Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIII

Selena blinked. “What?”

“This language you’re teaching me: that’s my language, isn’t it? I mean, the language that people like me-kzinti? — speak. Right?”

“That’s right.”

Hap nodded. “So I’m going to meet some other kzinti soon, right?”

“Eventually. Why do you think that?”

“Because with the language and the smells, it’s like you’re getting me ready. That’s it, isn’t it?”

Selena thought how many ways that was true: getting him ready for the rest of his life, actually. “Yes, that’s it.”

“I knew it! I knew it! So I’ll meet them soon.”

“Meet who soon?”

Hap blinked, surprised. “Why, my mother and my father.” He stared at her expression. “I do have a mother and a father, don’t I?”

As Dieter moved further off, Selena felt her eyes becoming wet. Hap’s face was suddenly tense as he watched her fighting against the tears. He blinked twice, rapidly: the kzin equivalent of a nervous gulp. “Tell me,” he said. “I can take it.”

2401 BCE: Subject age-five years

Selena entered the paddock slowly, carefully. She waited to see if Hap could detect Dieter’s scent, despite her extensive efforts at cleansing.

“So, Dieter is back for a while?”

How did he-? “Yes. I know that his scent disturbs you. I tried to-”

“Oh, I can’t smell him.”

“Then how did you know-?”

Hap stood, flexed his prodigiously growing limbs: they were long, rangy, distinctly immature, but already quite deadly. “I knew because you don’t smell like anything, not even yourself. And that’s how you smell, now, when he is back for a visit. Completely without scent.” Hap wrinkled his nose, which was now more angular, less button-like. “It’s not natural.” He tossed the last of his automated chase-toys from paw to paw. “Of course, nothing is natural around here.”

Selena looked at the toy: it had been a self-powered, semi-autonomous fuzzy quadruped. Originally quite fast and agile, it was now defunct and shredded beyond recognition: one of the rear limbs was missing, the other had been stripped down to the metal servos and armatures. The front limbs had been broken so that they now reached around behind the pseudocreature as easily as they did to its front. Which was consistent with the apparent theme of physiognomic reversal: the neck coupling had been snapped, allowing the creature’s featureless head to stare backward over its shoulder blades. It wasn’t the result of play; it was bloody-minded, fixated destruction. Hap had done the same with the other objects provided for his amusement; in fact, over the past three months, he had systematically reduced all of them to so much junk. Starting with the far simpler, slower “chase-and-chomp” toys that he had played with since he was two, he smashed every play/training ’bot he had been given. And now he had finished by mauling the most sophisticated model available, specially designed to hone hunting and stalking skills during his “training years.” Whatever modest challenges this ’bot had presented to him, he had caught it within two hours. Now, he set its remains aside, carefully putting it on the end of what had come to be known as Death Row: the queue of toys he had methodically destroyed, one after the other.

And it was Selena’s job to find out why.

Fortunately, Hap’s next comment provided a convenient way to segué into the topic. “I was wondering when you’d finally ask me about the toys.”

“Hap, the toys are just part of something larger. I know that.” And how could she not? For the last year and a half, cheery, affectionate Hap had been on an emotional and behavioral roller-coaster ride, more than had been observed in the other two males as they entered the human equivalent of the terrible teens. No surprise there: neither of the other two had experienced the sudden, rude awakening to the peculiarities of their existence as stranded orphans the way Hap had, twenty months ago. It made matters worse when Hap’s introduction to the next oldest male ended with that kzin shunning him suspiciously. The oldest one had been downright hostile. All these events had initially pushed him closer to Selena. He frequently sought the comfort of her patient lap, his eyes wide but seeing inward, and seeing nothing but uncertainty. Uncertainty about his origins, his nature, his future. At first, he spoke about it frequently, then in fits and starts, and finally, not at all. At which point he ceased to seek her lap. That change had been permanent.

Hap sat at some distance from her now, didn’t even look directly in her eyes. “Yes, it’s more than the toys. It’s so much more than the toys that I don’t really know how to think about it all at once. But the toys seemed like a good place to start.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think?”

Selena wondered: was this kind of insolence a common feature in kzin maturation? Probably not: their relationship with the older males would be a very businesslike affair. Open insubordination-for that is how their culture would almost certainly view such a testy response-would no doubt be met by a sharp cuff and dire threats of more. At the very least.

So, by elimination, this was an example of how human upbringing was changing him. Like Boyle’s Law of Gases, the contentiousness of his age was expanding to occupy any space that it was not soundly, physically, beaten back from. And even if they knew enough to imitate a true kzin upbringing, that would do no good, not anymore. He was what his upbringing thus far had made him: insightful, reflective, self-determining, curious, and capable of many intensities and shadings of affection for any number of humans. He was no more a natural kzin than a cockroach was, and never had she realized that so clearly as now.

His tone was exaggeratedly patient. “I said, ‘why do you think I started with the toys’?”

Selena set her shoulders back a little further and withdrew her emotions from her eyes. “I’m not here to make guesses, Hap. This is not a game.”

“Really? Then why these?” He gestured at the broken playthings. “Toys are for playing games, aren’t they?”

“They’re not just toys, Hap.”

“No? Then what else are they for?”

“For training you. For making sure you can exercise all your physical abilities.”

Hap sat back; the kzin smirk was surprisingly similar to its human equivalent. “Tell me about my physical abilities, please.”

“You don’t need me to tell you what you can see by looking in a mirror.”

“What I see and feel is not what I’m talking about.” He stood, and Selena thought: my god, he’s become so big, so fast . She felt, and quickly pushed down, a pang of fear. Hap was either too caught up in his own thoughts to have smelled it, or very possibly, would not have known what the smell meant: kzin senses were hard-wired to read the emotional states of the prey-creatures of their home world, not Earth. “What I’m talking about is what you expect me to become. What you know about my species, my birth, my family. Yes, you’ve told me I’m an orphan, but not why or how. Yes, you’ve told me that I’m a kzin and that I’m from another world, but not how I got here, or why. And every time I ask, you-what is the term? — you redirect me.” He sat down again, reclined. “You know, it gets pretty tiresome, being redirected all the time. And pretty insulting, too: I can hardly believe you didn’t expect that I would eventually catch on to what you were doing.”

“Oh, I knew you would, Hap. I knew.”

“Then why did you keep doing it? Why didn’t you stop redirecting, and just talk to me?”

What a wonderful question. And what a shitty answer I have: because I didn’t have the clearance to do that. Because once we start down this road, you won’t accept anything less than complete answers. And you shouldn’t. But no one can agree on when to drop the big bomb on you, Hap: no one can agree that the time has come to level with you about all the dirty truths of how you came to be here. That your race and ours are at war. That we slaughtered your mother and sister. That we don’t keep you here out of love, or even kindness, but bloody-minded strategic benefit.