“Long, long ago,” he whispered, “Kzinti were not as they are now. Once females could talk.”
Traat-Admiral felt his batwing ears fold themselves away beneath the orange fur of his ruff as he shifted uneasily on the cushions. He had heard rumors, but—obscene, he thought. The thought of performing ch’rowl with something that could talk, beyond the half-dozen words a kzinti female could manage . . . obscene. He gagged slightly.
“Long, long ago. And Heroes were not as they are now, either.” The sage brooded for a moment. “We are an old race, and we have had time to . . . shape ourselves according to the dreams we had. Such is the Patriarchal Past.” The whuffling twitch of whiskers that followed did kzinti service for a grin. “Or so the encoded records of the oldest verses say. Now for another tale, Traat-Admiral. How would you react if another species sought to make slaves of kzin?”
Traat-Admiral’s own whiskers twitched.
“No, consider this seriously. A race with a power of mental command; like a telepathic drug, irresistible. Imagine kzinti enslaved, submissive and obedient as mewling kits.”
The other kzin suddenly found himself standing, in a low crouch. Sound dampened as his ears folded, but he could hear the sound of his own growl, low down in his chest. His lower jaw had dropped to his ruff, exposing the killing gape of his teeth; all eight claws were out on his hands, as they reached forward to grip an enemy and carry a throat to his fangs.
“This is a hypothetical situation!” the Conservor said quickly, and watched while Traat-Admiral fought back toward calm; the little nook behind the commander’s dais was full of the sound of his panting and the deep gingery smell of kzinti rage. “And that reaction . . . that would make any kzin difficult to control. That is one reason why the race of Heroes has been shaped so. And to make us better warriors, of course; in that respect, perhaps we went a little too far.”
“Perhaps,” Traat-Admiral grated. “What is the nature of this peril?” He bent his muzzle to the heated bourbon and milk and lapped thirstily.
“Hrrrru,” the Conservor said, crouching. “Traat-Admiral, the race in question—the Students have called them the Slavers—little is known about them. They perished so long ago, you see; at least two billion years.” He used the kzinti-standard measurement, and their homeworld circled its sun at a greater distance than Terra did Sol. “Even in vacuum, little remains. But they had a device, a stasis field that forms invulnerable protection and freezes time within; we have never been able to understand the principle, and copies do not work, but we have found them occasionally, and they can be deactivated. The contents of most are utterly incomprehensible. A few do incomprehensible things. One or two we have understood, and these have won us wars, Traat-Admiral. And one contained a living Slaver; the base where he was held had to be missiled from orbit.”
Traat-Admiral tossed his head again, then froze. “Stasis!” he yowled.
“Hero?”
“Stasis! How else— The monkey ship, just before Chuut-Riit was killed! It passed through the system at .90 c. We thought, how could anything decelerate? By collision! Disguised among the kinetic-energy missiles the monkeys threw at us as they passed. Chuut-Riit himself said that the ramscoop ship caused implausibly little damage, given the potential and the investment of resources it represented. It was nothing but a distraction, and a delivery system for the assassins, for that mangy-fur ghost corvette that eludes us, for . . . Arreeaoghg—”
His raging ceased, and his fur laid flat. “If the monkeys in the Solar system have the stasis technology—”
The sage meditated for a few moments. “hr’rrearow t’chssseee mearowet’aatrurree,” he said: this-does-not-follow. Traat-Admiral remembered that as one of Chuut-Riit’s favorite sayings, and yes, this Conservor had been among the prince’s household when he arrived from Kzin. “If they had it in quantity, consider the implications. For that matter, we believe the Slavers had a faster-than-light drive.”
Stasis fields would make nonsense of war . . . and a faster-than-light drive would make the monkeys invincible, if they had it. The other kzin nodded, raising his tufted eyebrows. Theory said travel faster than lightspeed was impossible, unless one cared to be ripped into subatomic particles on the edges of a spinning black hole. Still, theory could be wrong; the kzinti were a practical race, who left most science to their subject species. What counted was results.
“True. If they had such weapons, we would not be here. If we had them—” He frowned, then proceeded cautiously. “Such might cause . . . troubles with discipline.”
The sage spread his hands palm up, with the claws showing slightly. With a corner of his awareness, Traat-Admiral noted how age had dried and cracked the pads on palm and stubby fingers.
“Truth. There have been revolts before, although not many.” The Patriarchy was necessarily extremely decentralized, when transport and information took years and decades to travel between stars. It would be fifty years or more before a new prince of the Patriarch’s blood could be sent to Wunderland, and more probably they would receive a confirmation of Traat-Admiral’s status by beamcast. “But with such technology . . . it is a slim chance, but there must be no disputes. If there is a menace, it must be destroyed. If a prize, it must fall into only the most loyal of hands. Yet the factions are balanced on a wtsai’s edge.”
“Chrrr. Balancing of factions is a function of command.” Traat-Admiral’s gaze went unfocused, and he showed teeth in a snarl that meant anticipated triumph in a kzin. “In fact, this split can be used.” He rose, raked claws through air from face to waist. “My thanks, Conservor. You have given me a scent through fresh dew to follow.”
Chapter 11
This section of the Jotun range had been a Montferrat-Palme preserve since the settlement of Wunderland, more than three centuries before; when a few thousand immigrants have an entire planet to share out, there is no sense in being niggardly. The first of that line had built the high eyrie for his own; later population and wealth moved elsewhere, and in the end it became a hunting lodge. Just before the kzin conquest, it had been the only landed possession left to the Montferrat-Palme line, which had shown an unfortunate liking for risky speculative investments and even riskier horses.
“Old Claude does himself proud,” Harold said, as he and Ingrid walked out onto the verandah that ran along the outer side of the house.
The building behind them was old weathered granite, sparkling slightly with flecks of mica; two stories, and another of half-timbering, under a strake roof. A big rambling structure, set into an artificial terrace on the steep side of the mountain; the slope tumbled down to a thread-thin stream in the valley below, then rose in gashed cliffs and dark-green forest ten kilometers away. The gardens were extensive and cunningly landscaped, an improvement of nature rather than an imposition on it. Native featherleaf, trembling iridescent lavender shapes ten meters tall, gumblossom and sheenbark and lapisvine. Oaks and pines and frangipani from Earth, they had grown into these hills as well . . . The air was warm and fragrant-dusty with summer flowers.
“It’s certainly been spruced up since we . . . since I saw it last,” she said, with a catch in her voice.
Harold looked aside at her and shivered slightly; hard to believe down in his gut she had been born two years before him. He remembered Matthieson. Young. A calm angry man, the dangerous type.
And you were no prize even as a young man, he told himself. Ears like jugs, eyes like a basset hound, and a build like a brick outhouse. Nearly middle-aged at only sixty, for Finagle’s sake. Spent five years as an unsuccessful guerrilla and the rest as a glorified barkeep. Well, Harold’s Terran Bar had been his, but . . .
“A lot more populous, too,” she was saying. “Why on earth would anyone want to farm here? You’d have to modify the machinery.”
There had always been a small settlement in the narrow sliver of valley floor, but it had been expanded. Terraces of vines and fruit trees wound up the slopes, and they could hear the distant tinkle of bells from the sheep and goats that grazed the rocky hills. A waterfall tumbled a thousand meters down the head of the valley, its distant toning humming through rock and air. Men and men’s doings were small in that landscape of tumbled rock and crag. A church-bell rang far below, somewhere a dog was barking, and faint and far came the hiss-scream of a downdropper, surprising this close to human habitation. The air was cool and thin, not uncomfortably so to someone born on Wunderland; .61 gravity meant that the drop-off in air pressure was less steep than it would have been on Earth.