Food for the kzinti was provided through an automatic feeder system. Officers' field rations of bloody meat, better than Raargh had been used to as a Trooper or a Sergeant, and some small live animals. There was even that prized Kzinti delicacy, a zianya, tipped into a trough and bound with cords to heighten its flavor-enhancing terror and prevent its struggling and shrieking. There were a couple of indoor fooches and even some entertainment tapes, though neither kzin used them. It was plain great efforts were being made to keep them comfortable. Raargh recognized soothing pheromones in the air. The small animals provided for them were kzin natives, presumably bred from stock imported during the occupation. Contemplating them, and particularly the futilely kicking zianya, gave Raargh the beginnings of an idea. Though he was not yet very hungry, he killed them all, and as he ate them spilled what was in total a good deal of blood, blood whose smell was very similar to that of kzin blood. No alarms responded, and the kzinti who appeared to be on maintenance work in different parts of the large room, but who were presumably doubling as guards, did not seem to notice. Most enclosed chambers frequented by kzinti or used by them as living space had a smell of blood about them, not to mention a complex of other smells. It was bracing and taken for granted.
Henrietta, Andre and Emma returned after a few hours, with a guard of several young Kzinti and humans.
“Noble Heroes,” said Henrietta, “you have seen the words of Chuut-Riit. You know his spirit lives on in this fortress, as you know the fighting spirit of the Heroes of Ka'ashi is not dead. Now, in his name, I ask you: Do you acknowledge obedience to the word of Chuut-Riit?”
“Chuut-Riit was Planetary Governor and of the blood of the Patriarch,” said Raargh. Was, not is, was his unspoken thought. I have my own hunt now—to preserve Vaemar and to rear him to be a leader of the kzin of this world. Once I thought the Patriarch's Navy would return with swift vengeance, but five years have passed and now I do not think that they will be returning soon. I play for time and for Vaemar. “Why do you need to ask of a kzintosh who won Name in battle?”
“Where were you going when Emma brought you here?”
Cumpston thought quickly. The less accurate information these maniacs had the better.
“Arhus,” he said. Arhus was the site of the biggest planetside kzin settlement. Arrangements had recently been made to grant the kzinti there a limited degree of self-government.
“I did not ask you to speak!” said Henrietta.
“But you insult Heroes. You interrogate them as if they were prisoners or slaves.”
Oddly, his words seemed to give her pause.
“These Heroes I know,” he said. “Do you think you are the only human who knows the Kzin? This young kzintosh has learned fieldcraft in the wild. Now he goes to his own kind to learn other things.”
“With your tuition, ARM agent?”
“I will not go with him to stay with kzinti at Arhus. How could I? But do you think you are the only human on this planet who wishes peace between Man and Kzin? If there can be peace, I do not wish the Kzinti ill. There is much about them I admire, and these two I have known long.” I hope there's enough truth in that to confuse her, he thought. Also I hope that there's no telepath among the kzinti here. I hope that all the telepaths on Wunderland have got nice cushy jobs with the human security forces and have been given Names and kzinretti of their very own and the nice gentle new telepathic drugs I heard our laboratories were working on and have no wish to help this crazy business.
Henrietta looked at him with somewhat lessened hostility. Plainly, he did have some relationship with these two kzinti. There was an expression of doubt or conflict on her face.
“Release him,” said Vaemar. He spoke in the Ultimate Imperative Tense, which Cumpston had never heard him use before. Henrietta moved to obey, but a celfone on Andre's wrist bleeped. He turned to Henrietta and spoke to her urgently.
“We've got your car under cover and we're taking it apart,” Henrietta told Cumpston. “I'll need you shortly to send a signal from its brain to say all is well. I'd advise you not to be smart and not try to do anything like sending or omitting key code-words. We have a telepath.”
But if you put a telepath on me I'd feel it, he thought. What do they want with me? he wondered. Why have they kept me alive? I'm nothing but a threat to them, not potentially useful and venerated like Vaemar or respected like Raargh. They might be able to get a telepath, of course. Bring one from Arhus or somewhere and peel my brain. I wouldn't like that. Or maybe they've got some idea of brainwashing and reprogramming me. With modern drugs that was not difficult. A fully suborned ARM officer might be very useful indeed. Cumpston had been trained to resist brain washing, and it would, he thought, be interesting in that event to see whether his training or Henrietta's chemicals were the more effective. That a battle between them might leave him an organic waldo was something better not thought about. He had seen the results of such conflicts in others and tried to blank his memory and imagination.
Henrietta interrogated him somewhat further, then she and Andre left, accompanied by a party of the humans and kzinti. Her questions, he thought, seemed somewhat unfocused. Both the humans and kzinti in general seemed, however, to come and go at will. One kzin was doing what looked like maintenance work under the control console, a couple of others were patrolling the upper gantries. A couple were staring at screens. One appeared to be curled up in a corner asleep. In the dim light at the corners of the large chamber it was hard to see exactly how many there were. It reminded him a little of the bridge of a warship at cruising stations. There were even, he noticed, small screened sanitary compartments. Well, that was not surprising. Cumpston, one of comparatively few humans to have been in a kzin's lair as a guest, knew that Raargh had a similar arrangement at his cave. Kzinti, like most felines, liked their toilets private, apart from their use of urine as a marker and in social rituals. Raargh himself, who seemed to be moving about with a good deal of freedom, had previously been inspecting the sleeping kzin and had gone to use one of these compartments without question.
Emma, some of the men, and some of the kzinti remained. Cumpston noticed an immediate change in the atmosphere with Henrietta's departure. The men, he saw, including some manretti, wore slightly different costumes to the ones who had departed.
“Different prides,” remarked Vaemar. So he saw it as well. One of the men, plainly an officer or in a command position, walked over and released Cumpston from the web. He had, Cumpston saw, the name “McGlue” on his jacket. As Cumpston stepped down, McGlue made a quick gesture, unnoticeable except to trained eyes. It was the recognition signal of a fellow ARM agent. Cumpston felt relief flooding though him. It appeared they were not without allies. McGlue also made a queer, twisted smile that seemed to run off one side of his face. Then Emma strode over. Yes, without Henrietta, the atmosphere was definitely different. Cumpston's gestalt sense, though acquired with difficult training, was hardly even a poor imitation of kzinti ziirgah, but its signals were unmistakable. Vaemar too was wrinkling his nose and ears, and his tail was lashing now.
“My mother has no proper plans,” Emma told them. “Her brains went loose after the events of the human invasion, after those things that happened when the disgraced coward once called Hroth-Staff-Officer surrendered. She has never fully recovered. For a long time she lost her memory of who she was. I did not lose mine.
“What she wishes now is to make this place into a refuge for Kzinti where they can be taught to understand human ways so they—Heroes and Conquerors—may eventually creep into some lowly place in the monkey hierarchy. She seeks to teach them the slaves' dream of proving indispensable to their masters, so they may one day rise to some kind of junior partnership, by monkey grace and favor—the mirror image of the very dream that some humans of Ka'ashi cuddled to their monkey breasts! She expects them to gradually penetrate human society, to at last take part in human plans and strategy, perhaps at last to take revenge on those who killed Chuut-Riit or their remote descendants.