by Larry Niven
The airboat did not have room for them all, but by now Kit could operate the polarizer levers. She sat ahead of Locklear for decorum’s sake, making a show of her pairing with him, and let Puss and Boots follow beneath as the airboat slid ahead of a good breeze toward their tacky, unfinished little manor. “They will be nicely exhausted,” she said to him, “by the time we reach home.”
Home. My God, it may be my home for the rest of my life, he thought, watching the muscular Puss bound along behind them with Boots in arrears. Three kzin courtesans for company; a sure ‘nough cathouse! Is that much better than having those effing warriors to return? And if they don’t, is there any way I could get across to my own turf, to Newduvai? The gravity polarizer could get him to orbit, but he would need propulsion, and a woven sail wasn’t exactly de rigueur for travel in vacuum, and how the hell could he build an airtight cockpit anyhow? Too many questions, too few answers, and two more kzin females who might be more hindrance than help, hurtling along in the yellow sward behind him. One of them pregnant.
And kzin litters were almost all twins, one male. Like it or not, he was doomed to deal with at least one kzintosh. The notion of killing the tiny male forced itself forward. He quashed the idea instantly, and hoped it would stay quashed. Yeah, and one of these days it’ll weigh three times as much as I do, and two of these randy females will be vying for mating privileges. The return of the kzin ship, he decided, might be the least of his troubles.
That being so, the least of his troubles could kill him.
Puss and Boots proved far more help than hindrance. Locklear admitted it to Kit one night, lying In their small room off the “great hall,” itself no larger than five meters by ten and already pungent with cooking smokes. “Those two hardly talk to me, but they thatch a roof like crazy. How well can they tunnel?”
This amused her. “Every pregnant kzinrret is an expert at tunneling, as you will soon see. Except that you will not see. When birthing time nears, a mother digs her secret birthing place. The father sometimes helps, but oftener not.”
“Too lazy?”
She regarded him with eyes that reflected a dim flicker from the fire dying in the next room’s hearth, and sent a shiver through him. “Too likely to eat the newborn male,” she said simply.
“Good God. Not among modern kzinti, I hope.”
“Perhaps. Females become good workers; males become aggressive hunters likely to challenge for household mastery. Which would you value more?”
“My choice is a matter of record,” he joked, adding that they were certainly shaping the manor up fast. That, she said, was because they knew their places and their leaders. Soon they would be butchering and curing meat, making (something) from the milk of ruminants, cheese perhaps, and making ready for the kittens. Some of the released animals seemed already domesticated. A few vatach, she said, might be trapped and released nearby for convenience.
He asked if the others would really fight the returning kzin warriors, and she insisted that they would, especially Puss. “She was a highly valued prret, but she hates males,” Kit warned. “In some ways I think she wishes to be one.”
“Then why did she ask if I’d like to scratch her flanks with my wtsai,” he asked.
“I will claw her eyes out if you do,” she growled. “She is only negotiating for status. Keep your blade in your belt,” she said angrily, with a metaphor he could not miss.
That blade reminded him (as he idly scratched her flanks with its dull tip to calm her) that the cave was now a treasury of materials. He must study the planting of the fast-growing vines which, according to Kit, would soon hide the roof thatching; those vines could also hide the cave entrance. He could scavenge enough steel for lances, more of the polarizers to build a whopping big airsloop, maybe even— He sat up, startling her. “Meat storage!”
Kit did not understand. He wasn’t sure he wanted her to. He would need wire for remote switches, which might be recovered from polarizer toroids if he had the nerve to try it. “I may have a way to keep meat fresh, Kit, but you must help me see that no one else touches my magics. They could be dangerous.” She said he was the boss, and he almost believed it.
Once the females began their escape tunnel, Locklear rigged a larger sail and completed his mapping chores, amassing several scrolls which seemed gibberish to the others. And each day he spent two hours at the cave. When vines died, he planted others to hide the entrance. He learned that polarizers and stasis units came in three sizes, and brought trapped vatach back in large cages he had separated from their gravity and stasis devices. Those clear cage tops made admirable windows, and the cage metal was then reworked by firelight in the main hall.
Despite Kit’s surly glances, he bade Puss sit beside him to learn metalwork, while Boots patiently wove mats and formed trays of clay to his specifications for papermaking. One day he might begin a journal. Meanwhile he needed awls, screwdrivers, pliers—and a longbow with arrows. He was all thumbs while shaping them.
Boots became more shy as her pregnancy advanced. Locklear’s new social problem became the casual nuances from Puss that, by now, he knew were sexual. She rarely spoke unless spoken to, but one day while resting in the sun with the big kzinrret he noticed her tailtip flicking near his leg. He had noticed previously that a moving rope or vine seemed to mesmerize a kzin; they probably thought it fascinated him as well.
“Puss, I—uh—sleep only with Kit. Sorry, but that’s the way of it.”
“Pfaugh. I am more skilled at ch’rowl than she, and I could make you a pillow of her fur if I liked.” Her gaze was calm, challenging; to a male kzin, probably very sexy.
“We must all work together, Puss. As head of the household, I forbid you to make trouble.”
“My Lord,” she said with a small nod, but her ear-flick was amused. “In that case, am I permitted to help in the birthing?”
“Of course,” he said, touched. “Where is Boots, anyway?”
“Preparing her birthing chamber. It cannot be long now,” Puss added, setting off down the ravine.
Locklear found Kit dragging a mat of dirt from the tunnel and asked her about the problems of birthing. The hardest part, she said, was the bower—and when males were near, the hiding. He asked why Puss would be needed at the birthing.
“Ah,” said Kit. “It is symbolic, Rockear. You have agreed to let her play the mate role. It is not unheard-of, and the newborn male will be safe.”
“You mean, symbolic like our pairing?”
“Not quite that symbolic,” she replied with sarcasm as they distributed stone and earth outside. “Prret are flexible.”
Then he asked her what ch’rowl meant.
Kit vented a tiny miaow of pleasure, then realized suddenly that he did not know what he had said. Furiously: “She used that word to you? I will break her tail!”
“I forbid it,” he said. “She was angry because I told her I slept only with you.” Pleased with this, Kit subsided as they moved into the tunnel again. Some kzin words, he learned, were triggers. At least one seemed to be blatantly lascivious. He was deflected from this line of thought only when Kit, digging upward now, broke through to the surface.
They replanted shrubs at the exit before dark, and lounged before the hearthfire afterward. At last Locklear yawned; checked his wristcomp. “They are very late,” he said.
“Kittens are born at night,” she replied, unworried.
“But—I assumed she’d tell us when it was time.”
“She has not said eight-cubed of words to you. Why should she confide that to a male?”
He shrugged at the fire. Perhaps they would always treat him like a kzintosh. He wondered for the hundredth time whether, when push came to shove, they would fight with him or against him.
In his mapping sorties, Locklear had skirted near enough to the force walls to see that Kzersatz was adjacent to four other compounds. One, of course, wits the tantalizing Newduvai. Another was hidden in swirling mists; he dubbed it Limbo. The o
thers held no charm for him; he named them Who Needs It, and No Thanks. He wondered what collections of life forms roamed those mysterious lands, or slept there in stasis. The planet might have scores of such zoo compounds.
Meanwhile, he unwound a hundred meters of wire from a polarizer, and stole switches from others. One of his jury-rigs, outside the cave, was a catapult using a polarizer on a sturdy frame. He could stand fifty meters away and, with his remote switch, lob a heavy stone several hundred meters. Perhaps a series of the gravity polarizers would make a kind of mass driver—a true space drive! There was yet hope, he thought, of someday visiting Newduvai.
And then he transported some materials to the manor where he installed a stasis device to keep meat fresh indefinitely; and late that same day, Puss returned. Even Kit, ignoring their rivalry, welcomed the big kzinrret.
“They are all well,” Puss reported smugly, paternally. To Locklear’s delighted question she replied in severe tones, “You cannot see them until their eyes open, Rockear.”
“It is tradition,” Kit injected. “The mother will suckle them until then, and will hunt as she must.”
“I am the hunter,” Puss said. “When we build our own manor, will your household help?”
Kit looked quickly toward Locklear, who realized the implications. By God, they’re really pairing off for another household, he thought. After a moment he said, “Yes, but you must locate it nearby.” He saw Kit relax and decided he’d made the right decision. To celebrate the new developments, Puss shooed Locklear and Kit outside to catch the late sun while she made them an early supper. They sat on their rough-hewn bench above the ravine to eat, Puss claiming she could return to the birthing bower in full darkness, and Locklear allowed himself to bask in a sense of well-being. It was not until Puss had headed back down the ravine with food for Boots, that Locklear realized she had stolen several small items from his storage shelves.
He could accept the loss of tools and a knife; Puss had, after all, helped him make them. What caused his cold sweat was the fact that the tiny zzrou transmitter was missing. The zzrou prongs in his shoulder began to itch as he thought about it. Puss could not possibly know the importance of the transmitter to him; maybe she thought it was some magical tool—and maybe she would destroy it while studying it.
“Kit,” he said, trying to keep the tremor from his voice, “I’ve got a problem and I need your help.”
She seemed incensed, but not very surprised, to learn the function of the device that clung to his hack. One thing was certain, he insisted: the birthing bower could not be more than a klick away. Because if Puss took the transmitter farther than that, he would die in agony. Could Kit lead him to the bower in darkness?
“I might find it, Rockear, but your presence there would provoke violence,” she said. “I must go alone.” She caressed his flank gently, then set off slowly down the ravine on all-fours, her nose close to the turf until she disappeared in darkness.
Locklear stood for a time at the manor entrance, wondering what this night would bring, and then saw a long scrawl of light as it slowed to a stop and winked out, many miles above the plains of Kzersatz. Now he knew what the morning would bring, and knew that he had not one deadly problem, but two. He began to check his pathetic little armory by the glow of his memocomp, because that was better than giving way entirely to despair.
When he awoke, it was to the warmth of Kit’s fur nestled against his backside. There was a time when she called this obscene, he thought with a smile—and then he remembered everything, and lit the display of his memocomp. Two hours until dawn. How long until death, he wondered, and woke her.
She did not have the zzrou transmitter. “Puss heard my calls,” she said, “and warned me away. She will return this morning to barter tools for things she wants.”
“I’ll tell you who else will return,” he began. “No, don’t rebuild the fire, Kit. I saw what looked like a ship stationing itself many miles away overhead, while you were gone. Smoke will only give us away. It might possibly be a Manship, but—expect the worst. You haven’t told me how you plan to fight.”
His hopes fell as she stammered out her ideas, and he countered each one, reflecting that she was no planner. They would hide and ambush the searchers—but he reminded her of their projectile and beam weapons. Very well, they would claim absolute homestead rights accepted by all ancient kzinti clans—but modern kzinti, he insisted, had probably forgotten those ancient immunities.
“You may as well invite them in for breakfast,” he grumbled. “Back on earth, women’s weapons included poison. I thought you had some kzinrret weapons.”
“Poisons would take time, Rockear. It takes little time, and not much talent, to set warriors fighting to the death over a female. Surely they would still respond with foolish bravado?”
“I don’t know; they’ve never seen a smart kzinrret. And ship’s officers are very disciplined. I don’t think they’d get into a free-for-all. Maybe lure them in here and hit ‘em while they sleep . . .”
“As you did to me?”
“Uh no, I—yes!” He was suddenly galvanized by the idea, tantalized by the treasures he had left in the cave. “Kit, the machine I set up to preserve food is exactly the same as the one I placed under you, to make you sleep when I hit a foot switch.” He saw her flash of anger at his earlier duplicity. “An ancient sage once said anything that’s advanced enough beyond your understanding is indistinguishable from magic, Kit. But magic can turn on you. Could you get a warrior to sit or lie down by himself?”
“If I cannot, I am no prret,” she purred. “Certainly I can leave one lying by himself. Or two. Or . . .”
“Okay, don’t get graphic on me,” he snapped. “We’ve got only one stasis unit here. If only I could get more but I can’t leave in the airboat without that damned little transmitter! Kit, you’ll have to go and get Puss now. I’ll promise her anything within reason.”
“She will know we are at a disadvantage. Her demands will be outrageous.”
“We’re all at a disadvantage! Tell her about the kzin warship that’s hanging over us.”
“Hanging magically over us,” she corrected him. “It is true enough for me.”
Then she was gone, loping away in darkness, leaving him to fumble his way to the meat storage unit he had so recently installed. The memocomp’s faint light helped a little, and he was too busy to notice the passage of time until, with its usual sudden blaze, the sunlet of Kzersatz began to shine.
He was hiding the wires from Puss’s bed to the foot switch near the little room’s single doorway when he heard a distant roll of thunder. No, not thunder: It grew to a crackling howl in the sky, and from the nearest window he saw what he most feared to see. The kzin lifeboat left a thin contrail in its pass, eliding just inside the force cylinder of Kzersatz, and its wingtips slid out as it slowed. No doubt of the newcomer now, and it disappeared in the direction of that first landing, so long ago. If only he’d thought to booby-trap that landing zone with stasis units! Well, he might’ve, given time.
He finished his work in fevered haste, knowing that time was now his enemy, and so were the kzinti in that ship, and so, for all practical purposes, was the traitor Puss. And Kit? How easy it will be for her to switch sides! Those females will make out like bandits wherever they are, and I may learn Kit’s decision when these goddamned prongs take a lethal bite in my back. Could be any time now. And then he heard movements in the high grass nearby, and leaped for his longbow.
Kit flashed to the doorway, breathless. “She is coming, Rockear. Have you set your sleeptrap?”
He showed her the rig. “Toe it once for sleep, again for waking, again for sleep,” he said. “Whatever you do, don’t get near enough to touch the sleeper, or stand over him, or you’ll be in the same fix. I’ve set it for maximum power.”
“Why did you put it here, instead of our own bed?”
He coughed and shrugged. “Uh,—I don’t know. Just seemed like—well, hell, it�
��s our bed, Kit! I, um, didn’t like the idea of your using it, ah, the way you’ll have to use it.”
“You are an endearing beast,” she said, pinching him lightly at the neck, “to bind me with tenderness,”
They both whirled at Puss’s voice from the main doorway: “Bind who with tenderness?”
“I will explain,” said Kit, her face bland. “If you brought those trade goods, display them on your bed.”
“I think not,” said Puss, striding into the room she’d shared with Boots. “But I will show them to you.” With that, she sat on her bed and reached into her apron pocket, drawing out a wtsai for inspection.
An instant later she was unconscious. Kit, with Locklear kibitzing, used a grass broom to whisk the knife safely away. “I should use it on her throat,” she snarled, but she let Locklear take the weapon.
“She came of her own accord,” he said, “and she’s a fighter. We need her, Kit. Hit the switch again.”
A moment later, Puss was blinking, leaping up, then suddenly backing away in fear. “Treachery,” she spat.
In reply, Locklear tossed the knife onto her bed despite Kit’s frown. “Just a display, Puss. You need the knife, and I’m your ally. But I’ve got to have that little gadget that looks like my wristcomp.” He held out his hand.
“I left it at the birthing bower. I knew it was important,” she said with a surly glance as she retrieved the knife. “For its return, I demand our total release from this household. I demand your help to build a manor as large as this, wherever I like. I demand teaching in your magical arts.” She trembled, but stood defiant; a dangerous combination.
“Done, done, and done,” he said. “You want equality, and I’m willing. But we may all be equally dead if that kzin ship finds us. We need a leader. Do you have a good plan?”
Puss swallowed hard. “Yes. Hunt at night, hide until they leave.”