Hap sat at some distance from her now, didn’t even look directly in her eyes. “Yes, it’s more than the toys. It’s so much more than the toys that I don’t really know how to think about it all at once. But the toys seemed like a good place to start.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think?”
Selena wondered: was this kind of insolence a common feature in kzin maturation? Probably not: their relationship with the older males would be a very businesslike affair. Open insubordination-for that is how their culture would almost certainly view such a testy response-would no doubt be met by a sharp cuff and dire threats of more. At the very least.
So, by elimination, this was an example of how human upbringing was changing him. Like Boyle’s Law of Gases, the contentiousness of his age was expanding to occupy any space that it was not soundly, physically, beaten back from. And even if they knew enough to imitate a true kzin upbringing, that would do no good, not anymore. He was what his upbringing thus far had made him: insightful, reflective, self-determining, curious, and capable of many intensities and shadings of affection for any number of humans. He was no more a natural kzin than a cockroach was, and never had she realized that so clearly as now.
His tone was exaggeratedly patient. “I said, ‘why do you think I started with the toys’?”
Selena set her shoulders back a little further and withdrew her emotions from her eyes. “I’m not here to make guesses, Hap. This is not a game.”
“Really? Then why these?” He gestured at the broken playthings. “Toys are for playing games, aren’t they?”
“They’re not just toys, Hap.”
“No? Then what else are they for?”
“For training you. For making sure you can exercise all your physical abilities.”
Hap sat back; the kzin smirk was surprisingly similar to its human equivalent. “Tell me about my physical abilities, please.”
“You don’t need me to tell you what you can see by looking in a mirror.”
“What I see and feel is not what I’m talking about.” He stood, and Selena thought: my god, he’s become so big, so fast. She felt, and quickly pushed down, a pang of fear. Hap was either too caught up in his own thoughts to have smelled it, or very possibly, would not have known what the smell meant: kzin senses were hard-wired to read the emotional states of the prey-creatures of their home world, not Earth. “What I’m talking about is what you expect me to become. What you know about my species, my birth, my family. Yes, you’ve told me I’m an orphan, but not why or how. Yes, you’ve told me that I’m a kzin and that I’m from another world, but not how I got here, or why. And every time I ask, you-what is the term? — you redirect me.” He sat down again, reclined. “You know, it gets pretty tiresome, being redirected all the time. And pretty insulting, too: I can hardly believe you didn’t expect that I would eventually catch on to what you were doing.”
“Oh, I knew you would, Hap. I knew.”
“Then why did you keep doing it? Why didn’t you stop redirecting, and just talk to me?”
What a wonderful question. And what a shitty answer I have: because I didn’t have the clearance to do that. Because once we start down this road, you won’t accept anything less than complete answers. And you shouldn’t. But no one can agree on when to drop the big bomb on you, Hap: no one can agree that the time has come to level with you about all the dirty truths of how you came to be here. That your race and ours are at war. That we slaughtered your mother and sister. That we don’t keep you here out of love, or even kindness, but bloody-minded strategic benefit.
Hap’s stare was quizzical, the same look she remembered from when he was a kit. Then, his eyes opened wide: “You weren’t allowed to tell me, were you?”
Selena had no clearance for any of this, but the situation had gone beyond concerns over clearance now. If she shut down this conversation, Hap would never trust her again. The relationship would be proven to be a sham. And suddenly, everything Selena had ever done for, or said to, Hap would become suspect; at the very least, he would know it had only occurred because it had been permitted by higher powers, that Selena’s own feelings and motivations were secondary to the dictates of others.
So Selena shook her head. “No. I was not allowed.” She smiled ruefully. “And to be honest, I’m not allowed to reveal that I was not allowed to reveal things to you.”
Hap frowned and then grinned. “That statement took me a moment to work through. Zzhreef’f!” Which, Selena knew, was the Heroes’ Tongue equivalent of “I’ll be damned.” He looked at her for a long moment. “So you’re going to break all the rules, now?”
“Hap, I won’t. I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Oh, Hap, because if I do, there will be consequences.”
“For you?”
“For you, too.”
“Such as?”
“Well, in all probability, the same people who haven’t allowed me to speak openly to you would probably keep me from coming back here. Ever again. It would be the last time we see each other. And there’s nothing I could do about it.”
Hap’s ears had laid back tightly against his increasingly angular skull. “They’d do that? Really?”
“Really. Look, Hap: you were right when you said that nothing here is natural. But the unnaturalness goes far beyond the fenced-in range, the lack of contact with your own kind, the refusals to let you see the rest of the world, the carefully edited books about history and current events, and these insipid toys.” He smiled happily when she spat out the words “insipid toys.” Clearly, that admission of repressed fellow-feeling restored much of his confidence in her. “I can’t tell you about all of that unnaturalness, not yet. But I think that is going to start changing now.”
“Why? Why should it start changing now?”
“Because of you.”
“Me?” Hap sat up: curiosity and pride-the pride of an adolescent being told that their input has made an impact in the inscrutable world of adults-was clear in his expression. “What did I do?”
“This.” She gestured to the rank of mangled toys. “And the impatience you expressed with your current information limits. It will show the people who have resisted telling you more about yourself, and your origins, that the matter is really out of their hands, now. They can hardly counsel patience anymore, because there’s nothing to be gained by it. Your comments today show that you understand that you’re living in the middle of a stilted game, not the real world.”
Selena had the impression that Hap was trying very hard not to look smug: he was failing miserably, and didn’t much care. “Did they, whoever ‘they’ are, really think I could get to be this old and not ask myself, ‘Hey, does everyone grow up alone in a special enclosure? Why are there only two other kzinti and why do they hate me? Where does all the stuff around me come from? Why are there so many questions that never get answered?’ Perhaps they thought that since I never knew any different, I wouldn’t see anything strange in all that?” His last point rose on a note of incredulity.
At which Selena smiled, because Pyragy had insisted that Hap would remain just that ingenuous. According to him, “the subject, knowing no different, will be unable to adequately frame doubts for some time yet, and will therefore, not be distressed by the peculiarities of his condition.”
Before she could respond, Hap sat erect again, surprise writ large on his wide face. “They did! They really thought I wouldn’t notice anything wrong? I can’t believe anyone would be that stupid.”
“You’d be surprised. But Hap, I’d like to start making things better for you, less unnatural. So tell me: if you could change one thing about your life here, right now, what would it be?”