World Of Ptavvs   ::   Нивен Ларри

(Would an amplifier boost the Power of a slave brain? He pushed the thought aside again.)

The far future was bleak at best. He was the last thrint; he couldn't even breed the real Kzanol to get more. Yes, he would be master of an asteroid belt and a heavily populated slave world; yes, he would be richer than even Grandfather Racarliw. But Grandfather had had hundreds of wives, a thousand children!

Kzanol/Greenberg's hundreds of wives would be human slaves, as would his thousand children. Lower-than-ptavvs, every one.

Would he find «women» beautiful? Could he mate with them? Probably. He would have to try it; but his glands were emphatically not Kzanol's glands. In any case he would choose his women by Larry Greenberg's standards of beauty- yes, Greenberg's, regardless of how he felt, for much of the glory in being rich is showing it off, and he would have nobody to impress but slaves.

A dismal prospect.

He would have liked to lose himself in memories, but something held him back. One barrier was that he knew he would nevermore see Thrintun the homeworld, nor Kzathit where he was born, nor Racarliwun, the world he had found and named. He would never look at the world through his own eye; he would see himself only from outside, if ever. This was his own body, his fleshly tomb, now and forever.

There was another barrier, a seemingly trivial matter. Several times Kzanol/Greenberg had closed his eyes and deliberately tried to visualize the happy past; and always what came to mind were whitefoods.

He believed Garner, believed him implicitly. Those films could not have been faked. Copying an ancient tnuctip inscription would not have been enough to perpetrate such a fraud. Garner would have had to compose in tnuctip!

Then the bandersnatchi were intelligent; and the bandersnatchi were undeniably whitefoods. Whitefoods were intelligent, and always had been.

It was as if some basic belief had been shattered. The whitefoods were in all his memories. Whitefoods drifting like sixty-ton white clouds over the estates of Kzathit Stage Logs, and over the green-and-silver fields of other estates when little Kzanol was taken visiting. Whitefood meat in a dozen different forms, on the family table and in every restaurant waiter's memorized menu. A whitefood skeleton over every landowner's guest gate, a great archway of clean polished white bone. Why, the thrint hadn't been born who didn't dream of his own whitefood herd! The whitefood gate meant «landowner» as surely as the sunflower border.