Cathouse

by Dean Ing

  Presently, studying the screen, Locklear said, “That gunner has us forty parsecs from anyplace. Jump into normal space long enough for an astrogation fix and you’ve got it.”

  “Do not abuse my patience, monkey. Our last Fleet Command message on hyperwave forbade us to make unnecessary jumps.”

  After a moment, Locklear grinned. “And your commander doesn’t want to have to tell Fleet Command you’re lost.”

  “What was that thing you did with your face?”

  “Uh—just stretching the muscles,” Locklear lied, and pointed at one of the meters. “There; um, that has a field strength of, oh hell, three eights and four, right?”

  Tzak-Navigator did not have to tremble because his four-fingered hand was in motion as a blur, punching buttons. “Yes. I have a star mass and,” the small screen stuttered its chicken-droppings in Kzinti, “here are the known candidates.”

  Locklear nodded. In this little-known region, some star masses, especially the larger ones, would have been recorded. With several fixes in hyperdrive, he could make a strong guess at their direction with respect to the galactic core. But by the time he had his second group of candidate stars, Locklear also had a scheme.

  Locklear asked for his wristcomp, to help him translate octal numbers—his chief motive was less direct—and got it after Apprentice Engineer satisfied himself that it was no energy weapon. The engineer, a suspicious churl quick with his hands and clearly on the make for status, displayed disappointment at his own findings by throwing the instrument in Locklear’s face. Locklear decided that the kzin lowest on the scrotum pole was most anxious to advance by any means available. And that, he decided, just might be common in all sentient behavior.

  Two hours later by his wristcomp, when Locklear tried to speak to the commander without prior permission, the navigator backhanded him for his trouble and then explained the proper channels. “I will decide whether your message is worth Grraf-Commander’s notice,” he snarled.

  Trying to stop his nosebleed, Locklear told him.

  “A transparent ruse,” the navigator accused, “to save your own hairless pelt.”

  “It would have that effect,” Locklear agreed. “Maybe. But it would also let you locate your position.”

  The navigator looked him up and down. “Which will aid us in our mission against your own kind. You truly disgust me.”

  In answer, Locklear only shrugged. Tzak-Navigator wheeled and crossed to the commander’s vicinity, stiff and proper, and spoke rapidly for a few moments. Presently, Grraf-Commander motioned for Locklear to approach.

  Locklear decided that a military posture might help this time, and tried to hold his body straight despite his pains. The commander eyed him silently, then said, “You offer me a motive to justify jumping into normal space?”

  “Yes, Grraf-Commander: to deposit an important captive in a lifeboat around some stellar body.”

  “And why in the name of the Patriarchy would I want to?”

  “Because it is almost within the reach of plausibility that the occupants of this ship might not survive this mission,” Locklear said with irony that went unnoticed. “But en route to your final glory, you can inform Fleet Command where you have placed a vitally important captive, to be retrieved later.”

  “You admit your status at last.”

  “I have a certain status,” Locklear admitted. It’s damned low, and that’s certain enough. “And while you were doing that in normal space, a navigator might just happen to determine exactly where you are.”

  “You do not deceive me in your motive. If I did not locate that spot,” Tzak-Navigator said, “no Patriarchy ship could find you—and you would soon run out of food and air.”

  “And you would miss the Eridani mission,” Locklear reminded him, “because we aren’t getting any blips and you may be getting farther from your rendezvous with every breath.”

  “At the least, you are a traitor to monkeydom,” the navigator said. “No kzin worthy of the name would assist an enemy mission.”

  Locklear favored him with a level gaze. “You’ve decided to waste all nine lives for glory. Count on me for help.”

  “Monkeys are clever where their pelts are concerned,” rumbled the commander. “I do not intend to miss rendezvous, and this monkey must be placed in a safe cage. Have the crew provision a lifeboat but disable its drive, Tzak-Navigator. When we locate a stellar mass, I want all in readiness for the jump.”

  The navigator saluted and moved off the bridge, Locklear received permission to return to his console, moving slowly, trying to watch the commander’s furry digits in preparation for a jump that might be required at any time. Locklear punched several notes into the wristcomp’s memory; you could never toll when a scholar’s notes might come in handy.

  Locklear was chewing on kzin rations, reconstituted meat which met human teeth like a leather brick and tasted of last week’s oysters, when the long-range meter began to register. It was not much of a blip but it got stronger fast, the vernier meter registering by the time Locklear called out. He watched the commander, alone while the rest of the crew were arranging that lifeboat, and used his wristcomp a few more times before Grraf-Commander’s announcement.

  Tzak-Navigator, eyeing his console moments after the jump and still light-minutes from that small stellar mass, was at first too intent on his astrogation to notice that there was no nearby solar blaze. But Locklear noticed, and felt a surge of panic.

  “You will not perish in solar radiation, at least,” said Grraf-Commander in evident pleasure. “You have found yourself a black dwarf, monkey!”

  Locklear punched a query. He found no candidate stars to match this phenomenon. “Permission to speak, Tzak-Navigator?”

  The navigator punched in a final instruction and, while his screen flickered, turned to the local view-screen. “Wait until you have something worth saying,” he ordered, and paused, staring at what that screen told him. Then, as if arguing with his screen, he complained, “But known space is not old enough for a completely burnt-out star.”

  “Nevertheless,” the commander replied, waving toward the screens, “if not a black dwarf, a very, very brown one. Thank that lucky star, Tzak-Navigator; it might have been a neutron star.”

  “And a planet,” the navigator exclaimed. “Impossible! Before its final collapse, this star would have converted any nearby planet into a gas shell. But there it lies!” He pointed to a luminous dot on the screen.

  “That might make it easy to find again,” Locklear said with something akin to faint hope. He knew, watching the navigator’s split concentration between screens, that the kzin would soon know the Raptor’s position. No chance beyond this brown dwarf now, an unheard-of anomaly, to escape this suicide ship.

  The navigator ignored him. “Permission for proximal orbit,” he requested.

  “Denied,” the commander said. “You know better than that. Close orbit around a dwarf could rip us asunder with angular acceleration. That dwarf may be only the size of a single dreadnaught, but its mass is enormous enough to bend distant starlight.”

  While Locklear considered what little he knew of collapsed star matter, a cupful of which would exceed the mass of the greatest warship in known space, the navigator consulted his astrogation screen again. “I have our position,” he said at last. “We were on the way to the galactic rim, thanks to that untrained—well, at least he is a fine gunner. Grraf-Commander, I meant to ask permission for orbit around the planet. We can discard this offal in the lifeboat there.”

  “Granted,” said the commander. Locklear took more notes as the two kzinti piloted their ship nearer. If lifeboats were piloted with the same systems as cruisers, and if he could study the ways in which that lifeboat drive could be energized, he might yet take a hand in his fate.

  The maneuvers took so much time that Locklear feared the kzin would drop the whole idea, but, “Let it be recorded that I keep my bargains, even with monkeys,” the commander grouched as the planet bega
n to grow in the viewport.

  “Tiny suns, orbiting the planet? Stranger and stranger,” the navigator mused. “Grraf-Commander, this is—not natural.”

  “Exactly so. It is artificial,” said the commander. Brightening, he added, “Perhaps a special project, though I do not know how we could move a full-sized planet into orbit around a dwarf. Tzak-Navigator, see if this tallies with anything the Patriarchy may have on file.” No sound passed between them when the navigator looked up from his screen, but their shared glance did not improve the commander’s mood. “No? Well, backup records in triplicate,” he snapped. “Survey sensors to full gain.”

  Locklear took more notes, his heart pounding anew with every added strangeness of this singular discovery. The planet orbited several light-minutes from the dead star, with numerous satellites in synchronous orbits, blazing like tiny suns—or rather, like spotlights in imitation of tiny suns, for the radiation from those satellites blazed only downward, toward the planet’s surface. Those satellites, according to the navigator, seemed to be moving a bit in complex patterns, not all of them in the same ways—and one of them dimmed even as they watched.

  The commander brought the ship nearer, and now Tzak-Navigator gasped with a fresh astonishment. “Grraf-Commander, this planet is dotted with force-cylinder generators. Not complete shells, but open to space at orbital height. And the beam-spread of each satellite’s light flux coincides with the edge of each force cylinder. No, not all of them; several of those circular areas are not bathed in any light at all. Fallow areas?”

  “Or unfinished areas,” the commander grunted. “Perhaps we have discovered a project in the making.”

  Locklear saw blazes of blue, white, red, and yellow impinging in vast circular patterns on the planet ‘s surface. Almost as if someone had placed small models of Sirius, Sol, Fomalhaut, and other suns out here, he thought. He said nothing. If he orbited this bizarre mystery long enough, he might probe its secrets. If he orbited it too long, he would damned well die of starvation.

  Then, “Homeworld,” blurted the astonished navigator, as the ship continued its close pass around this planet that was at least half the mass of Earth.

  Locklear saw it too, a circular region that seemed to be hundreds of kilometers in diameter, rich in colors that reminded him of a kzin’s fur. The green expanse of a big lake, too, as well as dark masses that might have been mountain crags. And then he noticed that one of the nearby circular patterns seemed achingly familiar in its colors, and before he thought, he said it in Interworld: “Earth!”

  The commander leaped to a mind-numbing conclusion the moment before Locklear did. “This can only be a galactic prison—or a zoo,” he said in a choked voice. “The planet was evidently moved here, after the brown dwarf was discovered. There seems to be no atmosphere outside the force walls, and the planetary surface between those circular regions is almost as cold as interstellar deeps, according to the sensors. If it is a prison, each compound is well-isolated from the others. Nothing could live in the interstices.”

  Locklear knew that the commander had overlooked something that could live there very comfortably, but held his tongue awhile. Then, “Permission to speak,” he said.

  “Granted,” said the commander. “What do you know of this—this thing?”

  “Only this: whether it is a zoo or a prison, one of those compounds seems very Earthlike. If you left me there, I might find air and food to last me indefinitely.”

  “And other monkeys to help in Patriarch-knows-what,” the navigator put in quickly. “No one is answering my all-band queries, and we do not know who runs this prison. The Patriarchy has no prison on record that is even faintly like this.”

  “If they are keeping Heroes in a kzinti compound,” grated the commander, “this could be a planet-sized trap.”

  Tzak-Navigator: “But whose?”

  Grraf-Commander, with arrogant satisfaction: “It will not matter whose it is, if they set a vermin-sized trap and catch an armed lifeboat. There is no shell over these circular walls, and if there were, I would try to blast through it. Re-enable the lifeboat’s drive. Tzak-Navigator, as Executive Officer you will remain on alert in the Raptor. For the rest of us: sound planetfall!”

  Caught between fright and amazement, Locklear could only hang on and wait, painfully buffeted during re-entry because the kzin-sized seat harness would not retract to fit his human frame. The lifeboat, the size of a flatlander’s racing yacht, descended in a broad spiral, keeping well inside those invisible force-walls that might have damaged the craft on contact. At last the commander set his ship on a search pattern that spiraled inward while maintaining perhaps a kilometer’s height above the yellow grassy plains, the kzin-colored steaming jungle, the placid lake, the dark mountain peaks of this tiny, synthesized piece of the kzin homeworld.

  Presently, the craft settled near a promontory overlooking that lake and partially protected by the rise of a stone escarpment—the landfall of a good military mind, Locklear admitted to himself. “Apprentice Engineer: report on environmental conditions,” the commander ordered. Turning to Locklear, he added, “If this is a zoo, the zookeepers have not yet learned to capture Heroes—nor any of our food animals, according to our survey. Since your metabolism is so near ours, I think this is where we shall deposit you for safekeeping.”

  “But without prey, Grraf-Commander, he will soon starve,” said Apprentice Engineer.

  The heavy look of the commander seemed full of ironic amusement. “No, he will not. Humans eat monkeyfood, remember? This specimen is a kshat.”

  Locklear colored but tried to ignore the insult. Any creature willing to eat vegetation was, to the kzinti, kshat, a herbivore capable of eating offal. And capable of little else. “You might leave me some rations anyway,” he grumbled. “I’m in no condition to be climbing trees for food.”

  “But you soon may be, and a single monkey in this place could hide very well from a search party.”

  Apprentice Engineer, performing his extra duties proudly, waved a digit toward the screen. “Grraf-Commander, the gravity constant is exactly home normal. The temperature, too; solar flux, the same; atmosphere and micro-organisms as well. I suspect that the builders of this zoo planet have buried gravity polarizers with the force cylinder generators.”

  “No doubt those other compounds are equally equipped to surrogate certain worlds,” the commander said. “I think, whoever they are—or were—the builders work very, very slowly.”

  Locklear, entertaining his own scenario, suspected the builders worked very slowly, all right—and in ways, with motives, beyond the understanding of man or kzin. But why tell his suspicions to Scarface? Locklear had by now given his own private labels to these infuriating kzin, after noting the commander’s face-mark, the navigator’s tremors of intent, the gunner’s brutal stupidity and the engineer’s abdominal patch: to Locklear, they had become Scarface, Brickshitter, Goon, and Yellowbelly. Those labels gave him an emotional lift, but he knew better than to use them aloud.

  Scarface made his intent clear to everyone, glancing at Locklear from time to time, as he gave his orders. Water and rations for eight duty watches were to be offloaded. Because every kzin craft has special equipment to pacify those kzinti who displayed criminal behavior, especially the Kdaptists with their treasonous leanings toward humankind, Scarface had prepared a zzrou for their human captive. The zzrou could be charged with a powerful soporific drug, or—as the commander said in this case—a poison. Affixed to a host and tuned to a transmitter, the zzrou could be set to inject its material into the host at regular intervals—or to meter it out whenever the host moved too far from that transmitter.

  Scarface held the implant device, no larger than a biscuit with vicious prongs, in his hand, facing the captive. “If you try to extract this, it will kill you instantly. If you somehow found the transmitter and smashed it—again you would die instantly. Whenever you stray two steps too far from it, you will suffer. I shall set it so that you
can move about far enough to feed yourself, but not far enough to make finding you a difficulty.”

  Locklear chewed his lip for a moment, thinking. “Is the poison cumulative?”

  “Yes. And if you do not know that honor forbids me to lie, you will soon find out to your sorrow.” He turned and handed a small device to Yellowbelly. “Take this transmitter and place it where no monkey might stumble across it. Do not wander more than eight-cubed paces from here in the process—and take a sidearm and a transceiver with you. I am not absolutely certain the place is uninhabited. Captive! Bare your back.”

  Locklear, dry-mouthed, removed his jacket and shirt. He watched Yellowbelly bound back down the short passageway and, soon afterward, heard the sigh of an airlock. He turned casually, trying to catch sight of him as Goon was peering through the viewport, and then he felt a paralyzing agony as Scarface impacted the prongs of the zzrou into his back just below the left shoulder blade.

  His first sensation was a chill, and his second was a painful reminder of those zzrou prongs sunk into the muscles of his back. Locklear eased to a sitting position and looked around him. Except for depressions in the yellowish grass, and a terrifyingly small pile of provisions piled atop his shirt and jacket, he could see no evidence that a kzin lifeboat had ever landed here. “For all you know, they’ll never come back,” he told himself aloud, shivering as he donned his garments. Talking to himself was an old habit born of solitary researches, and made him feel less alone.

  But now that he thought on it, he couldn’t decide which he dreaded most, their return or permanent solitude. “So let’s take stock,” he said, squatting next to the provisions. A kzin’s rations would last three limes as long for him, but the numbers were depressing: within three flatlander weeks he’d either find water and food, or he would starve—if he did not freeze first.

  If this was really a compound designed for kzin, it would be chilly for Locklear—and it was. The water would be drinkable, and no doubt he could eat kzin game animals if he found any that did not eat him first. He had already decided to head for the edge of that lake, which lay shining at a distance that was hard to judge, when he realized that local animals might destroy what food he had.