Man-Kzin Wars XIII-ARC (20 page)

Selena barely restrained the urge to reach out and touch his arm. She had heard rumors that he was the only one of his family who had managed to escape the system on a slowship. They weren’t of
herrenman
stock, and so remained on Wunderland, under the watchful eyes and ready claws of the kzin. It was surprising that he had any room left in his heart for anything, let alone a tiny kzin kit.

Instead of touching his arm, she stepped a little closer. “I think we’re pretty lucky to have you here, making your own messes, Captain.”

Armbrust looked up with a sudden smile. “My name is Dieter.”

“And I’m Selena, not Dr. Navarre. So the admiral gave you a ‘get into jail free’ card?”

“Something like that. After seeing the report about my debriefing by Director Pyragy, there was some concern at the higher echelons that the research project could be in danger of being compromised by personal and political agendas.”

Selena looked sideways at Armbrust. “Everyone has an agenda, Dieter.”

“True enough. But in this case, the top item on everyone’s agenda should be ‘save humanity.’ The rest is about method. In the case of your director, it seemed he was more interested in using young kzin to prove something about universal morality.”

Selena did not say anything; she did not dare. The problem was not that she disagreed with Dieter, but rather, that she agreed with him. Fervently. But even if the walls didn’t have ears, some things were simply too risky to discuss freely in public. And besides, she didn’t want to take any chances of being associated with the military agenda, because if Pyragy suspected that, she’d be off the project. Faster than spitting out swap-water. In another six months, maybe a year, her position would be much more secure, possibly invulnerable. But until then . . .

“Let’s walk, Dieter. You’ve a lot to see.” As they began strolling out of the observation hub and down one of the tubes that both separated and provided a means for observing the different habitats on either side, Selena noticed that the kit had padded away from the observation glass and was now paralleling them on their walk. “It seems you have a friend, Dieter,” Selena observed, nodding to indicate their tiny escort.

Dieter looked over; as he did, Selena quickly accessed her wrist-relay’s primary control program and deployed three of the near-invisible roving sensors in the kit’s habitat to triangulate, close, and follow him. It was the strongest independent behavior she’d noted thus far and if it was what it seemed—a post-imprinting affinity—that could be a major factor later on: both a variable to investigate and use as a positive stimuli and reinforcement.

If Dieter noticed what she was doing, he was too polite to mention it. “Yeah, I’m some great friend of that little kit’s, cheating him the way I did.”

“By cheating, are you referring to the fact that he only needed saving because you had already—er, destroyed his world?”

Dieter shrugged. “Yeah, that too. But I was thinking more about how I brushed against one of the dead females shortly after entering the nursery. I didn’t even consciously think about it at the time, but it was one of the possibilities we had discussed at the command level.”

“You mean, to coat yourself in a familiar, comforting scent?”

“Yeah; as far as we knew, the mere smell of humans, being so different, could have made the kits unapproachable under any circumstances.”

“That doesn’t sound like cheating, Dieter; that sounds like quick thinking.”

“It was just a trained reflex.”

“The others didn’t do it.”

“That’s because I mentally trained for it on my own. I thought through that assault again and again and again. And, of course, it didn’t work out anything like we planned. They never do.”

“No, but because you had rehearsed the alternatives so many times in your head, you were able to adapt, quickly and well, when reality went off in a different direction than any of the ones you’d planned on.”

Dieter shrugged and glanced back at the kit. “And now I feel kind of responsible for Hap—for him—I guess.”

Selena looked sideways at the Wunderlander. “Did you just call the kit ‘Hap’?”

Dieter seemed almost embarrassed. “Yeah.”

“Why ‘Hap’?”

“Well, it hardly seemed right to call him ‘Lucky.’ Yes, he survived, but we did kill his mom and sister and hijacked him to live among hairless aliens.”

Selena smiled sadly. “No, ‘Lucky’ just wouldn’t work.”

“But, in some ways, chance was on his side. And has continued to be. So, caught as he is in the hands of Fate, I thought ‘Hap’ might do. Mayhap, Hap-less, Hap-py: there’s no telling what Fate will deal him, but deal him it will.”

Selena looked at the half-black-, half-orange-furred kit that was becoming weary following them. Hap. A simple monosyllable. That was good. Furthermore, all its phonemes were easy for kzinti: they were basic sounds in the Heroes’ Tongue. And if the kit came to know that it had been named by the human for which it felt such instinctual affinity, that might be the influence mechanism that—

Dieter’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “How are the other kits doing?”

“The oldest male has proven entirely intractable, as we suspected he might be.”

“Too old?”

Selena nodded. “That’s our best guess. He’s not particularly sociable with the one that’s two months younger than he is, but we can’t tell if that’s normal, a post-trauma reaction, or just a personal quirk.” She smiled. “He’s the only one we’ve named, so far. Partly because he’s older, partly because he had such a distinctive personality.”

“Dare I ask what you’ve named him?”

“Cranky. Some insist on the longer version: Cranky Cat.”

Dieter raised an eyebrow. “Something tells me you never expect to establish communications with him, giving him a name like that.”

“It’s hard to see how we would forge a communicational link with him: he cannot be safely approached, and he is resistant to both positive and negative operant conditioning. Surprisingly so, for a young creature.”

“Although that could be the norm, for kzinti.”

“Absolutely so. And I could see several ways in which it would be a necessary survival trait. The kits are ferociously competitive with each other from a very early age. In Cranky, what we perceive as stubbornness and irascibility might well be tenacity and aggressiveness, now warped by being penned up in an alien, aversive environment.”

“And the second oldest male?”

Selena shrugged. “Hard to tell; he’s had a lot of trouble.”

“Why? I thought he was fine when we got him.”

“He was. But although he was probably too young to remember any of the trauma of his capture, he was old enough to feel it, for it to leave an emotional scar.”

Dieter clucked his tongue. “Kind of hard to think of kzinti having emotional scars.”

“I understand, but they can and do get them. In his case, I don’t think it would have been too bad: they are very resilient. But without a mother as a source of basic mammalian reassurance, I suspect his mind tucked the experience under his growing consciousness, and is now experiencing its side effects.

“From the beginning, he rejected food until he became desperately hungry. We had to feed him intravenously twice to ensure his survival. Of course, it doesn’t help that the damn milk substitutes just don’t appeal to the suckled kits.”

“I thought it was genetically reengineered from samples, that it was an exact match for their real milk.”

“Oh, it has all the right chemicals in all the right proportions, but something is still missing. As a lab-tech in the biology group put it, ‘ersatz is ersatz.’ And we should hardly be surprised: we’ve done no better with our own foods.”

Dieter smiled ruefully. “True enough. I’ve had tasty non-alcoholic beer, except it never really tastes like beer.”

“Yes, and given how much more acute the kzin senses of smell and taste are—about thirty thousand times and one hundred times, respectively—it’s hardly surprising that they reject the substitutes we’ve created.”

“And so the younger kzin male is weak from starvation?”

“Yes. It will be good when we can move him to unprocessed meat, about a month from now.”

“But Hap looks pretty robust.”

“That’s probably because he was newborn when he was taken.”

“What? Wouldn’t that make him weaker? More vulnerable?”

“No. He hadn’t been suckled yet. So, apparently, if newborn kzinti haven’t yet had natural milk, they tolerate our synthetics much better.”

“So he’s feeding well?”

“I don’t know that I’d call his intake anything more than ‘adequate.’ He’s still not a fan of our version of kzin food, but he doesn’t find it particularly aversive, either.”

“And the female kits?”

Selena nodded. “One is having an easier time of it; the other is in the worst shape of all. I expect we’ll lose her within the week.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

Selena shrugged, jammed her hands deep in her lab coat pockets. “Damned if I know. But my gut level instinct is that she has no will to live. I know that sounds bizarre to say about so young a creature, but it’s been true from the first. Listless, limp as a wet rag. She’s been on IV for the past three days; we had to catheterize her this morning. Nothing we do matters: she just keeps fading away, further and further. The other female is the exact opposite: some think she’s the most promising of all the kits. She’s certainly the apple of the director’s eye, and is surprisingly friendly to most of her handlers.”

“So, that’s good.”

“No, that’s bad. Or rather, it’s too much of a good thing. Now Pyragy has started exploring the possibility of making the females the primary focus of the research program, with the intent of increasing their intelligence and using them as a long-term weapon against the natural kzinti males. Kind of kzin Mata-Hari Delilahs that are secretly working for the good of humankind.”

Dieter rolled his eyes. “Please tell me you are making that up.”

“I wish I was. Unfortunately, it’s just further proof that the entire project is being administrated by a scientific illiterate.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that he’s still talking about this after Boroshinsky delivered his preliminary reports regarding the cause of the females’ lack of intelligence. And Boroshinsky’s preliminary reports are often more meticulous than papers presented at the Royal Academy.”

Dieter lagged behind; the orange and black ball of fur that he had dubbed Hap had flopped down in a histrionic excess of weariness. Dieter crouched down to be closer to him: through the glass, the kzin’s eyes narrowed happily, his torso pumping deeply and only a little more quickly than normal. “And what are Boroshinsky’s preliminary conclusions?”

“Firstly, the cause of the females’ semi-sentience is clearly genetic. So no amount of rehabilitation is going to work. But secondly, Boroshinsky also confirmed that the genetic constraints upon their intelligence is not merely a matter of a single, sweeping alteration to the original female genetics: it involves an ongoing program to maintain that genotype.”

“I don’t understand.”

Before she could stop herself, Selena had her hands out of her pockets, punctuating and emphasizing. “The kzinti had those clones on their ship—and probably near all breeding sites—to ensure that their females remain subsentient. Each of the clones belongs to one of sixteen different gene patterns, which, despite a great deal of diversity in other particulars, have two genetic traits in common: diminished development of the higher-function brain elements and neurochemical deficiencies. Both of which are sex-specific.”

Dieter stood, looked more puzzled. “Okay, I get the part about diminished brain development. I’m guessing that this trait keeps their equivalent of the cerebral cortex from becoming large enough to support sophisticated thought?”

“Correct. Whereas the neurochemical deficiency works by reducing how frequently and effectively the synaptic gaps are resupplied with the necessary bioelectric transmitters.”

“So the brain is smaller and slower.”

“Right. But that’s arguably not the most important fact uncovered by Boroshinsky. The kzinti have taken another eugenic step to ensure that female cognitive impairment remains permanent: the clones.”

“How do the clones fit into this?”

“Boroshinsky’s guess is that despite the genetic alterations, there are occasional regressions to the original, undiminished female genotype. So what the kzinti are doing with the clones, at least on interstellar voyages, is constantly refreshing the desired genetic signal with fresh copies.”

“And that’s important because . . . ?”

“Because it tells us how primitive and imperfect their genetic science is. The genetic fix they’ve imposed must not hold too well if they are constantly having to inject direct copies of the modified gene line back into the population all the time. Boroshinsky suspects, and I concur, that they probably couldn’t create a more absolute genetic alteration without risking that some of the effects would spill over into the male genome as well. That suggests that their genetic alterations are subject to considerable drift. That’s probably why they put in the neurochemical modification, too: being an entirely different gene modification, it’s an insurance policy against any reexpressions of full female brain development.”

Dieter frowned. “It’s hard to imagine the kzinti relying on such a complicated matrix of changes.”

“I agree, but a truly permanent solution would require one to be very good at genetic manipulation. From the looks of it, the kzinti never got to be very good at genetics: just pretty good.”

Dieter nodded. “Well, I guess that’s to be expected. Brandishing a test tube and wearing a white coat: hardly a Hero’s garb, I suspect.”

“Yes, there’s probably an inbred behavioral disinclination, as well. The life of a scientist might be suitable for the faint of heart, but
not
for the short-tempered.”

“Which is why the kzinti seem to rely on their slave races to provide many, or even most, of their technicians and bean-counters.”

“Yes. The kzin males have a glandular system that keeps them awash in a cocktail of hormones that functions like testosterone in human males, except about one hundred times stronger. Obversely, the females have an almost complete lack of it: another development of their highly selective breeding, apparently.”