Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIV

“Well, you wanted me to run us aground,” Fraaf’kur rumbled bitterly, breaking the eerie ambiance. “Now you go talk to your people.” He motioned with a jab of his muzzle toward the humans.

To Dan’s disbelief, none of the Rejoiners, who were only a few meters away, reacted to their arrival. They just stood there transfixed, clustering around the few shrubs that grew on the stony ground, like living statuary adorning some gorgon’s lawn. There was no sign of the crystalline, glacial presence that had assailed him out on the sea.

Schro loped off toward a group of humans. He sniffed at them and the air around them. “They’ve been here for weeks, and they’ve relieved themselves in their clothing. This doesn’t feel right.”

Dan approached more cautiously and waved a hand in front of a gaunt young woman’s face. Her eyes were open and raw, as if she hadn’t blinked in ages. “They’re alive, barely. I can sense that congregating around these bushes is of utter importance to them, certainly more so than eating or sleeping.” The small plants were strange themselves; he only spotted three of them, anchored to large rocks. Their general shape was conical, and they were covered in auburn, hair-like fibers, quite unlike the standard lavender-to-purple flora of Sheathclaws. “Perhaps these plants have got them ensnared with some hypnotic pheromone?”

“No.” Fraaf’kur sniffed one of the shrubs, his nostrils fluffing the lank hairs of the thistle. “This thing is not vegetable, it smells of animal!” Abruptly, he jumped two meters back and away from it as if it were a land mine, his tail lashing nervously. “I know what these things are,” he roared, pointing at the three tapering shrubs-or what appeared to be shrubs. “ Tzookmas! ”

“What the hell is a tzookma , Fraaf’kur?”

“We need to get out of here! Now!”

But he didn’t move. He was caught just like the poor Rejoiners who had come to this dreadful island, seeking to secretly build a powerful transmitter to contact Earth, or some other human planet. How did he know that?

All of a sudden, a medium-sized pteranobat swooped in close to the fuzzy cone and was instantly snapped up with a quick whip of a tongue and swallowed into the gaping mouth concealed by the rust-colored hair.

Schro scrambled away.

Dan pulled out his sidearm and immediately fired at the thing-nothing happened; like the wristcomp, the weapon had been rendered inoperable by salt water. Dan tossed the useless beam gun aside and slowly moved toward the immobile kzintosh. “What are we dealing with here, Fraaf’kur?”

“They’re called grogs in your human tongue. Intelligent, stationary creatures, like cognizant trees or oysters, with vast telepathic ability, able to hijack the brains of any living thing!”

“Can you move?” Dan asked, now terrified, already aware of the answer.

“No!” yowled Fraaf’kur.

Despite his intense fear, or precisely because of it, Schro poised himself to assault the shrub-the grog. “I can still move!” All kzinti, even prepubescent ones, generally had only one response to danger: attack blindly until it or you were dead. Schro was no different.

Dan immediately grabbed the young kzinchao by the scruff of the neck and yanked him back with all his strength, receiving a few gashes in the process. “Pull back, Schro! Don’t antagonize them. They’ve spoken to us before; maybe we can talk to them now.”

You think of yourself as more enlightened than the kzin, but you attempted to fire upon us first. Negotiation was a last resort for you, too, Daneel Guthlac; or is the kzin architecture within your psyche affecting your behavior? You are quite the puzzle.

“What are you talking about?” But he knew, the alien was growing an idea in his mind as sharp and shimmering as a diamond. There were traces of Manslaughter ’s telepath embedded within him, like psychic shrapnel. Their two consciousnesses-their two souls-had been in mortal combat when he killed the psychotic kzin…

“My biological sire is the evil telepath aboard the Righteous Manslaughter ?” Schro hissed as he finally connected the pieces. “I’m a genetic copy of one who killed most of the crew, and attacked you and the Apex when you tried to rescue them?”

Dan felt sick waves of disgust and betrayal roll off his son. Damnit, the grog was broadcasting widely. This was the moment Dan had worried about since the kit first asked why he had a human father.

“A clone of the hated telepath!” Fraaf’kur roared. “I knew your stink was familiar! I will have your scrawny pelt, you little monster!”

Schrodinger’s cat was a cruel joke of a name, Schro purred to himself. Then, suddenly, he screamed and leapt at Dan, savagely shredding his flesh with his black claws. He sank his teeth into Dan’s shoulder and mauled brutally, tearing soft muscle and tendon. Dan felt like the Nautical Devastation in the maw of the ketosaurus. Then everything turned bright red when a sharp canine tooth scraped his bone. He screamed and squirmed. For a brief second, Schro was indeed both alive and dead, simultaneously Dan’s little kit and bloodthirsty telepath, existing in that terrible moment before the wave function collapses.

Dan did not fight back. He was spent, and he refused to harm his son. He loved him-and not in the harsh way a kzintosh sire cared for his kits, but in the unconditional, sacrificial way humans love their children. He tried to hug Schro with his one good arm.

Stop, projected one of the grogs. A mob of weak, emaciated humans pulled Schro off him. Dan just lay there on the cold sand and stones, listening to the surf and the two kzinti’s snarling curses. The sun, 46 Leonis Minoris, was a bleary red eye in the sky, passing judgment. The physical pain was excruciating, but the hurt and emptiness in his core were utterly unbearable.

The ghost of Manslaughter ’s telepath oozed into the void.

“You can’t control us can you?” asked Schro, peering at the inert alien, with feral curiosity.

No. We don’t know why. We believe your shared mental architecture and distinct but overlapping minds are creating a feedback loop we can’t manage. This is very attractive to us, as it is how we exist with each other, but we fear you, especially the two of you, because we can’t control you.

“Kill it! Kill the feeble humans holding you back and kill the ch’rowling thing,” Fraaf’kur pleaded with Schro. He was more afraid of the tzookmas than the clone of the telepath who had killed his crewmates and maimed and marooned him on this miserable planet. “These things are rumored to be devolved descendants of the Slaver race! We’re all defenseless against them!”

Our great mnemonic archives have no memory of this Slaver race. As far as we know, we have always been as we are. We dominated this planet and its simpler organisms for billions of years. We carpeted entire continents in vast reefs, all telepathically linked, but then something happened, our population crashed-either because of disease or unexpected climate change-we were on the decline long before your people arrived.

Dan tried to sit up at this. The small action hurt immensely, but he wanted to face the faceless threat. Blood poured from his arm in buckets, and he knew that if he survived, he would spend at least a month hooked up to an autodoc-the idea of needles horrified him irrationally. When he was finally able to look up from his own gore, he saw the enslaved humans restraining his vicious son. “You say you fear us, but you wield unimaginable power against us…What do you want?”

We hold these beings because we wish to learn from them. We soak up their knowledge, their memories, their experiences. This being, Fraaf’kur, has current information of other worlds, of beings like us; perhaps a related species or a subspecies. We value this more than you can know.