 Who are the Chingsi?
Illustrated by Schoenherr The wind howled out of the northwest, blind with snow and barbed with ice crystals. It screamed over the top, whirled snow in a dervish dance around the hollow there, piled snow into the long furrow plowed ruler-straight through streamlined hummocks of snow. The sun glinted on black rock glazed by ice, chasms and ridges and bridges of ice. It lit the snow slope to a frozen glare, penciled black shadow down the long furrow, and flashed at the furrow's end on a thing of metal and plastics, an artifact thrown down in the dead wilderness. It's well on the cards that I'm all in one piece and not broken up at all, though I don't see how it could happen. If I were ten years older, it would have been an honor, being picked for the first long jump in the first starship ever. We got lined up between Earth and Mars, you'll remember, and James pushed the button marked 'Jump'. Two months later your time, one second later by us. Walking, talking natives on a blue sky planet with 1.1 g gravity and a twenty per cent oxygen atmosphere at fifteen p.s.i. The odds against finding Chang on a six-sun survey on the first star jump ever must be up in the googols. "The Chang natives aren't very technical—haven't got space travel for instance. We were able to show them our sun, in their telescopes. Look more like cats than people, but they're people all right.
 A race of cat-like humanoids from the planet Chang.
 The Chingsi are the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri.  A race of cat-like humanoids from the planet Chang.  Chingsi is what the people of China call themselves in this story.  The Chingsi are genetically mutated cats.