It was the luck of the draw for the crashlanders. When the Conquest Warriors attacked the fourth human slowboat bound for We Made It, their exploring warfleet had already bypassed Procyon. Strangely they had never probed Centauri, a binary that promised to be barren. There were so many stars—and a sub-light culture moves slowly. The kzinti literally stumbled into the resource and slave-rich Alpha Centauri system. A shock to both sides.
Yankee was very mellow as he twirled the stem of his goblet, staring at the luminous play of light on the bubble flaws in the glass. “But you haven’t told me why you are here. I thought you were happy wenching in the warrens of Crashlanding City? Here you can’t even kiss a woman. You’d need two of them, one standing on the back of the other!”
“Then I’ll have to settle for a kzinrett—if they are willing to stoop down to kiss me! That’s not so far from the truth. I’m here trying to make some sense out of kzinti gravitic designs.” Brobding Shaeffer was a hypershunt engineer. He did not have any formal training. Hyperspace technology had come so suddenly to We Made It that anyone with talent at understanding the weird technology had advanced rapidly in Stefan Brozik’s organization. There were no degrees in hyperspace engineering.
“What’s a hyperspace illiterate like you doing trying to understand gravitics? You don’t have any training in gravitics, either.”
Brobding laughed. “Maybe that’s why Brozik sent me. Kzinti gravitics is hairy stuff. Living through the cloistered life of orthodox physics schooling seems to pile up sand dunes that my esteemed colleagues can’t seem to wade out of. I’m the wind that scours the dunes down to bedrock.”
“Ah. The Devil’s Bellows.” The crashlanders had dozens of names for their winds.
“Yah.”
“So you’re here sticking your screwdriver into the various gravitic devices that the kzinti left lying around, are you? If you learn anything, tell me. I’ve become a kind of military historian. I’m raking over the coals of the war to figure out why we lost so many battles when we had the decisive weapon. It always seems to turn on the fact that their gravitic ships were able to operate to advantage inside the hyperspace singularity.”
“Brozik thinks so, too. He’s been building hyperdrive experimental ships equipped with salvaged kzinti gravitic drives.”
“I could have used one of those! Hypershunt or no, try running from a ratcat who is closing in on you at sixty gees! Scares the be-jesus out of you!” Yankee had done space battle with kzinti warriors at light-minute distances which was as close as he ever wanted to get. “I hear the kzinti drive is a Murphy to duplicate.”
“It’s the energy containment.”
“Not much to learn at Centauri,” mused Yankee. “Wunderland physics went to hell during the war. The Scholarium was decimated. First the kzin. Then ARM. Wunderland lost five of its top physicists during the assault on Down.”
“Brozik told me to talk to the experts. I was thinking of chatting it up with some of the resident kzin. Must be some of their gravitic technicians left around.”
“You’re braver than I am.” Talking to a kzin whisker-to-whisker was unthinkable to Yankee.
The crashlander was grinning now, his large nose about to fall into the devil’s charm of his smile. “If you are into pub-crawling we could move on to Tigertown.”
The hero of the Battle of 59 Virginis paled. Tiamat’s Tigertown was kzin territory, only nominally under human law. It was even policed by kzin. Not a place for the innocent.
There should have been no kzinti left in the Wunderland system; kzinti do not surrender. But wars only laugh at the rules of heroes. There are always survivors. A culture based on strict rules of bravery has its disgraced combatants, its failures, its eccentrics. Kzinti were wounded—to recover consciousness in human hospitals. Young kzin, who considered the Centauri system as home, had taken over the families of their heroic departed patriarchs. Kdaptists, deranged by humiliation, were using Centauri as a safe haven in which to formulate a new religion. There were kzinti who knew that however hard life was under human domination, they dared not go home.
Many of them had no home to go to. Some had found a niche on Wunderland—some skill, a human contact, the hope of reconquest kept them there. But most, upon release from the POW camps, had collected among their kind on Tiamat, in a volume of the asteroid that had been outfitted for kzin during their fifty-three-year rule of the Serpent Swarm. Tigertown.
“Come on,” said Brobding, “I know a place.”
Yankee had always liked to pub-crawl with his albino friend. But this wasn’t the maze underground of Crashlanding City where twists and turns led to secret pleasures known only to the natives. He hesitated. He was afraid of the kzin. He wanted to stay in his seat. He had led the team that built a waldo kzin and he knew exactly the strength of a kzin and his temperament and quickness in a fight, and he had teleoped that simulated kzin against two humans, nearly killing them while all the time restraining the force he had at his command.
Brobding was looking at Yankee now, waiting, the minutest smile on his face. “When you see a grin, just apologize quickly.”
Yankee got up and followed. The two of them, alone, were going into Tigertown. Why am I doing this? he thought—but couldn’t stop himself.
Chapter 6
The hour was quiet and the main trophy room almost empty. A lone kzin snatched a vatach from the snack cage, beheaded it with his teeth and squeezed the fresh blood into a cup with a dash of spiced brain sauce. It was just a steel cup—the splendid golden goblets were gone. He tapped his tail. He sat by himself under the mounted gagrumpher head which had once given some kzin a challenging six-legged chase back in the good old days when the huge Wunderland estates were governed by kzinti rule. The trophy was groomed with an oil that made it smell alive.
Hwass-Hwasschoaw was forever trying to get himself repatriated—to Kzin preferably. He had nothing else on his mind. This rodent hole in an asteroid was driving him crazy; the disability from his healed wound, its pain, was driving him crazy. It wasn’t easy to be stranded in an alien land after losing a war. His family had always been in the Secret Service of the Eye of the Patriarch; he had messages from his grandfather and his father that it was his sacred duty to deliver to the Patriarch. He had his own messages to report. And he was stranded. At the least he had to get back to W’kkai, where his father’s network would still be in place.
Hwass also carried the added burden of Kdapt’s teachings, his own self-imposed burden, important teachings which he must spread to the stars to ensure the victory of the kzin over this race favored by God. Who but Kdapt-Captain had understood the defeat at Wunderland and the path that must be traveled henceforth?
The gagrumpher trophy was not a good replacement for Leiter Obensim Frankhausen, who should be up there staring down at his masters. He had been captured during a kzinti foray into the Serpent’s Swarm. Times were deplorable!
Long ago, while Tiamat was being sieged from within by maddened man-slaves, the Club had shredded its mounted guerrilla leader, Obensim Frankhausen, disposing of him hastily down the excrement turbines. The Club had only survived because of the need for a holding area to confine kzinti prisoners. It had been the logical place to put them. As times mellowed and honor agreements were accepted by released kzin, the Club became the nucleus of the future Tigertown.
Leiter Obensim Frankhausen was never replaced in the Club’s main display room, although there was now a superbly stuffed kz’eerkt discreetly located in the urinal, where it served the same purpose. The grinning kz’eerkt was frozen in the act of reaching from the branch of a fruit tree for a luscious persimmon. These days it was affectionately referred to as “Ulf Reichstein Markham,” never in the presence of humans.