It’s hard, that is, until someone decides to kill him. His first mistake was lust, impure and simple. A week after he paroled Scarface, the one surviving kzin warrior, Locklear admitted his problem during supper. “All that caterwauling in the ravine,” he said, refilling his bowl from the hearth stewpot, “is driving me nuts. Good thing you haven’t let the rest of those kzinti out of stasis; the racket would be unbelievable!”
Scarface wiped his muzzle with a brawny forearm and handed his own bowl to Kit, his new mate. The darkness of the huge Kzersatz region was tempered only by coals, but Locklear saw those coals flicker in Scarface’s cat eyes. “A condition of my surrender was that you release Kit to me,” the big kzin growled. “And besides: do humans mate so quietly?”
Because they were speaking Kzin, the word Scarface had used was actually “ch’rowl”—itself a sexual goad. Kit, who was refilling the bowl, let slip a tiny mew of surprise and pleasure. “Please, milord,” she said, offering the bowl to Scarface. “Poor Rockear is already overstimulated. Is it not so?” Her huge eyes flicked to Locklear, whom she had grown to know quite well after Locklear waked her from age-long sleep.
“Dead right,” Locklear agreed with a morose glance. “Not by the word; by the goddamn deed!”
“She is mine,” Scarface grinned; a kzin grin, the kind with big fangs and no amusement.
“Calm down. I may have been an animal psychologist, but I only have letches for human females,” Locklear gloomed toward his kzin companions. “And every night when I hear you two flattening the grass out there,” he nodded past the half-built walls of the hut, “I get, uh, . . .” He did not know how to translate “horny” into Kzin.
“You get the urge to travel,” Scarface finished, making it not quite a suggestion. The massive kzin stared into darkness as if peering across the force walls surrounding Kzersatz. Those towering invisible walls separated the air, and lifeforms, of Kzersatz from other synthetic compounds of this incredible planet, Zoo. “I can see the treetops in the next compound as easily as you, Locklear. But I see no monkeys in them.”
Before his defeat, Scarface had been “Graf-Commander.” The same strict kzin honor that bound him to his surrender, forbade him to curse his captor as a monkey. But he could still sharpen the barb of his wit. Kit, with real affection for Locklear, did not approve. “Be nice,” she hissed to her mate.
“Forget it,” Locklear told her, stabbing with his Kzin wtsai blade for a hunk of meat in his stew. “Kit, he’s stuck with his military code, and it won’t let him insist that his captor get the hell out of here. But he’s right. I still don’t know if that next compound I call Newduvai is really Earth-like.” He smiled at Scarface, remembering not to show his teeth, and added, “Or whether it has my kind of monkey.”
“And we must not try to find out until your war wounds have completely healed,” Kit replied.
The eyes of man and kzin warrior met. “Whoa,” Locklear said quickly, sparing Scarface the trouble. “We won’t be scouting over there; I will, but you won’t. I’m an ethologist,” he went on, holding up a hand to bar Kit’s interruption. “If Newduvai is as completely stocked as Kzersatz, somebody—maybe the Outsiders, maybe not, but damn certain a long time ago—somebody intended all these compounds to be kept separate. Now, I won’t say I haven’t played god here a little . . .”
“And intend to play it over there a lot,” said Kit, who had never yet surrendered to anyone.
“Hear me out, I’m not going to start mixing species from Kzersatz and Newduvai any more than I already have, and that’s final.” He pried experimentally at the scab running down his knife arm. “But I’m pretty much healed, thanks to your medkit, Scarface. And I meant it when I said you’d have free run of this place. It’s intended for kzinti, not humans. High time I took your lifeboat over those force walls to Newduvai.”
“Boots will miss you,” said Kit.
Locklear smiled, recalling the other kzin female he’d released from stasis in a very pregnant condition. According to Kit, a kzin mother would not emerge from her birthing creche until the eyes of her twins had opened—another week, at least. “Give her my love,” he said, and swilled the last of his stew.
“A pity you will not do that yourself,” Kit sighed.
“Milady.” Scarface became, for the moment, every inch a Graf-Commander. “Would you ask me to ch’rowl a human female?” He waited for Kit to control her mixed expression. “Then please be silent on the subject. Locklear is a warrior who knows what he fights for.”
Locklear yawned. “There’s an old song that says, ‘Ain’t gonna study war no more,’ and a slogan that goes, ‘Make love, not war.’ ”
Kit stood up with a fetching twitch of her tail. “I believe our leader has spoken, milord,” she purred.
Locklear watched them swaying together into the night, and his parting call was plaintive. “Just try and keep it down, okay? A fellow needs his sleep.”
* * *
The kzin lifeboat was over ten meters long, well-armed and furnished with emergency rations. In accord with their handshake armistice, Scarface had given flight instructions to his human pupil after disabling the hyperwave portion of its comm set. He had given no instructions on armament because Locklear, a peaceable man, saw no further use for anything larger than a sidearm. Neither of them could do much to make the lifeboat seating comfortable for Locklear, who was small even by human standards in an acceleration couch meant for a two-hundred-kilo kzin.
Locklear paused in the air lock in midmorning and raised one arm in a universal peace sign. Scarface returned it. “I’ll call you now and then, if those force walls don’t stop the signal,” Locklear called. “If you let your other kzinti out of stasis, call and tell me how it works out.”
“Keep your tail dry, Rockear,” Kit called, perhaps forgetting he lacked that appendage—a compliment, of sorts.
“Will do,” he called back as the air lock swung shut. Moments later, he brought the little craft to life and, cursing the cradle-rock motion that branded him a novice, urged the lifeboat into the yellow sky of Kzersatz.
Locklear made one pass, a “goodbye sweep,” high above the region with its yellow and orange vegetation, taking care to stay well inside the frostline that defined those invisible force walls. He spotted the cave from the still-flattened grass where Kit had herded the awakened animals from the crypt and their sleep of forty thousand years, then steepened his climb and used aero boost to begin his trajectory. No telling whether the force walls stopped suddenly, but he did not want to find out by plowing into the damned things. It was enough to know they stopped below orbital height, and that he could toss the lifeboat from Kzersatz to Newduvai in a low-energy ballistic arc.
And he knew enough to conserve energy in the craft’s main accumulators because one day, when the damned stupid Man-Kzin War was over, he’d need that energy to jump from Zoo to some part of known space. Unless, he amended silently, somebody found Zoo first. The war might already be over, and certainly the warlike kzinti must have the coordinates of Zoo . . .
Then he was at the top of his trajectory, seeing the planetary curvature of Zoo, noting the tiny satellite sunlets that bathed hundred-mile-diameter regions in light, realizing that a warship could condemn any one of those circular regions to death with one well-placed shot against its synthetic, automated little sun. He was already past the circular force walls now, and felt an enormous temptation to slow the ship by main accumulator energy. A good pilot could lower that lifeboat down between the walls of those force cylinders, in the hard vacuum between compounds. Outsiders might be lurking there, idly studying the specimens through invisible walls.
But Locklear was no expert with a kzin lifeboat, not yet, and he had to use his wristcomp to translate the warning on the console screen. He set the wing extensions just in time to avoid heavy buffeting, thankful that he had not needed orbital speed to manage his brief trajectory. He bobbled a maneuver once, twice, then felt the drag of Newduvai’s atmosphere on the lifeboat and gave the lifting surfaces full extension. He put the craft into a shallow bank to starboard, keeping the vast circular frostline far to portside, and punched in an autopilot instruction. Only then did he dare to turn his gaze down on Newduvai.
Like Kzersatz it boasted a big lake, but this one glinted in a sun heartbreakingly like Earth’s. A rugged jumble of cliffs soared into cloud at one side of the region, and green hills mounded above plains of mottled hues: tan, brown, green, Oh, God, all that green! He’d forgotten, in the saffron of Kzersatz, how much he missed the emerald of grass, the blue of sky, the darker dusty green of Earth forests. For it was, in every respect, perfectly Earthlike. He wiped his misting eyes, grinned at himself for such foolishness, and eased the lifeboat down to a lazy circular course that kept him two thousand meters above the terrain. If the builders of Zoo were consistent, one of those shallow creekbeds would begin not in a marshy meadow but in a horizontal shaft. And there he would find—he dared not think it through any further.