“You mean, other than having to live here at all?”
“Yes, other than that.”
“Well-” he stared at the savaged toys again “-I’d like to change all that.”
She looked at the mauled bits of pseudo fur. “You mean, you want them removed?”
“No, no.” He seemed uncertain for a second; his pelt shook with annoyance. Then he looked her square in the eyes. “I just want to know this: when can I kill something?”
Selena felt the equivalent of a snowball materialize in her gut. Two years ago, he had still been her cheery, cuddly little Hap; now he was asking her about killing as matter-of-factly as a human teen might have asked when he or she could start dating. It was as natural to him as the pelt covering his body. And just as alien as that to Selena. She felt as if, in a single second, he had dwindled into some impossible distance, an invisible speck beyond the heliopause.
Selena swallowed, and said calmly, “You want something to chase, I presume?”
“Well, of course I do!” Hap smiled, stared at her indulgently. “What do you think, that I just want to slit a throat? Like snick-?” and he demonstrated in the air with a single, suddenly unsheathed claw. “Come on, Selena; where’s the thrill in that?”
Selena managed not to blink or retch. “Where, indeed,” she agreed.
After Selena completed her report, Pyragy looked away, sat silent for a full ten seconds. Then: “Thank you, Dr. Navarre. This is important information. And we will take your recommendations under advisement.”
Boroshinsky goggled at the director but said nothing. Poor Mikhail was starting to show his age a bit, despite the anti-senescence cocktails they had him on. He didn’t jump into fights like this one with the same alacrity that he used to.
Which left it to Selena. “Director Pyragy, I’m the one in direct contact with the subject. Who now knows that I take orders from a higher authority. If we put this off-if I am not allowed to give him certain minimal assurances about our increased forthrightness-then we will lose him. My personal relationship with him will be shattered beyond repair, and I am quite certain he will have nothing to do with anyone else. Not at this stage, and not under these conditions.”
“I was not aware your relationship with the subject had become an indispensable part of our project, Dr. Navarre.”
“This was outlined as a high-probability outcome before we even started, Director Pyragy. It has come to pass. As everyone-well, almost everyone-expected it would.”
He turned to look at her. “So what are you requesting?”
“It’s not what I’m requesting; it’s what Hap is requesting. And it is utterly reasonable.”
“What? That he be allowed to kill creatures?”
“Yes. More specifically, to hunt them down and eat them.”
Pyragy shuddered. “It is barbarous even to suggest it.”
“Director, we are not talking about a human. We are talking about a kzin. This is part of their growth process. It is only natural that he express this desire, this need. Indeed, it is a sign of our profound cultural influence upon him that he chose to wait-could force himself to wait-this long.”
Pyragy was silent for a long time; Selena watched a variety of emotions contend on his face. Stubbornness, prudence, distaste, pragmatism, willfulness, cunning. “Small animals,” he said at last. “Rodents only.”
Selena tried to think where she could find the largest, fastest rabbits. Squirrels, too. “That won’t work for long. The references we just received with the rest of Dr. Yang’s first reply all indicate that the kzinti bring down game many times their size and mass, and nearly equal to them in ferocity.”
“For now, this will have to do. We will cross the next bridge when we come to it.”
“I think we’ve already reached it, Director Pyragy. The subject has also asked about killing sapients.”
Pyragy swiveled to face her, his face rigid with horror. “He has asked about killing humans?”
Selena shook her head sharply. “No, no; his questions were philosophical in nature. In particular, he focused on the concept of justified homicide: he is having a hard time understanding that.”
“What? He wants to slaughter bunnies but he has a hard time understanding justified homicide? That is such a bizarre juxtaposition that I frankly suspect him of playing a joke on you, Doctor.”
“Director, I am afraid you are misconstruing my statement. The subject does not have a problem understanding the ‘homicide’ part of ‘justifiable homicide.’ His confusion stems from what he considers the endless and overfine moralizing that informs the extreme constraints our society imposes upon sufficient justification for killing another sentient. He called our attention to the ethics of killing ‘obsessive, pointless, and unnatural.’”
“And I presume you informed him of his error?”
“Director, for him, that opinion is not an error: that is the voice of his nature speaking.”
“Nature be damned. We were killers, once, too. But we have trained ourselves to be otherwise. So can the kzinti. This is the moment when his inclinations must not be indulged: he must be conditioned away from an easy acceptance of wanton slaughter.”
Selena stilled her drumming fingers. Here’s where the real fight starts-unavoidably. “Director, I’m sorry, but this is simply not a question of behavioral training. It is a matter of his nature, and it is not subject to our nurture, as so many of the ARM’s idealists presumed when this project started. Sapience is not a guarantee of ethics that evolve around a universal core of pluralism or sanctity of life. For the kzinti, there are worse things than killing, and that’s true for them no matter which end of equation they find themselves on: killing or being killed. What we need to realize is that it had to be that way for them, that there wasn’t any viable alternative. For them, the impulse to hunt, chase, and kill is a positive evolutionary trait. It’s how they survived as a species. Every part of both their inbred impulses and early social construction was determined by increasing their chances of success in taking on big, lethal prey animals: the only kind that could sustain a tribe of kzinti, given their immense appetites.”
Pyragy’s eyes had narrowed. “We suspected as much when we began this project, Dr. Navarre. And we proceeded with a moral resolve to mitigate this behavior, both so that the subjects could eventually become liaisons for us, and so that they could be used to civilize the kzinti.” He studied her carefully, clearly giving her enough time to realize that the pause implied the importance of what he was going to say next. “Are you proposing, Doctor, that we-including the ARM’s oversight personnel, such as the admiral and the executive-have all made a fundamental error?”
“I’m proposing, Director, that many of us were not well-prepared to face the challenges of this project squarely. And I am not referring to the methodological challenges, but the implicit ideological challenges.”
“What do you mean, ideological challenges? Do you mean the conflict between our system of values and the kzinti’s?”
“No, sir; I mean a conflict between the realities of our own existence and the ideologies under which we had buried them. Hindsight suggests that, during the last century and a half, during our Golden Age of Peace, there was a tendency to slip into a moral anthropomorphization of the universe.”
Pyragy’s ever-thickening brows lowered further. “I warn you, Dr. Navarre, if you cannot trouble yourself to be clear, I will be forced to censure you.”
“Okay, then, how about this: for the last one hundred and fifty years, many of our leaders were so pleased with how we supposedly purged violence from our natures that they generalized that lofty state of existence into a universal constant: it became the presumed zenith of social accomplishment for any civilization. And no one dared raise a hand in objection or doubt, for fear that they’d be reprogrammed due to their recidivistic sympathies, for aiding and abetting primitivism. From top to bottom, we all drank the Kool-Aid with blissful smiles on our wan little faces.”