CHAPTER 5
(2392 A.D.)
Short-Son tried to look over the edge of the roof but he was too far away and he already knew there was no escape in that direction. He glanced toward the pair of almost ship-sized elevators that rose into the artificial sky. Much too far away. Could a kzin fly?
Never had he felt such a rage. His mouth was wrapped back over his fangs in a death grin and he couldn’t have erased it from his face if he’d tried. His claws were out. His haunches were primed to leap at his tormentor and tear him to bits with fang and claw and hatred. He breathed. Only the fear kept him rooted.
“We hear you do it in trees with Jotok playmates!” taunted Hidden-Smiler whose smile was not hidden.
He remembered clearly through the rage how Jotok-Tender had told him the usage of fear, and practiced with him. Wait for the first leap. Apply that body-twist while extending the claws just so. A strange part of his mind was noticing that he had no control over his claws now—they were unretractable.
“Your father was a vatach!” rumbled another kzin who was not coming too close.
“His mother taught this toothless kit how to fight!”
Puller-of-Noses was relaxing now, sensing that Short-Son really didn’t have the courage to fight. That emboldened him. He wasn’t going to need his friends. He motioned them away. He’d take these ears himself. “You’re tied up like a zianya on the table, ready for the feast. I smell your fear, zianya.”
Short-Son snarled.
“Oh, we disturbed you! You came up here to feed on the grass. Don’t let us stop you.” Puller-of-Noses was enjoying the repartee.
“The grass is choice for one with a double stomach,” jibed Hidden-Smile.
Attack me! I’ll flip and slash your throats out! Short-Son’s thoughts were ravening, but he could say nothing. He hated them for teasing him, playing with him before they killed him. His fangs were sticking to dry lips, frozen by his grin.
“Our coward stinks of fear,” said Puller-of-Noses, ready for the kill, charging himself for a single leap that would rip the life from his prey. “You smell like a fattened grass-eater.” When his opponent didn’t respond, he couldn’t resist the final, ultimate insult. While he composed it, the tip of his pink tail flipped back and forth. “I’ll make a deal with you. Be an herbivore. Put your head in the grass and eat it, and I’ll spare your life. Or fight like a Hero and I’ll give you honor.”
If Puller-of-Noses had attacked then, a desperate Short-Son might have unbalanced him and slashed him to a quick death, but the pride leader was prolonging the agony, waiting for a reply, enjoying his wit too much to begin a battle that would end instantly and thus instantly end his fun. While he taunted, his only caution was to reestablish his crouch. The pause gave Short-Son a fatal moment of thought.
Puller-of-Noses had tendered a verbal bargain: eat grass and live or be a Hero and die.
His word of honor would force him to keep that bargain.
Puller-of-Noses was also too stupid to understand that he had actually offered Short-Son a real choice between life and death. In the challenger’s mind there was no choice at all between honor and eating grass. He thought he had Short-Son trapped.
Trembling, full of disgust for himself, Short-Son sank to his knees and began to eat the tall strands of green—crawling, ripping it from its roots with his fangs, chewing, though his teeth were not meant for such chewing. There was no way for his throat to swallow the fibrous cud, but he kept chewing and chewing.
Six kzin came forward with stunned eyes. Their ears twitched in amusement, but it wasn’t amusement they felt; what they felt was disbelief. And only then did Puller-of-Noses realize that he could gain no honor by killing this sniveling coward. Worse, he would be condemned to death if he broke his word. The ears of his intended victim were worthless.
* * *
From that day on Hssin’s “herbivorous” kzin had a new name spontaneously bestowed upon him—Eater-of-Grass. There was no suppressing the story. It spread like grassfire throughout the Hssin base. The Chiirr-Nig household disowned him. The naval shipyards no longer trusted him to work on their gravity polarizers.
He had no place to sleep, no place to eat, no one to talk to, no work. For a while he lived in corners and on roofs and in tunnels, hunting escaped rodents. It was hard to keep clean. Once he was mistaken for a wretched telepath. He even tried chewing on roots to ease his hunger, but in his stomach they turned to gas and indigestion. He begged—and grown kzin pretended he didn’t exist. He robbed a cage once of its live vatach which had been hung out for fresh air, a death offense if caught. He made it look as if the vatach had escaped. They all expected him to walk out onto the surface of Hssin and disappear into the mountains to die but he had no suit.
When he begged for a surface suit, yes, then they paid attention to him and charitably granted his wish. Eater-of-Grass didn’t walk into the mountains, however—he used the suit to break back into the Jotok Run, mostly because he wanted a bath. Soaking in water wasn’t the best way to take a bath, but it would do. He spent a day cleaning and grooming his fur. When no one came to throw him out, he saw no reason to leave.
This time he was more covert. He knew how to hide. He kept away from the hunting parties and he knew much more about Jotok manners. He stalked the wild Jotoki up in the trees and they hunted him when he wasn’t looking. He studied Jotok anatomy for lack of anything else to do—the lungs on the inner arm that fed the heart and doubled as a singsong voice, the strange-tasting brain tissue that grew in a cortex around the heart, the leaf-grinding teeth in the undermouth that made great spearheads when sharpened.
Eater-of-Grass built three hidden lairs. He pretended he was an ancient kzin, before language or iron or gunpowder, spraying and defending his territory. According to the Conservors that was the era when kzin fathers often ate their sons to keep down the competition. Wryly, he wondered how different it was today. Then a kzinrret hid her children and defended them fiercely. Kzinrretti still tried to be protective. He remembered his mother fondly—without her he would not be alive today.
When the lights came on one morning, green and yellow through the leaves, he lifted his ears to listen for kzin hunting parties but heard only insects and the fall of a branch. Broad leaves dumped their water. Swooping from one branch to another, a firg cackled every time it took to the air, visible because of the red scales down its back.
He sniffed—detecting no kzin smells—but he wasn’t alone. He could never pick up the scent of a Jotok, because of a Jotok’s ability to mimic any aroma, but a forest is full of clues. With nostrils flared, he was catching the tang of lush broken cells, sugar, acid, spice. The rind of the pop-spray. A Jotok was out there, eating fruit.
Yes—there he was, many eyes watching from a rocky ridge, one hand already around a branch ready to shoot himself up into the growth above, and far enough away to escape. Prey for today’s meal, perhaps. But the creature would be hard to track. Best to ignore him for now. But not totally.
Eater-of-Grass found a tree being garroted by a pop-spray vine and shimmied up the bark to tear off a bunch of ripe balls. The rind was tough but that meant nothing to a Jotok’s grinding molars. He placed the balls on a stump in sight of his prey and retreated far enough away to be out of fear’s range, trusting the animal’s natural curiosity to induce it to examine the offering.
He wasn’t quite sure how to spring a trap. This Jotok’s limbs had the bulk and shape of an adult, but the skin wore a youthful shine. The beast might still be too young to have intelligence, yet must be about the age at which its kind acquired (very quickly) kzinlike deductive powers, becoming both hard to catch and dangerous.
After eating the fruit-balls his prey didn’t move away. It sat on its mouth, watching him, elbows in the air. He approached and it retreated, he casually distanced himself and it followed—peculiar behavior for a wild Jotok. The animal was still there the next morning, much closer, sitting in the tree above him and watching.
He fed it again. “Some pop-spray for you, Long-Reach. Hai! Long-Reach!”
When he had retreated the required distance, it dashed to the ground to devour his offering, shoving the balls one at a time into its undermouth with a weird lateral chewing motion. All the while it stared at him with two eyes, focused one on the fruit, while the others jerkily kept a cautious watch on the neighborhood.
Then… “Long-Reach,” it imitated from a lung slit on one of the arms. “Long-Reach,” replied another arm.
Fan-like ears suddenly erect, the amazed kzin recognized what it was saying from his recent verbal exchanges with Jotok slaves. Its voices were musical, muting the hisses and gutturals of the Hero’s Tongue. He listened, fascinated, as the arms began to play with the words, chatting to themselves in harmony. “Long-Reach. Long-Reach. Long-Long-Long-Reach. Reach … Reach … Reach!”
It tittered, pleased with itself, shifted to the mockery of the chirping of various insects, then sat down to await the orange-yellow kzin’s response.
“Come here, Long-Reach,” he said in his most ingratiating manner. “Stupid animal, I want to eat you.”
“Want to eat you. Want to eat you,” it replied.
How remarkable, he thought. He had found a Jotok in transition. Jotok-Tender had told him that if he fed one of the beasts at this stage, it would follow him around and imitate him. The Jotok were very peculiar, indeed; children were not raised in a family, they had no household keep, no patriarch, no mothers, no brothers to terrorize them, no teachers, no discipline, no toys, no warrior games. They just grew up in the forest, and when an adult wanted a family he just took a trip to the forest, picked out a healthy youth who had managed to survive and took him home.
The transitional Jotok was “programmed” to bond to whoever adopted it. Unfortunately for the Jotok race, the transitional mind, having evolved on a planet where the Jotoki were the only intelligent life form, couldn’t easily differentiate between an adult Jotok and an adult kzin. Any intelligent parent sufficed. Thus they made excellent slaves.
Days later Long-Reach was still following him around, no longer afraid of its kzin parent at all. Astonishingly, it had acquired a vocabulary of more words than it could count on its five-times-five thumbs. He tried to remember himself as a small kit; certainly he had never learned the basics of the Hero’s Tongue in so short a time.
After catching a rodent to eat, and being astonished when Long-Reach promptly dashed off into the woods and came back with another rodent, he became challenged to find out how much he could teach the creature. Could it learn to use tools? He sharpened a stake with his knife and handed the blade to one of the five arms.
“Long-Reach, now you try.”
“Long-Reach, try.” The Jotok didn’t succeed. It wailed in consternation, but wouldn’t return the knife to Eater-of-Grass, demanding the right to continue to try. Half a day later it was still trying, by then more pleased with itself. The stake was sharp, if very short.
The kzin youth became delighted with the absurdity of their relationship. He found himself struggling up trees, which sometimes tottered under his weight, to gather delicacies for his Long-Reach, while Long-Reach got tangled in the underbrush chasing rodents for him. He no longer thought of Long-Reach as a meal, or even as an “it.” What he appreciated most was that Long-Reach never slept—at least one arm was always awake, watching for danger.
There were dangers. The wild Jotoki, who had passed through the transitional phase without being adopted, were antisocial beasts, protective of their territory, and, though hunter-shy in the daytime, were vicious at night. They had no language or learning, but were quite capable of inventing tools and devising intricate revenges for remembered transgressions. They knew that the kzinti were their enemies. They backtracked to deceive, they laid traps, they played jokes.
Of course, the worst danger was the kzin hunting parties.
Eater-of-Grass was amazed at how well Long-Reach knew the Jotok Run and how quickly he could take them away from danger. He was a very useful companion.