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have it. Instead, she was assigned a postal drop and a new e-dress. She was assured her correspondence would be rushed to her. Needless to say, she had to agree to having all her correspondence—in-going and out-going—reviewed and censored.
    None of these conditions bothered Jenni. Her last serious relationship had ended in an argument over silicon-based life forms—specifically as to the likelihood thereof and would humanity even recognize such unless they bashed into or rolled over our collective feet.
    Jenni’s family had long grown accustomed to hearing from her only through short notes on holidays and birthdays. Jenni didn’t doubt that her relatively introverted personality had been a major factor in causing Intelligence to select her over one of the handful of co-professionals who shared her esoteric interests.
    Time passed. Jenni settled happily into her new home. There, in addition to her new lab and extensive budget, she was given three assistants: Roscoe Connors, Ida Mery, and Theophilus Schwab. She rather suspected that at least one of them, if not all three, reported to Intelligence, but that didn’t bother Jenni in the least. After all, so did she.
    Not very long after Jenni was established in her new lab, she was given access to information that was unknown to the majority of humanity. What she learned about the Slavers and Protectors was fascinating, but since both these ancient races were unlikely to ever interact with humanity, what she learned was also largely inapplicable to the current problem.
    More importantly, Jenni was also sent files containing raw data taken from study of wrecked kzinti ships. (There was no other kind. The kzinti did not surrender.) She voraciously read this material, then set Ida Mery to constructing data bases. The one thing Jenni refused were files containing speculations about the kzinti.
    “Such information,” she explained, “would pollute my own conjectures. Perhaps later, but for now give me raw data. If my conclusions match those of other researchers, all the better for you.”
    So Jenni was sent raw data, some of it very raw indeed. First there were tissue slices, already mounted on slides. Later there were entire limbs, flash-frozen and untampered with (beyond, of course, the circumstances that had contributed to the death of the source in the first place). Eventually, she was sent whole corpses—or mostly whole. Kzinti extended their violent natures to themselves, suiciding rather than accepting surrender or capture. Therefore, the corpses Jenni received were rarely all in one piece.
    Here her practical medical experience—for she had worked both as a diagnostician and a surgeon, archaic skills that had all but died out with the coming of the autodoc—came in very handy. She dissected corpses, humming as she inspected organs and bone structures, comparing these to other samples.
    From her studies she slowly built a database representation of a “typical” kzin. She discovered that—at least among humanity’s attackers—there was minimal variation within the species. Kzinti seemed closely related as the “races” of Europe had been closely related. Certainly, there was no such variation as there had been between, say, an African pygmy and a strapping Nordic Viking.
    Kzinti males (she had yet to see the corpse of a female) were uniformly large—almost three meters tall. Their fur was usually a deep orange, adorned with a variety of tabby patterns that ranged from tigerish black on dark orange to paler orange on marmalade orange, to almost yellow stripes also on orange, although in this last the undercoat was sometimes of a pleasantly pale hue. Their long tails were pink and hairless. Their ears were complex, furling and unfurling in response to a wide variety of stimuli.
    Yet, despite the human tendency to call the kzinti “cats” or “catlike,” kzinti were no more so cats than humans were monkeys. Jenni went out of her way to stress this in her