by Hal Colebatch, Jessica Q Fox, Jane Lindskold, Charles E Gannon, Alex Hernandez, David Bartell
“It’s necessary,” Selena blurted, reaching to turn off the camera on the hoverbots which followed Hap. The three more distant bots—which completed the irregular, changing tetrahedral pattern around him—mercifully did not provide the gory details of the kill. “Without these instincts and these capabilities, any genuine kzin would reject him.”
Dieter nodded. “They still might.”
Boroshinsky looked sideways at the Wunderlander. “Why do you say this, Captain?”
“Just Dieter, please. Hunting is just the opening ante for being accepted as a Hero. If he is to have any standing among them—if he is to be a liaison who is respected, rather than scorned—he will need to know how to fight. Not hunt: fight.”
The air suddenly felt colder to Selena; she rubbed her arms vigorously.
Boroshinsky looked puzzled by Dieter’s assertion. “Shto? Maybe they have some form of martial art?”
Dieter shrugged. “Maybe; we don’t have any intel on that. Most of their combat moves seem to be a direct inheritance from inborn instinct. I suspect they spar, to hone those moves and improve their reaction time. But there’s no evidence that they have a special discipline for personal combat.” Dieter looked at the almost-vanished dust smudge. “Can’t say they seem to need one, either.”
“No,” said Selena. “They don’t. And he doesn’t. What he needs is competition.”
Dieter looked at her. “What do you mean?”
She sighed. “Hap has been asking questions about new additions to the preserve.”
Boroshinsky looked at her closely. “You mean like water buffalo? Rhinos? Maybe elephants?” He laughed.
Selena did not. “Yes. And more.”
Boroshinsky’s eyes widened. “What kind of more?”
Selena looked away. “Lions. Tigers. Bears. Oh my.”
Dieter nodded. “Now I know why he was asking me about the new breakthroughs in archeogenetics.”
Boroshinsky reared back. “Bozhemoie! No! Even if you get clearance for it, some of those creatures are too dangerous. Even for him.”
Dieter kept looking at the defile. “Too dangerous for him now, yes. Later? I wonder.”
Selena stared at the man who was in and out of her life, along with whispers about the special detachment that he was assigned to: it had no address, no known permanent base, no official name. He got a month Earthside every year. Usually. So she knew him, or at least she thought so. “Well, this is new. A week ago you were worried about us bringing in the caribou. Now you’re okay with him taking on raptors?”
Dieter’s lip twitched. “They don’t have a gene code on raptors. No dinosaurs other than the pieces they can pull from current reptiles.”
“Okay; a cave bear, then. Those they’ve got.”
Boroshinsky stared narrowly at her. “And how do you know that?”
“Same way you do, Mikhail. Insatiable curiosity coupled with inappropriate use of my clearance rating.”
Which made the older man laugh thinly. “Okay. You win.”
Selena kept staring at Dieter. “Well? What made you change your mind?”
Dieter nodded off in the direction of the ravine. “Him.”
“Hap?”
“Yes. He spoke to me today.”
“He spoke to you? After all this time?”
Dieter nodded. “Yes. It was nice. But very strange.”
“I’ll bet,” Selena concurred.
Boroshinsky frowned. “I know I’m not supposed to know anything about this, but I do. I know he stopped talking to you about a year ago. Why?”
Dieter turned to face him. “Because I told him about what I did on the kzin ship. How I snatched him. How I killed his mother.”
Boroshinsky stared at Selena. “And you—and the director—approved that?”
Dieter looked off in the distance. “I didn’t ask permission. No time, anyway. He’d mostly figured it out on his own, asked me questions that put me in a position where I’d have to lie, avoid the topic, or tell him the truth. So I chose the truth. And he ran off.”
“To grieve.”
“That. And maybe to keep from killing me.”
Selena stood slightly closer to Dieter. “Or maybe because he couldn’t bear knowing that the person he’s always trusted, even loved, had been the cause of all his misfortunes.”
Dieter blinked. “Maybe. Anyhow, today he seemed to have all those emotions well in hand. He was really very frank about it: ‘you killed the kzinti who were supposed to raise me. So I would appreciate it if you could help me get what I need in order to truly grow up.’”
Selena wished she had been there for that conversation and was simultaneously grateful that that bitter cup had passed her by. “And so what he asked for were…monsters?”
“Pretty much, yes. Prehistoric monsters. I agreed to support his request.”
“Out of guilt?”
“Out of common sense. Let’s face it, Selena: if he’s going to survive among natural kzinti, he has to know how to fight back, how to respond to a challenge. He knows it, feels it in his bones. It has to happen, and it has to start soon. Not with the big creatures, but at least some smaller ones.”
Selena found herself wondering how one went about procuring dangerous animals for slaughter: “Hello, Dial-a-Beast? I would like to order one each of the following creatures for next month: one hyena, one wolf, one cougar, one black bear, one—yes, that’s right. I’m interested in an ascending lethality rating…”
Dieter hadn’t stopped. “But I told him I would not support his other request.”
Selena felt her brain slide to a halt. “What other request?”
“Can’t you guess?”
They stared at each other for a long time. Then she got it: “Females?”
“Of course.”
Boroshinsky snickered. “What else?”
Selena shot him a look that she hoped would scald the old man’s conscience; he seemed serenely unperturbed by it. “Well, at least you didn’t promise him the start of his own harem.”
Dieter sighed. “Look, Selena, just because I’m not a scientist doesn’t mean I’m stupid. He’s six, so in his natural environment he’d be tussling with other male kzinti, and maybe some of the fights would even be getting serious. But there’s no way he’d have access to a female of his own for another fifteen or twenty years, minimum. He has to earn a Name first; at the very earliest, that means age twenty. Right?”
“Okay, so you’ve read the reports. But that doesn’t mean you should have—”
“Enough!” Boroshinsky was both frowning and smiling at them. “You argue like old married people. So why don’t you make it official and be done with it?”
Boroshinsky’s glee at playing matchmaker faded quickly; he saw the uncomfortable look on Dieter’s face, saw what was no doubt a similar expression on Selena’s. He had the good sense not to say anything else. Maybe later, Selena would reassure him that he’d done no harm, had no way of knowing that the two of them had been over it many times, but could not find a way to turn what they did have into a marriage. They were apart too much and had profoundly different lives, particularly since his was founded on the principle that, at any second, he might get called to defend the system, and die doing so.
Dieter pointed down into the defile. “Hap’s moving again.”
And so he was: there was a brief flash of black and orange which shot across the valley floor and disappeared into a dense cluster of Mediterranean pines. “He says that when he dreams, he can actually smell females, more clearly than he sees them.”
Selena nodded. “That’s my doing.”
“What?”
“We’ve been piping in a small amount of their scent into the paddock at night.”
“Good grief, why?”
“Well, in case you’ve forgotten, this is an experiment, too. Mikhail and his people have found so many hormone secretion systems in the kzin it boggles the mind. So we were trying to get a measure of which ones are relea
sed when Hap detects the scent of a female.”
Dieter’s left eyebrow raised. “Wouldn’t the answer to that be a foregone conclusion?”
Boroshinsky shook his head and waggled a corrective finger. “Not so obvious as you might expect. In human males, aggressive behavior of all kinds is associated with testosterone. But this is not the case with kzinti. After all, how do the adult males that lack females manage not to go murderously insane without mating access?”
Dieter nodded. “I don’t know: how?”
Boroshinsky held up his hands. “We don’t know yet. But some preliminary results suggest that the impulse to rut and the impulse toward violence do not seem to be created by the same hormone, although the presence of the first may change the hormonal cause of the latter.”
“What?”
“Let’s start with what we know: the kzinti are always ready to fight for honor, da?”
“Yes.”
“But they can control and mitigate that impulse. However, we also have evidence that they become utterly uncontrollable and primal when they are fighting over females, particularly if the females are physically present. So this suggests that there are two different intensities or kinds of violence hormones, the first of which operates without regard to the presence of females, the second of which operates only in their presence, when the male’s rutting-drive hormones are released. And for kzin society to remain intact, some such mechanism must be present: if both drives were generated by the same hormone and the same conditions, the intensity and frequency of the males’ routine dominance struggles would be indistinguishable from the mating combats. Meaning that there would be constant, irrepressible carnage. There would also be no way for the twenty percent of males who possess females to retain control over the other eighty percent who do not. The frustrated rutting urge would compel the eighty percent to sweep the others aside, regardless of the costs and casualties.”
Selena shook her head. “But maybe the difference between dominance and mating aggression levels is simply a matter of cognitive selection; since mating is the primary drive, the male kzinti choose to risk everything to satisfy it.”
“That was our first hypothesis, but some of my researchers discovered what we believe are different kinds of violence/aggression hormones. If we are right, this would mean that different external situations trigger the release of different hormones, which in turn generate different intensities and types of aggression.”
Selena shrugged. “Evolution constantly reveals the universe’s infinite capacity for creative solutions to adaptive problems.”
Boroshinsky winked. “Or provides a playground for its more advanced species.”
Selena stared. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, is this very nuanced hormonal arrangement a result of evolution or engineering?”
“What have you found?”
“Nothing, and I probably won’t. Because if the kzin hormonal matrix is a geneering job, it was both too good and done too long ago for us to be sure that it’s artificial. In fact, if it is a construct, it’s become so integral to the kzinti that their genome has evolved around it.”
“Then why do you suspect interference at all?”
Boroshinsky shrugged. “Now that we’ve got Dr. Yang’s data, we have access to full genetic analyses on the kzinti’s native food animals. A close comparison of the genomes indicates, that, like us, the kzinti evince a better-than-ninety-percent match to other chordates from their homeworld. But the kzinti’s extraordinary diversity of secretions and hormones is a distinct break from their home world’s dominant evolutionary paradigm.”
Dieter shrugged. “But every species has differences, developmental departures from the shared gene code. That’s why we don’t look like dogs. Or lobsters, for that matter.”
“True, but mutation from a common root stock also implies a basic constraint upon the rate of variation. Genetic change does not manifest as the sudden appearance of unprecedented structures, but as gradual variations upon a theme. And this isn’t; the kzin hormone structures come out of nowhere. They just doesn’t fit in with the rest of their world’s evolutionary paradigms, so far as we can tell.”
“Well, maybe you don’t have access to enough of their homeworld’s species. We just might not have the samples that would show the natural progression which produced this mutation.” Boroshinsky nodded at Dieter’s insight, but did not look convinced. Dieter smiled. “But you don’t think that’s the answer.”
“No, I don’t.”
Selena turned back to look out over the preserve. On the ridgeline that rose up behind the forest, she saw a fleck of black-orange ascending its jagged protrusions, spiderlike. The movement was sure, swift, even a little frightening. “Wherever their hormonal equipment came from,” she breathed out slowly, “it seems to work pretty well.”
2405 BCE: Subject age—nine years
For the first time since they had brought Hap to her as a tiny black-orange puffball, Selena was scared, physically scared, to enter the same space that he was in.
He was no longer a little puffball now. Slightly more than two meters in height, Hap had also begun to fill out. His chest was deeper and wider and his haunches were so angular with muscle that they almost looked like a cubist’s rendering. And what she had to tell him was not likely to improve his already dubious mood. Dubious because it was impossible to know exactly how or what he felt anymore.
He looked up as she stepped down from the floater, eyed it closely. What was he looking for? A means of commandeering it and escaping? Whether the humans’ growing fear of him had pushed them over the line into carrying guns?
But all he said was, “N’shyao, Selena.”
“And hello to you, Hap. It seems like you’re not finding the bears too challenging anymore.” She managed not to look at the lump of savaged black fur and exposed flesh, from which Hap had already carved out a sizeable lunch for himself.
“No, they’re very slow. Maybe it’s time to move to one of the bigger species. Or the more aggressive ones.” He got up and stretched: the men in the floater sat up much straighter. Hap smiled, his mouth opening ever so slightly as he did; it was not a pleasant expression. “Now, as much as I am pleased to see you, Selena, this wasn’t one of our regularly scheduled visits. Which I’m sure are all part of a careful interval of observation or conditioning or whatever it is you’re doing with me.”
She shrugged. “Probably some of both, which is no different from what a parent does as they nurture a child’s process of maturation.”
Hap’s fur rippled sharply with amusement. “Now that was a great answer, Selena. And I suppose it’s true, too. But tell me: what’s gone wrong? Why are you out here now?”
Selena collected herself. “I’ve told you we have a female kzin in our keeping, as well.”
“Yes, of course. Not like I’d forget that fact.” He sat down, looked at her a long time. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“I—I’m afraid so, Hap.”
“Why? Didn’t she do all the tricks you asked?”
Selena forgot Hap’s physical size, blinded by the greater enormity of his callousness, his facetiousness. “That’s revolting in so many ways that I don’t know where to start.”
“Then don’t start. And while we’re on the topic of revolting, please spare me any claims of regret or commiseration. We kzinti are your lab animals, pure and simple. You just had to put one down. Oh, I know you probably get attached to some of them, but that comes with the job, doesn’t it?”
Selena stalked over to look him in the eye. “We didn’t put her down. Your own brother kzin did that.”
For a moment, Hap sat mute. Then, faster than she could really follow, he was on his feet, crouched, ears halfway back and quivering, mouth slightly open.
And Selena didn’t care. Instead she looked him up and down with an appraising glance: “And yes, they say he looked just about like that when he did it.”
Hap looked down at her, t
hen looked away. “I’m not angry at you, Selena. I don’t know what I’m angry at, exactly. I just know that anything that happens to me—to us kzinti—is because of humans. You killed our mothers, you fight wars with our fathers, you brought us here, and you watch us grow. And measure and observe and make all sorts of guesses. We’re lab rats.”
“No. It’s not supposed to be that way. There have always been better intentions than that.”
He looked at her for a long moment, measuring. Then he sat. “Oh. So Dieter was telling the truth after all, last month.”
Selena had known that this encounter could go in many possible directions. But this surprise—that Dieter had obviously visited Hap last month, without authorization or escort—had not been on her list of anticipated outcomes. “What?” she said.
“Ah, so he never told you about visiting me? Well, so he kept his promise to keep it a secret. Another truth he told that I presumed was a lie.” For a split second, Hap might have looked guilty or wistful, but the expression was gone as quickly as it had arisen. “Dieter told me that most of you were hoping to allow me to go back to the kzinti. To function as a mediator, maybe.”
That son of a bitch of a meddling Wunderlander—
“No, Selena, don’t be angry with him. In fact, right now, the fact that he shared that with me—and that it was the truth, and didn’t tell you about doing so—well, it makes me think that maybe you’re not all faithless after all.”
“You really think that? That humans are all faithless?”
“Well, why wouldn’t I? Yes, you’ve provided most of what you’ve promised, but what you’ve promised is only a tiny fraction of what I’ve requested. And why can’t you provide the rest?” He leaned back until he was supine. “Because I am the enemy, because I’m your prisoner.” His tone became extravagantly sarcastic. “If you let me out, who knows what havoc I might cause? What secrets I might learn?”