QUIET. Silence fell; Dnivtopun could hear the uncomprehending whimper of a female in the next room, beyond the lightscreen door. One of his wives—they had all been nervous and edgy. Female thrint had enough psionic sensitivity to be very vulnerable to upset.
“You will have to get used to the idea,” Dnivtopun said. Powergiver knows it took me long enough. He moved closer and threw an arm around his son’s almost-neck, biting him affectionately on the top of the head. “Think of the good side. There are no tnuctipun here!” He could feel that bring a small wave of relief; the Rebels had been bogeymen to the children since their birth. “And you will have a planet of your own, some day. There is a whole galaxy of slaves here, ready for our taking!”
“Truly, father?” There was awakening greed at that. Dnivtopun had only been Overseer of one miserable food-planet, a sterile globe with a reducing atmosphere, seeded with algae and Bandersnatch. There would have been little for his sons, even without the disruption of the War.
“Truly, my son.” He keyed one of the controls, and a wall blanked to show an exterior starscape. “One day, all this will be yours. We are not just the last thrint—we are the beginning of a new Empire!” And I am the first Emperor, if I can survive the next few months. “So we must take good care of these slaves.”
“But these smell so good, father!”
Dnivtopun sighed. “I know, son.” Thrint had an acute sense of smell when it came to edibility; competition for food among their presapient ancestors had been very intense. “It’s because—” No, that’s just a guess. Few alien biologies in the old days had been as compatible as these humans . . . Dnivtopun had a grisly suspicion he knew the reason: food algae. The thrint had seeded hundreds of planets with it, and given billions of years . . . That would account for the compatibility of the other species as well, the kzin. They could eat humans as well. “Well, you’ll just have to learn to ignore it.” Thrint were always ravenous. “Now, listen—you’ve upset your mother. Go and comfort her.”
* * *
Ulf Reichstein-Markham faced the Master and fought not to vomit. The carrion breath, the writhing tentacles beside the obscene gash of mouth, the staring faceted eye . . . It was so—
—beautiful, he thought, as shards of crystalline Truth slid home in his mind. The pleasure was like the drifting relaxation after orgasm, like a hot sauna, like winning a fight.
“What progress has been made on the amplifier helmet?” his owner asked.
“Very little, Mast— Eeeeeeeeee!” He staggered back, shaking his head against the blinding-white pressure that threatened to burst it. Whimpering, he pressed his hands against the sides of his head. “Please, Master! We are trying!”
The pressure relaxed; on some very distant level, he could feel the alien’s recognition of his sincerity.
“What is the problem?” Dnivtopun asked.
“Master—” Markham stopped for a moment to organize his thoughts, looking around.
They were on the control deck of the Ruling Mind, and it was huge. Few human spaceships had ever been so large; this was nearly the size of a colony slowship. The chamber was a flattened oval dome twenty meters long and ten wide, lined with chairs of many different types. That was logical, to accommodate the wild variety of slave-species the thrint used. But they were chairs, not acceleration couches. The thrint had had very good gravity control, for a very long time. A central chair designed for thrint fronted the blackened wreck of what had been the main computer. The decor was lavish and garish, swirling curlicues of precious metals and enamel, drifting motes of multicolored lights. Beneath their feet was a porous matrix that seemed at least half-alive, that absorbed anything organic and dead and moved rubbish to collector outlets with a disturbing peristaltic motion. The air was full of the smells of vegetation and rank growth.
Curious, he thought, as the majority of his consciousness wondered how to answer the Master. The controls were odd, separate crystal-display dials and manual levers and switches, primitive in the extreme. But the machinery behind the switches was . . . there were no doors; something happened, and the material went . . . vague, and you could walk through it, like walking through soft taffy. The only mechanical airlock was a safety backup. There was no central power source for the ship. Dotted around were units that apparently converted matter into energy; the equivalent of flashlight batteries could start it. The basic drive was to the kzinti gravity polarizer as a fusion bomb was to a grenade—it could accelerate at thousands of gravities, and then pull space right around the ship and travel faster than light.
Faster than light—
“Stop daydreaming,” the Voice said. “And tell me why.”
“Master, we don’t know how.”
The thrint opened its mouth and then closed it again, the tendrils stroking caressingly at its almost nonexistent lips. “Why not?” he said. “It isn’t very complicated. You can buy them anywhere for twenty znorgits.”
“Master, do you know the principles?”
“Of course not, slave! That’s slavework. For engineers.”
“But, Master, the slave-engineers you’ve got . . . we can only talk to them a little, and they don’t know anything beyond what buttons to push. The machinery—” he waved helplessly at the walls “—doesn’t make any sense to us, Master! It’s just blocks of matter. We . . . our instruments can barely detect that something’s going on.”
The thrint stood looking at him, radiating incomprehension. “Well,” he said after a moment. “It’s true I didn’t have the best quality of engineering slave. No need for them, on a routine posting. Still, I’m sure you’ll figure something out, Chief Slave. How are we doing at getting the Ruling Mind freed from the dirt?”
“Much better, Master, that is well within our capacities. Master?”
“Yes?”
“Have I your permission to send a party to Tiamat? It can be done without much danger of detection, beyond what the deserters already present, and we need more personnel and spare parts. For a research project on . . . well, on your nervous system.”
The alien’s single unwinking eye stared at him. “What are nerves?” he said slowly. Dnivtopun took a dopestick from his pouch and sucked on it. Then: “What’s research?”
* * *
“Erreow.”
The kzinrret rolled and twisted across the wicker matting of the room, yowling softly with her eyes closed. Traat-Admiral glanced at her with post-coital satisfaction as he finished grooming his pelt and laid the currycomb aside; he might be de facto leader of the Modernists, but he was not one of those who could not maintain a decent appearance without a dozen servants and machinery. At the last he cleaned the damp portions of his fur with talc, remembering once watching a holo of humans bathing themselves by jumping into water. Into cold water.
“Hrrrrr,” he shivered.
The female turned over on all fours and stuck her rump in the air.
“Ch’rowl?” she chirruped. Involuntarily his ears extended and the muscles of his massive neck and shoulders twitched. “Ch’rowl?” With a saucy twitch of her tail, but he could smell that she was not serious. Besides, there was work to do.
“No,” he said firmly. The kzinrret padded over to a corner, collapsed onto a pile of cushions and went to sleep with limp finality.
A kzinrret of the Patriarch’s line, Traat-Admiral thought with pride; one of Chuut-Riit’s beauteous daughters. His blood to be mingled with the Riit, he whose Sire had been only a Third Gunner, lucky to get a single mate when the heavy casualties of the First Fleet left so many maleless. He stretched, reaching for the domed ceiling, picked up the weapons belt from the door and padded off down the corridor. This was the governor’s harem quarters, done up as closely as might be to a noble’s Kzinrret House on Kzin itself. Domed wickerwork structures, the tops waterproof with synthetic in a concession to modernity; there were even gravity polarizers to bring it up to homeworld weight, nearly twice that of Wunderland.
“Good for the health of the kzinrret and kits,” he mused to himself, and his ears moved in the kzinti equivalent of a grin. It was easy to get used to such luxury, he decided, ducking through the shamboo curtain over the entrance and pacing down the exit corridor; that was open at the sides, roofed in flowering orange vines.
Each dome was set in a broad space of open vegetation, and woe betide the kzinrret who strayed across the low wooden boundaries into her neighbor’s claws; female kzin might be too stupid to talk, but they had a keenly developed sense of territory. There were open spaces, planted in a pleasant mixture of vegetation: orange kzinti, reddish Wunderlander, green from Earth. Traat-Admiral could hear the sounds of young kits at play in the common area, see them running and tumbling and chasing while their mothers lay basking in the weak sunlight or groomed each other. Few of them had noticed the change of males overmuch, but integrating his own modest harem had been difficult, with much fur flying in dominance-tussles.