Free Man-Kzin Wars XIII-ARC by Larry Niven Page A

kept chattering at him anyway.
    “We have a full machine shop here,” she said, trundling in before her a gigantic walking frame, “and I had one of the machinists put this together for you. Your upper body simply isn’t strong enough for you to use crutches.”
    She grinned impishly at him. “Anyhow, Otto was worried you’d use the crutches for clubs. This walker is heavy—and bulky—enough that you’d have trouble lifting it.”
    The kzin had answered Jenni’s grin with one of his own, showing a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth. For a moment, Jenni was delighted. Then she noticed that his hackles had risen and his ears were folding tight.
    “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make you feel defensive. Funny, funny . . . Big, mean you reacting because little me shows you my flat, boring omnivore teeth. Really, I wonder that enough kzinti survive to adulthood for you to put armies into the field.”
    He glowered at her. Defiantly, she gave him a closed-lipped smile.
    “I have an idea,” she said. “Maybe you’d feel less defensive if you could talk to someone. Since you won’t admit you know Interworld, well, then, I’ll teach it to you. After all, it’s possible I’m wrong about your linguistic capabilities.”
    “However, first we need to get you on your feet. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to call in Roscoe and Theophilus. They’re going to help you stand upright. You, in turn, are not going to bite or claw either of them. I suspect you’re actually going to need to put your full concentration into balancing. You’ve been on your tail—quite literally—for . . .”
    She’d been about to say how long, then caught herself. “For quite a while.”
    Getting the kzin to his feet was easier than anyone but Jenni herself had expected. Even her medical staff tended to think of the kzin as a sort of furry human—when they weren’t thinking of him as a monster.
    Jenni didn’t make either of those mistakes. She thought of the kzin as what he was—an alien, descended from a race of predators, from a culture where even a show of teeth was considered a challenge that could lead to a fight to the death. Such a species would not survive very long if its members did not heal fast and cleanly.
    Still, Jenni permitted the others to think she was as surprised as they were. Best Otto did not realize how much closer to recovery the kzin was. She wasn’t really lying. Certainly the kzin had been able to stand, but he was still weak—she couldn’t resist the image—as a kitten. Certainly, he was far weaker than he himself had expected to be. His fingers had curled very tightly on the handgrips of the walker and he had shuffled forward as carefully as any geriatric case deprived of his float-chair.
    While they walked, Jenni had started very simple vocabulary lessons, focusing on concrete nouns such as “door” and “floor.” She avoided names. From the minimal information that had been gathered from humans who had escaped the kzinti and from the kzinti themselves, Names were a complex matter within kzinti culture.
    She wondered by what name or title her patient thought of himself, wished she could ask, but knew that he would never reply. That would mean admitting how much he actually understood.
    This first walking/language lesson session had not lasted long. The kzin had seemed relieved to get back into the hospital bed. The next day, he had to be hurting, but unlike a human patient who would probably have complained, he was evidently eager to try again.
    And so it went. Eventually, even the guards didn’t immediately tense when the gigantic orange-furred, black-striped creature went by, his pink, hairless tail twitching with the effort involved in every step. This was foolish, of course, because the kzin was far stronger and more mobile than he’d been on that first day he’d teetered to his feet, but humans were like that. The familiar was far less terrifying than the