The Man-Kzin Wars 06

Chapter 17

(2438 A.D.)

Back at the Eye’s safe retreat, Hwass-Hwasschoaw was not pleased when he learned about the fate of the Shark. On the spot he invented a fur-raising plot to recapture the Shark by surprise and brute force.

“No!” growled Grraf-Nig, prowling around the stone ramparts. For the first time he was really comprehending that he was free and he wanted no part of another flawed adventure. “There’s nothing you can do now to stop Si-Kish. We don’t need the Shark. It is all in my head. We have to get my head to Kzin.”

“The Shark is our transportation, you sthondat ganglion!” spat Hwass.

How did one teach cunning patience? “We will have to wait until Si-Kish has equipped his fleet with production hypershunts, then by cunning get ourselves to Kzin. Are you fresh from your mother’s womb, needing the glop licked from your eyes?”

“That will be too late!” stormed Hwass. “Kzin will be helpless if W’kkai owns hyperspace and they do not!”

“We wait!”

“If we wait, the Patriarch will have his throat clawed open! Tam Hwass-Hwasschoaw and you take orders from me-Trainer-of-Slaves.”

Grraf-Nig moved into a grinning crouch at this insulting use of a former name. He switched to the menacing tense of the Hero’s Tongue and laid his fan-like ears flat

“All I have to do is buy bright brass buttons to outrank you.” He hissed and Hwass hissed, raging. I am the one with the patience, thought the smaller, yellower kzin. Too much was at bay for them to kill each other now over such trivialities. He stalked down the narrow stairs and spent his energy chasing rodents among the stately hairwhip trees.

Calmer, sitting on an outcropping where he had trapped the rodent, he spat out the fur and bones of a tasteless meal, trying to crack the skull in his teeth for the taste of brains. Monkeyshine had followed him, too afraid to approach closer than the shelter of some saplings. Grraf-Nig smelled his fear-but the boy wasn’t hiding. A great Trainer-of-Slaves I am, he thought I breed for docile servants and get warriors! He shuddered for a moment to think about his kzin-killing Jotoki. And now his humans were going wild!

That little monkey animal over there in the saplings loved nothing better than to spar. He had the most ferocious grin when he attacked, arms flailing. One whack would have killed him. Why did he dare? He was the son of that Nora-beast, that’s why. It would take centuries to breed out that streak of ferocity. He thought of the little “kit” crawling around among the stones of the prison conundrum with its rollers and levers and slipways and hidden polarizers, determined to save his master,

“Come here, monkey” he growled.

The boy came instantly, and with a ready comb began to curry him industriously. It felt good. He wondered what would happen to his real sons. The new kzintosh would save his little kzinretti, but what would be the fate of the males? “I’m not angry at you,” he said. “I’m angry at that lice-infested, pissed upon, dung-eating son of a fop.” He jerked his teeth in the general direction of the fortress. “Come for a walk.”

They wandered through the trees together until they came to a meadow of green, streaked with the rushes of a small stream’s swamp, their bulbs open to the sun, storing energy for the long night. Mellow Yellow muttered and kicked at the grass. “Different kind of grass here than on Hssin. When I was your age, I once ate the grass on Hssin. Tastes terrible!”

“You never! Hshumpfss! Grass. Yeach!”

“When I was your age, I wasn’t as brave as you are.”

Monkeyshine loved compliments like that. Grinning, he attacked Mellow Yellow with an immediate grand leap and a punch to the belly. The kzin had to fling him to the grass-gently. It didn’t stop the boy-beast. He rolled to an erect position and was attacking again the instant his feet hit the turf Mellow Yellow had to take a real fighting crouch to protect himself They hissed and spat at each other, circling, charging, whacking, kicking. The kzin kept at the sparring longer than he usually did with this slave, but he was angry and it felt good. The boy was bleeding from scratches but still he fought without letup, the grin wide across his furless face.

Finally Mellow Yellow had had enough, but the monkey hadn’t-so he just stood there and let the boy try to tackle him, shaking the child away with spasms of his leg. “What kind of nonsense is this?” he growled. “Where did you get your warrior’s liver?”

“Long-Reach said my mother was a warrior. That’s not true, is it?”

“It shouldn’t be! Females don’t fight well!”

“Unless you poke them!” said Monkeyshine happily, who had practice at poking.

“Well, there’s that. Then you have to run like a herd of sthondats are after you!”

“Long-Reach told me to save you,” said Monkeyshine gravely.

“My Long-Reach has been a faithful valet. You did well. The Patriarchy is the better for it.”

Hwass-Hwasschoaw was no longer angry when they got back. He had another mad scheme of conquest to propose. They would attack and capture a human ship- another long argument that would end in frayed tempers, thought Grraf-Nig. He had no choice but to listen. Hwass was a font of leaps. In the middle of a leap he was so impatient that he would begin a new leap. Sometimes he would jump from the most serious of discussions to a lecture on the latest fashions. While debating a favorite plot (that might cost them their lives if misplanned) he could suddenly begin an arcane discourse broadly covering the finest points of religion-or of sheep ranching on Wunderland. He held the strange belief that God was manifest in the shape of the man-beasts. With his philosophical training Grraf-Nig was wryly sure that Hwass could have proved that God was manifest in the shape of a sheep.

Slyly Hwass began by mentioning the research on the human nervous system that Grraf-Nig had done as Trainer-of-Slaves, costing the lives of hundreds of experimental animals imported from the Wunderkind orphanages. “Among your discoveries there was a nerve gas that will disable a human immediately and then kill him by inhibiting the transmission of neural impulses.”

“Several of them. But the discovery was not mine. I got the formula from a human disc that came to Wunderland with the first slowboat in the luggage of a beast hunted by the ARM.”

“It could kill the crew of a ship before they could defend themselves?”

“In principle. On a larger ship such as the Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch the same weapon, using a slightly slower-acting gas that attacks the kzinti neural system, was not as effective.”

“You planned that attack” said Hwass grimly, “and your slaves executed the plan on your instructions. It was successful.”

“Yes.” Grraf-Nig did not dare reveal that his slaves had also done the planning.

“So it can be done.”

“I wouldn’t advise trying it in a larger ship.”

“Then will attract and ambush a small human ship.” This was going to be a long hunt, thought Grraf-Nig. He’d have to track his energetic prey with probing questions that would tire until finally, in the end, Hwass understood the stupidity of his latest scheme. “And if we appear in sartorial splendor at Si-Kish’s manor, he will be delighted to give us ships to ambush some UNSN patrol?”

“You think of me as an impractical dreamer. But you have also seen my practical talents. There is no lock that can stop my fingers. Did I not reach into a Conundrum Cell and pick you out, a feat that has never before been done in the entire history of W’kkai? I have the old navy in my livery. Why do you think Si-Kish is building his new navy from the ground up? The old navy is full of old kzin loyal to the legitimate Patriarch. A covert ride to the edge of the singularity can be arranged as a routine patrol.”

“And from there it is only a matter of inviting ourselves to tea in the monkeys’ mess?”

Hwass grinned with a battle eagerness. The grin did not challenge or offend Grraf-Nig because the eyes of this malevolent kzin were directed inward at some internal vision. “I know a Major Yankee Clandeboye who will be only too willing to bring us our ship and welcome us inside so that we may take it as a prize of war”