by Paul Chafe
—Kitten’s Tale: The Legend of Zree-Shraft-Who-Walked-Alone
The yearling zianya looked around nervously as Ayla Cherenkova watched through a pair of kzinti binoptics, holding one lens to her eye and using it as a telescope because they were too large for her to use both at once. The cluster of new shoots the graceful creature had found was tasty and rich, a rare bonus of nutrition and energy in an area where herd competition made sure that the best of the vegetation was consumed as soon as it appeared. It cropped them eagerly, but the prize didn’t come without risk. It was over a hundred meters from the rest of the herd, a dangerous distance from the protection afforded by fifty sets of eyes, ears, and noses. Every few bites it looked up and peered around nervously, fear not quite winning out over hunger in whatever calculus of survival its small brain used to determine the best balance between risk and reward. Evolution had shaped it to make the tradeoff well. It was alive because every single one of its ancestors had made that calculation correctly long enough to reproduce at least once. On average its behavior was exactly optimized for its environment.
Optimal on average, but in this particular instance it had made a disastrously wrong decision. Its genes would not see another generation. Cherenkova could not see Pouncer, but she knew he was there, creeping paw by paw through the long grass. Closer to the herd the odds were long that he would be spotted before he could leap. Out here the zianya’s chances were much slimmer.
There! The long grass rippled and the zianya must have heard the rustle. It looked up sharply, wide set eyes scanning for the threat. Pouncer remained invisible, but the prey animal’s survival calculations suddenly switched in favor of safety. It turned abruptly and started to trot back to the herd.
Pouncer screamed and leapt, and even at a distance of two hundred meters Cherenkova’s blood froze at the sound. The zianya startled and froze as well, its head whipping around to see two hundred and fifty kilograms of predator bearing down on it in midleap. Pouncer hadn’t been as close as he might have liked, and the herbivore launched itself into a run for its life, bounding so high and fast it seemed to be literally flying, skimming the grass. Like its behavior, its body was optimized for a lifestyle dominated by inexorable predation, with long, powerful legs for instantaneous acceleration and a streamlined rib cage built around a tremendous set of lungs for sustained speed. Pouncer tore after it, his body sinuous and muscular, a streak of orange and black through the long, sunburnt grasses. In the distance the rest of the herd turned as one and took flight. He was no more than ten meters behind the animal, but he was slowly losing ground. A healthy adult zianya could run both faster and farther than a kzin could, and with the lead it had started with there was no way Pouncer could catch it. It beelined for its rapidly receding herdmates, and it began to look like it had gotten away with its gamble. Pouncer was running flat out, but visibly losing the race.
There was a second blood-curdling scream and T’suuz burst from cover, almost directly in front of the fleeing animal. She had positioned herself between the prey and the herd while her brother stalked it, and now the evolutionary value of cooperative hunting showed itself. The panicked zianya skidded in a desperate effort to turn and spoil her attack, but it must having been moving twenty meters a second and was unable to overcome its momentum. Hunter and prey collided with an audible thump. T’suuz tumbled free of the collision and the zianya fell in a cloud of dust, skidding. It was up again and running almost instantly, but one leg dragged. T’suuz’s claws had found their mark. The skid and the fall had cost it time, and the injury slowed it. It accelerated away again, no doubt oblivious to the pain and straining every sinew to save its life, but Pouncer was hard on its heels now. In desperation it tried to veer away from him but T’suuz had recovered from her tumble and was cutting across the chord of its escape circle in anticipation of just that move. It caught sight of her and dodged back in the other direction, out of options. As it came in front of him again Pouncer leapt, his claws catching it across the hindquarters, knocking it off balance. It staggered and that was all it took; another leap and his talons dug into its flanks as he dragged it down. A high-pitched squeal of agony tore the air, cut off a second later as T’suuz caught up and sank her fangs into its throat.
Cherenkova breathed out, suddenly aware of her heart pounding with adrenaline over the chase, and ran to join them, suppressing the urge to cheer. It was long over when she got there, the zianya bloody and lifeless. Evolution had made humans into omnivores, efficient hunters who still had to be cautious of the large carnivores who stood at the very top of the food web, and she was overcome by a surge of pity for the poor creature. She looked away as Pouncer began to butcher it with a flaked stone knife to preserve the battery in their single variable sword. T’suuz watched him and licked her bloody muzzle clean. Ayla kept her feelings to herself. There would be meat tonight, the first in four days, and that was what was important.
They saved her the haunches and she roasted them in a fire started with dry grass and sparks struck from a battery pack salvaged from the wreck of the grav transporter they’d stolen at the spaceport. She called it grass, but it wasn’t really, just as the glorious plants the kzinti called burstflowers weren’t really flowers. Both were excellent examples of parallel evolution. Grass and flowers were latecomers to Earth’s biosphere, she knew, but they were good evolutionary answers to the problem of making a living through photosynthesis and had analogs on many worlds. Here the grasses were multi-stranded, like feather dusters, and the flowers had lobes instead of petals, but they still filled the same ecological niche. The grasses burned well enough that she had to be careful not to start a brushfire when she cooked, and they put their own delicate flavor into her meat.
She’d been there long enough to learn how to cook primitive. T’suuz had promised she could lead them to the czrav, the primitive Prides who lived in the deep jungle, out of contact with the Patriarchy. How long ago had that been? Long enough that the mountains where they’d abandoned the grav loader were now long out of sight behind them. Now even the wide savannah was ending, sloping down into the river valley that was the entrance to the vast rainforest jungle that stretched south and west a thousand kilometers or more. Long enough that hunger and exposure were becoming routine, long enough for her clothes to stiffen with sweat and dirt and her nose to become used to her own stench. The savannah was infested with gnat-like creatures that swarmed in clouds. They were almost invisible, but gave a tiny, nasty bite that took a long time to heal. As well there was a bigger, buzzing flyer the kzinti called a v’pren. V’pren got to be as big as her thumb, with jaws to shame an army ant. Their bite took out a sizable chunk of flesh, and between the v’pren and the gnats her skin had grown raw and sore. Pouncer had warned her that v’pren could kill when they swarmed, and she believed it. There were other dangers too, venomous lizard-things called mzail mzail, and the nomadic kzinti hunter prides that Pouncer called the cvari. It had surprised Ayla that fifty thousand years after the kzinti had gone to space there were still pockets on Kzinhome that lived wild, hunting with hand-crafted weapons and following the ancient migrations of the savannah’s fauna. It had taken only five hundred years from the invention of the steam engine until the last of Earth’s aboriginal tribes gave up the hunter-gatherer way of life for the temptations of technology, but it seemed the cvari would maintain their lifestyle until the end of time. They carefully avoided the nomads, and Pouncer made her choose hidden locations for her cook fires so they wouldn’t be spotted.
Neither of the kzinti seemed to mind her smell too much, although they both made a point of sitting upwind while she cooked. It can’t be more alien than squid. She’d been living on a diet that alternated zianya with hunger and was getting tired of it. Her skin and scalp were dry and itching. That could be just a lack of hygiene or…What vitamins am I missing here? Her beltcomp told her that a pure protein diet could do that anyway, something to do with the natural acids in the meat, but it didn’t tell her what p
lants on Kzinhome were safe to eat. Of course even zianya was not guaranteed to be safe; perhaps the itching was symptomatic of something else, some subtle toxin building up in her system. The v’pren seemed to die after biting her; whether the gnat-fliers did as well she couldn’t tell. Presumably something in her blood was fundamentally incompatible with their system. But kzinti eat people. That was a strangely reassuring thought; it meant eating zianya wasn’t going to kill her immediately.
Brasseur had said he’d eaten it dozens of times, but that didn’t mean it was a survivable diet. How did he live so long among kzinti? She had regarded him as an ivory tower academic, not at all well suited to the realities of a dangerous universe, certainly not when compared to combat veterans like herself and Quacy Tskombe. Now she was having to revise that estimate. Wherever she had gone, whatever she had faced, she had the might of the UNSN backing her up. All those years Kefan had spent in the Patriarchy he had only himself. It won him new respect in her eyes. But it doesn’t bring him back to life.
Nor did that thought help with her own survival. She looked at her zianya. Best to stick with what wasn’t immediately dangerous, and accept the long-term risks. How long she could survive alone on Kzinhome was an open question, but she wasn’t ready to die of acute poisoning just yet. Starvation wasn’t an option either, and that thought reminded her of just how hungry she was; four days was a long time with no food. She took a half roasted section of haunch from its improvised spit over the fire and tore into it, the juices running down her chin. The meat was tough but rich and she swallowed hungrily, as much a carnivore as any kzin. Closer to the bone the meat grew too raw and she put it back over the fire to cook further. While she waited she piled a few rocks into a rough inukshuk, the ancient trail markers of the high Arctic Inuit. Now the people will know I was here. She’d left one at each night’s campsite since they’d left the grav loader in the mountain foothills, a small gesture that somehow affirmed her humanity in her ultimately alien environment.
Pouncer watched her eat for a while, wondering at the monkey alien’s food rituals. He appreciated prepared meat, heated meat, spiced meat, even seared meat, skewered and sizzled on red hot plates at a fine house, to be served still steaming while the aromas rose and enriched the air. The preparation of food there was as much a part of the show as the trained dancers on the stage, but this Cherenkova-Captain, she charred the zianya like she was trying to sterilize it, and he couldn’t understand the purpose of the strange little stone piles she built each evening. Aliens were so…alien.
Their camp was concealed in a natural hollow beneath a small, sandy hillock topped by a lone, wide spreading grove tree. Pouncer stood and leapt to the top to watch the sunset between the younger trunks on its edge. After a time T’suuz came to join him. They lay in silence together, while Pouncer contemplated her. He knew little of kzinretti, but nothing she was corresponded to anything he knew. There was no doubt she was as intelligent as he was, and there was no doubt she deliberately concealed that fact from every other kzintosh but him. That her experience went far beyond the garden of prret was obvious, but how she had obtained it was another mystery. There was much to be learned, but so far she had volunteered almost nothing to satisfy his curiosity. The sheer exigencies of escape had precluded any further inquiry since they had crashed the stolen grav loader in some nameless canyon in the Long Range mountains. Survival had become their next concern, and remained their major one, but now there was time. He looked back to the fire where Cherenkova-Captain was slicing the zianya haunch into thin strips to preserve it. She would be busy until well after nightfall. He turned to T’suuz.
“So tell me your secrets, sister.”
“What secrets?”
“How a kzinrette comes to know of more than food, mating, and kits.”
She turned to look at him. “My reason is the equal of yours. Why should I not know as much as you?”
“Hrrr.” Pouncer considered that, watching the sky turn velvet black as the stars came out. He turned his palm over to contemplate his talons. “There is more here than raw ability. You are educated and experienced. I am sure it was not Rrit-Conserver who bent your brain every day from dawn to dusk, nor Myowr-Guardmaster who took you into the world to learn sea-sky-and-stone. How did you manage this?”
T’suuz rolled her ears in amusement. “What has a kzinrette in the Forbidden Garden got but curiosity to satisfy and time to satisfy it with? We are cared for by slaves trained to obey the Hero’s Tongue; all are sentients, most of them technical experts in one or more fields. They have access to the entire Citadel and its resources, they can travel anywhere on the planet, beneath the notice of any kzintosh but with the unquestioned authority of the Patriarch’s livery. I have walked Hero’s Square on a Kdatlyno’s leash, traveled South Continent with Pierin slaves as guides. What kzintzag or noble would dare question the destination of a slave delivering the Patriarch’s daughter? The Female Tongue is enough to control the slave walking me, and even if I must use the Hero’s Tongue on occasion, what kzintosh would believe what he’d heard?”
“And how is it that you have reason at all?”
“Do you remember the Test of the Black Priest?”
“Only vaguely. I was very young.” Pouncer leaned back, remembering. “I remember being frightened because he was so large. It was the first time I was away from mother, but he was gentle.”
“And what was the test?”
“He asked questions, but I don’t remember what questions. I do remember I didn’t know the answers and had to guess. I don’t know how I passed, or how anyone passes at that age.”
“You pass by not knowing the answers. For males the test assesses telepathic ability. Those who show latent talent are taken to become telepaths. That’s what happened to Elder Brother.”
“I am…” Pouncer caught himself. “We are the eldest of Meerz-Rrit, sister.”
“No, Patriarch’s Telepath was eldest, M’ress’s first litter. He failed the test and the Black Priests took him and gave him the sthondat drug. His litter-sister failed too. For females the tests assess reasoning skills, and again you must not know the answers. Those who reason too well are abandoned at the jungle verge to die. I would have failed myself, but M’ress taught me how to respond, coached me carefully while you slept. It was a tremendous risk for her to train her second daughter, and against the edicts. Had I been caught she might have been given the Hot Needle of Inquiry, and perhaps ruined a plan generations long in the execution.”
Pouncer twitched his whiskers in puzzlement. “Who would put a kzinrette to the Hot Needle?”
“The Black Priests would, if they suspected the truth.”
“Why?”
“That isn’t my secret to tell.”
“Then tell me why our mother took the risk.”
“Her own training forbade her to, but ours was a difficult birth and she could not bear again. She feared that she would lose us both, and she had the help of the most powerful telepath in the Patriarchy.”
“Have you been to the jungle?”
“Once, with our mother to be presented to her Pride.”
“Hrrr. I have hunted the jungle verge. It is a dangerous world. Often hunt parties don’t return. The czrav must be strong to make their home there.”
“The czrav are the reason hunt parties don’t return, if they manage to survive the other dangers. Their secrets are guarded more closely than mine.”
“Hrrr.” Pouncer turned a paw over. “The jungle is an unforgiving home.”
“It is where we evolved, brother.”
“But not where we evolved to.” He paused, contemplating. “You are not the only one, of course.”
“The only kzinrette with reason? Of course not. I am of Vda line, and all pure daughters of our line possess reason, and one quarter of those of Kcha/Vda whose fathers do not carry the black fur genes and who do carry certain other gene sets. I am one of very few privileged to learn and travel, because I am the Patriarc
h’s daughter, and because Patriarch’s Telepath could correct mistakes, should there be one.”
“Have there been mistakes?”
“Twice.”
“Patriarch’s Telepath will make no more corrections.” Pouncer paused, considering, remembering his unreasoning fear of the wasted figure on the floating prrstet, his anger at the test he believed might have killed him. I didn’t trust him. How little I knew. He was full brother to me. He looked to the distant horizon as he spoke. “Our brother is certainly dead, sister, and our father. Yiao-Rrit and our other uncles, even Third-Son and the other kits. Second-Son has much to answer for.” Unconsciously Pouncer’s claws extended. “What was our sister’s name, littermate to Patriarch’s Telepath?”