"The Hollow Moon," said Chorth-Captain, waking them.
The purring of the gravity-planer had ceased. The panels opened. Chorth-Captain gestured and they followed him out. The Protector came behind them.
Gravity changed abruptly. This was less disorienting for Dimity and Vaemar than it would have been had they not spent years with kzin gravity-technology. Since both knew something of the Hollow Moon it was easy to work out their situation.
They were in a compartment on the inner surface. There was a great concave roof above them, vanishing into blackness overhead, and a concave floor at their feet, but so partitioned and divided that it was impossible to see far. There was a diffuse light. The ship they had travelled in now looked like a stony spheroid. Its surface sparkled here and there with quartz-like chips that they guessed were miniaturized cloaking-generators. Held by gravity anchors, it stood within a translucent tube, one of several, on a landing pad such as was more-or-less standard for small spacecraft in the Serpent Swarm Asteroids. Above it was a hatch, now closed, obviously leading to the surface and space. There, too, was the glowing blue dome of a Sinclair time-acceleration field.
Some of the machinery around had, for both human and kzin, an alien look. But much of it appeared to be kzin military and naval equipment, either standard or modified. There were kzinti control consoles, close to standard naval models, and banks of screens, some blank, some with idly moving data. To Vaemar, they might almost be inside a kzin space station, though he knew more about this from Reserve Officers' intelligence courses than from his own experience. There was a nest of gravity-sleds, the kzin all-purpose transporters, which he had used often. Both took it all in fast. Gravity technology, Sinclair technology, Cloaking technology already better, or more compact, than anything we have. And now they are after the Hyperdrive! Chorth-Captain led them into another compartment.
A smell of Morlock struck Dimity, repellent even to her weak human nostrils. What she saw reminded for a moment of a hospital ward. A row of creatures lay on beds. Quasi-humanoids with swollen bellies. Morlocks, gorged on tree-of-life, beginning the change into Protectors. Dimity felt a stab of panic. She clutched at Vaemar's arm. "There is tree-of-life here!"
"You do not need to fear, monkey," said Chorth-Captain. "It is gone. It has been ingested. Before we flew we signalled to those here that we had you, and for the process to begin. These will have teachers when they awake. And there will be builders for the superluminal drive."
"Those here." Plural, thought Dimity. We have at least four enemies. The odds are against us anyway, and they will be worse soon. I can make sense of things in that realm where mathematics and metaphysics come together, but I cannot fight a kzin, let alone a Protector. And there are forty more here, beginning to change.
There, under a cold blue light in the corner, were other still silent forms: dead, dissected humans and kzinti. So, thought Dimity, the process of learning about other species has already begun in a practical way. She indicated it to Vaemar with a roll of her eyes and twitch of her Wunderlander aristocrat's ears.
Four more Protectors entered. They glanced briefly at Vaemar and Dimity and turned to the changing Morlocks. Dimity noticed again that they were laid out in four rows.
"Are they their children?" she asked Chorth-Captain.
The big kzin raised his ears in a gesture of assent. "Each cares for his own children."
"And the other Protector? Your ally?"
"He is childless. He came upon the tree-of-life first, and later we exposed others. They brought their children here, and waited. Why do you wish to know?"
Dimity began a retort, and bit it off. Her relationship with the untypical Vaemar had almost made her forget the hair-trigger temper of kzintosh in what she supposed must be called their natural state, particularly in their dealings with humans. She had never lived on kzin-occupied Wunderland, but knew that a human there who answered a question from a kzin with another, rhetorical, question, or in a formulation that smacked of sarcasm or irony, would have been lucky to keep tongue, face or life.
"I will be a more effective teacher, if I know the beings I am teaching."
Chorth-Captain inclined his own ears again. Apparently he accepted her explanation.
"And if I am to teach, I must have access to a knowledge base."
"That is anticipated. Come," Chorth-Captain said.
He led Dimity and Vaemar into another chamber nearby. They passed a couple of sealed passages, and dark tunnels with an old look about them. Only a small part of the hollow moon seemed to have been restored as living space. There was a chair for each of them, and two computers, based on kzin military models, but with what they guessed were Protectors' improvements, each with a keyboard adapted for their respective hands. "You may prepare your lessons," said Chorth-Captain. He was also carrying the suit, much ripped and of questionable use now as a garment, which he had taken off Dimity, and her boots. He dropped these on the floor and then gestured at Vaemar. "When the door is closed you may free him," he added.
He passed Dimity a tube, like an old-fashioned tube of toothpaste, and backed out. A door flashed shut behind him.
Dimity squeezed the contents of the tube over Vaemar's bonds. They foamed and dissolved.
Dimity looked desperately for a writing instrument. There was nothing. She took Vaemar's hand and pressed out one of his razor claws. She scratched on her arm. "They listen." Like most humans on Wunderland she had anticoagulants added to her blood and it dried quickly.
Vaemar raised his great eyes to the ceiling, then pointed to the tiny eyes of cameras. "They watch," he said. "They must hear what we say. Unless we do or say nothing, we must accept that fact."
"If they have been watching Wunderland television," said Dimity, "they probably know all the languages we do."
"I studied the history of Human International Law," said Vaemar. He added casually "Loquorisne Latinum?"
"Yes," said Dimity in the same language. "But it won't frustrate them long. Too logical and consistent. They'll translate. And they are bound to be recording us now."
"All the same, we have a little time to talk," said Vaemar. "Time is against us anyway for other reasons as well. How long will it take those Morlocks to change?"
"I don't know. No one knows much about the Pak. In a Sinclair field they could speed it up. But the fact that they are not using Sinclair fields for that purpose suggests the time may be variable."
"How do we stop them? How do you anticipate what they will do?"
"Wunderland has war-geared defenses," Dimity said. "If you were a Protector, what would you do?"
"I cannot think like a Protector, but here is one scenario: seize Tiamat. You agree that would be possible."
Tiamat was a roughly cylindrical asteroid of the Serpent Swarm, about fifty kilometers by twenty. It was an administrative center and military base of the Swarm and was heavily industrialized for space industries as well as a major production center for weapons and IT. It was also a research center for the Swarm. As the main site of the Swarm's experiment in commensualism it had a kzin community with a limited degree of self-government at "Tigertown" and some kzinti working with humans. Both Dimity and Vaemar had been there several times.
"For forty and more trained Protectors? Easy!"
"That would give them factories tooled up for hyperdrive technology, and working hyperdrive ships," Vaemar said. "And all the gravity-control industries. It would also give them very heavy battle lasers and other military weapons installations. Tiamat is well-defended."
"Yes."
"But not well-defended against the kind of surprise attack Protectors could mount. Then, if I were directing their strategy, I would attack Wunderland and the other settled asteroids of the Serpent Swarm from Tiamat. And while Wunderland's defenses are busy, crash this moon or another into it.
"Morlocks fight by dropping on their enemies and hurling rocks down on them. This would be the same thing on a bigger scale.
"The Protectors could break the moon up on its way by controlled explosions so that the fragments would impact in a predetermined pattern and with predetermined force. That would be the end of human-and kzin-life on Wunderland. If all was not destroyed by the first impacts, it would be so shattered that the Protectors could finish off any remnants at leisure. But the Morlocks in the great caves could survive. With Tiamat, they would not need Wunderland's industrial centers. They could destroy the other asteroid settlements one by one. Many are still reduced by war-damage anyway. I do not think their defenses would last long against Protectors."
"I cannot fault your reasoning," said Dimity. "And then… how many breeders would they get from the Morlocks of Wunderland?"
"Their numbers were thinned in the war, but they are breeding up again, as I know from personal experience," said Vaemar. "Hundreds, at least. Thousands, I am sure. We do not yet know how far the cave systems go."
"The Sinclair fields! That is why they have them here!"
"Yes, of course! I should have seen at once! They can use the Sinclair fields to accelerate breeding! They could have thousands more breeders and thousands of Protectors."
"That would also give them the numbers for genetic diversity."
"It would give them the numbers for a double leap into human and kzin space," said Vaemar. "And another bad thing strikes me, one which this Protector has perhaps not realized yet but sooner or later must: you humans have put much effort into developing reproductive technology, though you do not exploit its full potential. A Protector with access to that would not need to have got all its children before the change. It could clone as many as it wished from its own cell structure. There would be no limit to their numbers!
"We kzinti have experimented with cloning. A band of celibate warriors, who had dedicated themselves to the Eternal Hunt, tried to breed without females once. Each cloned his own kittens. But the kittens were incurably savage and aggressive… Is that so amusing?"
"If a kzin hero calls them incurably savage and aggressive," said Dimity, "they must have been a problem indeed!"
"They were. But the point is that the inhibitions of your culture or mine about cloning would mean nothing to a Protector. Dimity, we must stop them now. The cost of our own lives is nothing in these circumstances."
"I know," said Dimity.
"Unfortunately, at this moment I cannot see how."
"Nor I."
"Why didn't the original Pak Protectors simply clone themselves?" said Vaemar.
"Perhaps they had no need to think in such directions," said Dimity. "Their mature bodies were so strong, long-lived and perfect that they did little to develop biological sciences. They didn't need to improve on what they had. All that we know of the Pak species' thinking was what Brennan picked up while he was a Pak's prisoner and told to the humans who he met later. But there seem to be some gaps in Pak thinking. Humans are more creative. And, from what little I know about them, Protectors are unable to cooperate with one another beyond the briefest temporary alliances. Further, our own science showed us long ago that cloning sapient beings is fraught with risks. It seemed to promise everything at first, but then we discovered the pitfalls.
"The Protectors' science as far as we know is exclusively military-oriented. Each cares only for his own blood-line. It seems their only stimulation and excitement is war. They could have been the greatest race in the galaxy, but their intelligence and instincts together locked them into a dead-end. Their single-mindedness virtually robbed them of free will. Even their spaceflight was stimulated by nothing but a desire to find new breeding grounds. No curiosity, no sense of wonder. No sense of anything beyond themselves. The kind of creature I yearn desperately not to be. When I had to read of them it horrified me, because I saw so much of myself in them."
"It is something to be horrified," said Vaemar. "Raargh told me that to be aware of horror is an early step to knowledge. Know horror and you know glory. Know fear and you know courage."
"You understand the human idea of the knight, Vaemar? The ideal, I mean."
"I trust so. I have read much human history. It fascinates me that the knight should emerge from the dark ages, as it fascinates me that Roman order, Greek art and thought, could combine with barbarian vigor to build an order that would take you to the stars. Was it like that with other star-faring races, I wonder, races that did not have the Jotok as we did? But yes, I know of human knights. Some kzinti are like that too, but not many, and as you would expect, not quite the same."
"Can you imagine Pak knights, crusaders, chivalrous champions of some cause beyond ensuring more breeders?" said Dimity. "I cannot. I loved Nils because he, for all his lack of self-awareness, had something of the knight in him. I never saw what he did in the war, of course, Leonie had all of that… The Pak were-it seems are-little more than gene-carrying machines, breeding and fighting and crossing between the stars for no end but reproduction. Trapped by their own brain structure. Trapped, as I fear most of all to be trapped."
"Can we use that, I wonder? There are at least four blood-lines here."
"With the childless Protector to keep them in order."
"Yes. He is our prime target."
"Target? You have high hopes, Vaemar-Hero."
"A Hero does not need hope, Dimity-Human."
They logged onto the internet with the computers supplied. As they had guessed, they could receive but not send data. Dimity and Vaemar were both clever with computers, and they spent a lot of time trying to circumvent this.