Dan felt sick waves of disgust and betrayal roll off his son. Damnit, the grog was broadcasting widely. This was the moment Dan had worried about since the kit first asked why he had a human father.
“A clone of the hated telepath!” Fraaf’kur roared. “I knew your stink was familiar! I will have your scrawny pelt, you little monster!”
Schrodinger’s cat was a cruel joke of a name, Schro purred to himself. Then, suddenly, he screamed and leapt at Dan, savagely shredding his flesh with his black claws. He sank his teeth into Dan’s shoulder and mauled brutally, tearing soft muscle and tendon. Dan felt like the Nautical Devastation in the maw of the ketosaurus. Then everything turned bright red when a sharp canine tooth scraped his bone. He screamed and squirmed. For a brief second, Schro was indeed both alive and dead, simultaneously Dan’s little kit and bloodthirsty telepath, existing in that terrible moment before the wave function collapses.
Dan did not fight back. He was spent, and he refused to harm his son. He loved him-and not in the harsh way a kzintosh sire cared for his kits, but in the unconditional, sacrificial way humans love their children. He tried to hug Schro with his one good arm.
Stop, projected one of the grogs. A mob of weak, emaciated humans pulled Schro off him. Dan just lay there on the cold sand and stones, listening to the surf and the two kzinti’s snarling curses. The sun, 46 Leonis Minoris, was a bleary red eye in the sky, passing judgment. The physical pain was excruciating, but the hurt and emptiness in his core were utterly unbearable.
The ghost of Manslaughter’s telepath oozed into the void.
“You can’t control us can you?” asked Schro, peering at the inert alien, with feral curiosity.
No. We don’t know why. We believe your shared mental architecture and distinct but overlapping minds are creating a feedback loop we can’t manage. This is very attractive to us, as it is how we exist with each other, but we fear you, especially the two of you, because we can’t control you.
“Kill it! Kill the feeble humans holding you back and kill the ch’rowling thing,” Fraaf’kur pleaded with Schro. He was more afraid of the tzookmas than the clone of the telepath who had killed his crewmates and maimed and marooned him on this miserable planet. “These things are rumored to be devolved descendants of the Slaver race! We’re all defenseless against them!”
Our great mnemonic archives have no memory of this Slaver race. As far as we know, we have always been as we are. We dominated this planet and its simpler organisms for billions of years. We carpeted entire continents in vast reefs, all telepathically linked, but then something happened, our population crashed-either because of disease or unexpected climate change-we were on the decline long before your people arrived.
Dan tried to sit up at this. The small action hurt immensely, but he wanted to face the faceless threat. Blood poured from his arm in buckets, and he knew that if he survived, he would spend at least a month hooked up to an autodoc-the idea of needles horrified him irrationally. When he was finally able to look up from his own gore, he saw the enslaved humans restraining his vicious son. “You say you fear us, but you wield unimaginable power against us…What do you want?”
We hold these beings because we wish to learn from them. We soak up their knowledge, their memories, their experiences. This being, Fraaf’kur, has current information of other worlds, of beings like us; perhaps a related species or a subspecies. We value this more than you can know.
We’ve known our world’s position is close the Kzin Empire for millennia, and this planet, with its wide rangelands and big game, is very alluring to them, so we’ve always telepathically guided them away from here. But when your grandmother, Selina Guthlac, and the fugitive kzin telepath, Shadow, set down on this planet, their interspecies telepathic rapport intrigued us. There was only a clutch of us left then, and so we allowed them to stay and we observed them from afar.
And we’ve been watching this uncontrolled experiment in telepath breeding ever since. We theorize that, given a few eons of progress, you could develop into beings like ourselves. Your friend here accuses us of being devolved Slavers? We could very well be highly evolved kzinti.
Dan was struck dumb. He could sense that this had piqued Schro’s interest as well. The grog farthest from them snapped up a passing pteranobat as if this bombshell hadn’t been dropped. Dan stared at the reddish fur of the grogs, the vestigial paws hidden beneath the hair, their appetite…and he was suddenly glad Fraaf’kur couldn’t “hear” their psychic communication or he would have had an aneurism right then and there. Dan looked at his son, who had stopped struggling. The mindless humans backed off.
“Why interfere with us now?” Dan asked the impassive, pointed mass of hair.
We did not interfere with you. It was the humans from Hem, the ones who risk our security and yours with their need to contact the greater universe, who interfered with us. We were content to study you from a safe distance. You believe we have trapped them, but with proximity came a finer focus, and we were the ones who became spellbound by the most intimate details of their minds.
Even as we disagree with their rash actions-and especially now, with new information of these grogs from the planet Down gleaned from Fraaf’kur’s memories-we understand their need to reach out to others like themselves. The three of us have become something like the Rejoiners.
Dan was starting to black out. Violet spots danced in his vision. He forced himself to concentrate. “So then what do you want? You could have easily turned us away and had us forget all of this. Why all the theatrics with the ketosaurus? I’m sorry; you might be too alien for me, because I don’t understand your motivation.” He closed his eyes and let the foreign fractal thoughts form in his mind.
We could have turned all the others away and, in fact, we will. Even your friend here, Fraaf’kur, will have no memory of any of this. We have already implanted the urge in some of his nearby offspring to come here and fetch their father, but as we said, we cannot manipulate you and your child-
“I am not his child!”
You are, Schro. More than you know, for he is all that is left of Righteous Manslaughter’s telepath. Daneel Guthlac carries the part of him that has found peace here on Sheathclaws. That part, although subtle, is incredibly strong and drove him to create you. Manslaughter’s telepath did heinous things, but he was not evil. His mind was simply infected with rage, hate and addiction. You are healthy and happy. You are his redemption.
Schro grunted defiantly, but it was all bravado now. His ziirgrah was too sensitive, and he knew the truth, whether he wanted to or not.
Dan opened up to him, and the grogs, and bared the monster he had unwittingly hidden just under the surface. The astral remnant of Manslaughter’s telepath-really, just a collection of primal needs and sensations-flowed up from the recesses of Dan’s subconscious. It examined the kit with spectral tendrils and recognized its own reflection in the unpolluted pool of Schro’s mind. Content with what it saw, it sunk back down into the dark cerebral abyss from which it came.
You think we used the ketosaurus as a weapon, we did not. We wanted you here, Daneel Guthlac and Schro. We moved through the elementary network of latent kzin telepaths on this planet and rooted the idea to send you here in the Apex’s mind. We used the ketosaurus as a tool to bring out your true potential.
The young kzin said nothing. He turned and stalked away toward the interior of the island.