Coco thought about it. “That’s an interesting idea. It will take a few hundred years, of course. No time at all by our standards, but the human beings and tiger folk will have done new things by then. And it will have to be quite big. Lots bigger than the ones which just left.”
“Oh, there’s no hurry. It will be an interesting problem. We couldn’t extrude a whole spaceship, but we could do it in bits. The lifting and carrying and sticking things together will have to be done by avatars. But if the kzinti and human beings can figure it out, it can’t be too hard.”
The wind blew, and the wind blew, and the wind blew, as it always did. And the bushes and the trees with their crystalline leaves moved in the wind and tinkled like a billion tiny bells. The leaves flashed and glittered. Just for a moment, one of the bigger trees had some of the leaves flash what looked remarkably like a picture of a spaceship balanced on a tower of flame. And the tinkling sound was a little bit like laughter.
TWO TYPES OF TEETH
Jenni Anixter was one of the happiest people in the universe. Born at a time when aliens had been little more than a matter of speculation and rumor, she had seen them become a reality in her lifetime.
Her happiness showed in the lines lightly etched into her round face, in the way she moved her plump body as if dancing, in the bounce of short, untidy mahogany curls. That happiness might keep someone from noticing the thoughtful expression of her dark grey eyes. Certainly, this aura of happiness meant that despite her numerous academic degrees, Jenni was often dismissed as just a wee bit frivolous.
Now, Jenni herself was among the first to admit that the kzinti hadn’t proven to be a very nice reality. They might be real live aliens, but they were also warlike, focused on conquering and enslaving any sentient race they encountered. Non-sentient species gathered in along the way were a bonus, like sprinkles on an ice-cream sundae.
But nice or not, the kzinti were a reality. Due to them, Jenni Anixter, who had studied medicine because there simply weren’t scholarships and grants for those who wanted to specialize in hypothetical alien biology, found herself in much demand.
She was courted by a branch of ARM that very carefully didn’t name itself but had “Intelligence” (itself a euphemism for other, less genteel-seeming activities) written all over it. The members of this agency who came to speak to Jenni in her cramped little lab had clearly read all her papers. Jenni was flattered. Not many people bothered to read speculations on alternate biologies and the psychologies that would evolve along with them.
But these agents had done so. Moreover, they wanted to give Jenni a very big, very fancy new lab. Along with the lab would come lots of resources, an extensive budget, and even a few assistants.
There were, of course, conditions that went along with this largesse. Jenni would need to relocate to a very isolated Intelligence station, a base with an address so secret even Jenni couldn’t have it. Instead, she was assigned a postal drop and a new e-dress. She was assured her correspondence would be rushed to her. Needless to say, she had to agree to having all her correspondence-in-going and out-going-reviewed and censored.
None of these conditions bothered Jenni. Her last serious relationship had ended in an argument over silicon-based life forms-specifically as to the likelihood thereof and would humanity even recognize such unless they bashed into or rolled over our collective feet.
Jenni’s family had long grown accustomed to hearing from her only through short notes on holidays and birthdays. Jenni didn’t doubt that her relatively introverted personality had been a major factor in causing Intelligence to select her over one of the handful of co-professionals who shared her esoteric interests.
Time passed. Jenni settled happily into her new home. There, in addition to her new lab and extensive budget, she was given three assistants: Roscoe Connors, Ida Mery, and Theophilus Schwab. She rather suspected that at least one of them, if not all three, reported to Intelligence, but that didn’t bother Jenni in the least. After all, so did she.
Not very long after Jenni was established in her new lab, she was given access to information that was unknown to the majority of humanity. What she learned about the Slavers and Protectors was fascinating, but since both these ancient races were unlikely to ever interact with humanity, what she learned was also largely inapplicable to the current problem.
More importantly, Jenni was also sent files containing raw data taken from study of wrecked kzinti ships. (There was no other kind. The kzinti did not surrender.) She voraciously read this material, then set Ida Mery to constructing data bases. The one thing Jenni refused were files containing speculations about the kzinti.
“Such information,” she explained, “would pollute my own conjectures. Perhaps later, but for now give me raw data. If my conclusions match those of other researchers, all the better for you.”
So Jenni was sent raw data, some of it very raw indeed. First there were tissue slices, already mounted on slides. Later there were entire limbs, flash-frozen and untampered with (beyond, of course, the circumstances that had contributed to the death of the source in the first place). Eventually, she was sent whole corpses-or mostly whole. Kzinti extended their violent natures to themselves, suiciding rather than accepting surrender or capture. Therefore, the corpses Jenni received were rarely all in one piece.
Here her practical medical experience-for she had worked both as a diagnostician and a surgeon, archaic skills that had all but died out with the coming of the autodoc-came in very handy. She dissected corpses, humming as she inspected organs and bone structures, comparing these to other samples.
From her studies she slowly built a database representation of a “typical” kzin. She discovered that-at least among humanity’s attackers-there was minimal variation within the species. Kzinti seemed closely related as the “races” of Europe had been closely related. Certainly, there was no such variation as there had been between, say, an African pygmy and a strapping Nordic Viking.
Kzinti males (she had yet to see the corpse of a female) were uniformly large-almost three meters tall. Their fur was usually a deep orange, adorned with a variety of tabby patterns that ranged from tigerish black on dark orange to paler orange on marmalade orange, to almost yellow stripes also on orange, although in this last the undercoat was sometimes of a pleasantly pale hue. Their long tails were pink and hairless. Their ears were complex, furling and unfurling in response to a wide variety of stimuli.
Yet, despite the human tendency to call the kzinti “cats” or “catlike,” kzinti were no more so cats than humans were monkeys. Jenni went out of her way to stress this in her reports, but she didn’t know if anyone was paying attention.
In fact, what use her reports would be to Intelligence, Jenni did not know, nor did she care. She was happy learning new things every day, unhampered by mundane constraints regarding equipment or funding. In some vague sense, she was even happy to know that she was helping in the war effort, especially since she herself did not need to go to war.
Then came the day when they brought her a live kzin.
Somewhat alive might be a better way to put it. The kzin was floated into her largest lab, still encased in what looked like a ship’s emergency freeze unit. Beneath the frost, he appeared to be wearing a spacesuit of peculiar configurations.