Man-Kzin Wars XI, Hal Colbatch [story books to read .txt] 📗

more to it than that. After the building collapsed he was under the burning, smoldering, wreckage for a long time. There were other priorities in damage-control and rescue. While he was there the zeitungers got to him. They had been in the cellarage there, too, like your rats. Whether they could reach him physically to tear what was left of his flesh I don't know. But they tore his mind, for days. You can imagine that, now."

I could. Not the cruelest human being, I thought, who had experienced the zeitungers could but feel a throb of pity for this creature of a pitiless species. This wreck of a kzin and I had something in common, I thought.

"The effect, as far as I can tell, on human and kzin minds is parallel," Gale said. "What do kzinti fear? Many things, secretly. But to fail as Heroes perhaps most of all."

Even, perhaps, those far-off dreams of glory were something this lowly kzin and Arthur Guthlac the museum guard had shared.

"They lodged their poison deep in his mind," she went on. "He was there with them too long. And you see the state he was already in." Kzinti, even nontelepaths, had that rudimentary telepathic sense more acute than that of nearly all humans. More receptive. I had no difficulty understanding that a prolonged zeitunger attack, setting up patterns and paths in the brain, would be a different matter to the brief one I had endured. And the zeitungers themselves would presumably then have been filled with animal fear and panic. I tried briefly to imagine an unremitting zeitunger attack if one was already desperately injured and mutilated, blind, trapped, alone, helpless, in agony, hour after hour as fire crept closer. After a very short time I stopped doing that. Again, as I stopped shaking, the wan ghost of a smile crossed her strained face. This Wunderland woman was at least as tall as me, and our eyes were level. "Unlike your case," she said, "there was no treatment." Our faces moved together and I found myself kissing her again, gently, tenderly.

"Yet that," she went on after a moment, "may be another reason he struggles to live. To die of such shame and despair would be a victory for the zeitungers."

"Why has he had no modern treatment since?" I asked. "For anything? Body or mind?"

"Treatment? How?"

I did not understand everything yet, but I wanted to be gentle with her. At least some of my ghastlier and more grotesque fears and suspicions about her and this kzin seemed wrong. I put my arms around her and stroked her hair and after a moment she rested her head on my shoulder, hiding her face against me.

"I know an old kzintosh warrior, Raargh, who has many wounds from the war," I told her. "One arm and one eye are not his own, and his knees are metal. His scars are honored and honorable among the kzinti. There are kzintoshi with sons"—was I babbling a little now?—"who point them to the likes of Raargh as Heroes to emulate. But he had his wounds in battle."

"Then he is fortunate among the kzinti. This one they would despise. Or so he believes."

"But your kzin could have a better life," I told her. "Far better. There is good surgery. Transplants, prostheses, quick nerve, bone and tissue-growth are available now. For kzinti as well as humans. His mind, too, perhaps. There are facilities . . .

"Raargh lives well enough, even as kzinti count such things," I went on. "In hunts he pulls down game with his prosthetic arm and his artificial eye allows him to see in the dark." When I thought of Raargh I knew again that I felt rather more warmly to him than to most of the creatures. I remembered certain things that had happened in the caves. "He has adopted a youngster who is his pride and joy and I think he is getting more sons of his own."

"In the city hospitals, perhaps, and for the Herrenmanner and their clients, there is such treatment," she replied, raising her eyes. "What money do we have for that?" I remembered what a backwoods part of Wunderland this was.

"And who would help a kzin?" she added after a moment, with genuine puzzlement in her voice. "The kzinti have no power. On this planet they are destroyed. And I was no collaborator. I did my part to destroy them."

"It costs nothing," I said. "Part of the terms we offered the kzinti on this planet when we made peace was that their wounded would be treated."

I saw her face change.

"I did not know that!" Her face lit so that she looked a different person. Then it fell again. "But how would we get there?"

Explaining the new political situation in the cities would have taken a long time. I owed this deformed kzin little enough, thinking of what the kzinti had done to me and mine. But I owed Gale. If she had done nothing but save me from the zeitungers, I would have owed her. Anyway, she was a beautiful and desirable woman and, it seemed, an innocent one. And if I felt dawning love for her, along with desire, I suppose I also wanted to impress her. I took the identity-disk from my neck and passed it to her, my fingers twining round hers as I did so—a strange situation for lovers to be courting!

"You see my rank? I am a brigadier general attached to the UNSN general staff. At present on leave. But I can arrange transport for him . . . and you."

I had become embarassed by my earlier behavior. Now I was embarrassed by her reaction to my words. She went down on her knees and clasped my own. She kissed my hands, where the previous night she had kissed my lips. Her face was like a light of joy. I raised her to her feet and, holding her, walked with her to the window. Together we looked out.