“I didn’t know kzinti could swim,” Schro said, using his ziirgrah on Fraaf’kur. “He’s actually enjoying it.”
“Where he’s from, Kzinti have learned to swim, and on Sheathclaws, the lighter gravity and saltier oceans help buoy a kzin’s heavier frame,” Dan said, but he could tell something was wrong. Schro had crossed the link they had easily shared since he was a newborn kit and was now rummaging in Dan’s mind, which shouldn’t have been possible without the sthondat drug that boosted a talented kzin’s natural ziirgrah into true telepathy.
“What are you doing?” For the first time ever, Dan shut his mind to his son.
“What is a Schrodinger’s cat, father? Why did you name me after it?”
Dan signed heavily. He was unbearably thirsty and didn’t want to talk; he especially didn’t want to have this conversation here, now. “I had been unsuccessfully working on the captured Righteous Manslaughter’s hyperdrive for years before you came along. Honestly, I had quantum mechanics on the brain when I named you. It was only a crèche name, so I figured, what the hell, you would earn your own Name in time.”
“Are you sure that’s it? I get the sense it means something like being both alive and dead at the same time. The feeling is very strong.”
To Dan’s infinite relief, Fraaf’kur’s orange head popped out of the water. His fur was slicked back and he did indeed look like a marine mammal, like an actual sea lion. “I got it! Someone help me hoist it up.” He panted hungrily as he hefted the sealed crate.
In silence they affixed the gravbelt to the catamaran, where the mast intersected with the hull connectors. Dan activated the powerful motor and dialed up the artificial gravity field until it encompassed the entire ship, while Fraaf’kur poured his weight onto the starboard hull so that the sail swung up, perpendicular to the water, and the port hull surfaced.
“The rudder is completely gone and the sail is torn, but not tattered. If you increase the gravity motor’s strength and lift us up off the surface, only a few centimeters, just enough to remove the friction of cutting through the water, I can use the sail to steer.”
Dan complied and they were off. The airborne ride was rougher than being on the raging sea as they were now susceptible to the rapid, intense winds that hit them at odd angles. Nobody spoke. Fraaf’kur fought with the disobedient catamaran, his hunter’s concentration totally absorbed.
Schro sulked by himself in the bow of the port hull; something clearly bothered him, something he had seen in Dan’s mind. For the first time, Dan noticed the kit looked half-formed somehow, as if the Maned God ran out of kzin stuff and added a bit of human to finish the job. His body language and mannerisms were all too primate. Dan had always been accused of being too kzin, but Schro wasn’t kzin enough. It’s what his crèche mates picked up and instantly pounced on-his humanity. Dan couldn’t help but feel responsible for that, so he sat on the trampoline and focused on increasing or decreasing the output of the motor to the tempo of the surging waves.
The Nautical Devastation skidded onto the rocky shoal of the desolate island. Dan noticed a big, unmarked gravtruck abandoned on the shore, now a roost for several pteranobats; the leathery fliers eyed them as potential carrion. They disembarked quietly as if to avoid disturbing the death-like serenity of the beach. The only sound was the chill wind and pervasive screeching of immature pteranobats up in the guano-coated hills.
“Well, you wanted me to run us aground,” Fraaf’kur rumbled bitterly, breaking the eerie ambiance. “Now you go talk to your people.” He motioned with a jab of his muzzle toward the humans.
To Dan’s disbelief, none of the Rejoiners, who were only a few meters away, reacted to their arrival. They just stood there transfixed, clustering around the few shrubs that grew on the stony ground, like living statuary adorning some gorgon’s lawn. There was no sign of the crystalline, glacial presence that had assailed him out on the sea.
Schro loped off toward a group of humans. He sniffed at them and the air around them. “They’ve been here for weeks, and they’ve relieved themselves in their clothing. This doesn’t feel right.”
Dan approached more cautiously and waved a hand in front of a gaunt young woman’s face. Her eyes were open and raw, as if she hadn’t blinked in ages. “They’re alive, barely. I can sense that congregating around these bushes is of utter importance to them, certainly more so than eating or sleeping.” The small plants were strange themselves; he only spotted three of them, anchored to large rocks. Their general shape was conical, and they were covered in auburn, hair-like fibers, quite unlike the standard lavender-to-purple flora of Sheathclaws. “Perhaps these plants have got them ensnared with some hypnotic pheromone?”
“No.” Fraaf’kur sniffed one of the shrubs, his nostrils fluffing the lank hairs of the thistle. “This thing is not vegetable, it smells of animal!” Abruptly, he jumped two meters back and away from it as if it were a land mine, his tail lashing nervously. “I know what these things are,” he roared, pointing at the three tapering shrubs-or what appeared to be shrubs. “Tzookmas!”
“What the hell is a tzookma, Fraaf’kur?”
“We need to get out of here! Now!”
But he didn’t move. He was caught just like the poor Rejoiners who had come to this dreadful island, seeking to secretly build a powerful transmitter to contact Earth, or some other human planet. How did he know that?
All of a sudden, a medium-sized pteranobat swooped in close to the fuzzy cone and was instantly snapped up with a quick whip of a tongue and swallowed into the gaping mouth concealed by the rust-colored hair.
Schro scrambled away.
Dan pulled out his sidearm and immediately fired at the thing-nothing happened; like the wristcomp, the weapon had been rendered inoperable by salt water. Dan tossed the useless beam gun aside and slowly moved toward the immobile kzintosh. “What are we dealing with here, Fraaf’kur?”
“They’re called grogs in your human tongue. Intelligent, stationary creatures, like cognizant trees or oysters, with vast telepathic ability, able to hijack the brains of any living thing!”
“Can you move?” Dan asked, now terrified, already aware of the answer.
“No!” yowled Fraaf’kur.
Despite his intense fear, or precisely because of it, Schro poised himself to assault the shrub-the grog. “I can still move!” All kzinti, even prepubescent ones, generally had only one response to danger: attack blindly until it or you were dead. Schro was no different.
Dan immediately grabbed the young kzinchao by the scruff of the neck and yanked him back with all his strength, receiving a few gashes in the process. “Pull back, Schro! Don’t antagonize them. They’ve spoken to us before; maybe we can talk to them now.”
You think of yourself as more enlightened than the kzin, but you attempted to fire upon us first. Negotiation was a last resort for you, too, Daneel Guthlac; or is the kzin architecture within your psyche affecting your behavior? You are quite the puzzle.
“What are you talking about?” But he knew, the alien was growing an idea in his mind as sharp and shimmering as a diamond. There were traces of Manslaughter’s telepath embedded within him, like psychic shrapnel. Their two consciousnesses-their two souls-had been in mortal combat when he killed the psychotic kzin…
“My biological sire is the evil telepath aboard the Righteous Manslaughter?” Schro hissed as he finally connected the pieces. “I’m a genetic copy of one who killed most of the crew, and attacked you and the Apex when you tried to rescue them?”