The Man-Kzin Wars 06

Chapter 22

(2438 A.D.)

The UNSN Abraham Lincoln slipped slowly into its berth in orbit above the bleak surface of Barnard’s Starbase, the news of its arrival classified by the ARM. Chloe Blumenhandler sat with a very nervous General Lucas Fry in the reception area down-planet, watching the docking through the controller’s camera. She was very pregnant and had not seen her husband for seven months. Hyperspace travel was fast but not that fast-three days to cross a light-year. Fry had not seen Nora for eighteen years.

A phone chimed a few chords from Beethoven’s Fifth. ‘That’s me,” said Fry puffing out the comm from his belt infocomp. “Lucas here.” He listened for a second, then turned to Chloe. “It’s Yankee.” He switched on the sound. “Great operation! Smooth. We’re going to gild you and set you on top of the UN building!”

“Finagle hasn’t told you half of it! I’m just calling up to warn you. Nora isn’t going to recognize you when she sees you.”

“I know that,” said the general gruffly.

“It’s still a shock. I felt snubbed after all the trouble I’d taken to rescue her. I was outraged-just for a second. She used to do that tome when we were kids. She’d snub me when she was mad at me. I hated it.”

“Yah, well I’m made of sterner stuff than you flabby flatlanders. How is she?”

“Healthy as a kzin. We’re having a little trouble at the moment. She’s ripping off her clothes as fast as we can put her into them. Stubborn. She doesn’t like clothes. For the reception, we’re going to have to sew her into a jumpsuit.”

“Sounds like Nora.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Lucas. It’s not Nora. “I’ve been with her for three months now. I don’t know who the hell she is!”

“Is the brain damage bad?”

Yankee changed the subject “I hear they brought in Dr. Hunker for her. Is he there?” Dr. Hunker was from the Institute of Knowledge on Jinx. He was the man on the boosterspice team who studied neural-aging reversal.

“Yah, he’s here. How bad is the damage?”

“It hasn’t affected her intelligence at all. Bright as a brass button. She just doesn’t think with words, that’s all. Whatever intelligence is, it’s not language.”

“You can’t think without words, Yankee.”

“That so? Try catching a ball with words. What you mean is: words facilitate communication. A hermit never needs words.”

“She has no words at all?”

“I haven’t been able to teach her a single word of English. She has some kzinti chitchat, not much. She calls me ‘Hairless Hero.’ That’s a grievous insult but she says it with a smile. She’s still got her dimples.”

“She can smile?” General Fry was reaching for straws. “You bet. Her specially is practical jokes. It’s Nora’s smile because the face is the same, but it isn’t Nora’s smile. It’s less inhibited. Nora was coy. This lady hasn’t got a drop of coyness in her body. When we met she was more interested in my funny-looking penis than me.”

Chloe giggled and put both hands over her mouth, sputtering.

“General, you have a eunuch’s giggle,” complained Yankee.

Chloe grabbed the comm. “It’s me, silly. Do you think I’m not down here waiting for you?”

“As long as your father’s not there. It’s so good to hear your voice. How’s the kid?”

“Thumping,” she said proudly.

“They grow up to be monsters, you know. I have one eight-year-old here who is half as big as the general, and twice as smart. He damn near threw me over his shoulders and hauled me off to Kzin.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just one of my misadventures. I’ll tell you about it someday.”

The general wrestled with Chloe to take back his comm. “How are Nora’s brats?”

“The three boys are fine. The three girls are a bit spacy-brain damage. Now put my sweetheart back on the line.”

“Stop talking!” Chloe complained. “Come down here instantly!”

“I’ll have to jump out of the Lincoln and come down on beam power.”

It was ARM guards who brought Nora to the surface. They had “restricted” quarters for her set up, spacious for Starbase. Yankee had called ahead to see that Nora’s strange boudoir furniture from the Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch was used. The medical staff and equipment were in place. And teachers, psychologists, nursery staff. But no press. Absolute censorship.

Chloe took over to become one of the few people with easy access to Nora. She was attracted to this heroine of the wars. Here was the mother she had never had-a woman brave enough to attack kzinti with what amounted to bare hands. One mother had died. This “surrogate” mother was only wounded. Chloe was absolutely determined to be her friend, even find a way to talk to her.

Nora, in turn, was attracted to Chloe. Pregnancy had been a large part of Nora’s remembered life; she couldn’t recall a time before she had been pregnant. In her mind she was the only child-bearing woman in the universe. That her daughters might someday bear children was unreal. Her first reaction to Chloe was to try to pull off those maternity clothes to see the belly. Nora was not fond of clothes.

The guards restrained her, but Chloe knew how to handle the situation and when they met again a few hours later, in privacy, the expectant mother showed the experienced mother what she wanted to see and held the woman’s hand where it could feel the baby kicking. From that magical moment on, there was a bond between them. Chloe was the only one able to reassure Nora when her fur began to fall out.

The psychologists left around many objects so they might observe their patient’s interaction modes. Nora loved picture books and discovering new ones with Chloe. Her favorites she shared with her children. She loved to play Russian-egg games with her four-year-old daughter. She’d pop off a layer of egg and hand it to her daughter. Her daughter would pop off the next layer of egg and hand it back When they got down to the tiny chicken, they’d both laugh, put the chicken back in the tiniest egg, and begin to reassemble the eggs again. Over and over.

Nora liked to pile up chairs against the door to keep the psychologists out, take off her clothes and chase Chloe around the four-posted bed with a pair of VR goggles until she had them firmly on Chloe’s head so they could gallivant together in a virtual reality game called Other Worlds. It was hide-and-seek in a booby-trapped landscape whose rules of physics changed with each game.

The booby traps didn’t “kill” you-but they did do things like change the frequency of your visual spectrum, or change your size, or change the coefficient of friction of your skin, or your permeability to stone. When the two friends found themselves in one world where some objects had positive mass while others had negative mass, Chloe learned a major lesson about intelligence. Nora adapted to the strange forces. Chloe floundered, desperately trying to figure out what was going to happen by solving Newtonian equations like F =-ma.

Nora was generally just a good-natured child-woman who liked to play practical jokes on the psychologists and doctors who were studying her, but she had a terrible temper. Once, when the ARM was tightening up security; the maintenance men came in and put a lock on the door between her room and the nursery ARM wasn’t thinking of the nursery when they specified all doom. Nora improvised tools out of broken furniture and smashed the lock to bits, spitting and snarling like a kzin the whole while.

Of course, Nora and Chloe had their fights. Nora began to avoid Chloe, sulk, pretend she didn’t exist, hide Chloe’s goggles and retreat into their virtual world alone. “What’s the matter?” She knew she wasn’t going to get an answer, but she kept asking it. I’ve got to teach her to talk! She sat down with Nora’s favorite picture book. She let Nora turn the pages, but she was very firm about pointing at things and naming them. That afternoon Nora painted the book with mayonnaise.

All of this had been observed. Chloe knew that one-way mirrors were in the walls but they were so unobtrusive that they were easy to forget. The staff who watched was invisible, even socially. But one day Lura Hsi invited Yankee’s wife to lunch. She was the wife of Dr. Hunker, the boosterspice expert who was in charge of repairing Nora’s brain-if that turned out to be possible. Luras petite for a Jinxian, shorter even than most Jinxians, but she had the round powerful muscles of an ox on a neck thick enough to have pulled a yoke. She was a psychologist.

“Let me tell you what Nora can’t”

“But I love her! I’m doing everything I can to help. She’s just misunderstanding. I’ve got to talk to her. Communication solves everything. Yankee and I have this wonderful way of settling our problems because we can talk it out!”

“She’s not going to talk,” said Lura.

Chloe slumped. “I know. She growls at me, though. Sometimes she cusses me out in kzinti. I know because my translator told me.”

“She has a vocabulary about the size of a chimp’s.”

“She must be able to learn something just a few words. She’s so bright! I hate the kzin who did that to her!” Chloe was trying to hold back her tears.

“Let’s focus. State the problem.”

“She can’t learn to talk,” said Chloe.

“I see.” Lura smiled. “Is that your problem, or her problem?”

“It’s her problem. Yankee says I talk too much.”

“If you could ask her, she would agree with Yankee. You talk too much.”

“How else is she going to learn to talk!”

“Chloe, think. You are running on automatic instinct. When mothers teach their children to talk-they chatter. They point at things and say words. They open doors and say ‘open.’ A normal child has the machinery to process that and that’s the way you should teach them. Nora has a great soul-but souls don’t learn to talk; it’s neural machinery that learns to talk.” She paused to make her point

“She’s angry at you for trying so hard to make her talk. She can’t talk. People have been insisting that she do what she can’t do ever since the first day she boarded the Abraham Lincoln. For Finagle’s sake have pity on her! Everyone who meets her sees a sweet two-year-old and they fall in love with her-and go into an automatic language teaching mode. ‘See the doggie. Isn’t he a nice doggie? Doggie won’t hurt. Do you like black doggies? Old Rover, here, is black or do you like brown doggies like this one in this book? See the brown doggie. Oh, look at the red retriever.’”

Chloe thought about all this silently.

“Let me make an analogy. I had the sweetest father in the world. He was just as sweet as you are.”

“Lucky you.”

“But all he ever talked about to me was Riemannian Metrics and Godel Recursives and Fiechbacker Hyperspaces-since I was two. He might be having an interesting discussion with my mother about ancient Roman politics or about ice cream flavors with his brother but whenever I would walk in the room his eyes would glaze over and he’d go into his education-of-Lura mode. He had his mind set on making a mathematician out of me. He was a research mathist at the Institute because he was a hopeless teacher. He lectured and little me listened. I couldn’t stop him, I couldn’t ask questions.

“No matter how hard I listened it was all gibberish. I loved that man but he expected me to do the differential geometry of n-space before I could count, let alone add. I wanted to be a math genius, I was desperate to please him but I wasn’t at all sure of what he did. I thought he laid kitchen floors because of a very famous piece of mathematics called Kitchener’s Tiling that he was working on when I was three. I wanted him to stop and start over, but I was too shy to tell him. He was uninterruptable! I was a very angry young girl.”

“I’m talking too much?”

“Yes.”

“But she’s going to have to learn how to communicate.”

“Oh, she can communicate, all right. A very word-oriented Chloe just isn’t listening. Didn’t Nora brush mayonnaise all over your pretty book today? How else is a non-verbal person going to tell a verbal person to shut up?”

“Should I stop seeing her?”

“Darling, you’re doing great. But I have an exercise for you to try with her that will make all the difference in the world. I’m forbidding you to use words around her- except words like ‘yikes’ or ‘ouch’ or ‘wowie’ or ‘damn’; she’ll understand those.”

“Talk like a brainless teen-ager?” Chloe was horrified. Lura smiled and broke out a second beer for herself offering one to Chloe without saying a word.

“Oh wow!” said Chloe taking one and popping the top, comprehension dawning. She took a swig.

“Remember when she was playing the Russian-egg game with her little girl? What was she saying? Watch me open the pretty egg. Look at the prettier egg inside! Take the egg. Copy what I did! Now give me the egg and I’ll copy what you did.’ All without using any words. You can’t tell me that’s not communication.”

Chloe was conceding the argument with her facial expression, if reluctantly. “She’s not ever going to learn differential geometry that way,” she said glumly.

“Yes. And she can’t wish her mother in Iowa City a happy birthday. And she has a very hard time telling a chatterbox like you to stop trying to teach her how to talk. She tries so hard to be human-but we humans insist on thinking that only language is what makes us human.”

“I’ll be good,” said Chloe. “Yikes! I forgot to tell you; we just got a box from Iowa City. Her mother sent us all her old homework. We even have her nursery school crayon stick figures with arms coming out of the ears! She drew this fantastic picture of a kzin when she was in the second grade. It is so tall it has to stoop under the top of the page. It scared me cross-eyed! I am a chatterbox, aren’t I?”