The Man-Kzin Wars 05

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Buford Early’s laughter rolled across the broad veranda of the Montferrat-Palme manor: Evening had fallen, purple and dusky across the formal gardens, still with a trace of crimson on the terraced vineyards and coffee fields in the hills beyond. The ARM general leaned back in his chair puffing at his cigar until it was a red cornet in the darkness. The others looked at him silently; Montferrat calm and sardonic as always, Jonah stony-faced, Tyra Nordbo openly hostile. Only Harold Yarthkin and his wife seemed to be amused as well, and they were not so closely involved in this matter. With the human-style food out of the way Spots had joined them, curled in one of the big wicker chairs with saucers of Jersey cream and cognac, still licking his whiskers at the memory of the live zianya that had somehow, miraculously, been found for him.

“Glad you’re happy,” Harold said sardonically, pouring himself a glass of verguuz and clipping the end off a cigar:

“Why shouldn’t I be?” Early said. “An excellent dinner-it always is, here, Herrenmann Montferrat Palme-”

“Please, Claude.”

“- Claude. And fascinating table talk, also as usual. Politics aside, I enjoy the company here more than I have on Earth for a long, long time. But you said you had something to negotiate! It seems to me you’ve wound this affair up very neatly, and just as I would have wanted. All the evidence buried or gone, the bandits conveniently dead, and nothing of the tnuctipun but rumors. You might,” he added to Jonah, “consider writing this up as a holo script. It’d make a good one.”

“Not my field,” the ex-pilot said with a tight smile.

“You’re forgetting something, my dear fellow,” Montferrat said with wholehearted enjoyment. “You know the approximate location of the tnuctipun spaceship. We know the exact location, and as you love to point out, you don’t believe in swift direct action. We can get to it before you can-in fact, we just might have secured and moved it already. In which case you could look forever, it’s a big planet. Treasure-trove law is clearly on our side too, for what that’s worth. We could decipher some of those secrets you’re so afraid of, and send them off- to We Made It and Jinx, for example. Think of the joy you’d have trying to suppress it there,”

“No joy at all,” Early sighed, taking the cigar out of his mouth and concentrating on the tip. “I don’t suppose an appeal to your sense of responsibility for interstellar stability… no. You might try not to be so gleeful,” he went on. “What terms did you have in mind?”

“Well, my young friends here-“ Montferrat nodded at Jonah, Tyra and the kzin “- and their rather older friend back in the outback, have all gone to a great deal of trouble and expense. I think they should be compensated. To about the extent of a hundred thousand krona each, after tax.”

“Agreed,” Early said, sounding slightly surprised. “What’s the real price?”

“Well, in addition, you might get the blacklisting on Jonah removed-and have him and Fra Nordbo given security clearance for interstellar travel.”

Tyra’s face lit up with an inner glow at the ARM general’s nod.

“And?” he said with heavy patience, sipping at his cognac.

“And you go home. Or to another star system, but you get out of Alpha Centauri.”

Early laughed again, more softly, and set the snifter down. “I hope you don’t think I’m the only agent the… ARM has?” he said.

Jonah cut in: “No. But you’re the smartest-or if you’re not, we’re hopeless anyway. It’s a start.”

“It will win me time, which I will use,” Montferrat added. Early sat in silence, puffing occasionally, while the sun set finally; the stars came out, and a quarter moon, undimmed by Beta Centauri. A flash of shooting stars lit up the night, ghostly soft lightning across the hills and the faces of humans and the kzin.

“More time than you might expect,” he said. “Bureaucracies tend to get slower as they age, and mine… “More silence. “Agreed,” he said. “It’s time for me to move on, anyway. I’m getting too well known here. Lack of discretion was always my besetting sin. There’s still the war-we have to organize the ex-kzin slave worlds we’re taking as reparations-and doubtless other work will be found for me. Ich deinst, as they say.” He looked over at Montferrat. “Checkmate-for now,” he said, rising and extending his hand.

“For now,” Montferrat agreed. “Harold here to hold the stakes?” “Agreed; we can settle the details at our leisure.” He bowed to the ladies, an archaic gesture he might have picked up on Wunderland. Or not, if he was what they suspected. “And now, I won’t put a damper on your victory celebrations.”

He strolled like a conqueror out to the waiting aircar, the stub of his cigar a comet against the night as he threw it away and climbed through the gullwing door. The craft lifted and turned north and west, heading for Munchen, an outline covering a moving patch of stars.

“I doubt he’s going to accept defeat gracefully,” Jonah said, sipping moodily at his coffee. Montferrat had winced a bit when the younger man dumped his cognac into it. “Especially when he discovers the interior of the spaceship melted down into slag when the tnuctipun bastard died.”

“The hull alone is a formidable secret; he’ll have the satisfaction of putting that in the archives,” Montferrat said judiciously. “You know, I could almost pity him.”

That brought the heads around, even Spots’s. “Why?” Harold demanded, pulling himself out of reverie.

“Because he’s so able, and so determined-and his cause is doomed to inevitable defeat,” Montferrat said. At their blank looks, he waved his cigarillo at the stars.

“Look at them, my friends. We can count them, but we cannot really know how many. The number is too huge for our minds to grasp! With the outsider’s gift of the hyperdrive, we have access to them all-and the kzinti will too, in their turn, you cannot keep a law of nature secret forever, despite what the ARM thinks.”

His voice deepened. “The universe is too big to understand; vastly too big to control even by the most subtle and powerful means, even this little corner of it we call Known Space. There is an age of exploration corning-as it was in the Renaissance, or the twenty-first century. Nothing can stop it. Nothing can stop what we-all the sentient species-will do, and venture, and become. That is why I pity Buford Early-and why I never despair of our cause, no matter how bleak the situation looks. Tactically we may lose, but strategically, we cannot.”

Jonah looked thoughtful, and Harold grinned across his basset-hound face. Tyra Nordbo laughed, and leaned forward to put a hand on his arm. The jewels in her tiara glistened amid the artfully-arranged piles of blond hair and the shimmering silk of her gown dung.

“Thank you for everything,” she said.

“Nonsense,” he said, watching Jonah’s gaze on her, warm and fond. Bless you, my children, he thought sardonically. And f I wasn’t a middle-aged eighty and didn’t have commitments elsewhere, you wouldn’t have a chance, Jonah the Hero.

“The stars,” she said. “For both of us.”

“Perhaps,” Montferrat said. “Someday.”

“Someday.”

Jonah laughed. “Myself, after the past couple of years, I’m not so sure I’ll ever want to leave the confines of Greater Munchen again.”

Tyra laughed, but Montferrat had a suspicion the Sol Belter might mean what he said; he sounded very tired, at a level below the physical.

“May,” Jonah added, standing and extending his crooked arm, “I show you the gardens, Fra Nordbo?”

“I would be delighted, sir,” she said.

Montferrat watched them go. “A satisfactory conclusion, all things considered,” he said. “Very satisfactory indeed.”