Selena crouched down, face to face with him. “Are you ready, Hap?”
Hap nodded, having picked up the gesture from the humans around him. His nose was twitching eagerly; despite the supposedly hermetic seals, he could smell the natural biome beyond the paddock door. Then he stopped, looked around. “Deeder?” he asked, his ears flattening a bit in the kzin equivalent of a frown.
“Sorry, Hap. Dieter can’t be here today. He wanted to be. But he’s away.”
Hap’s nose twitched once, mightily. “No, he not. I smell him.”
“No, Hap; I’m sorry, but Dieter is not here-”
“Not here, but I smell him.” Hap pointed. “On you.”
Oh. Each member of Selena’s staff suddenly discovered that their routine tasks and instruments now demanded unusually close scrutiny. Well, her relationship with Dieter was going to get out eventually, anyhow. Probably half her team already knew or at least suspected. But, to coin a phrase, the cat was well and truly out of the bag now. “I understand now, Hap: you can detect his scent. But Dieter had to leave a while ago; the person I work for asked him to-”
The small wet nose twitched again. “Selena, no. You wrong. Smell is new, fresh. Very Dieter.” He wrinkled his nose. “Very strong Dieter smell.” His eyes drifted down, below her waistline.
Oh good god. “Hap, listen: Dieter couldn’t come. He wanted to but-but some other people wanted him to be somewhere else today.” Selena imagined herself punching Pyragy in his supercilious mouth. Again and again. “But Dieter will be back soon.”
The kzin cub’s fur flexed once. Was that akin to a shrug? A similar reflexive gesture had been observed in the other three cubs, and in circumstances that suggested the same social valence. “Okay,” acceded Hap. “We go now?”
Selena smiled, careful to keep her lips over her teeth as she did so, and nodded to him, then at her staff.
They opened the paddock door, and Hap looked back quickly at Selena, his eyes very wide. “No harness?”
Selena shook her head. “No harness; not today.”
Whereupon Hap performed a prompt, skittering, one-hundred-eighty-degree turn and was through the open doorway in a shot. Selena followed at a more leisurely pace.
By the time she emerged into the open air-and this time, it was truly open air, not an enclosed habitat like the others Hap had been in-the small cub was racing to and fro, moving so fast that he was a blur. He sped from bush to tree to flower to insect to rock and finally, to what was apparently an especially fragrant Mystery Groovy Spot in the middle of the grass. Where he stopped, panting, rolling in luxurious abandon.
Selena approached him slowly, carefully, mostly because she did not want to impede on his first experience of The Wild, but also because she was not quite sure what he would do next, and he was already big enough to be modestly dangerous, albeit not deadly.
Hap had evidently heard her approach. “Smells!” he purr-gasped. “Smells! All around! In my head, all over! It…it…” He stopped suddenly, sat up, a quick and terrifying gravity in his eyes: “No more walls. I want here. Always.”
Selena nodded. “Not yet, but soon.” She looked up, squinted into the distance: just a kilometer away, a high-security fence-three of them, actually-traced a dim line that paralleled the horizon. She wondered how long that restraint would be a sufficient guarantee against his already-awakening instinct for roving, for wanderlust.
“How soon?” Hap’s query was uttered in such a flat, matter-of-fact tone, that she couldn’t keep herself from glancing down at him. The cub that looked back-orange belly fur tremoring against the surrounding black of his pelt-suddenly seemed much older than two.
“I’m not sure how soon. The man I work for said that maybe, if you like the new food we have for you, you can stay here right away. Would you like that?”
Hap didn’t even nod. “Where is new food?” His eyes roved purposefully.
Selena schooled her face to impassivity as she motioned one of her staff to bring in the sealed plate. Hap’s nose was immediately hyperactive. “Meat?” he purred eagerly.
“Yes.” Selena kept her voice calm. “Try some.”
The plate was placed before Hap; the lid was removed. He started at the sudden puff of steam, the pungent smell of seared beef. “Meat,” he agreed. “But burned.”
“No: cooked. It brings out the smells, the tastes,” explained Selena, wishing she had authority in this matter. “Try it.”
Hap’s nose wrinkled dubiously, but he gamely seized and devoured a small chunk of the sirloin. He chewed for a moment-then his eyes went wide and the meat came out in a rush, propelled from behind by a veritable torrent of vomit.
Pyragy looked cross. It could have been for any one of several reasons. Rumor had it that his ongoing hormone therapy was interfering with his cardio meds. If so, his choice was between tiring easily (perhaps fatally) or verging into a cascade of implant and transplant rejections that would likely render his body alarming to all but the most open-minded of partners.
Perhaps no less distressing to him was the presence of Admiral Coelho-Chase and the ARM’s Associate Chief Executive, Maurizio Dennehy. Their presence was a clear indictment of his handling of the Kzin Research Project. And probably the recent episode involving the cooked meat had caused the long-standing official uneasiness to reify into a full-blown investigation.
But perhaps most frustrating of all to Pyragy was that his two most senior researchers-Boroshinsky and Selena herself-had been summoned by those same powers to explore a possible redirection of the program’s research goals. For a man who hungered after preeminence and prestige more than anything else, this was indeed a most annoying turn of events.
The admiral looked up from the reports and toward Boroshinsky. “So you confirm that you made these multiple recommendations against attempting to feed cooked meat to the kzin cub named Hap?”
“Da, Admiral. Some of our studies suggested that it might be mildly toxic to him. For kzinti, eating cooked meat would be analogous to us eating a mix of carbonized and denatured meat. Either upsets our stomach. Cooked meat has the equivalent effect upon the kzinti, causing the cub’s projectile vomiting: his system was purging itself of toxins.”
The admiral and the associate chief executive stared at Pyragy, who shrugged: “This was not known before we tried.”
“According to the collected reports and testimony, this outcome was suspected.”
“Suspected, but not known,” Pyragy persisted.
“Even if we were to concede that possibly specious point, why did you feel that it was important to attempt to get the kzin to eat cooked meat?”
Pyragy spread his hands wide. “Is it not obvious? To see if he could be weaned away from the taste of the fresh kill.”
“To what end?”
“Why, to put distance between himself and his more primal instincts. Admiral, Executive, if we are to successfully pursue our most basic mandate-to raise a kzin with whom we might have meaningful communication-we must ensure that he views us as fellow discussants, not possible entrées. If he retains a taste for raw meat, he will probably retain a taste for our own uncooked flesh, too. An independent board of animal behaviorists validated my concern that our relationship with him will remain forever compromised until and unless that association is broken. He will not see potential food creatures as fully sentient and equal to himself.”
“And do you agree with this independent review of kzin behavior, Dr. Navarre?”
“I do not know, Admiral, since I have not seen it.”
“Why?”
“Because the existence of the external review was not revealed to us until this week.”
“Very well, so you are not in possession of the particulars of the report. Given that proviso, and speaking off-the-record, Dr. Navarre, do you feel that the ability of the kzinti to conceive of creatures either as persons or as prey is as polarized as Director Pyragy is claiming?”