He reached into the batlike ear and pulled out one plug. “Ready to talk, ratcat?”
The quivering died, and the kzin’s head was completely immobile for an instant. Then it jerked against the restraints as the alien tried frantically to nod. Harold jerked at the slipknot that released the muzzle; at need, he could always have the computer administer a sedative so that he could re-strap it.
The kzin shrieked, an endless desolate sound. That turned into babbling:
“—nono gray in the dark gray monkeys gray TOO BIG noscent noscent nome no ME no me DON’T EAT ME MOTHER NO—”
“Shut the tanjit up or you go back,” Harold shouted into its ear, feeling a slight twist in his own empty stomach.
“No!” This time the kzin seemed to be speaking rationally, at least a little. “Please! Let me hear, let me smell, please, please.” Its teeth snapped, spraying saliva as it tried to lunge, trying to sink its fangs into reality. “I must smell, I must smell!”
Harold turned his eyes aside slightly. I always wanted to hear a ratcat beg, he thought. You have to be careful what you wish for; sometimes you get it.
“Just the code, commander. Just the code.”
It spoke, a long sentence in the snarling hiss-spit of the Hero’s Tongue, then lay panting.
“It is not lying, to a probability of ninety-eight percent, plus or minus,” the computer said. “Shall I terminate it?”
“No!” Harold snapped. To the kzin: “Hold still.”
A few swift motions removed the noseplugs and blindfold; the alien gaped its mouth and inhaled in racking gasps, hauling air across its nasal cavities. The huge eyes flickered, manic-fast, and the umbrella ears were stretched out to maximum. After a moment it slumped and closed its mouth, the pink washcloth tongue coming out to scrub across the dry granular surface of its nose.
“Real,” it muttered. “I am real.” The haunted eyes turned on him. “You burn,” it choked. “Fire in the air around you. You burn with terror!” Panting breath. “I saw the God, human. Saw Him sowing stars. It was forever. Forever! Forever!” It howled again, then caught itself, shuddering.
Harold felt his cheeks flush. Something, he thought. I have to say something, gottdamn it.
“Name?” he said, his mouth shaping itself clumsily to the Hero’s Tongue.
“Kdapt-Captain,” it gasped. “Kdapt-Captain. I am Kdapt-Captain.” The sound of its rank-name seemed to recall the alien to something closer to sanity. The next words were nearly a whisper. “What have I done?”
Kdapt-Captain shut his eyes again, squeezing. Thin mewling sounds forced their way past the carnivore teeth, a sobbing miaow-miaow, incongruous from the massive form.
“Scheisse,” Harold muttered. I never heard a kzin cry before, either. “Sedate him, now.” The sounds faded as the kzin relaxed into sleep.
“War sucks,” Ingrid said, coming closer to lay a hand on his shoulder. “And there ain’t no justice.”
Harold nodded raggedly, his hands itching for a cigarette. “You said it, sweetheart,” he said. “I’m going to break out another bottle of that verguuz. I could use it.”
Ingrid’s hand pressed him back toward the deck. “No you’re not,” she said sharply. He looked up in surprise.
“I spaced it,” she said flatly.
“You what?” he shouted.
“I spaced it!” she yelled back The kzin whimpered in his sleep, and she lowered her voice. “Hari, you’re the bravest man I’ve ever met, and one of the toughest. But you don’t take waiting well, and when you hate yourself verguuz is how you punish yourself. That, and letting yourself go.” He was suddenly conscious of his own smell. “Not while you’re with me, thank you very much.”
Harold stared at her for a moment, then slumped back against the bulkhead, shaking his head in wonder. You can’t fight in a singleship, he reminded himself. Motion caught the corner of his eye; several of the screens were set to reflective. Well . . . he thought. The pouches under his eyes were a little too prominent. Nothing wrong with a bender now and then . . . but now and then had been growing more frequent.
Habits grow on you, even when you’ve lost the reasons for them, he mused. One of the drawbacks of modern geriatrics. You get set in your ways. Getting close enough to someone to listen to her opinions of him—now that was a habit he was going to have to learn.
“Gottdamn, what a honeymoon,” he muttered.
Ingrid mustered a smile. “Haven’t even had the nuptials, yet. We could set up a contract—” She winced and made a gesture of apology.
“Forget it,” he answered roughly. That was what his Herrenmann father had done, rather than marry a Belter and a Commoner into the sacred Schotman family line. Time to change the subject, he thought. “Tell me . . . thinking back, I got the idea you knew the kzinti weren’t running this ship. The computer got some private line?”
“Oh.” She blinked, then smiled slightly. “Well, I thought I recognized the programming. I was part of the team that designed the software, you know? Not many sentient computers ever built. When I heard the name of the ‘kzinti’ ship, well, it was obvious.”
“Sounded pretty authentic to me,” Harold said dubiously, straining his memory.
Ingrid smiled more broadly. “I forgot. It’d sound perfectly reasonable to a kzin, or to someone who grew up speaking Wunderlander, or Belter English. I’ve been associating with flatlanders, though.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Only an English-speaking flatlander would know what’s wrong with kchee’uRiit maarai as a ship-name.” At his raised eyebrows, she translated: Gigantic Patriarchal Tool.
Chapter 16
“Now will you believe?” Buford Early said, staring into the screen.
Someone in the background was making a report; Shigehero turned to acknowledge, then back to the UN general. “I am . . . somewhat more convinced,” he admitted after a pause. “Still, we should be relatively safe here.”
The oyabun’s miniature fleet had withdrawn considerably farther; Early glanced up to check on the distances, saw that they were grouped tightly around another asteroid in nearly matching orbit, more than half a million kilometers from the Ruling Mind. The other members of the UN team were still mostly slumped, gray-faced, waiting for the aftereffects of the thrint’s mental shout to die down. Two were in the autodoc.
“Safe?” Early said quietly. “We wouldn’t be safe in the Solar system! That . . . thing had a functioning amplifier going, for a second or two at least.” Their eyes met, and shared a memory for an instant. Drifting fragments of absolute certainty; the oyabun’s frown matched his own, as they concentrated on thinking around those icy commands. Early bared his teeth, despite the pain of a lip bitten half through. It was like sweeping water with a broom: you could make yourself believe they were alien implants, force yourself to, but the knowledge was purely intellectual. They felt true, and the minute your attention wandered you found yourself believing again . . .
“Remember Greenberg’s tape.” Larry Greenberg had been the only human ever to share minds with a thrint, two centuries ago when the Sea Statue had been briefly and disastrously reanimated. “If it gets the amplifier fully functional, nothing will stand in its way. There are almost certainly fertile females in there, too.” With an effort as great as any he had ever made, Early forced his voice to reasonableness. “I know it’s tempting, all that technology. We can’t get it. The downside risk is simply too great.”
And it would be a disaster if we could, he thought grimly. Native human inventions were bad enough; the ARM and the Order before them had had to scramble for centuries to defuse the force of the industrial revolution. The thought of trying to contain a thousand years of development dumped on humanity overnight made his stomach hurt and his fingers long for a stogie. Memory prompted pride. We did restabilize, he thought. So some of the early efforts were misdirected. Sabotaging Babbage, for example. Computers had simply been invented a century or two later, anyway. Or Marxism. That had been very promising, for a while, a potential world empire with built-in limitations; Marx had undoubtedly been one of the Temple’s shining lights, in his time.
Probably for the best it didn’t quite come off, considering the kzinti, he decided. The UN’s done nearly as well, without so many side effects.
“There are no technological solutions to this problem,” he went on, making subliminal movements with his fingers.
The oyabun’s eyes darted down to them, reminded of his obligations. Not that they could be fully enforced here, but they should carry some weight at least. To remind him of what had happened to other disloyal members: Charlemagne, or Hitler back in the twentieth century, or Brennan in the twenty-second. “We’re running out of time, and dealing with forces so far beyond our comprehension that we can only destroy on sight, if we can. The kzinti will be here in a matter of days, and it’ll be out of our hands.”