Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIII

“One very angry cat I call Schrödinger, because I haven’t made up my mind whether he lives or dies.”

Hylo appreciated that. “You know what I would do,” she said. “In any event, you may have the stasis box.”

“I’ll send you the data you need, and destroy all copies.”

“Then this is our last verbal communication. We have no more use for you.”

“Why not?” said Flex, not so much caring as curious.

“We no longer have enough stars to compensate you. Our budget is exceeded. Money aside, we find you to be motivated by sex and revenge. Both are now spent tools.”

Both unlikely, sex and revenge, Flex considered. But both me. Bothme. Jinxian puns were rancid enough without being one’s actual name. He harrumphed. Sex and revenge, love and money, whatever you called them, that was not him, not anymore. He had his revenge, but Annie was still gone. Maybe she could at least rest in peace now.

“Good-bye,” Flex said, thinking more like “good riddance.”

“I wish you well,” said Hylo. “What will you do, now that you have a tiger by the tail, and a pocketful of stars?”

Flex thought that over. A pocketful of stars. “Tabam,” he said.

Bobcat swaggered through the seedy Orange District of Canyon like a bloody victorious warrior. If his tail hadn’t been blown off in that Fanged God’s anus of a planet, Wunderland, it’d be swishing around proudly. This current intelligence-gathering campaign had yielded very little data of military value. Two domesticated kzintoshi had been appointed to the City Council as representatives of the burgeoning kzin population. Of slightly more interest, those two kzinti had suggested they open up the site of the stasis-enshrined Heroes buried beneath set magma, to tourism. Bobcat’s ears quivered and his stumpy tail darted around cheerfully as he imagined the Patriarchy attempting to free these savage warriors while on a guided tour of the lava fields, but he knew that was a bit farfetched.

More disturbingly, he had sensed another telepath, a human ARM Agent, poking around the fringes of his mind. They had chased each other through the white caves of thought, a monkey holding onto a tiger’s tail. The tiger was caught, but if the monkey let go, the tiger would snap it up. Little did the agent know that this particular tiger had no tail! Bobcat locked down and moved away. He hadn’t sensed her presence in quite a while.

Now he simply enjoyed the brisk walk. Despite the pointlessness of this specific mission, he loved Canyon. Something about this hostile planet, with its cratered and scarred auburn surface, spoke to him on a cellular level. Old, desolate Warhead had found a new life, as if the monumental disintegrator wound had become infected with glittering architectural encrustations, creating a strange human-kzin amalgam society. Sometimes in the still void between stars, he toyed with the dream of someday retiring to Canyon. That was not likely. He understood that he would be worked until his synapses sizzled and nothing remained but a drooling kshat . He only regretted that every time he visited this world he so admired, he betrayed it. Telepaths were by nature poetic; they relied too much on imagery and metaphor to process the intangible world of the mind, so the irony was not altogether lost on Bobcat.

He pushed the thought out of his head and continued to walk through the bright lights and salty smells of the old seaside district that predated the vertical urban sprawl. As Devourer of Monkeys ’ Telepath, he was permitted a modicum of liberty, he had been Yearrl-Captain’s faithful servant since before the captain had a partial Name and his covert missions on other human-kzin worlds had made Yearrl rich and admired throughout the Patriarchy. There was a saying aboard the Devourer : when Yearrl bathes in blood, we all get splattered; and, in truth, as kzintoshi went, Yearrl-Captain was what humans would call a decent fellow. His Captain obliged him a few hours of leave after the operation, so Bobcat held his scruffy chin high, as if admiring the lavish balconies and clinging structures rising up the sheer cliff walls, and let the thoughts of the tall, spindly Canyonites wash over him in tune to the sound of the sea’s lazy surf. Where the true warriors on his ship saw an old, mangy half-kzintosh, humans saw a leaner, meaner version of their nightmares. His long-battered ego always appreciated these jaunts.

Bobcat stopped at an old kzin building made up in garish detail to look like an ancient human sanctuary. The flashing sign above the entrance read TEMPLE OF SEKHMET in Interworld. Inside, the walls were covered with vertical lines of primitive pictorial script and vulgar murals of stiff angular humans prostrating themselves before a kzinrett with the hairless body of a human female. Bobcat assumed the artist had never laid eyes on a true kzinrett as this representation had round, furry ears.

The smell of sex hung in the air like mist and young nameless warriors lurked about the lobby avoiding eye contact with each other. His ears twitched as he met Iggy Larsson, the large, barrel-shaped human in charge of this outfit. If you considered your average human to be a monkey, Larsson was a silverback gorilla.

“Bobcat!” The human flashed him a lascivious smile full of blunt, plant-crunching teeth, “We got some new merchandise brought over from Kzin itself!”

“Foliage must quake in terror at the sight of those incisors,” Bobcat snarled acidly.

Larsson slapped his back in a rude show of familiarity and the kzin’s ears fell flat on his head, then rose slowly with well-practiced restrained ire. He clamped down his mind, not wanting to sully it with what passed for Larsson’s thoughts. “Before you do your thing, I need to show you something I think Yearrl-Captain would be very interested in.”

A slow clicking noise in Bobcat’s throat began to announce his growing frustration, but he allowed the corpulent human to lead him into a small room housing a single orange female and a small, utterly black kit still suckling. All the frayed fur on Bobcat’s wiry frame flattened in horror. “I thought you euthanized all kittens born here?”

“Oh we do, except for a few females to replenish our stock, but something is different about this dusky little runt. At first, I thought it was the shock of his color. I’ve never seen a melanistic kzin before, but I just can’t bring myself to put it down. I wanted to know if it’s got some telepathic juju mucking with my brain. That’s where you come in.”

Larsson harshly grabbed the measly kitten by the scruff of his neck and lifted him up for the kzin’s inspection. The dull female made no attempt to rip the human’s arm off, so Bobcat guessed she was sedated. The telepath grudgingly loosened his mental grip and permitted a swift sweep of the kit. A low-grade telepathic cry emanated from this tiny nugget of neutron star, repeating the same reflexive message like an emergency distress beacon: protect me. Care for me. Love me.

Bobcat tore himself away and walked out of the cramped, suffocating room, “Yes, he’s got telepathic potential.”

“I knew it!” Larsson absently tossed the kitten back at his mother.

Bobcat’s nostrils flared and the long-denied scent of estrous pheromones entered his body, grounding him in the material world. He tried to control his arousal in front of the leering human. “I’m going to do now what I came here to do!” he roared as his mind went blank.

The old telepath bounded like a fresh kitten down the hall and into a gaudy room unsuccessfully made up to look like a palatial harem chamber. He pounced on the three females anxiously pacing the room. Something buried deep in the back of his mind understood that these little freedoms allowed him by Yearrl-Captain were as much a part of his imprisonment as his addiction to the sthondat drug. At the moment though, he didn’t care.