Slave (15 page)

While we were still fairly close to the town, we met quite a few other travelers, most of whom were either on horseback or in a horse-drawn vehicle of some kind. I thought it was interesting that a planet advanced enough for space travel would stick to such outmoded forms of ground transportation, but it did add considerably to the local charm and appeared to be much more enjoyable than walking—a fact that I brought to Cat’s attention on a fairly regular basis.

Poor Cat! He hadn’t had to walk very far in his Statzeelian boots up until then, and I could tell they were hurting his feet because he got slower and slower as the day went on—to the point where he was actually limping. I kept waiting for him to complain, but he never did. Finally I got tired of watching him suffer and made him stop.

“Boots too tight?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied in a rather clipped and irritated tone of voice. “But I have no others.”

“No shit, Cat!” I remarked dryly. “You were stark naked and barefoot when I bought you! Why didn’t you tell me they didn’t fit? We could have checked into getting some others before we left town, you know! But, have no fear, my dear Cat, for relief is at hand! I brought my Shoemaker in a Box with me. I never travel anywhere without it—well, not if I’m planning to do much walking and have the droid to carry it for me, that is. I’ve made more money off of this thing than just about anything else I’ve got.”

If I sounded excited enough to fire off my sales pitch, you must forgive me, for this little gizmo was one of the slickest inventions I’d ever run across. I’d found it on Taalus Geled, and what you did was, you took off your old shoes, set them down in front of the box, and then a beam of light scanned them. Then you scanned your foot (and leg if it was tall boots like the ones Cat was wearing) and put your old shoes or boots in the box.

About thirty seconds later you had a new pair, just like the old ones, only they fit you perfectly. All you had to do was add a bit more matter to the box if you needed a larger size or if the ones you had were full of holes. Any sort of matter would work, although adding some sticks of wood seemed to make shoes that held up the best. If you wanted a different style, there were a number of selections to choose from and you just scrolled the control to the ones you liked and pushed the button. I have no idea how it works, but with something like that you could, theoretically, recycle the same pair of shoes
forever. I’d done a booming business with it while I was hanging around Orpheseus waiting for the right slave to show up in the auctions there. Pretty cool, huh? Anyway, I doctored Cat’s feet and made him some new boots, and we continued on our way. Cat still limped a little bit from time to time, but I think he was just faking it so I’d rub his feet.

We passed no towns along our path, nor were there any inns along the road, though there were other roads that crossed ours from time to time. It seemed odd to me that there would be no such amenities so near a spaceport, but there’s just no accounting for differences in local customs. I assumed that any travelers along the road just camped out wherever they happened to be at nightfall and, fortunately, we had come prepared for that eventuality. My main concern was keeping the nocturnal beasties away and, while the droid had an anti-predator feature that worked by emitting a high-frequency sound that would keep them at bay, I hadn’t counted on the fact that Cat could also hear it. It just about drove him up the wall, so I had to turn it off.

Fortunately, that first night out wasn’t too bad as far as any bugs or critters were concerned. I had some repellent which seemed to work well enough—though it had been manufactured on an entirely different planet and was, therefore, intended to repel different species of insects—and we were able to sleep outside next to a gently flowing stream. Cat hadn’t been very talkative that day—mostly because his feet were hurting him, and then there was all the droid’s singing, which made conversation difficult at best—but that night he seemed
inclined to be loquacious. Stretched out on his pallet beside me on the bank of the stream, I could see him clearly in the moonlight—which was bright, by the way, since Statzeel had two moons—and if I’d been asked to come up with a more romantic setting, I don’t believe I could have done it. Aside from the sound of the flowing water, there were insects and other chirping critters out singing their nightly chorus to the moons and stars, and, for some reason, it got me to thinking about what the past few years of my life would have been like if I hadn’t had to go chasing Ranata.

Actually, I’d been thinking about it for the past several hours of our journey. Perhaps it was weighing on my mind because my quest seemed to be reaching the final stage at long last, and I knew that after this, my life—as well as Ranata’s—would undergo a significant change. All the searching, the bribing, the interro-gating—even fighting when I had to—all of that would now come to an end. That I was getting tired of it all didn’t matter because a mission such as that tends to give your life a purpose which, once it is removed, makes that life begin to seem empty, or even pointless. It had been a tough six years, perhaps, but it hadn’t been without its moments of exhilaration and excitement. The ups, the downs, the thrill of the pursuit that had kept me going, the promise I made to my father: all those things that had become so much a part of me were soon to be put behind me and laid to rest. When I thought of all the things I would have missed, all the strange places I wouldn’t have visited, all the odd creatures I would never have seen, it almost seemed worth it. That I would never have
met Cat was a given, and I hoped that, despite her suffering, Ranata might come to feel the same way some day; eventually seeing that this ordeal had been an inte-gral part of her life, shaping and changing her into the person she now was. It goes without saying that it can be rather difficult to see the bright side of six years of slavery, but if she was lucky, she might even begin to see that, though the past could never be changed, she might have grown stronger because of it.

The sister I remembered had been so young, so care-free, so certain of her allure and her own rosy future, and, while her ordeal might have changed her for the better, it was also distinctly possible that it had broken her completely. As I neared the end of my quest, I realized that I was afraid of what I might find.

Taken by the Nedwuts, she had been sold and traded many times over, hop-skipping across the galaxy like a rare commodity that couldn’t seem to remain in any one pair of hands for long. Greed at the price she would bring continually outweighed what it might have been worth for someone to keep her. There were other possible reasons for having been bought and sold so many times, of course—she might have been rebellious, or simply failed to please and then been passed on to someone else for a few credits. I’d been able to discover some of the prices she’d sold for, and it wasn’t always a huge sum, her value seeming to have fluctuated considerably over the years.

One previous owner had reported that she was more trouble than she was worth. He hadn’t gone on to explain why, and refused to answer any more questions when I pressed him to discover the reason. I suppose it might
have been that she was too weak or sickly, for she had never been strong. Not like Cat, who had been a warrior before being enslaved. He might not have been broken by all of the whips and chains, but how had she fared?

Oh, I’ll admit I was afraid to discover what had been happening to my sister over the past six years, but, surprisingly, I was also encouraged by what I had seen on my short sojourn on Statzeel. Of course, just what would happen once we found her was anyone’s guess, but, for some reason, the urgency to find her was beginning to fade. This might have been due to the fact that I had not, at least thus far, been witness to any mistreat-ment of the women of Statzeel, nor had I seen any women who appeared to be unhappy or downtrodden. I couldn’t imagine that slavery could ever be acceptable, but I hadn’t witnessed any public floggings, or, come to think of it, much of anything in the way of crime. It was a peaceful planet from what I had observed, and though the men did seem to get pissed pretty easily, the women were always able to calm them down.

This, alone, might have explained the sudden dragging of my feet, but there was another reason as well, and one that had been a thorn in my side all of my adult life. You see, that other reason was that I still had a pretty good idea that when we finally did find Ranata, Cat would be as taken with her as any other man, and I would be cast aside in her favor. I had no way of knowing just how steadfast and true Cat would turn out to be, and I wasn’t so sure I wanted to put it to the test. That Ranata might not want Cat never occurred to me.
I never told Cat about that fear, hadn’t even admitted to myself that I was keeping him at arm’s length because of it—this reason outweighing the loss of control which I generally avoided. I knew I wasn’t beautiful or alluring; never had been and never would be. The Exotic Beauty the makeup port had painted on me was a sham and I knew it. I couldn’t shake the sneaking suspicion that Cat was acting the way he had been only because I just so happened to be the one who was there to set him free and be kind to him. It wasn’t like he was in love with me or anything. He’d said he would stay with me, but he didn’t have to—after all, he was free to do as he wished.

I didn’t own him, didn’t have any claim on him whatsoever, and had no reason to believe that he would continue to stay with me forever. If my past track record was anything to go by, he probably wouldn’t, for no one else ever had, and while I might have been alone out of necessity to a certain extent, it was not completely by choice.

I suppose I could have hired a first mate to help me out, but I’d never met anyone I trusted until I met Cat. Perhaps it was because he’d been a slave and had come back to me after I’d set him free that made me trust him so much, or it could have been something inherent within him, though I couldn’t have said for sure. I did know that I liked being with Cat, and I didn’t think it was just because he was company after I’d been alone for so long. Sure, I trusted him, I was attracted to him, but to stay with someone forever required love—at least that’s how I saw it. Did I love him? Did he love me? I didn’t know the answer to either of those questions, but what I did know was that I would most assuredly miss him when he was gone.
That night as I lay on my pallet while night fell, listening to him tell me of his homeworld and its people, I knew that he understood why I hadn’t given up the search for my sister long ago. He understood what it meant to lose someone dear to him, and what a loss that must have been! I couldn’t begin to fathom how he must feel, knowing that he had not only lost his entire family, but the entirety of his species as well.

When I asked him about it, he replied, “I do not know that I am the only one. I have never seen any others, but that does not mean that they do not exist.”

Rolling over to face him, I gazed up at his intriguing face, now bathed in soft moonlight, and thought about what a loss it had been to the galaxy as a whole to be robbed of a species as beautiful and unique as this one must have been. It was a crime beyond measure, but no degree of punishment meted out to those responsible could ever restore Zetith and its people. In this case, the finality of death went far beyond the usual boundaries, for when a single person dies, generally speaking, there are offspring left behind to carry on. But not this time. Not with Zetith.

And, not having a mate of his own kind, Cat would possibly never even be able to produce any children of his own. The sadness of this fact was almost overwhelming to me.

“That’s true,” I agreed, “but, as far as you know, you’re the only one. You could search the galaxy for the rest of your life and never find anyone else, Cat! It’s got to be hard knowing that.”

“If it is hard, it is because I know that it could have been prevented. It was not a truly natural disaster. That is what I find difficult to accept.”
I did, too, but for a different reason. “You said it was an act of war, but also that the planet itself isn’t even there anymore. Why would anyone destroy an entire planet?

Most wars are fought to gain control over a disputed territory, so it just doesn’t make any sense to destroy a planet as well as its people. It’s as if they intended to exterminate your race, and didn’t give a damn about the world you lived on. Of course, I don’t understand why anyone would do that either. I mean, who could hate an entire civilization enough to do such a thing?”

“The Nedwuts?” he suggested. “They were the ones responsible.”

“Yes, but you didn’t even know what Nedwuts were until I told you, Cat! They weren’t the ones you were actually fighting, were they?”

“No,” he replied. “But we were besieged by more than one enemy.” He paused there, sighing sadly before continuing. “We were a strong race, but we could not fight them all.”

“But why, Cat?” I demanded. “Tell me why!”

“There were many theories,” he said. “But we never knew for certain, though their hatred of us was very strong.”

I’d heard of people who didn’t care for cats, but this was carrying it a bit too far! Then again, genocide was nothing new; this was just one of the few instances where the attempt to exterminate a race had come very close to succeeding. Then there was the abuse of Cat himself, both as a Zetithian and as a slave. I didn’t understand that, either.

“You know, I’m surprised those scumbag Nedwuts
haven’t had anyone try to wipe them out, too. If there was ever a race that needed killing off, it’s that one!”

Cat smiled knowingly. “You have reason to hate them, even as I do, but would you do that, Jacinth? Would you kill them all for what a few of them have done, giving them no opportunity to change, not even allowing those who might have been innocent to go on living?”

“Well, probably not,” I admitted. Then I thought about how alone Cat was, how abused he had been, and I wasn’t quite so sure…“I don’t know how you can be so damned noble about it!” I grumbled. “Honestly, Cat! You ought to ditch me and go after them!”