yes.”

“And the research team you indicated you were gathering for this project is already assembled-?”

“-and safely hidden on another rock.”

“A rock that’s big enough to store at least twenty years of consumables for you and your staff.”

Yang shook her head. “No. We, too, shall be in cryogenic sleep during your trip back to Sol.”

“And this place?”

Yang looked casually at the walls around her. “By sidereal midnight, it will be permanently abandoned. It will appear to have been ransacked by raiders.”

“Let me guess. Any records of either facility have already been erased from all files in the three Centauri systems.”

“Correct. Which means, of course, that if anything happened to us now, no one would know. So at this point, I suppose we are entirely in your hands, Lieutenant Armbrust.”

From her tone and unblinking gaze, Dieter wondered if Dr. Yang had meant that phrasing to obliquely prepare the ground for another intimate interlude and fresh pot of tea. He decided to interpret her words more literally: he drew his automatic and laid it beside him on the table. Yang looked at it; for the first time since he had entered her asteroid retreat, he saw an emotion pass across her supremely composed face. Well, technically, it was the second time he had seen the doctor without her façade of absolute composure-

She raised her eyes from the gun to meet his gaze, searching. “That is a most unusual gesture, Lieutenant.”

“As you said, you are in my hands.”

“And so?”

“And so, it seemed to those of us on the Lasso that however much good you would do here in the Centauri system, you would be infinitely more effective contributing to the war effort back on Earth. There you would have complete safety and the very best facilities in which to-”

Yang’s appraising eyes became distant, cold. “A half-genius, after all.” Her comment was not quite a pronouncement, was not quite spat out like bile, but it was close on both counts. She sat up very straight. “Lieutenant, I will guide you through the flaws of your conclusion. And you will not interrupt, because I sincerely doubt you have anything to add that I have not already considered.”

Dieter shrugged, leaned back. And being a creature of habit, he made sure that his change of position did not increase the amount of time it would take for him to reach his sidearm.

“Lieutenant, when you awaken in the Sol system, you will indeed be in the safest, best place in which to conduct a scientific experiment. Except in this one, crucial particular: there will be almost no kzin test subjects on Earth. The kzinti are here. This is where they will work, where they will ‘play.’ Where they will live, die, mate, make war, make mistakes-and will occasionally go missing. A resistance organization is already being laid out quietly on Wunderland. And so the kzin will experience ambushes there. There will be hunting accidents that claim both their young and their old. There will be trips that go awry, there will be lost castaways, renegades, adventurers, wanderers. In short, the kzin will suffer the losses that are inevitable during an extended occupation. And during the years you and I are sleeping, select agents will take advantage of these unlucky kzinti. They shall provide us with our first samples. If you are squeamish, you might not want to hear what is involved; if you are vengefully minded, you might savor the details. No matter: we are fighting for our lives and we do not have the luxury of gentle methods.

“Consequently, when my team and I awaken, we will remotely access the data compiled from these samples and from long years of observing kzin behavior and practices. And from that information and from those samples, and with the aid of the research you will cause to commence on Earth, we will eventually design weapons specially tailored to eliminate the kzin invaders.”

“You mean a selective bioweapon, a tailored virus?”

“Our ambitions go well beyond that, Lieutenant. However, suffice it to say that whatever weapon is to be used against them, it will be far more effective if it is produced, and readied, here. You will have live kzin subjects on Earth eventually, but probably never enough to amass as diverse a sample base as we will have accumulated here. And besides, what good is a secret weapon if you cannot be sure it will survive deployment? If it must cross space to get here, traveling in a ship, how could we be sure that it will not also be destroyed with that ship in battle? On the other hand, if the weapon is already here, and ready to deploy in proximity to the most sensitive enemy targets-”

“Yes. I see. But why do you think we will have any live subjects on Earth at all?”

Yang raised one pencil-thin eyebrow. “Do you really doubt the kzinti will attack our home system? Be assured of this: they will. They must. Indeed, I suspect that the first attacks on Sol will have occurred before your own voyage has ended. Their gravitic polarizers should allow them to make that same journey in five, six years, at the most.”

Dieter had a sudden vision of taking a shuttle down for his first visit to Earth, to the homeworld and womb of the human race, watching the disembarkation ramp lower-only to reveal a smoke-plumed panorama of devastation. He swallowed: “That’s a disturbing concept, Dr. Yang.”

“Perhaps. But remember: the kzinti leap before they look. I suspect Earth’s defense fleets shall take advantage of this repeatedly. And with every defeat, the kzinti will leave behind new technology that we will reverse-engineer. Imperfectly, of course, but we will narrow those gaps that exist. And in the course of such clashes, you will also have the opportunity-if you are very careful-to gather experimental subjects. Not many perhaps. But you will be able to examine the kzinti in ways that even I cannot, because you will control their environment absolutely. Conversely, I will have access to an immense social sample, but must observe it surreptitiously, from hiding. However, working together, we will be able to find the strategic pearl of great price: the answer to what makes a male kzin-a kzintosh-tick.”

“I presume you are not referring to anything as simple as biological imperatives.”

“You are on the verge of redeeming yourself, half-genius.” Dr. Yang smiled; Dieter wished she hadn’t. The expression was so unsuited to her face that it looked more like a rictus. “We must learn about their psychology, about their inner lives. Not just what they will show us in the course of our normal interactions with them; we must have knowledge of their emotions and thought patterns.”

Dieter nodded. “Of course. And when they invade our homesystem, we will undoubtedly take some prisoners. And with an unlimited amount of time in which to conduct interrogations-”

“No!” Dieter was startled by the loud, sharp monosyllable that jumped out of Yang’s small mouth. “I am not referring to interrogations. That would be completely counterproductive. What we must acquire is a command of their true, seminal psychology. And to do that, we will need to observe them without the trappings of culture and training. You will be in a position to separate their nature from their nurture.”

“What?”

Yang sighed. “Let me put it this way: what we learn from our society shapes us, prepares us to live in a particular cultural milieu, but it does so by coercing us to privilege some instincts and behaviors over others. That is the nurture component of our maturation process.”

“And nature is what we get from our genetics and epigenetics.”

“Exactly. And that is where the key of the primal kzin is to be found. To put this into terms that bear upon the outcome of this war, it seems urgent to answer this question: how would a kzintosh behave, think, feel if he was not raised among his own kind?”

“Who knows? Perhaps they are more extensively ‘hard-wired’ than we are, less dependent upon cultural shaping.”

“Perhaps,” agreed Yang, “but I suspect we will find that they actually have a very carefully controlled cultural environment.”

“Why?”

“Because what little we have learned thus far suggests that the females of the species are not merely protected and hidden, but sequestered from their own male cubs within mere months of giving birth to them.”

“What’s your point?”

“Let me put it in familiar terms: if you take humans away from their parents when they are toddlers or younger, they will not develop as most other children. This would be particularly true if they are put in an environment filled with daunting physical requirements, harsh discipline, and rich rewards for properly focused violence.”

“So you’re saying that, without their current upbringing, kzinti would be just big, cuddly, housecats?”

“Nothing could be further from what I mean. They are what their evolution has made them: superb killing machines. But as in all successful societies, adult kzinti will shape their young by amplifying their optimal traits with behavioral training and encouragements.”

“Perhaps all this is true, Dr. Yang, but tell me: why do we need to know what they’d be like without the cultural shaping? It’s not like we’re ever going to meet a kzin without it.”

“No, but we might create one ourselves.”

“To use in further experiments?”

“No: to use as a political liaison. Either this will be a war of extermination, or it will eventually end, through victory or exhaustion. And when that moment comes, it would be most helpful to have a kzin who considers us its mentors, its parents, its family.”

Yang leaned forward, tilted the teapot toward Dieter’s cup: nothing came out. “And so,” she finished, putting down the pot and folding her hands in her lap, “that is why I must stay here and not flee to Sol. I must remain to perform the research that can only be performed here. And that is why you must take the details of the research agenda back to Earth: so that we may isolate and identify the key features of the kzin nature.” She looked meaningfully at the handgun that was still resting on the table.

Dieter picked it up and returned it to its holster. “It seems you are needed here after all, Dr. Yang.”

She nodded, her eyes unblinking once again. “We all serve different needs, Lieutenant. Do be so good as to help me prepare another pot of tea.” She rose, hips swaying slightly more than necessary.

Dieter, shrugging, rose and followed her.

2396 CE: Sol System, Rearguard of the Third Kzin Invasion Fleet

Thrarm-Captain panted in open-mouthed hatred: the viewscreen showed yet another spray of glittering sparks that sought out and then converged upon the dim mote that marked the location of the rearguard’s last Slaughter-class battle cruiser. After a moment of darkness, there was a flicker, a flare, and then a white-blue sphere, expanding sharply from a brief, pin-point brilliance, a radiant halo chasing outward before it.

“Thrarm-Captain, Defiant Snarl is confirmed lost. The van continues to pull ahead of us, and-”

“-And that is a good thing, zh-Sensor. The van of the Fleet is supposed to gain more distance. We are the rearguard: we are accomplishing our task.”

“Without question, Thrarm-Captain, but were we not told to detach from the rearguard and rejoin the van when it had attained a distance of thirty light-seconds from the human flotillas?”

Thrarm-Captain’s ears became more rigid but pushed downward: zh-Sensor was correct. Of course, they should never have been in the rearguard in the first place. The unexpected arrival of the second half of the human fleet, converging as scores of cannily hidden squadrons, had made a ruin of the kzinti’s penultimate attack formation. The human surprise had put them swiftly and entirely off-balance: the kzin left flank had become the front, and the front had become the far right flank. Auxiliaries were suddenly in the line of battle; dreadnaughts were occluded by their own craft, unable to bring their firepower to bear with maximum effect. The third kzin fleet to attack Sol had studied and learned the bitter lessons the monkey boys had taught them during the two prior invasions. And this time, the kzin had been on the verge of defeating the spindly leaf-eaters-or so it had seemed.

Now, in the few spare moments between coordinating anti-missile fire and swatting away single-ships equipped with crude equivalents of kzin gravitic polarizer drives, Thrarm-Captain reflected upon how the outcome of this battle recalled the human martial art known as judo. The monkeys had not defeated this third invasion of their homesystem by meeting force with force, but by using the kzinti’s offensive momentum against them. The Heroes of the Fleet had broken the first human formations and had pressed on, eager to bring their weapons to bear upon the great prize: Earth itself. But that had been a baited trap. The real human defenses-smaller, lighter, unthinkably numerous craft-had materialized from various points of the battlesphere, and in so doing, caught the kzinti off balance. The kzin firepower was all on the line, which is precisely where the humans did not strike. And by the time the Fleet’s deployment could be altered, and the weapons of its battlewagons brought to bear, the regrouped heavy elements of the human main fleet had returned, and the rout of the kzinti had begun.

Thrarm-Captain wanted to call it a retreat, but that would have merely been a self-flattering fiction. True, the kzin had been able to throw together a rearguard to cover the withdrawal of the most important Fleet assets. And true, they had inflicted horrible losses upon the humans. But there were so many of the small enemy ships, and they spent themselves so freely, that there had been no chance to reform properly. The situation was so chaotic and fluid that it was no longer a true battle: it had devolved into a scattered collection of desperate brawls.

Thrarm-Captain knew zh-Sensor was waiting for his response and, gallingly, also knew that zh-Sensor was right: it was time for them to abandon the rearguard. The terrible strength of Thrarm-Captain’s hull was not intended for hunting or attacking, but for protecting. Only chance and dire need had put his ship, Guardant Ancestor, in direct engagement with the enemy. His job, and his hull’s very design, dictated that he keep his precious passengers out of harm’s way. But, today, the humans had made nonsense of everyone’s supposed missions: now, simple survival would be accomplishment enough.

“zh-Sensor, I need a close sweep of surrounding space. Helm: plot a course-shortest possible-to rejoin the main van. Communications, open a channel-”

“Thrarm-Captain.” It was zh-Sensor again, but his voice sounded different. Intrigued. Maybe puzzled. Possibly both.

“Yes, Sensor?”

“There is a Raker-class escort approaching from our aft port quarter low. It seems to be heavily damaged, Thrarm-Captain. It is venting volatiles and its energy output is irregular.”

A Raker-class? Well, there still were some in the Fleet, but not many. They had been far more numerous in the formations of the Second Fleet, but very few of them had come back. Designed for stealth and swift action, they had been optimal hulls for conducting operations within the peripheries of the Sol System’s asteroid belt. Unfortunately, their speed and diminished radar signature had been acquired at the expense of armor and protective screens: the Rakers had ultimately proven far too vulnerable to the humans’ weaponry. “Can you establish communications with it? What is its transponder code?”

zh-Sensor shook his fine-boned head. “No response to our hails, Thrarm-Captain. Their transponder is only transmitting intermittent characters.”

“Can you verify that the characters are in the Heroes’ Script?”

“Yes, the symbols are clearly Kzanzh’ef, but the sequence is too broken up for us to know if they are part of an authentic Third Fleet identification sequence.”

Thrarm-Captain felt a tinge of caution war with the stronger desire to save any of the other true Heroes of this fleet, particularly those who had fought a delaying action with weak ships against an overwhelming enemy. “How badly damaged are they?”

“Unclear, Thrarm-Captain. But energy spikes indicate thermal flares, probably from internal fuel explosions. There have been several combustion plumes-hydrogen, we presume-that support this analysis.”

“And other than the transponder signal, no communication whatsoever?”

“None, Thrarm-Cap-wait.” zh-Sensor’s ears stood up rigid, like wind-filled half-parasols. “They have shut down their fusion plant and are running off capacitors. Which they are turning on and off. Repeatedly.”

“So?”

“Sir, the pattern of the on-off sequencing: it is the Scout’s Tapping, Thrarm-Captain!”

The Scout’s Tapping? Thrarm-Captain’s lower jaw hung slightly; his angry, tooth-lined maw reflected faintly in the glass of an inert display screen. The humans had rarely, if ever, encountered the archaic code known as the Scout’s Tapping, so it seemed increasingly likely that he stood in a position to rescue Heroes who had fought well from ships that were outgunned and outdated. But until the other ship could officially prove its identity, he had to ignore it. He knew he should not feel a simmering rage against those protocols-the monkeys’ tendency toward guile and deception had made these precautions necessary-but still, they were now keeping him from doing what his instinct and the Hero’s Creed told him to do: save a ship that was obviously manned by his brothers.

zh-Sensor cleared his throat. It was a sound like a small motor starting. “Thrarm-Captain, are we to return the Raker’s signal?”

“What are they Tapping?”

“That their hunt is over, Thrarm-Captain. They must abandon their ship; they ask us for lifeboats.”

“Lifeboats? Why?”

zh-Sensor’s voice was low. “Because their commander knows that, with his transponder damaged, we cannot authenticate his vessel as belonging to the Fleet.”

The gesture was either the mark of a truly brave Hero-willing to take his chance among the leaf-eaters in lifeboats-or of a truly audacious deception. Maybe, reasoned Thrarm-Captain even as he recoiled from the implicit weakness of the act, it would be best to simply send over some lifeboats…

“Thrarm-Captain, human small-boats inbound.”

Thrarm-Captain swiveled toward the targeting screens. “Where?”

“Approaching us from the lee side of the Raker, Thrarm-Captain. Our firing solution lies directly through it.”

“Fire self-guiding seekers,” Thrarm-Captain yowled, but knew it would not be enough. The defensive batteries of three human smallships, coordinated in interlocking fields of fire, would certainly defeat his anemic missile attack. At most, he was buying the Raker some time.

zh-Sensor swallowed. “The Raker is turning about to engage them, sir. It is re-starting its fusion plant, but it seems to be having trouble.”

Well, of course; they had to shut down the fusion plant so that their on-off power pulses would come through as the Scout’s Tapping. The output of a live fusion plant would have drowned out the fluctuations in the smaller energy signature, much as the roar of nearby waterfalls had, in primeval times, made the original Scout’s Tapping useless. But, from a cold restart, that same fusion plant would take some time before rebuilding to optimal output.

On the main plot, the small vermillion speck of the Raker was gamely trying to come about and intercept the three, leaf-green lancets bearing down on Guardant Ancestor. Thrarm-Captain felt his gorge rise in frustration: frustration at not turning to fight, at failing to lend his aid and firepower to the stricken Raker, and above all, at not having immediately offered to rescue his fellow Heroes.

zh-Sensor started: “The Raker is firing beams and missiles-many missiles! Large-warhead drones, evidently. Two human craft have slowed their approach, and one has been damaged and broken off. The drones are slowing, though-”

Thrarm-Captain narrowed his eyes, felt his vocal chords vibrating, quaking, as he held back a scream of impotent rage. “Those are not drones. They were his lifeboats.”

“Thrarm-Captain, the lead human craft has been hit and destroyed. The second is damaged, but now reapproaching.” zh-Sensor blinked at his relays. “And-and you were correct, Thrarm-Captain; the Raker discharged its escape pods and lifeboats along with its missiles-”

“-thereby making it look, for a moment, like it had superior armament. Which disrupted the coordination of the human attack. Buying more time for us, but dooming themselves when the humans resume their attack. And see, they do so even now. This time, the leaf-eaters will finish the job. And the crew of the Raker has no way left to escape.”

But the Raker’s fusion drives surged to life and it discharged its beam weapons in the same moment that two human missiles hit the spindly hull, along with a brace of x-ray laser bursts.

The lasers hit the Raker’s tankage sections, but without any free oxygen, the result was simply a profound out-gassing of most of the remaining fuel. The human missiles, however, hit the gunnery decks, which fell suddenly and ominously silent. The interior explosions seemed a bit smaller than Thrarm-Captain might otherwise have expected, but for all he knew, the Raker’s racks were dry, and one of the human warheads might have been a dud. Either way, the Raker was now all but dead: fuel already low, and its systems evidently failing, the fusion plant died out again.

But the brief fire by the kzin ship’s full-powered beams had destroyed one of the two persistent attackers, the last of which now the last flinched back, withdrawing along with the first one the Raker had injured. Powering its gravitic polarizer drive from capacitors only, the Raker struggled to come back about and keep up with the rearguard-but would clearly not be able to do so much longer.

“More Scout’s Tapping in power pulses,” zh-Sensor murmured. “They send ‘Hsna’zhao.’”

The ancient Kzanzh byword of resolve, even in death, hsna’zhao meant, roughly, “on with the hunt!” It was the exhortation of a dying Hero to his living companions: to fight on, to not risk themselves by tarrying beside one who was already as good as dead.

Thrarm-Captain growled: he could take no more of this. “Helm, distance to the van?”

“Twenty-two light-seconds, Thrarm-Captain.”

Good: they could afford a little time. “Reduce acceleration to one-half. Hold steady so the Raker can come alongside.”

zh-Sensor looked up: contending emotions warred in his eyes. “Thrarm-Captain, I mean no insolence. I simply remind you of the protocols.”

The kzin captain reared to his full height. “Since the Raker appeared on our screens, I have chased my tail around that very issue, zh-Sensor. I can abide these overcautious dictates no longer. This is clearly one of our own craft, crippled, but brave in our defense. The humans attacked it and they destroyed one of the leaf-eaters’ smallships: we saw it with our own eyes. And they speak our language, know our Tapping, act as we would ourselves.”

“A clever foe might learn all these things.”

“Yes, they might, but to squander such a ploy here, in the midst of this chaos? No. That is not possible. And they have no way of knowing what we carry on board Guardant Ancestor, so we may safely set aside suspicions that this is a trap laid especially for us. Which leaves only one reasonable explanation: that every second we waste debating the obvious, our brothers remain in mortal danger of another attack like the last.”

zh-Sensor’s hide rippled sharply, once. Clearly, he had wanted to go to the aid of their fellow Heroes every bit as much as his captain. The captain turned toward his Helm and, as he gave instructions for allowing the Raker to dock, thought it is good to lead Heroes worthy of their title.

The kzin troopers, beamers held in a comfortable assault carry, straightened when Thrarm-Captain came around the bend in the main passageway. The squad leader made the stylized submission gesture that was a salute among them. “Thrarm-Captain, we had no word that you would be joining-”

“I sent no word: I did not wish to disturb your preparations. But I wish to see the Raker’s crew for myself.”

The squad leader’s eyes narrowed. “Uncertainty persists regarding their identity?”

“Uncertainty will persist until I have seen their commander, have accepted his salute, and have had you search every cubic meter of his ship. Which we will evacuate and then scuttle. But I am equally eager to be the first to welcome him: if it was mine to bestow upon him, I would give him a Name.”

“Sir!” The squad leader stood very straight, almost presented arms.

The floor jarred softly under their broad, well-padded feet. “Hard dock completed,” announced the junior squad leader, who checked his wrist comp. “The hardwire links are mated, but still no coherent data, and no video-feed from the Raker’s airlock. Their commo system is down, apparently.”

Reasonable, thought Thrarm-Captain, but in no way reassuring. “Visual check?”

The junior squad-leader had undogged the inner hatch of the Guardant Ancestor, entered its airlock, hunkered down to peer through the small, thick-paned porthole that should have looked through a similar window into the airlock of the Raker. “Again, no visuals, Thrarm-Captain. The glass is smoke-smudged, and it appears that their airlock has only one emergency light functioning.”

“Are they sending anything through the docking hardwire?”

“Yes, sir. They are pulsing it in the Scout’s Tapping. They are asking if our side is secure, sir. They have no sensor function to determine that the hard dock is complete, or that we stand ready on our side.”

Again, perfectly reasonable, given the circumstances. And again, not in the least bit reassuring. “Seal for vacuum ops.” Thrarm-Captain’s own actions suited his orders. “First Squad, force manual entry into the Raker. Stand ready to attack or assist.”

The kzinti so instructed loped into Guardant Ancestor’s airlock, worked at the manual access to the Raker’s outer airlock door, gave up, popped an access plate in its surface, revealing, among other things, a simple hand-crank. The largest of them spun the crank while the others waited. The door eventually gapped a bit, allowing the others to wedge in pry-bars and open it fully.

“The Raker is outgassing, even here in the airlock,” one of them reported, consulting his paw-held sensor.

“Atmosphere?”

“Standard, but a lot of hydrogen mixed in. They must have fuel leaks throughout the ship.”

A leak which Thrarm-Captain didn’t want entering his own ship any longer than necessary. Hydrogen’s flammability was the least of his worries: its monoatomic ability to undermine solids-metals, synthetics, composites-by simply passing through them led to a condition called brittlization. After enough exposure, gaskets disintegrated, steel sheeting crumbled like desiccated plastic. “Move quickly, then. What about their inner airlock door?”

“Battle damage, but I can hear someone pounding behind it.”

“How bad is the damage?”

“Bad enough, Thrarm-Captain.”

“That answer is no answer, Corporal. Tell me what needs to be done to open the door and how long it will take.”

“Beam-torch: three minutes, maybe four.”

“Then do it, and quickly.”

“At the run, Thrarm-Captain.”

Within seconds, the sparking glow of a beam-torch flickered inside the airlock. Satisfied, Thrarm-Captain caught the squad leader’s eye and made a grasping “to-me” hand gesture. The kzin noncom came immediately.

Thrarm-Captain leaned their space helmets together. He muted his radio feed and said, “This concerns me, squad leader.”

“The amount of time this is taking, or the possibility of treachery?”

“Both. I want you to summon two more squads to this area, but do not deploy them around the airlock. Keep them back, in staggered positions, protecting all junctures, all the way back to the main passageway and command bulkheads.”

“Yes, Thrarm-Captain.” And then the troop leader was gone, already summoning in the squads and preparing a defensive network with multiple fallback positions.

Thrarm-Captain toggled his radio open again. “zh-Sensor: report.”

“We are now twenty-four light-seconds behind the van. This puts us abreast of the leading elements of the rearguard, now.”

“Yes. And the Raker?”

“Sir, no activity at all, except that its power output continues to diminish steadily.”

“The human ships?”

“The ones which attacked the Raker fell back and have merged into the front rank of the leaf-eating harriers that are pushing us before them. But nothing else: no sign of heavier human hulls inbound.”

“Very well. Inform me at once of any changes.”

“Yes, Thrarm-Captain. I will-”

That was when, with a shrill screech of high-pressure atmosphere, the beam-torch team cut through the Raker’s inner airlock door: a brief wash of low-pressure flame flared up as it did. The operator quickly switched off the torch.

“What the Patriarch’s entrails just happened?” demanded Thrarm-Captain, instinctively moving closer to the source of the surprise.

“Thrarm-Captain, the atmosphere on the other side of the door is under tremendous pressure.” The high-pitched keening of the in-pouring gases almost made his report inaudible.

At that moment, a toxicity alarm started yowling and the specialist with the wrist comp looked up sharply. “Thrarm-Captain, the gas from the Raker: it’s pure hydrogen. Coming in at a rate of-”

But Thrarm-Captain wasn’t listening: he no longer needed to. He was too busy damning his own gullibility and rapping out orders: “Torch team, immediate return to our hull. Seal our hatches behind you. Bridge, jettison the emergency docking ring-”

The world seemed to tear itself apart around him. Before the torch team could exit the Raker’s shattered airlock, its inner door was blasted off its hinges with terrible force, killing two of the team outright, disabling a third.

Following that blast so quickly that it seemed to be part of the same event, flame came gushing into the companionways of Guardant Ancestor. The first roaring rush of white fire was the hydrogen combusting, knocking the kzinti down or spilling them sideways against walls and bulkheads. But hard on its heels came a thicker yellow-orange conflagration: clearly, a pressurized fuel-air explosive gas was being pumped in at immense pressure, right behind the hydrogen. The unit patches on the kzinti’s spacesuits began to burn. The battery of the beam-torch cooked off, detonating with a blue-white flash and a double-toned thunder-clap.

zh-Sensor’s voice was screaming reports as Thrarm-Captain picked himself up off the deck. “Launches from the Raker. More lifepods-no, not lifepods. Can’t be: they are maneuvering, moving straight toward our hull-”

Of course. The leaf-eaters are going to cut their way into my ship: why use an existing door when you can make your own? “zh-Sensor, engage the pods with all weapons; they are breaching craft.”

“Trying, Thrarm-Captain. They are too close; our weapons will not bear.”

That’s when the shooting started. The screaming buzz of a human heavy-coil gun was audible through Thrarm-Captain’s supposedly sound-proof faceplate, along with images of hellish carnage. The squad leader, who had been racing around the corner toward the airlock, caught a full flight of the electromagnetically propelled four-millimeter, tungsten-cored, steel needles. One moment he was there; the next, a vaguely bipedal mist of plasma and body parts was falling backward, a diffusing red smear. Following close behind him, a newly arrived junior squad leader was blown aside by just two of the projectiles, each one opening up a red crater on the left side of his torso.

Thrarm-Captain had his own handgun up as a reflective object rolled swiftly past the tee-intersection where the two kzinti had been riddled. Thrarm-Captain sent three fast rounds after it, may have hit the device, which, he now discerned, resembled a large metal ball propelled by four roller-rings on interpenetrated axes.

The full implications of what Thrarm-Captain was witnessing sunk in. The leaf-eaters were on his ship, with specialized combat ’bots. Somehow they knew what he was carrying, why his ship was built for defense not offense. It was impossible to conceive of how they had learned it, but they had, and their intent was now clear: they did not want to destroy his ship; they wanted to take it.

Unthinkable.

Thrarm-Captain had his mouth open to order his bridge crew to override all local controls and autoseal all bulkhead doors when there was a muffled blast from aft; the lights flickered and the faintly crackling carrier-tone of the command-channel died away. It came back after a moment, along with approximately half of the lights.

zh-Sensor’s words were tinny in the helmet’s compromised speakers: “Thrarm-Captain, power in Engineering is out. Apparently the humans have already sent some automated EMP bombs on ahead to-”

There was a dull explosion from the direction the robot-ball had gone-and zh-Sensor’s words died along with the rest of the lights. Leaf-eating spoor-spawn humans: they didn’t even have the courage to board themselves and-

Thrarm-Captain, changing his handgun’s now-malfunctioning power-pack, heard and then saw the approach of a new human robot: a floating oblong that bristled with weapons, one of which was clearly the hopper-fed coil-gun that had already killed two of his Heroes.

Screaming rage, seeing the spittle spray in a fine mist against the inner surface of his helmet’s face-plate, Thrarm-Captain seated the power pack, and brought up his weapon.

Which operated slightly longer than he did: the grav-chassised robot fired a stream of needles into the big kzin’s center of mass. Dead instantaneously, Thrarm-Captain’s finger remained frozen around the trigger: the gun fired a few rounds of futile defiance before falling to the deck in imitation of its wielder.

The autocutter-an expensive, purpose-built, one-use device derived from reverse-engineered kzin weapon technology-finished slicing into the hull of the kzin auxiliary cruiser that Lieutenant Commander Dieter Armbrust had determined was his op team’s target.

“Holding at two meters standoff,” announced the boarding pod’s steersman.

“Deploy charge; detonate at will,” responded Dieter.

The gravitically tamped charge-which cost a small fortune-spat out of the boarding-pod’s nose. It sunk snugly into a small depression that had been burned into the hull. It was ringed by a three-centimeter-deep groove that the autocutter had sliced fifteen seconds earlier.

“Three seconds.” Dieter checked his gear: mostly non-lethals. However, for entry, he was carrying a retrofitted kzin beamer: a carbine and, therefore, right-sized for him.

“Fire in the hole,” warned the gunnery sergeant in charge of the heavy weapons.

One sharp jar, and then the steersman was moving the pod in quickly, making his confirmations as he went: “Charge was successful: One-point-five-meter breaching hole established.” A soft bump as the pod kissed the holed hull: “Pressure gasket is deployed and holding; we have hard dock.”

The gunnery sergeant pressed a few virtual buttons on the heavy weapons control console. “Deploying proximity security packages.” Almost inaudible through the layers that were still between the boarding team and the interior of the kzin ship, there was a long ripping sound like an oversized popcorn popper in overdrive. “Cluster munitions have cleared ingress point. Releasing hunter-killer ROVs.”

Dieter nodded, turned to the six men in Alpha Team. “It’s easy to forget your training because of the excitement.” Or fear. But I can’t use that word, not here, not now. “So, one more time by the numbers. We enter in twos, we fan out, using the maps that are being uploaded by the ROVs to our helmet processors right now. Once we have located the target, we move toward it directly, leapfrog advance. A pair of ROVs will cover our six. Watch for friendlies; all teams are converging on the same point. Lethal systems are ‘weapons free’ until we reach and confirm the target. Then, only designated sharpshooters remain ‘weapons free’ with lethals: all the rest of us shift over to non-lethal systems. As soon as I signal ‘objective achieved,’ we reverse our path and fall back upon our pods. Watch for ambushes on the way out.” Dieter checked his watch. “Any questions?” Heads rotated tightly from side to side. “Gunny, are the ROVs done?”

“Almost, skipper. Ran into a few big bucks in terminal defensive positions. They took out one of my ’bots. Damn, but the ratcats have good night vision, even unaided. But that’s the last of them. I think I’m seeing the objective ahead. I’m labeling its location as Zone Cougar on your maps.”

Dieter glanced at the forehead HUD in his helmet. “Got it. And they’ve lost power in there?”

“Sure looks like it. Seems like this ship doesn’t have any more defense against internal EMP weapons than the other kzin battlewagons.”

Although I’ll bet today’s escapade might change that. Dieter nodded to his team. “Ready, team. Steersman, we go on ‘three.’ Cycle the valve in one, two, THREE-”

The iris valve at the front of the boarding pod contracted out of the way with a shuddering hiss-and they were in tiger-country. Dieter revised that assessment after a quick look through his thermal imaging goggles: they were in dead tiger country. To an unpracticed eye, it would have appeared to be the aftermath of a fevered abattoir nightmare, but knowing the sequence in which the hull had been breached and entered, Dieter had a precise forensic understanding of what he was seeing.

The lowest layer of kzin corpses, barely visible under the others, had been the first to die: they were both blasted and pulped. These were the ratcats who had been tasked with intercepting whatever came out of the human pod that had been sighted boring through this part of their hull. God knows what they expected to achieve beyond suicide. The gravitically tamped breaching charge had blasted in against them with the force of a 250-kilo bomb, then there had been explosive decompression tugging them right back out an instant later, until the pod made its hard-dock. There wasn’t much left of that first kzin welcoming committee.

The second scattering of corpses was piled atop the first. These were more conventionally riddled and dismembered: the late responders, or maybe simply those with enough self-control to hang back around a corner until all the carnage of the initial boarding was over. They had, however, come face to face with the first packages to emerge from the small payload bay at the front of the pod: small, self-propelled cluster-bomblet robots, most of which, like bees, had destroyed themselves in making their attack.

The third, less numerous and more scattered, group of corpses, were those that had run into the gunnery sergeant’s remote-operated attack drones. More responsive than simple robots, these partially autonomous systems had gunned down any remaining defenders, and were now watching Dieter’s flank and rear.

He glanced up to check his HUD’s objective locator guidon and aimed his hand aft. “This way. Follow me.”

Despite all the precautions and the support robots and ROVs, Alpha Team still had some problems. About halfway to their goal, they had a short, sharp meeting engagement with a trio of kzinti who had evidently been moving aft to protect the objective area. It had been a point-blank firefight, the muzzles of the contending beamers and coil guns almost touching as they discharged. The humans got off the first shot, accomplishing that only because the point-man’s thermal-imaging goggles showed a split-second haze of approaching body heat before the lead kzin came around the corner. The savage fight lasted four seconds, and Dieter’s one casualty wasn’t even inflicted by weapon fire: it was a melee kill. The unfortunate trooper’s coil rifle had taken off the gun hand of a kzin only two meters away. It had also punched a hole, big enough to see daylight through, through his right lung. But without breaking its stride, the kzin closed and scooped out the trooper’s Adam’s apple with one sweep of his remaining, claw-sprouting hand. Then the rest of Alpha Team reduced him to a riddled and seared mélange of orange fur and red blood.

Just before reaching their objective, Alpha had another gunfight, which lasted longer due to the team’s intentionally decreased firepower. Rather than take any chances, Dieter had already ordered that two of his remaining five men go over to non-lethals. It simply didn’t make any sense to get so close to the objective, only to destroy it themselves.

But the kzinti facing them-either because their communication was down, or because they were still trying to adapt to the rapidly changing scenario-did not anticipate that there would be a whole new contingent of human boarders converging on the objective. So when the six commandos of Gamma Team arrived, unbloodied and alert, they made quick work of the remaining kzinti defenders.

Dieter now cautiously scanned the wide, high-ceilinged objective area: it looked vaguely like a gymnasium. “Report.”

The response “Clear” came from the four point men moving gingerly among structures that looked like a cross between jungle-gyms and torture devices.

Dieter toggled his open channel. “All teams, Alpha and Gamma are at the objective. Beta Team, continue toward rendezvous. All other teams, converge into defensive positions ringing objective, as per op order ‘Sierra.’” Dieter used his chin to choose his own team’s tactical channel, and discovered that there was already too much chatter on it. “Pipe down. Sergeant Aquino?”

“Yes, sir?”

“On me. Let’s see what we’ll be dealing with.”

As it turned out, there wasn’t much to deal with at all. They easily found the door leading into the terminal objective: it was completely unlike the efficient naval architecture and fittings that surrounded it. The doorway was an irregular frame of crude, hand-beaten brass, distressed to impart the impression of great age. It was what Dieter would have expected at the threshold of a dragon’s lair. Which, on reflection, pretty much defined the room his team was about to enter.

Naturally, it was locked and he had no doubt that the mechanism was sturdy. But not sturdy enough to shrug off his gravitically tamped charges. His demo specialist was almost done with setting the four-point package when Aquino, whose ears probably rivaled those of their kzinti opponents, held up a hand. “Wait. I hear something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.” He looked at the brazen-bound portal. “Almost like-rabbits screaming.”

Dieter felt the hair on the back of his neck stand suddenly erect as a chill washed through him. “Finish and blow the package.”

“But sir-”

“Do it. NOW!” Dieter scrambled back. “Fire in the hole!”

Three seconds later, as the demo specialist dove past him, the charge went off with a shuddering roar, followed by a metallic clangor as the brutally twisted doorframe went cart-wheeling away.

And in the wake of that sound arose mewling cries of confused, mortal terror-counterpointed by what sounded like a ragged chorus of snarling sobs.

Dieter leaped up and toward the deformed, blackened doorway. “On me, all numbers!”

Aquino and one of his troopers were through the door before Dieter, but they lagged to a halt as they crossed the threshold, not understanding what they were seeing at first. But Dieter had anticipated this, had argued with the command staff to have it included in the training materials, had worried about it from the moment he had been given the clearance to see Dr. Yang’s full report. So he was the first to act.

He brought up his needler and dumped half a clip of its tranq-gelatin wedges into the closest kzin female, who was about to tear off the head of her own kit. She swayed, but the drug didn’t take effect fast enough. Her raking claws were off the mark, but still lethal-just not clean and swift. The small kit, no more than four weeks old, dropped to the deck, shriek-mewling, one of his lungs and much of his intestines spilling out.

Damn it: they’re too strong to succumb to the drugs immediately. Now if they’d given me the high-octane non-lethals I’d asked for-but that was all spilt milk. And Dieter had no time to cry over it. “Switch back to lethals. Two-tap the females-all of them.” He dropped his needler and snatched up his coil gun, already tracking across the loose throng of kzinretti and putting two rounds in each one that danced through his sights.

A moment later, his men followed suit. Some, lately arrived, did not understand the nuances of the situation, and actually shot a pair of kits. Aquino knocked their muzzles aside and shredded them with oaths as pointed and lethal as the projectiles of their own coil guns.

But critical damage had been done to the nursery’s precious population, overwhelmingly inflicted by the female kzin themselves. Walking through the litter of bodies, Dieter called out to the xenomed specialist every time he found a live kit. He did not call out very often. He worked deeper into the collective safehold of the harems of the senior flag officers.

At the very rear, in an alcove that was shrouded and almost completely unlit, Dieter saw faint signs of movement. Was it the admiral’s mate, perhaps: is that why she was in what looked like a specially secluded boudoir-bower? But no, he realized as he came closer, although it was a special place, set aside for privacy, it also permitted discrete observation. It had not been arrayed and appointed for mating.

It was for birthing.

Dieter parted the roughly spun gossamer blinds with the barrel of his gun, cautious but also feeling a sudden, deep spike of guilt. The female, stretched on her side, moved listlessly: one coil gun projectile, probably a stray, had gone through her neck. The wound, not arterial but severe, had created a puddle of blood beneath her: she was still alive only because of the immense vitality of her species. Under her paws was a newborn female kit. It had been slain with a single claw-slash across its tiny neck. The kzinrett’s bloody paw hovered over it, alternately protecting and caressing the little corpse.

Her other paw strained fitfully after the second kit of her litter, a half-black male that had not wriggled closer to her deadly embrace. What had stopped him? Had there been a subtle warning in the tone of his littermate’s desperate cries as the milk-rich body which had just given them life suddenly turned tender claws of death upon them? Had it been the smell of blood? Had it been the sight and sounds of devastation with which the strange hairless bipeds had shattered the quiet of the harem-nursery?

The kit’s nose wrinkled, turned uncertainly in Dieter’s direction, and his eyes blinked open as he made a small sound: “Meef?”

The sound roused the mother. Her eyes roved, her claws slid out of their beds, her arm came back; she even managed to raise her body slightly, to lean her torso forward…

So that she could reach far enough to kill her last kit.

Dieter brought up his weapon and squeezed the trigger once.

The female’s left eye imploded. She collapsed, as limp as old rags.

Dieter looked back at the kit; it blinked up at him through milky, and probably still blind, eyes. He reached down, scooped it gently into the crook of his left arm. He could swear that its eyes were fixed upon his.

“Meerf,” it said. And then the kit’s eyes closed, and it nestled against him tightly.

2396 BCE: Subject age-less than one year

Despite the scenes of carnage that she had been watching for the past minute, Dr. Selena Navarre flinched anew at the scene of a kzin female being bisected-literally bisected-by the screeching sweep of a commando’s coil gun. The image froze.

A freshly minted UNSN captain by the name of Armbrust came from behind the lectern. “Had we listened to Dr. Yang’s warnings, this outcome might have been averted. Instead, because the allowed non-lethals were too weak to instantly drop an adult kzin in its tracks, we had to resort to lethal weapons. And you can see the results.” He waved at the frozen tableau behind him. “In addition to having to kill all the females, twenty-five percent of the kits were killed by our fire, as well. They were too close to their mothers, and the situation was too chaotic to take more time or better aim.

“This outcome is compounded by the loss of sixty percent of the kits through the infanticide carried out by the mothers. This leaves us six kits. Of those, one was severely wounded. Your personnel have informed me that it has subsequently been euthanized.”

“It would not have been useful to us, anyway,” objected Director Pyragy’s rather snappish voice from the darkened auditorium behind Selena. “It was a female.” So, the team director had finally spoken up. In an attempt to minimize the scope of the disaster, of course. A disaster for which he, it was rumored, was primarily responsible: he had resisted almost every special tactical contingency the mission planners had placed before him for approval. Including the double-strength tranq rounds.

Captain Armbrust stared. “The female kit would not have been useful? Director Pyragy, at this point I would have thought that any kit would be useful. After all, as Dr. Yang pointed out in her research précis, there is nothing that proves that the females are inherently subsentient. It may simply be that-”

“Captain, your heroics in securing these live subjects are admirable, as was your rather baffling ability to identify the rumored harem-protection cruiser among the rest of the kzin ships.” Pyragy pompously sniffed distaste at the very things he had praised. “But the value of your speculations on the mental capacities of the kzin are directly proportionate to your qualifications in xenobiology and xenobehavior. Which are nonexistent.”

Armbrust smiled up toward the source of the voice at the back of the darkened auditorium. “That is almost entirely true.”

“‘Almost’ entirely? You have an uncompleted degree lurking somewhere beyond the margins of your resume, perhaps?”

“No. I had the good fortune of being briefed by Dr. Yang herself, and have subsequently been granted full access to her research proposal.”

“Your first point is a non sequitur. The second is valueless.” Rumor had it that the director had argued vehemently against granting military personnel access to the full text of the proposal. A strange vehemence, Selena reflected, considering that access to it was, in his current statement, “valueless.”

Armbrust apparently detected the same contradiction. “Valueless, Director? Then why did the command staff need to make repeated requests for access?”

“I wonder if sharing it with your command staff was deemed a breach of the project’s secrecy protocols, Captain,” mused the voice of Marquette, a member of the project’s Steering Board and an inveterate toady.

The captain’s smile widened. “Actually, I believe our overall clearance rating was higher than yours, in regard to the relevant data. We were actually going on the operation, after all.”

The director’s own voice rolled archly mellifluous over Selena’s head. “The reason we resisted granting you access was noise, Captain. The pointless, distracting noise that would have been generated by providing unqualified persons with enough information so that they could start their own pointless theorizings, which, out of sheer good manners, we would have had to listen to-rather than dismissing them out of hand, as was warranted. So: you have your answer. Continue your report.”

Armbrust had turned his back and was heading toward the lectern before the director had finished speaking. Selena quelled a sudden impulse to cheer the captain.

“So, to conclude,” said Armbrust, “we have only five healthy specimens, two of which are females of less than two weeks. Leaving us three males. One would soon have been removed from the combination harem-crèche-playground: he is at least three months of age. The other is approximately a month old and is not particularly pliable, according to your own researchers. The last one-”

“-Is no concern of yours, Captain. You can hardly know anything about a creature you held for less than two minutes.”

“True. But it is also true that it may have been a very important two minutes.”

“Yes, yes: I’ve heard all the amateurish tripe about kzinti possibly having a first-imprinting reflex such as many higher terrestrial mammals, and some species of birds. But at this point, that is only unwarranted and rather romanticized speculation.” The director’s voice slowed, deepened, became subtly dangerous: “I have it on good report that you have even shown up to look in on the littlest one, from time to time.” Selena did not know how a pause could be smug, but Pyragy’s was: “Perhaps some imprinting did take place, Captain, but perhaps it is not the kit who was imprinted.”

Armbrust shrugged. “Time will tell, I suppose. Now, allow me to show you how we came across our unexpected find as we withdrew.”

Selena sat forward: she had only heard the faintest whispers about this when she was posted to the team three days ago, but if the rumors were accurate, it would put a whole new spin on kzin gender socialization.

A new video clip flashed on the screen. The camera motion was jerky. The muzzle of a gun was perpetually visible in the bottom center of the dancing screen: typical scope-view footage. Then, whoever was holding the gun panned around and aimed down a short corridor. He zoomed in on an open doorway there: as the image swam and focused, it resolved into serried ranks of inclined glass cylinders, all over two meters long. And in each was-

Selena breathed in sharply. Her gasp was mercifully drowned out by the director’s abrupt, “So these are the cloning tubes? The vats, as I believe you nicknamed them?”

“Yes, sir. I’ll advance the recording, so you can see a few more.”

The view on the screen sped forward in time, seeming to race down the corridor until it reached the threshold of the long, dark room: female kzinti, encased in dimly lit gargantuan test tubes, stretched to the far wall.

“And when you took samples, did you-?”

“You will appreciate, Director, that we had to improvise everything from this point on.”

“Including dividing your forces in the face of your enemy?”

“Sir, this was an unexpected discovery made during a hot exfiltration. I made sure that our primary objectives-the kits-were all removed to safe holding ASAP. Then we set about rigging two of the ROVs to carry one of the tubes in its entirety, as well as gathering genetic samples from all the others, and taking samples of every fluid being pumped into or out of them.”

“Crude,” commented the director. “Marginally effective, at best.”

Had there been any room to doubt that Pyragy disliked, personally disliked, Captain Armbrust, it was gone now. To Selena’s mind, and most of the other researchers with whom she could talk about these results, Armbrust had shown considerable presence of mind and ingenuity getting out what he did. That he had then lost an additional five men when another wave of kzinti showed up was hardly his fault: the increased time required to transport the clone tube and samples had made another engagement a near certainty. But in light of what humanity had gained with those additional samples-

“And then you destroyed their ship?”

Armbrust nodded. “Yes, Director, as per my orders. As much to prevent the kzinti from learning of our presence and activities aboard their cradle-cruiser as to strike a further blow against them.”

“And your own ship was still operable enough to effect your escape?”

Armbrust unsuccessfully attempted to mask his smile; even Selena hadn’t been so gullible as to have believed that the damage taken by the captain’s Raker-class decoy ship-salvaged during the defeat of the Second Kzin Fleet-was genuine. “Director, my ship was not damaged at any point, except by the intentional beam hits upon the fuel tanks. In the staged fight that the kzin witnessed between us and our own smallships, one of which was automated and convincingly destroyed by our fire, all the missiles were duds. The apparent internal explosions were prepared charges, already on-board. Our fusion plant was fully operable; it was just rigged to allow us to simulate irregular function and battle damage. As was everything else on the ship. The actual lifepods and lifeboats were replaced with cheap shams, leaving enough room for us to use their launch tubes to deploy our short range breaching pods, once the kzin ship slowed to match course and come alongside.”

The director sniffed again. “A wonderful display of how satisfactory results can result from the suitable use of low cunning.” Armbrust smiled instead of taking the bait, leaving the focus clearly upon the director’s own ignorance of military operations. Selena was sorely tempted to snicker but thought the better of it. She was lucky to have received this assignment at all. Until she had securely established her experimental schedule, the loyalty of her personnel, and had made herself indispensable, her semi-autonomous position as leader of the Behavioral Team of the Kzin Research Project was far too tenuous.

There was an extended silence in the darkened room. Then the director’s voice: “Captain, that will be all.”

Armbrust came around the lectern one last time: he was, Selena noticed, a handsome enough man, although hardly the classical vid-hero. For that, he would have needed an extra six or seven centimeters and longer proportions in general: light-legged and fine-hipped, the bottom half of his body was that of a dancer; the top half was broad, hard, flat: a laborer or a weight-lifter. He looked up into the dark, along a trajectory that tracked back to the source of the director’s voice. “I wonder if I might ask a few questions. As a personal favor.”

The long pause was not promising, but then a new voice-that of the positively ancient board member Boroshinsky-broke in, heavy-accented and quavery: “You may ask your questions, gospodin Armbrust. It is the very least accommodation we can make in appreciation of your fine service.” The director may have grunted impatiently; Selena could not be sure.

“Spasebo,” Armbrust said into the dark with a slight, deferential nod. “My first question is: have you completed the radio array for establishing communications with Dr. Yang in Proxima?”

“We have,” Pyragy replied. “Although it will be some years before we know if she is still there to receive it. It seems the kzinti, if impatient, are also thorough hunters.”

“Indeed they are. With any luck, Dr. Yang has not attracted their attention. That was her plan.”

“And to the best of our knowledge, she has kept to it: we have had no signals from Proxima since the kzinti first attacked twenty-nine years ago.”

Armbrust’s shoulders seemed to relax. “My other question is about the behavioral component of her research plan: will it in fact be funded?”

“I do not know what you are referring to.” The director’s tone belied his words: he might as well have said, “I will not share that information with a troglodyte like yourself.”

Armbrust was undeterred. “I am referring to her suggestion that, if possible, a promising kit should be raised to adulthood not merely to observe the details of its speciate development and distinguish the influences of nature from those of nurture, but also to breed him as a possible liaison to his own people.”

The lights in the room snapped on; the director was on his feet, and very red. “How did you learn of this? Yang specifically stated in the appendix to her proposal that this part of it had been separately ciphered and kept apart from the rest.”

“I know. But I also spoke to her directly. And she made her intentions quite clear.”

Pyragy aimed a shaking finger down at Armbrust. “Yang’s suggestion is an optimistic delusion that ignores one obvious and decisive fact: a kzin raised by us would be rejected by those which are natural products of their own society. Given a reasonable chance, they would retroactively do to our subjects what their mothers were trying to do to them when you first took them from their nursery a few weeks ago.”

“So you have not funded Dr. Yang’s behavioral research initiative?”

“Oh, no: we most certainly have funded it. We have simply revised its objective.”

“How so?”

One of the other board members-Marquette, the toady-waved an age-gnarled finger in time with his pedantic drone: “It is our intent to show that the kzinti can be rescued, saved, from their own base nature.”

Selena Navarre almost spun around in her seat to stare. Really? Really? Could they possibly be serious? In their arrogance, they had decided to rehabilitate the kzinti? The Board could not be so blind, so stupid-could it?

“Professor Marquette speaks somewhat metaphorically,” Pyragy amended. “Let us say that we wish to explore the possibility that the kzinti need to be liberated from the eugenics programs that their one-time-masters-the Jotoki-apparently imposed upon them. And, having followed down that same path themselves, we must further explore what would happen if the modern kzinti were freed from their own hide-bound genetic tyranny.”

“Genetic tyranny?”

“Of course. Veiled references to the routine euthanization of intelligent females, and the cloned breeders you found are proof enough of that. Having the knowledge we now do, we can liberate the kzinti from their own self-perverted evolutionary growth, from the senseless violence in which they have immersed themselves. Even more deeply than we did. Until the ARM brought peace and order to our society.”

Good grief, thought Selena, he’s a true believer.

Armbrust muttered a guttural curse in some Wunderlander dialect and stared up at the director. “So you will correct the aberrations in the kzinti, the same way you did with humanity for the better part of three centuries? I’m tempted to dismiss it as impossible, but then again, you so pacified humanity that it took a near-genocidal wake-up call from the known universe’s apex predator to shake us out of that lotus-eater’s dream. But evidently even that hasn’t taught you that the universe is not inherently aligned with your cherished notions of nonaggression. So, now you’re going to try to make pacifists out of the kzinti? Good luck-and send the kzinti my regards and sincere commiseration.”

“They will no doubt appreciate such sympathetic wishes, coming from a warrior like yourself.” The director was smiling again. “Set a beast to catch a beast, I always say. And so we did, apparently. I thank you for bringing a set of beasts back to us, Captain. I am quite sure we can handle it from here, your own lofty cosmological warnings notwithstanding.”

Armbrust collected his papers and data chips, all the while glowering at the director. In the captain’s eyes, Selena saw a more profound, unconstrained variety of her own Belter sensibilities: the ARM had never managed to bring her people as completely under the yoke as they had the rest of the system, and particularly Earth. And now stalking from the room, mouth rigid, was the living evidence that the colonial ARM had been even less successful completing its pacification campaign in the Centauri system.

Which for some primal reason suffused Selena Navarre with a feeling of deep relief and reassurance. And then she understood why: we always had some real warriors left. But we still came awfully close to being utterly defenseless when it really counted…

“Dr. Navarre, tell me, what did you think of Captain Armbrust’s presentation?”

Selena nearly jumped: the director wasn’t wasting any time determining if the Wunderlander had any secret allies in his own camp. Particularly that part of the camp which was entrusted to assessing kzin behavior. In short, her camp. She schooled her features to bland compliance, and turned to look at him.

Pale blue eyes, so pale that it was momentarily difficult to discern where the white of the eye ended and the iris began, stared down at her, patient and cool. The mouth beneath them was smiling in benign receptivity. “Director Pyragy, the presentation was informative. It is unfortunate that the transmission of information became entangled with the expression of opinions, however.”

As she had hoped, Pyragy seemed very pleased by the response, construing it to fit the context he preferred. “It is refreshing to hear such sanity today,” Pyragy commented, casting a self-satisfied glance at Boroshinsky, who smiled faintly, eyes almost twinkling as he stared at Selena. His expression widened into an amused grin before he looked away, leaving her with the distinct impression that although he was quite old, there was nothing wrong with his ears or his mind. He had obviously understood that Selena had crafted her response so that Pyragy could construe it as he wished. Huh, leave it to a Muscovite to instantly perceive plausible deniability in action: Communism and the commissars have been gone for almost four centuries, but the Russians still remember the lessons. Besides, Selena was glad that Boroshinsky had seen through to her real reaction. As the Project Manager of the Biological Research Initiative, he would be a useful ally and could be trusted not to knuckle under if Pyragy brought his considerable weight of influence to bear.

Selena let her eyes slide over to the director himself, who was busy reviewing the agenda of the rest of their meeting. Shwe Pyragy was known for being utterly practical in his pursuit of greater institutional power: he was a career bureaucrat who had managed to get himself assigned to the Kzin Research Project simply as a matter of prestige. He did not have the credentials to be a primary researcher or even team manager, but he did have a nose for politics, a vast collection of owed favors, and a taste for high-profile assignments. This one certainly fit the bill, and might also be the last chance he had to prevent his career from a final, irremediable slide into back-office mediocrity and anonymity.

Pyragy was something of a failed prodigy within the Life Sciences Directorate of ARM. He had been a promising young star whose rise had staggered and slumped just when it was poised to become meteoric. It was impossible to say why this had occurred, or at least, Selena did not know anyone with access to the files that might have explained his surprisingly underwhelming career. It was whispered that Pyragy’s sexual tastes had been so wide and so injudicious that he spent an inordinate amount of energy-and took inordinate risks-in satisfying them. Along the way, he had evidently experimented with not merely a broad range of practices and partners, but with profound, and ultimately unsuccessful, changes to his own body. Both facially and physiognomically, he had been left stranded in a zone that was not so much androgynous as it was an arresting amalgam of distinctly male and distinctly female features.

Selena knew her negative reaction to be a function of her generation-the first of the post-Golden Agers-who, growing up with the threat of kzin-effected extinction hovering over their heads, reflexively considered such experimentation with inherited physical characteristics to be frivolous. She knew it was not-at least, not for all who pursued it-but the flip side of the peace and unprecedented personal liberties of Earth’s Golden Age had, all too often, verged over into egomaniacal license. In the decades just prior to Earth’s first encounter with the kzinti, increasing numbers of individuals, lacking purpose, had been caught in a growing undertow of ennui and hedonism, their self-indulgences masquerading under labels such as “unfettered exploration of the self.” She often wondered if this was what humans did when they did not have urgent matters to attend to: what historians, speaking of other empires and epochs, had frankly labeled “decadence.”

Well, the peace of the Golden Age, and the world it had spawned-good, bad, indifferent-were gone. Blood and sweat were back, and, if not exactly stylish, were accepted as the price of speciate freedom, perhaps survival. That made Shwe Pyragy a de facto anachronism who had outlived the cultural immediacy of his own choices. He looked down at her again: “Tell me, Dr. Navarre, do you feel that you can synchronize your research phases with those of the biology group?”

Selena nodded. “Yes. From what I’ve been able to deduce, kzin maturation is not only faster than ours, but has comparatively sharp developmental boundaries. Some of that may be simply because their growth stages are compressed into a shorter span of years. It simply seems their physical and behavioral development evince greater synchrony. It is also possible, however, that their physical and behavioral changes march to a much more powerful, chemically governed drumbeat than that which drives development in young humans.”

Pyragy nodded. “Reasonable. Do you foresee special challenges at any particular stage?”

Selena smiled, but not too widely: just enough to look modestly charming. “I foresee special challenges at almost every stage, Director. However, the stage we’ve labeled ‘infancy’-birth to one year of age-will probably be the simplest, since few complex cultural variables will be in play yet. On the other hand, the next stage-two to three years, or what we’ve crudely labeled as ‘childhood’-may present us with some of the greatest challenges.”

“Why?”

“Because we may not yet have the relevant information from Proxima Centauri by that time. Dr. Yang would certainly have received our wake-up call and request for information by now: we sent it almost six years ago. However, depending on how long it takes for her to gather and then send the data that was compiled in Centauri, we might not have received it when the kit enters that developmental stage.”

Pyragy shrugged. “Perhaps, but we should have all her data at the end of that stage, and so, be well-prepared for the next one. Which the Biological Research group has labeled the ‘training stage.’ What I don’t understand is, why ‘training’ instead of simply ‘puberty’?”

“Director, the kzinti don’t really have a word for puberty: their closest term is ‘trainable age.’ And it should be understood that, from what we can determine, the training received by these four-to-six year-olds is more like junior boot camp. Other than basic math and language skills, the focus is on physical readiness and combat.”

Pyragy stared at her for some time. “There is some merit to your label, then; we shall take it under advisement.”

“Thank you, Director. The ‘maturity’ stage-seven to eight years-will bring with it clear, sharpened interest in females and mating, even though natural kzinti have no access to either at this age. However, because whatever socialization we provide will lack the nuances, compensations, or distractions that make male kzinti manageable during these years, I am afraid that this is where we must expect to lose a great deal of control over our research subject. We can only hope that Dr. Yang’s data will include some useful insights on how kzin culture handles the onset of full sexual awareness and maturity.

“Through some lucky finds, we know that the kzinti themselves call the age of nine to twelve the ‘trekking years.’ It seems to be a period of wanderlust and itinerancies: they try their hand at many trades. It is unclear whether this is to give them a broad base of competencies, or an attempt to affix them as journeymen to a particular field of endeavor. Finally, they call the age of thirteen, of full maturity, the Name Year-not because any kzin will get a Name that year, but because this is the first point at which they may earn a Name. Although usually, it takes place much, much later. If at all.”

“And do you think we should be trying to make our test subjects liaisons to the natural kzinti, or exemplars of what the whole species might become if they were freed from the yoke of genetic and behavioral conditioning?”

Selena kept herself from swallowing nervously; this would have to be the most politic response of her career. “I think that it is too early to set our final objectives in stone. But I will hasten to add this proviso: whatever we plan upon, our objectives should remain conservative and maximally attainable ones.”

Pyragy smiled benignly. Because you interpret “conservative and maximally attainable” as synonymous with “what we humans can understand, control, and inculcate in a kzin.” Selena returned his smile and tried not to feel sick at having to curry favor with him. But in actuality, the most conservative and attainable of all objectives will be to let a kzin be a kzin-and to see what that means and watch how it happens. And if we’re lucky, to inherit at least half of his loyalties.

Pyragy strolled down to the lectern, set his presentation materials before him, and began: “The kits will be remitted to the care of Dr. Boroshinsky’s secure preserve in ten days…”

2397 BCE: Subject age-one year

When Selena came back down the inter-biome walkway, she was surprised to see Captain Armbrust in the observation hub. She was more surprised still to see the youngest of the kits, the one he had rescued, with its nose hard against the glass, a small halo of mist coming and going with its breath. The little male was displaying all the now-well-known kzin behaviors of affinity: his ribbed ears were fully deployed, each like one-half of a toy pink teacup. His eyes were wide open and the pupils very large. His fur displayed a slow, rhythmic rippling that ran from the base of his skull down to the end of his spine. While Selena watched, a tentative paw came up to rest on the part of the glass near the captain’s face.

She was tempted to just stand and watch, but protocols-and manners-demanded otherwise. “I’m sorry, Captain. I didn’t know you were coming. Of course, I didn’t know you were allowed to come in here at all. And next time, I’ll thank you to check with me before allowing any of the subjects to see you. Particularly that one.”

Armbrust stood straight; the kit propped himself up, blinked, sought the human face that had been pressed close to his own through the plexiglass. “I’m sorry.” Armbrust waved a hand at the doorway into the habitat dome. “Once I got through security, I tried to find someone to report to.” He shrugged. “There was no one around. No way to contact anyone, either.”

Selena sighed. “Yes, we’re pretty spartan, back here. Up until now, all our emphasis has been on getting these habitats set up as quickly as possible. Our little kits were getting a bad case of laboratory cabin fever. Particularly the oldest one.”

“How are they doing, if I might ask?”

“You might, if I can find out how you got in here at all. As far as I could tell, Director Pyragy would have been happy to banish you from the planet, let alone our primary live research facility.”

“You’re probably right about that. But the director doesn’t have more authority than the admiral I report to, and the military wants to keep a pair of eyes on this project. Much to Pyragy’s chagrin, I’m sure.”

“Yes, be sure of that. Pyragy is old-school: ‘pills not pistols; conditioning not cannons.’ You represent more than just a diametrically opposed set of opinions; you embody the destruction of his world.”

“Huh. Thought I was protecting it.”

“No, you are protecting the planet. But on that planet, there are many worlds, and Pyragy’s world was predicated upon the notion that we as a species had finally done away with violence.” She shrugged. “It was all swap-water, of course. But his generation of ARM administrators grew up thinking it was gospel.” The captain was smiling broadly. “What?” she asked.

“You said ‘swap-water.’ That’s a Belter expression: potable water recaptured from urine. Not always one-hundred percent clean when the systems get old, I’m told.”

“Yeah? So I’m a Belter. So what?”

The captain’s smile got wider still. “I find Belters…well, refreshing. Here on Earth everything is a little too tidy for me. Out where I grew up, on Wunderland, things are messier.” He frowned. “These days, a lot messier.”

Selena barely restrained the urge to reach out and touch his arm. She had heard rumors that he was the only one of his family who had managed to escape the system on a slowship. They weren’t of herrenman stock, and so remained on Wunderland, under the watchful eyes and ready claws of the kzin. It was surprising that he had any room left in his heart for anything, let alone a tiny kzin kit.

Instead of touching his arm, she stepped a little closer. “I think we’re pretty lucky to have you here, making your own messes, Captain.”

Armbrust looked up with a sudden smile. “My name is Dieter.”

“And I’m Selena, not Dr. Navarre. So the admiral gave you a ‘get into jail free’ card?”

“Something like that. After seeing the report about my debriefing by Director Pyragy, there was some concern at the higher echelons that the research project could be in danger of being compromised by personal and political agendas.”

Selena looked sideways at Armbrust. “Everyone has an agenda, Dieter.”

“True enough. But in this case, the top item on everyone’s agenda should be ‘save humanity.’ The rest is about method. In the case of your director, it seemed he was more interested in using young kzin to prove something about universal morality.”

Selena did not say anything; she did not dare. The problem was not that she disagreed with Dieter, but rather, that she agreed with him. Fervently. But even if the walls didn’t have ears, some things were simply too risky to discuss freely in public. And besides, she didn’t want to take any chances of being associated with the military agenda, because if Pyragy suspected that, she’d be off the project. Faster than spitting out swap-water. In another six months, maybe a year, her position would be much more secure, possibly invulnerable. But until then…

“Let’s walk, Dieter. You’ve a lot to see.” As they began strolling out of the observation hub and down one of the tubes that both separated and provided a means for observing the different habitats on either side, Selena noticed that the kit had padded away from the observation glass and was now paralleling them on their walk. “It seems you have a friend, Dieter,” Selena observed, nodding to indicate their tiny escort.

Dieter looked over; as he did, Selena quickly accessed her wrist-relay’s primary control program and deployed three of the near-invisible roving sensors in the kit’s habitat to triangulate, close, and follow him. It was the strongest independent behavior she’d noted thus far and if it was what it seemed-a post-imprinting affinity-that could be a major factor later on: both a variable to investigate and use as a positive stimuli and reinforcement.

If Dieter noticed what she was doing, he was too polite to mention it. “Yeah, I’m some great friend of that little kit’s, cheating him the way I did.”

“By cheating, are you referring to the fact that he only needed saving because you had already-er, destroyed his world?”

Dieter shrugged. “Yeah, that too. But I was thinking more about how I brushed against one of the dead females shortly after entering the nursery. I didn’t even consciously think about it at the time, but it was one of the possibilities we had discussed at the command level.”

“You mean, to coat yourself in a familiar, comforting scent?”

“Yeah; as far as we knew, the mere smell of humans, being so different, could have made the kits unapproachable under any circumstances.”

“That doesn’t sound like cheating, Dieter; that sounds like quick thinking.”

“It was just a trained reflex.”

“The others didn’t do it.”

“That’s because I mentally trained for it on my own. I thought through that assault again and again and again. And, of course, it didn’t work out anything like we planned. They never do.”

“No, but because you had rehearsed the alternatives so many times in your head, you were able to adapt, quickly and well, when reality went off in a different direction than any of the ones you’d planned on.”

Dieter shrugged and glanced back at the kit. “And now I feel kind of responsible for Hap-for him-I guess.”

Selena looked sideways at the Wunderlander. “Did you just call the kit ‘Hap’?”

Dieter seemed almost embarrassed. “Yeah.”

“Why ‘Hap’?”

“Well, it hardly seemed right to call him ‘Lucky.’ Yes, he survived, but we did kill his mom and sister and hijacked him to live among hairless aliens.”

Selena smiled sadly. “No, ‘Lucky’ just wouldn’t work.”

“But, in some ways, chance was on his side. And has continued to be. So, caught as he is in the hands of Fate, I thought ‘Hap’ might do. Mayhap, Hap-less, Hap-py: there’s no telling what Fate will deal him, but deal him it will.”

Selena looked at the half-black-, half-orange-furred kit that was becoming weary following them. Hap. A simple monosyllable. That was good. Furthermore, all its phonemes were easy for kzinti: they were basic sounds in the Heroes’ Tongue. And if the kit came to know that it had been named by the human for which it felt such instinctual affinity, that might be the influence mechanism that-

Dieter’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “How are the other kits doing?”

“The oldest male has proven entirely intractable, as we suspected he might be.”

“Too old?”

Selena nodded. “That’s our best guess. He’s not particularly sociable with the one that’s two months younger than he is, but we can’t tell if that’s normal, a post-trauma reaction, or just a personal quirk.” She smiled. “He’s the only one we’ve named, so far. Partly because he’s older, partly because he had such a distinctive personality.”

“Dare I ask what you’ve named him?”

“Cranky. Some insist on the longer version: Cranky Cat.”

Dieter raised an eyebrow. “Something tells me you never expect to establish communications with him, giving him a name like that.”

“It’s hard to see how we would forge a communicational link with him: he cannot be safely approached, and he is resistant to both positive and negative operant conditioning. Surprisingly so, for a young creature.”

“Although that could be the norm, for kzinti.”

“Absolutely so. And I could see several ways in which it would be a necessary survival trait. The kits are ferociously competitive with each other from a very early age. In Cranky, what we perceive as stubbornness and irascibility might well be tenacity and aggressiveness, now warped by being penned up in an alien, aversive environment.”

“And the second oldest male?”

Selena shrugged. “Hard to tell; he’s had a lot of trouble.”

“Why? I thought he was fine when we got him.”

“He was. But although he was probably too young to remember any of the trauma of his capture, he was old enough to feel it, for it to leave an emotional scar.”

Dieter clucked his tongue. “Kind of hard to think of kzinti having emotional scars.”

“I understand, but they can and do get them. In his case, I don’t think it would have been too bad: they are very resilient. But without a mother as a source of basic mammalian reassurance, I suspect his mind tucked the experience under his growing consciousness, and is now experiencing its side effects.

“From the beginning, he rejected food until he became desperately hungry. We had to feed him intravenously twice to ensure his survival. Of course, it doesn’t help that the damn milk substitutes just don’t appeal to the suckled kits.”

“I thought it was genetically reengineered from samples, that it was an exact match for their real milk.”

“Oh, it has all the right chemicals in all the right proportions, but something is still missing. As a lab-tech in the biology group put it, ‘ersatz is ersatz.’ And we should hardly be surprised: we’ve done no better with our own foods.”

Dieter smiled ruefully. “True enough. I’ve had tasty non-alcoholic beer, except it never really tastes like beer.”

“Yes, and given how much more acute the kzin senses of smell and taste are-about thirty thousand times and one hundred times, respectively-it’s hardly surprising that they reject the substitutes we’ve created.”

“And so the younger kzin male is weak from starvation?”

“Yes. It will be good when we can move him to unprocessed meat, about a month from now.”

“But Hap looks pretty robust.”

“That’s probably because he was newborn when he was taken.”

“What? Wouldn’t that make him weaker? More vulnerable?”

“No. He hadn’t been suckled yet. So, apparently, if newborn kzinti haven’t yet had natural milk, they tolerate our synthetics much better.”

“So he’s feeding well?”

“I don’t know that I’d call his intake anything more than ‘adequate.’ He’s still not a fan of our version of kzin food, but he doesn’t find it particularly aversive, either.”

“And the female kits?”

Selena nodded. “One is having an easier time of it; the other is in the worst shape of all. I expect we’ll lose her within the week.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

Selena shrugged, jammed her hands deep in her lab coat pockets. “Damned if I know. But my gut level instinct is that she has no will to live. I know that sounds bizarre to say about so young a creature, but it’s been true from the first. Listless, limp as a wet rag. She’s been on IV for the past three days; we had to catheterize her this morning. Nothing we do matters: she just keeps fading away, further and further. The other female is the exact opposite: some think she’s the most promising of all the kits. She’s certainly the apple of the director’s eye, and is surprisingly friendly to most of her handlers.”

“So, that’s good.”

“No, that’s bad. Or rather, it’s too much of a good thing. Now Pyragy has started exploring the possibility of making the females the primary focus of the research program, with the intent of increasing their intelligence and using them as a long-term weapon against the natural kzinti males. Kind of kzin Mata-Hari Delilahs that are secretly working for the good of humankind.”

Dieter rolled his eyes. “Please tell me you are making that up.”

“I wish I was. Unfortunately, it’s just further proof that the entire project is being administrated by a scientific illiterate.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that he’s still talking about this after Boroshinsky delivered his preliminary reports regarding the cause of the females’ lack of intelligence. And Boroshinsky’s preliminary reports are often more meticulous than papers presented at the Royal Academy.”

Dieter lagged behind; the orange and black ball of fur that he had dubbed Hap had flopped down in a histrionic excess of weariness. Dieter crouched down to be closer to him: through the glass, the kzin’s eyes narrowed happily, his torso pumping deeply and only a little more quickly than normal. “And what are Boroshinsky’s preliminary conclusions?”

“Firstly, the cause of the females’ semi-sentience is clearly genetic. So no amount of rehabilitation is going to work. But secondly, Boroshinsky also confirmed that the genetic constraints upon their intelligence is not merely a matter of a single, sweeping alteration to the original female genetics: it involves an ongoing program to maintain that genotype.”

“I don’t understand.”

Before she could stop herself, Selena had her hands out of her pockets, punctuating and emphasizing. “The kzinti had those clones on their ship-and probably near all breeding sites-to ensure that their females remain subsentient. Each of the clones belongs to one of sixteen different gene patterns, which, despite a great deal of diversity in other particulars, have two genetic traits in common: diminished development of the higher-function brain elements and neurochemical deficiencies. Both of which are sex-specific.”

Dieter stood, looked more puzzled. “Okay, I get the part about diminished brain development. I’m guessing that this trait keeps their equivalent of the cerebral cortex from becoming large enough to support sophisticated thought?”

“Correct. Whereas the neurochemical deficiency works by reducing how frequently and effectively the synaptic gaps are resupplied with the necessary bioelectric transmitters.”

“So the brain is smaller and slower.”

“Right. But that’s arguably not the most important fact uncovered by Boroshinsky. The kzinti have taken another eugenic step to ensure that female cognitive impairment remains permanent: the clones.”

“How do the clones fit into this?”

“Boroshinsky’s guess is that despite the genetic alterations, there are occasional regressions to the original, undiminished female genotype. So what the kzinti are doing with the clones, at least on interstellar voyages, is constantly refreshing the desired genetic signal with fresh copies.”

“And that’s important because…?”

“Because it tells us how primitive and imperfect their genetic science is. The genetic fix they’ve imposed must not hold too well if they are constantly having to inject direct copies of the modified gene line back into the population all the time. Boroshinsky suspects, and I concur, that they probably couldn’t create a more absolute genetic alteration without risking that some of the effects would spill over into the male genome as well. That suggests that their genetic alterations are subject to considerable drift. That’s probably why they put in the neurochemical modification, too: being an entirely different gene modification, it’s an insurance policy against any reexpressions of full female brain development.”

Dieter frowned. “It’s hard to imagine the kzinti relying on such a complicated matrix of changes.”

“I agree, but a truly permanent solution would require one to be very good at genetic manipulation. From the looks of it, the kzinti never got to be very good at genetics: just pretty good.”

Dieter nodded. “Well, I guess that’s to be expected. Brandishing a test tube and wearing a white coat: hardly a Hero’s garb, I suspect.”

“Yes, there’s probably an inbred behavioral disinclination, as well. The life of a scientist might be suitable for the faint of heart, but not for the short-tempered.”

“Which is why the kzinti seem to rely on their slave races to provide many, or even most, of their technicians and bean-counters.”

“Yes. The kzin males have a glandular system that keeps them awash in a cocktail of hormones that functions like testosterone in human males, except about one hundred times stronger. Obversely, the females have an almost complete lack of it: another development of their highly selective breeding, apparently.”

“So the females are not merely bred for low intelligence, but for docility, as well.”

“Yes, but that creates a problem, too. Calm is the handmaiden of cooperation. And patience. And patience generally assists learning. So ironically, if the females were not cognitively suppressed, they would be likely to outperform the males in terms of education and organization.”

“Which the males would take extra steps to prevent.”

“Exactly,” affirmed Selena. “I suspect that’s why their neurochemical alteration to the female genome induces a kind of kzin ADHD syndrome.”

Dieter stared. “A kzin with ADHD? Given their normal behavior, how could you tell?”

Selena smiled. “This is even more extreme: it significantly impedes language acquisition, deductive reasoning, symbolic and abstract thought. All those tasks would simply feel like too much work to a being with this genetic trait. This pretty much predicts that the females will not only be incapable of learning complicated tasks, but ensures that they will be most adept at activities that are instinctual, and that they will derive most pleasure from sensory stimuli. And that, in turn, means that their self-awareness will be rudimentary, akin to that of a mentally sluggish three year old.”

Dieter scratched the back of his head. “Rather like me, then.”

Selena stared at him frankly. “Tell me, Captain, does that self-deprecating humor act usually work on women?” She smiled.

The smile he returned was both sheepish and genuine. “Sometimes.”

Four meters away, Hap yawned, flopped prone again, allowing his eyes to stay closed as the sun approached its zenith. He rolled slowly, presenting his belly for the bright orb to warm…

2398 BCE: Subject age-two years

Hap, who was at the age where his posture only rarely reverted to the quadrupedal, was literally bouncing on all fours as Selena’s team led him toward the outer paddock. Sometimes she found it hard to remember that this endearing little fur-ball would evolve into a two-and-a-half-meter apex predator that was the scourge of her species. As if in reminder, Hap’s mouth gaped open as he panted in eagerness, revealing rows of surprisingly long, densely packed, sharp teeth. No, he was a kzin all right.

Selena crouched down, face to face with him. “Are you ready, Hap?”

Hap nodded, having picked up the gesture from the humans around him. His nose was twitching eagerly; despite the supposedly hermetic seals, he could smell the natural biome beyond the paddock door. Then he stopped, looked around. “Deeder?” he asked, his ears flattening a bit in the kzin equivalent of a frown.

“Sorry, Hap. Dieter can’t be here today. He wanted to be. But he’s away.”

Hap’s nose twitched once, mightily. “No, he not. I smell him.”

“No, Hap; I’m sorry, but Dieter is not here-”

“Not here, but I smell him.” Hap pointed. “On you.”

Oh. Each member of Selena’s staff suddenly discovered that their routine tasks and instruments now demanded unusually close scrutiny. Well, her relationship with Dieter was going to get out eventually, anyhow. Probably half her team already knew or at least suspected. But, to coin a phrase, the cat was well and truly out of the bag now. “I understand now, Hap: you can detect his scent. But Dieter had to leave a while ago; the person I work for asked him to-”

The small wet nose twitched again. “Selena, no. You wrong. Smell is new, fresh. Very Dieter.” He wrinkled his nose. “Very strong Dieter smell.” His eyes drifted down, below her waistline.

Oh good god. “Hap, listen: Dieter couldn’t come. He wanted to but-but some other people wanted him to be somewhere else today.” Selena imagined herself punching Pyragy in his supercilious mouth. Again and again. “But Dieter will be back soon.”

The kzin cub’s fur flexed once. Was that akin to a shrug? A similar reflexive gesture had been observed in the other three cubs, and in circumstances that suggested the same social valence. “Okay,” acceded Hap. “We go now?”

Selena smiled, careful to keep her lips over her teeth as she did so, and nodded to him, then at her staff.

They opened the paddock door, and Hap looked back quickly at Selena, his eyes very wide. “No harness?”

Selena shook her head. “No harness; not today.”

Whereupon Hap performed a prompt, skittering, one-hundred-eighty-degree turn and was through the open doorway in a shot. Selena followed at a more leisurely pace.

By the time she emerged into the open air-and this time, it was truly open air, not an enclosed habitat like the others Hap had been in-the small cub was racing to and fro, moving so fast that he was a blur. He sped from bush to tree to flower to insect to rock and finally, to what was apparently an especially fragrant Mystery Groovy Spot in the middle of the grass. Where he stopped, panting, rolling in luxurious abandon.

Selena approached him slowly, carefully, mostly because she did not want to impede on his first experience of The Wild, but also because she was not quite sure what he would do next, and he was already big enough to be modestly dangerous, albeit not deadly.

Hap had evidently heard her approach. “Smells!” he purr-gasped. “Smells! All around! In my head, all over! It…it…” He stopped suddenly, sat up, a quick and terrifying gravity in his eyes: “No more walls. I want here. Always.”

Selena nodded. “Not yet, but soon.” She looked up, squinted into the distance: just a kilometer away, a high-security fence-three of them, actually-traced a dim line that paralleled the horizon. She wondered how long that restraint would be a sufficient guarantee against his already-awakening instinct for roving, for wanderlust.

“How soon?” Hap’s query was uttered in such a flat, matter-of-fact tone, that she couldn’t keep herself from glancing down at him. The cub that looked back-orange belly fur tremoring against the surrounding black of his pelt-suddenly seemed much older than two.

“I’m not sure how soon. The man I work for said that maybe, if you like the new food we have for you, you can stay here right away. Would you like that?”

Hap didn’t even nod. “Where is new food?” His eyes roved purposefully.

Selena schooled her face to impassivity as she motioned one of her staff to bring in the sealed plate. Hap’s nose was immediately hyperactive. “Meat?” he purred eagerly.

“Yes.” Selena kept her voice calm. “Try some.”

The plate was placed before Hap; the lid was removed. He started at the sudden puff of steam, the pungent smell of seared beef. “Meat,” he agreed. “But burned.”

“No: cooked. It brings out the smells, the tastes,” explained Selena, wishing she had authority in this matter. “Try it.”

Hap’s nose wrinkled dubiously, but he gamely seized and devoured a small chunk of the sirloin. He chewed for a moment-then his eyes went wide and the meat came out in a rush, propelled from behind by a veritable torrent of vomit.

Pyragy looked cross. It could have been for any one of several reasons. Rumor had it that his ongoing hormone therapy was interfering with his cardio meds. If so, his choice was between tiring easily (perhaps fatally) or verging into a cascade of implant and transplant rejections that would likely render his body alarming to all but the most open-minded of partners.

Perhaps no less distressing to him was the presence of Admiral Coelho-Chase and the ARM’s Associate Chief Executive, Maurizio Dennehy. Their presence was a clear indictment of his handling of the Kzin Research Project. And probably the recent episode involving the cooked meat had caused the long-standing official uneasiness to reify into a full-blown investigation.

But perhaps most frustrating of all to Pyragy was that his two most senior researchers-Boroshinsky and Selena herself-had been summoned by those same powers to explore a possible redirection of the program’s research goals. For a man who hungered after preeminence and prestige more than anything else, this was indeed a most annoying turn of events.

The admiral looked up from the reports and toward Boroshinsky. “So you confirm that you made these multiple recommendations against attempting to feed cooked meat to the kzin cub named Hap?”

“Da, Admiral. Some of our studies suggested that it might be mildly toxic to him. For kzinti, eating cooked meat would be analogous to us eating a mix of carbonized and denatured meat. Either upsets our stomach. Cooked meat has the equivalent effect upon the kzinti, causing the cub’s projectile vomiting: his system was purging itself of toxins.”

The admiral and the associate chief executive stared at Pyragy, who shrugged: “This was not known before we tried.”

“According to the collected reports and testimony, this outcome was suspected.”

“Suspected, but not known,” Pyragy persisted.

“Even if we were to concede that possibly specious point, why did you feel that it was important to attempt to get the kzin to eat cooked meat?”

Pyragy spread his hands wide. “Is it not obvious? To see if he could be weaned away from the taste of the fresh kill.”

“To what end?”

“Why, to put distance between himself and his more primal instincts. Admiral, Executive, if we are to successfully pursue our most basic mandate-to raise a kzin with whom we might have meaningful communication-we must ensure that he views us as fellow discussants, not possible entrées. If he retains a taste for raw meat, he will probably retain a taste for our own uncooked flesh, too. An independent board of animal behaviorists validated my concern that our relationship with him will remain forever compromised until and unless that association is broken. He will not see potential food creatures as fully sentient and equal to himself.”

“And do you agree with this independent review of kzin behavior, Dr. Navarre?”

“I do not know, Admiral, since I have not seen it.”

“Why?”

“Because the existence of the external review was not revealed to us until this week.”

“Very well, so you are not in possession of the particulars of the report. Given that proviso, and speaking off-the-record, Dr. Navarre, do you feel that the ability of the kzinti to conceive of creatures either as persons or as prey is as polarized as Director Pyragy is claiming?”

Selena shifted awkwardly. “It seems unlikely, Admiral.”

“Why?”

“Because there is plentiful evidence that, after defeating a fellow kzin in an honor duel, the victor will consume a least some parts of the loser. Perhaps much more. But honor duels can only be fought between Heroes, between kzin persons. So it seems that the kzinti can operate socially without such an absolute distinction between prey and persons.”

“I concur, and consider this further evidence that the research project must be careful not to overanthropomorphize the kzinti,” added the associate chief executive with a stern look in Pyragy’s direction.

Boroshinsky cleared his throat. “In one way, however, we have determined that the kzinti are, unfortunately, similar to us. The biology group can conclusively report that kzin biochemistry is too similar to humans’ for the safe military use of toxins or biological agents. Although some are more injurious to kzin systems than homo sapiens, the margin of difference is completely insufficient for the creation of a tailor-made toxin lethal to kzinti but harmless to humans. Insofar as bacteriological and viral agents are concerned, preliminary tests suggest that our biochemistries are close enough that some pathogens could ‘hop’ species. On the other extreme, if the organisms are dependent upon specific genetic interfaces, then of course the kzinti are immune to all of ours, just as we are immune to theirs. But so far as we can determine, the kzinti have acquired absolute immunity to all the strains we find latent in their system.”

“Even their own digestive flora?”

Boroshinsky nodded at the admiral, a faint smile suggesting he appreciated the intelligence of the question. “Even that. The kzin digestive process is far more robust than ours. The first part is almost sharklike in its capacity; the lower portion simply retrieves moisture and desiccates the wastes. Also, their digestive process is more reliant upon glandular secretions than resident bacteria.” He sat back. “I am afraid my group has failed in its primary task.”

Associate Chief Executive Dennehy shook his head emphatically. “You have not failed, and your labors are not over, Dr. Boroshinsky. In fact, we are glad to learn this so early in the research process. By removing one alternative from our suite of strategic responses, we can focus on the remaining options. And quite frankly, we considered the possibility of finding a kzin-specific bioagent a longshot.”

“You did?” Boroshinsky and Pyragy were an unintentional chorus in expressing their surprise.

Dennehy nodded. “Once we learned that the kzinti had already enslaved races possessing advanced technology, it seemed likely that they would have either genetically amplified their resistance to biological weapons, or that, during an earlier conquest, another race taught them this lesson. The hard way. As far as simple toxins are concerned, we presumed that since they can metabolize our flesh, that our biochemistries would prove too close for either of us to remain wholly immune to what was toxic to the other. But there was no way of being sure without your research.”

Boroshinsky rubbed his pointy jaw. “Then, sirs, I am afraid I do not see what you hope we might yet discover as a weapon against the kzinti.”

Dennehy smiled. “I wish we could take the credit for the answer to that, but it comes from Dr. Yang. She anticipated all these dead-ends, observing that if there was any weapon to be found in the kzin biochemistry, it would not be something as inelegant as a simple poison or disease. Rather, the key was to find some way we might be able to turn their own natural secretions against them. And since the kzinti have so many more glands than humans, she thought it possible that there might be something resident in the endocrine system that we could exploit. Do you agree, Doctor?”

But Boroshinsky had not heard the final sentence: he was already scribbling notes on his datapad.

Dennehy smiled, then returned his face to impassive neutrality. “We trust this will provide appropriate new directions for the Research Project. Dr. Navarre, you are specifically instructed to keep your group focused on establishing the cognitive, behavioral, and social objectives necessary to facilitate positive, long-term communication with your subjects. That is not your primary concern: it is your only concern. Is that clear?”

“Very much so, sir. However, I must report that I consider only two of my subjects-the surviving female and the youngest cub-to show any probability of willing communication with us. Unfortunately, the female’s mental capacity has been conclusively demonstrated to be very low; she will probably never become more capable than a human child of three years of age. Less, when it comes to language.”

“We understand. So, aside from the kit named Hap, the other kzinti will provide you with bases of both biological and behavioral comparison. In time, we may also need to use them to generate cell lines-samples for the synthesis of kzin scents, hormones-that might be required by either your group, or the biology group. Before we adjourn, is there anything else?”

Pyragy made a huffing noise.

“Yes, Director?”

“Admiral, Executive, in light of these proceedings, I am uncertain regarding my own role in this project.”

“What do you mean, Director?”

“Is it not obvious, Executive? You have apparently made me redundant. My group leaders disagreed with my orders and policies and you have intervened on their behalf, overturning all my directives in a public forum. You could have chosen to do so in a more private venue with me, but you did not. So I must wonder: am I still in charge of this project, or have I been reduced to a mere figurehead?”

Selena had to hand it to Pyragy: he might be authoritarian, unctuous, and ingenuine, but the bastard had guts.

The two senior officials exchanged long looks before the executive turned dead eyes upon the Pyragy. “You ask a reasonable question, Director. Here is the response: it depends.”

“Depends upon what?”

“It depends upon your ability to follow the ARM’s mandate for this project at least as well as your group leaders do. And to date, that has not been the case. So let us put it this way, Director: your position on the project is entirely up to you. Does that answer your question?”

The look on Pyragy’s face said that it did and that he wasn’t at all pleased with it.

While he was still engaged in his angry staring match with the executive and the admiral, Boroshinsky looked over at Selena slyly, and actually winked. She smiled, nodded faintly in return, and resisted the urge to get up and dance on her desk.

At last: now we can get some real work done.

2399 BCE: Subject age-three years

“This is a funny language, but I like it.” Hap practiced the long, linked vowel strings of another of the Heroes’ Tongue’s compound verbs: in this case, eaooiiasou, or, “to seek-while-leaping.” He looked up at Dieter, blinking in the sun, and made the sound again, almost as if he were singing it: “Eaooiiasou!”

Dieter smiled back, keeping his lips closed as he did so, as Selena had taught him. If Hap learned the open-mouthed smile of humans, he’d be unintentionally sending a challenge every time he met a kzin he liked or found amusing. “He’s learning very quickly. And very well.”

Selena nodded, mindfully keeping an extra few inches between herself and Dieter as she drew him away from Hap. No reason to give her group any more reason to gossip than they already had. “Yes. He’s very clever. I just wish we had a better way to teach him the Heroes’ Tongue.”

“He seems to be doing well enough with what you’ve got.” Dieter listened as the next interactive learning program began, and the cub began getting corrective oral pulses from the biosensor implants when his pronunciation of unfamiliar phonemes veered off.

“Well, the problem is with what we’ve got of their language: not much, and not the right kind of lexicon.”

“What do you mean?”

“All we know about kzin speech is the comm traffic we’ve picked up when they invade, almost all of which is heavily encrypted and non-verbal. We got a bit more from debriefing you Wunderlanders who came in on the slow boats from Centauri. But most of what we have was harvested from the few military wrecks that were intact enough to do us any good. Like that Raker-class small-boat you modified for snatching the kits.”

“So what’s the problem with the information from the wrecks? Were their computers corrupted?”

“No, we got very clean data. But it was the wrong data. Normal speech and military comm traffic may overlap, but the latter is really just a word-poor, albeit highly specialized, dialect of the former. We don’t have very much in the way of domestic vocabulary, or terms that describe states of being, or emotional or philosophical concepts. And we won’t have any access to informal idiom until we get Dr. Yang’s first response. If she’s still there.”

Dieter nodded. “I see. And the kzinti don’t use voice recognition software?”

“Very little. In place of voice recognition software, they depend upon ocular tracking. And since their physical reflexes are much faster than ours, the differential between their ‘look-and-blink’ systems and our voice command programs is pretty low.”

With the next lesson over, Hap flopped backward, sprawling in a manner that somehow mixed the boneless repose of early adolescence with “limp as a kitten.” Then his head swiveled slightly, his nose flaring after a peripherally detected scent. His ears shot out to full extension, his shoulders tensed.

“What’s that?” asked Dieter.

“That,” Selena explained, feeling a bit of inexplicable melancholy as she did, “is Hap detecting the scent of other kzinti.”

“Females?”

“Males. We can’t start with females. Every bit of data we have suggests that once the male cubs are separated from the mothers, they are not allowed further contact. We suspect that the scent of females could-um, confuse them.”

“How long have you been piping in the scent?”

“Just today. And just a few whiffs. Nothing very-”

Hap rose slowly, his head turning, searching. Then he looked at the teaching module and turned his back on it. This left him facing Selena directly. “Where are the others?”

Damn it, he distinguished it that quickly. At one part per million, he-

“Where are they?” Hap’s tone, while not quite imperious, was crisp and no-nonsense. “Where are the others like me?”

Selena kneeled down: he had grown so large that she hardly needed to anymore. “They are in other paddocks, in other spaces.”

“Why? Why are we not kept together? Why have I not met them?”

“Well, that’s a long story-”

Hap promptly sat down; he looked up at her. “Tell me. Please.” He looked at Dieter. “When you come and then go-sometimes for weeks-I start wondering ‘why do I have to stay here? Why can’t I go with Dieter?’ But I know I’ll get the same answer as when I ask to go somewhere else: not yet. Always ‘not yet.’ It doesn’t make sense. All of you-without hair-you go other places. Places beyond the walls, beyond the fence. But I don’t. I stay here. It’s a big space, but I can’t go anywhere else. You don’t let me.” He looked back at Selena. “Why?”

Selena looked at Dieter and then took a deep breath. Before she could start speaking, Hap leaned forward. “Before you start telling me, I need to know something.”

Selena blinked. “What?”

“This language you’re teaching me: that’s my language, isn’t it? I mean, the language that people like me-kzinti? — speak. Right?”

“That’s right.”

Hap nodded. “So I’m going to meet some other kzinti soon, right?”

“Eventually. Why do you think that?”

“Because with the language and the smells, it’s like you’re getting me ready. That’s it, isn’t it?”

Selena thought how many ways that was true: getting him ready for the rest of his life, actually. “Yes, that’s it.”

“I knew it! I knew it! So I’ll meet them soon.”

“Meet who soon?”

Hap blinked, surprised. “Why, my mother and my father.” He stared at her expression. “I do have a mother and a father, don’t I?”

As Dieter moved further off, Selena felt her eyes becoming wet. Hap’s face was suddenly tense as he watched her fighting against the tears. He blinked twice, rapidly: the kzin equivalent of a nervous gulp. “Tell me,” he said. “I can take it.”

2401 BCE: Subject age-five years

Selena entered the paddock slowly, carefully. She waited to see if Hap could detect Dieter’s scent, despite her extensive efforts at cleansing.

“So, Dieter is back for a while?”

How did he-? “Yes. I know that his scent disturbs you. I tried to-”

“Oh, I can’t smell him.”

“Then how did you know-?”

Hap stood, flexed his prodigiously growing limbs: they were long, rangy, distinctly immature, but already quite deadly. “I knew because you don’t smell like anything, not even yourself. And that’s how you smell, now, when he is back for a visit. Completely without scent.” Hap wrinkled his nose, which was now more angular, less button-like. “It’s not natural.” He tossed the last of his automated chase-toys from paw to paw. “Of course, nothing is natural around here.”

Selena looked at the toy: it had been a self-powered, semi-autonomous fuzzy quadruped. Originally quite fast and agile, it was now defunct and shredded beyond recognition: one of the rear limbs was missing, the other had been stripped down to the metal servos and armatures. The front limbs had been broken so that they now reached around behind the pseudocreature as easily as they did to its front. Which was consistent with the apparent theme of physiognomic reversal: the neck coupling had been snapped, allowing the creature’s featureless head to stare backward over its shoulder blades. It wasn’t the result of play; it was bloody-minded, fixated destruction. Hap had done the same with the other objects provided for his amusement; in fact, over the past three months, he had systematically reduced all of them to so much junk. Starting with the far simpler, slower “chase-and-chomp” toys that he had played with since he was two, he smashed every play/training ’bot he had been given. And now he had finished by mauling the most sophisticated model available, specially designed to hone hunting and stalking skills during his “training years.” Whatever modest challenges this ’bot had presented to him, he had caught it within two hours. Now, he set its remains aside, carefully putting it on the end of what had come to be known as Death Row: the queue of toys he had methodically destroyed, one after the other.

And it was Selena’s job to find out why.

Fortunately, Hap’s next comment provided a convenient way to segué into the topic. “I was wondering when you’d finally ask me about the toys.”

“Hap, the toys are just part of something larger. I know that.” And how could she not? For the last year and a half, cheery, affectionate Hap had been on an emotional and behavioral roller-coaster ride, more than had been observed in the other two males as they entered the human equivalent of the terrible teens. No surprise there: neither of the other two had experienced the sudden, rude awakening to the peculiarities of their existence as stranded orphans the way Hap had, twenty months ago. It made matters worse when Hap’s introduction to the next oldest male ended with that kzin shunning him suspiciously. The oldest one had been downright hostile. All these events had initially pushed him closer to Selena. He frequently sought the comfort of her patient lap, his eyes wide but seeing inward, and seeing nothing but uncertainty. Uncertainty about his origins, his nature, his future. At first, he spoke about it frequently, then in fits and starts, and finally, not at all. At which point he ceased to seek her lap. That change had been permanent.

Hap sat at some distance from her now, didn’t even look directly in her eyes. “Yes, it’s more than the toys. It’s so much more than the toys that I don’t really know how to think about it all at once. But the toys seemed like a good place to start.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think?”

Selena wondered: was this kind of insolence a common feature in kzin maturation? Probably not: their relationship with the older males would be a very businesslike affair. Open insubordination-for that is how their culture would almost certainly view such a testy response-would no doubt be met by a sharp cuff and dire threats of more. At the very least.

So, by elimination, this was an example of how human upbringing was changing him. Like Boyle’s Law of Gases, the contentiousness of his age was expanding to occupy any space that it was not soundly, physically, beaten back from. And even if they knew enough to imitate a true kzin upbringing, that would do no good, not anymore. He was what his upbringing thus far had made him: insightful, reflective, self-determining, curious, and capable of many intensities and shadings of affection for any number of humans. He was no more a natural kzin than a cockroach was, and never had she realized that so clearly as now.

His tone was exaggeratedly patient. “I said, ‘why do you think I started with the toys’?”

Selena set her shoulders back a little further and withdrew her emotions from her eyes. “I’m not here to make guesses, Hap. This is not a game.”

“Really? Then why these?” He gestured at the broken playthings. “Toys are for playing games, aren’t they?”

“They’re not just toys, Hap.”

“No? Then what else are they for?”

“For training you. For making sure you can exercise all your physical abilities.”

Hap sat back; the kzin smirk was surprisingly similar to its human equivalent. “Tell me about my physical abilities, please.”

“You don’t need me to tell you what you can see by looking in a mirror.”

“What I see and feel is not what I’m talking about.” He stood, and Selena thought: my god, he’s become so big, so fast. She felt, and quickly pushed down, a pang of fear. Hap was either too caught up in his own thoughts to have smelled it, or very possibly, would not have known what the smell meant: kzin senses were hard-wired to read the emotional states of the prey-creatures of their home world, not Earth. “What I’m talking about is what you expect me to become. What you know about my species, my birth, my family. Yes, you’ve told me I’m an orphan, but not why or how. Yes, you’ve told me that I’m a kzin and that I’m from another world, but not how I got here, or why. And every time I ask, you-what is the term? — you redirect me.” He sat down again, reclined. “You know, it gets pretty tiresome, being redirected all the time. And pretty insulting, too: I can hardly believe you didn’t expect that I would eventually catch on to what you were doing.”

“Oh, I knew you would, Hap. I knew.”

“Then why did you keep doing it? Why didn’t you stop redirecting, and just talk to me?”

What a wonderful question. And what a shitty answer I have: because I didn’t have the clearance to do that. Because once we start down this road, you won’t accept anything less than complete answers. And you shouldn’t. But no one can agree on when to drop the big bomb on you, Hap: no one can agree that the time has come to level with you about all the dirty truths of how you came to be here. That your race and ours are at war. That we slaughtered your mother and sister. That we don’t keep you here out of love, or even kindness, but bloody-minded strategic benefit.

Hap’s stare was quizzical, the same look she remembered from when he was a kit. Then, his eyes opened wide: “You weren’t allowed to tell me, were you?”

Selena had no clearance for any of this, but the situation had gone beyond concerns over clearance now. If she shut down this conversation, Hap would never trust her again. The relationship would be proven to be a sham. And suddenly, everything Selena had ever done for, or said to, Hap would become suspect; at the very least, he would know it had only occurred because it had been permitted by higher powers, that Selena’s own feelings and motivations were secondary to the dictates of others.

So Selena shook her head. “No. I was not allowed.” She smiled ruefully. “And to be honest, I’m not allowed to reveal that I was not allowed to reveal things to you.”

Hap frowned and then grinned. “That statement took me a moment to work through. Zzhreef’f!” Which, Selena knew, was the Heroes’ Tongue equivalent of “I’ll be damned.” He looked at her for a long moment. “So you’re going to break all the rules, now?”

“Hap, I won’t. I can’t.”

“Why?”

“Oh, Hap, because if I do, there will be consequences.”

“For you?”

“For you, too.”

“Such as?”

“Well, in all probability, the same people who haven’t allowed me to speak openly to you would probably keep me from coming back here. Ever again. It would be the last time we see each other. And there’s nothing I could do about it.”

Hap’s ears had laid back tightly against his increasingly angular skull. “They’d do that? Really?”

“Really. Look, Hap: you were right when you said that nothing here is natural. But the unnaturalness goes far beyond the fenced-in range, the lack of contact with your own kind, the refusals to let you see the rest of the world, the carefully edited books about history and current events, and these insipid toys.” He smiled happily when she spat out the words “insipid toys.” Clearly, that admission of repressed fellow-feeling restored much of his confidence in her. “I can’t tell you about all of that unnaturalness, not yet. But I think that is going to start changing now.”

“Why? Why should it start changing now?”

“Because of you.”

“Me?” Hap sat up: curiosity and pride-the pride of an adolescent being told that their input has made an impact in the inscrutable world of adults-was clear in his expression. “What did I do?”

“This.” She gestured to the rank of mangled toys. “And the impatience you expressed with your current information limits. It will show the people who have resisted telling you more about yourself, and your origins, that the matter is really out of their hands, now. They can hardly counsel patience anymore, because there’s nothing to be gained by it. Your comments today show that you understand that you’re living in the middle of a stilted game, not the real world.”

Selena had the impression that Hap was trying very hard not to look smug: he was failing miserably, and didn’t much care. “Did they, whoever ‘they’ are, really think I could get to be this old and not ask myself, ‘Hey, does everyone grow up alone in a special enclosure? Why are there only two other kzinti and why do they hate me? Where does all the stuff around me come from? Why are there so many questions that never get answered?’ Perhaps they thought that since I never knew any different, I wouldn’t see anything strange in all that?” His last point rose on a note of incredulity.

At which Selena smiled, because Pyragy had insisted that Hap would remain just that ingenuous. According to him, “the subject, knowing no different, will be unable to adequately frame doubts for some time yet, and will therefore, not be distressed by the peculiarities of his condition.”

Before she could respond, Hap sat erect again, surprise writ large on his wide face. “They did! They really thought I wouldn’t notice anything wrong? I can’t believe anyone would be that stupid.”

“You’d be surprised. But Hap, I’d like to start making things better for you, less unnatural. So tell me: if you could change one thing about your life here, right now, what would it be?”

“You mean, other than having to live here at all?”

“Yes, other than that.”

“Well-” he stared at the savaged toys again “-I’d like to change all that.”

She looked at the mauled bits of pseudo fur. “You mean, you want them removed?”

“No, no.” He seemed uncertain for a second; his pelt shook with annoyance. Then he looked her square in the eyes. “I just want to know this: when can I kill something?”

Selena felt the equivalent of a snowball materialize in her gut. Two years ago, he had still been her cheery, cuddly little Hap; now he was asking her about killing as matter-of-factly as a human teen might have asked when he or she could start dating. It was as natural to him as the pelt covering his body. And just as alien as that to Selena. She felt as if, in a single second, he had dwindled into some impossible distance, an invisible speck beyond the heliopause.

Selena swallowed, and said calmly, “You want something to chase, I presume?”

“Well, of course I do!” Hap smiled, stared at her indulgently. “What do you think, that I just want to slit a throat? Like snick-?” and he demonstrated in the air with a single, suddenly unsheathed claw. “Come on, Selena; where’s the thrill in that?”

Selena managed not to blink or retch. “Where, indeed,” she agreed.

After Selena completed her report, Pyragy looked away, sat silent for a full ten seconds. Then: “Thank you, Dr. Navarre. This is important information. And we will take your recommendations under advisement.”

Boroshinsky goggled at the director but said nothing. Poor Mikhail was starting to show his age a bit, despite the anti-senescence cocktails they had him on. He didn’t jump into fights like this one with the same alacrity that he used to.

Which left it to Selena. “Director Pyragy, I’m the one in direct contact with the subject. Who now knows that I take orders from a higher authority. If we put this off-if I am not allowed to give him certain minimal assurances about our increased forthrightness-then we will lose him. My personal relationship with him will be shattered beyond repair, and I am quite certain he will have nothing to do with anyone else. Not at this stage, and not under these conditions.”

“I was not aware your relationship with the subject had become an indispensable part of our project, Dr. Navarre.”

“This was outlined as a high-probability outcome before we even started, Director Pyragy. It has come to pass. As everyone-well, almost everyone-expected it would.”

He turned to look at her. “So what are you requesting?”

“It’s not what I’m requesting; it’s what Hap is requesting. And it is utterly reasonable.”

“What? That he be allowed to kill creatures?”

“Yes. More specifically, to hunt them down and eat them.”

Pyragy shuddered. “It is barbarous even to suggest it.”

“Director, we are not talking about a human. We are talking about a kzin. This is part of their growth process. It is only natural that he express this desire, this need. Indeed, it is a sign of our profound cultural influence upon him that he chose to wait-could force himself to wait-this long.”

Pyragy was silent for a long time; Selena watched a variety of emotions contend on his face. Stubbornness, prudence, distaste, pragmatism, willfulness, cunning. “Small animals,” he said at last. “Rodents only.”

Selena tried to think where she could find the largest, fastest rabbits. Squirrels, too. “That won’t work for long. The references we just received with the rest of Dr. Yang’s first reply all indicate that the kzinti bring down game many times their size and mass, and nearly equal to them in ferocity.”

“For now, this will have to do. We will cross the next bridge when we come to it.”

“I think we’ve already reached it, Director Pyragy. The subject has also asked about killing sapients.”

Pyragy swiveled to face her, his face rigid with horror. “He has asked about killing humans?”

Selena shook her head sharply. “No, no; his questions were philosophical in nature. In particular, he focused on the concept of justified homicide: he is having a hard time understanding that.”

“What? He wants to slaughter bunnies but he has a hard time understanding justified homicide? That is such a bizarre juxtaposition that I frankly suspect him of playing a joke on you, Doctor.”

“Director, I am afraid you are misconstruing my statement. The subject does not have a problem understanding the ‘homicide’ part of ‘justifiable homicide.’ His confusion stems from what he considers the endless and overfine moralizing that informs the extreme constraints our society imposes upon sufficient justification for killing another sentient. He called our attention to the ethics of killing ‘obsessive, pointless, and unnatural.’”

“And I presume you informed him of his error?”

“Director, for him, that opinion is not an error: that is the voice of his nature speaking.”

“Nature be damned. We were killers, once, too. But we have trained ourselves to be otherwise. So can the kzinti. This is the moment when his inclinations must not be indulged: he must be conditioned away from an easy acceptance of wanton slaughter.”

Selena stilled her drumming fingers. Here’s where the real fight starts-unavoidably. “Director, I’m sorry, but this is simply not a question of behavioral training. It is a matter of his nature, and it is not subject to our nurture, as so many of the ARM’s idealists presumed when this project started. Sapience is not a guarantee of ethics that evolve around a universal core of pluralism or sanctity of life. For the kzinti, there are worse things than killing, and that’s true for them no matter which end of equation they find themselves on: killing or being killed. What we need to realize is that it had to be that way for them, that there wasn’t any viable alternative. For them, the impulse to hunt, chase, and kill is a positive evolutionary trait. It’s how they survived as a species. Every part of both their inbred impulses and early social construction was determined by increasing their chances of success in taking on big, lethal prey animals: the only kind that could sustain a tribe of kzinti, given their immense appetites.”

Pyragy’s eyes had narrowed. “We suspected as much when we began this project, Dr. Navarre. And we proceeded with a moral resolve to mitigate this behavior, both so that the subjects could eventually become liaisons for us, and so that they could be used to civilize the kzinti.” He studied her carefully, clearly giving her enough time to realize that the pause implied the importance of what he was going to say next. “Are you proposing, Doctor, that we-including the ARM’s oversight personnel, such as the admiral and the executive-have all made a fundamental error?”

“I’m proposing, Director, that many of us were not well-prepared to face the challenges of this project squarely. And I am not referring to the methodological challenges, but the implicit ideological challenges.”

“What do you mean, ideological challenges? Do you mean the conflict between our system of values and the kzinti’s?”

“No, sir; I mean a conflict between the realities of our own existence and the ideologies under which we had buried them. Hindsight suggests that, during the last century and a half, during our Golden Age of Peace, there was a tendency to slip into a moral anthropomorphization of the universe.”

Pyragy’s ever-thickening brows lowered further. “I warn you, Dr. Navarre, if you cannot trouble yourself to be clear, I will be forced to censure you.”

“Okay, then, how about this: for the last one hundred and fifty years, many of our leaders were so pleased with how we supposedly purged violence from our natures that they generalized that lofty state of existence into a universal constant: it became the presumed zenith of social accomplishment for any civilization. And no one dared raise a hand in objection or doubt, for fear that they’d be reprogrammed due to their recidivistic sympathies, for aiding and abetting primitivism. From top to bottom, we all drank the Kool-Aid with blissful smiles on our wan little faces.”

“‘Drank the Kool-Aid’?”

“It’s an old reference to sheeplike behavior that got people killed back in the twentieth century. It was a group phenomenon not unlike the one we observe in lemmings, except that we humans leap to our deaths following ideologies, not instincts. Everyone goes over the cliff because they’re too busy staring at and complimenting the emperor on his new clothes.”

“I asked for pellucidity, not insolence.”

“You got the truth as best I know how to say it. And since you didn’t seem willing or able to get my earlier hints about how our own social conditioning blinded us to the real challenges that we’d experience working with the kzinti-”

“Silence. I will not be schooled by you, Dr. Navarre.”

“Fine-but then you’d better find someone who you are willing to be schooled by, because your present policies are going to ruin our relationship with the test subject.”

“How? By compelling him to initially restrict his murderous appetites to rodents?”

“No: by retarding his development, by withering away those essential parts of him that don’t fit into the pacifistic procrustean bed that you’ve constructed not merely for him, but for all of humanity.” When Selena was finished, she realized that her voice had become sharp and that she was panting with suppressed rage.

Pyragy’s smile was small, but very smug. “I regret that I will have to report this outburst to our overseers, Dr. Navarre.”

Boroshinsky’s voice had risen even before the Director had finished: “Yes, Director, do. And add to your report that the entirety of the biology group supports Dr. Navarre’s findings and handling of this matter.”

Pyragy considered the back wall over steepled fingers. “Well, in light of your unanimity of opinion, I suppose a report might be precipitous. I shall therefore desist-”

“Too late,” Boroshinsky snapped. He tapped his wristcomp. “I’ve just sent a message to Admiral Coelho-Chase and Associate Executive Chair Dennehy that independent assessments from all the project’s group leaders are forthcoming.”

If looks could kill, Pyragy’s would have slain Boroshinsky on the spot. “That,” he almost whispered, “was very ill-advised.”

Boroshinsky shrugged. “Then fire me.” He smiled, sent a sideways wink at Selena. “But I suppose we’d all need to report that too, wouldn’t we?”

Selena had never had an impulse to kiss a man so old that his lips had a perpetual quaver in them.

But she did now.

2402 BCE: Subject age-six years

Down in the scrub-covered defile that wove its way into the preserve’s boundary ridgeline, there was a burst of dust. It told them that Hap had brought down the mule deer at last. Had he not exhausted himself earlier chasing a particularly nimble springbok, the current pursuit would have been much shorter.

“He’s a pretty impressive hunter,” Dieter commented, looking away. “But then again, they all are.”

Selena did not know what to say, and if Boroshinsky did, he didn’t offer it. But they all knew what Dieter meant, and they were all thinking the same thing: Dr. Yang’s reports-now distributed to all the members of the research project, as well as select military personnel-made repeated, ghastly mention of the kzin habit of hunting humans on Wunderland. It wasn’t done at random, and it wasn’t done in a cavalier fashion, but the fact remained: traitors, rebels, criminals, malcontents, and incompetents were not punished or incarcerated on Wunderland. They were the foxes in the horrible hunts whereby kzin officers amused themselves, and the higher ranking ones trained their young males. It was all too easy to stare at the settling puff of dust down in the ravine and imagine that it was not a mule deer thrashing beneath Hap’s teeth and claws, but a human.

“It’s necessary,” Selena blurted, reaching to turn off the camera on the hoverbots which followed Hap. The three more distant bots-which completed the irregular, changing tetrahedral pattern around him-mercifully did not provide the gory details of the kill. “Without these instincts and these capabilities, any genuine kzin would reject him.”

Dieter nodded. “They still might.”

Boroshinsky looked sideways at the Wunderlander. “Why do you say this, Captain?”

“Just Dieter, please. Hunting is just the opening ante for being accepted as a Hero. If he is to have any standing among them-if he is to be a liaison who is respected, rather than scorned-he will need to know how to fight. Not hunt: fight.”

The air suddenly felt colder to Selena; she rubbed her arms vigorously.

Boroshinsky looked puzzled by Dieter’s assertion. “Shto? Maybe they have some form of martial art?”

Dieter shrugged. “Maybe; we don’t have any intel on that. Most of their combat moves seem to be a direct inheritance from inborn instinct. I suspect they spar, to hone those moves and improve their reaction time. But there’s no evidence that they have a special discipline for personal combat.” Dieter looked at the almost-vanished dust smudge. “Can’t say they seem to need one, either.”

“No,” said Selena. “They don’t. And he doesn’t. What he needs is competition.”

Dieter looked at her. “What do you mean?”

She sighed. “Hap has been asking questions about new additions to the preserve.”

Boroshinsky looked at her closely. “You mean like water buffalo? Rhinos? Maybe elephants?” He laughed.

Selena did not. “Yes. And more.”

Boroshinsky’s eyes widened. “What kind of more?”

Selena looked away. “Lions. Tigers. Bears. Oh my.”

Dieter nodded. “Now I know why he was asking me about the new breakthroughs in archeogenetics.”

Boroshinsky reared back. “Bozhemoie! No! Even if you get clearance for it, some of those creatures are too dangerous. Even for him.”

Dieter kept looking at the defile. “Too dangerous for him now, yes. Later? I wonder.”

Selena stared at the man who was in and out of her life, along with whispers about the special detachment that he was assigned to: it had no address, no known permanent base, no official name. He got a month Earthside every year. Usually. So she knew him, or at least she thought so. “Well, this is new. A week ago you were worried about us bringing in the caribou. Now you’re okay with him taking on raptors?”

Dieter’s lip twitched. “They don’t have a gene code on raptors. No dinosaurs other than the pieces they can pull from current reptiles.”

“Okay; a cave bear, then. Those they’ve got.”

Boroshinsky stared narrowly at her. “And how do you know that?”

“Same way you do, Mikhail. Insatiable curiosity coupled with inappropriate use of my clearance rating.”

Which made the older man laugh thinly. “Okay. You win.”

Selena kept staring at Dieter. “Well? What made you change your mind?”

Dieter nodded off in the direction of the ravine. “Him.”

“Hap?”

“Yes. He spoke to me today.”

“He spoke to you? After all this time?”

Dieter nodded. “Yes. It was nice. But very strange.”

“I’ll bet,” Selena concurred.

Boroshinsky frowned. “I know I’m not supposed to know anything about this, but I do. I know he stopped talking to you about a year ago. Why?”

Dieter turned to face him. “Because I told him about what I did on the kzin ship. How I snatched him. How I killed his mother.”

Boroshinsky stared at Selena. “And you-and the director-approved that?”

Dieter looked off in the distance. “I didn’t ask permission. No time, anyway. He’d mostly figured it out on his own, asked me questions that put me in a position where I’d have to lie, avoid the topic, or tell him the truth. So I chose the truth. And he ran off.”

“To grieve.”

“That. And maybe to keep from killing me.”

Selena stood slightly closer to Dieter. “Or maybe because he couldn’t bear knowing that the person he’s always trusted, even loved, had been the cause of all his misfortunes.”

Dieter blinked. “Maybe. Anyhow, today he seemed to have all those emotions well in hand. He was really very frank about it: ‘you killed the kzinti who were supposed to raise me. So I would appreciate it if you could help me get what I need in order to truly grow up.’”

Selena wished she had been there for that conversation and was simultaneously grateful that that bitter cup had passed her by. “And so what he asked for were…monsters?”

“Pretty much, yes. Prehistoric monsters. I agreed to support his request.”

“Out of guilt?”

“Out of common sense. Let’s face it, Selena: if he’s going to survive among natural kzinti, he has to know how to fight back, how to respond to a challenge. He knows it, feels it in his bones. It has to happen, and it has to start soon. Not with the big creatures, but at least some smaller ones.”

Selena found herself wondering how one went about procuring dangerous animals for slaughter: “Hello, Dial-a-Beast? I would like to order one each of the following creatures for next month: one hyena, one wolf, one cougar, one black bear, one-yes, that’s right. I’m interested in an ascending lethality rating…”

Dieter hadn’t stopped. “But I told him I would not support his other request.”

Selena felt her brain slide to a halt. “What other request?”

“Can’t you guess?”

They stared at each other for a long time. Then she got it: “Females?”

“Of course.”

Boroshinsky snickered. “What else?”

Selena shot him a look that she hoped would scald the old man’s conscience; he seemed serenely unperturbed by it. “Well, at least you didn’t promise him the start of his own harem.”

Dieter sighed. “Look, Selena, just because I’m not a scientist doesn’t mean I’m stupid. He’s six, so in his natural environment he’d be tussling with other male kzinti, and maybe some of the fights would even be getting serious. But there’s no way he’d have access to a female of his own for another fifteen or twenty years, minimum. He has to earn a Name first; at the very earliest, that means age twenty. Right?”

“Okay, so you’ve read the reports. But that doesn’t mean you should have-”

“Enough!” Boroshinsky was both frowning and smiling at them. “You argue like old married people. So why don’t you make it official and be done with it?”

Boroshinsky’s glee at playing matchmaker faded quickly; he saw the uncomfortable look on Dieter’s face, saw what was no doubt a similar expression on Selena’s. He had the good sense not to say anything else. Maybe later, Selena would reassure him that he’d done no harm, had no way of knowing that the two of them had been over it many times, but could not find a way to turn what they did have into a marriage. They were apart too much and had profoundly different lives, particularly since his was founded on the principle that, at any second, he might get called to defend the system, and die doing so.

Dieter pointed down into the defile. “Hap’s moving again.”

And so he was: there was a brief flash of black and orange which shot across the valley floor and disappeared into a dense cluster of Mediterranean pines. “He says that when he dreams, he can actually smell females, more clearly than he sees them.”

Selena nodded. “That’s my doing.”

“What?”

“We’ve been piping in a small amount of their scent into the paddock at night.”

“Good grief, why?”

“Well, in case you’ve forgotten, this is an experiment, too. Mikhail and his people have found so many hormone secretion systems in the kzin it boggles the mind. So we were trying to get a measure of which ones are released when Hap detects the scent of a female.”

Dieter’s left eyebrow raised. “Wouldn’t the answer to that be a foregone conclusion?”

Boroshinsky shook his head and waggled a corrective finger. “Not so obvious as you might expect. In human males, aggressive behavior of all kinds is associated with testosterone. But this is not the case with kzinti. After all, how do the adult males that lack females manage not to go murderously insane without mating access?”

Dieter nodded. “I don’t know: how?”

Boroshinsky held up his hands. “We don’t know yet. But some preliminary results suggest that the impulse to rut and the impulse toward violence do not seem to be created by the same hormone, although the presence of the first may change the hormonal cause of the latter.”

“What?”

“Let’s start with what we know: the kzinti are always ready to fight for honor, da?”

“Yes.”

“But they can control and mitigate that impulse. However, we also have evidence that they become utterly uncontrollable and primal when they are fighting over females, particularly if the females are physically present. So this suggests that there are two different intensities or kinds of violence hormones, the first of which operates without regard to the presence of females, the second of which operates only in their presence, when the male’s rutting-drive hormones are released. And for kzin society to remain intact, some such mechanism must be present: if both drives were generated by the same hormone and the same conditions, the intensity and frequency of the males’ routine dominance struggles would be indistinguishable from the mating combats. Meaning that there would be constant, irrepressible carnage. There would also be no way for the twenty percent of males who possess females to retain control over the other eighty percent who do not. The frustrated rutting urge would compel the eighty percent to sweep the others aside, regardless of the costs and casualties.”

Selena shook her head. “But maybe the difference between dominance and mating aggression levels is simply a matter of cognitive selection; since mating is the primary drive, the male kzinti choose to risk everything to satisfy it.”

“That was our first hypothesis, but some of my researchers discovered what we believe are different kinds of violence/aggression hormones. If we are right, this would mean that different external situations trigger the release of different hormones, which in turn generate different intensities and types of aggression.”

Selena shrugged. “Evolution constantly reveals the universe’s infinite capacity for creative solutions to adaptive problems.”

Boroshinsky winked. “Or provides a playground for its more advanced species.”

Selena stared. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, is this very nuanced hormonal arrangement a result of evolution or engineering?”

“What have you found?”

“Nothing, and I probably won’t. Because if the kzin hormonal matrix is a geneering job, it was both too good and done too long ago for us to be sure that it’s artificial. In fact, if it is a construct, it’s become so integral to the kzinti that their genome has evolved around it.”

“Then why do you suspect interference at all?”

Boroshinsky shrugged. “Now that we’ve got Dr. Yang’s data, we have access to full genetic analyses on the kzinti’s native food animals. A close comparison of the genomes indicates, that, like us, the kzinti evince a better-than-ninety-percent match to other chordates from their homeworld. But the kzinti’s extraordinary diversity of secretions and hormones is a distinct break from their home world’s dominant evolutionary paradigm.”

Dieter shrugged. “But every species has differences, developmental departures from the shared gene code. That’s why we don’t look like dogs. Or lobsters, for that matter.”

“True, but mutation from a common root stock also implies a basic constraint upon the rate of variation. Genetic change does not manifest as the sudden appearance of unprecedented structures, but as gradual variations upon a theme. And this isn’t; the kzin hormone structures come out of nowhere. They just doesn’t fit in with the rest of their world’s evolutionary paradigms, so far as we can tell.”

“Well, maybe you don’t have access to enough of their homeworld’s species. We just might not have the samples that would show the natural progression which produced this mutation.” Boroshinsky nodded at Dieter’s insight, but did not look convinced. Dieter smiled. “But you don’t think that’s the answer.”

“No, I don’t.”

Selena turned back to look out over the preserve. On the ridgeline that rose up behind the forest, she saw a fleck of black-orange ascending its jagged protrusions, spiderlike. The movement was sure, swift, even a little frightening. “Wherever their hormonal equipment came from,” she breathed out slowly, “it seems to work pretty well.”

2405 BCE: Subject age-nine years

For the first time since they had brought Hap to her as a tiny black-orange puffball, Selena was scared, physically scared, to enter the same space that he was in.

He was no longer a little puffball now. Slightly more than two meters in height, Hap had also begun to fill out. His chest was deeper and wider and his haunches were so angular with muscle that they almost looked like a cubist’s rendering. And what she had to tell him was not likely to improve his already dubious mood. Dubious because it was impossible to know exactly how or what he felt anymore.

He looked up as she stepped down from the floater, eyed it closely. What was he looking for? A means of commandeering it and escaping? Whether the humans’ growing fear of him had pushed them over the line into carrying guns?

But all he said was, “N’shyao, Selena.”

“And hello to you, Hap. It seems like you’re not finding the bears too challenging anymore.” She managed not to look at the lump of savaged black fur and exposed flesh, from which Hap had already carved out a sizeable lunch for himself.

“No, they’re very slow. Maybe it’s time to move to one of the bigger species. Or the more aggressive ones.” He got up and stretched: the men in the floater sat up much straighter. Hap smiled, his mouth opening ever so slightly as he did; it was not a pleasant expression. “Now, as much as I am pleased to see you, Selena, this wasn’t one of our regularly scheduled visits. Which I’m sure are all part of a careful interval of observation or conditioning or whatever it is you’re doing with me.”

She shrugged. “Probably some of both, which is no different from what a parent does as they nurture a child’s process of maturation.”

Hap’s fur rippled sharply with amusement. “Now that was a great answer, Selena. And I suppose it’s true, too. But tell me: what’s gone wrong? Why are you out here now?”

Selena collected herself. “I’ve told you we have a female kzin in our keeping, as well.”

“Yes, of course. Not like I’d forget that fact.” He sat down, looked at her a long time. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“I–I’m afraid so, Hap.”

“Why? Didn’t she do all the tricks you asked?”

Selena forgot Hap’s physical size, blinded by the greater enormity of his callousness, his facetiousness. “That’s revolting in so many ways that I don’t know where to start.”

“Then don’t start. And while we’re on the topic of revolting, please spare me any claims of regret or commiseration. We kzinti are your lab animals, pure and simple. You just had to put one down. Oh, I know you probably get attached to some of them, but that comes with the job, doesn’t it?”

Selena stalked over to look him in the eye. “We didn’t put her down. Your own brother kzin did that.”

For a moment, Hap sat mute. Then, faster than she could really follow, he was on his feet, crouched, ears halfway back and quivering, mouth slightly open.

And Selena didn’t care. Instead she looked him up and down with an appraising glance: “And yes, they say he looked just about like that when he did it.”

Hap looked down at her, then looked away. “I’m not angry at you, Selena. I don’t know what I’m angry at, exactly. I just know that anything that happens to me-to us kzinti-is because of humans. You killed our mothers, you fight wars with our fathers, you brought us here, and you watch us grow. And measure and observe and make all sorts of guesses. We’re lab rats.”

“No. It’s not supposed to be that way. There have always been better intentions than that.”

He looked at her for a long moment, measuring. Then he sat. “Oh. So Dieter was telling the truth after all, last month.”

Selena had known that this encounter could go in many possible directions. But this surprise-that Dieter had obviously visited Hap last month, without authorization or escort-had not been on her list of anticipated outcomes. “What?” she said.

“Ah, so he never told you about visiting me? Well, so he kept his promise to keep it a secret. Another truth he told that I presumed was a lie.” For a split second, Hap might have looked guilty or wistful, but the expression was gone as quickly as it had arisen. “Dieter told me that most of you were hoping to allow me to go back to the kzinti. To function as a mediator, maybe.”

That son of a bitch of a meddling Wunderlander-

“No, Selena, don’t be angry with him. In fact, right now, the fact that he shared that with me-and that it was the truth, and didn’t tell you about doing so-well, it makes me think that maybe you’re not all faithless after all.”

“You really think that? That humans are all faithless?”

“Well, why wouldn’t I? Yes, you’ve provided most of what you’ve promised, but what you’ve promised is only a tiny fraction of what I’ve requested. And why can’t you provide the rest?” He leaned back until he was supine. “Because I am the enemy, because I’m your prisoner.” His tone became extravagantly sarcastic. “If you let me out, who knows what havoc I might cause? What secrets I might learn?”

Selena nodded. “Right. Well, I can see coming out here was mistake. I’ll see you next week, Hap, as per the schedule.” She turned on her heel and made for the floater with a brisk step.

“Selena, wait.”

She paused, turned.

Hap was staring at her and she couldn’t read his eyes, not because they were guarded, but because the mix of emotions and impulses was so tangled and contradictory that it defied delineation. “I’d like to know what happened to the female. ‘Pretty,’ you called her, right?”

Selena folded her arms but did not reapproach. “That is correct.”

“And one of your researchers decided to see what would happen if she was put together with one of the other males, now that they are sexually mature.”

Selena felt her stern demeanor slip. Come to think of it, Hap was right: they were just lab rats, after all. At least that’s how Pyragy had acted: playing god with his specimens…

Hap’s voice was patient: “You didn’t approve.”

Selena shouted, thereby overriding what started as a choked sob. “Of course I didn’t approve! I fought him-the decision-every way I could.”

“But you weren’t in charge.”

“No. And the person who was normally in charge had a heart attack and was still recovering.” Please, Mikhail: get better quickly, for your sake, for my sake, for Hap’s sake. “So the decision rested with someone who is not involved in our work directly.”

“Ah. An administrator?”

She nodded, both at the word and the way he said it: with a healthy measure of parodic hauteur. “He gave the orders and I tried to get them overturned. But there wasn’t enough time. He wouldn’t wait.”

“Is he a…a…” Hap struggled for the word; although infinitely more mature than a human nine year old, he still had a lot of language learning to do. “…a sadist?”

“No.” Although sometimes I wonder…“He wasn’t motivated by sadism.”

Hap thought. “He was trying to use mating as a reward mechanism, then.”

Selena felt her mouth snap shut, stunned at the canny insight of the almost mature kzin before her. Yes, he might be young, but like all his breed, he learned quickly; he had to, if he was to survive. The kzin genotype did not breed many geniuses: the species was inherently unsuited to long periods of reflection. But the genotype also didn’t breed many idiots: in accord with the old axiom that there were two kinds of combatants, the quick and the dead, the kzinti survived by having quick reflexes, quick wits, or both.

Hap pushed for confirmation of his conjecture. “So it was an attempt at creating a new reward mechanism?”

Well, why not answer? Hap had figured it out on his own, anyway. “Yes. And I wouldn’t let him use you as the test subject. I had that much authority over the process, anyway.”

“Hmm. Perhaps I wouldn’t have killed her, either.” A sharp, territorial glint danced briefly through Hap’s eyes and was gone, or maybe just quickly concealed.

Selena sighed. “Perhaps not. Probably not. But if I had given him access to you, that would have just been the edge of the wedge. I could have lost control, might no longer have been able to-” She dragged to a halt, not knowing how to explain.

“You might not have been able to continue to protect me,” he finished for her.

Selena nodded. “I know it sounds absurd, that I have to protect you from a colleague who wants to give you the opportunity to mate. But-”

“No, actually, I can see it very clearly, Selena. I may not like the restrictions on my life-and I’m coming to see that you don’t, either-but you’ve been as consistent, and also as humane, as you can be in maintaining those constraints. But this administrator seems rash. Which I find odd: aren’t administrators supposed to be the more cautious persons in an organization, the ones who keep the workers from running off in all directions, acting without authorization?”

Selena smiled. “Yes. And he certainly does that. But-”

“But what?”

“He had very different ideas about how you were to be raised. Several of us, his lieutenants you might say, had to appeal to his superiors to keep him from treating you kzinti in…questionable ways.”

“Torture?”

“No. Well, yes, in a manner of speaking.”

Hap frowned, then his eyes opened wide. “Oh, I see: not bodily torture. Something mental. Or behavioral.”

“Behavioral.”

Hap thought a long time, his eyes half-lidded. Then he nodded: “He was the one who tried to make me eat cooked meat, wasn’t he?”

Selena gaped. “You remember that?”

“Of course I do. So it was him?”

Selena nodded.

“So the torture you are referring to: he wanted to-how would you say it? — humanize us?”

Selena sighed. “Something like that. But higher powers intervened shortly after you came to live with us.”

“And these higher powers are the ones who want to send me back to the kzinti as a mediator, as Dieter described?”

“Yes. But they aren’t really in charge of, of”-she almost said “the project” but stopped herself in time-“our actions. They only step in if something goes wrong.”

“So they’ll be stepping in, now.”

“Yes, in a very big way.” And would very probably do so by permanently removing Pyragy, a step that was at least five years overdue.

Hap nodded. “So I take it that this administrator introduced Pretty to the oldest male, the one who almost tore into me. What did you name him, by the way?”

Selena stumbled after a lie, gave up, closed her eyes as she spoke: “Cranky Cat. They named him Cranky Cat.”

When she opened her eyes, Hap’s fur was rippling, but his eyes were hard. Sardonic amusement was a kzin expression she was learning to identify quickly these days. “What a dignified name,” Hap slurred. “Although I have to admit it is accurate, too. So Cranky Cat didn’t like Pretty any more than he liked me.”

“No, he didn’t.” Selena shut her eyes. “It was a disaster. Because I was trying to do everything I could do to stop it, the administrator didn’t inform me when the introduction was taking place. I got a panicked call from the researcher who worked most closely with Pretty, but by the time I got there, it was too late.”

Selena tried to put the memory of the blood-spattered paddock out of her mind, couldn’t. “We knew that kzin mating was pretty rough by human standards. So the overseers didn’t know until it was too late that this was-well, way beyond that.” The tapes ran on endless loop in her memory: the frenzied thrashing of Pretty; the pinning paws of Cranky Cat, which, as he came close to completing the coupling, began crushing, piercing, slashing-“He was coupling and killing her at the same time. And when our people realized what was happening, and tried to intervene, he finished. Both acts.”

Hap’s voice buzzed with a suppressed snarl. “Why did he do it?”

Selena shrugged. “There’s no way to find out. Cranky Cat never learned how to speak: not our language, nor yours. He wouldn’t have anything to do with us. So we’ll never know why he did it. But if you want my gut reaction, Cranky Cat’s drives made him unable to resist the urge to copulate, even as his speciate aversion to us made him kill her.”

“And why would his hatred of humans prompt him to kill her? Because he couldn’t reach you?”

“No, he wasn’t symbolically killing us. It was because he could smell that she was our creature. And at a deep, primal level, he could not abide that. He didn’t think about what he did; he just did it.”

Hap continued to stare at her, unblinking. Then his tail switched fitfully and he rose, moving to sit alongside the mauled carcass that, two hours ago, had been a black bear. “Selena, I want to know your world. All of it.”

“Hap, you’ve figured out so much on your own, so you’ve got to know I don’t have the authority to make that promise.”

“I know that. But if you don’t convince them to let me know more about Earth, then how will I be able to help you later on? Knowing your language and your ways is not enough. The kzinti-the real kzinti-will ask me for my honest opinion, for what you would call my gut reaction, but which is better expressed in the Heroes’ Tongue as grreeowm’m’hysh. ‘Ancestral spine-whispers.’ If I do not know your world, I won’t be able to answer the questions that will make me useful to them. So they will ignore me.”

Selena shut her eyes tightly, finding herself required to reject the very appeal that she herself had made so many times to the board, and for precisely the same reasons. “I cannot let you out into our world. I’m not permitted to do so. And I know they won’t change their minds about that.”

“Then allow your world to come in here.”

Selena opened her eyes. “What did you have in mind?”

“Give me free and unrestricted access to your public records, your library, your news: all of it.”

Selena smiled. “Relying on any one of those sources could give you a very distorted view of our world.”

“That is why I want-why I need-to see all of it. I presume no one voice will speak a complete truth. So I will get to know your world in the same way I get the full measure of each new prey animal you provide: by studying it from all perspectives.” Hap’s fur rippled slowly in a show of good-natured amicability. “Is it not a reasonable request?”

Selena stared at him. “It is. Quite unreasonable.”

Pyragy was putting on a good show in front of the admiral and the associate executive chair: to watch and listen to him, you’d never have guessed that he was doing everything he could to get Selena discredited and drummed out of the scientific community. “This is an excellent turn of events. You might even say that this has produced a silver lining greater than the darkness which started it: the unfortunate death of the female.”

Admiral Coelho-Chase shrugged, suppressing disgust at Pyragy’s increasingly obsequious mannerisms. “Dr. Navarre, much as I regret admitting it, the director does make a good point: it seems that Hap is now interested in the mission for which we’ve been grooming him, and that he’s coming back around to us in general. By any objective standards, those are excellent changes in him.”

“Yes, Admiral, they are quite excellent. But I’m afraid you are dead wrong about him becoming interested in his mission. Or rather, yes, he’s interested now-but not for the reasons you think.”

“Oh?”

“Admiral, Hap intends to betray us. At the very first opportunity he has to do so.”

“What? You mean this is all a conceit?”

Pyragy seemed ready to rub the admiral’s arm soothingly. “Dr. Navarre is exaggerating, at best, or prevaricating, at worst. She is just trying to diminish the new opportunities which have arisen from the unfortunate incident involving the female-”

“No, I’m quite serious. And I know my subject: Hap means to betray us.”

In the nine years she had known him, this was the first time Admiral Coelho-Chase had ever sputtered. “This is outrageous, if it’s true. After we’ve cared for him all these years-why, if he wasn’t a kzin, it would be treason, pure and simple.”

“But,” Selena explained levelly, “he is a kzin and therefore it is not treason. In fact, it is probably not as much a political action as it a developmental action.”

“What?”

“Admiral, look at his age. At this point in his growth phase, it is entirely natural for kzinti, like humans, to buck authority. Buck it hard. In the case of young kzinti, this takes the shape of suiting their actions to their words: when they start to talk the talk, they expect that they will be called upon to walk the walk. It is a phase of high aggression and a need to distinguish themselves from their parental and mentor figures by pursuing opposed paths, by separation, and frequently, by turning upon those who supported them.”

“And that’s natural?”

“Yes, just like rebelliousness in a teenager.”

“But he is almost full-grown and is now, according to you, determined to work as a confidential agent for the natural kzinti.”

Pyragy squared his shoulders dramatically. “Then, if this is true, we must euthanize him. Immediately.”

Selena surprised herself with the speed and vociferousness of her rebuttal. “Why? Because he won’t join hands and sing kumbayah with us? Damn it, he has to go through this if he’s to become an adult. Our own human children do. Or did, until lotus-eating idealists neutered them. But at least that’s over with.”

Pyragy’s upper lip contracted as though he had caught a whiff of dung. “Yes. The Golden Age of Peace is indeed behind us, and we have allowed our children to be raised with the knowledge of war and violence. With terrible results.”

“If speciate survival is a terrible result, then I guess you’re right, Director Pyragy. But this new generation has-thank god-the gumption and aggressiveness that comes from having a few fistfights growing up, and trying cases with their parents.”

“Yes,” Pyragy retorted, “and in all probability, by the time those children are as old as I am, they will no longer need to fight the kzinti, because they will have become as kzinti, themselves.” Pyragy looked as though he might spit. “It is horrific, barbaric.”

“A lot of real-life situations are, Director-horrific and barbaric. And having some familiarity with those realities is necessary if you’re going to have a reasonable chance of surviving a serious encounter with any of them. That’s part of the advantage of having kids, human or kzin, grow up in contention with their own parents, as well as their peers. It teaches kids not only about the limits of change, but also about conflict itself. They learn when it’s appropriate and when it’s not. Which battles to fight, which to avoid, which warrant biding one’s time. And every scrap of evidence we have says that the kzinti need that experience more than humans, much more. So before we declare Hap an irreclaimable turncoat, let’s remember this: we’re all he’s got, which means we’re his only scratching post. So, of course, he’s going to go through this phase. And a valid point of contention like this one-to whom he owes his first loyalties-is a natural lightning rod for those impulses and emotions.”

Associate Executive Chair Dennehy was studying Selena closely, as if he were making several decisions at once. “And what if this isn’t just a teenage phase, Dr. Navarre? After all, Hap has more reason to rebel against authority than any teen ever born.”

Selena nodded soberly. “Now that’s truth, plain and simple, Executive Dennehy. And yes, in turning away from us now, he could be starting down a path that ultimately makes him our permanent, sworn enemy. It might be that he never turns back toward us the way most human kids do when they overcome the tempests of their social and hormonal storm season that we call adolescence. And that’s too bad.

“But it was always a risk, one we knew and articulated right at the outset of this project. And after all, he’s right to feel the way he does. He’s been brought up to be a traitor to his own people, insofar as he is a creature of our making and interests. So we can only hope that, when his wisdom catches up with his intelligence, he will also realize that we were as honest as we could be throughout, eschewed the tactics of coercion, and have always worked not just for own best interests, but for his, and his people’s, as well.”

Pyragy snorted. “You give him entirely too much credit. He will not stop to think about these things. This is why he had to be civilized-fully and effectively civilized-first: by remaining a creature driven by his primal drives rather than thought, he will remain insensate to these higher appeals.”

“Then, Director Pyragy, you should be glad that he is turning away from us, here and now. Because if he’s not smart enough on his own to reflect upon his upbringing in the years to come, then he’s not the right person for the job of being our voice to the kzinti. A person incapable of autonomous reflection or insight would be disastrous to our diplomatic efforts, whatever their end.”

Pyragy grumbled but said nothing loud enough for anyone to hear.

Dennehy was nodding, though. “Dr. Navarre, however else these events might play out, I think you’re absolutely right about one thing: we can’t make a being what he is not. If a kzin, or at least this kzin, is capable-as you posit-of one day seeing our actions in perspective, then this is just a bump in the road, and possibly a necessary one. But if he is not, then you’re right again: he never would have been any good to us as a liaison.”

Selena nodded. “So does this mean that we can start giving Hap increased access to news, to libraries, to-?”

Dennehy nodded back. “Show him our world, Dr. Navarre. Starting today.”

2406 BCE: Subject age-ten years

Selena twisted the strand of silver-grey hair around her finger again and again and again.

“What is that?” Hap’s voice was throaty and deep.

“This? Oh, nothing. This is nothing.”

“You don’t toy obsessively with nothings, Selena.” He sniffed speculatively. “It’s a lock of Dieter’s hair, isn’t it?”

She felt a hot blush rise high on her cheeks, looked away: schoolgirl-stupid, that’s what I am.

Hap’s fur pulsed once, slowly. “Don’t be ashamed. I wish they still allowed Dieter to come in to see me. I miss him, too. A lot.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because Dieter had true strakh, honor.”

“There was a time you couldn’t abide the sight or smell of him.”

Hap swung his head slightly from side to side; an instinctual gesture, not learned, that was the kzin equivalent of a shrug. “It wasn’t as straightforward as that, Selena. I just didn’t know how to deal with what he had done.”

“And now you do?”

Hap’s eyes partially narrowed in easy acquiescence. “Yes. He was a warrior, doing a warrior’s work. But when I was no longer part of his warrior work, he became a friend. He watched over me, even when your rules said he wasn’t supposed to.” And Selena could feel, or at least imagined, the unuttered rebuke: which was more than you ever did for me. Which was, sadly, bitterly, true.

“So you’ve come to see Dieter as having more than one role in your life, as having a multifaceted identity?”

Kzinti rolled their eyes much as humans did: Hap did it now. “No, Selena, you don’t understand at all. Dieter doesn’t have a ‘multifaceted identity.’ Eeyaach, even I understand him better than that, and I don’t mate with him.” Selena didn’t know which she found more arresting: Hap’s patronizing tone or the notion of Dieter and a kzin mating. “Dieter is a warrior: that’s a single identity, not one of many. Seeing him as having many identities is just a by-product of your culture’s squeamishness. You’re trying to excuse his violent actions by pointing to all the other, gentle parts of him. Rubbish.”

“Always nice to have another chat about the infinite failings of the human race,” Selena muttered, with a good deal less good grace than she had intended.

“Oh, your failings aren’t infinite, just very plentiful.”

“Thanks for yet another correction. It’s amazing that you consider us worthy of your improving efforts.”

“Well…I don’t; not really. But some of you are worth it.”

“Dieter, for instance?”

“Dieter. And you.”

“No one else?”

“I don’t exactly have a wide circle of friends, Selena.”

“Well, I doubt you’re missing very much, then. We humans are, as you imply, hardly worth the time. Unlike kzinti, who are sterling examples of altruism and are surely treating their human slaves on Wunderland so much better than we are treating you.”

One lip rippled away from a tooth momentarily. “The kzinti say what they mean and do what they say.”

“Ah, so honor is the only virtue worth having?”

“It is the core virtue, at any rate.”

“And so you can school us in the nuances of honor?”

Hap shrugged like a human. “It is rare that kzinti lack honor. It is rare that humans have it.”

“Which is why you’ve decided that we are your enemies.”

Hap’s ears trembled and twitched backward. “Selena, don’t put words in my mouth. I’m simply not in a rush to help the people who destroyed my life and family and who’ve been lying to me ever since. Well, most of them.”

She could see the sacred, sainted image of Dieter Armbrust almost swimming in his eyes. It was a face she was imagining a lot, too: a face she would not see for at least two years, according to his most recent orders. Something was afoot, something he either did not know or could not tell her about. He had departed this morning. Whereto? Unknown. Mission? Unknown. Time until next contact? Unknown.

When she emerged from her own brief reverie, she saw that Hap was staring at the holding paddock again. “It’s really quite large,” he commented, nodding toward the immense bear that was walking the two-hundred-meter perimeter of the enclosure. When it reached the part closest to them, the massive creature put up its nose, growled, and tried the strength of the barrier. Defeated and disgruntled, it returned to its perambulations.

“Magnificent,” purr-buzzed Hap from deep in his throat. “Arctodus simus, or the extinct short-faced bear, courtesy of Earth’s best reverse-genetics. Last specimen thought to have died about thirteen thousand years ago. Shoulder height of one point eight meters when on all fours, four meters when upright, and all muscle. Almost a full metric ton of unrelenting carnivorous fury.” He paused, drew in a deep breath. Then he exhaled: “Magnificent.”

Selena looked at Hap sideways. “Hap.”

“Yes?”

“Don’t get any smart ideas.”

“Smart ideas are the only ones I have, Selena.”

“I’m not joking, Hap. No tricks, now.”

“Tricks? What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. For now, just leave that bear alone.”

Hap stared at her. “And just what do you think I might do? I can’t pull down the fence, and you’ve never been kind enough to give me a key to the gate. So just let me appreciate and savor my next challenge in peace, Selena.”

She looked at the bear; as big as Hap was, the bear was simply immense, larger than any mammalian predator had a right to be. “Okay, Hap. But-”

“But what?”

“That’s one big bear. And I–I worry about you, Hap.”

He looked at her, his ears like pink half-parasols, his eyes wide. One smooth ripple coursed the length of his pelt. “I know,” he said.

Selena, still in her nightshirt and sweatpants, grabbed for a siderail when the floater rushed down from thirty meters, having cleared the perimeter fence of Hap’s preserve.

“Go there-” she screamed, pointing, “there: the holding paddock.”

The pilot nodded curt understanding; the floater swerved so sharply that Selena had hold on to the siderail with both hands, partly to keep from flying out of the vehicle, partly to keep from vomiting.

“What are you seeing with thermal imaging?” she shouted above the wind.

The senior of the two security specialists shook his head. “Nothing yet.”

That was the same moment that the pilot switched on the forward floodlights, and the paddock gate jumped out of the darkness in high contrast: a sudden, vertical blue-white mesh that scalloped itself out of the surrounding black.

And it was open.

Selena saw the reason faster than she could blink her eyes: cracked wedges of stone-mostly slate, from the look of it-littered the area around the shattered lock. Hap had wedged them in, tighter and tighter until the lock had burst.

But no, that didn’t make any sense: the lock was rated for far more pounds per square inch than either Hap or the bear could generate on their own, even if they threw themselves headlong against the gate with a running start…

Yes, it was strong enough to thwart either one of them-but not both.

The monstrous genius of Hap’s plan now unfolded before her. He had baited the bear into charging against the fence repeatedly. And every time that mountain of muscles, bone, and fangs crashed into the gate, Hap had jammed a slightly wider wedge into the space between the frame and the lock until, adding his own strength, the gate was sprung.

“Damn it,” the senior security specialist snapped, “how did this happen? Where are the drones? Where are the-?”

And then Selena saw the telltale signs of the rest of Hap’s careful handiwork and planning. He had built the equivalent of a lean-to about two hundred meters away from the paddock: the semi-autonomous drones were littered about it. He had evidently watched how they operated, had discerned the one constant pattern: one was always close, three were farther off. So when he went into the lean-to, the closest drone lost access, tried following him in-and had been smashed with the discarded cudgel Selena saw in the doorway. One after another, the smart ’bots had demonstrated just how titanically stupid they really were. Why there had not been better oversight, she would inquire later: someone had evidently taken a very long coffee break. Which, now that she thought about it, was yet another pattern that Hap had probably figured out by testing the responsiveness of the drones. He had obviously learned to distinguish when they were receiving overrides from a live operator in comparison to when they were simply following the predictable commands of their expert system. Meaning that he had been able to put his plan into action when the odds were high that he was under automated, rather than live, surveillance.

“I’ve got a thermal bloom-there.” The security specialist pointed up toward the ridgeline. “Downloading coordinates.”

“ETA?” Selena demanded.

The pilot looked back; he and the security specialist exchanged glances. The latter coughed deferentially: “Dr. Navarre, the safety protocols are quite clear on this matter. When we do not have clear visual lock on any of the predators in the preserve, we are to assume-”

“I wrote those protocols, damn it, and now I am ordering you to disregard them. On my authority.” She faced the pilot. “Fly. Now.”

He did.

They could hear the melee almost three hundred meters away, even over the attitude fans and screaming engine of the floater: a constant counter-point of basso-profundo bellows and high-pitched kzinti yowls of what sounded like ecstatic fury. She had heard Hap fight predators before, but the sound had never been like this. She leaned over the pilot’s shoulder and shouted: “Hurry!”

The floater sped forward and then swerved into the steep-sided arroyo that cut lengthwise into the ridge, paralleling the crest before narrowing to a dead-end. The pilot reached for the floodlights. Selena put a restraining hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t you want to save him, Doctor?”

“Yes, but if we’re going to be sure of doing that, we don’t dare blind him.”

“Then use these, ma’am.” The junior security specialist, who was not much more than a kid, handed her his combo-goggles: light intensification blended with thermal imaging, software-integrated to provide maximum visibility under changing conditions. She slipped them on.

And her breath caught in her throat. Hap was doing something she had never seen before: he was retreating. His fur sticking slick against his body from the sweat pouring out of him, he scanned the surrounding slopes, looking for a way out.

The bear rushed him, so large that even before it got to him, Selena was unable to see Hap over its shambling bulk.

There was a flash of bioheat on shadow-Hap dodging toward the canyon wall-as the bear lunged, raking long claws at the evasive kzin, who, grazed, spun like a top, his yowl echoing up out of the ravine.

But Hap never really fell; tumbled by the glancing blow, he landed and jumped in the same moment, and was suddenly attached to the bear’s right flank, all four paws spread wide, claws buried in the thick hide, his jaws reaching, snapping up toward the spine.

Which was when the bear rolled, but not away from the attack: rather, the bear rolled into it.

Hap had never encountered such a move, possibly because he had never encountered so large and comparatively invulnerable opponent. Even the modern brown bears had instinctively pushed themselves away from the teeth-bristling kzin jaws. Which had made for a predictable endgame: Hap was so much faster that, by swinging himself aggressively into the roll, he always came down on the far side of the bears, his body wide of their dangerous jaws and arms. That was always the beginning of the end: the only variable was the time required to finish the job.

But the prehistoric bear had no fear of Hap, and if it felt the need to protect its head and neck from the kzin that had attached itself to its left side, that need was not stronger than its impulse to roll in the direction of its attacker, thereby crushing him beneath his metric ton of mass.

Which squeezed a scream out of Hap that sent a needle of fear-pain lancing down into Selena’s bowels and which she realized was a stab of maternal terror. Until the senior security specialist grabbed her shoulder roughly, she didn’t realize that she had also moved next to the railing, one leg already rising to clear it. She didn’t notice the specialist’s startled stare: she saw nothing but the battle down in the arroyo.

The bear, feeling Hap’s grip weaken and his teeth release into a scream, twisted so that the kzin was now mostly under him. The beast’s immense head, as large as a small refrigerator, bore Hap down, struggling and squirming as he was pinned in place by the snout. The jaws opened like those of a small steam-shovel and then snapped closed, locking down on the kzin’s upper left ribcage.

The sharp splintering of kzin bone reminded Selena of a sound she had heard years ago, sailing with Dieter down in Florida: their four-inch fiberglass mast had snapped in a sudden gale off the Florida Keys. Hap’s ribs sounded like three of those masts breaking in rapid sequence.

Hap squirmed, thrashed, yowled, blood welling up out of his throat, staining his maw.

“Do you have a shot?” Selena coughed through the bile in her throat and mouth.

The senior security specialist shook his head. “Steady this damned floater,” he growled at the pilot. Knowing, as they all did, that the thermals here were just enough to put a dangerous, unpredictable quiver in the vehicle, no matter what the pilot did.

And there wasn’t the time, anyway. Selena could tell, seeing with eyes that had learned to read such actions and understand their portents millennia ago, that the bear would soon attempt to shift to a final, mortal bite. It was in the sideways slide of the creature’s shoulders, the sudden rigidity of the head as it prepared for the kill.

But, whether it took the bear longer to get better purchase for that next bite, or perhaps the unexpectedly alien taste of a creature that did not share its genetic rootstock, the bear opened its maw a fraction sooner than instinct had instructed. Then the massive jaws pushed in quickly again, looking for a bigger mouthful of kzin to crush.

Selena gasped-not at the bear’s lunge but at Hap’s blinding speed. In the half eye-blink that the ursoid’s vicelike jaws relented, the kzin became a writhing corkscrew-blur of orange and black. The bear’s jaws snapped down resoundingly on thin air. Hap’s blood, trailing behind as he made his almost balletic escape, landed in a wide, dark arc upon the dry ground.

Selena thumped the driver on the back. “Now! The floodlights! NOW!”

The pilot complied, and the bear flinched away, the lights full in its eyes. Hap, half-facing the other direction, was not so completely blinded, and reacted with extraordinary speed and tactical presence of mind.

As the bear tried to avoid the light, obviously uncertain what to do next, the kzin quickly scanned the sides of the arroyo, and found what he was looking for: a rocky outcropping. Knowing it to be too steep and small to be useful as a perch, Selena did not understand Hap’s intent-until, gauging the bear’s half-blind approach, he leapt straight at the stony protrusion.

But instead of landing on it, Hap used it like a springboard: all four limbs were extended like ready shock absorbers when he hit it. In the split second before gravity could pull him down, he looked like a bug, fantastically affixed to the wall of the arroyo. Then he pushed off with savage force, propelling himself at the bear: he twisted in mid-air and landed square on his adversary’s back.

Normally, this would be when Hap would go for a killing bite to the back of the neck. But judging from the torn fur of the bear, he had already tried that tactic and had discovered the almost armored skeleton residing beneath that thick hide: even for the manic strength of a combat-stimulated kzin, the skull and neck bones of arctodus simus were simply too hard to snap or even dent.

So Hap adapted: holding on with his teeth and rear claws, he used his front paws to rake down across the bear’s face, from over the top of its head. The bear shook, seemed about to reprise its defensive roll, and then howled as a razor-sharp kzin claw found its mark: an eye. Forgetting the roll, the bear tried breaking away, running. Hap hung on, slashed, slashed again-and another, even more piteous roar announced the loss of the bear’s other eye.

Hap wasted no time, ripping with mouth and claws at the side of the bear’s face. It flinched away, stumbled: Hap was there again, teeth sinking deep into one of the steady legs.

The bear went down. A flash of black and orange was quickly at the side of its throat, well wide of the bear’s killing jaws, and behind the sweeping arc of its front paws. Hap buried his face deep into that part of the neck that would have housed the carotid artery in a human…

…Four of whom watched, speechless, from the airborne platform of the floater. Then the young security specialist retched. A moment later, his superior muttered, “Jesus Christ.”

Selena tapped the stunned, motionless pilot lightly on the back. “Kill the lights,” she said.

2408 BCE: Sol System, Asteroid Belt near Ceres

Dieter Armbrust knew he had lost the last smallship in his command group a moment before his SensorOp reported it. “Jiang just bought it, sir. Orders?”

Well, thought Dieter, now, commanding the 128th Squadron just means I have to fight my ship. For as long as I can. Which might not be very much longer, he conceded, with a glance at the plot.

The three remaining kzin Raker IIs were closing in on him from three points of the battlesphere: high to port, low on the bow, dead astern. The starboard side was occluded by a planetoid whose identifying number he’d forgotten. It wasn’t one of the major ones: it showed some evidence of old robotic prospecting, but no active mining. Not surprising: judging from the densitometer scans, it was just dead rock.

But that dead rock had kept him alive, shielding him from counter fire while the last two ships of his command-Jiang’s and his own Catscratch Fever-concentrated their fire on one half of the kzin squadron that they had baited into this part of the Belt. But now the other half of the ratcat formation was coming in on him, pinning him against the planetoid. Or so they intended.

Still, the kzinti had recovered quickly from Dieter’s ambush, a skill at which they had been steadily improving since their invasion force had arrived insystem twelve days ago. Scream-and-pounce was no longer the full measure of their tactical repertoire. They had become canny hunters, too, and this group had been the canniest yet.

And Dieter Armbrust would know. He had been in the thick of the fighting since this fourth kzin fleet had made its real objectives clear: to smash the defenses of the Belt as a preliminary to attacking Earth. The ratcats had become smarter, considering the unfolding game two or three moves in advance, instead of being constrained to their prior engagement doctrine of “damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead.” Almost two weeks’ worth of human ruses and decoy ships, double-reverses, and delayed envelopments had taught them not to ignore the torpedoes (or any of the other human toys in the battlespace) and to proceed with a judicious mix of decisiveness and caution.

But I’ve still got one trick left up my sleeve, thought Dieter. “Ms. Hitsu, ready at the helm: we are bringing the auxiliary thrust package on line within the minute. Until then, slow to one-quarter, feathering the gravitic planer to simulate battle damage.”

“Should I engage the damage simulation subroutine, Captain Armbr-?”

“Not entirely. Use occasional overrides. I’m worried that our automated damage mimicry is becoming predictable enough that their computers can detect it. It was a great trick a week ago, but it’s getting old. Time to revivify it by throwing in some random human overrides.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Mr. Paraway?”

“Engineering here, sir.”

“If we dump the current charge stored in our capacitors, how fast can we initiate the auxiliary thrust package?”

“About two seconds, sir.”

“Then prepare to do so on my mark.”

“Awaiting your mark, sir.”

On the plot, Armbrust watched as the three motes designating the kzin ships closed in, the one astern closing the gap most rapidly, the one on his bow coming fully out of the shadow of the planetoid alongside which the Catscratch Fever was making its now unsteady way. The bogey to port was keeping distance: she’d taken some beam damage at the start of the engagement, and might not be so ready to mix it up at closer ranges anymore. All the better.

“Helm: range to bogey astern?”

“Fifty klicks, sir. Full launch of missiles detected.”

“Full power to aft shields, as well as all active defenses that can bear.”

“Missile launch from the bogey dead ahead, sir. Should I take evasive-?”

“Steady at the helm, Ms. Hitsu. Remainder of active defenses are to concentrate upon those missiles. Range to bogey astern?”

“Uh-thirty klicks, sir. They’re coming up our pipes, closing to the point where shield effectiveness will begin eroding.”

“Which is what I’m counting on. Tell me when they are at ten klicks.”

“Uh-now, sir!”

“Mr. Paraway, engage the auxiliary thrust package.”

The Catscratch Fever bucked as kzin missiles and beams hammered at her stern, almost pushing through the defenses there. Shocks from the other direction announced the close intercept of the bow-bogey’s missiles. Meanwhile, a thready tremor rose up through the deck of the heavily modified smallship. Possibly, on the bridge of the stern-chasing Raker II, kzin eyes opened wide as they beheld the blue glow of an initiating fusion thruster-right before the star-hot exhaust came out and vaporized them like a moth caught in the flame of an acetylene torch. It had not occurred to this invasion’s kzinti that, apparently, the humans would not rely solely upon the gravitic planer drives: fusion still had a place as a thrust agency. And as a surprise weapon at close range.

The thruster’s extra propulsive force shot the Catscratch Fever almost straight at the bow-bearing kzin bogey. Armbrust turned to his weapons officer. “All tubes and beams on that ratcat. Cascading fire: don’t stop ’til she’s gone.”

Which took less than four seconds, during which exchange the Catscratch Fever took a few heavy hits herself, tumbling both crew and electronics. When the jolts and jerks ceased, the viewscreen was flickering, the sensors were offline, inertial damping sketchy. Armbrust swung himself up from the deck and back into the commander’s chair. “Damage report?”

“Coming in, sir.”

“Helm; do you have control?”

“Yes, sir, but I’m flying without sensors.”

“Do you have visual?”

“Scope-relays only, sir.”

“They’ll do. Take us back around this rock; we need to have its mass screening us as we sort ourselves out-before the third kzin ship arrives.”

“Aye, sir; flying by eye,” announced Hitsu.

Who was unable to see that the kzin had indeed learned all sorts of devious tricks from fighting the humans. Invisible in the great, dark reaches of space, Lieutenant Hitsu had no way of detecting the minefield that the now-destroyed kzin bow-bogey had sown just in the lee of the planetoid. Into which the Catscratch Fever now blindly flew.

At best speed.

2408 BCE: Subject age-twelve years

“If it’s any consolation, he never knew what hit him.”

Hap did not look over at Selena. “It doesn’t sound like that fact has been much consolation for you.”

“No, it hasn’t been. Not in the least.” Selena damned herself as she felt a cool, wet line trace itself from her left eye down the long, smooth slope of her cheek. She had promised herself she wouldn’t tell Hap about Dieter’s death until she could talk about it calmly, with perfect composure. She had thought she was ready; she had practiced in front of the mirror for three weeks, and finally, two days ago, had been able to get through her whole semi-rehearsed speech without so much as a quaver in her voice.

But that had been without an audience, without feeling the eyes of another person who knew how she felt about Dieter, who had been around to sense the love that had existed between them, despite the separations and impediments imposed by their respective careers and duties. Most importantly, in sharing the news with Hap, she was sharing it with another person who had loved Dieter, who would feel his own loss, and in expressing it-even if only by the careful suppression of public grief-would resummon Selena’s.

Of course, she temporized, maybe I never was going to be that ready: maybe one never is, when the loss is as painful as this one.

What Hap was feeling was unreadable. He was perfectly still, except for the faint expansion and contraction of his immense ribs: ribs which still bore the ragged scars of his first battle with a prehistoric short-faced bear.

“I have something for you,” Selena said. “Two things, actually.”

Hap did not look at her. “Oh? What are they?”

“Documents. One is a letter from Dieter, which he left with me years ago, and then recently updated.” If that had any impact upon Hap, she could not detect it. Then again, there was something in his posture and the set of his jaw which made her suspect that he would probably not have reacted to an incoming artillery barrage.

“I am grateful for it. And the other document?”

“It is the transcript of the debriefing of a man from the Wunderland system. His name is Kenneth Upton-Schleisser. The kzin occupiers attempted to use him to gain control of the slowship R.P.Feynman prior to their recent invasion of this system. You might find it interesting reading.”

“Why? Because I will therein learn of the horrors of war the kzinti have brought to the Alpha Centauri system?”

“Well, yes, but not battlefield horrors.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, in addition to often using children and innocent persons condemned on thin pretexts to populate their live hunts on the surface of Wunderland-”

That got a reaction from Hap: the faintest flinch, but clearly this was not in alignment with the “noble-warrior” view he had constructed of his own race, in comparison to humanity.

“-he reports how the kzinti convinced him to commit treason: they presented him with the severed hand of his wife. As an added incentive, his children would be used in a Hero’s Hunt if he did not succeed. He did not.” Selena stretched weary muscles; news of Dieter’s death had made her suddenly feel every year of her age. More.

“And so you have told me this. Why do I need to read the full transcript?”

“Because you won’t really believe the story unless you do. If I were in your position, I would suspect it was a propaganda narrative; a few unpretty truths amplified and bloated until they enrage readers, but bear little resemblance to reality. When you read what Upton-Schleisser said, and how he said it, you’ll know he’s telling the truth. And he’s offered to meet with you personally: to come here, without guard if you prefer, so that you can look into his eyes and hear his words from his own mouth. He tells me that this is the sort of personal accountability that the kzinti admire. Back in Centauri, he stood up to them, told the truth, and they respected him. They still used him ruthlessly, of course, but apparently they held him in some esteem.”

“They would, I think. But why would he be so willing to speak to me? I’m half worried he thinks that if he can get close enough to me, he hopes to kill me.”

“No: that’s not his reason at all. Actually, Upton-Schleisser grudgingly admires the kzinti, at least enough so that he believes there could be a foundation for communication. And maybe, in some distant time, cooperation.”

“So he’s a raving idealist, then.”

“Hardly raving. He hasn’t expressed this opinion to anyone other than me and Dr. Boroshinsky.”

“Why?”

“Because he knows that, in the wake of the fourth invasion attempt-in which over five million Belters died, and we lost almost two-thirds of the Home Fleet-that he’d be muzzled. No one wants to hear any talk about future peace: they want their own pound of kzin flesh. Almost every family lost someone in the Battle of Ceres and the aftermath engagements, so right now, they are focused on vengeance. But he wants to share what he experienced with you because, as he puts it, you both know what it’s like to have your life stolen by an enemy who wants to use you for their own purposes.”

Hap finally looked over at Selena: a stunned stare. “I’m surprised that you’re even willing to allow a person with those opinions in here to speak with me.”

Selena shrugged. “You may not feel it right now, Hap, but if, in some future time, you choose to look back at how we treated you as you grew up, I think you’ll find we have been as honest as we could be at any given moment. There were lapses, I know, and I’m sorry for those, but in general, we’ve been guided by the proposition that honesty is the best policy. Bringing Upton-Schleisser here to talk with you, that’s just an extension of that policy.”

Selena laid both documents on the flat rock table that Hap had crafted for himself: a dolmen that served him as a desk. She turned to leave, but paused. “Hap, you haven’t said one thing about Dieter’s death. Not one. And no physical reaction except silence. Why? Is this how you think kzinti face personal loss?”

“I really don’t know how natural kzinti face personal loss, and I really don’t care. My lack of reaction, as you perceive it, is more a consequence of being suspended between two completely contradictory feelings.”

“Which are?”

“You will not like them-at least not one of them.”

“And they are?” Selena insisted.

He looked at her. “I am proud of my people. They came back a fourth time, and from what I can read between the lines, they very nearly beat you; they came much closer than on any of the three prior invasions. And this time, they weren’t swatting down tufted monkeys who’d evolved into clever accountants: they grappled with a new generation of your best warriors. Because that’s certainly what Dieter was: one of your best warriors.” His voice faltered; it had a hum at the back of it and became thicker. “And that is the other feeling: great loss. I remember Dieter from-well, from the moment I can remember anything. And then, later, when it seemed like the world around me began to shift, when the simple truths of cubhood changed into the intricate lies of my life as your specimen, there was still Dieter. He always found ways to tell the truth, or at least distance himself from the lies. I did not always see and understand what he was doing when I was very young, but I do now.” His large, dark eyes looked into hers. “You have always cared for me, Selena, but allow me to be frank: we kzinti have spent untold millennia not having mothers beyond the first few months of our lives. But we have always had male mentors and role models, often more powerful than merely that of a father. Dieter was the only one I had. And he was worthy of it. Yes, he killed my family, but he was a great warrior, and had a great heart: he mixed great resolve and great regret in one soul and was not torn apart by it. Instead, it defined his greatness. And now he is gone. And I mourn him. And I am glad that he died a Hero’s death.

“And then, in the very next second, I feel that it is wrong to be sad at his passing: he did destroy my family; he has killed my Hero brothers. So how can it be right to grieve him?”

Selena put out a hand to touch Hap on one rock-hard arm, made soft by the layer of fur. “How can it be wrong?” she asked. “Yes, he was fair, and honest, and tried to help you, to compensate for the hurt and losses he had inflicted upon you. But those are just a bunch of words: you miss him because he was the first being to do this”-she squeezed his arm gently-“and you imprinted upon him. You came to know his smell and his movements and his voice and you treasured them in the very center of your soul. So how could you not mourn him?”

The arm beneath Selena’s hand was trembling very slightly as Hap looked away. He was quiet for several seconds. Then he swallowed and said, “I will be happy to have Kenneth Upton-Schleisser as a visitor. Good-bye, Selena.”

2412 BCE: Subject age-sixteen years

Selena stepped off the transport: the chill Far South Sea wind set her teeth on edge. Hap was waiting, staring at the endless inbound waves, the serried ranks of breakers making a perpetually futile assault upon the scree-lined coast. Well, perpetual as far as we humans measure time, she thought.

As she approached, he stood and his fur rumpled in glad greeting. “Welcome to Campbell Island, Selena. It is good to see you.”

My Hap has grown up. His voice was level and calm. Years of intensive reading, viewing, and study had put a high polish on his diction: had he been a human, he would have been called urbane. “It’s good to see you, too, Hap.”

He waved at the one tilting streetlamp perched just beyond the high-tide waters: it had already been old when the last of the whalers had abandoned the island in the twentieth century. It was a true museum piece now. “We can have our chat in the shadows of the one remaining sign of human habitation, if you’d like.”

Selena considered the rust-eaten metal pole and shook her head. “I’m fine here. Still enjoying your freedom?”

He looked around. “Yes. And no. The constant buzzing of your observation drones really does spoil the illusion of solitude and self-determination. Then again, so do your monthly shipments of my new opponents and prey. But I am grateful: without them, I’d lose too many of my skills. About which…”

She waited for him to resume; he did not. “What about your skills?”

“Is it true that the project’s overseers intend to send me along with the return mission to Wunderland?”

She shrugged. “That’s their intent.”

“And what about the rumors of a faster-than-light drive: are those accurate as well?”

Selena considered. Technically, she had been asked not to reveal the details on this bit of information, that the hyperdrive craft from We Made It was not merely a hopeful rumor but a fact. But just who was Hap going to tell? And honesty was, as she had always claimed, the best policy. “Yes; the stories about the hyperdrive are real.”

“Then I will accompany your human fleet to Alpha Centauri, at such time as it is ready.”

Selena felt the cold air rush in her open mouth. She didn’t care. “You’re serious.”

“Of course I am. I would not waste your time, summoning you out to the ends of the Earth as a joke.” He reflected. “I do not think my pranks were ever that inconsiderate…were they?”

“No, no.” She couldn’t even remember anything she’d rightly call a prank: Hap had found ways to circumvent authority and security on occasions-the scars on his ribcage were a reminder of that-but a “prank” implied frivolity. Frivolity had never been one of Hap’s traits. “I’m just surprised. Why the sudden change of heart?”

“There is nothing sudden about it. I just have not been willing to speak about my ‘change of heart’ as you call it, until now.”

“And how long have you been ruminating on this?”

“Before your last trip here, when you told me about the readying of the fleet.”

“Really? Before that?”

“Selena, after Dieter died, I turned from absorbing information to using it. To think for myself. And that was why I asked to come here: I needed solitude to think about what I should do next. I thought I might commit suicide.”

“Suicide?” Selena all but leaped over to his side. As if she could prevent any physical course of action that a full grown and clever kzin might be contemplating.

“Yes, of course.” Then, seeing the horror on her face, he snapped his head in the half-shake that was the kzin negation-reflex. “No, not because I was depressed or anything so pointless and melodramatic. I am happy to observe that this seems to be a purely human pathology. But when I thought about my duty to my race, I wondered.”

“Wondered if the time had come to make sure you couldn’t be used as a tool to further human interests?”

“Exactly.”

“But,”-she poked him-“you’re still here.”

He looked down at her and his pelt stirred through one, long, friendly ripple. “Yes, I am still here. Not due to a failure of courage. Quite the opposite, actually: I realized that the true test of my courage-the path that had fallen to me as a Hero, if I had such aspirations-was to keep moving forward. And that I would have to do so knowing that my actions and perspectives would probably never be understood, no matter which race was considering them.” His sigh drowned out the surf’s susurrations for a brief moment. “Both human and kzin philosophers, at least according to the translated materials you provided me, have pointed out that there are some deeds that require more courage than facing certain death. I do not know if I am about to embark upon an existence which is one long example of such a deed, but I foresee it as a distinct possibility.”

“That still doesn’t explain why you’ve decided to go with the fleet.”

He stared at the ocean again. “I have heard the death of my people in the voice of your news presenters. I have heard it for about a month now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that the hyperdrive is probably the worst-kept secret in human history. The news presenters have smelled its presence, and they know it portends sating your race’s gnawing desire for vengeance. For years, the kzinti had the advantage of the gravitic planer drives. In the most recent war, you finally fielded models with sixty-five percent the performance of the kzin engines. But still, in a war of attrition, you would have eventually lost. The populations of many kzin systems are arrayed against you, producing ships and sending Heroes in one fleet after another. And every time, you had to invent a new trick to save yourself. And so you did. And so you taught us a lesson that we would not forget.”

He looked at Selena. “How much longer before you inevitably run out of new tricks? Many of your commentators seemed fairly sure that a fifth fleet could not be stopped. But this-a faster-than-light drive-changes everything. It gives you the initiative. You will be able to act so quickly, recover and act again, that my people will be hard put just to fight you to a standstill. And a system such as Centauri, where there is a large human population, will almost certainly fall to you. And then all the stories of our so-called atrocities will become widely known upon Earth and you will convince yourselves, maybe accurately, that the universe is not big enough for both kzin and human. You will reconceive your war of defense into one of preemptive genocide.”

Selena nodded. “So you are doing this to ensure the safety of your own people.”

“Yes. And possibly yours.” His whole body rippled. “I have not decided that humans are in the right: that is a moot point. At least to me. But what I have seen is that the future of the kzinti could resemble what occurred to many of the peoples of this planet, the Zulu and the American Plains Indians, in particular. They too, were hunters like us kzinti. But they were washed away by the flood of your dominant society. Drowned and purged from existence.”

“Yes, but those peoples were also terribly outnumbered by the nations who took their lands. They were overwhelmed.”

“We, too, will be overwhelmed.”

Selena shook her head. “That’s just not accurate, Hap. The kzinti have many worlds, with a total population that is much greater than-”

“You misunderstand. I do not mean we will be overwhelmed by your numbers; I mean you shall batter us down with the quantities and powers of your innovation. I have been studying the culture of natural kzinti: they adopt pirated technologies very quickly, but they evolve and amplify them very slowly, if at all. It is the opposite with humans. And with your ARM relinquishing more and more of its control, and the UN releasing more and more of the technologies it repressed over the centuries, all constraints upon innovation and change have been lifted, and you are now making up for lost time. And the kzinti will neither be able to foresee, nor react to, all these new weapons and technologies quickly enough. But in the final analysis, it wasn’t just the sudden changes in your rate of innovation which showed me the necessity of my intended course. It was the changes in you, in your species, which ultimately decided me.”

Selena shook her head. “I don’t understand. What changes?”

Hap sat. “When was the first attempted invasion of Earth?”

“2383.”

“Correct. I came on the third fleet. A fourth was destroyed just four years ago. And the reason you defeated that one was not due to innovation, certainly not so much as was the case with your earlier victories.” He looked straight at her, almost searching for something in her face. “You humans have changed, before my very eyes. I didn’t realize it until I started thinking about what I had experienced as a cub, how the world had felt then, in comparison to now. It did not just seem to be a gentler, safer place: it was a gentler, safer place. Back then, all the sharp edges were padded: there was still a strong reflex against violence, even against displeasing people. Including me.

“But the wars have changed you. The young of your species do not have the same gentled reflexes of your generation. They are more direct and decisive, and understand that some matters cannot be settled with conversation and ever more conversation. Sometimes, a blade or a battle cruiser is required. In short, you are warriors now. Or, I should say, ‘once again.’”

“So, does this mean that you respect us more now? That you feel we are worthy?”

“No. Well, yes, but your worthiness is not the reason I have decided to cooperate.”

“Then what is?”

“Four fleets attacked you without success, and that was during an epoch when you had forgotten the skills of war making. Now, your current generation is bred to it: I no longer see panic or dismay in the faces around me, or on the news, when a battle is imminent.” He sighed. “You may be running out of new tricks, but the dragons’ teeth your generation sowed have sprouted into myrmidons. So I wonder: how dangerous are you going to be when all the living generations of man know war, remember nothing but war, and are deeply schooled in its arts?”

Selena stared at him. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

Hap nodded. “I know. But I have. A great deal.”

2419 BCE: Subject age-twenty-three years

Accented by its hallmark conglomeration of soaring spires and low-sweeping pavilions, the Shanghai Spaceport was a jarring mixture of extreme order and absolute chaos. All its personnel were doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing, with extraordinary competence, but usually without any greater sense of how their task fit into the greater whole. Not that this was unique to Shanghai: that kind of downstream cluelessness was pretty much endemic the world over. But here, each worker’s superficial gloss of perfectly composed competence often fooled the first-time traveler there into thinking that it would be more orderly than the other great spaceports of the globe. No such luck, thought Selena, as she accepted that her outbound flight would be delayed yet another hour.

Which meant that she would have to sit and brood over Hap’s departure far longer than she wished. That brooding would touch upon other, related losses: the loss of Dieter, the loss of Boroshinsky, the loss of her own youth and idealism. Hap had, during his later training, become something of a fan of old human fiction, and now employed a wildly anachronistic phrase to restart the flagging conversation: “Penny for your thoughts?”

“I was thinking about how strange it will be not to have you here. End of an era. That kind of thing.” Her tone was not as airy as she had hoped.

“Well, if my escorts do not show up soon, we might not have to part at all.”

Selena drew in her breath, then expelled it before explaining. “Your escorts are not coming.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Because you are free, Hap. Fully and absolutely free. No escorts, no oversight, no observers, no ‘cultural facilitators.’ You are on your own. Entirely.”

Hap’s jaw hung slack, and Selena hoped he did not make that a habit: all those teeth were a pretty disturbing sight. He recovered his facial composure about the same moment he regained his sardonic perspective on human promises: “Yes, free to be your ambassador to the kzinti, wherever that assignment should happen to take me.”

“Well, you’re right-and you’re wrong.”

“You mean, I could simply be a minor liaison, or an informer, for you?”

“No. I mean that you don’t have to represent us at all: you can declare loyalty to the kzinti, if you want. And if they’ll have you. We’re leaving that matter of conscience in your capable hands.” She smiled down at his immense paws.

“But why-why would you do this?” Hap stammered out.

“Because it is the right thing to do. And because you spoke the truth years ago when you observed that, all too often, we humans are without strakh. Well, this is our way of trying to make up for some of those lapses in honor.”

Hap blinked, then nodded. “This is a high honor you do me, holding yourself to a standard of behavior you did not promise. And to a mortal foe of your race, no less.”

“Perhaps. But I hope you will reflect upon what it really means to have this freedom conferred upon you.”

“Is it not motivated by your sense of honor?”

“Actually, no: this time, the motivation was kindness and justice.”

“I suspect my kind would call that weakness and foolishness.”

“Perhaps. But we would not do this for all kzinti. In your case, however, it is the only right thing to do. And I hope it will provide an illustration of one of the strengths of human society, in contrast to kzin society. For the kzinti, honor is the essential ingredient for cultural preservation: high oaths, and their rigid enforcement, are necessary if your state is to survive.” She shrugged. “But we humans-we are not creatures governed so completely, so essentially, by oaths.”

His ears expanded like the cowls of a cobra; it signaled a sharp, sudden realization: “And now I see why: you cannot be governed by oaths alone. Because you are not creatures of absolute values. We kzinti, our course is set as the course of an arrow: we seek and pursue objectives without question or regret, and without interminable reflection upon the ethics of our actions. Why should we? What we eat, how we breed, why we are kzin: these are not matters of debate or uncertainty. Our nature is direct, monofocal, and undiluted. We pursue excellence in those skills that help us attain those goals, and find little of interest in others. Anything else is, at best, a distraction from the quest to become a Hero: to conquer, to acquire a Name, a mate, offspring-and always, accrue greater strakh.”

He pointed, smiling and understanding. “But you humans are not built this way. If we kzinti are a precisely aimed arrow in flight, you are ripples upon the surface of running water: moving outward, and in so many directions at once. To kzinti who have not grown up in your midst as I have, I suppose it must look like a pointless squandering of energy. It is the diffusion of the self, of potency, and superficially appears to be a kind of dilettantism toward the entire business of life itself. I, too, had often suspected that was what your restlessness signified: a simple inability to focus on what really matters.

“But now I see the difference. It is in your nature to be this way, as much as it is in ours to be monodirectional and focused. And in both cases, our natures reflect, and are suited to, how we survived, and flourished, at the dawn of our respective sapience.

“We were carnivores, hunters. We identified prey and pursued it, relentlessly and without deviation. But you were omnivores: sustenance was to be found in many places, requiring many skills to acquire it from diverse sources. So you became versatile. You used tools sooner and better than we did. Given how long it took for us to get to space in our much longer history, we kzinti should have seen this difference in you, in your space-faring history, and realized its significance sooner. But we did not, because while we are superior at keeping our oaths, we are your inferiors when it comes to facing the truth.”

“What do you mean?”

“Is it not obvious? The oligarchic control, the culling of intelligent females, the rigidity of discipline: the kzin heart finds iron rules easier to tolerate than a nuanced and constantly shifting reality.”

Selena twisted her mouth sourly. “Oh, you mean the way we demonstrated our flexibility by imposing three centuries of self-inflicted social brainwashing that we still call our Golden Age of Peace?”

“Nothing proves my point more than your Golden Age.”

“What? How?”

“Because it was only three centuries long.”

“Only three centuries? Apparently kzinti have an intrinsically different sense of time, as well.”

Hap shrugged. “Perhaps we do. Did you mislead yourselves when you turned your swords into ploughshares and then denied that swords had ever existed? Yes, of course you did, but that is the risk of being creatures that advance through experiment and change. You try new things. Often, they do not work. Just as often, you then over-correct in rejecting them. But somehow, a dynamic equilibrium emerges. It may not be obvious until one has a perspective of far hindsight-looking back across decades, centuries, even millennia-but it is the truth of you humans: you improve by changing, and the process does not destroy you. Quite the contrary, it is the wellspring of your vitality.”

Selena smiled crookedly when he was finished. “I thank you, Hap. We had thought to teach you, but I suspect, when I reflect upon what you just said, that it is you who will have taught us.”

“And that comment teaches me, in turn.”

“Why?”

“Because, unless I am much mistaken, making that kind of admission-that you humans can and do learn fundamental truths about yourselves from outsiders-comes relatively easily to your species. It does not come easily to the kzinti.”

“Then perhaps that will be the greatest insight, and example, you will bring back to your species. After all, you admitted to learning from us, just now, and you did so with great ease.”

“It is simply a sign of your bad influence upon me.” Hap’s fur rippled in waves of mirth. “So I will have to learn to be more inflexible and stubborn.” He bowed. “I will not bid you farewell, or good-bye. The Wunderlanders have a better phrase for parting: Auf Wiedersehen. Until we see each other again.”

“Auf Wiedersehen, Hap. Success and good luck always.”

He stood tall-tall as only a massive kzin could stand-and turned with what seemed a ruffle and flourish of his pelt. Had he been a human hero, the movement of his fur would have been accomplished by a cape, swirling to mark his long-striding exit.

“Auf Wiedersehen,” Selena called after him again. And then, remembering one of Dieter’s intimate phrases, she whispered “-und tschüss, Liebling,” at Hap’s broad, receding back.