“To grieve.”
“That. And maybe to keep from killing me.”
Selena stood slightly closer to Dieter. “Or maybe because he couldn’t bear knowing that the person he’s always trusted, even loved, had been the cause of all his misfortunes.”
Dieter blinked. “Maybe. Anyhow, today he seemed to have all those emotions well in hand. He was really very frank about it: ‘you killed the kzinti who were supposed to raise me. So I would appreciate it if you could help me get what I need in order to truly grow up.’”
Selena wished she had been there for that conversation and was simultaneously grateful that that bitter cup had passed her by. “And so what he asked for were…monsters?”
“Pretty much, yes. Prehistoric monsters. I agreed to support his request.”
“Out of guilt?”
“Out of common sense. Let’s face it, Selena: if he’s going to survive among natural kzinti, he has to know how to fight back, how to respond to a challenge. He knows it, feels it in his bones. It has to happen, and it has to start soon. Not with the big creatures, but at least some smaller ones.”
Selena found herself wondering how one went about procuring dangerous animals for slaughter: “Hello, Dial-a-Beast? I would like to order one each of the following creatures for next month: one hyena, one wolf, one cougar, one black bear, one-yes, that’s right. I’m interested in an ascending lethality rating…”
Dieter hadn’t stopped. “But I told him I would not support his other request.”
Selena felt her brain slide to a halt. “What other request?”
“Can’t you guess?”
They stared at each other for a long time. Then she got it: “Females?”
“Of course.”
Boroshinsky snickered. “What else?”
Selena shot him a look that she hoped would scald the old man’s conscience; he seemed serenely unperturbed by it. “Well, at least you didn’t promise him the start of his own harem.”
Dieter sighed. “Look, Selena, just because I’m not a scientist doesn’t mean I’m stupid. He’s six, so in his natural environment he’d be tussling with other male kzinti, and maybe some of the fights would even be getting serious. But there’s no way he’d have access to a female of his own for another fifteen or twenty years, minimum. He has to earn a Name first; at the very earliest, that means age twenty. Right?”
“Okay, so you’ve read the reports. But that doesn’t mean you should have-”
“Enough!” Boroshinsky was both frowning and smiling at them. “You argue like old married people. So why don’t you make it official and be done with it?”
Boroshinsky’s glee at playing matchmaker faded quickly; he saw the uncomfortable look on Dieter’s face, saw what was no doubt a similar expression on Selena’s. He had the good sense not to say anything else. Maybe later, Selena would reassure him that he’d done no harm, had no way of knowing that the two of them had been over it many times, but could not find a way to turn what they did have into a marriage. They were apart too much and had profoundly different lives, particularly since his was founded on the principle that, at any second, he might get called to defend the system, and die doing so.
Dieter pointed down into the defile. “Hap’s moving again.”
And so he was: there was a brief flash of black and orange which shot across the valley floor and disappeared into a dense cluster of Mediterranean pines. “He says that when he dreams, he can actually smell females, more clearly than he sees them.”
Selena nodded. “That’s my doing.”
“What?”
“We’ve been piping in a small amount of their scent into the paddock at night.”
“Good grief, why?”
“Well, in case you’ve forgotten, this is an experiment, too. Mikhail and his people have found so many hormone secretion systems in the kzin it boggles the mind. So we were trying to get a measure of which ones are released when Hap detects the scent of a female.”
Dieter’s left eyebrow raised. “Wouldn’t the answer to that be a foregone conclusion?”
Boroshinsky shook his head and waggled a corrective finger. “Not so obvious as you might expect. In human males, aggressive behavior of all kinds is associated with testosterone. But this is not the case with kzinti. After all, how do the adult males that lack females manage not to go murderously insane without mating access?”
Dieter nodded. “I don’t know: how?”
Boroshinsky held up his hands. “We don’t know yet. But some preliminary results suggest that the impulse to rut and the impulse toward violence do not seem to be created by the same hormone, although the presence of the first may change the hormonal cause of the latter.”
“What?”
“Let’s start with what we know: the kzinti are always ready to fight for honor, da?”
“Yes.”
“But they can control and mitigate that impulse. However, we also have evidence that they become utterly uncontrollable and primal when they are fighting over females, particularly if the females are physically present. So this suggests that there are two different intensities or kinds of violence hormones, the first of which operates without regard to the presence of females, the second of which operates only in their presence, when the male’s rutting-drive hormones are released. And for kzin society to remain intact, some such mechanism must be present: if both drives were generated by the same hormone and the same conditions, the intensity and frequency of the males’ routine dominance struggles would be indistinguishable from the mating combats. Meaning that there would be constant, irrepressible carnage. There would also be no way for the twenty percent of males who possess females to retain control over the other eighty percent who do not. The frustrated rutting urge would compel the eighty percent to sweep the others aside, regardless of the costs and casualties.”
Selena shook her head. “But maybe the difference between dominance and mating aggression levels is simply a matter of cognitive selection; since mating is the primary drive, the male kzinti choose to risk everything to satisfy it.”
“That was our first hypothesis, but some of my researchers discovered what we believe are different kinds of violence/aggression hormones. If we are right, this would mean that different external situations trigger the release of different hormones, which in turn generate different intensities and types of aggression.”
Selena shrugged. “Evolution constantly reveals the universe’s infinite capacity for creative solutions to adaptive problems.”
Boroshinsky winked. “Or provides a playground for its more advanced species.”
Selena stared. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, is this very nuanced hormonal arrangement a result of evolution or engineering?”
“What have you found?”
“Nothing, and I probably won’t. Because if the kzin hormonal matrix is a geneering job, it was both too good and done too long ago for us to be sure that it’s artificial. In fact, if it is a construct, it’s become so integral to the kzinti that their genome has evolved around it.”
“Then why do you suspect interference at all?”
Boroshinsky shrugged. “Now that we’ve got Dr. Yang’s data, we have access to full genetic analyses on the kzinti’s native food animals. A close comparison of the genomes indicates, that, like us, the kzinti evince a better-than-ninety-percent match to other chordates from their homeworld. But the kzinti’s extraordinary diversity of secretions and hormones is a distinct break from their home world’s dominant evolutionary paradigm.”
Dieter shrugged. “But every species has differences, developmental departures from the shared gene code. That’s why we don’t look like dogs. Or lobsters, for that matter.”
“True, but mutation from a common root stock also implies a basic constraint upon the rate of variation. Genetic change does not manifest as the sudden appearance of unprecedented structures, but as gradual variations upon a theme. And this isn’t; the kzin hormone structures come out of nowhere. They just doesn’t fit in with the rest of their world’s evolutionary paradigms, so far as we can tell.”