“And I’m Selena, not Dr. Navarre. So the admiral gave you a ‘get into jail free’ card?”
“Something like that. After seeing the report about my debriefing by Director Pyragy, there was some concern at the higher echelons that the research project could be in danger of being compromised by personal and political agendas.”
Selena looked sideways at Armbrust. “Everyone has an agenda, Dieter.”
“True enough. But in this case, the top item on everyone’s agenda should be ‘save humanity.’ The rest is about method. In the case of your director, it seemed he was more interested in using young kzin to prove something about universal morality.”
Selena did not say anything; she did not dare. The problem was not that she disagreed with Dieter, but rather, that she agreed with him. Fervently. But even if the walls didn’t have ears, some things were simply too risky to discuss freely in public. And besides, she didn’t want to take any chances of being associated with the military agenda, because if Pyragy suspected that, she’d be off the project. Faster than spitting out swap-water. In another six months, maybe a year, her position would be much more secure, possibly invulnerable. But until then…
“Let’s walk, Dieter. You’ve a lot to see.” As they began strolling out of the observation hub and down one of the tubes that both separated and provided a means for observing the different habitats on either side, Selena noticed that the kit had padded away from the observation glass and was now paralleling them on their walk. “It seems you have a friend, Dieter,” Selena observed, nodding to indicate their tiny escort.
Dieter looked over; as he did, Selena quickly accessed her wrist-relay’s primary control program and deployed three of the near-invisible roving sensors in the kit’s habitat to triangulate, close, and follow him. It was the strongest independent behavior she’d noted thus far and if it was what it seemed-a post-imprinting affinity-that could be a major factor later on: both a variable to investigate and use as a positive stimuli and reinforcement.
If Dieter noticed what she was doing, he was too polite to mention it. “Yeah, I’m some great friend of that little kit’s, cheating him the way I did.”
“By cheating, are you referring to the fact that he only needed saving because you had already-er, destroyed his world?”
Dieter shrugged. “Yeah, that too. But I was thinking more about how I brushed against one of the dead females shortly after entering the nursery. I didn’t even consciously think about it at the time, but it was one of the possibilities we had discussed at the command level.”
“You mean, to coat yourself in a familiar, comforting scent?”
“Yeah; as far as we knew, the mere smell of humans, being so different, could have made the kits unapproachable under any circumstances.”
“That doesn’t sound like cheating, Dieter; that sounds like quick thinking.”
“It was just a trained reflex.”
“The others didn’t do it.”
“That’s because I mentally trained for it on my own. I thought through that assault again and again and again. And, of course, it didn’t work out anything like we planned. They never do.”
“No, but because you had rehearsed the alternatives so many times in your head, you were able to adapt, quickly and well, when reality went off in a different direction than any of the ones you’d planned on.”
Dieter shrugged and glanced back at the kit. “And now I feel kind of responsible for Hap-for him-I guess.”
Selena looked sideways at the Wunderlander. “Did you just call the kit ‘Hap’?”
Dieter seemed almost embarrassed. “Yeah.”
“Why ‘Hap’?”
“Well, it hardly seemed right to call him ‘Lucky.’ Yes, he survived, but we did kill his mom and sister and hijacked him to live among hairless aliens.”
Selena smiled sadly. “No, ‘Lucky’ just wouldn’t work.”
“But, in some ways, chance was on his side. And has continued to be. So, caught as he is in the hands of Fate, I thought ‘Hap’ might do. Mayhap, Hap-less, Hap-py: there’s no telling what Fate will deal him, but deal him it will.”
Selena looked at the half-black-, half-orange-furred kit that was becoming weary following them. Hap. A simple monosyllable. That was good. Furthermore, all its phonemes were easy for kzinti: they were basic sounds in the Heroes’ Tongue. And if the kit came to know that it had been named by the human for which it felt such instinctual affinity, that might be the influence mechanism that-
Dieter’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “How are the other kits doing?”
“The oldest male has proven entirely intractable, as we suspected he might be.”
“Too old?”
Selena nodded. “That’s our best guess. He’s not particularly sociable with the one that’s two months younger than he is, but we can’t tell if that’s normal, a post-trauma reaction, or just a personal quirk.” She smiled. “He’s the only one we’ve named, so far. Partly because he’s older, partly because he had such a distinctive personality.”
“Dare I ask what you’ve named him?”
“Cranky. Some insist on the longer version: Cranky Cat.”
Dieter raised an eyebrow. “Something tells me you never expect to establish communications with him, giving him a name like that.”
“It’s hard to see how we would forge a communicational link with him: he cannot be safely approached, and he is resistant to both positive and negative operant conditioning. Surprisingly so, for a young creature.”
“Although that could be the norm, for kzinti.”
“Absolutely so. And I could see several ways in which it would be a necessary survival trait. The kits are ferociously competitive with each other from a very early age. In Cranky, what we perceive as stubbornness and irascibility might well be tenacity and aggressiveness, now warped by being penned up in an alien, aversive environment.”
“And the second oldest male?”
Selena shrugged. “Hard to tell; he’s had a lot of trouble.”
“Why? I thought he was fine when we got him.”
“He was. But although he was probably too young to remember any of the trauma of his capture, he was old enough to feel it, for it to leave an emotional scar.”
Dieter clucked his tongue. “Kind of hard to think of kzinti having emotional scars.”
“I understand, but they can and do get them. In his case, I don’t think it would have been too bad: they are very resilient. But without a mother as a source of basic mammalian reassurance, I suspect his mind tucked the experience under his growing consciousness, and is now experiencing its side effects.
“From the beginning, he rejected food until he became desperately hungry. We had to feed him intravenously twice to ensure his survival. Of course, it doesn’t help that the damn milk substitutes just don’t appeal to the suckled kits.”
“I thought it was genetically reengineered from samples, that it was an exact match for their real milk.”
“Oh, it has all the right chemicals in all the right proportions, but something is still missing. As a lab-tech in the biology group put it, ‘ersatz is ersatz.’ And we should hardly be surprised: we’ve done no better with our own foods.”
Dieter smiled ruefully. “True enough. I’ve had tasty non-alcoholic beer, except it never really tastes like beer.”
“Yes, and given how much more acute the kzin senses of smell and taste are-about thirty thousand times and one hundred times, respectively-it’s hardly surprising that they reject the substitutes we’ve created.”
“And so the younger kzin male is weak from starvation?”
“Yes. It will be good when we can move him to unprocessed meat, about a month from now.”
“But Hap looks pretty robust.”
“That’s probably because he was newborn when he was taken.”
“What? Wouldn’t that make him weaker? More vulnerable?”
“No. He hadn’t been suckled yet. So, apparently, if newborn kzinti haven’t yet had natural milk, they tolerate our synthetics much better.”
“So he’s feeding well?”