Man-Kzin Wars XIII-ARC (22 page)

“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.”