CHAPTER 1
(2391 A.D.)
His tail was cold. Where could he run to?
The Short-Son of Chiirr-Nig fluffed the fur inside his suit to help him keep warm. At the airlock exit he hadn’t had time to appropriate better surface garb from the public racks. The suit was non-standard, too large and good only for a limited surface excursion. Eventually he would freeze. The oxygen mask and support pack should last indefinitely.
Ruddy light from an enormous red sun gilded the snow-swept rocks. A dim rose cast itself across the hunching sprawl of atmosphere-tight buildings that spread down into the valley gloom. The scene demanded infra-red goggles to penetrate the shadows, but Short-Son had no goggles. Could he run to the mountains? The jags against the sky had been named the Mountains of Promised Victory by the founding warriors of Hssin, but they were mountains of death.
Dim as R’hshssira was, the sanguine glare from the snow peaks drowned the stars along the horizon. But above, undismayed by the pale glow of R’hshssira, the heavens peered from a darkly mauve sky, seeming to give more light than Hssin’s litter-runt-of-a-star, even as they peered through wisps of cirrus.
If there was little light, there was warmth. But one had to be standing out on the open plain of Hssin in full daylight—forge-red R’hshssira looming full round in the sky—to feel the warmth. Nevertheless it was real warmth that soaked into space armor—if one was willing to freeze his backside and tail.
Short-Son of Chiirr-Nig turned his back to the sun, his tail held up to the radiation.
His warrior elders sometimes joked about whether Hssin was a planet or a moon because no kzin was really sure whether the pitiful primary, R’hshssira, was a father star or a mere lost whelp with slave. R’hshssira was too cool, too small to be a star, already having collapsed, without igniting its hydrogen, to the density of a heavy metal. Still it bathed them in a bloody warmth.
A star-beast in hibernation, its metabolism inactive.
A beast with no rotation, no magnetic field, fighting nothing. It slept and the slave satellite Hssin patrolled protectively close to the master’s lair.
Short-Son couldn’t go to the mountains. He had to escape back into the city he had just run from. He stared up at the constellations, at five brilliant, distant giants that lay across the River of Heaven. If there was no place to run to then let the Fanged God Who Drank at the River of Heaven take him to the stars.
Hssin served as a forward military base of the Kzin Patriarchy, barren as a moon, yet with atmosphere like a planet. The gas was thin, wicked, noxious, sometimes as stormy as the surface of R’hshssira was docile. The temperatures ranged over extremes impossible for life to endure. Nothing worth hunting could live in those hills and plains of shattered rock and ice. The kzinti who stayed here were pitied by the kzinti who passed through on their way to greater glory.
…And, thought Short-Son bitterly, who mock and torture the loyal kzin whose heroism keeps this wretched base open for the use of the Patriarchy. He envied the outward-bound warriors their journey, their wily females, the wood and leather and tapestry in their starships. He scorned their petty complaints about the hardships of space. He openly hated their sons who used him as sport, but kept private his thoughts about violating their soft-furred daughters.
The Short-Son of Chiirr-Nig knew where they were running to. The brightest star on the horizon of Hssin was the beacon that made them endure both their travels and the tedious duty at bleak military bases along the way. Looking at it, he refused to call that white binary by its Kzin name, Ka’ashi—he always called it by its unpronounceable exotic alien name, Alpha Centauri. What did those weird sounds mean?
An old warrior had once told him that the monkey aliens had named it after a beast that was half monkey, half herbivore; four cloven hooves and two hands. Just the name could make him smell the hunting and stalking of strange beasts! He had salivated over smell-pictures of the six-legged underland gagrumphers.
But it was he who was being hunted!
The Son of Chiirr-Nig thought of himself as a freak, as the only kzin in the Patriarchy who had ever felt fear. Perhaps others had felt fear—but they did not run.
What was a half-grown kzin youth doing on the surface, hurrying in a pressure suit so hastily donned that he had forgotten his thermal underwear? He had also forgotten his oxygen. His mask-pack was rumbling to make up the lack by the dissociation of atmospheric carbon dioxide and his fur was not keeping him warm. His tail was already numb. Heroes as stupid as he was, died, he castigated himself. He was alone. He didn’t even have his mother to protect him.
I’m a coward, he thought, using a particularly vicious word from the Hero’s Tongue which referred to scurrying animals too small to bring hunt-honor. He would never have let another kzin know that he used such a word to describe himself. Nevertheless, he wished he could understand why no one else was afraid to die.
Puller-of-Noses and Hidden-Smiler—he had his own private names for his youthful comrades—were hunting him and they would catch him and kill him. A game. His father was always pushing him into such games before he was ready. His father wouldn’t care if he died stupidly. It would please Short-Son’s sire not to be embarrassed anymore. That noble one had a name and many sons to do him honor, enough sons themselves to earn names and make themselves rich on the labor of monkey slaves.
An old warrior friend of Short-Son had told him that there were octal-to-the-octals of the man-monkeys to be had out there, swarms! herds! forestfuls! You could kill them by the army and eat them by the feast and still have enough monkey slaves left over to make you rich! For a while Son-of-Chiirr-Nig held his furless tail between his legs to warm it and, shivering, found Man-sun, a radian to the right of Wunderland’s two stars, at the edge of the constellation Raised Dagger. It was almost touching Victim’s Blood, a distant red giant star that the man-beasts worshiped as lucky Mirach or simply as Beta Andromeda. They had a rich vocabulary of hauntingly soft sounds.
Sometimes it awed him to be on the frontier. From within the Patriarchy, it was said, one could gaze at the night sky and be unable to espy any nearby unconquered stars—but out here the sky was filled with unspoiled herds and grass! So much monkey meat; too bad those kit warriors were going to kill him before he got his fangs into it. What a waste! His claws extended and retracted.
Short-Son had a problem. As long as he was outside, he was probably safe. But Puller-of-Noses was one organized kzin, a born commander. Already Puller’s father was arranging to send him with the recruits to Wunderland for the fourth assault on Man-home. By now there were probably two octals of his fur-licking sycophants waiting at the entrances to the city with their wtsai daggers ready to clip ears.
Looking for me.
But the base was enormous. The original assault on Wunderland had been staged from here. And the base had grown fivefold since then as the news of the coming conquest of the Man-system spread back deep into the Patriarchy. New ships arrived constantly and new facilities, tunnels, buildings, floater landing sites were springing up with disordered proliferation. Surely there was a place to hide.
The kzin youth began stumbling his way in the direction of some newer diggings, taking deceptive shortcuts that only led into mazes of walls. He had certainly not been prepared for this frantic expedition. He was already too cold to continue. When the pads of his feet began to go numb a more local solution seemed in order. He almost turned back when he found his advance blocked by the great Jotok Run, an extensive collection of domes and subterranean warrens used for the breeding and hunting of the Jotok slaves. He was going to freeze to death before he worked around it.
Why didn’t he get it over with? If he went back through a main residential entrance, they’d catch him—there would be a fight and he would be killed or hopelessly maimed. Maybe he could surprise them with a terrible rage and kill one of them before they got him? He could smile, but the rage paralyzed his leap. He had never been able to leap. It was hopeless. Why not let them kill him today? Even if he escaped today, they’d find him tomorrow and kill him—to purify the race.
That was when he remembered that kits were not allowed to hunt in the Jotok Run without a guardian. Puller-of-Noses could not be there with his gang. Of course, Short-Son was not allowed in the Jotok Run either, and if he was found there he’d be mauled, but at least the adults would not kill him.
There were no windows, and the walls were thick, self-repairing mechanisms which would give warning of malfunction. He found ways to climb up over the walls, with four fingered hands that had evolved for rock climbing.
In his mind, as he climbed, he dreamed that he was clandestinely attacking a monkey-fort. At every corner and ramp he brought out an invisible beam-rifle and poured light into the swarming man-monkeys. By the time he was overlooking the central loading courtyard, vast enough to take twenty floaters, he had killed octals and octals of the furless beasts. He gazed down upon the shadowed landing area and planned his final assault on Man-home.
Doom for all mankind! Then he could hunt giraffes!
He saw surface elevators big enough to take a floater down into the city. He could dimly make out some small kzin-sized airlocks. But a freight entrance would be the easiest to jimmy. There were good locks on the inside to contain the Jotok, who were clever and sometimes treacherous, but no real barriers from the outside. There was no need for barriers from the outside—a kzin did not break and enter without a reason he would be willing to explain to another kzin.
Short-Son did not have the normal entering tools, but he did have a toolkit on his suit and he had always been curious about mechanisms, probing them until he understood their function. He could no longer feel his feet when he dropped into the courtyard, and his fingers were so frozen he took an eternity to release the outer freight door. Stupid mechanism! A female could design a better latch hold!
The black wall slid open. He entered the freight chamber to swirls of condensation while the outer door rolled shut and the purifiers hummed to life—cleaning the nitrogen of carbon dioxide and methane, and adding oxygen. It took him seconds to disable the alarm. By virtue of kzin habit he was battle ready when the inner door released, ready for the five-limbed Jotok leap, or an adult custodian, or even a follower of Puller-of-Noses.
What he found was three of the baby five-armed Jotok, about the size of his hand, crawling around the loading area, totally confused by the stone floor. He squashed them with his foot. He passed through the barrier maze of opaque glass walls into a verdant biocology—tall trees, the babble of a brook, and when he removed his oxygen mask, the rotting steamy smells of a pampered rainforest and the hint of a distant pond with rushes. Some of the smells he couldn’t classify.