"Long-Reach is in their teaching them how to play cards.
"Louie won't be able to learn. You hurt him. He can't concentrate."
Trainer-of-Slaves was unmoved. He had grown up in a society with a high kit mortality rate. The younglings died routinely by violence and neglect. There were always more where they came from. Suffering was the way to Heroism.
"You're going Al hurt me now, too, aren't you? You're going to carve me up? Make a drooling idiot out of me?"
She was afraid. He had an unnatural compassion in his liver for that combination, fear and bravery. "I'm going to sew a tail on your backside," he growl-hissed. It was his way of trying to crack a joke.
She came out of the operation with artificial gland implants in her brain. She didn't feel any different. Her mind was clear. She was still driven to destroy the Shark. She still hated kzin.
Trainer-of-Slaves had been spending his spare time away from the Shark completing his mathematical model of the human brain. It wasn't all that difficult. The data-link did most of the work. All he had to do was enter the special human conditions (taken from the autodoc and his experiments) into the generalized model that kzin physiologists had developed cons ago to cover diverse organic brains Jotok, Kzin, kdatlyno, Chunquen, etc. They were all different and they were all the same.
Memory erasure was a delicate matter.
Memories were all interrelated like a giant e-dimensional crossword puzzle. No memory could be erased without snipping out pieces of a myriad of other memories. And the erased memory could always be reconstructed by "filling in" the empty puzzle blanks. The reconstruction went on automatically by the mere act of using the remaining memories. The missing pieces were "interpolated" during recall. If the erasure had been caused by wetware destruction, the "interpolated" information was simply stored elsewhere.
Organic brains, having evolved over hundreds of millions of years of deadly struggle, were systems designed to military specs. They could take great damage with minimal degradation of performance. No single location vital for system operation. And efficient redundancy insured that even heavy losses of data were recoverable.
That meant that Trainer couldn't erase the whole of the Nora-beast's memory at once without killing her. What he could do was set up a steady degradation of memory that didn't overwhelm the general homeostatic balance. He could alternately shrink and accelerate the dendritic root growth of her neurons, disconnect and randomly reconnect. He could arbitrarily change the strength of the synaptic coefficients. He could switch on or off the machinery that converted short-term memory into long term memory.
He could tuna on or off specific neural receptor sites in a way that unbalanced her brain so that it had to compensate with rapid neural learning. He could chemically accelerate learning by up to a factor of twenty, a dangerous game which if continued caused a kind of self-reference that left the mind fixated upon one event. Rapid learning overwrote old memories faster than they could be reconstituted.
The brain normally learned in spurts. Neural disequilibrium induced by failure turned learning on until a new equilibrium state was reached. Success turned learning off. Constant learning degraded old memories without ever giving them time to reintegrate into a new equilibrium state.
The Wunderland autodoc had taught Trainer-of-Slaves another neat trick. Using a carrier pseudo-virus, he could induce a neuron to suicide by budding. The bud killed its parent upon detaching but the bud then either reproduced itself (under one kind of stimulus) or began to sprout an axion (under a second stimulus). If the neural attachment sites were active, the axion would sprout dendrites and hardwire itself into the brain. That was another way of nondestructively degrading old memories.
The fur-growing gland he had implanted was only a whim.
He was not yet ready to tackle the disassembly and rewiring of her language processor. One leap at a time.
When the Nora-female recuperated he had an ice cream party for her in her rebuilt palazzo. Probably it was still not "monkey-proof' but it was the best he could do. The major improvement was a removable barricade across the nursery, so that she could get some peace from the little monsters if she wanted it. Louie was indeed impulsively destructive. The girls were all right. They fought each other like two kzinti in a tournament ring, and each was jealous of the attention that the Nora-beast gave the other. Brunhilde would die in a few years of too many brain cells.
Long-Reach played with the children while Trainer-of-Slaves was lounging on the giant pillow eating his liver-and-kidney ice cream. He spoke to Nora, unable to keep his eyes off her face.
"Hrr-r. You are very precious to me. I want you alive. But the hyperdrive motor is even more precious. It is precious to the Patriarchy. If you try to escape again, I will kill you."
"If I don't kill you first." She was picking out the purple berries and eating them before tasting her ice cream. She had dimples. It was the first time he noticed.
He grinned, trying hard to imitate a human smile by forcing a curl to his lips. "Forget you ever said that."
When they reached R'hshssira Nora's fur was coming in nicely. She wore a lustrous pelt that had changed her from an ugly pink "tail" into a stunningly handsome animal. She could still argue fluently in English, after a fashion, between the pauses, and he hadn't yet found a way to impregnate her with twins.
CHAPTER 26
(2423 A.D.)
Short-Son of Chirr-Nig, alias Eater-of-Grass, alias Trainer-of-Slaves, was home and excited. Why did he love that hot stove, R'hshssira? What was Hssin to him? Why was he looking forward to wandering through the old Jotok Run and gossiping with Jotok-Tender?
He sat in the Command Center trying to read the instruments long before they got there. He was babysitting Louis for his Nora-female because the boy's hostility was running her ragged and she needed a rest.
"Grrough! Stay away from that!" he commanded in slave patois. He whacked the boy, not too hard, and returned to his seat. "Come over here. I'll have something to show you soon."
He was hoping to interest Louis in the stars. Younglings brought out the father in a kzin, no matter how badly they behaved, and this one was his only male.
The electromagnetic silence disturbed Trainer. Had his instrument gone dead?
Louis was already back into mischief, glancing warily at the kzin to see if he dared do what he really wanted to do. He decided that he could. The kzin was busy.
When the Bitch had maneuvered closer into the R'hshssira system, the electronic telescope confirmed the awful truth. Trainer-of-Slaves let out a wretched scream of anguish. Destruction. The man-ghouls had been here first! They had come and gone. There wasn't a glimmer of any spacefaring. He howled and clawed the walls!
Louis dived under the astrogator's desk, terrified, leaving the fragment of plastic wall-stripping half stuffed into the computer slot.
The wrathful kzin saw only a monkey trying to destroy his machine. A claw scooped the screaming child out from under the desk, ripping jaws beheading him to silence the shriek. Angrily Trainer shook the child apart, the bloodlust driving him to devour an arm. But he wasn't hungry. He dropped the corpse and beat his breast.
The Fanged God had forsaken them without warning! Hssin would have had no news from Ka'ashi he reverted to the kzin name for Wunderland, unable to speak or think the human words. He howled! Death would have come from the heavens with superluminal surprise! His family wouldn't have had a chance. His mother! He tore his mane with bloody claws, bellowing. Hamarr the beautiful, his beloved comforter, his youth, his earliest friend! Dead! He stormed around the Control Center, smashing his Ka'ashi relics, things he had collected from that planet with love. Hamarr would have been fascinated by the porcelain, shattered now against the bulkhead.