Silence from the ship, though its hatch steps were down. Grace shrugged, then glanced at Locklear’s cabin. “The door prop is down, Curt. He’s trying to hump those animals again.”
“Damn him,” Stockton railed, and both turned toward the cabin. To Grace he complained, “If you were a better lay, he wouldn’t always be—good God!”
The source of his alarm was a long blood-chilling, gut-wrenching scream. A kzin scream, the kind featured in horror holovision productions; and very, very near. “Battle stations, red alert, up ship,” Stockton cried, bolting for the hatch.
Briefly, he had his pistol ready but had to grip it in his teeth as he reached for the hatch rails of the Anthony Wayne. For that one moment he almost resembled a piratical man of action, and that was the moment when he stopped, one foot on the top step, and Grace bumped her head against his rump as she fled up those steps.
“I don’t think so,” said Locklear softly. To Curt Stockton, the muzzle of that alien sidearm so near must have looked like a torpedo launcher. His face drained of color, the commander allowed Locklear to take the pistol from his trembling lips. “And Grace,” Locklear went on, because he could not see her past Stockton’s bulk, “I doubt if it’s your style anyway, but don’t give your pistol a second thought. That kzin you heard? Well, they’re out there behind you, but they aren’t in here. Toss your parabellum away and I’ll let you in.”
* * *
Late the next afternoon they finished walling up the crypt on Newduvai, with a small work force of willing hands recruited by Ruth. As the little group of gentles filed away down the hillside, Scarface nodded toward the rubble-choked entrance. “I still believe we should have executed those two, Locklear.”
“I know you do. But they’ll keep in stasis for as long as the war lasts, and on Newduvai—well, Ruth’s people agree with me that there’s been enough killing.” Locklear turned his back on the crypt and Ruth moved to his side, still wary of the huge alien whose speech sounded like the sizzle of fat on a skewer.
“Your ways are strange,” said the kzin, as they walked toward the nearby pinnace. “I know something of Interworld beauty standards. As long as you want that female lieutenant alive, it seems to me you would keep her, um, available.”
“Grace Agostinho’s beauty is all on the outside. And there’s a girl hiding somewhere on Newduvai that those deserters never did catch. In a few years she’ll be—well, you’ll meet her someday.” Locklear put an arm around Ruth’s waist and grinned. “The truth is, Ruth thinks I’m pretty funny-looking, but some things you can learn to overlook.”
At the clearing, Ruth hopped from the pinnace first. “Ruth will fix place nice, like before,” she promised, and walked to the cabin.
“She’s learning Interworld fast,” Locklear said proudly. “Her telepathy helps—in a lot of ways. Scarface, do you realize that her people may be the most tremendous discovery of modern times? And the irony of it! The empathy these people share probably helped isolate them from the modern humans that came from their own gene pool. Yet their kind of empathy might be the only viable future for us.” He sighed and stepped to the turf. “Sometimes I wonder whether I want to be found.”
Standing beside the pinnace, they gazed at the Anthony Wayne. Scarface said, “With that warship, you could do the finding.”
Locklear assessed the longing in the face of the big kzin. “I know how you feel about piloting, Scarface. But you must accept that I can’t let you have any craft more advanced than your scooter back on Kzersatz.”
“But—surely, the pinnace or my own lifeboat?”
“You see that?” Locklear pointed toward the forest.
Scarface looked dutifully away, then back, and when he saw the sidearm pointing at his breast, a look of terrible loss crossed his face. “I see that I will never understand you,” he growled, clasping his hands behind his head. “And I see that you still doubt my honor.”
Locklear forced him to lean against the pinnace, arms behind his back, and secured his hands with binder tape. “Sorry, but I have to do this,” he said. “Now get back in the pinnace. I’m taking you to Kzersatz.”
“But I would have—”
“Don’t say it,” Locklear demanded. “Don’t tell me what you want, and don’t remind me of your honor, goddammit! Look here, I know you don’t lie. And what if the next ship here is another kzin ship? You won’t lie to them either, your bloody honor won’t let you. They’ll find you sitting pretty on Kzersatz, right?”
Teetering off-balance as he climbed into the pinnace without using his arms, Scarface still glowered. But after a moment he admitted, “Correct.”
“They won’t court-martial you, Scarface. Because a lying, sneaking monkey pulled a gun on you, tied you up, and sent you back to prison. I’m telling you here and now, I see Kzersatz as a prison and every tabby on this planet will be locked up there for the duration of the war!” With that, Locklear sealed the canopy and made a quick check of the console readouts. He reached across to adjust the inertia-reel harness of his companion, then shrugged into his own. “You have no choice, and no tabby telepath can ever claim you did. Now do you understand?”
The big kzin was looking below as the forest dropped away, but Locklear could see his ears forming the kzin equivalent of a smile. “No wonder you win wars,” said Scarface.
The Children’s Hour
by Jerry Pournelle
& S.M. Stirling
Prologue
The kzin floated motionless in the bubble of space. The yacht Boundless-Ranger was orbiting beyond the circle of Wunderland’s moons, and the planet obscured the disk of Alpha Centauri; Beta was a brighter point of light. All around him the stars shone, glorious and chill, multihued. He was utterly relaxed; the points of his claws showed slightly, and the pink tip of his tongue. Long ago he had mastered the impulse to draw back from vertigo, uncoupling the conscious mind and accepting the endless falling, forever and ever. . . .
A small chiming brought him gradually back to selfhood. “Hrrrr,” he muttered, suddenly conscious of dry throat and nose. The bubble was retracting into the personal spacecraft; he oriented himself and landed lightly as the chamber switched to opaque and Kzin-normal gravity. Twice that of Wunderland, about a fifth more than that of Earth, home of the great enemies.
“Arrrgg.”
The dispenser opened and he took out a flat dish of chilled cream, lapping gratefully. A human observer would have found him very catlike at that moment, like some great orange-red tiger hunched over the beautiful subtle curve of the saucer. A closer examination would have shown endless differences of detail, the full-torso sheathing of flexible ribs, naked pink tail, the eyes round-pupiled and huge and golden. Most important of all, the four-digit hands with a fully opposable thumb, like a black leather glove; that and the long braincase that swept back from the heavy brow-ridges above the blunt muzzle.
Claws scratched at the door; he recognized the mellow but elderly scent.
“Enter,” he said.
The kzin who stepped through was ancient, his face seamed by a ridge of scar that tracked through his right eye and left it milky-white and blind.
“Recline, Conservor-of-the-Patriarchal-Past,” he said. “Will you take refreshment?”
“I touch nose, honored Chuut-Riit,” the familiar gravelly voice said.
The younger kzin fetched a jug of heated milk and bourbon from the dispenser, and a fresh saucer. The two reclined in silence for long minutes. As always, Chuut-Riit felt the slightest prickling of unease, despite their long familiarity. Conservor had served his Sire before him, and helped to tutor the Riit siblings. Yet still there was an unkzin quality to the ancient priest-sage-counselor . . . a Hero strove all his life to win a full Name, to become a patriarch and sire a heroic Line. Here was one who had attained that and then renounced it of his own will, to follow wisdom purely for the sake of kzinkind. Rare and not quite canny; such a kzintosh was dedicated. The word he thought was from the Old Faith; sacrifices had been dedicated, in the days when kzinti fought with swords of wood and volcanic glass.
“What have you learned?” Conservor said at last.
“Hrrr. That which is difficult to express,” Chuut-Riit muttered.
“Yet you seem calmer.”
“Yes. There was risk in the course of study you set me.” Chuut-Riit’s hardy soul shuddered slightly. The human . . . fictions, that was the term . . . had been disturbing. Alien to the point of incomprehensibility at one moment, mind-wrackingly kzinlike the next. “I begin to integrate the insights, though.”
“Excellent. The soul of the true Conquest Hero is strong through flexibility, like the steel of a fine sword—not the rigidity of stone, which shatters beneath stress.”