As she approached, he stood and his fur rumpled in glad greeting. “Welcome to Campbell Island, Selena. It is good to see you.”
My Hap has grown up. His voice was level and calm. Years of intensive reading, viewing, and study had put a high polish on his diction: had he been a human, he would have been called urbane. “It’s good to see you, too, Hap.”
He waved at the one tilting streetlamp perched just beyond the high-tide waters: it had already been old when the last of the whalers had abandoned the island in the twentieth century. It was a true museum piece now. “We can have our chat in the shadows of the one remaining sign of human habitation, if you’d like.”
Selena considered the rust-eaten metal pole and shook her head. “I’m fine here. Still enjoying your freedom?”
He looked around. “Yes. And no. The constant buzzing of your observation drones really does spoil the illusion of solitude and self-determination. Then again, so do your monthly shipments of my new opponents and prey. But I am gratefuclass="underline" without them, I’d lose too many of my skills. About which…”
She waited for him to resume; he did not. “What about your skills?”
“Is it true that the project’s overseers intend to send me along with the return mission to Wunderland?”
She shrugged. “That’s their intent.”
“And what about the rumors of a faster-than-light drive: are those accurate as well?”
Selena considered. Technically, she had been asked not to reveal the details on this bit of information, that the hyperdrive craft from We Made It was not merely a hopeful rumor but a fact. But just who was Hap going to tell? And honesty was, as she had always claimed, the best policy. “Yes; the stories about the hyperdrive are real.”
“Then I will accompany your human fleet to Alpha Centauri, at such time as it is ready.”
Selena felt the cold air rush in her open mouth. She didn’t care. “You’re serious.”
“Of course I am. I would not waste your time, summoning you out to the ends of the Earth as a joke.” He reflected. “I do not think my pranks were ever that inconsiderate…were they?”
“No, no.” She couldn’t even remember anything she’d rightly call a prank: Hap had found ways to circumvent authority and security on occasions-the scars on his ribcage were a reminder of that-but a “prank” implied frivolity. Frivolity had never been one of Hap’s traits. “I’m just surprised. Why the sudden change of heart?”
“There is nothing sudden about it. I just have not been willing to speak about my ‘change of heart’ as you call it, until now.”
“And how long have you been ruminating on this?”
“Before your last trip here, when you told me about the readying of the fleet.”
“Really? Before that?”
“Selena, after Dieter died, I turned from absorbing information to using it. To think for myself. And that was why I asked to come here: I needed solitude to think about what I should do next. I thought I might commit suicide.”
“Suicide?” Selena all but leaped over to his side. As if she could prevent any physical course of action that a full grown and clever kzin might be contemplating.
“Yes, of course.” Then, seeing the horror on her face, he snapped his head in the half-shake that was the kzin negation-reflex. “No, not because I was depressed or anything so pointless and melodramatic. I am happy to observe that this seems to be a purely human pathology. But when I thought about my duty to my race, I wondered.”
“Wondered if the time had come to make sure you couldn’t be used as a tool to further human interests?”
“Exactly.”
“But,”-she poked him-“you’re still here.”
He looked down at her and his pelt stirred through one, long, friendly ripple. “Yes, I am still here. Not due to a failure of courage. Quite the opposite, actually: I realized that the true test of my courage-the path that had fallen to me as a Hero, if I had such aspirations-was to keep moving forward. And that I would have to do so knowing that my actions and perspectives would probably never be understood, no matter which race was considering them.” His sigh drowned out the surf’s susurrations for a brief moment. “Both human and kzin philosophers, at least according to the translated materials you provided me, have pointed out that there are some deeds that require more courage than facing certain death. I do not know if I am about to embark upon an existence which is one long example of such a deed, but I foresee it as a distinct possibility.”
“That still doesn’t explain why you’ve decided to go with the fleet.”
He stared at the ocean again. “I have heard the death of my people in the voice of your news presenters. I have heard it for about a month now.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that the hyperdrive is probably the worst-kept secret in human history. The news presenters have smelled its presence, and they know it portends sating your race’s gnawing desire for vengeance. For years, the kzinti had the advantage of the gravitic planer drives. In the most recent war, you finally fielded models with sixty-five percent the performance of the kzin engines. But still, in a war of attrition, you would have eventually lost. The populations of many kzin systems are arrayed against you, producing ships and sending Heroes in one fleet after another. And every time, you had to invent a new trick to save yourself. And so you did. And so you taught us a lesson that we would not forget.”
He looked at Selena. “How much longer before you inevitably run out of new tricks? Many of your commentators seemed fairly sure that a fifth fleet could not be stopped. But this-a faster-than-light drive-changes everything. It gives you the initiative. You will be able to act so quickly, recover and act again, that my people will be hard put just to fight you to a standstill. And a system such as Centauri, where there is a large human population, will almost certainly fall to you. And then all the stories of our so-called atrocities will become widely known upon Earth and you will convince yourselves, maybe accurately, that the universe is not big enough for both kzin and human. You will reconceive your war of defense into one of preemptive genocide.”
Selena nodded. “So you are doing this to ensure the safety of your own people.”
“Yes. And possibly yours.” His whole body rippled. “I have not decided that humans are in the right: that is a moot point. At least to me. But what I have seen is that the future of the kzinti could resemble what occurred to many of the peoples of this planet, the Zulu and the American Plains Indians, in particular. They too, were hunters like us kzinti. But they were washed away by the flood of your dominant society. Drowned and purged from existence.”
“Yes, but those peoples were also terribly outnumbered by the nations who took their lands. They were overwhelmed.”
“We, too, will be overwhelmed.”
Selena shook her head. “That’s just not accurate, Hap. The kzinti have many worlds, with a total population that is much greater than-”
“You misunderstand. I do not mean we will be overwhelmed by your numbers; I mean you shall batter us down with the quantities and powers of your innovation. I have been studying the culture of natural kzinti: they adopt pirated technologies very quickly, but they evolve and amplify them very slowly, if at all. It is the opposite with humans. And with your ARM relinquishing more and more of its control, and the UN releasing more and more of the technologies it repressed over the centuries, all constraints upon innovation and change have been lifted, and you are now making up for lost time. And the kzinti will neither be able to foresee, nor react to, all these new weapons and technologies quickly enough. But in the final analysis, it wasn’t just the sudden changes in your rate of innovation which showed me the necessity of my intended course. It was the changes in you, in your species, which ultimately decided me.”