“Well, I’ll drop by at the celebration for an hour or so and bring one of my cubs.” That would be safe enough if closely supervised; most intelligent species had long infancies.
“We are honored, Chuut-Riit!” The human bowed, and the kzin waved a hand to break contact.
“Valuable,” he muttered to himself, rising and pacing once more. Humans were the most valuable subject-species the kzin had yet acquired. Or partially acquired, he reminded himself. Most kzin nobles on Wunderland had large numbers of human servants and technicians about their estates, but few had gone as far as he in using their administrative talents.
“Fools,” he said in the same undertone; his kzin peers knew his opinion of them, but it was still inadvisable to get into the habit of saying it aloud. “I am surrounded by fools.” Humans fell into groups naturally, they thought organization. The remote ancestors of Kzin had hunted in small packs; the prehumans in much larger ones. Stupidity to deny the evidence of senses and logic, he thought with contempt. These hairless monkeys have talents we lack.
Most refused to admit that, as though it somehow diminished the Hero to grant a servant could do what the master could not. Idiocy. Chuut-Riit yawned, a pink, red, and white expanse of ridged palate, tongue, and fangs, his species’s equivalent of a dismissive shrug. Is it beneath the Hero to admit that a sword extends his claws, or a computer his mind? With human patience and organizational talent at the service of the Heroes, there was nothing that they could not accomplish! Even monkey inquisitiveness was a trait not without merit, irritating though it could be.
He pulled his mind away from vistas of endless victory, a hunt ranging over whole spiral arms; that was a familiar vision, one that had driven him to intrigue and duel for this position. To use a tool effectively, you had to know its balance and heft, its strengths and weaknesses. Humans were more gregarious than kzin, more ready to identify with a leader-figure; but to elicit such cooperation, you had to know the symbol-systems that held power over them. I must wear the mask they can see. Besides which, their young are . . . what is their word? Cute. I will select the cub carefully, one just weaned, and stuff it full of meat first. That will be safest.
Chuut-Riit intended to take his offspring, the best of them, with him to Earth, after the conquest. Early exposure to humans would give them an intuitive grasp of the animals that he could only simulate through careful study. With a fully domesticated human species at their disposal, his sons’ sons’ sons could even aspire to . . . no, unthinkable. And not necessary to think of it; that was generations away.
Besides that, it would take a great deal of time to tame the humans properly. Useful already, but far too wild, too undependable, too varied. A millennium of culling might be necessary before they were fully shaped to the purpose.
* * *
” . . . didn’t just bull in,” Lieutenant Raines was saying, as she followed the third aquavit with a beer chaser. Jonah sipped more cautiously at his, thinking that the asymmetry of nearly pure alcohol and lager was typically Wunderlander. “Only it wasn’t caution—the pussies just didn’t want to mess the place up and weren’t expecting much resistance. Rightly so.”
Jonah restrained himself from patting her hand as she scowled into her beer. It was dim in their nook, and the gravity was Wunderland-standard, .61 Earth. The initial refugees from the Alpha Centauri system had been mostly planetsiders, and from the dominant Danish-Dutch-German-Balt ethnic group. They had grown even more clannish in the generation since, which showed in the tall ceramic steins along the walls, plastic wainscoting that made a valiant attempt to imitate fumed oak, and a human bartender in wooden shoes, lederhosen, and a beard clipped closer on one side than the other.
The drinks slipped up out of the center of the table, of course.
“That was, teufel, three years ago, my time. We’d had some warning, of course, once the UN started masering what the crew of the Angel’s Pencil found on the wreckage of that kzin ship. Plenty of singleships, and any reaction drive’s a weapon; couple of big boost-lasers. But”—a shrug—”you know how it was back then.”
“Before my time, Lieutenant,” Jonah said, then cursed himself as he saw her wince. Raines had been born nearly three quarters of a century ago, even if her private duration included only two and a half decades of it.
“Ingrid, if you’re going to be Jonah instead of Captain Matthiesson. Time—I keep forgetting, my head remembers but my gut forgets . . . Well, we just weren’t set up to think in terms of war, that was ancient history. We held them off for nearly six months, though. Long enough to refit the three slowships in orbit and give them emergency boost; I think the pussies didn’t catch up and blast us simply because they didn’t give a damn. They couldn’t decelerate us and get the ships back . . . arrogant sons of . . .” Another of those broad urchin grins. “Well, bitches isn’t quite appropriate, is it?”
Jonah laughed outright. “You were in Munchen when the kzin arrived?”
“No, I’d been studying at the Scholarium there, software design philosophy, but I was on sabbatical in Vallburg with two friends of mine, working out some, ah, personal problems.”
The bartender with the unevenly forked beard was nearly as attenuated as a Belter, but he had the disturbingly mobile ears of a pure-bred Wunderland herrenmann, and they were pricked forward. Alpha Centauri’s only habitable planet has a thin atmosphere; the original settlers have adapted, and keen hearing is common among them. Jonah smiled at the man and stabbed a finger for a privacy screen. It flickered into the air across the outlet of the booth, and the refugee saloonkeeper went back to polishing a mug.
“That’d be, hmmm, Claude Montferrat-Palme and Harold Yarthkin-Schotmann?”
Raines nodded, moodily drawing a design on the tabletop with a forefinger dipped in the dark beer. “Yes . . . teufel, they’re both of them in their fifties now, getting on for middle-aged.” A sigh. “Look . . . Harold’s a—hmmm, hard to explain to a Sol-Belter, or even someone from the Serpent Swarm who hasn’t spent a lot of time dirtside. His father was a Herrenmann, one of the Nineteen Families, senior line. His mother wasn’t married to him.”
“Oh,” Jonah said, racking his memory. History had never been an interest of his, and his generation had been brought up to the War, anyway. “Problems with wills and inheritances and suchlike?”
“You know what a bastard is?”
“Sure. Someone you don’t like, such as for example that flatlander bastard who assigned me to this.” He raised his stein in salute. “Though I’m fast becoming resigned to it, Ingrid.”
She half-smiled in absent-minded acknowledgment, her mind 4.3 light-years and four decades away. “It means he got an expensive education, a nice little nest-egg settled on him . . . and that he’d never, never be allowed past the front door of the Yarthkin-Schotmanns’ family schloss. Lucky to be allowed to use the name. An embarrassment.”
“Might eat at a man,” Jonah said.
“Like a little kzin in the guts. Especially when he grew enough to realize why his father only came for occasional visits; and then that his half-siblings didn’t have half his brains or drive and didn’t need them either. It drove him, he had to do everything twice as fast and twice as good, take crazy risks . . . made him a bit of a bastard in the Sol sense of the word too, spines like a pincodillo, sense of humor that could flay a gruntfish.”
“And Montferrat-Palme?”
“Claude? Now, he was Herrenmann all through; younger son of a younger son, poor as an Amish dirt-farmer, and . . .” A laugh. “You had to meet Claude to understand him. I think he got serious about me mostly because I kept turning him down—it was a new experience and drove him crazy. And Harold he halfway liked and halfway enjoyed needling . . .”
* * *
Municipal Director of Internal Affairs Claude Montferrat-Palme adjusted his cape and looked up at the luminous letters that floated disembodied ten centimeters from the smooth brown brick of the building in front of him.
HAROLD’S TERRAN BAR, it read. A WORLD ON ITS OWN. Below, in smaller letters: HUMANS ONLY.
Ah, Harold, he thought. Always the one for a piece of useless melodrama. As if kzin would be likely to frequent this section of Old Munchen, or wish to enter a human entertainment spot if they did, or as if they could be stopped if by some fluke of probability they did end up down here.
His escort stirred, looking around nervously. The Karl-Jorge Avenue was dark, most of its glowstrips long ago stolen or simply spray-painted in the random vandalism that breeds in lives fueled by purposeless anger. It was fairly clean, because the kzin insisted on that, and the four-story brick buildings were solid enough, because the early settlers had built well. Brick and concrete and cobbled streets glimmered faintly, still damp from the afternoon’s rain; loud wailing music echoed from open windows, and there would have been groups of idle-looking youths loitering on the front steps of the tenements, if the car had not had Munchen Polezi plates.