by Paul Chafe
“How long will he be in there?”
“The bones must be set and then regrown, and he has internal injuries. Two days at least, perhaps three. Will he be paying?”
Tskombe hesitated, but the injured kzin had told him he had no money. I knew what I was getting into. “I’ll be paying.”
“Five thousand kroner.” Healer tapped keys on his console to enter the transaction.
Tskombe thumbed his beltcomp to authorize the payment. “I’m looking for a ship, and a pilot. Do you know where I could find one?”
“Most passengers depart from the down-axis hub.”
“I need a small ship that I can hire for myself, and a kzinti pilot.”
“I don’t know of any.” Healer paused, considering. “I perhaps know someone who might.”
“I’ll leave you my contact information.” Tskombe keyed his beltcomp to dump his details alongside the kroner transaction. “Please let me know.”
“Hrrr.” Healer was concentrating on his control panels. Tskombe watched him for a minute, then left. It seemed like a good time to go.
His altruistic instincts had cost him five thousand kroner, and he had nothing to show for it. He walked further, found nothing promising. The underworld was not his world, the kzinti underworld even less so, and it occurred to him that Trina might be better at navigating it than he would. He pushed the thought away. The underworld was all about making contacts, and he didn’t want Trina doing what she’d have to do to make those contacts. Eventually he gave up and took a tube car back to the UN section, tired and frustrated. Trina was back when he arrived, swimming and splashing with Curvy in the pool in a modest one-piece swimsuit. Curvy was lifting and tossing her, as Trina laughed and tried to balance on the dolphin’s back, looking in the moment like a little girl without a care in the world. Tskombe smiled, his mood lifting. He had risked a lot to bring her to Alpha Centauri. To see her recapture a moment of her stolen childhood made it worth it.
“Quacy!” She swam over gracefully, sleek as a seal. Curvy leapt, splashed and came up beside her, clicking and whistling. “Did you get us a ship?”
“Not yet.” He laughed as she climbed out of the pool. “And it isn’t a ship for us, it’s a ship for me.”
“You’re not leaving me here, are you?” She didn’t quite manage to make the question light and offhanded.
“Trina…” The words caught in his throat. “Trina, I have to. You can’t come to Kzinhome, it’s too dangerous.”
She didn’t say anything, just looked away. He stumbled on. “We’ll get you an ident, you don’t need a birthright here. We’ll set you up with the Bureau of Displaced Persons, they’re set up to look after you. You need to go to school, get your education, get a career.” She stayed silent, and he could tell she was fighting back tears. All she knows is I’m abandoning her, like everyone else in her life. “Don’t worry, I’ll come back for you.” He said it because there was nothing else he could say.
She gave up and cried then, and he put his arm around her shoulder, the water from her hair soaking through his shirt. She put his head against his chest and he held her, somewhat awkwardly. He was unused to children, not quite sure what was appropriate with one who was almost a woman. The sobs shook her small body, echoing across the pool. Curvy had dived, sensing perhaps that this was a moment to leave the two alone. The overhead lights reflected off the pool’s waves to make dappled patterns on the wall and he watched them. Tskombe had made his decision to get her out of the brothel on the spur of the moment, motivated by the confluence of opportunity and conscience. He had planned to deliver her to Wunderland and leave her to a better life while he continued on to Kzinhome, but what Trina needed most wasn’t a well-meaning institution, she needed her parents. Failing that she needed a stable adult figure in her life. Tskombe hadn’t planned on that role, but it was the one he found himself in.
So he would come back for her, if he could. At the same time Curvy’s well computed odds against his success made the commitment seem hollow. It was unlikely that he’d be coming back at all.
“Do you promise?” She looked up at him with big, uncertain eyes.
“Yes, I promise.” He felt a lump in his throat as he said it, and he held her close.
The next night he was back in Tigertown. He knew his way around the corridors better now and drew fewer looks. He went to the same kzinti bar as before, saw the same three humans there, and was ejected just as quickly, by a proprietor who was markedly less tolerant than he’d been the first time. He went by Healer’s, but Healer was too busy to see him. He sat down at a tube station to think. Perhaps I’m going about this the wrong way. It could take him a year to develop the connections he needed. The kzinti had their own thriving sub-economy in Tigertown, and it had to interface with the larger human economy in the Centaurus system. Maybe the smarter thing to do is just go through a transshipment company, someone who routes supplies to the rock miners. They’d have existing arrangements with ships, some of which would be flown by kzinti.
He stood up. That’s a much better idea. Wandering around Tigertown with half a plan and no clue was getting him nowhere fast. He should have realized that sooner. He grabbed the next available tube car and punched for home. He spent the transit time looking up shippers on Tiamat’s network through his beltcomp. There were lots. He’d start in the morning.
He knew there was something wrong as soon as the tube car’s door hissed open. It wasn’t the UN quarters station, and there were three men in ARM uniform waiting for him.
“Colonel Quacy Tskombe?”
“Yes.” There was no pointing denying it, they were obviously looking for him, and they’d rerouted his tube car when the computer registered his thumbprint for the fare.
“I’m Sergeant Veers, ARM. You’ll need to come with us.”
There was no point in resisting either. Unlike New York, where surveillance was pervasive but he could at least run freely, Tiamat allowed no such options. If he bolted they’d just order the vacuum doors sealed and go pick him up. The tube station he’d arrived at was ARM headquarters. They took him in and put him in a cell, one of only two in the section. As the Swarm Belters had steadily pushed the UN out of their affairs. ARM’s role on Tiamat had been reduced from effective autocracy over all civilian affairs to a strictly advisory capacity, with the Swarm Goldskins doing the real police work. He asked questions but they gave no answers. That was to be expected, but their diffident manner and discomfort when he asked them told him all he needed to know. They were acting on orders from Earth to arrest him, but they didn’t know why. He could use that, maybe.
“Look,” he said to Veers through the bars. “I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here, but there is a serious mistake.”
The other man shrugged. “I have orders to find you and hold you, pending further notice from Earth.”
“I’m not surprised you have orders to find me. I think if you’ll read them again you’ll see that you’re supposed to hold my orders from Earth and go and find me so I can read them, not hold me in anticipation of my orders. I’m expecting a mission.”
“I know what they said.” Veers’s voice was dismissive, but he punched keys on his desk. He was checking. Tskombe watched as his eyes flicked over the display. “And they still say that.” There was satisfaction in his tone at being proved right.
“Sergeant.” Tskombe persisted. “Someone has obviously made a serious bureaucratic error. Check my file and you’ll see who you’re dealing with.”
Veers tapped more keys. “Your file is sealed.” He turned to face Tskombe. “Look, I don’t know what the problem is, but I do have my orders. They say to hold you and wait for instructions; I’ll hold you and wait for instructions. It’ll get straightened out one way or another.”
Tskombe paused. He’d counted on his impressive war record, culminating in the mission to Kzinhome, to convince the ARM that he’d made a mistake. Work with what you’ve got. “Of course it’s sealed. What do
you expect of someone conducting classified missions? Now, this problem will be corrected.” Tskombe used the firm but restrained voice he used on subordinates who’d messed up. “And I’m not going to hold you responsible for carrying out your mistaken orders. I will hold you responsible if you don’t act to correct them. So you have a choice. Correct the problem yourself and get a commendation for initiative, or hold me here until I miss my mission start and end your career on the spot.”
Veers looked uncertain. “I can send a message to Earth.”
“What’s the turnaround for hyperwave to Earth? Twelve days? That’s unacceptable, Sergeant.”
“I don’t know what you want me to do, sir.” The ARM sounded aggrieved, as though the situation was Tskombe’s fault. Which was largely correct.
He’s calling me sir. That’s a good sign. “You can access my immediate superior here on Tiamat.”
“What’s the ident?”
Tskombe suppressed a smirk as he gave Veers Curvy’s comcode. The ARM was almost falling over himself now, to absolve himself of responsibility for someone else’s error. Bureaucracies never change.
He watched Veers’s eyes widen as Curvy’s authority status came up on the screen, then widen further as Curvy herself did. He hadn’t expected a dolphin. Tskombe couldn’t hear the conversation because Veers’s desk had switched on its sound damper automatically when it placed the call.
When the call ended he keyed his desk, popping the lock on Tskombe’s cell. He was apologetic. “I’m sorry about the confusion, sir.”
“Not at all. You were doing your job right. And you’re still doing it right, verifying the correctness of your orders. I’ll put that in my report.” Tskombe left the cell, trying hard not to run. The problem was only temporarily solved. There would be follow-on orders from Earth, probably dealing with both him and Curvy and much more explicit than the first set. Ravalla’s team must have issued them as soon as the details of his escape from New York came to light and before the whole situation was clear. Veers would not be fooled twice, and on Tiamat there was nowhere to hide. If he wasn’t already gone by then, he’d find himself on a ship back to Earth to face court-martial for desertion. It might be smart to get a ship to Wunderland first, where anti-UN sentiment was even higher than in the Serpent Swarm and the environment was a lot looser. The problem with that idea was that by the time he’d gotten himself, Curvy and Trina to the planet he wouldn’t have enough money left to hire a ship all the way to Kzinhome. Something was going to have to happen. They were running out of time.
The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.
—Plato, Apology, quoting Socrates
Ayla Cherenkova sat atop the sandstone dome that housed Ztrak Pride’s high forest den, watching 61 Ursae Majoris set the sky afire as it slipped toward the red rock spires that marked the western horizon. The forest here was higher and dryer than the triple canopy jungle of the eastern den. The high forest den was another cavern complex, set in one of a series of similar domes rising out of the sandy plateau, rounded into almost perfect teardrops by ancient winds, when the forest had not yet claimed this part of the continent from the desert. In the distance a herd of tuskvor drank from a small river that snaked lazily along the bottom of a flood-cut ravine. Further up, a big male was moving circumspectly toward the group. Ayla raised her binoptics to scan the herd, but they were doing nothing interesting. She lowered them again and yawned.
The caverns below her were spacious, floored in stonewood over sand. There was plenty to eat. The pride had butchered a few of the tuskvor they rode, once they’d cut them out of the main migration stream, yielding hundreds of tons of meat that they cut into slabs and dried in the hot sun atop the dome, where the shade of the tall trees didn’t fall. She had been glad to see that Camel, who she’d come to see as her tuskvor, escaped the slaughter. She liked to think it was Camel’s winning personality that had saved her, although V’rli-Ztrak had spoken disparagingly of her bulging fat pouches. The kzinti liked leaner meat, and when she saw the tuskvor butchered she understood why. Even a lean tuskvor yielded meat almost too rich to digest this early in the forest season.
She raised the binoptics again. Tuskvor fattened themselves in the jungle but they mated in the high forest, their life rhythms governed by the alternating seasons on opposite ends of Kzinhome’s central continent. She had learned that from C’mell, who after the mazourk lessons had taken it upon herself to teach her the ways of the czrav. The huge herd beasts gave birth in the forest too, after a two-year gestation. Mating and birth were vulnerable times when they needed to be away from the grlor and the other jungle predators, but the forest didn’t provide the huge volumes of lush fodder that the jungle did. The czrav moved with them for similar reasons.
By the watercourse the herd was moving closer together, responding to the big male’s presence. The vast migration had started to break up as they came out of the deep desert dunes into the western grasslands and up into the forest. The herds now wandered aimlessly in mating groups: a huge mature male, a grandmother or two or three, and a couple of dozen mothers with offspring of varying sizes. The younger males wandered around between the herds, being chased away by the harem keepers if they came too close. They fought each other instead of the big males. The winners got a chance to mature and perhaps hold a harem; the losers died, every time. She’d seen it happen several times now. What was going on in her field of view now was a little more interesting. The full sized males fought the grandmothers for the right to mate with the entire harem that surrounded them. If the male was big enough the grandmother would yield after a little shoving. If not, the struggle would be titanic, with the larger mothers, nearing the end of their own bearing years, joining in to drive off the interloper. As she watched, the male came closer and one of the grandmothers turned to face him. They were evenly matched in size. If a fight transpired it would be sensational.
The male bellowed at the grandmother, but backed off again when she came closer. Cherenkova put the binoptics down again in frustration. Maybe there would be a fight, but it didn’t look like it would come before dark. The tuskvor mating ritual was fascinating, it was epic, but it was also slow moving and she was rapidly becoming bored with it. After the first frantic days of butchering and feasting and setting up the den, pride life had fallen into a complacent routine. Everyone had something to do except her. She had earned her place in the pride when the Tzaatz attacked, and learned to handle tuskvor well enough that C’mell and Quicktail had taken to calling her Cherenkova-mazourk. Now those things were past, and once again she felt like a pet. Pouncer had set off on Camel to find Mrrsel Pride’s den, his mother’s pride, the start of his namequest to gain allies for his cause. It was something he had to do himself, he explained, and it was too dangerous for her to come. She was safe in the den, supposedly, with V’rli-Ztrak standing for her safety, but Sraff-Tracker, in particular, still looked at her like a prey animal. She found it prudent to spend a lot of time outside.
At least avoiding him gave her something to do. She had read hundreds of books on her beltcomp, and its memory held enough to let her read for the rest of her life, but she needed more than that. She needed action, and she wanted to get off the planet. She took to running simulations on the Swiftwing simulator, dreaming of stealing another courier to take her back to human space. The problem with that plan was that it required retracing her steps, and Ztrak Pride wouldn’t be leaving the desert until the wet season returned to the jungle. Watching tuskvor mate was a good way to pass the time. She was making notes on it, notes on pride life, notes on the flora and fauna of the desert. I am the reluctant researcher, a kzinologist by circumstance. Kefan Brasseur would have been pleased.
Chrrowwwlll! The cry was mourning, yearnful, and it yanked Ayla from her reverie. Chrrowwwlll! It came again. She had heard it before. Where? Aboard the Fanged Victory, falling in from Crusader to Kzinhome. It was the sound the
kzinretti had made in the ritualized mating dance. There was another fact she’d learned from C’mell, though she’d filed the information and forgotten it until the mating call brought it back to mind. The third Hunter’s Moon of the year was called the Mating Moon, and while kzinretti could come into fertility at any time of year, there was a seasonal synchronization that brought most of them into heat around that time. She looked up and saw the Hunter’s Moon full above her. Was it the third time since they’d left the jungle? She couldn’t remember. She’d lost track of how long she’d been on Kzinhome. Too long, and no end in sight.
Chrrowwwlll! Kzinti mating at least would be something different to see. It was getting cooler anyway. She took a last look at the tuskvor herd in the fading light, where the spurned male was shuffling away from the group. She stood up and found the path off the dome down to the den mouth.
The pride circle fire had just been lit, but rather than the usual good-natured banter that went on as the kzinti slowly gathered for the first story, it seemed like the entire pride was already there, watching in intent silence. In the center of the circle the kzinrette Z’slee was crouched with her haunches in the air, flicking her well tufted tail back and forth and howling her need with earsplitting vehemence. The circle was much more structured than it had been before. The males were in their usual places, alone or in pairs or threes, but the females were clustered tighter around them than usual, and they didn’t seem to be moving from group to group. The unmated males had one segment of the circle by themselves, each of them alone. Even V’rli was lying close beside Ferlitz-Telepath, in front of her honored rock rather than on it.
As Cherenkova watched, Z’slee rocked back and forth, then circled, growling deep in her throat. Ayla recognized the patterns from the ritual dance on the kzinti battleship on the trip insystem, but Z’slee’s movements were raw and primal, unvarnished by the stylistic interpretation of dance-trainers. She was deep in heat. Ayla found a natural rock shelf by the wall where she could sit and see without getting in the way. Every male had their eyes locked unblinkingly on Z’slee. Instinct told her the mating display could turn violent with no warning, and she didn’t want to get caught in the middle. It was deep twilight outside the cave, and the scene was made unreal by the flickering of the pride circle fire. She realized she was holding her breath.