Selena felt her mouth snap shut, stunned at the canny insight of the almost mature kzin before her. Yes, he might be young, but like all his breed, he learned quickly; he had to, if he was to survive. The kzin genotype did not breed many geniuses: the species was inherently unsuited to long periods of reflection. But the genotype also didn’t breed many idiots: in accord with the old axiom that there were two kinds of combatants, the quick and the dead, the kzinti survived by having quick reflexes, quick wits, or both.
Hap pushed for confirmation of his conjecture. “So it was an attempt at creating a new reward mechanism?”
Well, why not answer? Hap had figured it out on his own, anyway. “Yes. And I wouldn’t let him use you as the test subject. I had that much authority over the process, anyway.”
“Hmm. Perhaps I wouldn’t have killed her, either.” A sharp, territorial glint danced briefly through Hap’s eyes and was gone, or maybe just quickly concealed.
Selena sighed. “Perhaps not. Probably not. But if I had given him access to you, that would have just been the edge of the wedge. I could have lost control, might no longer have been able to-” She dragged to a halt, not knowing how to explain.
“You might not have been able to continue to protect me,” he finished for her.
Selena nodded. “I know it sounds absurd, that I have to protect you from a colleague who wants to give you the opportunity to mate. But-”
“No, actually, I can see it very clearly, Selena. I may not like the restrictions on my life-and I’m coming to see that you don’t, either-but you’ve been as consistent, and also as humane, as you can be in maintaining those constraints. But this administrator seems rash. Which I find odd: aren’t administrators supposed to be the more cautious persons in an organization, the ones who keep the workers from running off in all directions, acting without authorization?”
Selena smiled. “Yes. And he certainly does that. But-”
“But what?”
“He had very different ideas about how you were to be raised. Several of us, his lieutenants you might say, had to appeal to his superiors to keep him from treating you kzinti in…questionable ways.”
“Torture?”
“No. Well, yes, in a manner of speaking.”
Hap frowned, then his eyes opened wide. “Oh, I see: not bodily torture. Something mental. Or behavioral.”
“Behavioral.”
Hap thought a long time, his eyes half-lidded. Then he nodded: “He was the one who tried to make me eat cooked meat, wasn’t he?”
Selena gaped. “You remember that?”
“Of course I do. So it was him?”
Selena nodded.
“So the torture you are referring to: he wanted to-how would you say it? — humanize us?”
Selena sighed. “Something like that. But higher powers intervened shortly after you came to live with us.”
“And these higher powers are the ones who want to send me back to the kzinti as a mediator, as Dieter described?”
“Yes. But they aren’t really in charge of, of”-she almost said “the project” but stopped herself in time-“our actions. They only step in if something goes wrong.”
“So they’ll be stepping in, now.”
“Yes, in a very big way.” And would very probably do so by permanently removing Pyragy, a step that was at least five years overdue.
Hap nodded. “So I take it that this administrator introduced Pretty to the oldest male, the one who almost tore into me. What did you name him, by the way?”
Selena stumbled after a lie, gave up, closed her eyes as she spoke: “Cranky Cat. They named him Cranky Cat.”
When she opened her eyes, Hap’s fur was rippling, but his eyes were hard. Sardonic amusement was a kzin expression she was learning to identify quickly these days. “What a dignified name,” Hap slurred. “Although I have to admit it is accurate, too. So Cranky Cat didn’t like Pretty any more than he liked me.”
“No, he didn’t.” Selena shut her eyes. “It was a disaster. Because I was trying to do everything I could do to stop it, the administrator didn’t inform me when the introduction was taking place. I got a panicked call from the researcher who worked most closely with Pretty, but by the time I got there, it was too late.”
Selena tried to put the memory of the blood-spattered paddock out of her mind, couldn’t. “We knew that kzin mating was pretty rough by human standards. So the overseers didn’t know until it was too late that this was-well, way beyond that.” The tapes ran on endless loop in her memory: the frenzied thrashing of Pretty; the pinning paws of Cranky Cat, which, as he came close to completing the coupling, began crushing, piercing, slashing-“He was coupling and killing her at the same time. And when our people realized what was happening, and tried to intervene, he finished. Both acts.”
Hap’s voice buzzed with a suppressed snarl. “Why did he do it?”
Selena shrugged. “There’s no way to find out. Cranky Cat never learned how to speak: not our language, nor yours. He wouldn’t have anything to do with us. So we’ll never know why he did it. But if you want my gut reaction, Cranky Cat’s drives made him unable to resist the urge to copulate, even as his speciate aversion to us made him kill her.”
“And why would his hatred of humans prompt him to kill her? Because he couldn’t reach you?”
“No, he wasn’t symbolically killing us. It was because he could smell that she was our creature. And at a deep, primal level, he could not abide that. He didn’t think about what he did; he just did it.”
Hap continued to stare at her, unblinking. Then his tail switched fitfully and he rose, moving to sit alongside the mauled carcass that, two hours ago, had been a black bear. “Selena, I want to know your world. All of it.”
“Hap, you’ve figured out so much on your own, so you’ve got to know I don’t have the authority to make that promise.”
“I know that. But if you don’t convince them to let me know more about Earth, then how will I be able to help you later on? Knowing your language and your ways is not enough. The kzinti-the real kzinti-will ask me for my honest opinion, for what you would call my gut reaction, but which is better expressed in the Heroes’ Tongue as grreeowm’m’hysh. ‘Ancestral spine-whispers.’ If I do not know your world, I won’t be able to answer the questions that will make me useful to them. So they will ignore me.”
Selena shut her eyes tightly, finding herself required to reject the very appeal that she herself had made so many times to the board, and for precisely the same reasons. “I cannot let you out into our world. I’m not permitted to do so. And I know they won’t change their minds about that.”
“Then allow your world to come in here.”
Selena opened her eyes. “What did you have in mind?”
“Give me free and unrestricted access to your public records, your library, your news: all of it.”
Selena smiled. “Relying on any one of those sources could give you a very distorted view of our world.”
“That is why I want-why I need-to see all of it. I presume no one voice will speak a complete truth. So I will get to know your world in the same way I get the full measure of each new prey animal you provide: by studying it from all perspectives.” Hap’s fur rippled slowly in a show of good-natured amicability. “Is it not a reasonable request?”
Selena stared at him. “It is. Quite unreasonable.”
Pyragy was putting on a good show in front of the admiral and the associate executive chair: to watch and listen to him, you’d never have guessed that he was doing everything he could to get Selena discredited and drummed out of the scientific community. “This is an excellent turn of events. You might even say that this has produced a silver lining greater than the darkness which started it: the unfortunate death of the female.”
Admiral Coelho-Chase shrugged, suppressing disgust at Pyragy’s increasingly obsequious mannerisms. “Dr. Navarre, much as I regret admitting it, the director does make a good point: it seems that Hap is now interested in the mission for which we’ve been grooming him, and that he’s coming back around to us in general. By any objective standards, those are excellent changes in him.”