Arthur Guthlac, Wunderland, 2427 a.d.
I've been stupid, I thought. Being stupid on a strange planet is very often an effective way to be dead. Even a planet as friendly to Man as Wunderland.
Stupid to go through fifty-three years of desperate war to die on Wunderland seven years after Liberation in a bad storm, on a leave I've spent a long time looking forward to.
But maybe I won't die, I told myself then as the mud fell and slid about me. Maybe I'll look back on all this one day and laugh. I've been in far worse places and survived. Keep climbing, disregard my ankle and get above the flood-mark. Then climb higher. I didn't know then what I was climbing into.
I had set out from Gerning in an air-car for a day's lone hunting in the wilder country to the east. I hadn't brought much in the way of food or clothes or even weapons. What's the point of a hunt with modern gear that gives the game animals no chance? You might as well zap them by laser with the aid of a satellite camera. I had an antique . 22 rifle and a box of bullets and a handy little device copied from the kzin trophy-drier for anything I wanted to freeze-dry and bring home.
There was a good autodoc in the air-car, of course, and a modern communication system. My headquarters could get in touch with me, and I with them, at any time. I hoped they wouldn't.
A long, long time ago, I had been a museum guard on Earth. I had worn a quaint uniform and collected banned scraps of militaria and had also dreamed of exploring distant worlds-had hoped more realistically that with some saving and luck I might one day get a budget package holiday to the Moon to remember for the rest of my life like some of my lucky fellows on the museum general staff. There had been notions of glory and heroism, too remote, too impossible even to be called dreams, barely possible to hint at even to my sister, the one human with whom I had in those days confided. Now, if I wore uniform, it was different and had a star on the collar. But, more importantly for me at that moment, I had humanity's first interstellar colony to make free with as a conqueror-well, as a Liberator, certainly-and I didn't want to waste the experience.
A pity nobody at Gerning had told me about the weather. Apparently-that is the most charitable explanation-it had never occurred to them that even a holidaying flatlander would be so ignorant or stupid as not to know what those black-and-silver clouds building up in the west meant. The ramscoop raid from Sol by the UNSN seven or eight years ago, shortly before the Liberation, had, it was said, as well as causing terrible damage, upset the patterns of the weather. Storms in the storm-belt came earlier and stronger. Something to do with the cooling and droplet-suspension effects of dust in the air. It was expected that things would return to normal eventually. As I had been preparing to depart my hosts had been more interested in laughing at a funny little thing called a Protean that had turned up in the meeting-hall, a quaint and harmless Wunderland animal which had evolved limited powers of psi projection and mimicry. That there were less harmless ones with psi powers I was to find out shortly.
Anyway, the clouds built slowly, and, like a cunning enemy, they gathered out of the west, behind me. I took off near noon and three-quarters of the sky was clear. I flew low, not at even near full speed, over the farmlands and woods, fascinated as always by what I saw below. Much of the time I left the car on auto-pilot, and enjoyed being a rubber-necking tourist. With the kzin-derived gravity-motor, so much more efficient than our old ground-effect lifts, I could vary the speed and height with the touch of a finger on the controls. The car gave me a meal, and the day turned into afternoon.
I passed over human farms and little scattered villages and hamlets. The simple dwellings of people living simple lives, far away from much government and from much of the twenty-fifth century. I knew many of these people had originally settled here with the simple life in mind, but then the war and kzin occupation had knocked their technology way back into the past anyway. Some of these settlements were again prosperous, pleasant-looking places from the air, but there were some desolate ruins, relics of the war and the occupation that had halved the human population of this planet. I passed over the scattered wreckage of destroyed war-machines and the kzin base, and the great tracts that the kzinti had had go back to wilderness as hunting preserves. Humans had often enough been the victims set running hopelessly in those hunts… Many more had died under the kzinti in other ways.
But ghastliness was relative. The Gerning district had largely survived. After the first hideous butcheries the local humans had learnt kzin ways, and their survival-rate had increased. They humbly avoided contact with their overlords, abased themselves when they encountered them, and sweated on diminishing land with deteriorating equipment to raise the various taxes that were the price of life. The local kzinti, many attached to the big military base, had, apparently, not been quite like the creatures of the dreadful Lord Ktrodni-Stkaa, and the local Herrenmann had been able to intercede with their commanding officer occasionally. I had gathered that there were a few kzinti still living in remote bits of the black-blocks around the area now, as well as solitude-seeking, eccentric or misfit humans. Wunderland was sparsely enough populated that anyone who wished to be left alone could be.
There were herds of cows and sheep passing below. On Earth I'd never seen them free-ranging like this. Wunderland creatures, too. There were a herd of gagrumphers, the big, six-legged things that occupied an ecological niche similar to that of bison or elephants on Earth, moving in and out of the marvelous multicolored foliage, red and orange and green. Then the human settlements thinned out, and I was passing over forest again, and uneven ground with a pattern of gullies and water-courses below me, small rivers low at the end of summer like silver ribbons. The roads were few and narrow.
This was what I had once dreamed of: the landscape below me could never be taken for Earth. Every color and contour was different, some things slightly and subtly off, some grossly strange. And ahead of me as I flew, on the eastern horizon, were the tall spires and pinnacles of great mountains, low-gravity-planet mountains sharper and higher than anything Earth had to show, pale and almost surreal against the blue and pink tints of the eastern sky.
I should have noticed how quickly it was getting dark. But there, below me, was something else: a tigripard, the biggest felinoid-the biggest native felinoid-predator in this part of Wunderland. Their numbers had built up during the kzin occupation, partly because of the general chaos and desolation, and also because the kzinti found their fellow-felinoids rather good sport in the hunt and encouraged them, and they remained a nuisance for these backwoods farmers with their still relatively primitive appliances and equipment. What modern machinery the kzinti had not smashed or confiscated during the war had largely become inoperative through lack of maintenance and the farmers were in many cases beginning again from Square One. I saw some ancient farming robots sprawled broken like the corpses of living things or, on one long-abandoned farmstead, jerking and grubbing uselessly through degraded programs that no longer made sense. The further one got from Gerning the fewer the little farms and cottages were and the more backward they looked. Nothing like Earth farms.
The tigripard was a big one, worth a hunter's attention. But there was no sport or achievement in shooting it from above. I followed it for a time, not approaching close enough to alarm it. That was difficult. I guessed that in the last few decades all Wunderland creatures had become only too alert to terror and destruction from the air. The tigripard was running down a long slope to lower-lying, river-dissected, territory. A moving map on the instrument-panel gave me a general picture. I saw it leap a river-a big leap, but the river was low. The human settlements were much sparser in this area but there were still a few and there was still quite good grazing for animals. The locals should thank me for ridding them of a dangerous piece of vermin, I thought. There was very little legal hunting on Earth-even a UNSN general would find it hard to get a permit there-and I was a completely inexperienced hunter. At least of things like this.
We were approaching a more deeply gullied, poorly vegetated area like a small badlands. The tigripard turned into a gully and tracking it became more difficult. After a time I landed and, hefting my little rifle, followed on foot.
That was the first stupid thing: I was so used to military sidearms that could bring down a kzin or a building, that sought their own targets, and could be used like hoses against kzin infantry if necessary, that I took it for granted the. 22 was all I needed. Another stupid thing: I was so used to thinking of my alien enemies as eight-to-ten-feet-tall bipedal felines or blips on a radar screen that I found it hard to think of a feline the size of a tigripard-even a big tigripard-as dangerous to me personally. It was quite a long descent to the watercourse at the bottom. There was a small game-track at first but that petered out. The gully's walls gradually rose above me, reducing my view of the sky.
I scrambled down to the bed of the watercourse, jumping easily further and further down in the low gravity, looking for tracks in the damp sand and mud beside the stream. There were none. I pressed on, into the next gully, almost like a small canyon. It wound and twisted and still the mud yielded nothing. I was practicing my tracking skills when two things happened: the tigripard leapt up onto a rock in front of me, snarling, and the sky turned black.
I've had plenty of infantry training, even if quite a while ago. I brought the gun up fast and fired. In that space its report was ridiculously small, swallowed up by the air around. The tigripard was faster. If it had gone for me I should probably have died under its claws then and there. But evidently it was experienced enough to be wary of Man, or at least of Man plus weapons. It leapt sideways and disappeared behind the gully slope. Whether I hit it or not I had no idea. And at that second I had other things on my mind.
I had never seen a daytime sky turn midnight black before, and the light die in an instant. Who has? Wunderlanders who live in the storm-belt have, I discovered.
Then the rain and lightning came, the rain in solid sheets, the lightning hardly less unbroken. Thunder filled and shook the sky. I had seen the sky of Wunderland purple in the light of Alpha Centauri B, one of the great sights of Human Space. This flaring, vivid purple light was a different thing. In an instant I was soaked with freezing rain, my head was ringing and I was almost blinded. That's when I heard the tigripard again.
The tigripard knew Wunderland better than I. But it made the mistake of snarling its challenge before it leapt. I dropped flat as I fired again and its leap carried it over me. It was a very near thing, though: a hind-claw shredded the light shirt I was wearing. Below me the ground gave way, and I rolled down a steep incline. I fetched up bruised and dazed at the bottom. Had it not been for Wunderland's light gravity I would have been a lot worse off. And the tigripard and the fall had saved my life. As I got groggily to my feet again a bolt of lightning struck the place I been standing a few moments before. I saw rocks and earth hurled into the air, and then for a while I might have been blinded.
I could only hope the tigripard was at least temporarily blinded too, but I heard it snarling somewhere not far away. The skyline had become near and narrow and lightning was trickling all around it. There were the lashing hailstones, too. Any bigger and they would do real damage. Flicking my rifle back and forth, trying to cover all directions at once, I ran, still part blind, running straight into cliff faces, stumbling and falling to a ground that the cloudburst had already churned to mud, boiling up like soup. Live soup, too. I saw creatures like the froggolinas and kermitoids, I supposed long encased in it, springing to life and away. Three times I thought I saw movement that might have been the tigripard and fired at it. The fourth time I heard a snarling, very close, and knew there could be no mistake. But my rifle was so slick with water and mud, and my hands so cold in the sudden rain and hail, that the selector must have moved to automatic setting. I fired off all the rest of the magazine in an instant.
I groped for the box of cartridges. Had I brought it with me or left it in the car? I couldn't remember, but a frantic search showed I didn't have it now. If it had been in my pocket I had lost it in the fall.
I've studied many disasters. I know the worst of them usually don't have a single cause. They are an accumulation of small things, too small to guard against: a weather or meteor report misfiled by a tired duty officer, an alarm system not checked one day as it has been every day for years, a faucet blocked by paint, a decimal point shifted one place in a computer's instructions, a fleck of dust working its way into an old keyboard… I had got where I was in those gullies by an accumulation of small things, and, I realized quite suddenly, my life was in danger.
So far I had been excited, keyed-up, furious. Suddenly I felt cold and frightened: not the fear of battle, but another kind of dread. Not only from the tigripard, which seemed to have gone, perhaps hit, though I doubted that, perhaps to stalk me from cover, but from this rain. Great chunks of earth turned suddenly to mud were falling from the gully banks and I realized I could end up underneath one. But there was a more inevitable peril. One thing I know something about is the theory of terrain, and recalling what I had seen from the air, I knew these canyons must flash-flood in rain like this. I realized that I had seen high-water-marks in them, all well above where I was now. In fact, I thought, that was probably why the tigripard was gone. It was climbing, and if I was to remain alive I had better do the same fast.
I slung the rifle over my shoulder and started up the slope. It was hard to make much out in the ceaselessly-rolling thunder and the constant beating of the hailstones but I thought I could feel the ground as well as the air shaking. I was so covered in the mud I squirmed through, and in ice from the hailstones, that perhaps even the superb sensory equipment of the tigripard was confused and could not find me.
There was another thing I remembered: tigripards, though among the most obvious, were by no means the only Wunderland animals I had to fear. Among other things, very relevant at this moment, there was the mud-sucker, a thing vaguely like a giant leech, which, I had been told on the orientation course I was now remembering, could lie dormant in mud, like this, for a long time and then come to life in rain, like this rain. Apparently its prey included large animals, perhaps up to human size. "No one knows how big they can grow," the instructor had said. "But don't be the one to find out." Rykermann had also told me that, like much other Wunderland fauna, little was known about them. They gave cryptic hints of some kind of dim psi ability, and he too was definite that it was best to keep out of their way.
Another nasty thought: some of the wrecked war-craft which I had flown over on my way here had had nuclear engines. Could spilled radioactives have worked their way into this mud over the last seven years? Of course the car had instruments that could have told me at once.
Then the real floods came. Out of the west, and concentrating my mind. The rain must have been falling there and filling these water-courses long before the storm reached me. A real roaring and shaking of the ground and white-foam-fronted black water below me advancing like a wall. Hydraulic damming-I remembered the phrase from somewhere as I scrabbled upwards for my life in the slipping mud. I slipped and rolled again, ending up caught in a clump of sharp black rocks just above the rising water. I had damaged my leg some months before in the caves, but it had been healed. Now I felt it was gone again, in a different place, near the ankle. Maybe (I prayed) not broken this time. One small mercy: crawling, almost swimming vertically, up the mud-slope in the hail, an ankle was perhaps less crucial than when walking or running. Another mercy was the low gravity. But progressing up was very different from my carefree jumping downwards. Anyway, I got to a ridge. I tried to stand then, and found I couldn't. The. 22 made a sort of crutch, not very handy for it was the wrong length and either barrel or stock sank into the mud when I leaned on it. I more-or-less hopped a few yards.
I had to get back to the car. And then I realized I had not the faintest idea in which direction the car was.
I sat down in the mud and hail then, cursing feebly that I hadn't had the sense even to slip a modern cover-all into one of my pockets. It would have weighed next to nothing, taken up no space and would, if I had needed it, kept me as dry and warm as toast. It would even have been strong enough to protect me in a fight. I had put on locally made clothes for the sake of fresh air and ventilation on a warm morning, as well as because it was one of the things tourists do.
There were a lot of other things, which, if not misled by the benign appearance of the morning and my own excitement and inexperience of this world, I might also have brought: a gyro-compass, a locator, a beacon, even an ordinary mobile telephone, not to mention real weapons. I had plenty of navigation instruments and communications equipment, as I had a good autodoc and almost everything else I might need, but they were all in the car. I had an implant by which I could be traced if necessary, but there was no reason for anyone to think I was in great distress. If anyone was interested and they assumed I had enough sense to remain with the car and its equipment, then even a storm like this should have been no problem: a matter of touching a button and closing the canopy.
It took me a long time to make progress, and it horrified me how quickly what little daylight there was failed.
And the river was still rising. Chunks of mud were sliding and dropping into it from the sides of my ridge. And the ridge itself was shrinking. Soon it would be an island, and soon after that it would be covered completely. I would have to climb again. It was then that I fully realized how much my life was in real danger.
I was alone, lost, injured. And this was not my world. I knew something of its weather and its wild-life in theory, but I knew that in some ways, simply not having grown up here made me blind and vulnerable to dangers that others instinctively avoided, blind as a village yokel of the fifteenth century on Earth suddenly time-transported into a modern city or a modern transport complex. Where was the tigripard? I hardly dared move now, lest it sense from the pattern of my foot-falls that I was injured and come circling back. Indeed I feared I was already projecting psi waves to tell it I had changed from hunter to prey. But move I must. Before I had made much more progress it was full night, or at least the storm's equivalent of it. I had not appreciated what night was like in the unpeopled country where there was no artificial source of lighting. The clouds obscured everything in the Wunderland sky above, though far away in the West was a dim glow that might have been the lights of Gerning reflected against them. Far to the East it was lighter for a while, but then the clouds covered that as well. The almost incessant lightning was a danger, but soon it seemed to be my major source of light. It was not full night yet, and when I climbed higher I saw a distant ribbon of paler sky far to the east still, but full night was coming.
I climbed again. Glancing back once I saw the black rushing water tear away the last of the ridge where I had rested. The hailstones tore at its surface and lumped together into chunks of ice.
I knew that I was on what was technically a big island between two rivers, low and narrow when I had seen them from the air, now both grossly swollen and rising all the time. I recalled seeing houses not far away. I toiled further up the next sliding muddy slope, again using my weapon as a sort of crutch. It took me a long time, and my skin crawled as I waited for the impact of the tigripard on my back, and thought of the irony of dying under the claws of a feline after all. Then at some point the sliding mud became more stable and solid. My ankle was badly swollen but massaging it seemed to help, and out of the mud I could walk, slowly and cautiously. The rifle was some more use as a prop here, but I wished it had been a couple of feet longer. Again I was thankful for Wunderland's light gravity.
Below me, something writhed through the mud up the track I had left. For a moment I thought it was the tigripard. But as it came closer I saw it was a shapeless thing with a trumpet-like suctorial disk, the orifice ringed with small fangs and tentacles-a mud-sucker, a big one. I was feeling too battered and numbed to react for a few seconds, then fear and revulsion set me moving a good deal faster than I would have thought possible. It didn't like the firmer ground though, and after waving its trumpet in my direction for a time turned back, vacuuming up some of the newly active froggolinas as it went. I hoped it would find the tigripard-or did I? The tigripard was a brother compared to this thing, and deserved a cleaner fate.
You can imagine my delight when, as I gained some even higher ground, a burst of lightning showed me a road at my feet. More importantly, after I had followed this for a while, another burst showed the unmistakable straight lines of man-made walls and structures some way off. Another two or three flashes and I made out that there was a small village, a hamlet, I suppose it should be called. A single street and a few one-story houses. Shelter, warmth, food, help, safety. I hobbled on as fast as I could.
Realization didn't all come at once. First I noticed there were no lights burning. Then in the lightning flashes I saw roofless skies through gaping holes where windows had been. The hamlet was a deserted ruin.
If I was bitterly disappointed, I saw that it was still shelter of a sort. I know now why you should keep out of deserted ruins in this part of Wunderland if you're alone and can't see well, and if you're effectively unarmed. At that time what I wanted was to get out of the cold driving rain and hailstones at least. And I wanted a door to keep the tigripard out should it return, or even the sucker-thing whose hunting-patterns I knew nothing of. I found one building, the only two-story one, that not only had a door but also still had a bit of roof on it, and hunkered down in the driest corner I could find. I took off my clothes and shook as much water from them as I could, badly missing modern tough and water-repellant fabrics, dressed again, though the warmth they gave was largely imaginary, then curled myself into a ball in an effort to keep as much of that warmth as possible, and waited for the night and storm to pass. If the flash floods came quickly they should fall equally quickly. I was still worried that the tigripard was tracking me, but could see no sign of it.
In fact I fell asleep almost at once, without meaning to, but when I awoke nothing had changed. Certainly it was now full dark night even without the piled-up storm-clouds. But getting to sleep a second time was impossible.
One good thing had happened-like all UNSN troops I have had my night-vision enhanced by nanosurgery and now my eyes had grown accustomed to the dark. It wasn't perfect but I made the most of what light there was and in all but the darkest patches of night I was no longer completely blind and helpless.
I've had my skin toughened a bit too, but despite that it was still very cold and miserably uncomfortable. The sites of the injuries I had had in the battle with the mad ones in the caves a few months before were aching in concert with the pain in my ankle despite all the miracles of modern medicine, and something, I didn't then know what, was making me both more anxious and unhappy than I should have been.
I got up and set out to explore a little. Black as the night was, the almost continual lightning showed me the empty rooms, long ago stripped of furnishings, miniature waterfalls from the gaps in the remnants of roof and ceiling, and a broken staircase leading down into a cellar or shelter which I had no inclination to enter. I could hear water down there splashing into mud, and I had no desire to get involved with more mud or what might live there. In other rooms some small creatures that I could not make out clearly scuttled away as I entered. I remembered the poison-fanged Beam's Beasts and gave them as wide a berth as they gave me. As I expected, I found nothing useful. The house had been thoroughly stripped long before.
Was that a light I could see out the window? The hail slackened for a while. With that bit of clearing I could see further, and suddenly my spirits rose again. For there was, I saw between the lightning flashes, indeed a dim orange square of light some way off.
The tigripard must be far away. Surely if it was nearby I would know by now. Perhaps it recognized the. 22 as a weapon. Perhaps like so many larger wild creatures it avoided even the ruins of Man. I didn't know then that it had another good reason for keeping away from the house.
I wrenched down a splintered door lintel. A piece of it made a better crutch than my empty gun. Leaning heavily on it, I set off up what had been that hamlet's only street. A black silhouette grew around that orange square as I drew nearer: a bigger house standing by itself on a rise of ground. The light was an upper window.
There was a path leading to the door, but as I approached it more closely I realized things: the house was too big, the upper windows too high and small, while the ground-floor windows, where they occurred at all, were mere slits, and dark. The door was too high and wide. And, as I said, the light in that window was orange. There were other things about the architecture. This was not a human house but a kzin one. I looked back and saw how on its rise of ground it dominated the hamlet and gave a view of all the surrounding lands. This had been the mansion of the local kzin overseer of human slaves.
Plainly it had been slighted during the Liberation. I could make out, now that I looked, where the high walls and towers that must have surrounded it in the old kzin architectural style would have stood. Their rubble filled what must once have been a moat or ditch. I saw stumps of concrete and metal where defense and security installations must have been torn down. Behind the house were some large storage tanks, though I could not see whether or not they were intact. On the roof silhouetted against the sky in the lightning there was no sign of the dishes or antennas of modern communications equipment.
But that light burning now was ruddy orange. Not white or yellow. Only kzinti liked that orange light. Were there kzinti here still? It was quite possible. I knew that some of them still lived in the depopulated districts, shunning humans for obvious reasons, and this place, purpose-built and to their size, still relatively defensible, would be far more suitable for them than any others around. As I stood looking up at it I saw the silhouette of someone or something cross the lighted window.
Well, I would ask no shelter or favors from kzinti. Both pride and prudence said that. I was a soldier and I could stand an uncomfortable night in the ruins if necessary.
Trying to distance myself from the pain in my ankle, I hobbled back through the mud to the ghost-hamlet. For no particular reason I knew, save that it seemed the best-roofed and I had left the. 22 there, I returned to the first house I had entered and curled up in my former place.
Then the zeitungers came.
I didn't know then that's what it was. I had heard of the zeitungers, originally called the zeitung-schreibers, of course, but I had never encountered them. And what I had heard of them had given me no true idea of them or of what encountering a pack of them when alone at night and physically spent was like.
Humans and kzinti alike on Wunderland loathed them and would stop at nothing to exterminate them. Like the Advokats and the Beam's Beasts, however, they liked the ample food which they associated with human activity. No one had told me they were often to be found in the ruins of human buildings here, presumably because nobody thought I would be spending a night in such ruins. They were carrion-eating vermin like the disgusting Advokats but with, in addition, an ability to project psychic damage and distress which they used as a weapon, an especially potent one when they were packing. They didn't limit themselves to carrion. The zeitungers' mental emanations could make a small-brained animal-an Earth rabbit or dog, say-lie down and scream, waiting for them to mob it and tear it to pieces alive.
On a big-brained animal and especially on a sophont the effect was more complex. Cognitive dissonance, a combination of pathological anxiety, hallucination, hypertension and, above and beneath and overarching all, black, disabling, even killing, clinical depression-if "depression" is an adequate word. Wunderland creatures had evolved a certain resistance to the zeitunger power. Earth animals, and humans, had not. The creatures could apparently do nothing else mentally. They might be able to communicate among themselves-every member of a shoal of fish or flock of birds on Earth can turn in the same direction in an instant-but they were not telepaths. The only power their dim minds had was destruction.
All the meanings of darkness. There are two kinds of memories which, if you let your mind dwell on them too intensely in the wrong circumstances, can destroy your reason and you. We all have a store of them and they are in a sense opposites. Normally we can erect a kind of cordon sanitaire around them most of the time: one kind is of horror, trauma, tragedy present again and unbearable; the other is of joy, happiness, innocence, destroyed, violated and lost forever. They can combine. The zeitungers give you both, with a quantum jump in emotional intensity and immediacy. That happened.
It began like a dream. Word-salads. A brain beginning to race, like a vehicle going out of control. And a high, thin monotonous threnody wailing in my brain to the strings of a harp:
Till a man shall read what is written, So plain in clouds and clods; Till a man shall hunger without hope Even for evil gods…
Then very early memories of gardens-lost gardens. Myself a baby with toys in a nursery, laughing on my mother's knee-never had memory been so sharp and clear. Then reliving the death of my parents, that blow that came too soon and that I now knew had maimed me. Then like a bad, silly dream, I was reliving with a feeling of black regret my last day at school, the school I had hated, the realization that-all my own fault-I was leaving unqualified for anything but a life in a menial, dead-end job if I was very lucky, a lifetime on the dole more likely: there were far more people than jobs in the peaceful, prosperous, Golden-Age world I grew up in, long before ARM took notice of certain desperate messages coming in from lonely ships in space. I relived walking up the stairs to the assembly-hall and the class-rooms one last time that day, rooms and halls and passageways almost empty as the last of the others were leaving, wishing I'd worked harder, and thinking "It's too late now." As I say, silly memories to cast one into a black depression. But the zeitungers were just getting down to business. All the bad memories of adolescence and my young manhood… it went on.
Then it became waves of futile anger at everything: at myself, at the storm and at the people at Gerning who had not warned me of it. Then memories of every sad thing that had ever happened to me: my futile, dead-end, prewar job at the museum, my timidity and failures with women-all those latter came back in detail, from teenage onwards, until the time I finally retreated into an emotional shell with my sister Selina and some dreams as my only friends-my farewell to Selina before she went into space and the kzinti took her, my pathetic, childishly caressed, dreams of glory and success, the terror when my forbidden military studies were discovered by the museum authorities. More recently the loss of Jocelyn van der Straat. My one sibling dead, like my parents but infinitely more horribly, my one brief lover lost, disappeared.
As far as I felt anything beyond pain and pity for myself, and that falling, falling, it was a kind of huge, sick disgust for the human race, its murderousness, its greed, ingratitude, disloyalty and viciousness. Its self-importance and delusions of spirituality. The kzinti gave us the true measure of the universe: pure carnivores, with no concept of altruism or mercy. How could any of us, even me in moments of weakness, have thought differently? I found my mind running back to images of what must have happened to Selina when they got the Happy Gatherer. I thought of what had happened here on Wunderland when the kzinti invaded, and for a time my mind filled with lines from the "Dirge of Neue Dresden":
Oxygen supports combustion. Big fires need draughts to last. Hot air rises. Heated enough It rises very fast. There would be vacuum at the fire, except then, from every side the atmosphere implodes to fill it, and the draught is thus supplied. The heat increases, the wind increases, carries its fuel like a tide, travels at hundreds of miles an hour and topples walls in its stride…
There were other things I thought about. The decades of war had given my mind all manner of horrors to settle on. How stupid, I now saw, were the hopes that some humans caressed of some kind of eventual reconciliation between Man and Kzin! Even I, thanks to my association with the kzinti called Raargh and Vaemar, and Cumpston and some of the other humans I had worked with, had been wavering in that direction. It was all foredoomed wishful thinking.
Some humans talked of, praised, the kzinti's courage and honor, but that courage and honor, if those were not mere names we humans had projected onto the minds of aliens we could never understand, only made them more dangerous. I had seen in their military what looked like their devotion to duty, and their strength and resolution, more than I needed to: those qualities were as terrifying as anything else about them. Honor? What did that mean? There was nothing ahead but war to the knife, pain, bloody, terrifying death, till all were dead. Like the Slaver War of the ancient past. That was how life and the Universe were made.
Then it got worse. If you have experienced bad clinical depression you may know what I mean. Different in each person's case, and yet the same. A black dog ravaging. Black sea-weed in the brain. Poisoned ice. Something wrong at heart and lungs. It did not stabilize on one beach of desolation. It was like falling from ledge to ledge, each lower and narrower than the next, and a knowledge that quite inevitably a ledge was coming that would be the last and narrowest, and that after that there would be nothing but a pit below. No safety-net, no survival. And with physical nausea thrown in: they didn't miss that trick. There was plenty on my conscience, and I got it all. Those who had died because I gave the wrong orders, those who had died because I gave the right orders, those who had died… I have never actually heard myself moaning in mental anguish before.
Then three beings entered the room: two of them were kzinti I knew-Raargh, the tough old ex-sergeant, and young Vaemar. They must have come from the big house, I guessed. I had no idea they were in the Gerning district. But then, between them, was Jocelyn.
"Get up, silly monkey," said Raargh. "Come with us."
"There is no need for alarm," said Vaemar, in his precise, almost pedantic, English. "The situation is under control."
"Arthur," said Jocelyn. She stepped towards me, arms wide to embrace me. She was naked, and for a moment I thought she must be cold. Then I felt myself standing (or was I?) moving forward into her embrace, while the knowledge of the miracle of her existance and return to me began to flood into my mind. I cried out in wonder and joy. Then the two kzinti leapt at her, teeth flashing, ripping at her flesh. Jocelyn became Selina, dying when the kzinti took the Happy Gatherer.
They all turned into white skeletons and fell in clattering heaps of bone to the floor. They disappeared.
Then I lost all rational thought. There was only darkness and fear. The pit. A sense of suffocation. Darkness visible, despair physical, a dagger of poisoned ice in my chest.
I was sitting with my head buried in my hands, shaking, thinking of suicide-the idea had a tangible shape, something that entered my mind on spider-legs and squatted there-when I heard the distant snarl of the tigripard again. I raised my head from my hands.
The zeitungers were round me in a ring on the damp, dusty floor, eyes bright. They looked like very large Earth rats. There was the. 22 where I had abandoned it. I reached out, and the feel of the weapon in my hands, even though I knew it was useless, gave my mind a moment's revival. The zeitungers seemed to sense it, and retreated a couple of paces. Then the uselessness of it overcame me and I dropped the thing. They came forward again, and I saw their mouths opening in snarls that revealed their little fangs. In a moment, I knew, they would spring. There was nothing I could do about it. My brain was in such a state I would have welcomed them, as I was meant to.
The door flew open. A human figure leapt into the room. A red sighting spot appeared on one of the creatures' heads, and an instant later a laser cooked its brain. I don't know if the scream from it and the others was a physical or mental event or both. The horror they had filled my brain with was jerked about. Some of them sprang at the human, and the beam rifle cut them to pieces in mid-air. The others made for the cellar, and a good number died on the way. Then the survivors wheeled in a mass and made for the main door and the street. Few reached either. The human leapt after them. In the dim light from the doorway I recognized the contours of a kzin infantry beam rifle. It fired again, this time on another setting. A thin, incandescent jet of plasma-gas followed them.
I leapt back, bad ankle or not, from the blast of heat on my face, and came down on that bad ankle heavily, screaming and cursing. Good honest physical pain, good honest screaming and cursing. This was real. There were flames flickering now where the beam had hit inflammable material, and thick steam and smoke, but in that light I saw that my deliverer was a woman.
She dialed another setting on the rifle, and a jet of foam from it smothered the flames-the kzinti who had made it had learnt about house-to-house fighting. She came to me and put out her hand. I took it, and for a moment could only cling to it, babbling incoherently. Her hand was real, firm and solid. Then my brain seemed to clear. I apologized. The feelings of the last-how long had it been?-suddenly seemed largely unreal, as the nausea of sea-sickness suddenly seems unreal to a passenger ashore on dry land, or as a spacer leaving hyperspace forgets the blind spot. She lit a lamp, and shone it round the corners of the room. In its light I saw her properly for the first time. I vomited, and got to my feet. Like the recently sea-sick passenger, I was very unsteady.
She was tall like nearly all Wunderlanders, and handsome, or more than handsome, in a hard sort of way. The way she handled the heavy weapon-heavy for a human even in this gravity-told me she was strong. Her clothes were plain, and in the city would have been called drab, the everyday garb of the women I had seen on the farms of Gerning. They evidently repelled the rain, though, unlike mine.
"My name is Arthur Guthlac," I told her. "I'm from Earth. I've hurt my leg and I'm lost." Her face in repose looked strangely sad. Well, perhaps not strangely. On a large part of the population of Wunderland the tragic past lay heavily.
"My name is Gale. Do not be afraid. Or ashamed." She spoke a dialect of rural Wunderland, with some slightly old-fashioned constructions. "There were many zeitung-schreibers. I know what they can do. Now you had better come with me."
"Must I walk far?" I remembered my manners and made some sort of speech of thanks, still finding my voice hard to control.
"You're not free of it yet," she said. "It takes a while. I live at the big house. Not far."
The house with the orange light. That was the only big house and the only habitable-looking one. Well, if this woman lived there my previous thoughts about it being inhabited by kzinti were apparently groundless. Now that she had identified the zeitungers, and I realized the nature of the attack that had been made on me, I wondered if my previous fears of the place had simply been a product of their first mind-probes when they began gathering around me.
"The sooner you are warm and dry the better," she said.
That was certainly true. We stepped out of the ruin into the spectral street. Gale swept the rifle-barrel, firing once at an errant zeitunger I did not see and blowing it apart. Then she "broke" the butt open to replace the charge, extracting the old charge-pack.
The tigripard leapt out of the night as the lightning dribbled about us. Thunder drowned its snarl. Gale leapt sideways, a hand to her belt, something flashing in her hand. I had not seen a human move so fast. The tigripard's charge carried past her, past the spot where she had been an instant before. She struck as she leapt. It gave a scream of pain and rounded back on us, creeping towards us, belly close to the ground. Then she had the beam rifle together, one-handed, somehow, up and firing. The tigripard died in mid-spring. I saw that in her other hand she held an oversized knife, and as she wiped the tigripard's blood from it and returned it to her belt I saw it was a monomolecular-edged kzin w'tsai. I thought that I would not like her for an enemy, and I have been in some hand-to-hand combat.
She passed me the lamp and dialed the laser setting on the rifle down to provide an additional flashlight. The rain and hail were back in full force again, the visibility closing in.
I leant on her a little as I hobbled up the path to the house again. It had been, I guessed now, her silhouette I had seen crossing the window. But why that kzin-ish, murky orange light?
"How did you know I was out here?" I asked.
"I did not know that you particularly were here, but I sensed the zeitungers packing. A kind of psychic backwash reaches all minds around when that happens. Then the only thing is to go out and kill them all. Follow your thoughts, as it were, and they are easy enough to find."
This lady was mentally as well as physically tough, I thought. I did not know if I could have done that. She opened the door with a large electronic key. It looked too modern and hi-tech for this place. It also looked as if it had been made for larger hands than hers. kzin claws. I followed her in.
"Are you alone?" I asked. A stupid, perhaps lethally tactless, thing to say at a time and in a place like that, but I was not thinking clearly.
"I am a widow," she said. That was not remarkable. After fifty-three years of war and kzin occupation there were plenty of widows-and widowers and orphans too-on Wunderland. "But I am not alone," she went on. "There is a kzin in the house."
I was sure she was not bluffing about that as I stepped across the door. Not just the light, the smells. On Earth and in space I had been used to dwelling-spaces that cleaned themselves. On liberated Wunderland I had become used to more primitive standards. But this place smelt strange and disturbing. Not dirty, but not right. Partly it was the smell of poverty, which, once you have smelt it, you cannot mistake and cannot forget. There was also a smell like a field-hospital, a very primitive one, that did not have pleasant associations for me. But it also smelt of kzin. And that smell you cannot mistake or forget either. Perhaps, I had a wayward thought, she manufactured that smell artificially to keep human and animal intruders away more effectively than any pack of ban-dogs. But if I had had designs on her or on the house, and even if she had not been carrying the kzin weapons, absence of kzinti was not the way I would have been inclined to bet. But at that moment the absence of wind, rain and hail made up for a lot.
The entrance hall, when she operated a switch, was lit by the same ruddy orange light. The light of Kzinhome, perhaps, but dimmer. This kzin evidently did not like the lights bright. I sat down on an uncomfortable wooden seat. When the kzinti walked Wunderland as conquerors, I knew, their dwellings had been decorated with preserved bodies or parts of humans or other kzinti they had killed. There was none of that here, though there were some slightly discolored or unfaded patches on the high walls where such trophies might once have been mounted. The place was furnished with old Wunderland farmhouse furniture, too little for the room's more-than-human size, and with one of the kzin-sized couches they called fooches. There were a couple of pictures, old Wunderland rural scenes mainly, not unlike those I had seen for sale at Gerning, or in the tourist shops at Munchen. One, however, was turned to the wall.
"Wait here," she said, and went up the stairs.
I waited. Despite the almost euphoric feeling of relative physical comfort and of relief from the zeitunger attack, my mental state was still pretty wretched-bruised, as it were-and I was fearful of being alone. I was also fearful of the unknown kzin. There were no distractions. To give myself something to do, I went to the picture turned to the wall and examined it. Then I wished I hadn't. For it was not a picture but a mirror. I did not know why a mirror should be turned like that, but it did not seem reassuring. I began to think of ghouls and vampires. Did this woman wish to hide the fact that she had no reflection? A stupid, irrational thought for a modern man, a space-traveler come to that, but in my circumstances it got a toe-hold in my mind. Or could she not bear to look at herself?
Then she returned. She looked ordinarily human. Real, solid, and, I saw now, beautiful. I already knew that for a Wunderlander she was muscular. Her body was what I would once have called splendidly put together, though that seemed a suddenly crude and insulting way to express what I felt. She had changed into something less peasant-like: a multicolored robe of modern, or at least prewar, fabric. And though there was a hardness and strength in her face, there was also, I saw now, another quality, a tenderness, that I had never seen in Jocelyn's.
"You can stay," she said. "I would not turn you out tonight for the zeitungers anyway. You have already got a mind full of their poison, though it has not worked its way in too deeply yet. And there may be more of them out there. I have seen what happens before when they come in a pack across lone travelers, especially at night. And there may be other things. Come."
Cautiously, I followed her into a ground-floor pantry-like place. I made myself not think about the nonhuman size of the rooms and many of the other things, like the pantry's great meat-hooks. She gave me some food from a fairly modern automatic unit and we talked about a few inconsequential things. I suppose I babbled a bit, laughed at some things that were not really funny. I noticed some things about her of the sort that snag in the mind at such times. I may have paid her some silly, clumsy compliments. After a little such she laughed too.
Then there was a bathroom, where she left me for a while, with an adequate range of both human and kzin-sized fittings, and a wonderful hot shower and soap, neither of which were things kzinti used, along with a modern dryer and human-sized basin and toilet. No mirrors, again, though, and that absence seemed odder here and uncomfortable once more. While I was cleaning myself up she must have been preparing a bed for me in one of the adjoining rooms. It was primitive enough-in space and even on Earth I was used to sleeping-plates-but when she led me to it the fabrics looked warm and clean and inexpressibly inviting. She massaged my ankle and put some dark ointment on it that felt hot but relieved the pain and a tight bandage that relieved it further. Not like modern medicine but it all moved me to another small speech of thanks.
"Rest now," she said. "I have things to do." She spread a cover over me and turned down the light. She closed the door firmly as she left.
I should have been alert to possible danger. But I simply lay there, savoring the warmth and dryness and comfort, watching through the high window-slits the rain, hail and lightning that could no longer reach me. I had no temptation to go exploring on my own at night in a kzin-inhabited house.
It would have been nice, I thought, in the sort of sexual fantasy perhaps to be expected of a man in my condition, suddenly brought from the worst mental anguish imaginable, from great physical discomfort, pain and danger, to comfort and warmth, and a deeply lonely man in any case, if my hostess would open the door, enter wearing nothing but the robe I had last seen her in, shed it, and climb into the bed beside me.
It was different to most sexual fantasies however, because a few minutes later she did precisely that. She climbed into the bed beside me, and wrapped her limbs about me, naked, warm and willing. I had known nothing like her since… since Jocelyn. I did not believe she was real till I felt her full, heavy breasts against my face, the smooth, warm skin, the roughness and strength of her thighs, her lips moving over mine and whispering in my ear. She was a strong, beautiful, lover. And I turned to her not only with lust and passion but a desperate need. Whatever it was, she understood. She was erotically inventive as well as tender and sweet to me then. Save for her sounds of passion, and a command once, at the beginning:-"Lie still! Let me do it!"-she said little at first. At last, as I lay with my head on her chest, savoring the warmth and fullness of her breasts about my face, she spoke again.
"You'll not be good for much tomorrow," she told me.
"You are so energetic, then?" I had no intention of finishing our night at that point. She sat up in the bed, and I saw her in the dim light, a naked shape that was inexpressibly beautiful to me at that moment, surrendered to me, yet I saw the strength in every line of her body. I raised my hands to caress her.
"Whether I am or not, I speak of the zeitunger attack," she said when we paused. "I have seen the effects before. Believe me, this is therapy for you, though believe me also, that is not all it is. It has been a long time for me."
Her estimates of our demands for energy were not misplaced. Later we talked a little more, about the usual things in such circumstances, very quietly and gently, a lot of it not quite vocal, throat and lip noises. At last sometime during the night I fell asleep, holding her warmth, her softness, her loveliness and comfort, to me. But when I awoke she was gone.
When the next day came, black and stormy as the previous evening, I hardly noticed it. The aftermath of a zeitunger mind-attack, if you shake off the depression and don't let it drag you down into a sort of catatonia, is, after a delay which can vary from minutes to a day, an extremity of weakness and lethargy. I was grateful that for me the time-lag before it struck had been considerable
Gale's therapy, if that was what if was, had saved me from the worst of it, I think: at least a lot of the zeitunger poison she had purged away. I was simply drained of everything. But if she had saved me from the worst after-effects of the zeitungers, she had been right about what would be left for me, once the delayed effect of what they had done hit home.
If the bed I was lying in had somehow caught fire I might have been able to roll myself away from it by a supreme effort but again I'd not necessarily bet that way. I lay there as though drugged through the brief dark day, dozing, listening numbly to the thunder and the rain pounding outside, the water gushing from the eaves in thick torrents. I heard Gale's voice beyond the door, talking to the kzin, I supposed, though I heard no kzin voice in reply: those harsh hiss-spit nonhuman tones are unmistakable. In those hours I felt too mentally as well as physically weak to care about this whole bizarre set-up. If she wanted to act as housekeeper or whatever it was to a ratcat, it was altogether too odd for me to care or worry about then. She looked in on me at times, saw there was a blanket covering me and did the other usual things. She seemed to have done such things before, and be used to lifting. Well, many people on Wunderland had become experienced nurses. She held me for a while, but even while feeling her warm against me I was too weak to move.
By evening, though, I felt livelier. In fact I was feeling hungry. And I wanted her again. The sick, killing depression and feeling of mental anguish seemed largely gone even as a memory. But zeitunger influence on my central nervous system or not, I quite rationally didn't want to go venturing about the house alone. The resident kzin might not take kindly to meeting a strange monkey wandering loose in its own lair without a proper introduction, and I was certainly in no shape for a dispute. I found Gale had repaired my torn shirt and trousers with sealant and added a local man's blouse which, if not modern fabric, at least did a little to keep the cold out. If it was inadequate it was more than I expected, and a far more generous gift than it might appear: I had been briefed on the fact that after the decades of war and desperate shortages these rural Wunderlanders had powerful cultural and psychological inhibitions against giving away any possessions. I dressed and padded cautiously about the room. There was a picture on the wall of a man, bordered in black, and another picture of the same man with Gale and two small children. I remembered she said she was a widow.
Anxiety beginning to surface again. And questions without answers. Too many of them, I now thought. I had learnt again the previous day the old lesson that ignorance could be fatal. Anything to do with kzinti was dangerous. But there seemed to be no answers in this dimly-lit room. My thoughts started to run as if in a squirrel-cage.
There was a large cupboard standing by one wall-Wunderland rural, made from the local wood. Such a thing would have been worth a fortune on Earth, and it occurred to me that once the hyperdrive became economical and used for more than military purposes there would be new intersteller trades set up. Perhaps I could board that rocket while it was still on its launching-pad. That was a happy enough thought, but I had plenty of other thoughts not far beneath the surface still. After a few moments contemplation I discovered that the cupboard looked somehow sinister. That old phrase "skeleton in the cupboard." Whoever first coined it had a poetic talent of a sort, packing a story with a lot of very unpleasant, immediate and persistent imagery into four words. I opened the cupboard.
No skeleton. But other things. I knew these backwoods places often did not have autodocs, but this stuff seemed very strange. Bandages, like the bandage Gale had put on my ankle (bandages that could be used as restraints, perhaps?). Rolls of that old substance cotton-wool, which, like other things I had seen in this part of Wunderland, recalled my days at the museum and displays there of houses of the past.
There were a few old-fashioned medicines and applicators, including sprayers and tubes of fungicide. I didn't like that, but at least when I looked at them more closely they proved to be old kzin miltary medical supplies-kzin-specific, not human. They bore the dots-and-commas kzin script which I could read somewhat and the winged-claw sign of the equipment of Chuut-Riit's regular armed forces. The sort of thing kzinti used in campaigning when there was no doc handy. Presumably they had been there since before the Liberation. There was a relatively modern garbage-disposal unit on the cupboard floor. It was a small, free-standing device and I guessed Gale had tidied it in there when she cleared the room for me. Its power had been turned off.
You can learn a lot about people from their garbage. But not this time. When I opened it, I saw a number of stained cotton-wool swabs. They appeared to be stained with blood. Of what type I couldn't tell in that light. Had I seen the same sort of things in the pantry? There were a few other odds and ends in the cupboard, which I thought had been made originally to hold clothes. The cupboard door had a black panel on its inside, which faced me when I opened it. It wasn't wood like the rest, and there seemed to be something odd about it. When I looked closely I found it was another mirror, painted over.
So much for the cupboard. I found it vaguely unsettling, and with no answers. No skeleton, anyway. I lay down again and waited till Gale reappeared. She was dressed in another colorful gown, a semi-formal one of clearly prewar style, a little more revealing than the last. Beautiful Gale.
"You're better, I know," she said after we had kissed. "But wait till later. We'll be dining shortly."
"I'm more than ready," I told her. And then, again rather clumsily, "And I thank you once more. If there is any way I can repay you for what you have done for me…" I was trying to convey several things and probably didn't do any of them properly. I raised my hands and caressed her. She responded, but there was something abstracted in her response. I asked her about the resident kzin.
"He wants to see you," she said. I did not want to see him. I wanted to leave the first moment I could, preferably perhaps the next morning after another night warmed by her without having anything to do with any kzinti, to find my car or otherwise call for help-I supposed even this place had some sort of communications-get back to Gerning and have my ankle seen to, and get on with my life.
Thinking about another night with her though, and the previous night, made me wonder if this should be the end of the affair. I very definitely did not want it to be the end. Perhaps she would come too?
But one thing I had learned about backwoods Wunderlanders. They were sticklers for their own codes of hospitality. If this kzin wanted to see me, as courtesy, and more, to Gale, I could not refuse. Indeed to have refused could have caused more than offence to her. I thought it might well have been enough to provoke the creature's hair-trigger anger, and perhaps against her as well as me. Did he still consider her his slave? And was he resentful about my handling of his property?
Anyway, I consented to his desire to see me. There seemed no alternative.
"Does he speak English or Wunderlander?" I asked. "I know something of the slaves' patois, and the script, but I cannot manage the Heroes' Tongue." In any case, I knew, it was an insult for a monkey to use the Heroes' Tongue to a kzintosh. During the Occupation it was a fatal insult.
"Conversation will not be required," she said. "He is not meeting you to converse." A few moments before, with the touch of her on my hands, and her lips on mine, I had felt positive and happy enough. Suddenly, things seemed abnormal and disturbing again. There was, I realized, strain in every line of her face and stance now, in every tone of her voice. This kzin-or something-was making her do something against her will. No, I didn't like any of this at all.
"We will dine together," she said.
I didn't like that either. Not one bit. It was abnormal. Kzinti did not eat with humans. Monkey eating-habits disgusted them as theirs disgusted us. They tore and gulped at raw meat, often enough live meat. Those fangs could sheer the biggest bones.
A sudden hideous chill in my spine: kzinti did eat with humans, of course, when humans were the meal. Was that what this was all about? A trap to supply the kzin with monkey-meat? Was I to be a course rather than a guest at the dinner? Was Gale some sort of bait for unwary travellers? Kzinti had sometimes-often-taken hostages to force humans to act against their wills. Those children?
I told myself I was being stupid, but a doubt remained. The main point with which I reassured myself was that if this kzin was determined to eat me it could have done so the previous night, or at any time during the day just finished when I was virtually helpless. Or did they like their meat conscious and terrorized? They did when they ate a zianya, I knew. The glandular secretions of its terror and pain added flavor to the meat, and it was said they considered that flesh ripped from a zianya's body before it died to be especially delicious. Did they consider attacking a human recovering from a zeitunger pack-attack unsporting, as I had considered it unsporting to beam or shoot the tigripard from the air?
Should I run now? Bad ankle and all? Stupid. A human even with two sound legs could not hope to outrun a kzin-many had tried. And to attempt to flee is guaranteed to provoke the attack reaction in them. Even Cumpston, who knew some individual kzinti far better than I did, had warned me that never, even in games with those he knew, would he make a feint of running from them. And Gale had the beam rifle. I could not outrun that.
Yet I could not believe anything so hideous.
Or could I? What good explanation for any of this could there be? And why, why was this woman living so, serving a kzin as if humans were still their slaves on Wunderland? What hold did it have on her? I hadn't cared a little time before, but suddenly, as my mind came back towards normal, that question did matter. I remembered a horrible old story about the aftermath of an ancient human war and a surviving death-camp victim found protecting and serving his old torturer, hiding him from the vengeance of the liberators: "He promised to treat me better next time." Was there something like that here?
Or was there some explanation even worse? That Gale was acting as a willing bait in a trap? Acting from some perverted hatred of her own kind like Emma, or getting a share of the meat and a kick out of cannibalism? I had encountered crazy humans on Wunderland before-not very long before. Indeed it was they who had, I now realized, killed my love, my Jocelyn. Humans steeped in more tragedy than their minds could cope with, humans raised as privileged kzin collaborators, humans twistedly pro-kzinti or simply wicked for wickedness' sake. That there were human cannibals on Wunderland I knew. There was not a sick perversion but some human would indulge in it. After decades of war and occupation madness was abroad on this planet. There was a rigid control about Gale, something damming and stopping her emotions, something desperately abnormal. She seemed to wish not to speak, to betray nothing, and yet was clearly under some terrible pressure.
Then Gale said something else. Defensively, as if she expected protest:
"His eyes are not… he does not like strong light. We will be dining in the dark."
I would be insane to agree to that. I had my suspicions about this kzin and his meat-appetites already.
And yet… My sister Selina was said to have had latent telepathic abilities. I had never been tested but I had at least something-an erratic and occasional intuition about others-which, when I had felt it in the past, had stood me in good stead. I felt it now and it told me Gale was not lying about that half-stated fact of the creature's eyes, at least. Not exactly. But I was equally sure that she was keeping something back.
And I felt her care for me, her tenderness, was genuine. Or had she used sex to, among other things, deliberately confuse my perceptions?
I would be at every sort of disadvantage. Kzinti were happy to be night-hunters. Further, darkness enhanced the rudimentary sense they possessed which, in a few individuals, was developed into the power of the telepaths. If they were physically close to one in the dark, I had been told-and when I was told it, by a human under a bright sky, the idea of being physically close to one in the dark had made me shudder inwardly-even the non-telepaths could read something of one's state of mind. It was an ability evolved to help them to hunt out game that attempted to hide at night and in caves and other darknesses. Not that they often deigned to read monkeys' states of mind when they strode Wunderland as conquerors…
I should have refused absolutely. But something prevented me. Was it the fear and sadness in Gale's eyes? Was it some dawning feeling of love for her, that great destroyer of survival-instincts? The tenderness in her that I felt? Was it that the zeitunger attack had simply left me in no mental state to put up any resistance? Perhaps the desire not to appear a coward to her? And besides, if the kzin wanted me dead, then I, alone, unarmed, and unable to run, was dead anyway. I allowed Gale to lead me towards whatever lay at the top of the stairs.
The dim orange light was still burning, and I quickly memorized the details and layout of the place as well as I could, noting thankfully that the dark would not be quite total and the kzin would not, it seemed, be too close to me. There was a fire behind a screen near the place where I would evidently sit. That warmth was out of consideration for my too-light clothes, I supposed, and so I could see the food and cutlery in front of me at least. It was a very tiny fire, shielded by the screen, and looking at it I remembered something Rykermann had told me, one of those wayward thoughts which a mind seeking distraction from what is before it flees to: Rykermann believed that, possibly because of their flammable fur, kzinti without armor, in battle and house-to-house fighting, in the rare event that they were afraid of anything, were afraid to be with out-of-control fire in confined spaces. Hence the foam attachment on Gale's rifle. Sometimes, occasionally, that fact could be used.
There was one big central table, with another human-sized chair, plainly for Gale, about two-thirds of the way up, and a kzin-sized chair-not one of their usual fooch recliners, I noticed-at the other end. I thought, with more unease that contained a great deal of real fear, that it would be easier for the kzin to spring at me across the table from a sitting than a reclining position.
In my military studies of the kzinti I had come across a little about their dining habits. "But if you go into a kzin dining-room you're in a lot of trouble anyway. If they've left you a weapon or you can improvise one, try to take as many of them with you as you can. Go for the eyes and tendons," had been one manual's advice on the correct etiquette for the situation. The table was standard enough, from what I had read, with its central notched runnel and ditch for blood, although I also noticed that runnel had no bloodstains, or at least no fresh ones. But the smell of blood was thick enough now. Kzinti loved the smell of blood. And there was no kzin food here. Or not on the table.
Gale turned down the lights, leaving only the dimmest glow of the screened fire. True, there were still occasional lightning flashes outside the window, and a near one might light up the room, but I said nothing about that, or of my enhanced night-vision. But thanks to that little glow of the fire behind me, I would be looking from dim light into darkness, so my night-vision would be effectively nullified. Had she planned it that way? There is something horrible here! But it was too late to flee. I knew I would not make it even down the stairs.
She brought some bowls, placing one before me, and one before her own place. Then she brought another for the kzin's place. I smelt blood even more strongly then. I think she may have seen how pale in the dim light my face was, or heard my hard breathing. She kissed me quickly on the cheek.
"Wait," she said.
She left me alone for a moment. I heard something heavy advancing. The kzin was only a blot of darkness as it entered the room. I saw/sensed it moving into the great chair. Its progress seemed to take a long time. But kzinti are much faster than humans on their feet. Its footfalls were strange. It said nothing. Why did it say nothing? There was no explanation for any of this. I strained every bit of the poor mental faculty I had to sense something beyond sight. Gale was sitting towards the other end of the table, closer in the darkness to the kzin than to me, but I sensed she was quivering with tension. Why a bowl? Kzinti tore meat. They did not eat out of bowls. Come to that, why had the kzin not come out with Gale to hunt the zeitungers? Their night-vision was better than any human's, their reflexes faster, they hated zeitungers, and they loved hunting for its own sake.
"Eat," she said, and her voice was cracked with strain. Somehow I got a piece of food to my mouth. And then, "Let us be thankful for what has been provided."
Or was it a kzin at all? There was the kzin's gingery smell, unmistakable (or was it-that idea that had first crossed my mind when I entered this place! – A counterfeit of kzin smell? I remembered that I had heard no kzin voice in this house). The thing was big like a kzin, bigger than a man. I could sense that unmistakably.
But its breathing was a shrill whistle, nothing like that of a kzin, with a bubbling like nothing I knew, and the strange sucking noise it also made was not the noise of a kzin eating. No kzin sucked its food!
The lightning flared.
The head I saw in dim, momentary silhouette was not like a kzin's head. Was that a trumpet-shaped protuberance? The lightning flared again, longer and brighter.
The thing I saw was not a kzin.
I gave a roar of panic and terror from the bottom of my diaphragm, worse, more tearing, than a scream. Not a very courageous reaction from a decorated brigadier, but I tell myself now that my brain still had some zeitunger-poison in it. I leapt backwards in horror, knocking over the fire-screen, hitting the wall. The firelight flared brighter and the hideous thing seemed to leap at me. The walls were thick, as in any kzin-built structure, and the small window deeply recessed. I jumped onto the window sill, gibbering like a monkey. Then Gale turned on the light.
The ghoul, the thing, the obscenity, stared back at me.
I saw I was wrong. It was a kzin. Or it had been one, once.
Both ears were completely gone-not merely ears but hair and skin and flesh. Much of the head was naked bone, veins led across it by some makeshift, ghastly amateur medical procedure. One eye was an empty, bony socket, the other partly occluded by a projecting keloid-scar. The nose and muzzle were gone, leaving only a red cavity. So too was the whole lower jaw gone, and the fangs of the upper jaw. There was only a wobbling fragment of tongue dripping blood and slaver and the hole of a gullet. I saw it had been feeding by sucking bloody liquid through a tube. There were stained lumps of cotton-wool lying near.
The kzin raised its paws as if to hide its mutilated head. Paws, I saw, not hands. The fingers and claws were gone as well, and its fore-limbs were asymmetrical, the right one withered and twisted. Burns. Attached to the left one was a metal rod. I guessed it communicated by using this on a keyboard.
I had been aware of Gale's muscles when I saw her handle the rifle and then when we held each other in the night. Wunderlander or not, she had lived a strenuous life. She went to the kzin now and helped it stand. I saw that for a kzin it was a small one, the smallest male I had seen except for a telepath. It gazed at me from between its mutilated paws with its single half-eye. She said something to it I could not follow, then led it away. Again it took a long time, for it shuffled very slowly. There was something wrong with its legs and feet as well, and it was hunched and bent as if its spine was damaged.
I was left alone on the window ledge. I climbed down and returned to the table, breathing hard and trying to control myself and to retain my food. I was still sitting there when she returned
"He was in the ramscoop raid," she said. "He had run into a burning building and it collapsed while he was inside it. Now I keep him alive. He is ashamed to be seen. But after last night he wished to see you."
"You seek to torture him?" I understood very well how many on Wunderland hated the kzinti. Well, who could understand that better than I? But still I disliked torture for its own sake. And the state of this creature could inspire horror and revulsion but not, in a sane being, hatred.
"No, no!" There were tears on her cheeks. "But he wanted to feel if you were… if you were…" More tears, almost uncontrollable, like a dam breaking. After a time she calmed down.
"Then, if you wish to be kind, is it kind to let him live?" I asked. "I would have thought most kzinti would prefer to die and go their God rather than drag out life so reduced."
"He fears death because he is no Hero," she replied. "He believes that if he meets the Fanged God he will meet him as a coward and the God will regurgitate his soul into nothingness. For he did not get his wounds in battle. He was not a warrior kzintosh, you see. He never saw battle. His rank-title was Groom/Assistant-To-Healers. A medical orderly, a corpsman, a stretcher-bearer. Despised by other kzinti always. A humble, lowly semi-civilian. No Fighter's Privileges. If he had died in that burning building, or died of his injuries afterwards, he would not have died acceptably, in battle, on the attack. He had his injuries in a shameful manner. He fears to die now. I help him live."
"And for the same reason, I suppose, he hides away?" I asked.
"Yes. And so he did not want me to tell you. He wanted you to think he was a fearsome warrior… a Hero. It left him a little… pride. A little less shame. He is… often confused. I tried to tell him… that… that even as his own kind count such things, he would be…" She made a sound of helplessness.
I made some gesture, some sound, of non-understanding. "I have not heard of a kzin who was ashamed of scars before," I said. "Quite the reverse."
She gave a peculiar, tearful smile. "No Hero," she said. "But there was more to it than that. After the building collapsed he was under the burning, smoldering, wreckage for a long time. There were other priorities in damage-control and rescue. While he was there the zeitungers got to him. They had been in the cellarage there, too, like your rats. Whether they could reach him physically to tear what was left of his flesh I don't know. But they tore his mind, for days. You can imagine that, now."
I could. Not the cruelest human being, I thought, who had experienced the zeitungers could but feel a throb of pity for this creature of a pitiless species. This wreck of a kzin and I had something in common, I thought.
"The effect, as far as I can tell, on human and kzin minds is parallel," Gale said. "What do kzinti fear? Many things, secretly. But to fail as Heroes perhaps most of all."
Even, perhaps, those far-off dreams of glory were something this lowly kzin and Arthur Guthlac the museum guard had shared.
"They lodged their poison deep in his mind," she went on. "He was there with them too long. And you see the state he was already in." Kzinti, even non-telepaths, had that rudimentary telepathic sense more acute than that of nearly all humans. More receptive. I had no difficulty understanding that a prolonged zeitunger attack, setting up patterns and paths in the brain, would be a different matter to the brief one I had endured. And the zeitungers themselves would presumably then have been filled with animal fear and panic. I tried briefly to imagine an unremitting zeitunger attack if one was already desperately injured and mutilated, blind, trapped, alone, helpless, in agony, hour after hour as fire crept closer. After a very short time I stopped doing that. Again, as I stopped shaking, the wan ghost of a smile crossed her strained face. This Wunderland woman was at least as tall as me, and our eyes were level. "Unlike your case," she said, "there was no treatment." Our faces moved together and I found myself kissing her again, gently, tenderly.
"Yet that," she went on after a moment, "may be another reason he struggles to live. To die of such shame and despair would be a victory for the zeitungers."
"Why has he had no modern treatment since?" I asked. "For anything? Body or mind?"
"Treatment? How?"
I did not understand everything yet, but I wanted to be gentle with her. At least some of my ghastlier and more grotesque fears and suspicions about her and this kzin seemed wrong. I put my arms around her and stroked her hair and after a moment she rested her head on my shoulder, hiding her face against me.
"I know an old kzintosh warrior, Raargh, who has many wounds from the war," I told her. "One arm and one eye are not his own, and his knees are metal. His scars are honored and honorable among the kzinti. There are kzintoshi with sons"-was I babbling a little now?-"who point them to the likes of Raargh as Heroes to emulate. But he had his wounds in battle."
"Then he is fortunate among the kzinti. This one they would despise. Or so he believes."
"But your kzin could have a better life," I told her. "Far better. There is good surgery. Transplants, prostheses, quick nerve, bone and tissue-growth are available now. For kzinti as well as humans. His mind, too, perhaps. There are facilities…
"Raargh lives well enough, even as kzinti count such things," I went on. "In hunts he pulls down game with his prosthetic arm and his artificial eye allows him to see in the dark." When I thought of Raargh I knew again that I felt rather more warmly to him than to most of the creatures. I remembered certain things that had happened in the caves. "He has adopted a youngster who is his pride and joy and I think he is getting more sons of his own."
"In the city hospitals, perhaps, and for the Herrenmanner and their clients, there is such treatment," she replied, raising her eyes. "What money do we have for that?" I remembered what a backwoods part of Wunderland this was.
"And who would help a kzin?" she added after a moment, with genuine puzzlement in her voice. "The kzinti have no power. On this planet they are destroyed. And I was no collaborator. I did my part to destroy them."
"It costs nothing," I said. "Part of the terms we offered the kzinti on this planet when we made peace was that their wounded would be treated."
I saw her face change.
"I did not know that!" Her face lit so that she looked a different person. Then it fell again. "But how would we get there?"
Explaining the new political situation in the cities would have taken a long time. I owed this deformed kzin little enough, thinking of what the kzinti had done to me and mine. But I owed Gale. If she had done nothing but save me from the zeitungers, I would have owed her. Anyway, she was a beautiful and desirable woman and, it seemed, an innocent one. And if I felt dawning love for her, along with desire, I suppose I also wanted to impress her. I took the identity-disk from my neck and passed it to her, my fingers twining round hers as I did so-a strange situation for lovers to be courting!
"You see my rank? I am a brigadier general attached to the UNSN general staff. At present on leave. But I can arrange transport for him… and you."
I had become embarrassed by my earlier behavior. Now I was embarrassed by her reaction to my words. She went down on her knees and clasped my own. She kissed my hands, where the previous night she had kissed my lips. Her face was like a light of joy. I raised her to her feet and, holding her, walked with her to the window. Together we looked out. The lightning flashes were definitely further away now, the rain was thinning and, I guessed, the floods would subside quickly. I accepted all that she said, but one question remained.
"I still don't understand," I told her. "A kzin. An enemy. An invader of this planet who would have enslaved and destroyed us all. Yes, his burns and injuries are terrible. But why do you care for him so?"
There were sounds behind us. The mutilated kzin shuffled slowly into the room again. Evidently it had decided to face me, with courage of a kind that I hoped I would never need, though it still held its paws as if to try to hide what was left of its head from my sight. But it looked less horrible now. It made some gestures to Gale that she plainly understood.
She went to a dresser and took a bottle that I recognized: bourbon, something both species drank. She took two glasses for us and another bowl that she put in front of the kzin, pouring a little into each.
"I will explain to him," she said. "Things must be explained to him carefully."
"But first," she said, "we usually drink a toast each night." And then, raising her glass, "To my children."
Following her example, I drank. The kzin, manipulating its trumpet with difficulty between its paws, dipped it into its bowl and sucked.
Without words I understood, and I saw that she knew I understood.
"Yes," she said. "He held up the building while they escaped."
Larry Niven
The Man-Kzin Wars 11
Grossgeister Swamp
Hal Colebatch
Wunderland, 2430 a.d.
The kzin lapped noisily, then raised its head and looked into the eyes of the Abbot of Circle Bay Monastery. The kzin was young and its ear tattoos betokened the highest nobility. The abbot was small and elderly.
"This is excellent brandy, Father," the kzin remarked. His Wunderlander had only intermittent nonhuman accent. "My Honored Step-Sire Raargh Hero told me not to miss it."
"I am glad, Vaemar, My Son-within-these-walls. We try to mitigate the austerities of the field-naturalist's life."
"I don't know if I'm really entitled to be called that," Vaemar said, putting down the empty bowl. "I'm only a student."
"These are the statistics we've compiled," said the abbot, extracting a memory brick from his computer and passing it to Vaemar. "What we know of human use of the swamp since the first landings on this planet. I hope it's helpful."
They crossed the garth to the car parked in the meadow just beyond the monastery gates. A few crumbling fragments of walls, overgrown with multicolored vegetation, were the only traces of the refugee camp that had stood there at the time of Liberation ten years before. What had been a refuse-filled ditch then was now an ornamental moat with floating plants. A couple of monks were tending the fish-ponds that joined with it. "There are the monkeys!" remarked the abbot. It was an old joke between then, dating from Vaemar's confusion over nomenclature on his second visit to the monastery. A grazing pony caught the odor of the kzin and fled.
"I feel a little foolish telling you to be careful," said the abbot, looking up at Vaemar who stood beside him like a tower of teeth, claws and muscle. "And I hope I'm not insulting. But nonetheless, I will tell you. Again. We've never known everything that's in the swamp, but we've always known a lot of the life there is highly dangerous, certainly to humans. Overly inquisitive or incautious people have long had a habit of disappearing there. Of course, if you go in a small canoe alone up a waterway inhabited by big crocodilians that's perhaps not overly surprising, but… Marshy can tell you more."
"Our canoe should be bite-proof," said Vaemar. "And it's a good deal harder to upset than a one-man job."
"I know. But some of those who have disappeared ought to have known their business. There was a sailors' rhyme on Earth, once:
Take care and beware of the Bight of Benin Where one comes out and forty go in.
I'll not nag further. But I want your expedition to be a success. And no more disappearances."
They boarded the car for the short flight over the rolling, flower-bright meadowland and down to the creek, last reach of Grossgeister Swamp, where the big canoe and the rest of the expedition waited.
Vaemar checked the loading of the canoe and its outriggers as the abbot chatted with the other five expedition members. It was a primitive and stupid craft compared to those which had been generally available on Wunderland before the invasion and the following decades of occupation and war, but it was the best the university had available for student expeditions now, and in some ways its very low-tech nature could be an advantage. They moved out of the creek under the engine, then took up their paddles.
The canoe travelled almost silently under the thrust of the six paddles, two of them worked by the muscles of kzinti.
Water-dwellers, amphibians, land-dwellers occupying the ecological niches that on Earth would be filled by swamp-deer, peccaries and the like, were plentiful, as were flyers. Creatures of all sizes that would have fled at the sound of the engine presented themselves for the expedition's cameras. But this part of Grossgeister Swamp was never quite silent. Water lapped in the channels between the islands and the stands of trees, insectoids and amphibians sang in ceaseless choirs and choruses, and from time to time there came the splash of some larger creature breaking the surface.
The land varied from rises of mud supporting reed-clumps and a few drowning bushes to substantial sandy islands with game trails and occasional dwellings, some occupied, some plainly abandoned and going back to the swamp. Occasional floats in the channels marked fishermen's nets. The vegetation was almost entirely the red of Wunderland: neither the green plants of Earth nor the orange of Kzin had been able to colonize this place.
After an hour of paddling they reached one of these substantial islands with more obvious signs of long-term occupation. The house on it was a solid structure, with the vegetation before and about it clipped and trimmed like a lush red lawn and hedge. There was a dock and a moored boat spiky with electronics. Marshy, the occupant, a lean old man who reminded Vaemar of a farmer in the backblocks beyond the Hohe Kalkstein, greeted them warily, taking no trouble to disguise the fact that both he and the house were armed, even though ten years after the end of the war on Wunderland a party of four young humans, two of them girls, and two young kzinti, did not look particularly threatening. The human students had a couple of slung strakkakers as well as their collecting guns (unusual strakkakers on Wunderland in that they had large trigger-guards and given the right personalized coding could be operated by kzin as well as human hands) but Vaemar and the other kzin, Swirl-Stripes, carried only their w'tsais here. Vaemar presented the abbot's letter of introduction.
Marshy ushered them in. One large room, lined with shelves on which curious odds and ends were interspersed with old books, had as its dominating feature a great sweep of curved window, once plainly the main viewport of a spaceship's bridge. Its upper part gave a panoramic view of a maze of islands, channels and sloughs, with here and there in the distance open water rippling and sparkling in the sun. Its lower part extended below the water-line, giving a view like a great aquarium. Some of the life-forms they saw would have been recognizable to a terrestrial biologist as examples of parallel evolution. Some, a few, were introduced creatures from Earth. Some were familiar Wunderland creatures. Some were still utterly strange. There were comfortable viewing arrangements, even a kzin-sized indoor fooch as well as human couches in front of the great window. Vaemar wandered over to it as Swirl-Stripes and the human students appropriated the seating. Rosalind MacGowan came to the window beside him. Marshy dialed them refreshments.
"He told me you were coming," he said. "Asked me to keep an eye on you. Don't know if I can do much in that direction. And you appear capable of looking after yourselves. What do you know about the Great Ghost? Have you been here before?"
"Only round the edges," said Rosalind, "with Professor Rykermann, as Hon… as Vaemar will tell you."
"Most of us only know it round the edges," Marshy said. "Do you know what you're looking for?"
"Life in the center. New life," said Vaemar. "And anything else worth studying. New ecological relationships, for example. Urrr." His ears betrayed the equivalent of a human frown of concentration as he spoke.
"You are… abstractly curious?"
"Yes."
"Umm… I see." There was a flicker of a new expression in the man's bleak old face. "I was there just after the Liberation. Everything dead. The water still covered with floating carrion. It made me sick and I've seldom been back. But I suppose nature's tidied the place up in its own way now."
"That's what we want to measure," said Anne von Lufft, her face and voice full of eagerness. "The extent to which the center is being re-colonized."
"Can't you do it with satellites?"
"Not in enough detail," said Hugo Muller. "Some of the life-forms are small. And satellites are expensive. There's no substitute for being on the ground."
"That's the right answer," said Marshy. "Also, I suppose, there's not much thesis-fodder to be had from satellite readings."
"We're only third-years," said Toby Hill. "They're not big theses."
"But they might lead to big theses," said Marshy. "What do you want an old swamp-hermit to do for you?"
"Tell us about Grossgeister," said Swirl-Stripes.
"That would take eight minutes or eight lifetimes." He touched a button and a map was thrown up on one wall. "You know its center is an ancient meteor crater, like Circle Bay itself. Or in this case, more than one crater. The bigger islands are mainly remnants of ancient ring-walls. It's big. No one knows it all. You can't even map it by satellite because satellites can't tell all that's land and all that's shallow water, or see through overhanging forest. Peat burns under the surface in places and makes smoke and steam. A lot of the boundaries between land and water can't be defined, anyway. Many of the channels and marshlands and smaller islands change. In the wider waters the currents build up sand bars and tear them down.
"There are stretches like a great river of vegetation, miles wide and a couple of inches deep. It's fed by rivers and by the sea and by underground springs. Part of its shallow, part of its fresh, part of its deep, part of its salty from the sea. There are wide stretches of open water. Men who have lived in it longer than I have perished, without modern navigation aids or smart boats, only a short way from home, lost in channels and islands that all look exactly like each other. Nobody's ever known everything that lives-or lived-in it.
"Humans have always fossicked round the edge of Grossgeister, but in the three hundred years we've been on this planet, we've never tamed it. We've hunted in its margins and its creeks ever since the first explorations-but from the first day we've had a feeling it was also hunting us. Your kzin Sires"-he told Vaemar and Swirl-Stripes-"never took much interest apart from the military aspects-of course you like to hunt dry-footed."
"We can conquer water," said Swirl-Stripes.
"You know that the heart was cooked out of it. The kzinti used the heat-induction ray when a particularly troublesome gang of Wascal Wabbits took refuge there. Then, during the Liberation, a big kzin cruiser was shot down. It came down slowly, and there were survivors who went on fighting for a while. The hulk's still there, as far as I know. I suggest you leave it alone. I take it you've had basic ROTC training and know better than to monkey with any weapons or propulsion systems… I see you have your own weapons."
"Of course. We know there are many dangerous life-forms. We have had instructions."
"Never forget it. When the kzin ship went down, the crew abandoned it when they had fired the last of the ready-use ammunition that they could reach at the circling fighters and took to the swamp. They were a big crew, even after their battle losses, but their number was smaller by the time they got to this island. I'm talking about fighting kzinti, well-armed. You have maps, compasses, GPS?"
"Yes, and motion-detectors and autoguards for our camp. And a field autodoc. Telephones, of course."
"Don't rely on autoguards. And see here-" He showed the skull of a crocodilian on the shelving. "See those teeth? Bigger than yours, young kzinti, and a lot bigger than the rest of you can muster. Doc or no doc, you'll be a long way from help if you strike trouble."
"We've got telephones and rockets," said Rosalind.
"If you have problems, don't be backward about using them! I'll come if I pick anything up."
"Thank you."
"We all help each other in the Swamp. And the abbot is an old friend of mine. He says to help you, and I owe him… Look there."
They stared down at a thing like a Persian carpet of lights moving through the water beyond the window, a couple of feet below the surface.
"It's beautiful," said Anne.
"There are a lot of bioluminescent forms. That's something fairly special to show up in daylight. There are still endless wonderful things in Grossgeister, as well as dangerous ones. Night in the swamp can be something to see. If there are no natural lights I have my own." He touched a switch and submerged lamps illuminated the water beyond the window. "As you know, the biodiversity of this planet is thought to owe a great deal to the frequency of meteor-strikes. One can watch the life-forms passing down there for hours, and always something new. I'd make a feeding-station there, but I'm afraid the big carnivores would take it over.
"But to return to the danger, which I think is what the good Father wished me to impress upon you: there are about three hundred humans living in the margins of this swamp. People who know it relatively well. Some are second- or third-generation swamp-folk. In the last year at least fifteen have disappeared. And others in previous years. One here, one there. Don't ask me how, or why. Just watch out."
"Were they wearing locators?" asked Rosalind
"No. These are swamp-folk, not ROTC. They live in the marshes because there they are left alone. A lot of people don't like government, and if you suggested they carry an implant so government could track them they'd not take kindly to the idea. Even for their own good. We're a contrary bunch who hang on the skirts of the Great Ghost…
"Don't forget," he went on, "we're relatively close to well-populated areas here. But a lot of this planet is wild. And things can come in from the wild."
"Then why do you live here?" asked Anne. "There's plenty of drier land available."
"Very simple. I love it. Like the other swamp-folk, perhaps I'm not too partial to government. And with modern medicine available again I needn't fear damp in my joints."
Not to mention the retainer you get for keeping an eye on things, thought Vaemar. Including things like me. I think your antipathy to government may be a little selective. Yet he also felt that, at one level, the old human was telling the truth.
"The dangers?"
"My Hero, young as you are, I see you have a few scars and ears already. What is life without danger? Even some of us monkeys know that as a question."
"Have these disappearances been plotted?" asked Vaemar. He was grinning, the reflex to bare the teeth for battle.
"Of course. Here." Marshy printed out several sheets of maps. "This is what the abbot meant you to have. Of course these are approximate areas only. Some of the times are only approximate, too. If you can see a pattern to it, good luck to you."
"One here, one there."
"Yes."
"But in the deeps rather than the edges…"
"Yes, as far as we can tell."
"Not a plague, then. A plague would be less discriminating."
"Quite. But in the swamp there are always plenty of things ready to eat you. It may be people have simply grown careless with peace. Neglected to set their locks and fences because there's no threat in the sky. Never mind the threat in the water. We're not a strictly logical species."
They thanked him and walked back to the canoe. Marshy gestured to Vaemar and drew him back, a little behind the rest.
"You are in charge?" he said. It was both statement and question.
"Yes. I'm the senior student… although I'm actually younger in years, of course. We mature faster."
"I know the University policy: no discrimination for kzinti, no discrimination against kzinti. I agree with it. You must earn your successes fair and square. And the abbot told me about you, too. His recommendation I trust.
"But what I did not, perhaps, wish to say in front of the others, is that with these disappearances… Kzin revanchists are suspected."
"I suppose that's inevitable. Perhaps it's even true."
"Do you think it's true? Kzin defiance? It would be counter-productive…"
"We are not very skilled at defiance," said Vaemar. "We never had to defy enemies before. We just ate them up." He licked his fangs. "I suppose some kzinti might do counter-productive things."
"Satellites and radar would show up any big movements-air-cars flying, for example, or the discharge of heavy weapons," Marshy said. "And they're monitored by machines and alarms that don't nod off in the small hours. Something killing clandestinely sounds to some like kzin stalking behavior."
"Humans stalk, too," said Vaemar.
"There were a lot of feral children running wild on this planet by the time the war ended," said Marshy. "I doubt they've all been rounded up. Untameable. Savage. Good at killing."
"Children of which kind?"
"Both. They won't be children now, though."
"I suppose I was nearly one of them," said Vaemar. "I could have been left to run wild-or die-given that a few things had happened a little differently." They were silent for a moment save for the sand crunching under their feet as they walked.
"A couple of kzinti have set up a fishing business on Widows' Island," said Marshy. "Largely supplying fish products to other kzinti, I'm told, but some human trade too. It's marked on the map I gave you."
"I'll have a look… I assume you are suspicious of me?"
"I'm a swamp creature of a sort. I'm suspicious of many things."
"So you've probably recorded our meeting."
"Why do you say that?"
"If there are kzinti revanchists, and I join them, and come back and eat you, ARM would know what had been happening?"
"My dear young fellow! You don't suppose…" Marshy threw up his hands as if in indignation. Then he looked straight up into Vaemar's eyes. "You will see the wonder of the place. I've told you of the danger. I know that it is insulting to stress danger to a Hero and that I have trespassed to the limit of acceptable manners in saying as much as I have. But remember, young Hero, the fact you are in charge means you are responsible for young lives besides your own." He paused a moment.
"I've a fair nose, for a monkey. You use toothpaste on your fangs."
"Yes. I spend a lot of time among humans, like my Honored Step-Sire Raargh Hero. It seems a good idea. But we call it fang-paste. I will care for those in my charge."
"Yes," said Marshy, "I think you will." Then in a fair rendering of the Heroes' Tongue, he added:
"Snarr' grarrch."
"Urrr."
The shadows of Alpha Centauri A were lengthening as they made camp on a large island. Wide stretches of open water gave a clear field of view all round. By the time the defenses and sleeping accommodation were set up it was nearly dark. Alpha Centaruri B rose early at this time of year, in a blaze of purple with a silver core.
The sky, however, was always brilliant with the light of the Serpent Swarm and Wunderland's satellites, natural and artificial, that had survived the war and been supplemented since, hung like multi-tinted glow-globes. Even the dust of war had contributed a legacy of brilliant sunsets and a diffusion of luminescence at night. The high sliding lights that were satellites and spacecraft made a strange contrast to the primordial feeling of the swamp about them. The swamp had lights of its own-will-o'-the-wisps of incandescent marsh-gas, light-dragons-living beings but barely more substantial-and the more solid shapes of luminescent plants and animals, above, on and below the water.
The humans and kzinti ate and slept separately, though Swirl-Stripes and Toby played banjos together briefly. The kzinti, more silent than the humans when they chose though far bulkier, would patrol the perimeter of the camp at irregular intervals during the night. Their own weapons, though far less devastating than most of the military weapons both sides had been employing by the time fighting on Wunderland ended, were judged more than adequate to handle any known swamp-creature. Vaemar made the first patrol. The oscilloscope on the motion-detector, an invaluable tool on biological expeditions like this, was in a constant frenzied dance and small creatures were to be seen in plenty. Vaemar made field-notes of these, and relaxed enough to snap up one or two of them, but there was nothing obviously threatening.
Drifting in the channel with leaves and other small pieces of debris were the paired berry or bubble-shapes that he knew were the eyes and nostrils of crocodilians. Some of these pairs had enough distance between them to indicate formidable size, but the camp's defenses, both physical and electronic, were effective, and the drifting eyes caused him no concern. He settled for a while into a stand of vegetation, still as another piece of wood as his fur rose and fell minutely to compensate for the movement of his breathing. Only the lights reflected in his great eyes or a gleam of the tips of his shearing fangs would have betrayed his presence to the unwary. He made some mental notes for essays he had due on other subjects-Caesar's use of fortifications as defensive anchors in his campaign against the Helveti, the adaptation of gravity-fields as dust-deflectors for spacecraft passing through Trojan positions, possibilities of hyper-connectivity in neuronetic logic-lattices. There was also a long essay on the Normans-their ability to combine Roman and Viking cultures in medieval chivalry, marrying order and achievement to barbarian freedom and vigor. He had selected this as his major psychohistorical topic. He allowed himself a single move in the chess game he had been playing in his mind for some weeks, and settled into reflection.
Given another turn of the wheel, he thought, and these humans would have been my slaves and prey animals, and I might have been a princeling in a Royal Palace. And then he thought, Yes, and with an eight-squared of ambitious elder brothers between me and my Honored Sire or any throne, not to mention Combat Master who trained, by all accounts, a great deal more lethally than does the ROTC. Very likely I would be dead. Certainly, I would not have been given a clean slate on which to write, perhaps, part of the destiny of my species on this planet. A colony of tubes, which might have been plant or animal, springing from the submerged roots of a tree at the water's edge, pulsed with slow rings of light as it siphoned the water for small organisms. There was a fascination in watching it, though such a sessile thing, even if biologically an animal, would be beneath a traditional hunter's notice.
I am free to appreciate the forms and colors of life, thought Vaemar, free to see a strange beauty in all of this, and speak of it, free to pursue knowledge for its own sake, without my siblings killing me as an oddity. The thought should have been a comfortable one, but there was something about it that did not make for ease. Free to be a freak? Like Dimity-Manrret? Free not to be a kzin? That has a bad taste.
There was a rushing in the water of a multitude of fish-like things, galvanized, it seemed, by a single mind and purpose. The bubbles of the crocodilians vanished abruptly. Something vast and dark heaved in the water before him. Phosphorescence deep below the surface showed rhomboid paddles and tapering, serpiform neck and tails. He resisted a brief and atavistic but, he knew, irrational, urge to leap down the bank and into the dark water after such prey. Certainly, I would have missed seeing this. Perhaps I am realizing what all royalty realizes sooner or later-high destiny is the tastiest of meat but it kills. Still, I have destiny of my own and cannot flee from it. Nor do I wish to. What does my Honored Sire Chuut-Riit think of me as he watches me from the Afterlife? That I have become half-human? Yet his own last words, found by Zroght-Guard Captain, written of his killers, my brothers, with his claw in his own blood: FORGIVE THEM. He meant allow them an honorable death, perhaps. But even so, many would think, that was an un-Kzinlike ending to his story here. And elder brother, who did not go mad with the rest, but who died saving me and the other new-born in the kittens' nursery?
One of my few memories of Honored Sire Chuut-Riit, my very last memory of him alive, is when I cried out to him how hungry we were. There was patience in his voice, even gentleness, as he told me: "Something very bad has happened." Then he bade me wedge the door again and wait, as he went, knowingly, to foul and shameful death. We are more complex than we let ourselves believe.
My destiny? I owe my life to many-to elder brother whose sense of duty over-rode the hunger-madness, to the unknown, probably Nameless and now almost certainly dead Hero who brought me to Raargh as he held the last kzin fort on Surrender Day, to Raargh himself a dozen times for his training, yes, and to the humans who fought at our side in the caves against the mad ones-against Henrietta, Honored Sire's old Executive Secretary, and her madder daughter, Emma. There is some pattern behind it all. A kermitoid hopped onto his muzzle, then, realizing its mistake, attempted flight. He disposed of it with a swipe and snap. There was another dark wave in the water, vee-shaped, moving up the channel.
My Honored Sire Chuut-Riit wished to understand humans, even if that began with dissection, and my Honored Step-Sire Raargh Hero has impressed on me my duty to do so now. Perhaps I begin to understand a little. The humans can be as destructive and barbaric as the kzinti, or much more so-I think of the Ramscoop raid, of humans running wild in the Liberation, of the mad ones in the caves-but humans can erect mental barriers against barbarism. Some of them are small, like the fang-paste that old human remarked on. Some are greater, like religious commands, or the human idea of the Knight. But those barriers are created, artificial, unnatural things. Kzinti can erect mental barriers against barbarism, too-where would we be without Honor, or without the wisdom and control of the Conservers?-but it strikes me, also, that there are things the civilized mind cannot cope with. Things like us, perhaps? Our ancestors came across civilized races and enslaved them with hardly a decent fight. We must change, but we must not change too much. I must study the limits of the civilized mind.
Below him the night water roiled when great beasts fought and tore. The froggolinas resumed their strange song.
Dawn was a noisy business in this part of the swamp. They breakfasted, and compared the lists of life-forms noted and recorded. It was agreed to approach the University to establish a permanent observation post here.
They made a quick biological survey of the island identifying and recording signatures electronically, and replotted its position on the chart. Then they pressed on. The current in the channel was flowing strongly here and they were content for a while to drift with it. The rings worn by each member of the party allowed them to fire any of the party's weapons. Two armed lookouts were posted at all times and, as a further precaution against unwelcome visitors climbing aboard, they rigged a temporary bulwark around the center section.
They came upon another island dwelling, but when they landed at the small pier they found it was empty. It was not marked on their charts, but nor were many such. It had plainly been a human habitation, and Anne pointed out that a family seemed to have lived there: there were children's clothes and toys. But the vegetable and small animal life that had established itself in the house indicated it had been empty for some time. Re-embarking, Vaemar noticed a small boat moored on the other side of the pier. The unsinkable materials of its hull kept it afloat, but it was full of water. There had been rainstorms some weeks before, and the variety of life swarming and splashing in the hull showed it had been water-logged for a long time. It had a sophisticated and, on present-day Wunderland, still expensive, neuronetic lattice for a brain, but that was still in place.
"I don't like that," said Hugo. "Whoever left here should have taken the boat with them."
"Perhaps they had another," said Toby.
Swirl-Stripes took out two heavy kzin ex-military beam rifles, University property which, strictly speaking, were not allowed to private kzinti on Wunderland. He slung one and passed the other to Vaemar.
"We'll use the motor now," said Vaemar. "I think we ought to have steerage way." Many of the channels were wider here and silence was less important for observation than it had been when they were slipping between narrow banks. In any case, the deserted dwelling was not entirely reassuring and steerage-way, they tacitly agreed, could be a useful thing to have.
GPS satellites provided them with a moving map that had at least reasonable accuracy, though they soon learnt to treat it with caution. A translucent panel and a camera below the water-line in the bow showed an endless parade of living things. Cruising on minimum power they had some groundings on soft mud, but these were no more than a nuisance. There were things like horseshoe crabs and things like giant centipedes, mud-colored things and things whose bright colors shouted poison. The life they stirred up getting the canoe off reminded the students that the mud-banks were a whole new ecosystem waiting to be explored.
After about three more hours they came to the fish-processing business Marshy had spoken of. The buildings-high, strong-walled and windowless in the lower part-and the boat tied up there were kzin-sized, not human. There were a multi-purpose radar dish, fences, and a security watch-tower. Kzinti living away from human supervision were allowed only light and basic hunting weapons, but the place had a secure look about it. There was a sign-board giving the name of the business in both kzin and almost correct human scripts-still a slightly odd sight on Wunderland, but much less so than it would have been ten years previously. There was also a large air-car, disarmed but plainly ex-military, parked on a landing-pad. Vaemar and Swirl-Stripes called a greeting in the Heroes' Tongue as they approached. There was no answer.
"This," said Hugo, "is getting monotonous."
Vaemar steered the canoe away from the island and into a sheltered creek out of sight of it. They erected bulwarks and metal mesh-screens covering the benches and steering position. They rechecked and cocked their weapons, and approached the island again. Motion detectors and infrared sensors keyed to pick up the body-heat of large life-forms told them nothing in the jumble of land and water and what was virtually a broth of small quick lives. Scanning and filming, they cautiously circumnavigated the island, and a couple of surrounding ones. Apart from the absence of the kzinti, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. There were a couple of big crocodilians working the channels, but even if they were a threat to adult kzinti, the electronic and physical defenses of the place should have kept them out with ease-it was what they were designed for. There were a cloud of flying creatures round the fish-drying sheds and the smell from these was almost overpowering.
Weapons ready, they landed. Movement near the water. The snout of an automatic gun-illegal for outdwelling kzinti-was tracking them. In the instant it took Vaemar to identify it he knew that, had it been set to fire, they would have been already dead. On examination it had no ammunition. Fences carried lethal electric current but the gate was open. The main door was not merely unlocked but part open as well. Vaemar's fur bristled. This was an unheard-of thing among kzinti, save when a great one wished to show either his overwhelming security or to be extravagantly hospitable.
The racks of drying fish, some glowing brightly in decay, had attracted a multitude of small creatures apart from those circling and fighting in the air. The operating log of the processing machinery which converted the fish into highly flavored bricks much enjoyed by some kzinti, both by themselves and as a relish to ice creams and other foods, showed it had not been in use for several days.
"I estimate this operation was run by about five kzintosh," said Vaemar, when they assembled in the main building. "In addition there were kzinretti and kittens."
That would not have been the case before Liberation. High kzin nobles had extensive harems. Kzin kittens were usually born as male and female twins and the daughters were a valuable commodity for their fathers, negotiable instruments and presents to both superiors and clients. A mid-ranking officer of partial Name might have a clawful of females, including some from the harems of any rivals he might have quarrelled with successfully. The military hierarchy had its own system of allocations. What one human student had called "honored upper lower middle-class" kzinti-NCOs of partial name, for example-might be allotted a single female each. Naturally these tended to be both less attractive and less fertile than those the nobles kept for themselves. But since the Liberation things had become very different-so many high kzin nobles, officers, and indeed kzin males in general, were dead that there were enough kzinretti for even kzinti in trade, like these fishermen. The human government had encouraged this change in customs for several reasons, partly on the theory that females and offspring of their own would tend to give more kzintosh a vested interest in stability. Anyway, the small factory and the attached dwellings were empty.
"We stay together and search," said Vaemar. As Marshy had told him that some of the swamp folk were inclined to blame the human disappearances on the kzinti, it had occurred to him that humans, Exterminationists or vigilantes, might very well be responsible for the disappearance of the kzinti. But humans could not fight kzinti without weapons, and there was no obvious sign that weapons had been used here-no sign of blast damage or burning from beams or plasma-guns. No lingering molecules of poison gas were detected, though their safety equipment included a highly sensitive analyzer. The empty gun was a puzzle. Had it been put there by the kzinti as a bluff, or had it in fact fired off its charges in battle?
Within the main building there was a computer, a standard kzinti Naval model with an interface to human hardware, but it was dead. In fact, upon examination it seemed to have been deliberately wrecked by someone who knew what they were doing. Otherwise there was nothing like gross damage or blast craters to suggest a violent attack. Here and there in walls and in the windows of some outbuildings were small round holes, but they did not look like the effect of any modern weapon. He took the computer's memory-bricks. They also found a telephone, but no relevant calls were logged on it. There was a kind of odd, unhealthy peace about the place. He even wondered if the whole group had simply abandoned the enterprise and moved somewhere else. But why had they left their possessions, including the costly car?
Swirl-Stripes called him. There, in a small puddle, were the bones of a very young kitten. Proof of violence and killing at last. But with no other information. The bones had been covered with small carrion-eating animals which had entirely destroyed the soft tissue and had made considerable headway in destroying the bones themselves. He put them, with a sample of the muddy ground they lay on, in a collecting-box for police attention when they returned to Munchen. Only a small box was needed. The humans seemed saddened by the fact the kitten had still been clutching a toy prey in its hand-both Rosalind and Hugo had remarked on it.
Here and there amid the marks of various swamp-creatures there were a few old kzin tracks discernible to a trained hunter but no other recognizable tracks or footprints to give a clue what had happened. Toby suggested flying the air-car to Munchen at once, but there was no key for it, and kzin cars were generally left in such a state as to very definitely not be vulnerable to theft or tampering.
"There appears to be ssome dangerrous enemy," said Vaemar. His kzin accent was a little stronger now. "Swirl-sstripes and I know our duty is to hunt down this killerr of kzinti and kittens. But as Marshy hass reminded me, I am in charge of the human lives here as well. Do the humans wish to rreturn to summon help?"
"I cannot speak for the others," said Hugo, "but I do not think I should care to have it said of me that I refused to follow where a Hero led because I was afraid." The other humans made a nodding gesture of agreement.
"This killer of kzinti might be human," said Vaemar.
"That is another reason we should be there," said Hugo.
"Or send a message?"
"Let us wait and see what message we have to send."
Rosalind appeared poised to say something, but looked at the grim, set faces of the others and evidently decided that any comment would be redundant.
"Let us move!" said Swirl-Stripes. "Every moment we stand speaking our prey may be escaping us."
They headed deeper into the swamp. They saw no more dwellings. There were countless wild creatures, large and small, but none that presented an obvious threat to them in their strong-hulled boat, armed and alert. They saw no kzinti or humans.
The swamp changed. Channels grew wider and deeper, but the life about them grew less abundant. They were approaching the dead heart of Grossgeister. When the kzinti had concentrated the heat-induction ray on it, most of the vegetation had been too wet to burn quickly, but the waters had boiled, including the liquid that made up a good part of the internal volumes of the typical Wunderland swamp-plants. Tides and currents since then had washed away most of the masses of dead animal and vegetable organic matter, and some life-forms had begun to re-colonize the area.
With the channels generally wider here, the water was clear and empty down to a pale sandy bottom, though processions of large fish could now at times be seen swimming in from other areas. The stands of vegetation on the islands were mostly dead and crumbling. Among the grey of the dead plants on the islands some new red shoots were now beginning to appear. Crocodilians and other large animal life-forms which had scrambled or somehow flung themselves ashore in an attempt to avoid the boiling water were skeletons lining the island banks. There were human skeletons among them, too. It had, after all, been humans the kzinti had been after. Once they saw sunlight gleaming on metal among the bones: a pair of dolphin hands. Apart from the sound of the waters this part of the swamp was still very silent. The flying things stayed where there was more food.
They picked an island with relatively few bones and dead vegetation for their camp that night, where a sparse fringe of reeds was beginning to grow back in the clear shallows, and had their electronic defenses set up well before Alpha Centauri A began to sink. The boat was too stupid to defend itself but they hoped that would not be necessary. It was agreed one kzin and one human would be on watch at all times. Vaemar telephoned Marshy, the abbot and the University giving the basic details of the disappearances and saying that they required no assistance as yet. The long war had made the humans of Wunderland, as well as the kzinti, a fiercely independent and self-reliant culture. They would get no help unless they asked for it. Vaemar tried to open the bricks he had taken, using the boat's computer, but they made no sense and appeared to have been deliberately scrambled.
As the night deepened, so did the sadness of the scene: apart from a few swimmers there were almost none of the spectacular bioluminescent displays of the outer marches. Instead of the swamp growing noisier as it took up the business of the night, it grew even quieter.
"It feels as if Zeitungers were around," said Anne. Zeitungers were shuffling, gluttonous vermin related to Advokats, carrion-eaters who outdid Advokats by possessing a limited psi ability to broadcast mental depression and nausea. Humans and kzinti alike hated them even worse than they did Advokats or the fluffy white, blue-eyed, poisoned-fanged Beam's Beasts. They were, however, not known as swamp creatures.
"I don't think they are necessary here," said Vaemar. "This scenery is sad."
"You feel it too?"
"Of course." Then he added: "You were sorry when we found the dead kitten."
"Of course. We all were."
"I thought so. Our kinds are still killing one another in space, you know, and on other planets."
"But not here."
"So it seems. I hope you are right… You do not hate kzinti?"
"The abbot says we should be grateful to you for a number of things. He said it was thanks to you that we rediscovered the whole moral universe that we had been in danger of forgetting-courage, sacrifice, faith… And you know I do not hate you, Vaemar."
"Fear us, then?"
"Why do you ask? Are you trying to understand us?"
"Yes. I think I make some progress."
"Should I help you understand humans? I think of a human politician I once heard of: 'He worked tirelessly to promote greater understanding between nations that understood one another only too well already.'"
"That seems to me a very human thought… And you can think a little like one of my kind… But I am your fellow-student accepted into the university. I am also your superior officer in the ROTC. Further, I am younger than you. Is it not seemly to instruct the young?"
She might laugh, but she did not smile at him. Not smiling at kzinti, not showing the teeth in the kzin challenge for battle, was still, ten years after Liberation, a conditioned reflex for humans.
"I was ten years old at Liberation. By then my family farmed in the high country northeast of the Hohe Kalkstein. We seldom saw kzinti. I, for myself, as a child, did not really understand hate. Kzinti were above and beyond my hate. But fear, yes, and yes. A lucky human family was one with but a few dead to mourn. My family were unusually lucky, I know now, or rather my grandfather was foresighted to get us away. Near the towns, even in Gerning, things were very different. We paid our taxes, and the local Herrenmann had the task of representing us to the kzinti. We had strong rules for survival by then. I knew no different life.
"One thing I remember. Kzin words were starting to creep into our language from the slaves' patois. Once, my parents caught me using some new kzin word, or a word derived from the Heroes' Tongue. My mother wanted to punish me, but my father said: 'No, she must learn it. That is the future.' That day I ran away. I was in the forest for a day and a night until a search party found me. My father's words were echoing in my mind. 'That is the future.'"
"There are plenty of human words invading the kzin tongues on Wunderland now," Vaemar said.
"Our little farm was not much," Anne went on. "There were few of our old possessions left-a few pieces of china and crystal from old Neue Dresden, a few old paper books. Things like that. An old woman taught us children in a one-roomed school, and her work was increasing, for there was no way to repair our computers. Our robots had begun to fail and some of the farms near us were ploughing again with animals. Our culture was little enough, but I knew fear then, for somehow I was old enough to understand what my father meant. To see it all going, soon all gone. All, all, all…"
"I see," said Vaemar. "Like the Jotok. Like most conquered races… I would have said like all conquered races, if I had not begun studying Earth history, and… if I had not certain thoughts…"
"I know little of the Jotok but the name. A name that was an omen of fear for some among us, as I discovered later when I began higher studies. An indication of what we would become. Once your allies?"
"Once our… employers. How could a culture like ours have developed a science of spaceflight? When we reached the stars we found we were the only culture of warrior carnivores that leapt and hunted there. We did find a few other sapient carnivores, some of which had got up to knives and spears, and they gave us good sport on their own planets. We found alien spacefaring races, but they were scientific and civilized and cooperative, and when we met them and enslaved them as the Fanged God had decreed they could hardly put up the ghost of a fight… All but the last one, of course…
"The Jotok had hired us as mercenaries and security guards for their trade empire… I do not know how many powers of eights of years ago. On the worlds of the Kzin Patriarchy they are our slaves and prey, and hardly a trace of their civilization remains except in our naval equipment-and words like 'navy,' I suppose. You must have noticed that for cats our spacefaring has an incongruously nautical vocabulary: we had little to do with the sea on our Homeworld. I guess the Jotok began as seafarers. They live in water when they are young. There is a legend that a few of them escaped at the end of that war when our long-sires turned on them and removed their flesh, a legend of a Free Jotok Fleet, waiting and vengeful somewhere in space, but I do not believe it feasible. Too much time has passed and we have seen no sign of it. It may be one of those… urrr… necessary legends, like the old prophecies of Kdarka-Riit. You know of them?"
"A little."
"There is one he composed when relaxing replete with the rest of his pride after a successful kz'eerkti-hunt on Homeworld." Vaemar quoted:
"Oh, Race of Heroes, have a care. Tree-swinging monkeys are not all That wait. Pride may precede a fall When under distant stars you fare. "Your claws pull down each alien race. Each is your prey, and our God's laws Deliver them into your jaws. So thought the Jotok in your place…
"But of course you know how hard it is to preserve the nuances when translating rhyme into rhyme… some think there is a hint of an emotion in that stanza which we have no word for, but which has a human name…" His voice trailed off. The priesthood, then as now, had not liked prophets outside their own prides, and a prophet whose Full Name had included any suffix other than Riit would not have got away with it. Unspoken, another verse from the sage's ancient chant, recently resurrected by a few Conservors of the Ancestral Past, ran through his mind:
Death then for many. For some few Another, stranger fate will be: Tree-swingers who have left the tree Will turn kzinti into something new…
"Are you happy, Vaemar?" Anne asked suddenly. "I mean, with your life?"
"Happy? I don't perhaps quite understand… to a kzin warrior of the old school the question would hardly make sense. Heroism and Conquest are-were-what were meant to matter, not happiness. Except, perhaps, a noble death in battle, a worship-shrine where your descendents might honor your bones, honor and esteem during your life as well, your Heroism recognized and wide estates and hunting territories and of course a large harem seized while you lived… I had a privileged background originally, you know, which would have made things easier in some ways if not in others. I suppose happiness entered into it incidentally. I must reflect on that."
"Does the question make sense to you?"
"I'm not sure… I have enjoyed much of my life so far… hunting with Honored Step-Sire Raargh Hero, the mental achievements of my studies… collecting a few ears. Many things-university, our projects in the caves, smelling the hunter's winds, even writing for the review, even watching the swamp-creatures here as a kind of student of life, not just as a hunter after sport or prey… and now, we have a real Hunt again to give it meaning. Yes, Anne, I have much to be content with in my life."
"Even the university, then?"
"I am told," Vaemar said, stretching to his nearly three-meter length and ripping a thick dead branch effortlessly to pieces in a muscle-rippling gesture that might recall a house-cat idly sharpening its claws, "that some… outsiders… at University, in fraternities especially, members of ethnic minorities who were reputed to have collaborated unduly during the Occupation, for example, have had to put up with unfair bullying and hazing. That never happened to me. Certainly my family could not be called collaborators. But perhaps it was because of my early victories for the Chess Club."
Anne laughed, "You say that so innocently!… I actually think you mean it!" Her voice became more serious again: "But you speak of the real Hunt we are engaged on. What animal is big enough and fierce enough to predate upon kzinti? Dragons?"
"Humans, perhaps."
"But humans have disappeared too."
"What do the other humans think?"
Vaemar settled himself onto the sand, forelimbs before him, head raised, hindlimbs tucked ready to spring, his tail curled out of the way but ready to give that spring extra power. He looked like a sphinx. Anne sat before him, almost between his great forepaws, arms wrapped around her knees.
"Hugo and Toby, like you and Swirl-Stripes if I may say so, like the adventure of the hunt," she said. "Simian curiosity, feline inquisitiveness… they're not so far apart. And hunters' pride. Rosalind never says much."
"No. But in some ways she is a little like a cat, that one. Or she has spent time with cats."
"She wanted to share this watch with you. But so did I."
"Indeed? Am I to be flattered by such attentions?"
"I asked her why, and she changed the subject."
"There will be other watches."
"So I said. She has always been nice to me. I think she is lonely. I gather she grew up in Munchen, without family." Delicate ground to tread on when talking to a kzin, thought Vaemar. But there are many kzinti on Wunderland without families also. Thoughts ran on: Zroght-Guard Captain carrying me out of the Keep, pausing at the bloody litter of my Honored Sire's bones so I might remember. Old Traat-Admiral comforting me with a few grooming licks and a spray of his urine…
"Perhaps she saw more of kzinti than I did during the Occupation," Anne went on. "They say the human city-bred and farm-bred are different on this planet now."
"She does not move like you," said Vaemar. "And there is something strange about her hair."
"I hadn't noticed."
"I have to watch humans."
"None of them have any theories about a predator here. Obviously," she laughed again, "it can hardly be an alien from space!"
"It is an ecological mystery," said Vaemar seriously. "From what we saw at the island I have a puzzling feeling-it is not more than a feeling-that our prey… our enemy… behaves like both a sapient and a nonsapient. It does not seem to use weapons, yet it disables computers."
"And it appears to attack kzinti," said Anne. "When there is so much food in the swamp, is it sapient behavior to select the most fearsome warriors in the Galaxy for prey?"
"As you have reminded me," said Vaemar, "it also appears to hunt humans. You speak of the most fearsome warriors. But you are the species that have defeated the kzinti on this planet."
"I am not sure what my point is," she replied, "but, whatever it is, does that not tend to prove it further? If there is indeed something predating upon kzinti and humans, it is either very stupid, or very, very dangerous. If it was stupid, it would be dead."
"What predators hunt lions and tigers on Earth?"
"Apart from humans in the past, nothing. There are biological laws. A tiger-predator-a dragon, perhaps-would have to be too big to survive."
"And the same here. Unless such a predator lived in water."
"And there is plenty of water here. Or unless it was very cunning and well armed."
"Or unless it was small. Microbes and bacteria kill as well."
"Generally not quickly," said Anne.
"No, but my Honored Step-Sire Raargh Hero told me once of campaigning in the great caves. A Hero who had been curled asleep with his head on the ground awoke mad and died screaming. They found insectile predators had crawled into his ears and eaten his brain from within. And there are plants on Kzin that herbivores have learnt never to touch. Should they eat them the seeds grow claws in their bellies and devour…"
"There were great reptiles on Earth once-dinosaurs," said Anne. "And similar creatures on Kzin. They were very successful and lasted many millions of years. And we have found big fossils here. As well as the giant birds still living in Southland, and big things in the Equatoria forests. We don't know them all."
"That is a long way away."
"Big water-dwellers too… Could there be something like a Plesiosaur with a long flexible neck and a mouth full of teeth, lifting silently out of the water and descending silently to seize us from above." She looked up and gave a slightly nervous laugh. "I'd better stop before I scare myself. This isn't the best time or place to imagine monsters. It's good to see fangs gleam in the dark and know that they are yours, Vaemar."
"Yes. There have been… there are… big creatures and water tends to support bigger ones," said Vaemar. "But I don't see any dinosaurs or thunderbirds around at the moment. Nor do any satellites see them… But I see something there!"
Something large and dark was moving up the channel. Vaemar and Anne whipped out infrared glasses, their weapons cocked. But the swimmer, somewhat reptilian, showed the small jaws and teeth of a herbivore. It turned into the thin fringe of vegetation and began to browse. Vaemar stretched again.
"What was that!" He was instantly poised for battle, ears flat, claws extended, jaws gaping, strakkaker poised. Anne dropped into a crouch over her weapon, her own ears-the mobile ears of the Wunderland aristocracy-swivelling towards the sound. There were long moments of silence.
"I heard something," she said. "Nothing clear. Just swamp-noises, perhaps… but…"
"It sounded like the cry of a kzin… a long way away."
"My ears aren't as good as yours."
"I barely heard it." Vaemar bent to the recorder, and played it back, amplified. He filtered out the water-noises.
"Yes, I hear it now."
"One burst of cries, and then silence. Nothing more," said Vaemar.
"Are you sure it was a kzin?"
"No. I am not even sure it was something imitating a kzin. There are many voices in this swamp… but… it reminded me of a kzinret…
"I shouldn't be surprised if there wasn't some sort of rational explanation for all this," he added. "But that doesn't mean it's necessarily a comfortable one."
The browsing creature vanished suddenly. The two took a few steps beyond the defenses towards the dark, star-spangled water. It exploded at them. The crocodilian was medium-sized but more than twice the length of the human. More than two meters clear of the ground in its leap, its movement was too fast for a human eye to follow. The boat shrieked a belated and futile warning. The fence flared. Anne was knocked sprawling, but before the jaws could seize her, Vaemar had leapt screaming, fangs, claws and w'tsai flashing. He did not need the beam rifle. Two slashes severed the monster's head, though one set of its claws ripped his shoulder. Not deeply, but enough to make admirable scars. How fragile they are! he thought, as he helped Anne to her feet and helped her dress his wounds and her own cuts with the small medical kits they all carried. How did they ever win? It was not a new question. Foolish. We should have stayed within the defenses and not allowed the quiet of the night to lull us. I am glad Honored Step-Sire Raargh was not with us to see that.
Anne was relieved by Hugo, and at midnight he and Vaemar handed over to Toby and Swirl-Stripes. Cameras and monitors recorded the sparse life that showed itself in the vicinity of the island, but by the time they had breakfasted, with Alpha Centauri A standing well above the horizon, they had noted nothing significant. Rosalind collected some small transparent creatures which had gathered in the muddy depressions of the kzinti's footprints at the water's edge. Vaemar removed the crocodilian's jaws for a trophy and bagged them to contain the smell. They broke camp and pressed on. Rosalind raised the matter of returning again, but the other humans outvoted her without the kzinti needing to express any further opinion.
They saw nothing but the unchanging, ever-changing, swamp for several hours, largely clear water and islands where a little new life struggled to establish itself. The channels widened again. With the wider water came gentle, rippling wind and the boat hoisted a small sail. They moved quietly on. Virtually at water-level, they could not see far. Then a great curved shape loomed over the near horizon.
Half-submerged, water lapping at its ports and open air-locks, many of the blisters of its weapons-turrets empty and broken, a couple of massive electro-magnetic rail-guns shattered and pointing uselessly at the sky, the great wedge-and-ovoid of the kzin cruiser was still an impressive sight.
Life seemed to be returning a little quicker here, perhaps because organic compounds in the wreck provided a food-source, or perhaps because its many compartments provided a nursery for juveniles.
It was so obviously a dead and broken thing, however, that there was little air of menace about it. This, Vaemar and the others knew, might be deceptive. With derelict kzin warships all over the planet, and huge dumps of them being slowly demolished at Munchen and elsewhere, this one had not been worth attention and had been left to the swamp since its crew abandoned it. There was no reason to suppose some of its various engine-systems were not still fuelled and much of its war-load not still aboard.
Keeping their distance, they cruised around the wreck.
"No sign of life," said Hugo.
"Yet it will be full of hiding places," said Swirl-Stripes, "for both predators and prey. We should approach silently."
They cast off the outriggers-convenient for cargo but unnecessary for stability-and secured them on a sandbar. As they approached the hulk they stopped the engine and took to their paddles again. The humans stood to their guns at bows and stern as the kzinti's muscles drove the boat almost silently through the water.
"Skraii rar kzintoshi!" The words had been shrieked under many stars, but as the great hull loomed over them, only Swirl-Stripes and Anne, sitting immediately by Vaemar, heard him utter the ancient battle-cry: "I lead my Heroes!"
They passed through the gaping airlock into the hulk. Sunlight through the airlock and from holes below the surface refracted upwards through the rippling water, casting dancing patterns of light in the cavernous gloom. There was much more life here: molds, insectoids, many things that found the great wreck a shelter and nursery. In the bars of green-gold sunlight that shot the water below them tiny minnowlike creatures could be seen swarming. It would be an excellent place for crocodilians to be lurking, but they saw none.
Vaemar, remembering his battle with Raargh Hero and their human allies against the Mad Ones in the caves six years before, paid particular attention to what was, or might be, above them. The minnows obviously did not matter. His eyes were capable of seeing in the dimmest light, and were reinforced by other senses and sensors, but in the chaos of wires, ducting, unidentifiable wreckage and swarming small life neither his eyes nor the artificial biological sensors made out major life-forms. The water lapping through the whole chamber made it impossible to tell anything meaningful from motion detectors. The ceaseless lapping also provided a background noise, enough to defeat kzin ears that could normally pick up the heartbeats of a hiding prey or enemy. Nor were the kzinti's noses much use in the overwhelming smell of dampness and decay. Here and there as they proceeded further into the dimness a few lamps still glowed above and below the water on dials and meters but they revealed little. Vaemar called up the plans for this class of cruiser on the boat's internet terminal, but they lacked detail. Like all spaceships, but especially large kzin warships, it was intricately subdivided. His Ziirgah sense-evolved to aid a kzin on a solitary hunt-detected principally the keyed-up nervous tension of Swirl-Stripes and the humans around him. That was not quite all, but he was unable yet to identify the added factor.
They passed through a door, and paddled up a narrow companionway. It was much darker here and two of the humans had to put down their guns and operate lights. Had the ship been human-sized the boat would have been unlikely to get into such a passage and as it was the lack of room on either side would have brought on claustrophobia for any sufferer.
They passed one open door leading into a room whose ruined finery suggested it had once been a senior officer's cabin. There were trophies fixed on the bulkhead above the lapping water, rotted in the living damp into bare black skulls that startled them until they realized their age, and the remains of a ceremonial hsakh cloak that would never be worn again. There were kzin bones on the bunk, laid out to suggest someone had taken a moment to arrange the occupant's body with decorum before the survivors abandoned the ship. He must have been a respected officer.
As they went on something dark and swift flashed ahead of them and out of sight. It was hard to tell its size, but it was not small, and its movements did not seem to be like either man or kzin. At the end of the companion was another door, open but with a sill at its foot that prevented further passage in the boat.
"Toby will remain and guard the boat," said Vaemar. "The rest of us will proceed on foot. It will give us more hands for the guns and lights. Rosalind, you will bring up the rear." Heroes should go first, and Rosalind struck him as the least clumsy human.
Wading through opaque water that came at least knee-deep on the kzinti and considerably higher on the humans was not an appealing prospect. There was, however, a vertical ladder that led upwards to what would obviously be drier areas. Rosalind lagged behind, doing something with the flasks she carried on her belt. Collecting samples of the water, he supposed, though he could not see the point of such activity. He growled and gestured. This was no time for undirected monkey inquisitiveness. He gathered them around the foot of the ladder, guns still facing outwards.
In an emergency a kzin could have scrabbled up it in a single leap. That was not necessary now. They went cautiously. Vaemar, remembering again the caves, making a mental map of the way they had come. As he did so, a smell hit him that knocked away all the conflicting smells of wetness, mold, humans and plant and animal life. It was a smell of pure death. The humans had never heard Vaemar's battle-snarl before. He went up the last rungs in one bound, Swirl-Stripes and the humans crowding behind.
They swung the beams of their lights round the chamber. The humans cried out. Vaemar and Swirl-Stripes roared.
Hanging upside down from the deckhead were the flayed corpses of several kzinti. Though the skin and several of the limbs were missing and the bodies otherwise damaged, it was plain from the sizes that they were both males and females. There were five males. There had been five males at the little fish-processing business.
Guns ready, instinctively moving again into a circle with their eyes and weapons facing outwards, they approached the bodies.
They had been dead for days, but not many days. Vaemar exerted his self-control. A kzintosh warrior must not lose judgement in the presence of death, however much the dishonoring of Heroes' bodies might provoke it: rage and blood-lust should be channeled into the worthwhile and efficient vengeful slaughter of enemies. Such, he thought at that moment, had been the teaching of his Honored Sire Chuut-Riit, whose military writings he had studied, and the lessons drilled into him by Honored Step-Sire Raargh Hero.
There did not seem to be marks of beam-weapons, blades, or projectile weapons on what was left of the bodies, though the heads were much damaged. He heard a high-pitched whirring sound behind him, and spun round, claws extended to strike, but it was only Rosalind, with a high-speed camera, filming the scene. For a moment he was doubly infuriated by this insult to the dead and raised his claws to strike it away. Then reason returned: a film of the scene would be useful as evidence. She was behaving correctly. Still, orders should be formerly given.
"This is now a military situation," he said. "As holder of the senior ROTC commission, I am taking formal command. Hugo, you are second in seniority and will be second-in-command. We press on. Any questions?"
There were none. He was the youngest present but kzin matured faster than humans. It would have been a bold or foolish human on Wunderland who questioned a kzin standing as Vaemar stood, claws extended, beam rifle cocked, ears flat in his head and his jaws salivating and wide in a killing gape.
Something moved in the darkness overhead. It was hard to tell its size or shape, but it was fast, and it disappeared before they could focus on it. A quick shot after it produced no result but a fall of sparks where some still-live power-line ruptured.
Lights played over the deckhead showed a few small ventilation ducts. But humans had used the ducting of kzin ships in the war, hiding in and crawling along passages where the great felinoids could not follow. Nerve-gas was the prescribed kzin treatment for the problem…
"Humans would have used weapons," said Anne cautiously. Vaemar growled in his throat but said nothing. Whoever or whatever had hung up those kzin bodies like animals, it was plainly the work of intelligence, not any predatory swamp creature.
"These appear to have been eaten," said Anne. "Humans never eat kzinti."
"Never?"
"Well, hardly ever."
Then something pale caught Anne's eye. She pointed. Vaemar recognized the bones at once as a pair of human femurs, still joined to a human pelvis. Hugo was cursing softly and incessantly, jerking the snout of his weapon about, aiming futilely at one dark, silent opening after another. Anne's chest was heaving as she took deep, deliberate breaths.
Humans eat other humans? Vaemar had heard of it happening in famines during the Occupation, though it was rare. That kzinti could eat other kzinti he of all the kzintosh on Wunderland, last son of Chuut-Riit, had the direst reason to know. But that was a matter of hunger-frenzy when, in adolescents, mind and control went together. This was systematic butchery.
From the compartment below them the boat suddenly screamed. Vaemar and Swirl-Stripes leapt back down the steps. Their beam rifles fired, but for an instant only. Their reflected beams hit the water, flashing it into live steam. Had they depressed the triggers an instant longer, the kzinti would have broiled themselves. There were two explosions, ear-crackingly loud in that confined space. Something hit Vaemar and knocked him backwards across the door-sill. Swirl-Stripes screamed and charged through the water. Then whatever it was had gone.
Vaemar rose cautiously. The rifle had been torn from his claws and he was, he knew, lucky not to have lost digits as well. Its bulk had saved him, but its charge-regulator was smashed. Something had hit it hard. One rifle was useless.
Not only one rifle. Hugo's strakkaker was in two pieces, and one of his arms hung broken. Anne strapped the arm with an expanding mini-splint and applied a pain-killer, but he was plainly out of any fighting for a time.
The others covering him, Vaemar examined the companionway. The bulkhead some distance behind him gleamed raw with the impact of a new missile. The missile itself was still sizzling in the water. It was nothing but a blob of metal, but could have been-must have been-a bullet from a real "rifle"-a hunting rifle such as both kzin and humans used both to practice marksmanship and to kill game without the disintegrating effects of a strakkaker or a military beamer.
Toby was gone and the boat's brain and computer terminal had been smashed. The brain, Vaemar thought, was not much loss, but the computer would have been valuable. Other gear was gone too, including food, spare ammunition, the telephones and the motion-detector.
"It wasn't Toby," said Hugo. "I'm sure it wasn't Toby." He looked up at Vaemar with drugged, still pain-filled eyes. "Upon my name as my word, I pledge, it was not him. Whatever it was has taken him…"
"We go on," said Vaemar. No human, whatever their knowledge of kzin body-language, would have argued with him. They returned to the chamber of dead kzinti.
There were open doors leading to dark companionways. Beams of light down them showed nothing. There were also closed doors. Molds and plants growing on them suggested they had been shut a long time, presumably ever since the ship had come down.
Hugo pointed to one: around the handle it was clean and shining. A panel of colored lights beside the handle showed its lock was alive.
"Open it!" ordered Vaemar. There was a chance the lock was not actually engaged.
Anne pulled on the handle, uselessly. Swirl-Stripes tried, also without result. Without the code for the lock neither human nor kzin muscular strength was going to move it.
They had the beam-guns, but Vaemar thought their lasers would have no effect on the door before their charges burnt out. It would be stupid to fire them at the wall. Partly to give himself time to think, but largely because decorum demanded it, he ordered the kzinti's bodies cut down and their remaining limbs suitably composed. Briefly but pointedly, he urinated on them, offering them the mark of one who bore the blood of Chuut-Riit and the Patriarch. No need to carry their mutilated bodies into the light of day. They would lie with the bones of other kzinti here, in this brave ship. It was not too bad a spot. Or it would not be once they had been most comprehensively avenged, of course. He remembered a stanza from one of his favorite human poems, "The Ballad of the White Horse":
Lift not my head from bloody ground, Bear not my body home; For all the Earth is Roman Earth, And I shall die in Rome.
They had been hung on meat-hooks such as were common in any kzinti dead-meat locker. There were other hooks with strips of dried stuff hanging from them. Rosalind collected some samples for further analysis. He wondered whether to leave a couple to watch the door while he led the rest on to investigate the other companionways. No, all military training spoke against dividing a small force, especially in the face of an enemy whose deadliness was now plain.
Brief, cautious forays into the other companionways revealed nothing. His companions might be his soldiers, but they were also his fellow-students, and he had a consciousness of his responsibility to them along with his lust for vengeance and battle. To go, leaving some unknown behind that locked door, seemed a bad idea, as well as violating all kzin instincts and precepts of honor. To sit tight and wait upon the enemy to make the next move seemed a bad idea also. Anyway, it was a good idea to eat, but not in the presence of these dead. Off one of the companionways was another room, empty and relatively dry. They retired there and ate and drank. The small blocks of compressed food from their belt-pouches did not need preparation and in a situation like this humans and kzinti could eat together. It was, however, a very unsatisfying meal. It provided energy but would hardly assuage kzin hunger-pangs much. They should, Vaemar thought, have made sure they had a proper meal earlier. He filed the thought away for next time.
What would Honored Sire do? Vaemar wondered. Or Honored Step-Sire? He also thought of the cleverest humans he knew-Colonel Cumpston, or Professor Rykermann, or Brigadier Guthlac, or the abbot. Even the manretti-Dimity with whom he talked long and who beat him at chess, or Leonie, whose adventures in the caves with Honored Step-Sire Raargh when he received his rank and Name he had often been told about. This compartment seemed at first a good place to wait. It had but a single door. But it would be dark eventually. That meant less to the night-eyed kzinti than to the humans, but it would still be a disadvantage in dealing with the unknown. And the single door meant there was no line of retreat.
Vaemar's ears twitched violently at a sound. Motioning the others to stillness, he moved silently to the door and into the companionway, in a stalking crouch with his stomach-fur brushing the deck. He leapt. There was the sound of a hissing, spitting struggle. The others burst out behind him, weapons levelled. Vaemar was holding a kzinret.
"Be still!" he hissed at her in the Female Tongue.
"Be still yourself!" she replied, and not in the Female Tongue, but in the Heroes' Tongue, in the tense of equals. "Release me! I am not an enemy."
Vaemar was nonplussed. The Heroes' Tongue, with its complex tenses and extensive technical vocabulary, was far beyond females' comprehension. And what female, even if she had the intellectual equipment to do so, would speak to any kzintosh in the tense of equals?
His surprise made him forget for a moment their whole position. Then he saw how thin she was, how tensely she held her body. Her great eyes were violent-edged and wild. But one kzinret, alone, could hardly be a threat. He released his hold on her. She stood poised to run or fight. He gestured to Swirl-Stripes and the humans. "These… companions," he said. He gestured more explicitly: "Humans," he said, "you know?"
"Yes," she said. "I know."
He saw that she was older than he, but not old. She would have been at the end of adolescence when the human hyperdrive armada swept in to reconquer Wunderland a decade before. She would have spent her formative years with humans as her slaves and prey. If she was the daughter of a noble-and most kzinti had been the sons and daughters of nobles-she might have been cared for by a gloved, padded and otherwise protected human nurse. But her vestigial female mind was unlikely to see humans today as sapients and companions. He would have to be careful.
"My name is Karan," she said. She looked at him as if the information might convey something significant.
A quite common female name. What was not common was for a female to enunciate it in a clear and grammatical sentence. There were things about her eyes, her whole posture, that were not normal. Then her eyes narrowed. Vaemar knew that she was seeing his ear-tattoos. A kzinret of upper-normal female intelligence might dimly know them as betokening Quality.
"Riit!" she said. Swirl-Stripes, he saw, jumped a little at the word. Even the humans, whose childhood had been under the kzin Occupation, knew it. He picked up the glandular responses. But there was no awe or reverence in her voice. She spoke, and all his senses reinforced this impression, like one recognizing and challenging an enemy.
"My name is Vaemar," he said. It was "name," not "Name." Some odd scrap of memory recalled to him a sentence from a literature course: "His sensitive ear detected the capitals." Then he added: "I am a student." He realized as he said it that such a word could have no meaning to her. Or could it? She had recognized the ear-tattoos.
"I also hunt killers of kzinti," he told her, still in the soft, simple syllables of the Female Tongue. "Who has killed Heroes and kzinretti here?"
"You do not know? You are bold to stick your nose into a cave where you know nothing."
Clear, grammatical sentences. Imagery. Abstract conceptualization.
A kzinret telling a Hero he knew nothing! Vaemar felt bewilderment and rage in almost equal proportions. He fought both down. Living with Raargh and among humans had taught him self-control. It had also instilled in him a determination that, however he died, it would not be of culture-shock. But this was something he felt he must handle alone as far as he could. He ordered Swirl-Stripes and the humans to guard the entrances to the corridors. Then he turned back to her.
"No," he said, and not in the Female Tongue this time. "I do not know. But that is why we are here in arms."
"'We'…" she repeated. She looked the kzinti and the backs of humans up and down. She seemed, whatever else, to take this in without surprise.
"We are no longer at war with humans on this world," he told her, slipping into a more complicated vocabulary before he realized it. "And they are no longer our slaves. We work together."
"I worked with humans before you were born," she replied. Then she added, "I am small enough to hide in the ducting. You kzintosh are not. If you do not wish to be like those"-she gestured in the direction of the flayed corpses-"by the time the sun goes down, I suggest we are far away. You will take me with you."
How exactly we are going to get away is another matter, he thought. Aloud he said: "You tell me nothing. Who are the enemies we have come to destroy?"
"Enemies you kzintosh have destroyed already. The Jotok."
"I do not understand. Say on!"
"There were adult Jotok in this ship when it came down, serving as slave-mechanics. Most died. But enough survived to breed. The whole ship here in the swamp could have been designed as a giant nursery for Jotok-full of sheltered, water-filled compartments and with unlimited food that could be fetched from close by."
"But adult Jotok were decorous slaves!"
"Only to their trainers, and those to whom they bonded when young."
Vaemar had read and been told of the Jotok but, except perhaps in those barely-remembered days as a kitten at the palace, he had never seen a live one. Many kzinti had had Jotok slaves, but those that survived the fighting on Wunderland had been killed by their masters at the time of the Liberation as part of the general destruction of military assets. Kzin Heroes going out to die would not leave their slaves for victorious humans. He knew, however, that wild Jotok could be savage. Hunting them was a favorite sport on kzin worlds-they were generally a far better challenge than unarmed humans and other monkeys-and even relatively small artificial habitats had boasted Jotok-runs.
"These Jotoki masters had died or abandoned them," Karan went on, "and the new generation had known no masters. They had no teachers but their own masterless adults, who had no loyalties to any living kzintosh. Kzinti had eaten their kind, without a thought. Now they eat kzinti. And humans, and any other prey, large or small."
"Then why are you alive?" asked Vaemar. The question of how she, with her female mind, could understand these things and speak of them clearly and fluently was another matter.
"I have burrows here. Compartments with no openings for a large Jotok to enter, save doors I can close and guard. I keep ahead of them and so far I have survived."
"How did you get here?"
"Does it matter now?"
"Yes. I am dealing with the unknown, and if possible I must see the background of events before I move. I take it we are in no immediate danger."
"Not for a short time. Most of the big Jotok swim far when hunting. The smaller ones are hiding from us now, apart from the guards they have to keep us in. But when the others return…"
"There is another thing I do not understand," said Vaemar.
"I know."
"Yes, you know. You are not an ordinary kzinret."
"I told you my name is Karan," she replied.
"Yes."
"Were we on a world of the Patriarch, young Riit, I would die under torture before I said more. And I will say no more of that now."
"You are a sapient female. That is plain."
She glared at him silently, teeth bared and claws extended. But all the kzinti had claws extended here. "For some, a few, who bear that name…" She stopped. "I have said too much," she hissed at length.
"Or not enough."
"My mother taught me a little of our secrets before she died in fighting. I ran from my Sire's house. I was a feral kitten. I met feral human kittens. There were caves."
I am remembering, thought Vaemar. Raargh's story of how he got his Name.
"We lived in the great caves, until the night-stalkers killed most of us and captured me. They killed the human who was with me, and they broke my legs and left me for meat."
"And a Hero with a human female freed you?"
"Yes! How do you know?"
"That Hero is my Honored Step-Sire, Raargh. I have heard his stories. The female human was Leonie." This kzinret would have been hardly out of childhood then. Had she been any older he doubted any human kit would have survived her company long, sapient or not. Adolescent kzinti of both sexes, on kzin-colonized Ka'ashi, had not been notable for their tolerance of humans or for interspecies diplomatic skills.
"Yes, Leonie-human. Heroes came then, and I was taken into the household of Hroarh-Officer."
"Hroarh-Officer! My Honored Step-Sire Raargh's old commander! I have met him."
"He lives?"
"Yes."
Her ears moved in a strange expression. "When my legs were mended, he was gracious enough to take me into his household, and then into his harem."
"He has no use for a harem now," said Vaemar.
"That I know. I was with him while he lay shattered. I stanched the bleeding though he screamed at me to let him die. I told him it was his duty to live, his duty to our kind. I had never spoken to him in the Heroes' Tongue before, let alone given him commands…
"It was a strange time. We lay together in the wreckage and I comforted him and talked with him. It was not humans that had maimed him so, you know. It was in the fighting between the followers of Traat-Admiral and Ktrodni-Stkaa, before the humans landed. And I revealed to him the secret that I was tired of keeping. That some on this world knew already. That I was one of the Secret Others… the females whose brains were not killed."
"I knew nothing of this," said Vaemar.
"No, Riit. And perhaps I should kill you now to keep that secret. But this is no longer a kzinti world. And I am hungry to speak."
Vaemar called to the others, "Any movement?" There seemed to be nothing. All were alert. The sighting dots of the weapons moved back and forth in the darkness of the corridors, running over mold, dark metal, and, farther down some passages, rippling water that might conceal an armed, approaching enemy. Swirl-Stripes fired the beam rifle at this, flashing it into steam, but it was a precaution only and he could not keep the trigger depressed for more than an instant. Vaemar told him to cease. More, or closer, live steam would broil them, and as it was the clouds from these momentary bursts were highly inconvenient, especially when they were striving to see. This closes about me, thought Vaemar. And then again: What would honored Sire, and Honored Step-Sire do? And then: Seek knowledge. Seek more knowledge. He waited for the air to clear and returned to the kzinret.
"Tell me more."
"I kept Hroarh-Officer alive, and stopped him killing himself until aid arrived. The other kzinretti had yammered and fled when the fighting started. I stayed with him while they gave him some sort of field-surgery. It gave him help, I think, to hold my fingers then. We talked long in that time. He became the first kzintosh I did not hate.
"And later I stayed to make sure he did not die. Then there were the human landings, and he commanded his troops from a cart in the battles that followed until few were left alive. Wounded and maimed, nearly all, kept for garrison duties, though there were fewer garrisons each hour. He even taught me a little skill with weapons then, for we did not know what the days might bring, and he had accepted what I was. Finally he told me: 'Go, Karan, I know now my duty is to live. Let me be an example: if I can live, so can Raargh-Sergeant with his one arm and eye and these other half-Heroes of mine. But we must let the monkeys give us every chance to die in battle first, taking as many of them as we may with us to present to the Fanged God. You must hide yourself and survive. I will keep your secret. You are free," he said, "No longer the property of this useless half-kzintosh. But remember the Hero I once was."
"You were loyal to your Hero," said Vaemar. Strange linkings of fate. If she saved Hroarh-Officer and he in turn did not let Raargh Hero die, then I owe this strange kzinret Raargh Hero's life. Which means I owe her my own life too. Well, let us see how long we shall keep our lives.
"I hardly know what I was loyal to," she told him. "Many memories. Warring drives. Why should I love the patriarchy that enslaved all females and blanked the minds of nearly all? Robbed them of more than life? Oh, we of the Secret Others know how it was done, more or less. The stories have been handed down. There were humans I had met-the Leonie Manrret in the caves was one-who were more kind to me than my own kind. Yet Hroarh-Officer was truly my Hero, and I am kzinti too. He lives, you say?"
"Yes, and he is honored."
"I am glad. But I do not think he would wish to see me again as he is now… Anyway, I left Hroarh-Officer at his command. I evaded the fighting and the hunting humans, and made my way at last to the swamp. I learnt to swim and to catch fish and other prey. There is hunting in plenty at the edges of the swamp.
"One day, I saw other kzinti in a boat. I was tired of living alone and I went to them. They took me to their island. I helped with the fishing there, and watched and thought. I was but a kzinret again, a brainless worker and breeder, but things were not quite the same. I showed initiative. I spoke, a little, in the Heroes' Tongue. I gave directions to the other females, and, if I did not do or dare too much, I found that in time this was accepted by the kzintoshi. You know it would not have been before…"
I can see the kzintoshi would have accepted you, Vaemar thought. If you were well fed you would be rather a beauty. One part of his mind felt he was wasting time, but still he returned his attention to what she was saying. Until he knew more there was nothing he could do to give targets to the wandering sighting dots of their weapons.
"I saw that something was happening to our kind on this planet under human rule. Something too big for me to understand. There was opportunity here, but also the chance of disaster. What would we become? Have you ever asked yourself that question?"
"There have been a few occasions, sometimes as long as whole minutes together, when I have thought of other things," said Vaemar.
"I wished to think," she went on, ears twitching in appreciation of the sarcasm. "Alone. I took to solitary hunts. I swam in the clear water. Sometimes at night, when the others slept, I watched the internet, the human sites as well as the kzin ones at Arhus and Tiamat. I saw humans and kzinti beginning to work together here, even as I saw the great battles between them in space."
Vaemar tried to imagine a kzinret following space-battles. He could not. The notion was simply too alien. Think of her as a human in a fur-coat and it might be easier, he thought. The way humans are warned not to think about us. No. Those great eyes were not human, however weird and disturbing the light of intelligence in them was.
"And what did you conclude?"
"Both kinds are incomplete. But the strengths of the humans and the kzinti may complement one another one day. I think no kzintosh of the Patriarchy could understand that. They could not conceive of hairless monkeys on equal terms. But I, a female raised to be a slave and grown as a kitten among both kinds, can see it."
"I have human companions," said Vaemar. "These with me here, and others."
"In the depths of your liver, can you truly say before the Fanged God that they are partners, you who bear the ear-tattoos of the Riit? You cannot answer."
"No, I cannot answer that," said Vaemar after a moment. "I have tried…"
"Even as you could not truly think of me as the equal of a kzintosh, of your companion there?"
"Enough!"
"That is your answer? To use the Ulimate Imperative Tense? You would have been a kit when royalty on this planet ended."
"Chuut-Riit was my Sire!"
"As he was of an eight-cubed or so of other kittens. But we waste time. The Jotok attacked the camp while I was hunting alone. I returned and saw it from a distance. They evaded the defenses-there are old Jotok among them who know kzin technology well in their way-surprised and killed the kzinti and bore their bodies away. I followed them. They led me here. They came originally from this ship and it is still their headquarters and nursery."
"Why did you not take down the bodies of the dead kzinti and kzinretti?"
"I hoped the Jotok-the adult Jotok-would return if I left them undisturbed, thinking I had gone, and that I might take them by surprise. But I think they know I wait."
Still nothing in the corridors. None of the others, when he asked them, knew even as much of Jotok as he. Swirl-Stripes had vague memories of Jotok slaves and being taken as a kitten on a Jotok-hunt with his Sire. He had been given a Jotok arm to eat at the end of it. No memories or knowledge tactically useful.
"Why do you stay?" he asked Karan.
"I survived to get here by luck and by surprising them. I was able to swim here, even through the wide channels, when they did not know of me. But I trapped myself. I could not survive if I tried to swim back with them in pursuit. And they have watchers here. Old Jotok who know kzinti weapons. Such a one fired at you and wounded the male human just now. Even with your boat we will be hard put to escape."
"How many of them are there?"
"Eights-cubed now. Mostly young and completely feral but, as I say, with a few oldsters. They have been breeding unchecked for eight plus two years. Unchecked and unsupervised. How many there are in this ship now I do not know. I venture along the ducts and corridors to hunt and kill as I may. The smallest ducts that I can enter are too small for at least the biggest Jotok to travese easily."
"Why do they not hunt you down? They must know of you."
"I keep moving. I survive because they do not know the codes I use to set the door-locks. I stay away from large openings. I have slept briefly, and in a different place each time lest they decode my settings or activate some tool to break the locks. Also do not forget I am kzin and my claws are sharp. Sometimes at night I scream and yammer. That seems to make the old ones fear. Fortunately, before the kzinti abandoned the ship they destroyed nearly all of the weapons and tools that they could not carry away. After eight plus two years in the water and damp most weapons that are left no longer live."
"The Jotok did not maintain them?"
"Many of the Jotok, including their maintainers-of-weapons, had died in the fighting. The survivors were a group chosen randomly by Fate. I think that most of those that remained had almost no habit of doing such things without the orders of kzinti. As for the few that did, they had no structure of obedience by which they could enforce discipline on the rest. But I think that is starting to change. They are beginning to acomplish new things. I had seen Jotok slaves in the harem and thought I knew something of their ways. Even then they could surprise sometimes. Like humans. Like some kzinretti, also, Riit! Be thankful they have neither beam-weapons nor plasma-weapons. The solid-bullet rifles were the simplest and they are the last. The doors and walls of this ship can withstand those. When they over-ran the kzinti on the island they used rifles, but mainly they used stealth and numbers. They carried their dead away, as they carried away the dead kzinti. Their dead were many, for the kzinti fought as Heroes. The kzinretti too."
"But you did not?"
"One kzinret wade into a fight against eights-squared of enemy-a fight already lost? What intelligence is that?"
Strange, thought Vaemar. That question she asks shows the cusp we are on. I take it for granted our kind would fight so. Such is all our history. Yet I would not, as she did not. Nor would the best fighters I know. What are we becoming? And then: Fool! Discipline your mind! What of nerve-gas? No, even if they have any, they could not use it here without destroying themselves.
"The fact the open water about here is still so lifeless should have warned us of something," said Vaemar aloud. "The kzin heat-induction ray may have killed everything but after eight plus four years large aquatic life-forms should have reestablished themselves more abundantly-how long does it take a fish to swim up a channel? They have even cleared out the crocodilians, and in the water those are not easy meat."
"Yes. But you had as well bend your mind to getting us out of this place, Hero. They have used it as a trap before: large animals and humans have come in through that opening previously, the opening you used. They have not gone out again. There are Jotoki there now, watching and waiting for us, Jotoki with guns. When the sun begins to descend in the sky, well before nightfall, the hunting Jotok will return in eights-cubed."
"You have evaded them. So will we."
"I was not a great threat to the big sentient adults. They tend to stay in groups and narrow passages that protect me from them also protect them from me. And they know I cannot escape. Some time soon my fortune will desert me and they will overwhelm me or I will grow weak and starve here. So, I think, they have reasoned, as far as I can understand the way their brains work. They will hunt you with more determination. But more importantly, they will destroy your boat. Without that we are all trapped here. I do not think you or the humans can swim all the way out of this swamp to the land, least of all with the Jotok in pursuit. I know that I cannot."
"They are no threat against modern weapons," Vaemar began to say. But the words died in his throat. In these corridors and compartments, firing a strakkaker would probably be as lethal to everyone around as it would be to the target: its blizzard of Teflon-glass needles would ricochet off the walls. They had no battle-armor.
They had already seen that the heat-effect of the remaining beam rifle in such confined spaces would probably be even more dangerous to its users if it was fired for more than an instant. This was a warship, built to reflect beams fired from great laser-cannon in space: under the skin of the walls there would be mirror-layers. With care they might get off a few aimed shots, but their weapons were by no means the decisive edge they might at first seem.
"What other machinery is working?" he asked.
"How should I know? The machinery of a spaceship was not part of a kzinret's education, even in the harem of Hroarh-Officer."
"Can we get to the command bridge?"
"What is that?"
"The place from which the ship was flown and fought."
"I do not know… What does it look like?"
"It probably has many lights and screens. Globes in which there may still be pictures. And semicircles of screens surrounding seats. A fooch for the captain."
"There are several places like that."
Inspiration. "There should be a battle-drum. A great drum of sthondat hide. Or probably human hide."
"Yes, I know of such a place. But the drum is rotted."
"That does not matter."
"There are also often many Jotok there."
There would be, he thought. Commanders in action often kept a few Jotok to hand on the bridge in case a damage-control party had to be dispatched quickly. Trained Jotok, fiercely loyal to their trainer alone… Jotok were creatures of habit and would probably seek the same habitats for generations. Why had the kzinti not triggered the ship's self-destruct when they abandoned it? Presumably because they wanted to live to fight another day. The self-destruct of a kzin space-cruiser would be in the multi-megaton range. In space it might just be possible to get away in boats before it blew, but not splashing through a swamp on the ground.
"Vaemar! Swirl-Stripes!" Anne called. "There is some sort of movement in the corridor."
They dashed back to her. The Jotok moved fast. They had an impression of writhing limbs. She fired the strakkaker straight down the hatch. Then they were gone.
They stared down. Toby's dead body lay at the bottom of the ladder. It was identifiable by some of the clothing. The Jotok had thrown it up into the strakkaker blast.
"Why did they do that?"
"Psychwar. Just because they look strange, they are not stupid," said Vaemar. "They seek to terrify us. I mourn for our dead companion. But now we need not embark on a hopeless quest to find him. He will be avenged."
"Urrr." It was a kzin expression of many things, including agreement, which had entered the human tongue on Wunderland. Vaemar peered down at what was left of the body. There was a volley of rifle fire and he jumped back from the aperture. The Jotok were there in some force, and well armed. But something black with winking lights lay in the water below among the shreds and glistening bone. A telephone. The mangled thing it rested in was sinking. What would Honored Sire Chuut-Riit and Honored Step-Sire Raargh-Hero do? They would not, he thought, attack with such a small force against such difficult odds, unless there was no other way to win through, however much his instinct shrieked "Attack!" Himself, Swirl-Stripes, a kzinret, an injured human male, two human females. Not much of an army. It would not be shameful to summon help. All, human and kzinti, except Karan, had small locator implants under their skins, but these would tell no more than their position. The telephone was now a prime objective.
Vaemar turned to Hugo.
"You can descend the ladder? You may need your hand to fire your weapon."
"I can jump. But aiming will be difficult, I think."
"Anne?"
"I can try."
"I go," said Swirl-Stripes. Hefting the undamaged beam rifle, he leapt through the hatchway, firing as he leapt. The sill at the companion door gave him a moment's protection as he grabbed the telephone and flung it up to Vaemar, then leapt back through a hail of bullets from the Jotok. Vaemar saw him lurch convulsively in mid-air as bullets hit, though the momentum of his leap carried him back up the hatchway. He fell and lay flat. From the time he had spoken only seconds had elapsed.
Vaemar thought for a moment that Swirl-Stripes was dead, but then he gave a scream, the kzin scream of agony that few humans had ever heard and none ever forgot. Vaemar held his threshing claws still while Anne and Karan, coming together without words, examined him. The examination was not lengthy. The slow heavy slug of the Jotok hunting rifle had smashed a hole the size of a man's hand in his back. They sprayed it with broad-spectrum disinfectant, coagulants, and anesthetic agents and stuffed expanding bandages into the wound to stop the broad flow of purple and orange blood. The lower part of his body and his hind legs were paralyzed. With modern medical procedures the shattered nerves, bones and muscles could be regrown, if Swirl-Stripes could be got to a modern hospital. If he could not be got to a modern hospital fast he would be dead anyway and paralysis would not be a problem for him.
The telephone's main battery was damaged, but a small back-up battery seemed to be working. Vaemar passed it to Anne, hoping it was not keyed to Toby's voice alone.
"I can't get through," she said after a several attempts.
"We have layers of every kind of armor all round us," said Hugo. Like a lot of the technology available on post-Liberation Wunderland the telephone was primitive, produced when human factories had been running down during the kzin occupation, and modern molecular-distortion batteries had largely been banned because they made overly handy bombs. Its signals could not travel through the armor of the cruiser. With kzin gravity-control technology, weight had been of relatively little consequence in building kzin warships. Battle-damage meant holes in the outer hull-indeed he had seen several when they first approached the cruiser, but here they were deep in the labyrinthine subdivisions, probably with several sealed compartments between them and the sky.
He turned to Karan. "The bridge, the place with the drum. Is it near the top of the ship?"
"Yes."
"Can you see the sky there? Is there a window?"
"I did not see one. There are still lights burning there. But I think there is sky…"
There might be a window. Kzinti hated being confined or being completely dependent on artificial senses, and it was normal to have a window on the bridge that the captain could see through at least when the ship was at cruising stations. It would of course be closed and shielded in battle. Could he open it? Better to try that than try to force their way back up the corridor where the boat waited, especially now. And "sky" sounded hopeful.
"Can you lead us there?"
"Yes. But there are Jotok. And we must go through corridors. A Hero cannot crawl through the ducts. Many of them are too small even for me."
Especially, thought Vaemar, a Hero carrying Swirl-Stripes. He obviously could not leave the disabled kzin to the Jotok, and even in Wunderland's gravity he was far too heavy for the others to think of lifting. Another grim thought: carrying Swirl-Stripes he would not be able to fight either. Would the humans have the speed of reflex and marksmanship to beat the Jotok? Then the grimly amused thought: Why do I ask? They beat us. Swirl-Stripes was too weak or too responsible to protest as Vaemar taped his claws with the special tape the medical kit contained for that purpose. An injured kzin lashing out in agony or in a half-conscious delirium was not something even another kzin wanted to be carrying.
No point in delay. He bent and hoisted Swirl-Stripes on his back. Karan and Anne went ahead, with the beam rifle and one strakkaker. Karan, Vaemar saw, ported the heavy kzin weapon as if she knew how to use it. Rosalind and Hugo brought up the rear with the other strakkakers. Swirl-Stripes, drifting in and out of consciousness, asked to be left, as a Hero would. Vaemar ignored him, as a Hero would.
The emergency lights were few and random in the upper corridor through which Karan led them, but at least it was dry underfoot, and dry enough to use, if necessary, the beam rifle in a brief burst with relative safety. Once or twice the floor beneath their feet swayed. Kzin warships seldom died easily and there must be a great deal of structural damage in the lower part of the cruiser, under water and gradually sinking under its own weight into the mud. More holes in the armor on the upper part of the hulk might have been useful.
For some way even the kzinti's ears detected no movement by any large bodies ahead: apparently the armed Jotok had concentrated below to cut them off from the boat. Then the lights became a little brighter and more frequent, a proper supplement to their own lamps. They passed a fire-control point lit by a bank of small globes that seemed to have been put there recently. It made progress a little faster.
"Your work?" Vaemar asked Karan.
"No. The Jotoks' work. I told you they were beginning to accomplish things. They are beginning to make repairs."
A little while before it had been he who had reminded the others that the Jotok were not stupid. But it was hard to remember the weird creatures had originally been on this ship as technicians and the trained, loyal slaves of Heroes. The ship was obviously wrecked beyond hope of ever flying again. Why were they repairing it? Habit? To make a fortress? Who knew how those joined brains worked, or were coming to work now? Vaemar though that he was probably the first kzintosh for generations, apart from the professional trainers-of-slaves, to care how or why Jotok thought. Until recently very few kzinti had been interested in the thought processes of any of the other species which the Fanged God had placed in the Universe for them to dominate.
There was a Jotok scuttling up a pipe. A young one, its five segments not long joined. An Earth marine biologist would have thought it an impossible mixture of phyla: echinoderm and mollusc, starfish with a large dash of octopus giving the arms length and flexibility. Then they saw others on the pipes and bulkheads, miniatures of the adults that could hold and fire kzin weapons and, given sufficient numbers, even overwhelm kzinti in close fighting. I wonder if their ancestors designed our guns for us? Vaemar thought. The color of the bulkheads here was orange, and the passage was wider. This had been senior officers' country. The bridge must be near.
Anne shouted and pointed. Ahead was brighter light. The corridor opened onto the bridge. Hope against hope, there was a broad shaft of daylight. The captain's window and more was gone. Battle damage. Of course the ship's attackers would have concentrated on the bridge. Vaemar smelt the air blowing in from the wide channels and the salt of the not-so-distant sea. Swirl-Stripes had lost consciousness. Vaemar laid him down, and punched in the telephone's distress call, holding the key down for a continuous send. The others had needed no orders to check the doors and hatchways and close those that could be closed.
No large Jotok to be seen, though there were a few small ones climbing about the walls. Vaemar strode to the captain's fooch, kicking a couple of smelly, disintegrating trophies aside. Before him was the semicircle of screens which the bridge team would monitor in combat, the keyboards and touchpads they would operate.
There were still some panels glowing as if with life. Light pulsed aimlessly across several screens. The ship was not yet entirely dead. An image came to Vaemar of commanding a ship like this in its pride.
There had been the power here to lay worlds waste. Vaemar had been in wrecked kzin warships before-there were plenty of them on Wunderland-and even in their ruin they could not but remind him: My Sire was Planetary Governor. I might have been Planetary Governor, too. Not merely to command such a ship, or a dreadnought that would dwarf it, but to lead a fleet of thousands, to order their building and their loosing upon the enemy with a wave of his hand… The thought was instantaneous, fleeting, ravenous. He closed his jaws with an effort, but did not retract his claws. He might need them at any moment. He remembered the words of Colonel Cumpston, his old chess-partner: "You know you are a genius, Vaemar. By kzin or human standards. More than the kzinti of this world will have need of you." Make my own destiny, he whispered to himself, tearing his eyes from the fascinating weapons consoles. I am Riit and I can afford to adapt. It is easier for me than for one who needs to prove something each day… But I do need to prove something each day. It is just that I am not quite sure what. But my challenge is here. His disciplined his thoughts. The human Henrietta had demonstrated to him the madness which dreams of a reconquest could lead into. And at this moment he had a real enough task for a Hero before him.
He had done all he could to summon help. Now they would have to help themselves. He stood rampant.
"Show yourselves, Jotok Slaves!" he roared in the Ultimate Imperative Tense of the Heroes' Tongue, the tense that normally only one of the Riit's blood-line or a guardian of the kzin specie's honor might use.
No response.
"Show yourselves, Jotok!" He roared again, this time in the normal Imperative Tense, which simply meant: "Obey instantly or be torn to pieces."
"More humble, kzin!" came a voice from nowhere.
"Who spoke?"
"We show ourselves." One of the meaninglessly flickering screens, a large one set high, cleared. Swirl-Stripes, drifting back into consciousness, yelled and scrabbled with his forelimbs. The huge image of a Jotok stared down at them.
The thing's real size was hard to judge, but the juveniles they had seen so far looked tiny, spindly copies. The thing had age and bulk. More, Vaemar and the staring humans recognized, it had power… Authority. Vaemar had little memory of Chuut-Riit's palaces. But he knew Authority. And this thing-these things, he remembered they were colonial animals-had none of the air of a slave. Even through the medium of the viewing screen that was obvious. He raised his ears and flexed them, so the tattoos might be seen. He had no doubt they were in the deadliest peril. These killers-of-kzinti would not have revealed itself/themselves were they not confident that they were complete master of the situation. They could hardly intend that he should live or escape to give warning of their existence. And even as these thoughts flashed through his head he was conscious of Karan's eyes upon him.
"More humble!" came the voice.
"I speak to you in the Tense of Equals," said Vaemar. He fought down a plainly futile urge to leap at the screen and destroy it. "And I am Riit. What do you wish?"
"That you should know us. There are still some Jotoki left," said the old Jotok, "who lived on this ship as slaves of the smelly-furred kzinti. We"-one of its arms gestured towards itselves-"rose to the position of fuse-setter and maintainer of secondary gravity motors. Scuttling to do our master's bidding before we roused its wrath. Waiting to be torn apart and eaten when we became too old to serve. But that was not to be…
"Many of us died when the ship came down in this swamp, and our kzin masters were killed. The other kzinti abandoned the ship. They cared nothing for us, of course. Had they been in less haste they might well have taken us with them as a dependable food source.
"We were alone. Time passed. We hunted and survived. Those of us who could operate the ship's radios listened for orders from our masters, for words of others of our kind, but we heard nothing.
"Many more Jotoki died then of masterlessness. We, and some like us, did not. We knew we had no living masters. And we and those who are like us prepared to strike back.
"We have journeyed far from the ship. We have killed the kz'eerkti and the kzinti. We feast on them and on the swimming creatures. This realm we make our own.
"We see the pictures that the kz'eerkti transmit. We have learnt from them a little of what was taken from us. We, and the Jotoki species, have learnt of revenge!"
Swirl-Stripes moaned again. Vaemar was suddenly aware of Anne beside him. "Keep him talking," she mouthed. His acute hearing just picked up the words. He wondered if the Jotok could lip-read human speech. It seemed highly unlikely. Everything so far had been said by it-by them?-in an odd blend of the slave's patois with additional odd and insolent importations from the Heroes' Tongue.
"This realm we make our own…" Hardly. And perhaps he could do worse than point that out right away.
"The disappearances in Grossgeister Swamp are already starting to attract attention," he said. He spoke straight up at the image, though he did not know from where he was actually being observed. "That is partly why we are here. If we do not return without further harm, more will come in greater force. Your realm will not last long."
"I see you have kz'eerkti slaves working for you now that you have abandoned us," said the Jotok. Vaemar disentangled resentment in the scrambled tenses. Have these Jotok become jealous of humans? Certainly, it was plain they had no idea how things really stood on Wunderland. I can hardly expect them to think like us. And then he thought: They have only seen the world from the point-of-view of kzinti techno-slaves. They know nothing of how things really are. And almost like us when we collided with the humans, no real experience of war except the old style of kzin wars of conquest. Ambushing paddlers in the swamp is not war. Even at the very first, they were traders, not warriors… And that led to another thought.
"Do you seek to trade?" he asked.
"Trade?"
"Your ancestors traded."
"We seek revenge for our ancestors. We are angry. We have much to avenge."
"So do we!" He thought of the flayed kzinti corpses in the compartment below. But vengefulness was the most dangerous of all emotions for a kzin on Wunderland. There was a lost war to avenge, and for all kzinti that was a demon living in their minds that needed strong caging. It sometimes escaped.
"Our vengeance has begun," the Jotok replied. "As we begin to understand what we have lost."
"Your ancestors were traders. We offer you trade again." So, I must become an instant expert on another alien psychohistory, he thought. As if having to learn to live among humans as an equal was not enough. Yet perhaps what he had learned among humans was a help. He was practiced in thinking the unthinkable, in saying the unsayable, in dealing with members of an alien species rather than taking them automatically as slaves and prey. He could at least talk to the Jotok. The creatures were silent for a moment, as if in thought. Then they asked: "What have you to trade?"
"The oldest trade there is. Our lives for yours."
"Say on, kzin."
"Kill us, and others will follow us to this ship. Next time they will be shooting as they come. Release us, and you may live."
"Zrrch! So a kzin begs for its life!" Could there be a deadlier insult? Vaemar felt his ears knotting with the effort as he again fought down the urge to scream and leap at the image. I am Vaemar! I am Vaemar-Riit! I am Son of Chuut-Riit! I can control my emotions!
"For the lives of others!"
The Jotok seemed to hesitate. Presumably its brains were conferring among themselves.
"We have killed kzinti," it/they replied. "We know kzinti. Kzinti will not forgive!"
That was true.
"Also we have killed kz'eerkti, kzinti's new favorite slaves. Kzinti will not forgive."
A certain information gap there, thought Vaemar. But basically this monstrosity is right. They have done too much to be allowed to live. Besides, I have no authority to make a binding deal with them. And the monkey-trick of lying is not available to me.
"And I have no authority to deal," added the Jotok, as if echoing Vaemar's own thoughts. Was that some dim race-memory of a civilization that had had organization, consultation, hierarchy? "Only to kill." This was in the Heroes' Tongue, nearly pure. "And to tell you, kzinti, before you die, of the wrath and vengeance of the Jotoki, whom you have twice betrayed! Take that message to your Fanged God! You will die, kzinti, but you will know your killers."
Its mouths struggled with an untranslatable alien word: "Rrrzld… stand clear!"
"There!" Anne pointed.
The Jotok was on a small gantry near the deckhead, largely concealed in the shadows cast from the patch of sky. A Jotok band might once have played there for the pleasure of the Captain. Vaemar jumped and fired the beam rifle with kzin speed an instant before the Jotok could operate its own weapons. The Jotok, hit in its center by the beam, staggered to the edge of the balcony, drew itself up, and fell. In a convulsive spasm its toroidal neurochord ruptured, its five arms separating themselves into the individuals they had originally been. Vaemar's Ziirgah sense reeled for a moment under the psychic blast of their agony. For a hideous second he almost understood what it was like to be a colonial animal torn apart, and not for the first time gave an instant's thanks he was not a telepath. Other Jotok-large, mature Jotok-appeared, running for the balcony which, they saw, carried a set of heavy rifles, mounted in quad. Anne and Hugo shot them down with the strakkakers. Karan screamed and leapt. Vaemar spun on his hind-legs. Three more Jotoki rushed out of the darkness at them, kzin w'tsais whirling in their hands. Vaemar leapt after Karan. Together they dismantled them.
There was silence on the bridge for a moment, save for rustling like forest leaves as the small Jotok fled, and thrashing of severed Jotok arms and brains, their voices diminishing into death. Behind and below them were more purposeful sounds.
"We must get out now!"
The hole in the deckhead was not an impossible leap for a kzin in Wunderland's gravity, but it was far too high for a human, even if Hugo had been unwounded, and there was the dead weight of Swirl-Stripes. The tough sinews and central nerve-toroids of the dead Jotok, however, when separated by Vaemar's w'tsai and razor-like claws, plus the expedition-members' belts, plus the humans' clothes knotted together, made a sling. Modern fabrics could stand huge stresses without tearing. While the humans held the Jotok back with short bursts from their weapons, Vaemar and Karan scrambled to the gantry, and leapt to the opening. They hoisted the others out one by one.
Coming into the bright sunlight, with the wide rippling blue-green water and the wind from the sea, was for a moment like leaping into a new world. But it was, Vaemar thought, as he hefted the rifle again and surveyed the situation, a world they might not enjoy long.
They were on the upper part of the kzin cruiser's ovoid hull, which curved down to the water a dozen yards away. The surface would hardly have afforded a purchase for feet or claws were it in pristine condition, but it was pitted by minor damage and there was a build-up of molds and other biological debris.
A movement caught the corner of Vaemar's vision. With faster-than-human reflexes he spun and fired. Another large Jotok, carrying a rifle in two of their arms, a knife in another, leapt out of a turret. Mortally wounded, they staggered on two of their arms towards the group, shrieking with all their mouths, and collapsed. Vaemar retrieved the rifle before it slid into the water.
There were, they now saw, many other openings in the hull, including the empty or damaged blisters of weapons-turrets and mountings. There were a score or more of places from which the Jotok could fire at them from behind cover. They themselves had no cover, and charges and ammunition for their weapons were running low. They had escaped from one trap into another.
"Can you swim?" Karan asked him.
"It appears I shall have to." The nearest island, the sandbar where they had left the outriggers and a good deal of equipment, was considerably more than a mile away. He could even see the outriggers drawn up on the bank there, tauntingly near yet hopelessly out of reach. Vaemar had had swimming lessons as part of his ROTC training but had not liked it. Rosalind and Anne could perhaps swim to it, Vaemar thought, and Karan said she could swim, but Hugo's arm was still useless, there was the dead-weight of Swirl-Stripes, and he was by no means sure that he could do it himself.
Not all of us, not without help, he thought. Let the females save themselves, and he and Hugo would hold the Jotok off as long as they could. These females, after all, were sentient, and to die protecting them would not be pointless. Should they escape, they would be able to summon vengeance. He thought of his debt to Karan. In any case, it did not appear there was any choice.
On the other claw, making such a stand would not achieve much. The Jotok could probably dispose of him and Hugo quickly, then pick off the females in the water at their leisure, either with guns or by swimming after them in numbers. It would be a bad death to be pulled under water by Jotok. There was no way to summon the outriggers. And, he thought, very little time. Drowning was a most unattractive death, but being eaten by Jotok in this decaying ruin of a proud kzin vessel even more so.
"Vaemar! See!" Rosalind pointed. In the water, caught against the bulge of a half-submerged turret, was a large dead bush, a small tree. Vaemar stared at it, then at her. He didn't see the relevance in their present situation.
"That can make a boat for us!"
I would never have thought of that, Vaemar realized. Honored Sire Chuut-Riit should have begun studying humans earlier. He could calculate the physics quickly. The wayward thought came to him that if kzinti had cared for water they might have been more notable seafarers themselves. He had heard that on some planets… He also knew there was a temptation for thought to flee in all directions from imminent death and focused his mind sharply. It was a bad day to die, with the sun, the breeze filled with the scents of life and wide spaces, and the sparkling water, but any day was a good day to die heroically.
"It will not take the weight of Swirl-Stripes," he told her. "And I am not leaving him. The rest of you take it, and go. Hurry! Avenge me. And the others." The tree might support them and leave their hands free to fire their weapons. He noticed as he spoke that Swirl-Stripes's eyes were open again, and though violet with pain, seemed clear. I will put a weapon in his claws, Vaemar thought. He will have a warrior's death.
"We can take Swirl-Stripes," Rosalind said, "if we can give him a little more buoyancy. What have we that will float?"
They had very little equipment of any kind. Swirl-Stripes raised his head weakly and pointed at the dead Jotok.
"Conquer water," he muttered. It was an echo of something he had said in Marshy's house. Vaemar recalled the swimming creatures they had seem. Jotoki swam. That was, of course a large part of the problem. And Jotok must swim very well to have conquered and devoured so many of the native swimmers of Wunderland in their own element. The Jotok they had just dissembled had massive sinews and muscles. W'tsai in one hand, razor claws of the other extended, he sprang to the Jotok's body.
Cleaning the entrails and pulling the muscles and sinews of the arms through the hole the rifle had blasted through it was harder than he had expected. But with the last field-dressing from their belt medikits sealing the hole at entry and exit, the empty, inflated body made a kind of float. The sinews, along with those Jotok pieces and the clothes they had already used for the sling, tied the float to Swirl-Stripes, and Swirl-Stripes to the tree. The rest of them, naked, seized various branches and pushed and kicked the tree clear, into open water and the deep channel. Vaemar took one of the strakkakers. It was lighter than the rifle and would be easier to manage single-handed.
The bulk of the cruiser still loomed over them. The first Jotok to appear on the upper curvature of the hull were silhouetted perfectly against the skyline, and Vaemar, holding the strakkaker in his free hand, shot them before they could draw a bead on the tree with their rifles. Anne, swimming clear and using both hands to aim her strakkaker, accounted for two more.
There was no more firing for a while. There had not been many adult Jotoki in the ship, and they had not many functioning weapons. Vaemar, looking down through the green water at the white sand that seemed very far below, was glad he could use at least one, and generally both, hands to cling to the branches. He also found his claws could not retract, and tried to avoid ripping his flimsy handholds to pieces. He remembered from his historical studies a statement made by a human sage named Francis Bacon who had lived on Earth nearly twice eight-cubed years before; "A catt will never drowne if it sees the shore." He hoped it was true. The water was cold and repellent on his fur at first, but became less so as time passed. He was glad that Wunderland's orbit and inclination meant the weather was warm.
Jotok were not the only enemy, he remembered, and felt his hind-limbs kicking harder at the thought of what might be beneath them. He told himself that when the Jotok had cleaned out so many prey-swimmers, big swimming carnivores had no good reason to be in the area. Watching for Jotok, and anything else swimming on the surface, holding his weapon cocked and above water, clinging to the branches and keeping an eye on Swirl-Stripes and the rest, his mind was too busy to panic at the feeling of void below him, especially if he did not look down. Anyway, he told himself, he had been in space, and this was not much different. He hoped the Jotoki on the ship did not have the means of calling the adults who were away hunting, and he hoped the hunters did not choose this time or this route to return. His eyes met Karan's, paddling beside him, and he forced himself to raise his ears in a smile. There was a wide expanse of blue-green water between them and the wreck of the cruiser now, and Vaemar felt a sudden small surge of pride that he had conquered it. They swam on.
Something touched his foot. He kicked frantically, hoping to damage it before it struck, but it was the upward-sloping sandy bottom. The current, once they were into it, had helped them more than they realized, but it had almost carried them past their sandbar, and already they were on the far side of it, away from the wreck. Just as well, Vaemar thought, kicking now with full, purposeful, disciplined strength. No point in letting the Jotok see what we're doing. In a few moments the tree was aground, and they waded ashore, Vaemar carrying Swirl-Stripes again. There, on the other side of the island's low central ridge, were the outriggers as they had left them. All were tired, and both the kzinti and the naked humans found themselves shivering. Hugo looked very weak, bent over cradling his injured arm.
"Are you able to carry on?" Vaemar asked him.
"We are soldiers now," said Hugo. And you win wars, Vaemar thought, looking at the frail creature striving to stand rampant with his weapon. Well, this is a war for me to win now.
Vaemar realized that despite the meager compressed rations they had had in the ship, he was beginning to get hungry again. They faced a long and difficult journey to safety, but…
We have won, thought Vaemar. Land under their feet and the outriggers, proper boats and with a good deal of their equipment, changed the whole situation.
But the situation was changing again. He looked back to the hulk. The water round it was seething, now, and the kzin's keen eyes could see Jotok-large, mature Jotok-climbing out of the water back into the hull. The hunters returning. There were eights-squared of them already. It would not be a good idea to wait till the returned Jotok attacked them here in force. Best to head back to Marshy's island at once, and hope to escape them by hard paddling and straight shooting. Hope too, that the signal for help had got through and help would arrive in time. He remembered what the old hermit had told them: the kzin crew's number was smaller by the time they got to this island. And they had not had armed Jotok swimmers pursing them. But the outriggers made all the difference. They could also make a proper call for help now.
The outriggers exploded in boiling orange mushrooms of flame. Humans and kzinti flung themselves flat. Explosion reflex had been drilled and engrained into them all. The ridge running along the axis of the sandbar saved them.
Hugo had landed on his broken arm but Vaemar could pay no attention to his noises as he crawled to the crest of the ridge. The bushes overtopping the crest of the ridge flashed into fire. Behind him, another half-mile away, the vegetation on the next island was also burning-and in no ordinary fire. The long-dead, tinder-dry stuff was exploding. Pushing a small "V" in the sand with his claws he risked a quick view of the cruiser.
One of the weapons-turrets on the hulk was pointing at them. Already there was enough drifting smoke to show the ghost of a beam passing back and forth. From somewhere near the burning island behind him came a vast explosion, not of flame, this time, but of steam. More steam, he saw, was beginning to rise around the derelict.
The Jotok were firing a battle laser. Not one of the cruiser's main weapons-those, if they had been serviceable, would have melted the island to slag-but still something designed to knock out armored ships in space-battles. It was mounted in a functioning, armored turret which their own weapons could never damage. He backed away down the slope of sand that was their only protection. As he did so the low coarse vegetation on the top of the ridge, analogous to marram on Earth, flashed into flame. A trickle of melted silica ran down the slope behind him.
The laser played back and forth. The heart of Grossgeister was burning as well as boiling for the second time. A great semicircle of the dead islands were ablaze. Mighty rolling clouds of smoke and steam billowed up.
Good, thought Vaemar. A bit more of that and we will be hidden. Also, it will have to be noticed soon, if our signal did not get through. He realized satellites must have already registered that a heavy kzin military laser was firing in Grossgeister. He hoped the response would be an investigation, rather than a nuke from the Strategic Defense Command.
For the moment they were sheltered in the lee of the sand ridge, though the laser was sweeping just above their heads, lighting the smoke cloud more brightly as the smoke thickened.
He realized Rosalind was beside him. The others were huddled down some distance away. Dust and soot particles, suddenly incandescent in the beam, flared and sparkled in the air above them. Vaemar slapped out a burning spot on his fur and worked himself further down into shelter.
"Can't you stop them?" he asked.
"What do you mean?"
"You know what I mean." He grinned at her, the fanged grin that humans on Wunderland has learned long before to dread. There was saliva in reflex and his fangs dripped. Humans had learned to dread that also. "You have been in contact with them, haven't you?" He would have lashed his tail if it had not meant a risk of losing it.
"I don't understand you."
"This is no time for monkey lies!" Naked as she was, she looked very Simian to him. "The old Jotok knew you! They were crying out to you, weren't they, trying to say your… name"-suddenly, for the first time since he had been a kit, it was hard for the kzin to acknowledge a human name-"'Rrrzld… stand clear!' And in the fighting, you were the only one whose shots hit no Jotok. You were firing to miss. I saw."
"You see a great deal, young Riit. But not everything," she replied. "You do not see that we have met before."
"Go on!" His claws and teeth were very close to her now. "Speak or die!" The razor-tip of a black claw touched her naked skin. There was a small trickle of blood.
"We met in the caves," she said. "You were my prisoner once. I was Henrietta."
She was a third-year university student. About twenty Earth-human years old. Henrietta had been his Sire Chuut-Riit's executive secretary, the highest-ranking human slave under the kzinti occupation, the collaborator with the highest price on her head after Liberation. When, six years before, she had held him and Raargh captive in Chuut-Riit's secret redoubt, he had seen her closely. She had had an adult daughter, Emma. Emma whose crazy plan had been to lead a kzin rebellion. This dark-haired young manrret could not be Henrietta. There was no similarity in voice, in eyes, in anything. And then he realized that she could be. Henrietta had had many contacts. She could have had transplant surgery. New eyes to thwart retinal pattern analysis, new skull-shape, new lungs to thwart breath-particle analysis. Something odd about the hair… Sufficient new parts would make DNA testing useless. He could see no scars, but with sophisticated surgery and regrowth techniques they could be made invisible anyway.
What had Anne said of her? That she kept to herself. And she did not move like a human? Did that mean not like a young human? Not like a human with its own legs? He remembered something else. In Marshy's house, the last time they had been together in formal circumstances, she had not sat while he remained standing. And she had begun to call him "Honored" before biting off her words.
"In the Name of my Honored Sire, Chuut-Riit, I command you!" he snarled in the Ultimate Imperative Tense. "Speak truth!"
"I escaped when the ARM stormed the secret redoubt," she told him. "Another body was taken for Henrietta's. Its head was completely destroyed and it had spent some time in a Sinclair field. ARM and the Resistance had the body they wanted. No one had an interest in looking or testing too closely. Markham had the body destroyed."
"I rremember."
"I hid. I changed my appearance. At length I got to the swamp. A lot of fugitives have come here at one time or another. Yes, I made contact with the Jotok, fairly recently. Then I returned to Munchen. I took the identity of a student. Largely to be near you."
"Why? Why did you deal with the Jotok? Was dealing in conspiracy with kzinti and humans not enough for you?"
"No. You know what your Honored Sire came to believe-that kzinti and humans both are threatened by a conspiracy of which the human ARM is but one aspect-one tentacle. He warned Henrietta of such. I saw that it could manipulate well-meaning humans. More, that it could manipulate kzinti-and would. It had tricked your Honored Sire into shameful death."
"His death was not shameful! He died saving me and the other kits! I rremember his last day."
"There was no kzintosh nobler and braver. The shame was upon others. I was desperate to secure you as an ally. But… you saw how Henrietta's plans failed. Several of those around me were ARM agents. Humans are easily manipulated by them. Kzinti they have experience in manipulating, too. They have selected and seek to breed what some call Wunderkzin, kzinti who are like men. You are the first among those who their eyes and hopes are fixed upon."
"I musst be a leaderr to the kzinti of Wunderland!" He was speaking in Wunderlander again. "Many have ssaid sso. I am of Chuut-Riit's blood!"
"Few know that better than I. Few would grudge you your destiny less or hope more for its fulfillment. But humans and kzinti together are not enough. To defeat the ARM we must add the Jotok to the equation. Another set of alien brains, I thought. Those linked brains perceive things differently to either of ours. A great potential asset. I thought I had reached them. But they have been masterless too long. The older ones will never reenter servitude."
"You are hardly in a position to persuade them to." He was able to get his accent under control again.
"I tried. I spoke with them. Living with the kzinti, Henrietta had seen what the Jotok were capable of. Their brains were not destroyed. Gaining their confidence was slow and dangerous, but I managed it in the end. I have made many secret trips here in the last three years. Easily done. There are many places one can enter and leave this swamp unobserved, and what was left of Henrietta's organization could at least get me a small, stealthed boat. I told them what I could of… recent developments on Wunderland, but the old one's minds were too set for them to properly take it in, the young one's minds were too unformed. But I was making progress! They came to acknowledge me as an entity, a non-Kzin, and would not willingly harm me. At least"-bitterly-"that old Jotok entity we have killed would not. Does that not tell you something about them? They are not naturally savage. Well, we have repaid his trust in the way humans so often do!"
"Stand up then. See if their laser will not willingly harm you. And what of the dead humans? The dead kzinti who sought but to fish? How do we repay them! Urrr!"
"The Jotok are not like humans. They are not like kzinti. That is the whole point. But within them still is the remnant of something high and great. The universe needs them. To unite the best of the three species against ARM."
"I do not see how…"
"It is all spoilt now. Even if they would listen to me, I have no way of reaching them. I wished to stay with you, Honored One, to speak with you when we might, to have you see… things… It was foolish of me to come on this expedition, but I thought I could control it. I should have realized that I as one of six could do little. I have made bad judgments, mistakes."
Her eyes looked into Vaemar's eyes. How could I ever have taken her for young? he thought as he saw the weariness there. "I have tried to do my best… for all… I have paid somewhat of a price…" There was liquid running out of her eyes now, the human sign of grief. "But now there is another plan, another chance. If I can live… If I can but reach the abbot. He may shelter me, I think. And then, and then…" Something else came into her eyes, making her look like the young Rosalind again, and then faded.
"I am confused often, Vaemar-Riit… and you see how I look. I have had much surgery. My skull is not my own…"
And you weren't excessively sane last time I saw you, Vaemar thought. The ghostly beam sweeping through the smoky air above them suddenly ceased. Cautiously they raised their heads. The turret on the hulk was not moving, as far as they could see, though it was hard to make out in the huge bank of white steam boiling around it. The laser had not been cooling efficiently. Either it had burnt out-not unlikely given that it had probably not been systematically serviced for the last ten years, and its cooling system was designed for firing in space anyway-or the Jotok thought them dead.
Meanwhile, thought Vaemar, the outriggers that would have been their means of escape were gone. Even the dead tree that had carried them here was burning fiercely. Alpha Centauri A had fallen far towards the horizon and night would be only a few hours away. There was no point in thinking about what to do with Rosalind/Henrietta now. He summoned the others.
"We will wait until it begins to grow dark," he told them. "Then we must set out to swim to the next island. And the next after that."
They would have to try to keep Swirl-Stripes afloat with the aid of his inflated Jotok, but Vaemar did not feel optimistic. If the returning Jotok adults pursued them they would have no chance. And even without the Jotok there would be dire problems for swimmers. The further they got away from the dead area and the Jotok, the more numerous the crocodilians and other predators would become.
Vaemar was confident that his, and Karan's, teeth and claws would see him and her through, and in other circumstances he would have reveled in such a chance to hunt and kill, especially as the channels got narrower and the water shallower towards the edges of the swamp, but he had other charges. "Do not show yourselves on the skyline!" he ordered. There was no point in letting the Jotok know they were alive. Swirl-Stripes was still drifting in and out of consciousness, but seemed to be slowly sinking. They fed him a little water when he could take it, and some compressed food from their last remaining ration pack. That reminded Vaemar of another problem. He himself was beginning to get hungry. So, he imagined, was Karan. He knew he could control his own hunger for a while yet, but in an extremity of hunger a kzin, especially, and sooner, a young kzin, could lose control and mind and attack any living thing in a mad frenzy. As Chuut-Riit's last surviving kit he had especial reason to be reminded of that. Let me not forget I am a Hero, he asked the Fanged God. Time passed.
The fires on the islands beyond them were beginning to die down now. The dry dead plant-stuff had not lasted long. Then in the distance he heard, or rather felt, the drumming of an engine. Marshy's boat partially surfaced in the wide channel between two of the smoldering islands. Weapons pods and sensors were extended on it.
Vaemar knew their body-heat would not show up in infrared-not with half the land masses around them still red-hot. Though the fur on his back crawled with the expectation of a laser-blast, he leapt to the highest point of the ridge, waving his arms and roaring, the tightly-focused kzin roar that can carry for miles across land or water. He saw the boat alter course towards them and dropped again. It approached and grounded in the shallows. Marshy, wearing a battle exoskeleton and carrying a beam rifle of a pattern forbidden to civilians on Wunderland of either species, leapt through the water and dropped down beside them. Vaemar, Hugo and Anne began to tell him what had happened. Then Rosalind/Henrietta screamed.
It was a scream of pain that almost shocked the kzin as his glands reacted. She was thrashing in the sand, clutching her head. A convulsive lurch took her whole body clear of the ground, then she fell back limply. She was plainly dead.
Vaemar turned to Marshy, seeking some explanation. Then he saw the old human's face was also contorted with pain. He was struggling desperately out of the exoskeleton. He flung it aside and leapt away from it, almost naked now like the rest of them.
"Heat!" he cried.
At the same moment Vaemar felt a burning against his skin, on his hands and between his shoulders. The metal fastenings of his belt, the only substantial thing he was now wearing, were hot, as were the rings keyed to the guns. He smelt a new burning smell, one that reminded him of the battle in the redoubt: burning kzin-hair. They had just now burnt through his fur. There was also smoke raising from Swirl-Stripes, but with his nerve-damage he would be unable to feel anything except his hands, which were tearing at each other. Vaemar stripped the belt from him, with no time for gentleness, and felt its metal components and compartments burn his hands. The rings followed. He tore off his own belt and rings. The humans were doing the same, Hugo with one arm having a difficult time of it. Between Vaemar's shoulders was a point of agony as if a rusty nail was being driven into a nerve-trunk.
"Heat-induction!" cried Marshy. "It's the heat-induction ray!"
The Jotok in the hulk must have been playing it on the islands and the surrounding water for some time. It heated metal first, nonmetallic substances and living tissue much more slowly. Some ceramics were nearly proof against it and the weapon's own containment chamber was ceramic. But it heated everything in the end. It was too slow to be useful in space-battles, but it was standard equipment on kzin warships also outfitted for ground-attack, and a terrible weapon in the right circumstances, like these. The kzinti had developed it to boil the seas of Chunquen, when the natives of that watery planet had tried to resist their invasion from primitive missile-armed undersea ships. It was the weapon that had boiled the heart out of Grossgeister before.
Vaemar yelled to Karan, explaining through clenched fangs what had to be done. Her claws made quick work of slicing through the loose skin between his shoulders and removing the locator. Then they did the same for the others, Vaemar having to hold them as Karan worked. Fortunately the locators were intended to be removable, but not like this and it was painful work. Human and kzin blood spilt and ran together in the sand. No doubt with the heat and change in chemical environment the devices would be transmitting emergency signals before they cooked. Rosalind/Henrietta's head was smoldering now. Much of the skin and flesh had burnt or peeled away to reveal a metal skull.
Get in the water! His instinct shrieked, and he knew his instinct was wrong. The water would soon be boiling, as it had boiled before. He had seen pictures of the original kzin landings on Wunderland, and of what had happened when, at both Munchen and Neue Dresden, humans had tried to take refuge from fires in pools and fountains. Last time it had happened in the swamp, the creatures in the water had flung themselves ashore before the end… Already the water around Marshy's boat was boiling, stream beginning to rise again in a white curtain. And Vaemar realized the boat's brains and electronics were probably already cooking. As he watched, one of its guns began to fire, cycling a stream of bolts in random arcs high into the sky.
Another thought: the boat's power-source was probably a molecular-distortion battery. That would cook off also. In the war, human guerrilla forces had used MD batteries as bombs. The boat was far too close. Desperately, Vaemar wondered if he might leap into the water and push it away. The boat was firing other weapons now, as well as flares. Its siren began a screaming noise that sounded like its brain crying out.
A green bar of light slammed downwards through the smoke-obscured sky. None of those huddled on the sandbar had ever seen anything like it: a heavy naval battle-laser, mounted as either the major armament of a capital warship or in a military satellite. There was another beam, and another, converging on the hulk. The water around it was boiling in earnest now. Gun turrets on the hulk were firing again, but randomly, as ready-use ammunition cooked off. A hatch opened and it launched a Scream-of-Vengeance fighter. But it was either uncrewed or crewed by half-dead Jotok and simply flew in a crazy parabola before crashing in the swamp and exploding. A weird combination of flames and steam was jetting out of the holes in the great hulk.
"Cover your eyes!" cried Marshy.
Even with eyes covered and faces pressed into the sand, they saw the white flash as a bank of MD batteries in the hulk exploded. There were more explosions. Then the green beams cut off.
"They would have detected the kzin heat-induction ray at once," said Marshy. "We will have to tell them it wasn't kzinti using it." He pulled a com-link from the discarded exoskeleton and spoke urgently into it. A wave hit the sandbank, slopped over the fused glass of the ridge and splashed them. It was hot, just short of unbearable.
The secondary explosions became less frequent, then stopped. The clouds of steam drifted away and they saw the hulk clearly again. Where it had previously plainly been a derelict kzin warship, it was now a twisted, shattered, unrecognizable mass of blackened wreckage and slag, the water about it still bubbling and boiling. No living thing could be seen on or in it. They stood staring at it in silence for some time. Marshy worked on Swirl-Stripes with a small, portable doc. Its lights at length pronounced his condition stabilized. Then Karan pointed: Kzin eyes could make out that dead Jotok of all sizes were floating out of the wreckage. Already, from nowhere, a few carrion-eating flying things had appeared in the sky.
"Nothing could have survived that," said Marshy. "But perhaps we should go and look." He splashed to his boat. "The brain's not quite cooked," he said as he returned. "But it was a near thing. Most of the electronics are out, but we've got a ride home." He was carrying lightweight ABC suits, protection against atomic, biological or chemical contamination, and passed these to the other humans.
"I'll take Anne and Hugo," he went on, helping Hugo into one. "I've none to fit kzinti. You had better stay and look after your companion till we return." He looked down at Rosalind/Henrietta's body. "That had better be disposed of," he added, tactfully. "Does she have a family?"
Anne tore her eyes away from the bare metallic skull and the hands stilled in the act of trying to claw it open. Her own face was very white. "She told me she was an orphan," she said in a somewhat shaky voice. That was not surprising. There were, after all, many orphans on Wunderland. "Forgive me… it's… it's nothing."
Hugo placed his uninjured arm round Anne's shoulder and guided her to the water's edge where she too donned a suit. Vaemar, watching, though again how strange and simian the naked humans looked, with their odd tufts of hair, sexual characteristics and ungraceful taillessness. And yet companions, he thought. Hugo and Anne splashed out to the boat. Marshy retrieved a decontamination kit from it and sprayed them all.
"You seek to finish the Jotok?" Vaemar asked Marshy.
"No. To preserve any we can, though I have little hope of that."
"For what? A new generation of slaves for the Wunderkzin? Perhaps there are still a few skilled Trainers-of-Jotok among the kzinti here."
"No."
"Or for the humans?"
"No. Unless they are trained very early they cannot live as slaves. In any case enslavement, even of another species, is contrary to all human law, and Wunderland, I need hardly remind you, is part of human space again… But I shall have to search thoroughly. We shall be gone a little while," he added as the boat moved away.
Vaemar turned to the body again. Henrietta. His Honored Sire's slave, who his Honored Sire had at last addressed as "Friend." Who had mourned his Honored Sire and tried in her way to be faithful to his memory, as well as to bring some sort of settlement between kzinti and men. She had done him no real harm, indeed had given good advice in their escape, and her remains deserved dignified disposal. Besides, he was getting very hungry now, and not only because of the relaxation that followed release from deadly danger. Karan, he could see, was hungry, too.
Another thought passed through his mind: after he had commanded her in the Ultimate Imperative Tense to speak truth, she had suddenly ceased to claim that she was Henrietta, and had begun to speak of Henrietta in the third person. Did that mean anything? Was she not the real Henrietta? There had been a number of human females among the followers of Henrietta and Emma in the redoubt. Perhaps it didn't matter. A pair of aircraft flashed into the sky above, hovered for a moment over the wreckage, barrel-rolled and were gone.
He had finished tidying the scene when Marshy and the others returned. Swirl-Stripes had also taken a little nourishment and the lights on the doc remained steady.
"Nothing," the old man said. "As I thought. They were all cooked."
"Is that such a disaster?"
"It is a… misfortune. And a cause of sadness. They were a great civilization once. Not only great, but benevolent. They raised many worlds to civilization and prosperity in the days of their greatness. Oh, they did it for their own ends, partly, realizing that successful traders need wealthy customers. But perhaps there was more to it than that…
"We had better get out of here," he went on. "There are some liberated radioactives in that wreckage. This place will soon be deadly for all who go near, and remain deadly until it's cleaned up. Another reason there will be no Jotok. Any more distant foragers who return now will die. And your companion needs more than first aid or the boat's doctor. We can't stay around and we can't help them anyway."
He turned again to the battle-exoskeleton. Rosalind/Henrietta's belt and its utility-pouches lay on the sand nearby. He picked them up together, and began to close the exoskeleton down. "Odd," he said after a moment.
"What is odd?"
Marshy pointed to the console. The sensory equipment on the battle armor included a broad-spectrum life-form scanner. Its oscilloscope, which had been flat-lining, was now recording small waves. He put the belt down to examine the screen more closely. As he did so the waves stopped. He raised the belt again, holding the two together for a moment, and then opened the ceramic containers that hung from the belt. He drew a light from the exoskeleton.
"Look."
"What are they?"
"Jotok tadpoles. Free-swimmers, still unjoined. She must have collected them in the hulk."
"Yes," said Vaemar. He remembered now how she had dropped behind them as they waded up the flooded corridor. That water must have been alive with larval Jotok. They were the minnowlike things he had seen in the first chamber.
"No ordinary swimming creature has a brainwave like that," said Marshy.
"So what happens to them?" asked Vaemar. "You say they cannot be enslaved. Will you kill them?"
"No."
"I know humans are sentimental at times. Will you set them free to starve? Or to live feral in the wilds and the swamps, the last of their kind on this world? As zoo specimens, perhaps?"
"None of those things. The abbot and… others… gave me several missions a long time ago: one was to find Jotok, if any still survived. The ponds at Circle Bay Monastery can be nurturing-places for them. And they can be taught to be both intelligent and free. It will take a long time. But perhaps we can make them traders once more. A highly honorable calling for Jotoki. I said they helped many species to civilization once. Now we can help them to civilization again."
Vaemar felt a snarl rising in his throat. Free Jotok! A planned outrage to the kzin species, to the Patriarch whose blood flowed in his veins! His jaws began to gape and he felt his claws sliding from their sheaths. One sweep of those claws would end that possibility once and for all. The man, like all its kind, was, he knew, contemptibly slow. He began to raise one arm, hind-claws digging into the ground to give his stroke purchase, muscles without conscious thought twisting to give his body added torque as he struck… He felt Karan's eyes on him, and something made him pause. He felt the surge of fury recede. Was he still a kzin of the Patriarchy? He stood puzzled for a moment, tail twitching.
Henrietta had been his Honored Sire Chuut-Riit's faithful slave. Free Jotok would be a memorial to her. In an indirect way, they might carry on her work. In a strange, unforeseen way, they might be a memorial to Chuut-Riit too. Perhaps, he thought, our memorials are always unforeseen. My Honored Sire was a great enough master to inspire loyalty in some humans, and as a result I live and a race may live again. He lowered his arm. He did not know if Marshy had noticed, or noticed the effort with which he spoke.
"I ssee… Sshee ssaid the univerrse needed them."
"Whoever you mean, she was right. They were a rare thing, too precious to lose…"
They boarded the boat. Minor injuries and scorches were treated. Swirl-Stripes was taken below, and they headed up-channel on the surface. They drew away from the drifting clouds of smoke and steam, the islands of crackling flames.
The slanting rays of Alpha Centauri A lit the clear water a delicate blue-green that deepened as the sun sank further. The islands they passed were living again. Vaemar, his fur dry, settled into the broad, almost fooch-like, bench that ran around the aft cockpit, watching the colors changing in the water and sky, the first stars and sliding satellites appearing as Alpha Centauri A set. A few hours before, he though, he had not expected to see the stars again. Life was good. Karan sat in the opposite corner. He felt a sudden tickling and looked down. The tip of her tail was twined around his. Their eyes met again and this time it was she who raised her ears in a smile.