The Lord Commander of the Black Pride was desperate to eliminate the smell of abject fear from his command room.
CHAPTER 23
(2420 A.D.)
Long-Reach was in a panic argument with himselves. The ship was no longer a safe place. Mellow-Yellow was in danger. Mellow-Yellow was in hibernation. Kzin warriors were talking about slashing the throat of Mellow-Yellow for cowardice. They were rough with him when they put him away. After the battle they would take him out and kill him. Joker had heard them say so while he was relining the gravity walks. Long Reach felt grief in the tips of his thumb-fingers. No more card games. No more currying that fine pelt.
He felt an unexplainable desolation.
Fourteen Jotoki were directly bonded to Mellow-Yellow. In the slave quarters these fourteen bundled together, avoiding conversation even with Jotoki who were bonded to other Kzin. Arms entwined, they chattered and moaned and sifted thoughts among their brains. The need to help Mellow-Yellow was unsettling and painful because they could not help him. Disoriented, they set about their tasks mechanically, then returned to the slave quarters to share their agony.
Long-Reach knew that the man-beasts had to be fed, but while he went through the motions he was remembering another such terrifying time of threat long ago on another world. Simpler times. Only one kzin had been menacing Mellow-Yellow then, not a ship full. The challenge had taken place in the birth haven of Long-Reach among the trees and swamps and caverns that had nurtured himselves during the growing-up and were almost alive enough to come to his aid when he needed to call upon a glen or ridge between hill banks. The very land had helped him kill that other kzin.
Now there were only the cold corridors of a ship and pipes and snaking power lines and catwalks and patrolling warriors. Killing one kzin to save his master had been the most troubling horror of his life. To kill a whole shipload was unthinkable, enough to make his arms disconnect from each other and send him stumbling in an uncoordinated scramble of arm-legs.
Nevertheless, that is what he, himselves, was thinking.
Lieutenant Argamentine knew that her routine had been upset. That bizarre kzin who was called Mellow-Yellow by his five-armed followers disappeared to be replaced by a taciturn kzin who was larger and redder, whose only function seemed to be that of interrogator. He took her from her cage, never very gently, never so roughly that he hurt her. Together they rode a capsule to his tiny torture chamber. He questioned her. He brought her back to the charge of the slaves, forgetting her until the next time he needed to torture her.
She had grown up dealing with difficult people, including her father, and she had long ago developed a facility of manner with intractable personalities but this one fitted none of her patterns. He was disturbingly. He was impatient with chitchat. He was impossible to reason with about anything like her living conditions or the needs of the children. He was interested only in answers and he was impatient with devious answers.
When she did not give him what he wanted he turned immediately to torture, preferring agonizing nerve-slim to mutilation. But she got no feeling that he was interested in torture. He had an uncanny sensitivity, almost as if he was a latent telepath. When she didn't have answers to his questions, he blandly moved on to the next question. But if she did have answers and tried to withhold them, he became ruthlessly persistent.
Desperately, she tried to get an angle on him. He was curious about the strangest things.
“Sea Statue at UN Comparative Cultures Exhibit. You know?”
She knew, but like most flatlanders, she'd never really wanted to know much about the one-eyed Thrintun monster who lived inside, frozen in stasis. It was a story three hundred years old. She was tortured into remembering.
Had the Sea Statue been moved?
Had the Sea Statue been transported to Alpha Centauri?
Had the Sea Statue provided the principles of superluminal flight?
Were the UNSN officers in thrall?
War bred the strangest paranoia’s from its soup of deceptions, misinformation, misdirection, and poor communication. And lack of any cultural basis for understanding.
When she was thrown back into her cage after her last session, the silent children seemed to know that she was hurting and her mind half incoherent. They just held her. They were too numb, and too maltreated themselves, to be able to give her much. Finally the food came.
“You're late. We're starving,” said Lieutenant Argamentine. She wasn't even ready to try to figure out a five-brained spider.
The three children were very quiet around Long-Reach. He fed them but he was also the chief lab technician in a place where they were mere lab animals. She couldn't read Long-Reach's emotions. He had no face. A mottled pot-belly where his face should have been. His eyes and arms were expressive but she didn't know how to read their mobility.
“Bean mash on kzinbones,” said Long-Reach's translator with an appropriately apologetic melody. Short(arm) took umbrage with the vocoder and offered an English translation. “Not kzin bones! Shudder. Groundified bone and marrow, rolled to cracker shape. Bonding heated. Kzin rations for ship. Not kzin bones! Kzin not cannibals except with kits of wrong father.”
Freckled(arm) made an interjection to correct an aspect of short(arm)'s terrible English grammar.
“Are you going to stay around for another English lesson?” asked Nora. She didn't really want this strange creature to go. The torture was demoralizing her.
“No. Must go. Mellow-Yellow in trouble,” lamented Long-Reach. “Bad, bad, bad,” commented three of his arms in a round-robin.
“I haven't seen him for a while.” Was she better off with Mellow-Yellow or Redfur?
A pause while the vocoder sorted out the conversation. “We are all doomed by death,” said its speaker. “A big battle,” kibitzed skinny(arm). “Ship has been recalled to Alpha Centauri,” intoned big(arm).
She decided to exact some intelligence of her own. “Why are they interested in Thrintun slavers?”
“What?” Long-Reach consulted the vocoder and drew a blank.
“One-eyed scaly monsters who take over minds. They died in a war with the tnuctipun billions of years ago. I've just had my memory forcibly refreshed,” she said ruefully.
“Kzin worry about free-will,” said Long-Reach. “All the time, worry. Warrior fetish. Always must be in control. Didn't you feel the wave of intrusion? Myselves went right to the kitchen and made up hot soup for Mellow-Yellow, then wondered why I do this. Pleasant feeling to serve others. Kzin no like.”
Suddenly Nora was remembering an impulse of feeling that had overwhelmed her just days ago. Devotion. An enormous need to help someone. She had supposed it was something Mellow-Yellow had put in her food to make her tack. “There's a Slaver loose down there?”
“Was. Big explosion, hour ago here, days ago there. Don't know what's happening today. Tomorrow we find out. We're all doomed.”
“Are you a slave?” she asked, curious about the creature's response. She found out that his vocoder couldn't translate the word for him, and she couldn't explain it to him. The nearest he could come was the English word "friend." As in "only friend."
Redfur the Torturer didn't come back. But a delegation of four Jotoki did. They seemed ill at ease in their body motions. It was impossible for her to stop trying to read expressions off the belly-faces that sat on their mouths even though she knew they weren't faces. The shoulder-mounted eyes watched her. They wanted something. They gave her a delicate dish of stuffed leaves that tasted like Greek Dolmades, vine leaves, almost as if it were a ceremony. Another presented her timidly with green and red garters for her elbows and knees.