The Man-Kzin Wars 11

Chapter 1

Occupied Wunderland, 2406 a.d.

The human freighter from Tiamat and the Serpent Swarm landed at a corner of the old München spaceport not needed at that moment by the warships of the Patriarch's Navy.

Humans, however, inconvenienced their conquerors even potentially only at their peril. Under the guns of security guards of the Wunderland government the freighter was unloaded with feverish haste, largely by sweating human muscle.

The guards took their bribes, ran checks over the piles of cargo seeking for weapons, explosives or other contraband, checked the manifests with their counterparts at Tiamat, took more bribes, and saw the cargo into a bonded warehouse. Few humans served either the kzinti or the collaborationist human government with fanatical zeal, but terror, desperation and poverty made workable substitutes for devotion. The ship took off again for Alpha Centauri A's asteroids before the kzinti decided they needed its landing area.

With the area cleared there was time for another, more thorough check. Part of the cargo, 50- and 100-liter liquid containers, was shown to be medical and agricultural chemicals, as the manifest described. Raw material for geriatric and other drugs, plus a few agricultural trace-elements in solution. There were also the usual vacuum and zero-gravity products that were a mainstay of Serpent Swarm export, manufactured in space and on asteroids where there were still relatively few kzinti and more working human factories. There were sealed containers with the warning symbol for radioactive substances, but these were elaborately certified from Tiamat's medical laboratories and the government as vital isotopes for nuclear medicine and without potential weapons use.

The chemical containers and some of the other cargo were loaded into primitive but well-armed wheeled vehicles. The kzinti allowed few humans to use flyers, even the clumsy human ground-effect cars. The vehicles' signatures were transmitted continually to the kzinti and Wunderland government satellites monitoring traffic and they were allowed to proceed by road along a predetermined route to a processing plant. That road had, long before, been made in a few hours by the flame of a hovering ship's reaction-drive fusing the ground. Now it was kept more-or-less in repair by gangs of human serfs with picks and shovels.

The geriatric chemicals needed processing but, even without the remainder of the consignments, they, far more than the nuclear material, would still have made a prize almost beyond price for any highjacker. There were few geriatric drugs or facilities on the ground for making them with the Wunderland economy shattered by the war and the kzin occupation. People were ageing and dying. Few human criminals, however, now had the resources for a highjacking. Crime was largely a matter of solitary muggings or Government-level corruption.

The processing plant where the vehicles stopped stood in a semi-ruined area on the outskirts of the city. There had been a battle there in the few days of organized human ground resistance around München after the kzinti landings, and much of the area had been flattened, but some factories were now providing a thin stream of necessities. The Trummerfrauen (that archaic term recently revived on Wunderland) had been and gone. The repaired and gimcrack new buildings—factories, workers' huts, a few small bars and shops—stood here and there like islands.

The streets wandering through this semi-wasteland were bleak and empty, though the reddish Wunderland vegetation was growing back on the wide stretches where nothing had been rebuilt and there were some Wunderland scavenging creatures, bolder than they had once been. Beam's Beasts, Advokats and even a few of the foul zeitungers were breeding up again as sanitary services broke down in these districts, and attempts at preserving something of civic culture gave way to apathy and despair. However, some humans kept minimal services going. Kzinti did not like dogs barking, and the dogs rounded up to help produce that primitive, now near-priceless chemical, insulin, were muzzled or without vocal chords in their cages under the plant, the plant itself sheltered behind heaps of rusty razor-wire. Kzinti seldom deigned to visit these parts but there were a few robot and human sentries, the robots the better armed.

The containers were unloaded, checked off again, and stored in secure areas. The contents of most of them were made into desperately needed drugs. Some people involved got rich, though in rapidly inflating occupation money. Some made enough to get to the Serpent Swarm or into the hills. Some of the nuclear material found its way to hospitals where painful and primitive treatments and procedures had been revived, often for long-forgotten but now also revived diseases. Many people who would otherwise have died, lived, at least for a time.

However not all the containers were opened. Some few were removed and dummies substituted. These containers were eventually loaded onto other primitive vehicles, or onto horses and mules, and, with other traffic, taken northeast in cautious stages to the great limestone escarpment of the Hohe Kalkstein and the sparsely-settled country beyond. A few days after they left the warehouse the collaborationist government on orders from the local kzin supervisor-of-animals brought in a kzin telepath to sweep the minds of key personnel working in the plant. The resistance was alerted beforehand and several fled. The alert was not perfect, however, and so several others died, but they died before the telepath could reach them.

Occupied Wunderland 2407 a.d.

The convoy arrived in the little valley at nightfall. Nils and Leonie Rykermann and a dozen others emerged from hiding and greeted it. More remained hidden.

“Our instructions,” said the guerrilla courier in charge of the convoy, “are to get this stuff to you, and you are to get it under cover. Bury it in the caves—caves that aren't used—and forget it until you hear further.” He passed Rykermann a sealed copy of orders.

“What is it?”

“I don't know.” That was hardly surprising. “Need to know” was enforced with religious zeal in the Resistance. Kzin interrogation of prisoners very often included telepathic probing, and even without this kzin tortures were very persuasive. “Markham's ships picked it up off Acheron.” He gestured to the nuclear-material warning which some of the containers bore. That seemed self-explanatory even if the rest did not. “It was landed with false certifications. I know there was a lot of effort put into getting it here.”

Rykermann nodded. “If it's something that kills ratcats, that's all that matters for now,” he said. Hatred glittered in his eyes. “Dead ratcats. That's all that matters,” he repeated to himself. It was probably an unnecessary statement. None of the humans present felt differently.

“I don't think Sol would go to this much trouble to send us strawberry ice cream,” the courier said.

Their infrared signatures, diffused through the canopy of leaves, and further by the cloaks which they and their mounts wore, might be indistinguishable from those of a herd of gagrumpher or other large Wunderland animals to kzin or government surveillance satellites. But it would be foolish to bet that way for too long and they wasted little time in talking.

Rykermann, the Resistance's chief biochemist and Wunderland's major expert on the great cave systems of the Hohe Kalkstein, supervised the rapid unloading of the animals. The containers were stacked inside one of the many cave entrances in the area. Some of these caves joined the huge main system, but even those that did not could be prodigious in themselves. Mapping the great caves and their connecting passages—many times the size of the Carlsbad Caverns of Earth—had been barely begun when the kzinti landed forty years before, and after decades of use by human guerrillas it was still very far from complete. A quick prior inspection had shown these chambers at least to be free of recent signs of Morlocks, the large, quasi-humanoid but near-brainless predators that had ruled in the deep caves. The two parties hurriedly began covering the containers.

“I'm sorry I can't stay and socialize,” said the courier.

“Don't apologize,” said Rykermann. “Whatever this stuff is, we'd better not linger too near it. And I've got an honest job to get back to.”

“Kzin!” screamed Leonie as the two gravity-cars rose over the valley-wall. Her beam rifle was firing before she finished the word. Attached to her rifle was a small surface-to-air missile. It just missed one of the sledges, but the kzinti did not know it was the only one the guerrillas had—given the threat of such missiles, they could not circle firing from the air. They needed no other encouragement for ground-combat. Other guerrillas, previously posted, fired from hiding-places around. Some of the weapons were primitive makeshifts, others were more modern and effective.

The kzin cars were sledges for light scouts and hunting-parties, not for full-scale war, but they carried a couple of heavy beam-weapons mounted at the noses and the great felinoids had sidearms. The beam from one smashed into the part-buried heap of containers before the housing of the car's gravity-planer was hit and it turned over, the screaming kzinti leaping clear, firing their own weapons as they came. The main human party was down too, firing into them.

One of the human party's horses provided a diversion. Maddened by the smell of kzinti it broke its tether and ran screaming. Uncontrollable reflexes triggered by the sight and by the smell of its terror, two kzinti leapt at it, razor claws slashing through saddle, hide, muscle and ribs, the kzinti themselves presenting a target the human marksmen were quick to find. The shrieking animal ran in a semicircle, crashing into a group of kzin as it collapsed in its death-agony. The humans had time to begin firing at the grounded kzin troops in earnest before they leapt.

The ground combat was short and bloody. No human could hope to match a kzin in speed or strength, but if the human was trained and experienced and could get in or under shelter with a modern weapon, the odds were evened a good deal. The members of the guerrilla supply column obeyed their instincts and went down in a circle, firing outwards. The kzinti obeyed their instincts and tactical doctrine: they leapt and charged, screaming and firing as they came. Kzinti died in the charge, but the circle of guerrillas was overrun and shattered. Their heavy weapons apart, the kzinti's speed and agility were as terrible in battle as were their claws, teeth, strength and merciless fury.

Leonie leapt to one of the abandoned kzin sledges and swung its heavier gun onto the main kzin body. More kzinti died, the survivors scattered, regrouped and counterattacked. Leonie and the gun were their main target for a moment. A laser blast hit her squarely in the chest, but she was wearing one of the guerrillas' few high-tech light-weight flak-jackets with layers of mirror. She went down in a diving somersault and crawled away as the guerrillas—Rykermann's group and the few survivors of the supply party—gave covering fire. The kzinti again charged the main human position. Again kzinti died, and so did a large number of humans, then, but thanks largely to Leonie and the gun, the humans now outnumbered the kzin enough to take losses and keep fighting.

The leader of the guerrilla convoy was torn apart by the claws of one kzin slow to die of wounds, who plunged on to wreak havoc with rest of the convoy party. The surviving kzinti scattered after their first slashing leaps, but humans followed them, screaming their own battle-cries. The kzinti, instead of disappearing into the darkening forest, regrouped and leapt back. Strakkakers, Lewis-guns and beam and bullet rifles met them. The kill-ratio was better this time, almost one kzinti for every two humans dead. Four kzinti made it into the cave, where the fight ended. The humans had bombs of nitrate-based explosives.

Nils and Leonie Rykermann, highly-experienced fighters, and protected as major assets by their own people, survived, as did some of their fighters. None of the convoy party did.

The last fighting kzin, staggering bloody and maimed from the cave to die on the attack, fell screaming in a storm of converging bullets and beams. The few surviving humans moved fast, killing the wounded kzinti and those of their own too badly wounded to move.

“Let's go!” Tasso von Lufft, the second-in-command, grabbed Rykermann's arm.

The dying kzin commander had been playing possum, hoping to lure a human within reach of his claws. Rykermann finished shooting him between the eyes. Some kzinti were terrified of going to the Fanged God without ears or noses. In case this kzin should be one such, Rykermann paid his respects to the details of this belief by slashing the nose off with his ratchet-knife. Two more slashes secured the tattooed ears, which would go to his belt—a kzin custom which the guerrillas had adopted. With practiced fingers he rifled the ammunition pouches.

“We can't leave this stuff!” Leonie protested. Half the containers were unburied still, a number scarred by the kzin beam. The damp ground around them steamed.

“There'll be more ratcats here any minute,” von Lufft objected.

“Not quite yet,” said Leonie. “If that was a set ambush they'd have had follow-up on top of us now. I think it was just a hunting party or a random patrol.”

“But the cars will probably have signalled,” said von Lufft. “And satellites will have picked up the beams. We've got to get out of here fast! There will be more kzin forces on the way here now. That's if they're in the mood for a hunt and don't just hit us from space.”

“They died to get that stuff here,” said Nils Rykermann, gesturing at the dead leader of the couriers. “Whatever it is, it's important.”

“And if it's dangerous, and leaking? Those drums took a fair hit. Like the man said, I don't think it's strawberry ice cream.”

“If they're leaking virulent radioactives we're dead already. But”—a quick examination—“I don't see my meter moving. I'm hoping they were made with strong linings. Come on! The sooner we get them covered the sooner we're out of here.”

The containers were quickly buried in the caves, invisible to any human in the entrance or the main passage. Decades of war had made these resistance fighters instinctively expert at camouflage. The scattered bodies, human and kzin, were stripped of equipment and weapons. Some of the humans carved pieces of flesh from the dead kzinti for ritual cooking and eating later.

There were too few survivors to carry everything away, and what could not be moved was smashed. They turned to the kzin cars and wrecked them as thoroughly as they could. Flying them was out of the question. It had been, Rykermann thought, counting the survivors, a Pyhrric victory—in fact no victory at all. The kzinti could afford to lose a couple of carloads of troops more than the guerrillas could afford to lose so many proven fighters—and friends. Friends who had died for he knew not what. He hoped it was worth it to whoever in Sol System was responsible. The courier group would have to be rebuilt from scratch with a fresh draft of doomed humans. Most guerrilla formations had already had casualty rates of several times one hundred percent of their original numbers. With that thought Rykermann, not for the first time, fought down a sense of hopelessness that at times threatened to overwhelm him. How much longer will recruits come forward for the fight? he thought. And answered himself: As long as the kzinti remain terrible and unendurable. And that will be until we are all dead, and forever beyond that. He scattered a few pressure-mines about the site, and sacrificed a precious strand of Sinclair wire, stretching it between two trees at a height where it might, with luck, decapitate or bisect any kzinti charging in pursuit, though it was fiendishly dangerous and difficult to handle in the dark.

The surviving guerrillas scattered into the forest, to where the rest of their horses and ponies were waiting hobbled under a limestone overhang at the entrance of another cave. They were not ideal transport between the trees but they were the fastest things reasonably safe from mechanical detection, and horses needed no urging to flee from the smell of kzinti. There were many horses without riders now, and the surviving guerrillas turned some of these loose in the hope they would be a decoy.

Then they rode, the woods dark around and above them. Behind them after a little while were the flashes and reports of kzin missiles hitting the site of the fighting. Lights in the sky were kzin gravity-cars flashing towards the scene, loaded with troops.

Branches whipped by them. The fleeing guerrillas smashed through a glade where a small herd of gagrumphers were sleeping, the creatures lurching bellowing to their feet in the dark around them. Good, thought Rykermann, as he realized what they were. The infrared signatures of the big beasts milling about might help confuse kzin spy-satellites as well as ground troops. At his command they hauled their horses round and headed northwest, at right-angles to their previous path.

They splashed through a wide, shallow stream, dropping powerful olfactory agents that might confuse kzinti tracking them by unaided scent. Rykermann turned to glance at Leonie, bent low over her pony's neck, urging it on, and the other survivors about, counting them again. He dug in his own spurs. It would be a near thing. It was one of the rare nights when, with neither Alpha Centauri B nor Wunderland's moons yet risen, the sky would be relatively dark for some time. He hoped that would help the fleeing humans more than the kzinti.

The kzinti bombarded the area behind them, though only with ordinary weapons, then their troopers landed and swept it, snarling over their dead. One triggered a pressure-mine, adding to the rage and confusion. With their eyes' superb sensitivity to movement and their keyed-up, hair-trigger reflexes, they blasted a number of small animals, both in the limestone glades and hollows and when they fired at dim movements in the dark of the caves. They found one badly-wounded human alive whom Rykermann's party in its haste had missed and took him for terminal interrogation. They removed their own dead and threw the burnt human dead into the caves, after removing ears and other trophies in their turn. The unburnt human dead were stacked in the cars—monkeymeat.

Then they left, searching for humans, some running on all fours and leaping into the dark of the forest like the great hunting cats they were. One of the sledges was salvaged, the other, wrecked beyond possibility of further use, was abandoned. The slave-worked factories produced them for the kzin armed forces in thousands. One flying car hit the Sinclair wire, with spectacular and bloody results. They left. As Rykermann had hoped, the noisy gagrumphers delayed them a little.

Silence returned to the valley and the caves. Then the flying cave-creatures that the humans called mynocks returned from the deeper caverns to their perches, hissing, squawking, their droppings, rich in nitrates and concentrated uric acid, falling to add to the deep layers already forming the cave floor: food for the vermiforms and other scavengers. More acidic compounds, burying the containers a little deeper.

After a time a party of Morlocks from the deeper caves approached the place where the noise and lights had been. The mynocks rose in a shrieking cloud, some snapping at the Morlocks with their horny toothed beaks and beating at them with barbed leathery wings. The Morlocks leapt and tore at them with slavering, baboonlike muzzles, dragging those they could out of the air to tear apart and eat alive. The main cloud of mynocks divided and flapped away, some into the night sky outside, some down the tunnels and into the labyrinth's deeper darkness. The Morlocks were savage and hungry. With the mynocks gone the smell of burnt human flesh drew them, heads down and bulging eyes running with tears and squinting against the little starlight that filtered into the cave's crepuscular zone.

One, climbing over the new mound of soil and rock, exposed one of the containers. It grasped it with splayed, five-fingered hands and worked it partly loose. The container's hard ceramic outer casing had been damaged, as had some of the metal of the inner casing beneath, but not completely penetrated. The Morlock shrieked and spat as it touched a jagged metal surface still hot. It knew only that it had no smell about it of food. It abandoned the container and joined the others tearing at the mynock and human corpses.

When all was eaten the Morlocks left again. Later the mynocks came back. The life-cycles and the chemical processes of the cave ecology resumed.

Chapter 2

Liberated Wunderland, 2433 a.d.

Again, Alpha Centauri A was setting, though at this time of year Alpha Centauri B rose early, filling the sky with wondrous purple light, silver-cored. Two watchers took their ease on the scarp of the Hohe Kalkstein, admiring the splendour of evening as their system's twin star cleared the horizon in its diamond-brilliant glory, offset by the ruby point of Proxima. There were satellites in the near sky, and the frequent sliding and flash of meteors: the wonder-filled evening of Wunderland. Before them, the escarpment swept down into a great plain, with a view of distant mesas to the south-east and a few far scattered lights. From certain cave mouths in the cliffs below them flying creatures issued into the twilight—great leather-flappers, species of mynocks, and little flittermyce in clouds like smoke.

Nils Rykermann, Professor of Field Biology at München University, lay back on a portable couch, punching a notebook's keys in a leisurely manner. His colleague and pupil Vaemar, sometimes known as Vaemar-Riit, Master of Arts and Science, doctoral student in several disciplines and son of the late Planetary Governor Chuut-Riit, recent injuries at his neck and shoulders sutured, disinfected and dressed, reclined on another.

“I think we've done all we can for the moment,” Rykermann remarked. “Back to the city tomorrow.” He had recently taken to smoking Wunderland chew-bacca and now he looked into his pipe's glowing bowl as an aid to thought. The pipe, an intricately-worked thing of wood and metal, was a gift from his pupil, who did not himself smoke.

“I suppose it has to be.” Vaemar lashed his tail meditatively. “I enjoy the High Limestone.”

“Even with your Morlock bites?”

“Yes. Stupid creatures to attack me at odds of only eight to one. And it's a few more ears for my trophy-belt. Honored Step-Sire Raargh will bawl me out about the scars but he'll approve none-too-secretly. So will Karan. And young Step-Siblings will admire. And Orlando.”

“Raargh's got plenty of scars himself, and a lot of them from the same creatures,” said Rykermann. “I got some with him. Anyway, it looks as if we won't have to breed a new Morlock population in test-tubes. We know now that they're living and breeding in the deep caves all by themselves. Lots of them, it seems. We'll have to improve security for our expeditions, though. And you've got other work to do.”

“Yes, I'm afraid I tend to let my enthusiasm for field-trips bias me too much towards my biological studies.”

“I'd noticed. But as the greeting goes, The Kzin is a Mighty Hunter. I don't want to discourage you. And your other grades and projects leave nothing to be desired. The physics, mathematics and history prizes were a good trio. And up here the formations grow well. You positioned the Sinclair Fields and the pumps cleverly.”

The two were silent again for a time, contemplating the night and the majestic view. Vaemar pointed. “Visitors,” he said.

Rykermann squinted in the direction of Vaemar's extended claw. A few moments later his eyes too made out the lights of an approaching car. Vaemar gave a churr of delight as it landed and his old friend and chess partner, Colonel Michael Cumpston, alighted.

Cumpston greeted them briefly, giving Vaemar a scratch under the chin in response to his grooming lick, but in a half-crouching position: in the past Vaemar's enthusiastic welcome had knocked him over more than once.

“I've got a message from Arthur Guthlac,” he told Rykermann. “He would take it as a personal favor if you could meet him at your first convenience.” He paused and went on in a different tone. “Early's involved.”

“Why didn't Arthur just send me an e-mail? We're seeing him in a few days anyway, aren't we?”

“This isn't social, I'm afraid. Security,” said Cumpston.

“Why couldn't he come himself?”

“Give him a break! He's been working round the clock trying to get his desk cleared before the big event. There's some secret business.”

“What?”

“As I said, secret. He didn't confide in a humble colonel. Anyway, you're wanted back at the ranch. Now.”

“I'm not a soldier any more. He can't order me round. In fact, since I'm a Member of Parliament, it could be a breach of Parliamentary privilege to do so.”

“Nils, Arthur may be a friend of ours, but don't mess with Early. You know better.”

“I thought he'd left Wunderland. That Montferrat-Palme or someone had put pressure on him to go—to get out of the system.”

“He went—physically. Some have said it would be better if he was still under our noses.”

“We're just about finished here for the time being, anyway,” Rykermann said. “Vaemar can take charge of packing things up.”

Cumpston nodded. Though he kept his expression blank, the former exterminationist's friendship for and trust in the young kzin pleased and amused him. “Another thing. Arthur says you should upgrade your security. He was vague about the details, but I gather there have been a few… problems in this area.”

“I suppose we have let things get a bit lax.” There were farms and hamlets dotted about the fertile tableland beyond the great escarpment and things seemed very peaceful.

They were silent for a moment. Then Cumpston stretched his arms and cracked his knuckles in a leisurely way. It had the effect of showing him the instruments on the forearm of his jacket.

“Don't look now,” he said slowly, making an gesture that took in a heap of boulders to his left, and raising his hand to pinch his lower lip, “but I am getting a signal from the motion detector from behind that rock-pile. Something quite large and bipedal. The high probability is human.”

Rykermann nodded thoughtfully, as if agreeing with the point Cumpston had made. He did not have a laser-ring like the ARM officer, but the ring on the hand that brushed his thigh activated his pistol. Vaemar yawned and also stretched, a feline's extravagant stretch that arched his back and dug his claws into the ground. He pulled up one forearm and then the other, in a lazy, breadmaking gesture. Then he leapt over the rock.

There was a human scream, and an angry spitting from Vaemar. He reappeared holding a human child or adolescent. Thrust into his belt was a gun it had evidently been carrying.

“Feral,” he said, though the clothes it was wearing made it obvious. “And clever. Look at this.” His hand with retracted claws touched his captive's cheek with surprising gentleness. “Rarctha fat. That's why I didn't smell him. No weapons.”

“Who are you?” asked Rykermann. The youngster struggled and spat.

“Not a Wabbit,” said Cumpstom. The Wascal Wabbits were the most sociopathic gang of ferals on Liberated Wunderland. Their facial tattoos were easy identifiers.

“Turn him round,” said Guthlac, though the young feral's sex was not in fact obvious. With a single practiced movement he brought a tranquilizer-gun from his belt and fired a Teflon dart into its shoulder. The feral went limp.

“They don't hunt alone,” said Cumpston, as the feral was put into his car.

“I know,” said Guthlac.

“A gang of them, armed, can be a real danger,” said Cumpston. “I'll report to security, of course, and get some proper people out here after them, but in the meantime, it wouldn't be a good idea for any of your students to be wandering about unsupervised or unarmed.”

“Not all my students are helpless,” said Rykermann. “And none of us are ever quite unarmed. All the same, I don't want anyone using weapons on children. I hope we have the resources to bring them all in soon.”

“That's up to you. You're the politician,” said Cumpston. “But as I say, I gather Arthur's had… reports. Disappearances. Within a few miles of here. Maybe this lot are to blame.” He turned to Vaemar. “Don't leave your students here alone. I'd suggest, if I may, that you call them up now. Get them back to town as soon as you can.”

Chapter 3

“You sent Earth a message a couple of years ago, asking us if a consignment of radioactives or biological weapons had been sent to Wunderland at a certain time during the war,” said Brigadier Arthur Guthlac. “Why?” He spoke with the indefinable awkwardness of a friend suddenly turned official.

“Two years ago?” Rykermann frowned. “Yes, of course I did. But why bring that up now? I assume it's been dealt with.”

“No. Thanks to our bureaucracy it has only reached the relevant desk recently. And that by chance. One of Early's subordinates with a long memory happened to see it on its way to the files. It was, of course a secret job, and very few ever knew about it. Normally we, or the Wunderland Government, would have sent out a team to clean it up in due course—when a mountain of higher priorities had been disposed of.”

“So?”

“Why did you send it?” Guthlac repeated. “When you did?”

“A routine part of tidying up,” Rykermann told him. “We buried some stuff during the war, stuff we were told had been sent from Earth, and I thought the UNSN should remove it. It was obviously something secret and military. Therefore something dangerous. I won't apologize that it took us a long time to get round to it. We've also had one or two other things on our hands, you know.”

“You're sure it was stuff sent from Earth.”

“That was what we were told,” said Rykermann. “From Earth via the Serpent Swarm belt. The courier who delivered it to us was killed. I don't know any more than that.”

“When did it happen?”

“It was about a year before the kzinti captured me in the caves. About fourteen Earth-years before liberation.”

“So it got through,” Guthlac said. “We thought it had been lost in space.”

“What was it?… Don't pull that stone face on me. We took risks for it,” Rykermann told him. “A number of people died for it. Answer my question, please, Arthur. Also, I happen to be not only the chief biologist for the cave complexes, I'm very close to the Minister for Environmental Protection. Do you want me to tell him there's an unknown bioweapon from Earth at large and Earth won't tell us anything about it? That is my duty as a Wunderlander and a member of the Government. And there was nuclear stuff, too.”

“Nils, I know well enough you are a politician,” said Guthlac. “In any case I suppose you'll need to know. It's Pak tree-of-life. And, Nils, I'm ordering you to say nothing about it.”

Rykermann drew in his breath sharply. He looked as if he was about to burst out with something, but then said only: “Why?”

“I'll tell you. But I'll trade you information. Tell me more. Everything that happened then.”

“We were in the wild country beyond the Hohe Kalkstein. There was a fight.” Rykermann told him the story.

“We hid the stuff and cleared out,” he concluded. “After that we had plenty of other things to do, beginning with getting away. If I thought about it at all later, I wondered if it might be a radioactive agent we were meant to smuggle into kzin ships or areas and then open. Enriched uranium for detonators, perhaps. Initiators for simple fission bombs. Plutonium. Caesium. Or some biological plague that the Sol Laboratories had developed to use on ratcats. But I had other things on my mind. We'd done as Sol instructed, at big risk all along the way. In the day-to-day matters of staying alive I didn't give it too much thought.

“The resistance was getting into a bad way then. Not just because attrition was wearing us down and more and more humans were either giving up and accepting their lot or just dead. Chuut-Riit had begun studying humans and that was making life harder for us all. Some kzinti were investigating monkey stuff—it had been beneath their dignity before—and some were also getting all too interested in what they found. They were learning more about us and it was getting harder to hide.

“Then I was captured by the kzinti,” Rykermann went on. “Thanks to Raargh-Sergeant and because we'd fought together against the Morlocks, and Leonie had soft-heartedly saved his life, I was awarded fighters' privileges and paroled. That changed my lifestyle. I wouldn't risk front-fighting and then falling into kzin claws again after breaking my word to them—there are some things you can't ask of a man and that's one of them. I was exhausted anyway. Plus they had a zzrou implant in me, not being overly trusting of any monkey. I became more a back-room boy for a long time. There was plenty for a backroom boy to do.”

Guthlac nodded. Rykermann went on.

“Time passed. We did what we could, growing a little weaker and more hopeless each year. Then came other things, it seemed on top of one another, hard and fast: the ramscoop raid and the death of Chuut-Riit, followed by the kzinti's civil war and the Liberation. That didn't mean the end of work for us. In many ways we were busier than ever.

“I thought the zzrou would kill me come Liberation. But a human doctor managed to hack it out. He died instead of me when it exploded. Thanks to Leonie, some of my people found me in the wreckage just before I bled to death. But without fancy surgery I spent the Liberation with a hole the size of your fist where my right scapula had been, and not, as you can imagine, taking a very active part. Finally they got me to the UNSN forces and one of the military regeneration tanks. Other wounded had to make do with organ banks. I was fortunate enough to be spared that.”

Rykermann was telling Guthlac things he knew already, but Guthlac let him speak on. He knew one terrible thing Rykermann might be referring to when he spoke of organ banks and apparently it still helped him to talk.

“Later, when things had settled down, and I was generally tidying up loose ends, I asked the authorities if they had sent us any dangerous radioactive material. I didn't hear anything more. That was the last I thought about it until now. I love my biological work and that's what I'd rather concentrate on. And… well, there were other things on my mind, too.”

“Dangerous, to leave radioactives around.”

“Cleaning up Wunderland will be a long job, Arthur,” Rykermann said. “There are lots of crashed ships, lots of spilled radioactives, lots of munitions, half-made experimental bioweapons, lots of hot dumps still. Our granite's generally a lot hotter than Earth's as well, which can make detection more difficult. I guess we'll have to wait till the war's over in space before we can even think of seeing the resources to do the job properly. But now you say…” Again he stopped as if biting off words.

“Anyway, you were right,” Guthlac said. “There were some nukes in it, along with triggers—bombs ready to go. Some of them very dirty and with a big bang for their size.”

“That's not very nice to have loose on Wunderland,” said Rykermann. “There are still kzin revanchists around, not to mention some humans who could be even more dangerous. Apart from—the other thing. We must bring it in now. I suppose you have the signatures of the nukes?”

“Yes. Here.” Guthlac gestured to a computer-brick. “They shouldn't be too hard to find—in fact they were designed to leave signatures so they could be retrieved from hiding-places easily. We also had transmitters broadcasting those signatures. They are so miniaturized they aren't very effective, but they might help. We also have triggering codes. But you want the full story?”

“To Hell with the nukes! Pak tree-of-life. Why?”

“One of the greatest services Markham and the Alpha Centauri resistance did for humanity was to set up a maser facility on Nifelheim,” Guthlac said. “They were able to send Sol a lot of information about the kzinti and in particular their fleets.”

“Markham? He knocked down a lot of the kzin surveillance satellites,” said Rykermann. “And his people jinxed others to send misleading information. The resistance would never have survived otherwise. That's what we owe him for. But what's Markham got to do with tree-of-life?”

“For us it was the intelligence he sent that mattered. Keeping that secret channel open was priceless. We were also masering them, but at both ends we kept our messages short and few. For the kzinti to have intercepted them would have been disastrous. But as you say, until Chuut-Riit settled firmly into command they didn't take much interest in what monkeys did so long as they were decorous slaves. We, like you, took advantage of that.

“The message we sent with the special consignment was deliberately cryptic. Decoded it said only: 'Hide it. You'll get further instructions if and when the time comes.'

“When things were going from bad to worse in the war, about the time of the third big kzin fleet attack on Sol,” Guthlac went on, “Early's people launched Operation Cherubim.”

“I've never heard of it.”

“Very few did. By that time we were beginning to fear sabotage of the war effort by pacifists and would-be quislings in Sol system. Thanks to Markham's masers we knew that in the Centauri system humans had not been exterminated but were living under a collaborationist government. We made that public knowledge, thinking it might be good for morale—Sol people would have grounds to hope their families and so forth here might still be alive. Anyway, we only rediscovered the need for any censorship slowly. It was a mistake. It meant there was a temptation to some Sol people, when they knew they might go on living under the kzinti, to settle for something like the same, rather than endless, grinding, hopeless war and increasing poverty, hardship and coercion for all.”

“If you can call it living,” said Rykermann. “The worst that Sol people endured was paradise beyond dreams compared to what we had here.”

“I know. But the possibility of a negotiated surrender for Sol was an inducement to defeatists and others: People worked out that those who did services for the kzinti—assisted them in their conquest—might expect to be rewarded by them. They worked out there were probably people like that on Wunderland.”

“There were,” said Rykermann. “Since I was out of things at the Liberation I missed seeing most of what was done to them then.”

“At first we hadn't bothered with security much, discounting any possibility of kzin spies or agents,” said Guthlac. “No human would spy or do sabotage for the kzinti, we assumed. But we learnt better as time went on. Humanity wasn't united. Secrets did matter. Operation Cherubim was deadly secret: To send a ship to Alpha Centauri with human volunteers—childless, of course—who would be converted into Pak Protectors. They carried tree-of-life agent in a sealed compartment. Something went wrong. They never arrived. Perhaps they ran into kzin ships. Perhaps just one of the accidents of spaceflight.

“But there was another operation on the same lines: To send tree-of-life agent in an unmanned ship.”

“Why?”

“It was the emergency backup. There were many advantages from the covert operation point of view: simpler, quicker, a ship able to accelerate and decelerate faster and, without life-systems, smaller, harder to detect or intercept. Plus, we weren't over-supplied with suitable Protector volunteers. The resistance had instructions to pick it up at the edge of the system and smuggle it to Wunderland.”

“As geriatric drugs and trace elements.”

“Yes. Not a complete lie, of course. It is a geriatric drug—and how! Always make your cover story as close to the truth as possible. The idea was, even if someone at the Alpha Centauri end who had an idea of what it was fell into kzin hands and was probed by a telepath, he or she could fix on the idea of a geriatric drug and medicine, just possibly the telepath would not detect an actual lie. That was the idea, anyway. Whether or not it would have worked is another matter. But anyway nothing was said in our maser as to what it really was. Then, of course, when it arrived it was to be hidden.

“If Sol system had been plainly falling, instructions would have been masered to open the containers and make Protectors. From there it would, we hoped, go as Operation Cherubim had been meant to go. Of course, we would give instructions then to try to ensure that the Protectors created would be suitable individuals—volunteers, with high ethical standards and records—good people, in short—and childless. We would have wanted trained scientists and fighters, of course, so they'd have as big a start as possible in knowledge and experience.

“We would do the same on Earth. The kzinti would find themselves attacked by Protectors in both systems simultaneously. We sent the nukes as well so the Protectors would have powerful weapons ready to hand right away, either as bombs or pumps for lasers. Even Protectors couldn't build nuclear processing-plants and factories in a kzin-occupied system overnight. But it was a desperate ploy, only to be used if all else was lost. We wouldn't have control over the process, or over who the human Protectors in this system would be. You know Protectors, once they are used to their state, are more or less indestructible, smarter than human geniuses, and unless they're killed they live for thousands of years. One can't imagine they would ever have handed power back to breeders, or even agreed not to make more Protectors. They could produce their own tree-of-life, given time. There was fear that we were exchanging one demonic enemy for a worse. But even if they had been universally benevolent, even if they defeated the kzinti, it would have changed our society utterly and probably forever…

“Anyway, the plan never had to be used, for which we may give thanks. The ramscoop raid and the death of Chuut-Riit gave us a breathing space, and instead of Protectors the hyperdrive saved us. We were lucky.

“As for Operation Cherubim, it seems that all those in the need-to-know circle in the Centauri system died. The kzinti found the maser transceiver in due course and they didn't stop at half-measures in blasting Nifelheim out of the sky with all its personnel. Also, quite a lot of ARM intelligence people from Sol died in the war, you know. We had gaps in our own records and knowledge. We didn't keep a lot of things electronically at all, for fear of kzinti or their agents hacking into our files. We lost both hard copy and computers when the kzin hit assets on Earth, which happened more often than most people know. Anyway ARM decided the consignment had never arrived and wrote it off… And you say the containers were hit in the fight.”

“Yes.”

“Well, at least they can't have been breached,” Guthlac said. “If any tree-of-life agent had escaped you'd have known all about it at the time. How old are you, Nils?”

“A hundred and one last birthday.”

“Even twenty-six years ago, you would have been too old to make the change. Exposure to tree-of-life would have killed you. But you're still here. And none of the rest of your party was affected either. I think—I hope—we can assume the integrity of the containers. They were made strong, after all… Although no stronger than the ordinary hospital containers they were supposed to be. We expected them to be inspected and x-rayed by the collabos at least, and we didn't want to arouse suspicion by making them anything special.”

“They may have been damaged, though,” said Rykermann. “I remember seeing them take hits. And twenty-six years buried wouldn't have improved them. There can be some powerful microorganisms and compounds in Wunderland soil, in the caves in particular. I'd suggest they be removed at once.”

“Obviously. That's why I sent for you as soon as I realized what your report was about. Can you find them?”

“With deep-radar it should be easy enough,” Rykermann said. “I remember the locality.”

“We want to be discreet about this,” Guthlac said. “We also don't want humans being put at risk of exposure to tree-of-life. Trustworthy—very trustworthy—kzinti would be useful on a job like this. The stuff's no danger and no value to them. I say that because I think of Vaemar. Can Vaemar destroy them?”

“He's still up at the caves. He's due to return in the next day or two. You know why.”

“This is tricky,” said Guthlac. “We don't want humans approaching those containers, not given the state they might be in, but I'm not happy about any kzinti, not even your young paragon of virtue, finding out too much about them. It might be best to simply clear the whole area and nuke it.”

“It might be best,” said Rykermann, “to make sure the containers are still there first.”

“Why shouldn't they be?”

“There were several people in our own party—the party that met the couriers when they were buried—who survived. I've lost touch with some of them. I'm not saying any of them would necessarily steal such things or have any motive to, but who knows who they might have talked to since then? The fighting's been over on this planet for thirteen years. Barroom reminiscences about some buried containers of weapons might have tempted some crook or adventurer to go on a private treasure-hunt for all we know.”

“If such a crook had opened them he or she would have had a surprise. And I think we would have known about it by now.”

“Even so, surely they should be counted and inventoried before they're destroyed?”

“I take your point. Can Vaemar do that?”

“Yes.”

“Get him onto it then. I don't need to tell you to stay well away from the area yourself. It shouldn't be too dangerous for him.”

“May I tell Vaemar what he's doing? He knows about the Pak, by the way. He searched old Earth records for another project.”

“I didn't know that. Act at your discretion. If he knows about the Pak there doesn't seem much point in concealing this from him. It'll give him an incentive, in fact.”

Chapter 4

Circle Bay Monastery, despite being home to an order of celibate male monks, had detached guest houses for lay visitors, including females. With a wedding planned to be held there shortly the bride, Gale, and her guests Leonie Rykermann and Karan, who had arrived early by air-car, were experimenting with clothes and cosmetics in front of a mirror. Twenty-fifth-century cosmetics, including skin-coloring agents as permanent as tattoos until one wanted to remove them, gave plenty of scope for experiment.

“You think headband suits me?” Karan asked.

“Not one like mine,” Leonie told her. “Try a white one. Or better, the one holding the jewel.”

Karan surveyed the result from several angles. “Little cape?” she asked. “Like this?” She demonstrated.

“That ought to turn a few heads,” said Leonie. “Including Vaemar's.” She herself wore a long skirt that hid her legs, legs that she still moved awkwardly.

The telephone on Karan's belt beeped. As she listened to its message her eyes lit and her whiskers twitched. She bared her teeth and raised her ears.

“From Nurse and Orlando!” she told the others. “Tabitha looking at pages of picture-book! Not eating it!” Life with Vaemar had improved her Wunderlander grammar and vocabulary.

“That's wonderful!” said Leonie. “Wonderful for us all! Wonderful for history!” They had all been hanging upon evidence that the first daughter of one of the Secret Others—the thin, hidden line of intelligent kzinretti—had bred true. It didn't always happen. The Secret Others had been few to begin with, and they were very few now. Karan on human-liberated Wunderland was perhaps the first intelligent kzinrett in millennia who did not have to hide her sapience.

“Hurrah for history!” said Gale. “Bring them to the wedding!”

“Yes, now I can. And rate Nurse charges can't leave them alone with him too long.” Karan's ears swivelled. “Car coming,” she said.

Leonie's ears also twitched slightly—she had a little Families blood. She stepped to the door. “If that's Arthur, I won't let him in. It's unlucky for the groom to see the bride before the wedding.”

“If Vaemar,” said Karan, “I'll not see him till finished here.” She applied a little nontoxic gold paint to the tips of her fangs and surveyed the result thoughtfully.

“And Tabitha?”

“News will keep,” Karan told her. “Want to break not all at once. Better still, perhaps, let him find out for self. Proud quicker if his discovery, I think. He's got lot to adjust to.”

“He's a genius,” said Leonie. “He'll adjust.” Her voice trailed off. The word “genius” was haunted for her. She thought of another genius trying to adjust. Then, a moment later: “It's not Vaemar. It's Nils.”

“Is he all right?” asked Gale. “None of them were due yet.”

“Why didn't you tell Arthur about Morlocks?” Vaemar asked. It was night and Rykermann, bringing Leonie back to München, had summoned him. Rykermann had told him in private code that there were secret matters to discuss.

“I was about to,” Rykermann told him. “Then I remembered Early. And Arthur reports to Early, wherever he may be now. I'm not sure that I wanted Early nipping trouble in the bud by sending a comet or asteroid into the Hohe Kalkstein. Or worse. Never forget what a totally ruthless swine Early is. I believe there's more unevolved Pak in him than in most of us…

“I'd like to be able to go back to Arthur and report the stuff is safe or destroyed before I give either of them the happy news that we spent so much toil and blood to deposit tree-of-life with a colony of Pak breeders who are really unevolved. Let's destroy the stuff first. Or make sure it is destroyed.”

“Unevolved? Or evolved differently?” asked Vaemar.

“Leonie and I were discussing that a very long time ago. When she was a student, before the first reports of the kzinti began coming in. The Angel's Pencil warnings, the disappearing ships… It seems like another age. But plainly the Morlocks have remained far closer to the original Pak breeders than humans have… And it was another age. It was a good post-graduate class I had. She's the only survivor of it.”

“I raised the question then,” said Leonie. “Why, after coming so far from the direction of the Core, hadn't the Pak gone one small and logical step further and planted a second colony a mere four light-years away on Wunderland? And we found the answer: they did. I remember spooning a fossil out of the cave floor, cleaning it with sonics, inch by inch, day by day, finding the analogues of human bones and organs that no alien life-form had any right to possess. DNA from live specimens confirmed it. It was going to be my doctoral thesis. I even began wondering about plans to somehow… rehabilitate… them when my work had made me famous. Then, er… no offence… our studies were rudely interrupted… Nils set me and the other post-grads to work analyzing an orange hair he'd found…”

“In any case, it seemed interesting and even exciting before the invasion, but not important, the way our priorities were after that,” said Rykermann. “If there was any reason to worry about potential Pak Protectors, there were several million around in the form of humans anyway, even if we hadn't suddenly found ourselves with other things on our minds.”

“I'd asked Earth to send us everything known about the Pak, although the university had the basic texts here. Not much more had arrived before the invasion. Partly caution at the Earth end, I suppose. The Pak story was like the knowledge in the early Middle Ages of the Earth being a spheroid. Scientists knew about it and it wasn't exactly secret, but people didn't talk about it much. Partly, there simply wasn't much known. Besides, the university had a limited budget for buying interstellar maser time…

“Presumably tree-of-life failed here for the same reason it failed on Earth and the Protectors eventually died. As on Earth, some breeders survived.”

“But there were differences,” Leonie told Vaemar. “You know because of Wunderland's lighter gravity the caves are much bigger here than on Earth or Kzinhome. Big enough to be inhabited by large life-forms on a permanent basis. There are fewer roof-collapses and the slower flow of water means larger volumes of limestone are dissolved in ballroom chambers and honeycombs rather than along the narrow lines of stream-courses. With the mynocks and other flying things there is a lot more protein being brought into the caves than is usually the case on Earth. The breeders moved into the caves—possibly to escape tigripards or other predators—and found themselves on top of the food chains there.

“Without many predators or competitors in the caves and without weather or any need to devise shelter or protection from it—without rain or heat or ice-ages—they were under far less evolutionary pressure than were the breeders on Earth. Those grew up fighting leopards on the savannah.”

“Leopards?” asked Vaemar. “I remember, they are…”

“Big cats. Fighting such creatures is a good way to sort out the cleverest as survivors.”

“I see.”

“The caves were like a great womb they never had to leave, and in which they had almost no need to develop. Possibly the radiation from the Pak ships and engines on Earth also caused mutations that didn't occur here. Anyway, these breeders on Wunderland didn't need many brains. They also escaped the worst of the meteor impacts that have obviously affected evolution on the surface here. In fact the meteor-impacts would probably have helped them by changing water-levels and giving the caves more suspended tables and more habitable layers of chambers.

“In this gravity they were well-muscled and already well suited for leaping and clinging to stalactites and so forth. Once their eyes and other senses adapted to the dark, their evolution must have almost ceased, as it has with many life-forms in Earth caves. On Earth there is a species of crustacean found in caves in Australia whose close relatives live in caves in the Canary Islands and the Carribean. They hardly changed in the time continental drift separated them so far.”

Rykermann nodded.

“Earth scientists think Homo sapiens is not all Pak in its inheritance,” he said. “The theory is that the original Pak Protectors probably modified the breeder population to better fit the Earth ecosystem and biochemistry. Sewed in the genetic material of Earth primates. That is why humans seem to fit well into the Earth animal kingdom… It also raises the possibility that the breeders on Wunderland were not so modified, or modified differently. It's patently obvious that they have never developed anything resembling a civilization. We three know that all too well. Predatory bands, with rudimentary stone weapons, almost entirely carnivorous…”

Rykermann went to a collecting pannier.

“And there is your latest specimen, Vaemar.” He produced a translucent container and handed it to his pupil. “It is dry and withered, but…”

Vaemar turned the thing over. “A Morlock infant or late-term fetus. A mummy.”

“Or a human infant or fetus, perhaps?”

“It could be, I suppose,” said Leonie. “There were children who took refuge in the caves during the war. Maybe this was a stillbirth. Or an abortion by some poor child. They had no birth control.”

“Damaged as it is,” said Rykermann, “it has sufficient characteristics of both species to puzzle us as to its identification, does it not? I think it may be a hybrid. A human-Morlock hybrid, not carried to term. And humans and Morlocks are meant to have evolved under different stars. It should be as impossible as… as a human-Kzin hybrid. Add that to the DNA profiles. Anyway, Vaemar, just let me know if the stuff's still there, and sealed. Obviously, take all precautions for dealing with dangerous material. And don't forget there's radioactive material there as well.”

“What you say about Early—” said Vaemar. “Are the Protectors so dangerous? I would have thought we had the power to conquer them.”

“Yes,” said Rykermann. “They are so dangerous. Arthur's told me quite a lot, apart from what Earth sent us. The one human Protector we know of, Brennan, was a Sol Belter, an evolved, modern man, the product of many generations of civilization and science and imbued with the values of benevolence and cooperation that are part of all the great human religious and ethical systems. Also, fortunately, he was a good man.

“When he became a Protector he adopted the entire human race and his interventions in human affairs were benevolent as well as secret. He probably saved Earth from perishing in war, over-population and pollution, even if he then nearly killed us with kindness by making us almost too gentle and pacifist to resist when your lot came calling. Morlock Protectors, it's safe to bet, wouldn't be like that.”

Leonie gave a sort of jerk, and nearly fell. Her legs were not what they had been and sudden emotion now made her even more clumsy. Both Rykermann and Vaemar reached out to help her.

“What is it, Lion-cub?”

“Protectors with hyperdrive!”

Rykermann thought. Leonie saw his face grow pale in turn. Vaemar made a questioning sound.

“The kzinti didn't want to destroy the human worlds,” Leonie said. “They wanted them intact for themselves, and they wanted to keep the human race like the Jotok. However merciless they are in battle kzinti have a kind of conservationist sense towards other species—according to traditional kzinti's cosmology, other intelligent species have a place in the great hierarchy ordained by the Fanged God. It just happens to be a very long way below their own. Isn't that right, Vaemar?”

“The Fanged God gave us other species to serve us and for us to prey upon, not to exterminate except when we had no other choice,” said Vaemar. “At least that is the traditional teaching. Remember the kzinti offered the humans of Ka'ashi—excuse me, I mean of Wunderland—a cease-fire as soon as the Conquest Landing was complete.”

Rykermann took up the thought. “But the Protectors would have only one aim: Destroy all possible competitors. First to exterminate the human species, and if necessary destroy the human worlds and all other life on them—they'd use anything: relativity weapons, anti-matter weapons, the dirtiest possible thermo-nukes and ramscoops in atmospheres, killer hypersonics, geological disrupters. They'd make missiles of comets and asteroids, trigger solar flares. No possibility of treaty or negotiation. All other species, especially all other sapient species, regarded as vermin-to-be-exterminated by definition. Not only would they be more totally focused on destruction than would kzinti, they are far more intelligent than nearly all individuals of either of our species, and far tougher…

“There's a theory, you know, that Venus's tectonic plates were somehow turned over a couple of million years ago. It makes no physical sense. We can't see how such a thing could have happened, except by artificial disruptors greater than any we've even conceived of. But what if, when the original Protectors reached Earth, they found some sort of life on Venus, some sort of potential threat or competitor? Well, I suppose we'll never know…”

“Impossible, surely!”

“I hope so… I suppose we would still make more human Protectors in response, if we had tree-of-life and they gave us time. But it's far harder to defend against an enemy that wants to do nothing but kill you than against one that merely wants to conquer you.”

“They'd like to take Earth and Wunderland as breeding-space, of course, but an empty Earth and Wunderland,” Leonie said. “Taking them would be secondary to getting totally rid of the human race, a dangerous rival and a mutated deviation from the Pak form.

“Perhaps they wouldn't even care much about preserving Earth or Wunderland or the Asteroids if they had Mars and Venus to terraform, not to mention the colonies we've established in other systems and all the various moons and planetoids available. Given what we know of Protector toughness and engineering intelligence, they might consider several possible worlds that are too tough for us as ripe for transforming and could write Earth and Wunderland off.

“Of course, once they'd removed the human race, they'd take on the kzinti without pausing to draw breath. Then they'd wipe out any and every other sapient or potentially sapient race they found. According to what Brennan learnt, there weren't even other animals on the Pak homeworld. As well as human hyperdrive technology, they'd get kzin gravity technology—giving them even more worlds and weapons.”

Vaemar's eyes gleamed and more of his fangs showed.

“You think they could beat Heroes? The Patriarch's Navy?” he asked.

“Vaemar, my friend,” Rykermann said, “humans are, in fighting ability, a crude, feeble, slow, stupid, fragile, soft, merciful, pacifist and rudimentary version of Protectors. I do not mean to insult, but need I say more?”

“No,” said Vaemar. “I see.”

“And even Brennan, evolved and benevolent as he was, was utterly ruthless,” Rykermann went on. “One reason it took a long time to establish a proper human presence on Mars was that creatures there attacked the early bases. I don't know much about them, but apparently Brennan just wiped them out. No interest in preserving them, not even any curiosity about them—Protectors seem to have very little abstract curiosity.

“Look back to the Slaver War for a precedent for a Pak Space-War, perhaps. Or worse: even at the end the Slavers didn't kill the nonsapient life-forms. Look to a war of extermination throughout the galaxy. A war against all life. The war of humans and kzinti would seem a quaint, friendly affair by comparison, a skirmish or two, a sort of neighborly disagreement. Pak without the hyperdrive would be more than bad enough. Pak with the hyperdrive… well, my imagination's limited, I suppose, but I think they would just go on destroying intelligence or potential intelligence wherever they found it, on and on up the spiral arm, out to the other arms, back towards the Core, until they had all the galaxy or until they came up against something worse than themselves. If there is such a thing.”

Rykermann paused and collected his thoughts.

“This is very scary,” he said. “Or rather, it could be. But consider: These Morlock Protectors, if they did exist, wouldn't know anything. However clever they may be potentially, they have no teachers. Knowledge must have a source.”

“I've thought of that,” said Leonie. “They could get teachers. I've tried just now to put myself inside the skull of a newly-awakened Morlock Protector from the great caves. Such a Protector would, I guess, have memories of the Breeder stage. That could mean memories of the existence of humans and kzinti—probably of fighting against humans and kzinti in the caves—memories of aliens, of weapons, of war. And a knowledge of its own ignorance. If I were such a Protector, now suddenly a super-genius—the first thing I would set out to do would be to acquire knowledge.

“There could be several ways to begin that. We've cleared a lot of the old human and kzinti weapons and equipment from the war out of the great caves but there are probably still a lot left. Who knows what remote chambers and tunnels some of our people ended up fighting to the death in? Our Protector could take them apart and find out how they worked. But more importantly, if I were such a Protector, before I showed my hand more obviously, I'd capture humans and kzinti and find out everything they knew.”

“How?”

“Raids on the surface. They'd talk under torture.”

“Kzinti? Heroes?”

“Yes, Vaemar. As far as I know any sapient will talk under torture eventually. Isn't one of your—the kzinti's—own instruments of torture called 'Hot Needle of Inquiry?' They wouldn't have developed it if it didn't work…

“But Pak Protectors would use anything, and unlike either of our species, would feel no particle of distaste at having to do so. Normal kzinti, I know, regard torture as something not admirable or heroic, to be resorted to only from necessity, though that doesn't stop them once the necessity has been established. Those of both our kinds who enjoy torture for its own sake are abnormal individuals, shunned and despised by the normal. For a Pak Protector such scruples would be without meaning.

“As the Protectors' knowledge grew, interrogation would get easier. They could alter prisoners' brain or body chemistry, for example, so even the bravest could not but tell everything they knew at once. They'd find out about computers quickly and hack into them. They might capture kzinti telepaths and use them. Can you imagine a Pak Protector with access to the internet? There are certain to be computers with internet linkage lying in the caves among the bones and weapons.

“There is another thing. You know, Vaemar, that the great weakness of the kzinti is that they are impatient. They attack before they are ready. Time and again, that was the only reason we won, both strategically and tactically.”

“So Raargh-Hero drilled into me in our earliest hunts. And so wrote my Honored Sire Chuut-Riit.”

“Pak, as far as we know, are enormously patient. After all, they are very long-lived. That is probably one reason why, though they had spaceflight for a long time, they never, as far as we know, bothered with any space-drives beyond fairly simple interstellar ramjets. Also, of course, after a certain level, perpetual war may militate against technological progress. The original Pak colonization project took tens of thousands of years just to get to these systems. They didn't mind. They don't have the weakness of impatience…

“Perhaps Morlock Protectors would not be as smart as either Pak or human Protectors. They are starting from a much lower pre-change base-level of intelligence than human Protectors, certainly. Living in a largely risk-free, challenge-free environment in the caves for tens of thousands of years they might have devolved. They might. But that they've devolved enough is not the way to bet.

“But they might get the hyperdrive.”

“You're trusting him with a lot,” Leonie said, as Vaemar's car dwindled in the northeastern sky.

“He'd have worked out the Morlock-Pak relationship for himself. In fact, I mentioned it to him a long time ago, when it didn't seem important in the way it does now. Don't forget, he'd also done work on the Hollow Moon as part of his space-engineering units.” The Hollow Moon was one of Wunderland's many small moons, further away than most. About four miles across, with a space at its core, so deep radar said, apparently about a mile in diameter, it orbited Wunderland at a distance of about 60,000 miles. Apart from being hollow, its other oddities included a near-spherical shape, usually only associated with objects of far more mass and gravity. Humans had begun to study it before the kzin invasion, but that study had been dropped during the war and the Occupation. What human spacecraft the kzinti had permitted to fly then were needed to keep the shattered economy turning over, not for abstract research or flights into areas that the kzinti might disapprove of. There were what appeared to be ancient tunnels leading, presumably, to its core, but they were blocked. Its metal content was quite high, but that of many other moons and asteroids was higher and these were more worth mining. There were entrances to its tunnels of some depth, but during the war neither side had used these much as hiding-places, simply because they were too obvious.

After Liberation abstract and academic scientific projects had resumed slowly, the cheaper ones first. There was plenty to do on the surface of the planet and on the inhabited asteroids and little money for space exploration. Policy had been to leave the anomalous moon alone until there were again resources available for a proper, long-term expedition. It had been thought at one time that it was an ancient artifact of the Slaver Empire, but its orbit was receding gradually from Wunderland (one reason it had not been demolished as a danger by the first colonists), and if it had dated from the Slavers' time it would have disappeared into space long ago.

“I stick to my old idea. What could it be but the original spaceship the Pak used for the journey from Sol?” Rykermann said. “In any case if I can't trust Vaemar after what we've been through, who can I trust? Yes, laugh if you like.”

“You know, don't you,” Leonie said, “that seeing you and Vaemar together—like the fulfilment of everything I'd been working for—was important in helping me live. I think I'm entitled to laugh. Sometimes it seemed it was your hand I was holding, and sometimes a kzin's.”

Rykermann nodded. No need to ask what she referred to. After she had partially come out of the tank, Vaemar and Raargh had spelled him, sitting at her side while he slept. The hospital staff hadn't liked it at first, but the kzinti had been very insistent, and he had cooperated with them.

“I wish… I wish Brennan had been right, and we could have kept the gentle society we had,” said Leonie. “There is nothing good about becoming warlike.”

“We had no choice,” said Rykermann. “But you know I'm a convert now. I'll work for peace and reconciliation. Work with Vaemar and the Wunderkzin.”

“I know. It's stupid of me, perhaps, but I feel I must say it. We have been at war for sixty-six Earth years. The war goes on in space. One gets weary. Gorillas settled their quarrels with gestures and rituals.”

“But kzinti didn't. Or Pak…”

“I suppose so,” said Leonie, shedding her clothes. “Let's go to bed.” But her eyes were full of apprehension.

Rykermann still found it disturbing to look at his wife as she stood there naked. There were no scars marring her body, but when she was seen from a few feet away certain things became more apparent: below the waist that smooth skin was a little darker than it had been, the hair was a different color, and there was a difference in the vase of her hips and thighs. The pubis was more prominent, and the buttocks a little flatter above and fuller below.

Those were among the external differences. Her body was beautiful, as were the bodies of most men and women on a light-gravity world where modern medicine and cosmetic techniques were again available, but much of the lower half of that body had once been someone else. That and much more had left them both emotionally bruised and vulnerable. Leonie had lost consciousness as they were carrying her out of the cave, and had not known until a long time after the operation what had been done to her—Rykermann did not know if she would knowingly have accepted such a transplant even to save her life—and telling her had taken some time. Now they lived with it, and other things.

When she looked at him now he saw again the expression that had been on her face the first time he had seen her conscious after the operations and the long regeneration processes.

He also remembered her as she had been carried out of the cave, apparently dead or dying from the laser-wound, and his entreaties to her to live, shouted until they sedated him. But she lives, he thought. Thanks to Dimity and to a couple of kzinti, she lives… And thanks to a donor, too, whoever she may once have been. Collaborator? War criminal? Accident victim? Best not to think. What does she fear? The idea of yet more monsters unleashed on our world… our worlds!… or the stranger's body sewn onto her? Or that I am still desperately in love with a beautiful super-genius who saved her life and about whom we can never speak? Oh my poor, dear wife! He stepped forward and took her in his arms. He began to run his fingers down the familiar curve of her spine, then stopped. Once his hands would have known by instinct how to caress her. The first times they had made love when she returned from hospital had been bizarre, and in a real sense frightening, for them both. It had more of comfort and release now, but still… Her breasts were still the same firm-tipped softness against him that he knew so perfectly. He felt the body that was not entirely her body respond to him, and the sudden wetness of her tears on the skin of his chest. There was the saltiness of them in his nostrils, more a taste than a smell, the fluttering of her eyelashes' attempt to brush them away. When he bent to kiss her, the part of her skin that touched his lips tasted as it had always done. Much of the rest, he knew, would not.

My dear, dear wife, he thought. Life has not exactly been kind to you. You deserved better. We are casualties of war, we in our way as much as the millions whose bones lie bleaching about this planet. Nothing to do but press on. Kipling had the words for it: “Be thankful you're living, and trust to your luck, and march to your front like a soldier.” And you are the bravest soldier I know. But what would I not give to make the world kinder for you?

Chapter 5

Vaemar landed his car in the High Limestone country, the Hohe Kalkstein, in an overgrown glade formed by an ancient cave roof collapse, near the twisted wreckage of an old kzin military sledge, partly covered with reddish vegetation and sunk into the soil. There was also a scattering of bones, gnawed by large and small teeth, bleached and fading into the ground. The Wunderland War Graves Authority had much to do and few people to do it with.

Kzinti loved exploring caves, but unless charging in the heat of battle, no kzin was capable of entering one recklessly. Vaemar had lights and a handgun as well as his w'tsai, and a tough helmet which now had the addition of a lobster-tail neck-guard at the back and epaulettes covering his shoulders—the favorite initial tactic of Morlocks was to drop both rocks and themselves onto the heads of intruders. He checked his radiation detector, very much standard procedure for all who ventured into the great caves of Wunderland, littered with the debris of more than five decades of war. As he crossed the threshold, there was a sharp jump in the gauge and a whirring from its miniaturized descendent of a Geiger counter. Vaemar leapt back. The radiation was not huge, but he saw no reason to expose himself to it. He climbed into a tough, lightweight suit, also standard equipment, and resumed his exploration, keeping a wary eye on the detector.

He moved further into the cave, lights and his own superb eyes sweeping the darkness for any signs of activity. There was nothing on the cave floor, not even the normally ubiquitous vermiform scavengers.

There was little, without major surgery, which they disliked, that could be done to kzinti's eyes to make them more efficient light collectors, but Vaemar did carry a pair of goggles that extended his visual range further. Such simple and lightweight aids were quite new, and humans had reason to be thankful that the kzinti had not possessed them during the war.

There, as Rykermann had described it, was the embankment of earth that covered the containers. Deep layers of mynock droppings showed it had been undisturbed for a long time. Evidently the transitory creatures did not remain long enough for the radiation to affect them.

He set up a motion detector focused into the cave beyond, unfolded a small robot digging tool, and stepped well back as it went to work.

The robot struck solid material after only a few moments. Vaemar deactivated it and stepped forward. One glance was really enough, but he pushed more earth aside to be sure. Beneath the earth was rock. Not only had the containers been removed, the removal had been disguised. The Geiger counter whirred merrily.

Vaemar searched the immediate area thoroughly, but there was no other reasonably possible hiding place. Weapon at the ready, he ventured down the tunnel a long way, out of sight of the daylit mouth and into the beginning of a branching labyrinth of chambers, but again without result. He had compasses, motion detectors and miniaturized sensory devices, all specially developed for such expeditions. Infrared beams in his helmet gradually created a three-dimensional picture of the cave that could be retrieved in several ways, including a hologram.

He found and killed a couple of Morlocks, pausing to note with scientific detachment their body weights and general state of nutrition. He knew better than to try eating the foul-smelling, foul-tasting things. Each tunnel ended at last either in a blank wall, a stream diving under rock, or some passage too small for a kzin to easily enter, though plainly Morlocks had ways of coming and going from the bigger cave systems. The radiation level was falling now. Making a really comprehensive map would take some time. Vaemar felt it would be foolish to go further, especially when he had hardly room to move. His instincts screamed for him to press on, but he had become used to disciplining those instincts. Placing himself in a situation where enemies might come upon him at total disadvantage was not Heroic behavior. He returned to the car, and sent Rykermann and Arthur Guthlac a report, along with a copy of his recorded data. He searched some other small caves in the limestone glens and valleys nearby, without result. He surveyed the whole area with instruments from the air, recording radiation traces and signatures. Then he headed for home.

Below Vaemar's car were the fields and buildings of a human farm. His eye flickered across the instrument console. Since Cumpston's warning of trouble with the feral gangs, most farms in the area had gone onto at least a minimal state of defense alert, which included transmitting a signal identifying themselves and indicating their electronics were functioning normally. This one was not transmitting.

Vaemar made a leisurely pass low over the farm, sending out an interrogatory. He saw the movement of some animals. Nothing else. He decided that an examination of the situation was within the ambit of his task, and landed outside the main building.

No one greeted him, and the wandering animals fled. He saw many human footprints on the ground, some bare. There was not much smell, which was in itself suspicious—it suggested scent-deadening Rarctha fat. The main door was open. The human height of it did not bother Vaemar—kzinti were comfortable going on all fours and preferred to do so when stalking or running any distance—but it was hardly wide enough to admit his shoulders. Looking in, he could see some brightly colored toys of human children scattered about. He called out, but there was no answer. His Ziirgah sense told him nothing apart from confirming that the place was empty, but it picked up desperate hunger from somewhere else.

A white object like an oversized fluffy ball with blue eyes bounced up from the ground and through the air towards him. He hurled himself backwards, almost faster than a human eye could have followed, w'tsai flashing. The Beam's Beast fell in two pieces, fangs squirting venom. Further evidence that the place had been deserted for some time.

Stepping back into the courtyard, he noticed a limestone outcrop that had been fenced off for no obvious reason. Examining it more closely, he discovered a sink-hole at its center, covered by a metal grating, with no bottom to be seen. He tied a light to a fine cable and lowered it through the bars into the hole. It twirled around, showing blackness and stalactites. His sensitive nose and whiskers tasted the air from it. He could hear the cave-sounds of dripping and running water. So, the great caves touched the surface here, as they did in many places.

He sensed game animals watching him fearfully from the cover of the trees. I would like to bring Orlando hunting here, he thought. And then, remembering the new state of things: And Tabitha, too, and Karan. Make it what the humans call a family picnic. Dimity, too, perhaps.

Looking further at the main farm building, he saw indeed that stairs at one side led down to an underground cellar, where wooden containers were kept. Further on, the artificially shaped and lined walls gave way to living rock with cave formations, that seemed to go on down into darkness. “Monkey-daffy, monkey-lucky” was an old kzin maxim on Wunderland, but he could hardly believe anyone capable of such mad folly. There was certainly a stout steel-barred gate at the end of the cellar, but that, he saw had been opened. There were also footprints on the damp floor. Vaemar was a good tracker, but the prints were too confused and overlaid for him to make much out, save that several were human-sized and had five toes. They did not seem quite human shaped. There was a smell of blood, not new.

He returned to the surface and moved on to another building. Opening the door of this he stepped into a considerably hotter climate. Vegetation grew thickly. It smelt of death. No Rarctha fat here.

A couple of small bodies lay dead at his feet. Lemurs. Under the kzin occupation there had been a minor human industry—evidently there still was—growing them as playthings for very young kzin kittens, who loved them. They had no fighting abilities when caught, but like all primates they tasted good and chasing them through trees was a good exercise in training kittens to judge the strength of branches. A nursery game. The next step for the kits had been chasing baboons, which were much more dangerous, and then the real thing, which was much more dangerous again. These appeared to have starved. He saw the sharp faces of other lemurs peering at him from above. There were feeding-trays without food. Vaemar thought of releasing the lemurs, but did not know if they would survive in such a climate and with strange vegetable matter to eat. He had seen some food containers outside, and scattered some of the vegetable matter from one on the ground. The lemurs, starvation evidently overcoming even their terror of the kzin, leapt down to it.

No humans anywhere. What was the human term? Déjà vu. This had happened before, in Grossgeister Swamp, when his small expedition had found human and kzin dwellings deserted.

His detector showed no trace of the missing radioactives. A check with deep radar showed nothing moving underground in the immediate vicinity. He made a report and flew on. He passed over several more farms. Some responded to his interrogatories, a couple did not. There were also some plainly long deserted.

Vaemar had rooms at the University, but he also had another residence, a considerable distance from most human habitation: a few buildings on the wooded lower slopes of the Valkyrieheim Hills, smaller sisters of the Jotun Mountains, northeast of the Hohe Kalkstein. It was not far from the country where he had grown up with Raargh in the years immediately after the Liberation, the country which he still to some extent regarded as his home territory.

During the occupation the largest of these buildings had been a small palace for a kzin noble with, like almost all kzinti, a consuming love of hunting. Post-war, as was frequently the case on Wunderland, the original human owners of the land were no longer around. Normally the estate would have been redistributed back to other humans, but ARM and others had quietly decided that Vaemar-Riit, potential leader of what were coming to be more widely called the “Wunderkzin,” should be housed in some dignity.

Unlike many surviving kzin buildings, the high outer walls were intact. What had once been an eight-fold hedgehog of concentric defenses was much reduced, though not eliminated. Vaemar the postgraduate student did not deign to notice openly the possibility of assassination from either human exterminationists or from kzinti who regarded him as what they called—another new term for the Heroes' Tongue—a kwizzliing, but Vaemar-Riit the leader of the Wunderkzin was obliged to take certain precautions.

There was a small community on the estate. His Step-Sire Raargh and both their respective families lived there, as well as occupants of the old servant's quarters, guard and guest-rooms. Raargh had his own buildings and enjoyed a reasonable-sized harem of traditional kzinretti now, but Vaemar remained monogamous.

This was partly by reason of policy. A first mate several years older then he, as Karan was, would have been by no means unusual previously. To stop so long at one would have been very unusual, when he had almost every kzinrett on the planet for the taking. But Vaemar understood and accepted the arguments put to him by Cumpston and others that the old ways could not continue. He had put them to other kzinti and fought more than one death-duel over them: smaller households and harems with females for every male kzin—“families”—would help ensure a more stable Wunderkzin society than the old way of vast harems for the nobles and little or nothing for the rest.

Further, and more important than policy, Karan had let him know in no uncertain terms that other females in his harem would have to be approved by her. So far none had been. He had, of course, a number of kits by various other females but they generally mixed with Raargh's. None save Orlando, his first, and so far only, son by Karan, had been born with the Riit blazon of red on the chest. He accepted fairly philosophically the fact that having a sapient mate brought some restrictions along with advantages.

There was good hunting territory nearby, with tigripards as well as gagrumphers and other large beasts. Here he was much less the graduate student, and much more the kzin prince, though a modern, Wunderkzin prince.

Vaemar landed in his inner courtyard, acknowledged the greetings of his servants (servants, not slaves, and the greetings less than a full prostration in these times), including the hired human Nurse in heavy, Teflon-reinforced apron and gloves, and fended off a mock attack from an excited Orlando. His banner was broken out from a high turret with a blast of horns and roll of drums.

Raargh made his report on the doings of the estates and, as Vaemar had forecast, made pointed comments about the Morlock bites. Vaemar remembered that the human he had studied with much interest called C. Northcote Parkinson had said the motto of retired senior sergeants was: “There are no excuses for anything!” That, he thought, as the grizzled old veteran gave him a quick grooming lick, summed Raargh up well. Big John, the kzin medical orderly whom Gale had cared for, stumped out. His head, face, hands, feet and spine were largely a complex of metal and regrown tissue, but his new ears were smiling. Raargh and Vaemar—Vaemar-Riit!—had called him “Hero,” and at Arthur Guthlac's request Vaemar had taken him in. Raargh's now-numerous kittens, and Orlando too, looked upon his extravagant scars and prostheses with respect. His burden of cowardice had been taken from him. He had a mate of his own, for that matter, and a couple of kittens as well, all of which would have been quite beyond his dreams had he lived out his life, even unmutilated, in the old order of things.

Vaemar made a prostration before the worship shrine holding a ceremonial jar, liberated from the quarters of the late Jocelyn van der Straat, which still contained at least a few molecules of the urine of his Honored Sire Chuut-Riit, and a few fragments of bone and hair identified by DNA testing as those of Elder Brother who had died protecting him as a kitten. He killed a yearling bull from the holding pens and ate quickly. Groom plied his blowdryer and talcum powder. Then Vaemar carried the recording brick to his laboratory, and called Arthur Guthlac's headquarters again.

A large hologram of Wunderland stood on the center of Guthlac's control console, a duplicate on Vaemar's. Circular marks on it, like old sores on a body, marked the sites of nuclear explosions. Some were fairly recent, from the Liberation or the intra-Kzin civil war that had so aided the human reconquest, some dated back to the original kzin landings. The oldest sites were quite faded now: the kzinti had blasted any human resistance that became too prolonged, but they had used fairly clean bombs. They were ecologists in their way, and anyway had not wished to destroy the infrastructure of the planet. But the monitors that built up the picture of Wunderland's radioactivity were sensitive. A myriad of lines crossed the northern hemisphere. A far smaller number crossed the less-settled southern hemisphere.

“These are the traces of highly radioactive substances which satellites have recorded in the last year,” Guthlac said. “From the state of the ground we don't think the stuff's been gone longer than that. Fortunately we can narrow it down further. The signatures you recorded match these—” he pointed to a long lonely line that crossed the Wunderland equator and continued down the globe. “They've gone to Little Southland. A couple of them have, anyway. As far as we can make out, the bulk of them can't have been moved far, though. You did a good job, Vaemar.”

“The University has routine trips to Little Southland,” said Nils Rykermann. “Mainly instrument checks. Vaemar can be rostered to do it. If we want to keep this matter quiet…”

“We do. For the moment certainly.”

“Vaemar had better take a look, then. A look and back. He shouldn't be away more than a couple of days at most.”

“What do you have in mind?” asked Cumpston.

“If what you say is on the loose,” said Rykermann, “then for obvious reasons we don't want humans going after it blindly. Vaemar is better able to look after himself than almost any human and if he can tell us what he sees, then we can at least make our next move with knowledge. Anyway, if all the containers are together, we can at least say they've been gotten away from the Morlocks. Setting aside the question of who took them.”

“It might be—” Cumpston bit off the words. To suggest in Vaemar's electronic presence that it might be dangerous for him would be an insult to test even Vaemar's exceptional self-control.

“The deserted farms?”

“That's bad. We thought the feral gangs were falling apart, but maybe this is their doing.”

“If nothing worse. The thing we fear. We can't keep this secret much longer.”

“The police have some ready-reaction teams,” said Rykermann. “They're small but they've got good weapons. I'll get them up there now!”

“What about ARM?”

“They're Wunderland police, not ARM, and what they do is not ARM's business. Why do you think we have a police bagpipe band?”

“I always assumed it was to torture kzin prisoners. Or maybe flatlanders.”

“I'll take that up with you later. Our pipers are actually part of an elite reaction force that doesn't care to advertise its presence as such. Band-practice covers a multitude of sins. I've still got plenty of rank in the Wunderland armed forces and I'll get them up to the Hohe Kalkstein now.”

“Are you going to warn them about what they've really got to look out for?”

“Yes, there seems no choice about that now. But they are our best.”

“Do you really think your best is good enough?”

“At the moment we've got no choice, with so much of our forces still tied up in the space war.”

“I will give you full discretion,” Guthlac told Vaemar. “Take any companions you wish, but lead. Lurk cunningly in the tall grass, scent out the spoor, do not scream and leap at the prey, but return. Knowledge is the prize.”

“I have done the ROTC intelligence course,” Vaemar reminded him, with the barest hint of something else in his voice, and adding after a moment, “sir.”

“And that, my young Hero, is another reason you are chosen,” Guthlac told him. “Act at discretion.”

Kzaargh-Commodore paced. Night-Lurker's bridge did not allow him much space, a dozen strides one way, a dozen the other. But Captain, Navigator and the rest of the bridge team kept well out of his way.

One kzin heavy cruiser. With repairs of less than naval dockyard standard. But with claws still capable of seizing Glory on an epic scale. Still with claws capable of devastating a planet or a system.

Eight-and-four Earth-years had passed since, returning with some damage from a hit-and-run raid on the human bases in Sol system, his ship had received news of the death of great Chuut-Riit, of fratricidal war between Traat-Admiral and Ktrodni-Stkaa, and, far worse and more unbelievable, disaster on disaster, the shattering news of the human reconquest of Ka'ashi, and of the humans' possession of a superluminal drive against which no kzin strategy could prevail.

Kzaargh-Commodore had turned tail and fled. A commander less sure of his own courage or of his crew would have leapt into the battle, however hopeless, but his veterans trusted him unwaveringly, and he had long since passed the point of needing to prove his courage to himself. He had guessed from other experiences that the apes had developed a means of detecting the monopoles that powered the big kzin gravity-motors, but like all modern warships, Night-Lurker had a reaction-drive as well.

Evading detection in such circumstances was not difficult. In the vastness of space it was surprising that ships, even with detection equipment, encountered one another as often as they did, and he had more delta-V than he needed. He slowed the ship and headed in a long, elliptical orbit out of the Alpha Centauri system, well above the plane of the ecliptic, to further reduce chances of detection.

But he did not entirely flee. He dispatched Chorth-Captain, one of his best officers, once “Hider-and-Whisperer,” a specialist in cloaking and communications technology, now promoted to Partial Name and Ship-Command rank, in a cloaked Rending Fang heavy fighter craft to spy out the situation. They would rendezvous later.

Strictly speaking, his duty as a commander in the Patriarch's Navy, if not to die on the attack, would have been to get his ship back to the nearest kzin world, or to Kzinhome itself.

But who knew which were the kzin-held worlds now? Further, he knew, his one ship, added to whatever kzin fleet was still in the area, would make no real difference to the situation. On the other hand, lurking in the Centauri system, it could still inflict terrible slashes if it could leap from hiding. His experience of humans was that, like other monkeys, they lacked persistence. No doubt the skies over Ka'ashi would be guarded and patrolled by human ships in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. But given a quiet time, that guard would grow slacker and more perfunctory. Then he would fall on them out of those skies like the vengeance of the Fanged God. The greatest shame that the Patriarchy and the Heroes' Race had ever suffered would be blotted out in the blood of the insolent omnivorous apes. Given the element of surprise, the arsenals of his ship were more than enough to lay the planet to waste. Surprise would be impossible at first, but given time… And he carried several battalions of infantry in hibernation for landings when the monkey-cities and bases had gone down in nuclear fire.

Later, with new data passively collected and after thought and discussion with Captain, he modified his plan. Knock out the defenses of population centers of Wunderland from the sky, certainly, but use the troops to seize Tiamat. The shipyards there, they had learned, were converting to hyperdrive technology. To capture that for the Patriarch would be a feat to eclipse merely burning a world in vengeance!

Meanwhile, he would repair his ship's damage as a Hero might lick his wounds, and wait for the monkey guard to slacken and become distracted. A simple enough plan, but as time went by he came to realize it might not be an easy one. As was so often the case, the kzinti's worst enemy was themselves. The monkey-prisoners in the live-meat cages were eaten faster than they bred and with manufactured food life became less pleasant. Telepath went mad. With boredom, tension and unappetizing food there were several death-duels until he put a stop to it. Since Night-Lurker had set out on a battle-mission, and he was not yet a full admiral, there were not even females of his harem aboard. He made rousing speeches to the crew, promising them inglorious death and their ears on his belt if they crossed him, glorious death or perhaps just plain glory, if they obeyed as Heroes.

His ship had drifted beyond the outer Comet halo. He had watched the broadcasts from Ka'ashi, and had seen the reassertion of monkey government and authority. A few messages passed back and forth with Chorth-Captain, pulses too fast to be detected except by a dedicated receiver. Then Chorth-Captain's replies stopped. Perhaps he was laying low in deep grass, waiting his chance to leap. Perhaps the monkeys had found him.

He thought now and then of the full Name that would undoubtedly be his: Kzaargh-Chmeee, perhaps? Or perhaps—for given such a feat and such a service it was not quite impossible—Kzaargh-Riit?

Kzaargh-Commodore had learnt the superluminal drive could only be engaged outside the gravitational singularity of a star system, and the double-star of Alpha Centauri A and B gave a huge volume of space in which it could not operate.

He had seen on various screens, too, something of the so-called Wunderkzin. Many of the kzinti of human-recaptured Wunderland lived lives at least as independent of their simian conquerors as any such defeated creatures might, and clung to some poor rags of honor. They were hardly pleasant to look upon. But a few had gone further and actively sought a partnership with the apes. It was sickening and at first unbelievable. Indeed, Kzaargh-Commodore was by no means convinced that the broadcasts featuring these creatures were anything more than monkey propaganda. He cut off even the passive reception of messages, lest the apes had some method of detecting this, and also lest this propaganda should somehow reach his Heroes. The longer the wait the better.

Orlando, Vaemar noticed as he entered the nursery, had finished his jigsaw puzzle, a five-thousand-piece picture of Lord Chmeee locked in slashing battle with a herd of sthondat-like monsters. Good. Human-derived jigsaw puzzles were not in the same league as the puzzles of the kzinti priesthood, but they were useful for schooling infants in patience and persistence. And he had finished it very quickly.

Orlando was lying on his back, holding a large ball of fiber in his front claws while ripping at it with his back ones. Vaemar remembered for a moment the first time he himself had leapt on such a ball, the day his Honored Sire Chuut-Riit had brought him to the Naming Day of Inga, one of Henrietta's children. He did not know what had happened to Inga, and twice he thought he had seen Henrietta dead, though each time he had been left with suspicions that it had not really been her… A lot of blood down the runnel. But he remembered well leaping onto the fiber ball, running and tumbling with the squealing human infants, and gorging on sugary cake.

The cake had made him sick afterwards, as he was held by an unfortunate Guard Trooper in the car flying back to Honored Sire's Palace, but a taste for it had remained a small secret pleasure with him, one to which he had recently introduced Karan. The abbot at Circle Bay Monastery, with whom he sometimes discussed ethics, said it could hardly count as a vice. Indeed, since the ova of birds and the mammary secretions of cattle had gone into its making, it did not have the connotations of being entirely vegetable matter (in any case kzinti, despite their boasting, had never been complete and total carnivores). The ball shrieked as Orlando tore at it. His claws reached the center, slicing through the last tough envelope. Tuna-flavored ice cream poured out, drenching the kitten. He jumped and spat, then when he realized what it was, settled down to licking it from his fur and the floor, purring like a small gravity-motor. Vaemar smiled indulgently and contributed a lick of his own. “The kzin is a mighty hunter,” he told his son. Those fiber balls were juggled high in the air by a robot, and it took some leaping for the kitten to capture one—with the penalty of a very painful electric shock if it misjudged timing and distance. A possibly lethal shock in the most advanced mode.

“Tabitha caught two, Daddy,” Orlando told him.

“Did she? Did she indeed? Where is Tabitha now?”

“Upstairs. She took them with her. She caught the first ball and then one after I caught mine.”

Each time a ball was caught, the robot increased its speed, the complexity of its juggling and its shock. The third ball was by no means easy even for a kitten older than Orlando with fast reflexes and a powerful leap to catch. It required, and was meant to require, some planning ability as well as strength and dexterity. Kzin kittens matured at somewhat variable rates, but Orlando—still younger than Vaemar had been when his Honored Sire perished and Raargh adopted him—had done very well to catch the second.

“How did she do that?”

“She climbed into the roof and jumped down.”

Vaemar thought for a moment.

“Have you ever caught a fourth ball, Orlando?” he asked.

“No, Daddy.” Then, realizing that this was said as a challenge, Orlando's posture changed. “Program the robot, Honored Sire! I will catch the fourth ball now!”

Vaemar watched while he did so, then groomed his son and soothed his scorches, both proud.

Alpha Centauri B had risen when Vaemar strode up the steep winding track above his mansion to the small guest house in the wood. The forest, normally full of stir at this time as the nocturnal creatures took over their shift, fell almost silent about him. There was game to be flushed here, but he was not hunting.

Like all kzin buildings, the guest house was large and thick-walled. But unlike most it had windows of some size close to the ground and a human-sized as well as a kzin-sized door. Its roof sprouted electronics. His presence was signalled as he drew near, and the kzin-sized door opened.

There was a fooch for him in the main room. He reclined in it as Dimity Carmody dialed him bourbon and another tuna ice cream. Although he had eaten already custom and politeness demanded he take a little (in any case, as he told himself, no kzin is ever entirely full).

She had been watching an ancient classic film from Earth, Peter Jackson's original of The Two Towers. She turned the set down. Vaemar read a sampler Dimity had put on the wall, a quotation from a human writer who had lived on Earth more than five hundred years earlier: “Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.”

“Chesterton,” Vaemar remarked.

“Yes.”

“I have taken some notes of his writing. 'It is constantly assumed, especially in our Tolstoyan tendencies, that when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb. The real problem is—Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity?'”

“I know you have a good memory,” said Dimity. “You have that word perfect.”

“Yes, don't I? Which may suggest that particular passage has been important to me. Perhaps there is some reason for that.”

“Your sense of humor means more to me than you may know, Vaemar.”

“When will you be ready for the Little Southland trip?” Vaemar asked.

“Tomorrow. Tonight. Now. As soon as you like,” she told him.

“I have some new instructions,” he told her. “Looking for stolen radioactives. It's not quite what was planned.”

“It doesn't matter. I'm ready to go. You'll take me with you, won't you, Vaemar?”

“So we agreed,” He looked at her with great eyes for a silent moment. “Dimity…” He paused again.

“Yes, Vaemar?”

Vaemar knotted and unknotted his ears for a moment. He lashed his tail. He rose and walked across to their chess-game set up on a table, making a single move. Then he spoke slowly.

“Dimity, you know that I am one of the first kzinti to have been brought up, almost from kittenhood, with a good degree of human contact on more or less equal terms, with human companions and… friends. Among my very earliest memories are running with the human infants and leaping on a ball of fiber that Henrietta prepared for me. Much later I learned where she got that idea… After the Liberation I helped Honored Step-Sire Raargh Hero when he worked on human farms. I have learnt Wunderlander and English from the best of sleep-tapes. I am a postgraduate at the University and a commissioned member of the Reserve Officer's Training Corps, with even a limited access to lesser military secrets. Human students whom I tutor prepare assignments for me diligently. I have led expeditions and fought against dangers with humans as allies. I have talked late into the night with human companions and shared many thoughts with them. I take part in many human, and encourage to the best of my ability many mixed, social activities. In chess I am a system master and aspire to interstellar master. Soon I hope I will be the first kzin to add the post-nominals PhD, DLitt and DSc to my Name. I am the leader of the Wunderkzin, and, slowly, our numbers among the whole kzin population of Wunderland and the Alpha Centauri A System grow. I recite all this to emphasise the fact that no kzin knows humans better than I. I know humans better than I know the kzinti of the Patriarchy.”

“Yes.”

“I am also, like my Honored Sire, a genius. That is a fact. In the society of the Patriarchy “genius” is an insult rather than a compliment. Geniuses may live on sufferance if they have useful skills. Otherwise they are generally killed by their fellow kittens, the warriors, in their nursery games and first combat training. Honored Sire lived because he was a great fighter as well, as befits one of Riit blood. You are… a super-genius. Even if we had not fought as allies in the caves against the Mad Ones, that would be a bond between us. We genii must stick together. Yours is a deeper mind than mine. It is hard work for me to read your papers—even those I am allowed to. Dimly I grasp the implications of Carmody's Transform, which you discovered so young! Do not worry, if I were allowed to see your hyperdrive work I doubt that I could steal it, Dimity friend, even if I were so inclined. But perhaps my talents spread wider.”

“Vaemar scatter-brain! Everything from astrophysicist to warrior to song-writer! Mine are so narrow!”

Vaemar shifted uneasily. His tail lashed again. If a sinuous felinoid like a nine-foot tower of claws, fangs and muscle could look awkward, Vaemar did so. He licked his lips once or twice. “I… care about you, Dimity. We are alike.”

“You have been good to me. I do not know what I would have done without you.”

“You said song-writer? The university review, you mean?”

“Yes!”

They sang together, laughing:

“I thought it was important to get the students laughing at that one,” Vaemar said. “Our 'Cat in the Hat' really laid them in the aisles, too, didn't it? I'm afraid Orlando and Tabitha got hold of the hat, though. There wasn't enough left of it to keep when those two had finished.”

He paused, again washing his black lips with his great tongue, and then continued, looking down into Dimity's eyes: “Honored Step-Sire Raargh also taught me never to be ashamed of using my Ziirgah sense, or to hide it as though fearing someone would come and make me into a Telepath. I know some humans fairly well, I think, and I read emotions. And in you I read desperation… How do you see the future, Dimity?”

“It could be full of hope. We are still digesting the implications of what the hyperdrive means. Planets for all? And one day, after the eventual peace in Space, the kzin worlds will get it too.”

“You think so? So do I. It is among a number of reasons why I have felt no inclination to try and steal it. Such action would be counter-productive.”

“Of course,” she said. “They may have it already. At least one hyperdrive ship went missing when the Armada swept in. It may have been captured. But anyway knowledge leaks, and some humans would be prepared to spy for the Patriarchy, and kzinti students-of-particles are clever.”

“The war will go on, you think? A hyperdrive war?”

“It may or it may not,” she said. “There is nothing I can do about it. I try to school myself not to brood upon things I cannot change. But there is another thing which is less dramatic but whose implications may be at least as important—humans now have the technology of kzin gravity-control. That will give us new planets, too. In the early days of human exploration of Sol system, terraforming even the nearer planets had low priority because the asteroids had lighter gravity. A little slow work done on Mars. Nothing on Venus, though Earth in theory at least had the biology to start transforming its atmosphere cheaply since the twentieth or twenty-first century. Such things will matter much less now. And there need be less competition for territory.

“We can have the stars, humans and kzinti, too. If we can live together here, Vaemar-Riit, then we can share a universe in peace. It may take several centuries, of course. It may never happen. There is a chance, more than a chance, even if we can achieve a peace now, of more wars before it really happens. I have heard rumors that peace negotiations drag on, but so does the war in space.”

“Those are my thoughts also,” said Vaemar. “Stars and planets for all, one day. And a pair of species that nothing can challenge. Soon I must begin teaching Orlando to share this purpose. Today I found something important: he has the patience to solve puzzles. Many kittens do not. But, Dimity, how do you see your future?”

“You have been good to me Vaemar,” Dimity said again. “You don't hate me?”

“Hate you? Why should I?”

“One great reason. I made building the hyperdrive possible. In time to win the war for humans. I could be seen as the greatest enemy the kzin species has ever had.”

“I could answer that several ways,” said Vaemar. “When you translated and applied the manual for the hyperdrive I understand you did not even know of the war. And whether that was so or not, you did what you did for your kind. Any kzin who could have done the same would have done so. It would be irrational to hate you for that.

“Further, I think now that we needed to lose a war. As a race, we were becoming more than foolish with victory. We were becoming permanently intoxicated with it. We were so used to swallowing up feeble, peaceful races that we took for granted that was the only way things could be in the Universe. But the God was more subtle and more generous than we had come to assume. Our ancestors had prayed for enemies worth the fighting. They were given to us just before our own arrogance and savagery ate us up.

“There are other things. We were lucky, I think, to have met humans when we did and not just gone on expanding unopposed until we ran into something worse. We had missed, or deprived ourselves of, a great deal. I have read Honored Sire's meditations and have come to see how right he was when he perceived that humans have talents and abilities we lack—or have deprived ourselves of. I enjoy biology and mathematics, for instance, and reading of historical events, human as well as kzin. I sang 'Lord Chmeee's Last Anthem' for sheer joy in the words as well as Heroic blood-lust. It excited me—actually excited me!—to discover how the Normans of Earth combined barbarian vigor with Roman order and discipline to conquer so much from so tiny a base. Could I have enjoyed these things as a princeling in Honored Sire's palace? I would have been killed by my brothers or by Combat Trainer as a freak. Who knows how many other young kzinti died like that—intellectual misfits in a warrior culture? My brothers would have had to gang up on me, though, and there would have been fewer of them at the end of it, for in single combat I…” He trailed off.

“But there is another thing. As I grew up with Raargh after the human victory, mixing with humans, I thought long and hard on the future of my kind. And its future not here on Wunderland only. I believe that in the long run the best future for us is as partners with humans. When I say I believe in an eventual partnership of our kinds I do not just use words. What might we not do together! You have said it will take centuries and I agree, but perhaps I can do something to bring it about a little quicker here on this world at least. Hatred is not a good way to begin. And nor do I dislike you, Dimity. Dislike is more destructive than hatred, more long-lasting…

“And there is a further thing again. Not in this case a completely rational or utilitarian consideration. Your presence is more agreeable to me than your absence. There are bonds between you and me. When I am near you I feel I am near a like mind. Almost I could wish I was a Telepath at such moments—though say that to no other kzin! Almost I have wished I was a… no, that thought is not even for you! What could I do but take you in? Raargh knew what he was doing when he ran through fire to save you in the battle in the caves.”

Dimity reached out a hand, and scratched the kzin at the base of his ears. Vaemar permitted himself to purr.

“And if we are both genii, we are both misfits,” he went on. “I have mixed with humans too long to be a kzintosh of the Patriarchy, even though I bear this.” He tapped the red fur on his chest. “And you…”

“I should be teaching,” said Dimity. “When I was a professor I was not a good teacher, but I think I communicate better now. I should have the ordinary domestic life that should be any human's lot: my own people, my own mate and children. Instead…”

“I know that by human standards you are beautiful,” said Vaemar. “Even I can see that. Some have said you could have any mate you wanted. If he is not afraid of your mind.”

“What I want now,” said Dimity, “is to know that for the moment I may stay here if I wish. I need a refuge.”

Vaemar sprayed a very little—a couple of drops—of urine on the fabric of her trouser leg. It reinforced his mark for all kzinti to know.

“Of course,” he said. “You are my guest and chess partner as long as you wish. But you care to come to Little Southland.”

“Yes, I also need to run.”

“From what?”

“Everything.

“T.S. Eliot?” said Vaemar.

“Do not kzinti feel like that sometimes?”

“When we do, we usually go out and kill things. Or fight each other. You are free to hunt in my preserves if you wish. I have human-size weapons you may use.”

“Thank you, Vaemar, but I do not think that would help. I am looking forward to Little Southland. What of Karan?”

“Like me, she must learn to live with humans. It is harder for her in some ways, perhaps, easier in others. She is not Riit. But I think she has bred true. Tabitha has intelligence! I thought that was the case when I realized her vocabulary was far beyond that of a normal female kitten of her age—or normal kzinrett of any age, to be sure—but now I know. She reads! She plans!”

“Are you glad, Vaemar? You and I know abnormal intelligence may be a curse as well as a blessing.”

Vaemar paced for a while before answering. His gait betrayed troubled thought.

“I am mortal,” said a voice on the screen. “You are Elfkind. It was a beautiful dream, nothing more.”

“Yes, I think I am glad,” Vaemar said at last. “It is a new thing, and like many new things I must accept it. She will not need to live her life as Karan did for so long, pretending to be a moron. You will help teach her, perhaps?”

“If I can. I would like to repay your hospitality to me somehow.”

“Are you sure you do not wish to kill something? My hunting preserve is free to you.”

“When do we leave?”

“Pack your equipment.”

“I already have.”

Chapter 6

“He took Dimity with him? Does Nils know?” Cumpston pinched his lip in a worried gesture.

“I didn't feel it was my business to tell him,” Arthur Guthlac said. “I don't want to go dancing into that minefield. It was a difficult decision to allow Dimity to go off to him at all. You can imagine the opposition and the arguments we faced. But once we decided we had no right to interfere with her we stuck by that decision. You can't put that mind in a cage. And there had to be a demonstration of trust in Vaemar. A big one…”

“No,” said Cumpston, “not our business to tell Nils. Especially not now, Arthur. We can't be their keepers. Anyway, you have other things to think about at the moment than raising taboo subjects.”

“And yet, I can't forget we're all bound together in funny ways.”

“How do you feel about the safety of those two misfits off together?”

“Let's not forget, those two misfits are probably the two most intelligent members on this planet of the two most deadly species known. I'm not overly concerned about them.”

“More deadly than Protectors?”

“That's something I hope we don't have to find out.”

“And Patrick Quickenden. He won't be too pleased.”

“That's not my problem. He's not a Wunderlander.”

“He loves Dimity too, you know.”

“I know. But we've got enough things to sort out without lovesick Crashlanders as well.”

“How do you feel, General?” Cumpston asked. “About the wedding, I mean.”

“As I should feel, I guess,” Guthlac told him. “Scared. Happy. I've never been married before. I want to be with Gale for the rest of my life. I want lots of children and I want them to live here on Wunderland. I'd like to get her farm back into proper production. Big John can help now he's been patched up. Earth's been too crowded and conformist for a long time. I don't particularly care if I never see it again. I'd like my children here. And none of those damned birth restrictions!”

“We had to have them. It's the only reason we've been able to keep the crowding down a bit.”

“Yes, but Earth hasn't kept the blandness down. Or the conformity and police control, more than a little of which I had a hand in making. As somebody said: 'I've seen some terrible things and a lot of them I caused.' But I see what I've been missing now. Wunderland is full of surprises still. Gale was the best of them.”

The red telephone on Guthlac's desk called him, then went into battle-secret mode, vibrations keyed to his personal implant. He listened to it, then stared at it with curious expression.

“That was Defense Headquarters,” he said at length. “A message has just come in on the hyperwave.”

“I gather it's something important. Are you going to tell me?” There was something like consternation behind Cumpston's voice as he stared at Guthlac. The brigadier had raised a hand and was wiping away tears.

“Oh, yes, it's important. And I'm going to tell you. Everybody will know soon enough anyway. McDonald and the Patriarch's negotiator have signed a treaty. Humanity and the Kzin Empire are at peace. Sixty-six years after first contact. It's a funny feeling.” He looked at the wetness of the tears on his hand with surprise.

“Peace. It's a funny word, Arthur.”

“It's going to take some getting used to… For the kzinti, too. I doubt they've ever been at peace with anyone before.”

“Some geneticists have speculated,” said Cumpston, “that the war has changed the kzinti. Killed off their most aggressive individuals, made the species less dangerous.”

“And some,” said Guthlac, “have speculated that the war has changed them by killing off their most stupid and reckless individuals, and made the species more cunning and more dangerous.”

“I know. What do we believe?”

“After sixty-six years of war, there must still be a place for optimism, for hope… for ideals. Otherwise we are indeed no better than animals.”

“Yes.” Cumpstom raised his eyes to the window. “Does the sky look different to you.”

They both stared at it for a long time. “Yes. Or I think it will soon. Do you believe death is not going to fall out of it again?”

“I'm trying to…” Cumpston said. “I hope our kzin friends here will be pleased… I mean our real kzin friends…Vaemar, Raargh, Karan… Big John.”

“You think of them first? You're a funny bird, Michael.”

“Vaemar's always been vulnerable to a certain stain: quisling, collaborator. Maybe that's gone now.”

“Vaemar was only a kitten when the kzin forces on Wunderland surrendered. A lost, orphaned kitten, when Rarrgh took him in. Should he have fought to the death against us with his milk-teeth? Anyway, even if there's now a cease-fire in space, I doubt it means the likes of Vaemar can come and go between here and the Patriarchy just like that.”

“Perhaps he can one day. Another thing I'm realizing: we don't have to use Baphomet.”

“No.” Baphomet was something very new, which the two officers had been briefed on shortly before. It was an update of the old idea of a disrupter bomb. A complex carrier designed to penetrate deep into the crust of a suitable planet, and set off explosions which, it was calculated, could turn over a tectonic plate. It had been tried on a lifeless world orbiting Proxima Centauri and had worked. Had the target's geology been a little different, Proxima would have become a twin star sub-system.

“Sorry, Arthur, I'm still trying to get my mind around it all. There's a lot to think about. It's going to take a while to digest. But your children, and Gale's, can maybe grow up in a better time.”

“Give me a chance to get some first!”

“Me too, perhaps.”

They both laughed, and Guthlac poured celebratory drinks.

There had been a resumption of brief and cryptic messages from Chorth-Captain. He had established himself on Ka'ashi. He had discovered an arms depot, and a mighty ally. It was time to leap.

Kzaargh-Commodore had broken his rule of maximum possible silence. He sent back interrogatories. The replies remained cryptic. Things were going better than expected. The ally was unexpected but potent. Attack!

The kzinti had no allies. Other races were enemies, prey or slaves. It was inconceivable that the kzinti needed allies. Or rather, Kzaargh-commodore thought, struggling like so many kzinti to fathom an utterly new situation, it had been inconceivable that the kzinti needed allies. His crew trod softly for he was puzzled and angry. He had sent more interrogatories, but Chorth-Captain had fallen silent again.

Fury, puzzlement, impatience… and hope. He had become capable of waiting no longer.

There was a comet which he had marked out, a large and highly volatile one, plainly destined to a short life. Hiding as he might in its tail, he turned his ship and plunged back towards Ka'ashi.

A pod of dolphins broke surface in the car's flying shadow as the Ocean rolled away below. Dimity called them. The communicator was programmed to translate into Dolphin, and Dimity had picked up some of their concepts long ago.

They exchanged pleasantries, but with difficulty. During the decades of war many dolphins had come to maturity in the oceans of Wunderland with little knowledge of the human partners who had brought them as fellow enthusiastic colonists across interstellar space. Cooperation was being rebuilt slowly, and though the humans of Earth had employed some dolphins in their war-fleets as strategists it was hard to know how much these Wunderland dolphins knew—or cared—of the kzinti or current events. Still, they were friendly to the human walkers, and asked if, like their fathers, they might trade for hands. Dimity recorded their identities.

Little Southland was not very little. It was a detachment of Wunderland's southern continent, a knife-shaped triangle of land stabbing towards the South Pole, with a total area of 17,000 square miles, much of it cool to cold desert like Patagonia. With the temperate areas of Wunderland still empty or only sparsely settled, there was no need to cultivate it. There were some military installations and a few scientific ones.

Its population of avianoids was its main macrobiological interest. Varieties of creatures with vast striking beaks resembling the diatrymas of Earth's Eocene roamed it, and there were some introduced Earth birds, too: The “banana belt” of the northern coastal regions had a climate not unlike the south of New Zealand and there were a few ranches for reconstituted and slightly modified moas, strongly fenced in and over to protect them from the savage and powerful locals.

The car climbed. Vaemar and Dimity approached the land at about ten miles' height, searching with instruments.

“There!” A fuzzy radiation signature, but one that matched the record in the brick. Dimity tracked an optical telescope in.

“Nothing that shows on the surface,” said Vaemar. “It would be hidden, of course.”

“Granite everywhere. Hot granite. That won't make following a radiation trail easier.”

They deployed a deep-radar scanner. A faint but unnatural grid of lines became visible. Vaemar grinned and his claws slid from their sheaths. “Prey,” he said, and then: “We must give no cause for suspicion. Dimity, take over flying. If anyone contacts us, better that they see your face than mine.”

There were interrogatory signals coming in from the scientific and military stations on the ground, but the car answered them automatically with the University's code and signature. They descended. Vaemar and then Dimity could make out the movement of life-forms on the surface. They changed into lightweight combat/utility suits, Vaemar's leaving his claws free, and Dimity adding a helmet with breathing mask, and landed.

Vaemar, followed by Dimity, stepped out into a landscape of grey, under a swirling grey sky, punctuated by rocks, and surrounded by rock walls and pillars, wind and rain-eroded into fantastic shapes reminiscent of dragons, sthondats and other great beasts of legend and fact. There was a thunderstorm dribbling lightning on the horizon. Distant hills were speckled with snow. Hardy, spiky vegetation grew about them. This was a cool wet plain, and days like this without high winds were rare. But life seemed reasonably abundant. Vaemar's eyes and the infrared detector in Dimity's face-mask found a number of small animals watching them from concealment, or in some cases burrowing frantically.

Dimity saw what she thought at first was a man approaching them, although the motion was wrong. She activated the binoculars in her helmet and pointed to the biped. An avian, or an avianoid creature, high, with great legs, atrophied wings and a mighty striking head and beak, standing, they could see, higher than Vaemar. To Dimity it resembled a holo of a carnivorous Earth dinosaur. It was making a high-pitched scream.

“Thunderbird,” said Vaemar. “They must have good eyes. We have evidently invaded this one's territory.” It was fast, and in Wunderland's gravity even those small wings could help it make great hops. Suddenly it was very close.

Dimity brought up her rifle, but Vaemar was quicker, and he gestured to her to leave it to him. He waited a few moments more, then fired as the thing leapt again. Its huge head shattered and its body slid towards them in a kicking ruin.

Almost on top of them, a second thunderbird erupted from concealment behind a rock wall. Vaemar's stride became a vertical leap. The thunderbird's huge hind-claws barely touched the ground, and it too leapt again, wings extended to show barbed claws, its colossal armored beak snapping and clashing at the kzin. Vaemar twisted in mid-air, avoiding the beak in a blur too fast for Dimity to follow, and landed on the creature's back. As they crashed to the ground together his jaws severed its neck in a single bite. The second thunderbird ran headless for a distance, wings flapping, before it collapsed.

“Perhaps those screams will call others,” said Vaemar. “From what we know about them they are cooperative to some extent. However, we have no time to waste on game. Where is our real quarry?”

They surveyed the wilderness of rock.

“Caves are the best hiding-place from an aerial search,” said Dimity. “But they have to be a certain size. There are no caves of such magnitude here.”

“Caves are also obvious hiding places,” said Vaemar. “If you have technology there are other ways of hiding.”

“Bending light?”

“Or radar pulses. You see how much we think alike, Dimity? I do not need to explain things to you.”

“Not a technology we've mastered. Not without a lot of bulky and obvious equipment.”

“No. We haven't.”

The portable deep-radar showed a maze of granite. The radiation signature they had been following was lost.

There was a quick movement in the shadows of the rocks. Vaemar and Dimity spun to face it, weapons ready. Sight, smell and Ziirgah sense all told Vaemar of another kzin. He called a challenge/greeting in the Heroes' Tongue.

It came forward slowly. It was an adult male, with a good collection of human and kzin ears on its belt-ring. Vaemar stood rampant, staring, but with most of his fangs not yet showing. In that posture his chest was thrust forward somewhat, throwing into prominence the red splash that marked him as Riit. There was his own belt-collection as well. Both kzinti had their ears folded, and it was impossible to see their ear-tattoos in detail.

The other kzin did not challenge or bare fangs, indeed the slightly bowed attitude of its head might indicate that it conceded Vaemar's dominance, although, Vaemar thought, the gesture might have been made less ambiguous.

“Who are you?” he asked in the Neutral Tense, though as Riit he might have used a far higher one. Dimity, he knew, now understood something of the Heroes' Tongue. She had had sleep-lessons since returning to Wunderland and was a good natural linguist.

“Chorth-Captain,” replied the other kzin. “Of the Patriarch's Navy and the Patriarch's Claws.”

The Patriarch's Armed forces had been disbanded on this planet when the kzinti accepted the human cease-fire, the day when Raargh, who had been Raargh-Sergeant, had fled with Vaemar in a stolen air-car to the backwoods country beyond the Hohe Kalkstein.

“There are no other Patriarch's Claws on Wunderland,” said Vaemar, deliberately using the human name for Ka'ashi. Let Chorth-Captain make what he would of the qualifier “other.” He added, “I have not met you before.”

Chorth-Captain was plainly much older than Vaemar, and he looked a great deal more experienced, strong, tough and battle-scarred. But Vaemar was Riit.

That put him in an anomalous position on Wunderland. Some humans, he knew, wished to groom him to lead the kzin who had remained on post-Liberation Wunderland to take a place as partners with humanity. The reasons had been put to him openly, and, as he had told Dimity truthfully, he had agreed with them. He had felt no—well, little—conflict of loyalties once he concluded that what he was doing was for the long-term good of the kzin species. Indeed it was a project he had firmly committed himself to. Some humans he had dismembered in battle in the great caves. Some he had eaten. Regarding some like Rykermann, Cumpston, Leonie, the abbot, Dimity, or Anne von Lufft who had been one of his companions on a hazardous biological excursion, honor and companionship alike demanded that he die protecting them if necessary, as much as if they had been his Honored Step-Sire Raargh Hero or Karan.

And yet with this he was Riit. The Riit had ruled the kzinti since before the Heroic Race first leapt into the stars. A large number of the kzinti of Wunderland respected him and, when necessary, obeyed him. It was left to other, older kzintosh, including some of the few surviving professional officers like Hroth and Hroarh and the old warriors on Tiamat to link with the human authorities and guide relations between the kzin and human communities in detail, but it was he who performed many ceremonial duties like opening Veterans' Hospitals and other projects and presenting the State of the Wunderkzin Address to the human Parliament. He knew he was being groomed even in his academic courses. It did no harm that he was tall, strong and fast even by kzin standards, as one would expect of Riit, and had been trained and was backed by Raargh-Hero, one of the toughest old kzintoshi on the planet. At the moment he could afford to find out more about this Chorth-Captain and not put his dominance to the test.

“I still do not see how you got through the defenses,” he said.

“I landed here recently,” said Chorth-Captain.

Vaemar found it hard to believe him. Wunderland, and the whole Alpha Centauri system, was ceaselessly monitored by live and electronic sentinels against another kzinti raid or invasion. Kzin ships had come, certainly, in the last few years—from kzin worlds that had no knowledge of the human hyperdrive or the human victory, freebooters whose livers had been maddened by old rumors, hungry for loot and glory, or regular Naval vessels returning from distant missions. Part of his duties was to help negotiate with them. Those that had not surrendered when informed of the true situation had not lasted long.

“I hid long on the Hollow Moon,” said Chorth-Captain, as though detecting his thoughts. “Since the battle between the fleets of Traat-Admiral and Ktrodni-Stkaa, and the human invasion I have lain in wait. I had help. There is much traffic. I left my fighter there and came back to Ka'ashi in a gig. It was small and undetected.”

Of course, Vaemar knew, not all the kzinti on Wunderland were entirely sane. Defeat had unhinged many, especially fighting kzin to whom defeat at the hands of weed-eating apes was unthinkable. Delusions among them that they were officers of the victorious Patriarchy, generally complete with Patriarchy-bestowed Names, were not uncommon, with pathetic and tragic consequences. There were also the crazed kdaptists, already splitting into murderously-quarrelling sects. Chorth-Captain, at least in this poor light, did not look insane or deluded, but not all of them did. He smelt a little strange, but that was not surprising. Also, it was a point of honor for kzinti not to lie outright, but many had developed great ingenuity in bending the truth. Association with humans had done nothing to diminish that skill. Vaemar wondered whose side Chorth-Captain had fought on in the final civil war of kzin that had killed his own first protector, old Traat-Admiral, and which had made the human hyperdrive Armada's reconquest so much easier.

“What are you doing here? What do you want?” Vaemar asked. His mind framed the question: “Do you know who I am?” but he decided it was better not to force that issue at present. He did not particularly want to get into a fight in this situation.

“I know what you seek. Come with me, and I will show you.”

Vaemar and Dimity paused. Similar thoughts raced through both their minds. “I know what you seek.” A statement like that contained a challenge. How did Chorth-Captain know? What exactly did Chorth-Captain know? That someone—or something—had made a covert landing here? And why should he show them? He had not acknowledged himself as being under Vaemar's dominance, indeed calling himself a member of the Patriarch's Claws might be taken as defying that dominance. He had offered no hostility, and had voluntarily revealed himself to them, so he did not appear to be intending an attack. He seemed to accept the presence of Dimity at Vaemar's side without comment. Chorth-Captain turned away—which might be a gesture of trust—and started along the tunnel. Vaemar hesitated a moment, then moved to follow him.

He saw the Protector too late. Its leap carried it outside the swing of his flashing claws. It landed behind him and before he could turn it had seized and secured his arms.

Vaemar kicked backwards with his hind legs, steel-hard, razor-edged claws extended. Kicks, again too fast for a human eye, that would have disembowelled a Man or a Kzin. The Protector avoided them effortlessly and caught his feet in its free hand. Vaemar's claws could not reach the hand's leathery skin, but the Protector pressed with a fingertip on Vaemar's feet so his hind-claws involuntarily retracted. From the corner of his eye he saw Chorth-Captain leap in the same instant, run up a wall on his hind legs and somersault to land beside Dimity, seizing her weapons and tucking her under one arm. Vaemar twisted his head violently, dagger fangs in bolt-cutter jaws crashing together where the Protector's head had been an instant before. The Protector shifted its grip to hold him paralyzed and taped his hands and feet securely. Though it stood little more than half Vaemar's height, it lifted him onto its shoulders.

Chapter 7

“I called Dimity,” Patrick Quickenden told Nils Rykermann. “She wasn't answering. Then I called Vaemar's household. It took me a while to get put through to a human but the kittens' nurse was there. Apparently Dimity and Vaemar flew south. But they've stopped reporting.”

“As far as I know,” said Rykermann, “there was a trip to Little Southland due. Routine check of some automated experiments.” He did not speak particularly warmly to Quickenden, his coolness not all due to security considerations. He knew the Crashlander's protectiveness of Dimity stemmed from a love similar to that which he was trying to kill in himself.

“Their car is down,” said Quickenden. “It was sending out a normal carrier wave. No answer when we interrogated it. Then that cut off.”

Rykermann tried to keep his face impassive. He knew and disliked his own jealousy and possessiveness towards Dimity, and knew its irrationality, but could do nothing about it except try to switch his thoughts in other directions, and keep Dimity at a distance. He guessed now that he was always to be torn in two.

Is Dimity in danger? Yes, stupid! We are all in danger! Tree-of-life? Protectors? Dimity doesn't merely look younger than her years like us, thanks to geriatric treatments. Because of those years in Coldsleep she is young. She could survive the change to Protector if she got a whiff of tree-of-life. And she is with Vaemar, who would tend to think it disgraceful to notice danger because he's not a human in a fur coat but a young male kzin. And Dimity, just because she is a super-genius, isn't assured of common sense. The reverse if anything. I don't want her to go chasing after hidden tree-of-life, and possibly finding it.

He looked at Leonie. A sudden thought of her exposed to tree-of-life gave rise to a peculiarly horrible image: her lower body was much younger than her upper. Mad and impossible. Still, Leonie's presence gave the situation between him and Quickenden at least a superficial feeling of normalcy.

“What happened then?” he asked after an awkward silence.

“I told Guthlac and Cumpston. They've gone to find them. Karan went with them.”

“Karan?”

“Would you like to try and stop her, when she's made her mind up? They suggested she go back to Vaemar's palace and wait. She thought Vaemar might need her.”

“So what do we do now? Go after them?”

Rykermann touched his desk. A hologram globe of Wunderland sprang into existence above it. He touched an icon and the scattering of human settlements on Little Southland was displayed.

“If those three can't take care of any problems our presence may not make much difference,” Rykermann said at length, reluctantly. It's no business of his that I can't let myself see Dimity again.

“Vaemar only spent a short time at the caves,” he went on. “He only looked at a few of the nearest passages. I'm worried about what may be happening there. We've left no one on guard.”

“I'll take a look, if you like.”

“You're not a Wunderlander. I'd rather go myself or, no offence, send someone who knew the ground better. That isn't Procyon in the sky, you know.”

“Someone should be here to coordinate the others or call for help if we need it. That seems to be you or Leonie. She says she'll go with me.”

“I'll organize a car for you,” said Rykermann. No point in protesting. When Leonie's made her mind up, I think I'd rather try to stop Karan. Anyway, I'd like to let you see the caliber of my mate. “Go well-armed, keep your com-link open to me, and wear pressure-suits with the helmets on and the faceplates closed at all, I mean all, times you're on the ground. Don't land at all if you can help it. Just use the car's deep-radar to monitor movement in the caves. If it's bipedal and within certain size parameters, we've got a pattern-recognition program that can tell you if it's human or Morlock. Or kzinti, for that matter. If it's none of those things, well…”

“What chances of other humans there?”

“I hope there won't be any. But even this long after the war, there are too many Ferals about. Leonie and some others have been trying to bring them in, particularly the children, but it's a slow process. They're cunning and wild, and, incidentally, can be very dangerous. There are still weapons lying about for anyone to pick up. I don't know if you understand danger sufficiently, Patrick. Obey Leonie's instructions at all, all times.”

“We Made It isn't exactly a garden world, you know,” Patrick said. “And I was a spacer before I got involved in hyperdrive engineering. My life hasn't been completely sheltered.”

“Those are natural dangers. Not like thinking beings, highly-intelligent beings, consciously out to get you… A spacer, yes, of course you were…

“I never asked you…” Rykermann went on after a pause. “But were you—”

“Yes. I was flying the first ship that helped stop the derelict, and the first to board it. I found Dimity.”

“And without you?”

“It was heading straight for one of the gas-giants. We had quite a race to catch it and deploy the grapnels before it went too deep into the gravity-well. We kept signalling, and there was no answer…”

“You found Dimity…”

“I'll not forget going aboard, pushing through those floating eyeless corpses with their lungs going before them, those monks with their shaven heads, and my light falling on that black medical coffin, with the last lights of its emergency power blinking red. There was a translucent panel. When I saw her face I thought at first that she was dead, too, of course, but she looked so…”

“So we owe you Dimity's life.”

“There were several ships and crews involved. They were all needed before we saved the ship. It wasn't just me. Others actually got her out.”

“But without you she'd be dead.”

“That's true.”

“And without Dimity, no working hyperdrive. Not for decades at least. Not until too late.”

“No. We were making slow progress translating the manual. Dimity was still in rehabilitation therapy when we got it—they were wondering what to do with her, in fact. Then she got word of what was happening somehow and forced her way onto the project. How she broke out of the hospital, evaded the medics, got into the project headquarters—all underground on a strange planet—and forced the team-leaders to give her a hearing and authority was an epic in itself. As you say, she saved us decades. Without her, we might easily be working on it still.”

“And without the hyperdrive, Leonie and I would surely be dead by now, and unless we'd made Protectors Wunderland and probably Earth would be kzin hunting-grounds.”

“Not to mention my own world. I was wrong to say we might be working on it still. They'd have got to We Made it, sooner or later. Probably sooner. We were behind kzin lines though we didn't know it.”

“If we need to land and search for tree-of-life,” said Leonie, “Or do any fighting, it might be handy to have a kzin with us.”

“Apart from Vaemar there aren't that many kzinti available who we know well enough to use, not at short notice,” said Rykermann. “And even on this planet, most of them still have no love for monkeys. Don't ever make the mistake of thinking the handful of Wunderkzin like Vaemar and Raargh are typical, Patrick. I know we're civilizing them, but it's a slow business…”

“I was thinking of Raargh. He knows the caves, too, and that eye of his could be useful,” said Leonie. “I think the alte Teufel's bored with peace, anyway. Promise him the chance of battle, and he'd be with us. I'll call him and brief him now.”

“Take care, Lion-cub.” He kissed her.

“It's all so…” Patrick Quickenden waved his hands at the landscape below them, another part of the great limestone plateau which Vaemar had flown over a few days before. The sight of a herd of gagrumphers that Leonie pointed out filled him with excitement.

He's like a kid, Leonie thought. Hard to feel objectively about him. I know he loves Dimity, which makes him a sort of ally of mine—“The lover of my rival is my friend?” That's a new one. Does she love him? Dimity, who I've competed against hopelessly since I was 18, who saved my life, apart from saving our species. Paddy, if she could love you, and you could take her back to Procyon, it would make things… And I know someone else who's in love with her, too. I wonder if he knows he is… One other, at least. That's if you don't count… Well, let's not get toocomplicated… Paddy, sparkle-eyed at the streams running under the sky and the gagrumphers plunging away through the trees, there's a lot riding on you…

The great problem, once you've been any sort of leader, which means once you've been any sort of manipulator: Can you again come to value people for what they are, rather than for how they might be able to serve your own ends? We forget that between men and women sexual exploitation isn't the only kind of exploitation there is. At least we do as soon as a war's over… Now if you and Dimity… What am I thinking about? Dimity may well be dead. Patrick, you seem a happy, decent man, the product of a world less tortured than this one. Can I leave you an innocent man, not try to make you my catspaw? She caught his eyes. In love with Dimity he might be, but Leonie saw he was admiring her at least as much as the landscape. I wonder if it would turn him sick to know what's under my trousers? she thought. And then: Let me get all that boiling black stuff out of my head, anyway. Nils and I are lucky, compared to so many.

“I can never get used to it,” he said. “I don't mean agoraphobia—I've had treatment for that—but still it all takes my breath away. Living on the surface like this…And”—he pointed to the horizon—“And those mountains—like needles.”

“We've had to live in some odd places,” said Leonie. “Sometimes during the war it seemed we were underground more often than on the surface. There were children born in the caves who knew stalactites better than stars or mountains.”

“Your children?”

“None of my own. Others had their own lives and priorities, but for us, then, it seemed children were not exactly a good idea,” Leonie said. “Pregnancy would have kept me out of action for a long time, with medical care the state it was in, and… what sort of a world would it have been to bring a child into? Of course, it was fortunate not everyone on Wunderland had the same policy—the population was dropping fast as it was.

“I was going to broach the subject with Nils after the war. I'd been important enough to have geriatric drugs throughout and I still had an apparently young body, as he did. I would have run out of natural ova sooner or later, but that didn't worry me—stimulating stem cells to produce new ova is an elementary procedure. Then, you know, I lost the lot.”

“That shouldn't be a problem,” Patrick said. “I know that on Earth creating ova from other tissue isn't unusual. I think it's been done since the twenty-first century, at least.”

“I don't think I could do that. We've been very cautious about biotech for humans here. Quite a deep cultural inhibition. The first colonists got a bit carried away and there were some—unfortunate incidents. We're lucky the only inheritance was mobile ears for some of us, which are harmless and sometimes useful even if it does encourage snobbery. But I haven't told you all the details of what I am. Perhaps I'm a bit mixed up. In my emotions as well as”—a bitter laugh—“literally. The lower body I have now is ovulating all right… whoever she was, she was young. But you'll understand I don't exactly consider it a problem solved…”

There was an awkward silence.

“Look at that!” Patrick pointed excitedly again. A smile returned to Leonie's eyes as she watched the Crashlander's excitement. Much remained park-like—woodlands, glades, small streams. Herds of gagrumphers and other creatures could be seen. There was also a scattering of human farms and hamlets. Fruit trees, and even a few vineyards for small bottlings of wine grown in the old natural way. Leonie had flown over this landscape many times, but she could still appreciate its loveliness. Humans had become human in a landscape not too unlike this. For both of them there was some touch of Eden about it.

“I can't get over it!” said Patrick. Then: “Where are the caves?”

“Underneath us. Underneath all this country. You can trace them on the deep radar.”

“I'd rather just watch all this,” His face was alight with wonderment. “I feel so lucky to have seen it! When this is all over I want to walk through this country. I don't think I'd get agoraphobia again, the treatments were good. I'd love to live under a sky for a while!”

“We'll be down in it shortly,” Leonie said. “I hope it comes up to expectations.”

Chapter 8

The tunnel was roofed over, but the grey light of the sky penetrated. There was a room at the end of the tunnel, entered through what looked like a spaceship's airlock. Power cables snaked about. There were familiar computer-screens and consoles, mostly kzin-sized and of more-or-less kzin military pattern, as well as instruments and machinery whose function neither Vaemar nor Dimity could guess at. Vaemar and Dimity were deposited there, weaponless but unharmed. As Chorth-Captain covered them with a beam rifle, the Protector removed their garments, searching them thoroughly and ripping Dimity's apart in the process—Vaemar beneath his coverall wore much less, mainly straps and pouches. It ran police tape over their hands and feet. This was specially made to restrain kzinti from using their claws, and far stronger than was necessary to immobilize a human. Then the Protector surveyed them.

So far, things had moved too fast for Vaemar or Dimity to see the Protector properly. Guthlac had surmised that it would be close to the original Pak form. For all its immense strength it was smaller than Dimity and barely half the height of either kzin, with a protruding muzzle hardened into a horny beak, a bulging, lobed, melon-like cranium, with large bulging eyes, and exaggerated ears and nostrils, part of its Morlock heritage, in a parody of a human face even more bizarre than the face of a Pak or human Protector, joints like huge balls of bone and muscle rolling below a skin like leather armor. Chorth-Captain stood beside it.

“Traitor!” Vaemar snarled at the other kzin. “You hand your own kind to alien monsters! I challenge you—to the death and the generations!”

“Traitor? Handing our kind to alien monsters? Who speaks?” Chorth-Captain replied in the Mocking Tense. “Do I speak to Vaemar, sometimes called Riit, chief kollabrratorr on Ka'ashi? Holder of a commission in the Human Reserve Officer Training Corps? Who would join our kind with the vermin of the Universe? Yes, kollabrratorr, I call you, kollabrratorr and kwizzliing, perversions that only the vermin had words for till they infected our tongue! As for your challenge, it is nothing. The mere jabbering of a Kz'eerkt-chrowler.” Kz'eerkt meant “ape,” “monkey” or “human.” “Chrowl” depending on who used it and when, was an either intimate or obscene term among kzinti for sexual intercourse. In normal kzin society such as had existed pre-Liberation, a death-duel would inevitably have followed such an insult. Dimity thought she could feel the effort with which Vaemar controlled both his voice and his body language to reply calmly. At least he has had good training at that, she thought. Growing up among humans, learning to follow human rules—like me.

“You are brave when your monster has tied my claws,” said Vaemar. “If you had wished to know why I have done as I have, and spoken with me, I could have told you my reasons. But you are one of those who weary me with your stupidity, who think with hot livers instead of brains. Who may yet be the destruction of our kind. What do you think you have done?” He gestured with his tail and ears at the Protector. “You are the slave of this thing?”

“He is an ally,” replied Chorth-Captain. “It is not I who am the slave of aliens. We have watched you long, Vaemar-sometimes-called-Riit. Ka'ashi has Heroes still who do not crawl like bugs into your fur as you abase yourself before the monkeys.”

The Protector gestured. Chorth-Captain disappeared for a few moments while the Protector watched them. They guessed he was attending to their car. The Protector's voice when it spoke was a series of clicks and poppings. But it spoke slowly, taking trouble, and it used what had once been called the Slave's Patois, but which was now becoming a common, value-neutral, lingua franca between humans and kzinti on Wunderland.

“Obey and you will live,” it said. Its strange eyes travelled from Dimity to Vaemar and back. It was Dimity who replied.

“What do you want?”

“Teach.” It touched a keyboard and a bank of screens sprang into life. Wunderland television channels and internet sites. One of them, Dimity and Vaemar saw, showed Vaemar's palace and its surroundings and outbuildings, including the guest house Dimity used. A camera somewhere in the woods. Others showed München University, including the Dimity Carmody Physics Building with its inscription.

“Teach… what?”

“Everything. You I know.” It touched another keyboard. An old newsreel, showing Dimity and a group of scientists. Patrick was right, thought Dimity. It was stupid to broadcast the fact of my return to Wunderland. But too many people knew anyway.

“We have been watching you for a long time,” said Chorth-Captain, returning to the room. “I supplied the original equipment, which has been improved upon. The Patriarchy will be grateful to Chorth-Captain when those improvements are incorporated into the standard equipment of our Navy. We improved surveillance and stealthing among many other things. We know much. But my ally wishes to learn more. You two are… associates”—he cast another look of loathing and contempt at Vaemar, black lips curling—“with one another. We have known for some time, and considered it advantageous for all its loathsomeness and indignity, monkey-dirt scratched upon the Name of Riit. Did you think we were careless with the trail of radioactives? We laid a trail to bring you here.”

“We will need to know more,” said Dimity. “Teach? Teach what?”

“Context,” said the Protector. Its beak clacked over the word. “Teach about humans. About kzinti on this planet. About space.” It paused. “Gods,” it said, surprisingly. Then it said the word Dimity and Vaemar had hoped against their reason not to hear. “Hyperdrive.”

“I haven't the tools,” said Dimity. She knew it would be pointless to play dumb. The Protector knew. Vaemar and I set ourselves up, she thought.

“Make tools,” said the Protector. And then: “We have begun.” It turned its back, leaving Chorth-Captain to guard them. Its fingers blurred with speed on the keyboard. Doors flashed shut almost soundlessly around them. For a moment there was a hint of G-force, gone almost instantly, and a purring noise. Both Dimity and Vaemar recognized it. They had flown in ships with kzin gravity-motors before. The panel of grey sky above was suddenly swirling with indescribable colors.

“Yes,” said Chorth-Captain. “A gravity-planer. Much improved. And shielding devices, also much improved. Good enough to get us past the monkeyships and the monkeys' machine-sentinals. Again I supplied the basic equipment from kzin stores. Once I had demonstrated them to my ally he was able to make advances with them. Hear how quiet the planer has become.”

“How did you meet your ally?” asked Vaemar, with a mildness, almost a casualness, in his voice that Dimity had heard once or twice before. She felt a shiver run up her spine.

“In the caves. When the traitors struck in the great battle before the humans attacked”—You don't say which side you consider the traitors, Vaemar thought—“I took a Scream of Vengeance fighter we carried and flew to the Hollow Moon. In the confusion it was not noticed there.”

So, thought Vaemar. Are you a coward, Chorth-Captain, and has your knowledge of cowardice driven you mad? Or is this all a lie? The latter, he thought. Chorth-Captain's body-language suggested lying. So, he saw, did the instrumentation numbers on the bulkhead. This craft was not from a ship of one of the Ka'ashi-based squadrons. He said nothing.

“Watching with its instruments,” Chorth-Captain continued. “I saw the apes were gaining the upper hand, and before they had gained all air- and space-superiority about Ka'ashi I took this gig and, leaving the fighter as hidden as might be, I flew back to Ka'ashi, evading the apes' clumsy, noseless searchers, back to the wild country and the great caves. I lurked there when the war ended, hoping to find some way back to Kzinhome so I might fight on, or some way to die gloriously in battle, killing monkeys eights-squared times as Lord Dragga-Skrull killed Jotok. I made occasional raids on the surface. I learnt of Chuut-Riit's hidden redoubt which the monkeys had found. It was abandoned and sealed when I reached it but I broke the seals and took equipment from it. Years passed. Monkeys died at my claws, when they were foolish enough to wander alone or in small troops. In the caves I met my ally. He alone had been exposed to the chemical and made the change. He had memories of his previous life, and of the war. Of Heroes and monkeys, of weapons and fighting, which he was soon able to understand. His intelligence had, of course, become very high, though he had been barely sentient before. He did not kill me, but showed me that an alliance against the apes would be in the interest of both our kinds.” He lied a moment ago, but he's not lying now, Vaemar thought. Chorth-Captain went on.

“He demonstrated his intelligence to me, and together we modified this craft, and built other things. I contacted Heroes the apes had not corrupted and they too supplied us with knowledge and equipment. We tested his improvements to cloaking devices and they worked. We flew to the southern island undetected and carried out much work there, free from the attention of monkeys or… other things. Under his direction we studied what we could of the plight of Ka'ashi. I told him what I knew of space and the war. We agreed the monkeys were the most noxious vermin of the universe…”

Dimity caught it vaguely, Vaemar much more clearly. There was a great deal wrong with Chorth-Captain. There was a strange kind of buzzing in his voice. But there was more than that. Most kzinti of the officer class, used to framing orders, did not commonly in such a situation deliver themselves of prolix monologues like this, least of all to monkeys or prisoners. And Vaemar's Ziirgah sense picked up a fuzziness, something off-key, in Chorth-Captain's emotions as well as in his voice and body-language. His brain has been tampered with, thought Vaemar. By the Protector, obviously. The thing that was a brainless Morlock. Rykermann is right. They are a peril indeed.

“Where are we going?”

Chorth-Captain gestured at another screen. Wunderland was a great sphere. Vaemar saw they were already several hundred miles up, and still accelerating. There was no interference from the guardships, manned and automated, that patrolled the space above the planet.

“The Hollow Moon. There we will be undisturbed.”

I don't think so, thought Vaemar. Our disappearance will be noted. But then he thought that, thought they might be searched for, there would be no particular reason to include the Hollow Moon in the search, especially if this craft's cloaking was truly good. There would be no reason to think they were in space at all.

Dimity had thought of no way to remind him of the locators.

“Where is the tree-of-life?” asked Dimity.

“Most of it is still in the caves, along with most of the warheads. It is safe. There was a little we took to the Hollow Moon but it is now being used. You will not be exposed to it.”

There was something else Dimity and Vaemar could hardly help noticing. Chorth-Captain would hardly be talking to them so frankly if he expected them to live to tell the tale, whatever the Protector said. The Protector may be smarter than most human geniuses, thought Dimity, as, by our IQ tests, are Vaemar and I. But Chorth-Captain sure isn't.

Wunderland continued to shrink on the screen. Now it was a great, multicolored disk in space. The Protector had been sitting calmly in a lotus-position. Its oversized eyes appeared almost dreamy. But both the captives sensed it was absorbing every word. Both knew that in an instant it could spring. After a time it spoke into what appeared to be the mutated descendant of a standard kzin-pattern com-link. When Dimity asked who it was speaking to she was ignored. There were flexible tubes for food and waste-disposal, and human and kzin were evidently expected to use them together, in each other's sight. On Wunderland members of the two species who had ties with one another might sometimes drink together, or eat small delicacies like ice cream, but there were usually powerful taboos beyond more than that. Evidently there had been captives on this vessel before.

Chorth-Captain told them of how he had made contact with a number of the kzinti who had been in Chuut-Riit/Henrietta's Redoubt and escaped or survived its storming. Through them he had begun to build up a knowledge-base for the Protector about Dimity and Vaemar.

The kzinti had been masters of gravity control for millennia—the gravity-planer was their principal space-drive—and normal Wunderland gravity was maintained in the chamber. Chorth-Captain fitted caps on their heads and they slept.

Leonie, after asking permission and giving certain passwords, landed her car in the courtyard of Vaemar's palace. Patrick Quickenden remained in the car, keeping out of sight as much as possible.

Raargh, Seneschal in charge in Vaemar's absence, greeted her. One of his kittens, frolicking in the long grasses nearby, leapt to join his sire, going down into a mock-attacking crouch at the sight of the human. He was about as big as, and somewhat more powerful than, an Earth leopard. Leonie had once beaten such a kitten to death with a metal bar in a prolonged and desperate fight. Her old legs and thighs had borne the scars of that fight for a long time. Rarrgh looked at him, gave a single growl in an unmistakable tense, and the kitten fled.

Twenty-five years earlier Rarrgh and Leonie had seen each other for the first time, across the sights of a beam rifle, as Raargh lay pinned under rocks in a Morlock-infested cave. Each owed the other at least one life. Raargh raised his remaining natural arm and touched her shoulder.

“Got message, urrr!” he said. “Trouble!” He gave a purr of satisfaction and anticipation. He passed Big John the w'tsai of the Seneschal's office, in its ornately-engraved gold and purple sheath. “Care for this, Hero, till I return.” He slapped his belt where his own old w'tsai hung. “Urrr!” he repeated, snapping his teeth and flexing his claws.

Chapter 9

“The Hollow Moon,” said Chorth-Captain, waking them.

The purring of the gravity-planer had ceased. The panels opened. Chorth-Captain gestured and they followed him out. The Protector came behind them.

Gravity changed abruptly. This was less disorienting for Dimity and Vaemar than it would have been had they not spent years with kzin gravity-technology. Since both knew something of the Hollow Moon it was easy to work out their situation.

They were in a compartment on the inner surface. There was a great concave roof above them, vanishing into blackness overhead, and a concave floor at their feet, but so partitioned and divided that it was impossible to see far. There was a diffuse light. The ship they had travelled in now looked like a stony spheroid. Its surface sparkled here and there with quartz-like chips that they guessed were miniaturized cloaking-generators. Held by gravity anchors, it stood within a translucent tube, one of several, on a landing pad such as was more-or-less standard for small spacecraft in the Serpent Swarm Asteroids. Above it was a hatch, now closed, obviously leading to the surface and space. There, too, was the glowing blue dome of a Sinclair time-acceleration field.

Some of the machinery around had, for both human and kzin, an alien look. But much of it appeared to be kzin military and naval equipment, either standard or modified. There were kzinti control consoles, close to standard naval models, and banks of screens, some blank, some with idly moving data. To Vaemar, they might almost be inside a kzin space station, though he knew more about this from Reserve Officers' intelligence courses than from his own experience. There was a nest of gravity-sleds, the kzin all-purpose transporters, which he had used often. Both took it all in fast. Gravity technology, Sinclair technology, Cloaking technology already better, or more compact, than anything we have. And now they are after the Hyperdrive! Chorth-Captain led them into another compartment.

A smell of Morlock struck Dimity, repellent even to her weak human nostrils. What she saw reminded for a moment of a hospital ward. A row of creatures lay on beds. Quasi-humanoids with swollen bellies. Morlocks, gorged on tree-of-life, beginning the change into Protectors. Dimity felt a stab of panic. She clutched at Vaemar's arm. “There is tree-of-life here!”

“You do not need to fear, monkey,” said Chorth-Captain. “It is gone. It has been ingested. Before we flew we signalled to those here that we had you, and for the process to begin. These will have teachers when they awake. And there will be builders for the superluminal drive.”

“Those here.” Plural, thought Dimity. We have at least four enemies. The odds are against us anyway, and they will be worse soon. I can make sense of things in that realm where mathematics and metaphysics come together, but I cannot fight a kzin, let alone a Protector. And there are forty more here, beginning to change.

There, under a cold blue light in the corner, were other still silent forms: dead, dissected humans and kzinti. So, thought Dimity, the process of learning about other species has already begun in a practical way. She indicated it to Vaemar with a roll of her eyes and twitch of her Wunderlander aristocrat's ears.

Four more Protectors entered. They glanced briefly at Vaemar and Dimity and turned to the changing Morlocks. Dimity noticed again that they were laid out in four rows.

“Are they their children?” she asked Chorth-Captain.

The big kzin raised his ears in a gesture of assent. “Each cares for his own children.”

“And the other Protector? Your ally?”

“He is childless. He came upon the tree-of-life first, and later we exposed others. They brought their children here, and waited. Why do you wish to know?”

Dimity began a retort, and bit it off. Her relationship with the untypical Vaemar had almost made her forget the hair-trigger temper of kzintosh in what she supposed must be called their natural state, particularly in their dealings with humans. She had never lived on kzin-occupied Wunderland, but knew that a human there who answered a question from a kzin with another, rhetorical, question, or in a formulation that smacked of sarcasm or irony, would have been lucky to keep tongue, face or life.

“I will be a more effective teacher, if I know the beings I am teaching.”

Chorth-Captain inclined his own ears again. Apparently he accepted her explanation.

“And if I am to teach, I must have access to a knowledge base.”

“That is anticipated. Come,” Chorth-Captain said.

He led Dimity and Vaemar into another chamber nearby. They passed a couple of sealed passages, and dark tunnels with an old look about them. Only a small part of the hollow moon seemed to have been restored as living space. There was a chair for each of them, and two computers, based on kzin military models, but with what they guessed were Protectors' improvements, each with a keyboard adapted for their respective hands. “You may prepare your lessons,” said Chorth-Captain. He was also carrying the suit, much ripped and of questionable use now as a garment, which he had taken off Dimity, and her boots. He dropped these on the floor and then gestured at Vaemar. “When the door is closed you may free him,” he added.

He passed Dimity a tube, like an old-fashioned tube of toothpaste, and backed out. A door flashed shut behind him.

Dimity squeezed the contents of the tube over Vaemar's bonds. They foamed and dissolved.

Dimity looked desperately for a writing instrument. There was nothing. She took Vaemar's hand and pressed out one of his razor claws. She scratched on her arm. “They listen.” Like most humans on Wunderland she had anticoagulants added to her blood and it dried quickly.

Vaemar raised his great eyes to the ceiling, then pointed to the tiny eyes of cameras. “They watch,” he said. “They must hear what we say. Unless we do or say nothing, we must accept that fact.”

“If they have been watching Wunderland television,” said Dimity, “they probably know all the languages we do.”

“I studied the history of Human International Law,” said Vaemar. He added casually “Loquorisne Latinum?”

“Yes,” said Dimity in the same language. “But it won't frustrate them long. Too logical and consistent. They'll translate. And they are bound to be recording us now.”

“All the same, we have a little time to talk,” said Vaemar. “Time is against us anyway for other reasons as well. How long will it take those Morlocks to change?”

“I don't know. No one knows much about the Pak. In a Sinclair field they could speed it up. But the fact that they are not using Sinclair fields for that purpose suggests the time may be variable.”

“How do we stop them? How do you anticipate what they will do?”

“Wunderland has war-geared defenses,” Dimity said. “If you were a Protector, what would you do?”

“I cannot think like a Protector, but here is one scenario: seize Tiamat. You agree that would be possible.”

Tiamat was a roughly cylindrical asteroid of the Serpent Swarm, about fifty kilometers by twenty. It was an administrative center and military base of the Swarm and was heavily industrialized for space industries as well as a major production center for weapons and IT. It was also a research center for the Swarm. As the main site of the Swarm's experiment in commensualism it had a kzin community with a limited degree of self-government at “Tigertown” and some kzinti working with humans. Both Dimity and Vaemar had been there several times.

“For forty and more trained Protectors? Easy!”

“That would give them factories tooled up for hyperdrive technology, and working hyperdrive ships,” Vaemar said. “And all the gravity-control industries. It would also give them very heavy battle lasers and other military weapons installations. Tiamat is well-defended.”

“Yes.”

“But not well-defended against the kind of surprise attack Protectors could mount. Then, if I were directing their strategy, I would attack Wunderland and the other settled asteroids of the Serpent Swarm from Tiamat. And while Wunderland's defenses are busy, crash this moon or another into it.

“Morlocks fight by dropping on their enemies and hurling rocks down on them. This would be the same thing on a bigger scale.

“The Protectors could break the moon up on its way by controlled explosions so that the fragments would impact in a predetermined pattern and with predetermined force. That would be the end of human—and kzin—life on Wunderland. If all was not destroyed by the first impacts, it would be so shattered that the Protectors could finish off any remnants at leisure. But the Morlocks in the great caves could survive. With Tiamat, they would not need Wunderland's industrial centers. They could destroy the other asteroid settlements one by one. Many are still reduced by war-damage anyway. I do not think their defenses would last long against Protectors.”

“I cannot fault your reasoning,” said Dimity. “And then… how many breeders would they get from the Morlocks of Wunderland?”

“Their numbers were thinned in the war, but they are breeding up again, as I know from personal experience,” said Vaemar. “Hundreds, at least. Thousands, I am sure. We do not yet know how far the cave systems go.”

“The Sinclair fields! That is why they have them here!”

“Yes, of course! I should have seen at once! They can use the Sinclair fields to accelerate breeding! They could have thousands more breeders and thousands of Protectors.”

“That would also give them the numbers for genetic diversity.”

“It would give them the numbers for a double leap into human and kzin space,” said Vaemar. “And another bad thing strikes me, one which this Protector has perhaps not realized yet but sooner or later must: you humans have put much effort into developing reproductive technology, though you do not exploit its full potential. A Protector with access to that would not need to have got all its children before the change. It could clone as many as it wished from its own cell structure. There would be no limit to their numbers!

“We kzinti have experimented with cloning. A band of celibate warriors, who had dedicated themselves to the Eternal Hunt, tried to breed without females once. Each cloned his own kittens. But the kittens were incurably savage and aggressive… Is that so amusing?”

“If a kzin hero calls them incurably savage and aggressive,” said Dimity, “they must have been a problem indeed!”

“They were. But the point is that the inhibitions of your culture or mine about cloning would mean nothing to a Protector. Dimity, we must stop them now. The cost of our own lives is nothing in these circumstances.”

“I know,” said Dimity.

“Unfortunately, at this moment I cannot see how.”

“Nor I.”

“Why didn't the original Pak Protectors simply clone themselves?” said Vaemar.

“Perhaps they had no need to think in such directions,” said Dimity. “Their mature bodies were so strong, long-lived and perfect that they did little to develop biological sciences. They didn't need to improve on what they had. All that we know of the Pak species' thinking was what Brennan picked up while he was a Pak's prisoner and told to the humans who he met later. But there seem to be some gaps in Pak thinking. Humans are more creative. And, from what little I know about them, Protectors are unable to cooperate with one another beyond the briefest temporary alliances. Further, our own science showed us long ago that cloning sapient beings is fraught with risks. It seemed to promise everything at first, but then we discovered the pitfalls.

“The Protectors' science as far as we know is exclusively military-oriented. Each cares only for his own blood-line. It seems their only stimulation and excitement is war. They could have been the greatest race in the galaxy, but their intelligence and instincts together locked them into a dead-end. Their single-mindedness virtually robbed them of free will. Even their spaceflight was stimulated by nothing but a desire to find new breeding grounds. No curiosity, no sense of wonder. No sense of anything beyond themselves. The kind of creature I yearn desperately not to be. When I had to read of them it horrified me, because I saw so much of myself in them.”

“It is something to be horrified,” said Vaemar. “Raargh told me that to be aware of horror is an early step to knowledge. Know horror and you know glory. Know fear and you know courage.”

“You understand the human idea of the knight, Vaemar? The ideal, I mean.”

“I trust so. I have read much human history. It fascinates me that the knight should emerge from the dark ages, as it fascinates me that Roman order, Greek art and thought, could combine with barbarian vigor to build an order that would take you to the stars. Was it like that with other star-faring races, I wonder, races that did not have the Jotok as we did? But yes, I know of human knights. Some kzinti are like that too, but not many, and as you would expect, not quite the same.”

“Can you imagine Pak knights, crusaders, chivalrous champions of some cause beyond ensuring more breeders?” said Dimity. “I cannot. I loved Nils because he, for all his lack of self-awareness, had something of the knight in him. I never saw what he did in the war, of course, Leonie had all of that… The Pak were—it seems are—little more than gene-carrying machines, breeding and fighting and crossing between the stars for no end but reproduction. Trapped by their own brain structure. Trapped, as I fear most of all to be trapped.”

“Can we use that, I wonder? There are at least four blood-lines here.”

“With the childless Protector to keep them in order.”

“Yes. He is our prime target.”

“Target? You have high hopes, Vaemar-Hero.”

“A Hero does not need hope, Dimity-Human.”

They logged onto the internet with the computers supplied. As they had guessed, they could receive but not send data. Dimity and Vaemar were both clever with computers, and they spent a lot of time trying to circumvent this.

Chapter 10

The well-armed car carrying Arthur Guthlac, Colonel Cumpston and Karan touched down beside Vaemar's empty vehicle. Apart from its turret-mounted weapons, Cumpston had a strakkaker and Guthlac a heavy, powerful beam rifle, a great cannon of a thing based on a kzin sidearm, and with mini-waldos for human use. Karan had a kzinrett's knife, the new and improved female version of a w'tsai, and another strakkaker. Weapons ready, the occupants alighted, the humans wearing breathing filters as Dimity had. In case they needed the car quickly, the engine was left idling and the doors unlocked. There was no sign of any live friend or enemy.

Karan pointed and bounded to the dead thunderbirds, the humans hurrying behind. Small scavengers scattered.

“Beam rifle, close range,” said Cumpston. “And the other looks like a kzin bite.”

“They stood here,” said Karan, pointing. Looking closely, Guthlac and Cumpston could make out two very different-sized sets of footprints, the larger tipped with claw points. “It didn't get near them.”

“The car has been tampered with,” said Cumpston. “Look! Its antennas are gone.” He also tried the door.

“Dimity and Vaemar, according to the ways we can measure IQs, are possibly the two cleverest beings on Wunderland,” said Guthlac. “I hope they can look after themselves.”

“Clever doesn't necessarily mean survivor,” said Cumpston. “There's more than a touch of the idiot savant in Dimity. Super-genius she may be, but she's narrowly focused. Just because she shatters the old sexist stereotype of the beautiful blonde doesn't mean she… More common sense, better instincts and reflexes, may mean survival in a place like this. Vaemar, I can't pronounce on. But he's an intellectual, too, however sharp his claws are. I wish old Raargh was with them, or some human sergeant-major.”

Guthlac thought he detected something in his friend's voice when he spoke of Dimity. There could hardly be a less appropriate time or place for him to comment. “Karan, can you follow their trail?” he asked.

Karan was already moving down one of the rock-tunnels, almost on all fours, a barred orange shadow in the shifting and flickering grey light.

“We might do better to search from the air,” Guthlac said. “This is another labyrinth.”

“If there was anything to see from the air I think we'd have seen it,” said Cumpston. “Come on! We're lucky to have her, but I don't want her getting too far ahead on her own. If anything happened to her, would you want to be the one to tell Vaemar?”

“Trail stops,” said Karan a few minutes later.

They caught up to her. They were standing in a circular space in the rock-maze.

“Do you smell anything?” Guthlac asked her.

“Sand and rock turned over.” Karan said. “Not a long time past. And kzintosh. There has been another male kzin here. And at the car. And something else. A bad smell.”

Cumpston pointed to the edge of the rock wall. “Sand and rock turned over there?” he asked her.

“Yes.”

“A gravity motor.”

“But all gravity motors are monitored,” said Guthlac.

“Get through to the monitoring stations,” said Cumpston. “Pull your rank, Arthur! Hurry! They must have recorded something.”

Guthlac sent the message. His face was dark. “I'm getting a very ugly thought,” he said.

“So am I. But tell me yours first.”

Guthlac made sure Karan was out of earshot, still hunting along the rock wall. He spoke softly and quickly.

“Vaemar has taken Dimity into space. He's a kzin. It looks as if he's taking her to the Patriarchy. Our pioneering hyperdrive expert!”

“Any ship that took off from here would be too small for interstellar travel.”

“But it could meet a bigger one.”

“We've monitored Vaemar pretty carefully. And taken other precautions. There's been no hint of anything like that.”

“Apart from reversing the kzinti's whole military position, it would get him back his place beside the Riit throne. Perhaps position him for a bid for the Patriarchy! Why should we trust him to be more loyal to us than to his own species? Especially when the reward could be so enormous? I know policy was to trust him as much as possible, but perhaps we've put too much temptation in his way. Or perhaps it was just a mistake to trust a ratcat!”

“That hangs together very nastily,” said Cumpston. “I have just one small ray of hope that you're wrong. It was we who sent him here. He couldn't have planned a secret rendezvous with a spacecraft… unless it had been waiting for a long time.”

“And unless he manipulated us into sending him. He knew he'd be coming this way sooner or later. I've given Defense Headquarters an emergency alert. The next thing is to get after them, anyway. But Vaemar doesn't feel like that to me.”

“I put some trust in someone when all appearances were against her a little while ago,” said Guthlac. “In a ruined hamlet beyond Gerning in a storm. I haven't regretted it. I'll try to believe the best of Vaemar yet, but I'm putting out an emergency alert to Defense HQ all the same.”

“We should have stopped her associating with him so. That's obvious enough with hindsight.”

“Dimity is an Asperger's. A superlatively high-functioning one. When she makes up her mind to do a thing the only way you can stop her is by breaking that mind.

“She can be killed any time,” Guthlac went on. “There's an implant in her that can be activated remotely. An idea we got from the kzin zzrou. ARM insisted on it.”

“Arthur! We've got to get her back!”

“I know!”

“You mustn't let ARM know what's happened! Not yet!”

“Michael, there are a lot of things neither of us let ARM know about. And I don't mean your peculiarly-colored bird or a certain Earth flower with green petals. Try to hang onto hope.”

“Does she know?”

“I don't know. ARM was subtler than the kzinti about such things. Nanobots in the food. But Vaemar's got one too. ARM is not trusting. It wasn't my idea or orders, but…” Guthlac suddenly smacked his own head. “Idiot! How do we win wars with generals like me? I had completely forgotten! They both have locators in them anyway! Standard VIP models. We can read them from the car!”

“Come on!”

Calling Karan, they turned and headed back out of the granite maze. The thunderbird launched itself at them from the rock wall. Half as big again as the ones Dimity and Vaemar had killed, its vast striking beak knocked Guthlac sprawling. The tough fabric of his coverall saved him from being torn apart, but had the thing snapped its beak it would have crushed his bones in an instant. Karan was a blur of rippling orange muscle as she leapt at it. Screaming, two more thunderbirds launched themselves from the rock wall.

Karan severed the first thunderbird's neck with her fangs and claws before the beak could seize her. Cumpston, getting his beamer up just in time, shot another in the chest. The third sprang into the air again, and came down on their car. Guthlac fired at the bird and hit the car. Its tough materials could normally have withstood far worse hits, but the unlocked door flew open. Either the beam or the avian's great kicking legs activated the controls, and car and avian tangled together shot fifty feet into the air, rolled, dived, and crashed into the rock wall.

Guthlac struggled free of the dead weight of the first thunderbird. Cumpston ran to them. Karan got to her feet, staggered and fell again, pumping gouts of purple and orange blood from gaping lacerations in her thighs. Guthlac found the end of a severed blood-vessel and held it shut while Cumpston raced for the crashed car and its medical kit, killing the broken-limbed avian as it struggled and snapped at him. The car's fuel lines had ruptured, and as Cumpston turned and ran back to Karan a spark ignited the clouds of hydrogen billowing from it. Automatically released jets of inert gas quickly smothered the flames, but the cabin and control console were wrecked.

Frantic work with a kzin military chemical bandage stabilized the wound, but it took time. Karan was weak and barely conscious.

The car, it was soon obvious, was not going to fly again without major repairs, and the lock on the car which Vaemar and Dimity had used was keyed to open to the patterns of Vaemar's and Dimity's hand or their tappetum or retina respectively. It was centuries since the last manually pickable lock had been made for anything as expensive as a car. Any attempt to burn the doors open, if it did not ruin the car's delicate mechanisms, would probably exhaust their weapon first. They carried Karan into the meager shelter of an overhang as rain began to fall from the grey sky. Mobile telephones were a standard part of their equipment. They called for help, and waited. After a time the rain gave way to sleet and snow. More thunderbirds came.

The comet-debris had served them well, Kzaargh-Commodore thought. Night-Lurker had passed undetected into the thick asteroid belt the humans called the Serpent Swarm.

The long descent back towards the sun had not been spent in idleness. Heroes had worked to disguise the ship.

At first Kzaargh-Commodore had thought to disguise it as a derelict, but had changed his mind after coming across a genuine kzin derelict warship. After stripping it of all that might be useful and giving the dead Heroes aboard space burial, he had sent it sunward for a test, cold, tumbling, patently helpless and dead. Human instruments had identified it, and interrogated it, and when it did not respond batteries of laser-cannon had vaporized it. The same happened when he sent in a stealthed ship's boat, manned by a crew of Hero volunteers. Stealth technology took them quite a long way, but it was plainly not the whole answer. Rocks did better, if they were not identified as being on a collision course with Ka'ashi or some other large body—there were too many rocks for the human defenses to vaporize them all, and in any case many contained valuable ores.

The apes seemed arrogantly confident of their mathematics and of their meteor defenses. Any large meteor whose path missed Ka'ashi by more than 50,000 miles was generally not intercepted.

Night-Lurker became a lurker indeed. Like Lord Hrras-Charr of legend, who had cut off his own ears to fool his enemy, the cruiser had lost external parts. So altering something as complex as a spaceship without dockyard facilities was a mighty task, but his Heroes were skillful. Most of the removed parts had been stored inboard or put into orbits from which they might one day be retrieved, but one way and another it had changed shape and shrunk. Its sleek lines and mirror-finished surface had disappeared under stony plating and rubble. The ports of its great rail-guns and laser-cannon were hidden by lids. Its gravity-engines were never used. There was sufficient delta-V for it to maneuver with short bursts of low-powered chemical rockets, inefficient but far harder to detect in space.

“What do you think of Chorth-Captain?” asked Dimity.

“He is not his own master. I do not only say that because it is unbelievable that a Hero would voluntarily serve such monsters. He appears to have no power to correlate. And there is a spot on the back of his neck that is not a battle-scar. It is metallic. I saw it gleam. I think it is some kind of Protector-made descendent of a zzrou.”

“Could a Protector have learnt of such things?”

“The caves contained abandoned equipment of all kinds. The Protector could have found a zzrou and improved on it. Chorth-Captain is likely not the first Hero it captured. It could have experimented on others until it perfected what was necessary for a reliable… slave… servant…?”

“Catspaw?”

“It is not a term I would choose. But an enslaved Hero—or a succession of them—would have been very useful to the Protector at first. I imagine less so now. But I do not know why it did not simply create an army of Protectors on Wunderland as soon as it knew how.”

“I think I know why,” said Dimity. “The first Protector wanted a force of Protectors it could control. These are not quite the same as the original Pak Protectors and it had become aware of how limited and temporary Protectors' ability to cooperate is. That is why it worked gradually, in an environment where it set the parameters of existence.

“Here it is in control of the others far more completely than it would be in the caves, where suddenly aware new Protectors might remember hiding places and so forth of their own. But there is another thing. As soon as it could, I am sure the first Protector began keying into the internet. Remember the old saying that the net is the most two-edged of all swords? A power to one's own side but the greatest gift imaginable to an enemy? There is material about Protectors on the internet, and although most of it is under security closure a Protector's intelligence would crack that open quickly.

“The Protector would try to learn about creatures like itself, and I am sure it would come upon scientific papers about the Hollow Moon. The theory is that this is an ancient Pak ship. If that is so, there may be Pak machines here, Pak books… manuals… Surely for the Pak teaching newly-changed breeders must have always been a high-priority use for resources.”

“It would not know the language of such manuals.”

“It could learn. You and I learn languages very quickly by the standards of our kinds.”

A dark spot grew in the lightning-streaked grey of the sky. A car from one of the monitoring stations. It landed near the overhang and six well-armed humans alighted. They were dressed in the tough uniform overalls of the Wunderland security forces.

Guthlac and Cumpston went forward to meet them, stepping between dead thunderbirds. The creatures had been attacking in increasing numbers. Guthlac had begun to worry about their ammunition some time before. He had brought the big rifle thinking to deal with Morlock Protectors if he had to. But its size and weight, even with the mini-waldos, were a disadvantage, and even without considering that he had managed to wreck the car with it. Thunderbirds moved fast. He realized it was as well he had not had to deal with Protectors, who evidently moved much faster. Last time I was in this sort of trouble was because I went hunting with a .22, he thought, thinking Wunderland game was all sport after kzin-hunting.

The leader of the rescue party stepped ahead of the rest to meet them. At the sight of Karan, lying unconscious, his strakkaker swept up. He cocked it with a fluid, infinitely practiced movement and trained it on her.

“What are you doing?” Guthlac jumped forward in front of the man.

“What are you doing? That's a ratcat, isn't it? A friend of yours?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact she is. She was wounded a little while ago defending us.”

“We believe in dead ratcats here.”

“Not this one.”

“I'm the one who decides that around here.”

“Do you know who I am?” Asked Guthlac.

“Yes. Someone who owes their life to our responding to your call. Stand aside!”

“The war has been over on this planet for more than ten years! Put that weapon in its proper place!”

“I know the proper use for a weapon when there's a live ratcat around.”

“I repeat! The war is over on this planet. There is a peace treaty. I will not repeat that again!”

“I look quite pretty now, don't I,” the man said. “Thanks to our Liberators. But see my skin. Look at my face a little closely. A little pink here and there. I spent years with a metal jaw and half a metal face, thanks to one of those Teufel's claws.”

“Well, you don't have to now,” said Guthlac.

“Yes, I'm lucky, aren't I? My wife, my son, my two brothers, and my uncle, had no such luck as metal replacement parts. Just a quick, short ride down the kzin alimentary canal. Oh, I'm a lucky man, all right! A little micro-surgery to deaden the nerve ends before our Liberators' arrived would have helped. All the nerve ends. I could have gone to my cousins perhaps—maybe after a while they could have looked at me without vomiting. Oh, I forgot! They were in Neue Dresden. You ask me to be a ratcat lover?”

“We are a brigadier and a colonel of the UNSN,” said Guthlac. “We happen to be the Liberators you just thanked. The kzinti ate my only family before you were born. I have fought them for more than fifty years. But here on Wunderland things must change. And this particular ratcat was instrumental in saving the lives of two humans, not long ago. She was young when the war ended, and took no part in it. In addition she is”—not really a recommendation to tell this character she is the mate of the leading kzin on the Planet—“our friend.” Dear God! he thought. Let this character kill Karan and we can say goodbye to any hope of Man-Kzin cooperation on this planet—our best chance of building eventual peace between the species—forever.

He saw Cumpston raise his right hand and pinch his lower lip between forefinger and thumb in a nervous or thoughtful gesture he sometimes had. It also had the effect of pointing the table-facet of the jewel in the ring on his index finger at the man. Not yet, Michael, he thought. But if necessary…

“You lie,” the man answered. “God knows why you should bother. But female ratcats can't think. After Liberation we kept some in zoo cages and fed collaborators to them. They didn't stop to ask them their political opinions before they sat down to dine.”

“This one thinks,” said Guthlac. “A few have always done so, secretly. If you are opposed to the Kzin Patriarchy and Empire you should see what an asset to humanity intelligent kzinretti may be.

“All of which,” he added, “is irrelevant to the fact that I am giving you a direct military order. I am not debating. She comes with us. And she will be given the best of treatment. That is more than because she is our companion and was wounded fighting in our defense, and has been beside other humans in peril before. There are high reasons of policy. Harm her, and you will regret it more keenly than I can say.”

“Wunderland is independent! I do not need to take orders from the UNSN.”

“I tell you of my certain knowledge that if you give that reason at your court-martial it will do you little good.”

Cumpston intervened. “Do you know Nils Rykermann?” he asked.

“Yes,” said the man.

“One of the resistance's greatest leaders in the war, and now a close friend of ours. Harm that kzinrett, and you will answer not only to the kzin who is her mate, but to him. In your place I would prefer the kzin.”

He could kill us all and make it look an accident, Cumpston thought. By the time anyone else arrived, the thunderbirds wouldn't have left enough of our bodies to investigate. I doubt he has too much inhibition against killing humans. Best get him now, perhaps, and as many of the others as I can with the ring, then draw and fight it out with the rest. But they have beam rifles and they're ready and they look like fighters…

“Rykermann was my commander,” the man said at length. “For him I will do this. Get it into the car.”

Getting Karan into the car was not easy. If much smaller than a male kzin, she was still the size and weight of a tigress. But she was partly conscious and did her best to help. The car carried them to a dome that rose out of the near-tundra landscape. There were other buildings with the dishes of heavy-duty com-links, all surrounded and covered by strong fencing. Karan was put into shelter. Guthlac, using all the psychological dominance at his command, and his brigadier's identity and electronic passes, demanded a desk and called his headquarters and then Rykermann. He summoned his modified Wolverine-class command ship, the Tractate Middoth. It was well-armed for its size, and its small permanent crew were his own picked men. It was a vast relief to see its familiar shape appear and grow in the gray sky and swoop to the landing-pad.

Chapter 11

“First, I wish to know more about your gods,” said the Protector. “The internet has told me something, but not enough.” Despite the squeaking and popping of its beaklike muzzle, the words were understandable. Its grammar was good.

Pain. Dimity sensed it dimly. Vaemar with his hunting instincts sensed it more acutely but all his training was to ignore and despise pain save when it was a useful alarm signal. Not surprising it is in pain after such a transformation, thought Dimity. Thank you, Herr Doktor Asperger. I think I understand something of it. Doubtless we owe Asperger's Syndrome to our own Protector inheritance.

“You”—it fixed its gaze on Dimity—“have a god that is everywhere and all-powerful. It can never know achievement, striving, the conquest against odds, triumph. Because it is, it can only be, and never know becoming. Do you agree?”

“Up to a point,” said Dimity. “I'm not a theologian. I think there is an idea that our God can know such things through us, His creatures. Perhaps that is one of the purposes of our creation. To know becoming.”

“'Perhaps'? What kind of a concept is that? And you”—its bulging Morlock eyes swivelled to Vaemar—“You have a god like yourself, only bigger. A fanged beast that needs courage and fights against Infinity and something called Fate that will one day overcome it. You are both promised a life beyond death, but given only barest hints of what that will actually be like. Somehow humans will be given worlds to rule, somehow kzinti will be hunted and devoured by the Fanged God, yet somehow live again in him if they defy him and fight so that they become worthy. Their identities will survive, for if they fight nobly the Fanged God will give them a new and greater life. Have I simplified your theology?”

“Yes,” said Dimity and Vaemar together.

“I had no idea of a god,” said the Protector. “In the caves there was Hunger. Eating. Hatred. Fear. Mating. Enemy-prey. Thoughts moved sluggishly but emotions surged. Then enemy-preys. All danger. All food. Old preys. The flyers and the runners. New enemy-preys. Things like you and you, that killed and killed. Killed like the water flooding the lower tunnels, with things that blinded and burnt. The big ones were hard to kill, the small ones were hard to kill too. I survived. I knew almost nothing but survival and breeding. Those about me died, for your kinds killed them and then you killed the flyers and other things that were our food. That was all. That, and a dim idea that something had sent our food to us, and made the waters flow.

“Then, after the Change, I began to wonder who had made the caves—the caves that I thought then were the world. Then, when the light burnt less outside, I left the caves. I saw what I now know is the scarp, sweeping down to the great valley. The sound of what I know is wind. Smells I had never imagined. I saw what I now know are the stars. Something had made this. It could not exist without a cause. Since then I have come to understand other concepts. Worship… I need to know much more… so much more.”

It went on for a long time. It spoke with them of the creation of stars, and the physics of the Big Bang and the Monobloc, theories discarded with new knowledge in the twenty-second century, and resurrected with newer knowledge in the twenty-fourth. They tried to divert it. Finally it left them.

“No time to get her to kzin facilities. She'll have to stay with us,” Guthlac said. “I'm not leaving her here with these gonzos.” There had been tense hours while they waited for the ship to arrive.

“I agree,” said Cumpston. “But will she make it?”

“She's a kzinrett. She's tough.”

“We don't have a kzin autodoc.”

“Her main problem's loss of blood. We've got some universal plasma. It won't carry oxygen but it'll give her heart something to work on and stop her blood vessels collapsing.”

“Can you give it to her?”

“I had infantry combat training, a long time ago, including first aid. Never thought then that I'd be using it on a kzin, though. And my men are versatile. Wait till you try Albert's recipe for the wedding punch! Looking after a very important kzinrett shouldn't be too much for them.”

“Now to find our missing pair.”

Guthlac wiped his forehead. “They're alive,” he said at last.

He pointed to the screen before him. A ship could be stealthed, but, at least for a time, its passage through atmosphere could not. “That could be the trace of the ship.”

“It could be.” The instrumentation showed a faint trail of atmospheric disturbance, dissipating as they watched.

“If that's a ship, it's got the best cloaking I've ever seen. Beyond the atmosphere there will be no way to follow it.”

“We are looking for Protectors. Rykermann thinks the Hollow Moon was the original Protector ship. Could they be heading for it?”

Guthlac punched numbers. “It gives us somewhere to start looking,” he said.

“I've got them,” he said at last. “Extreme range, and there's interference, but that's where they are.” He turned to Albert Manteufel, his pilot. “Take her up!”

“Gnosticism…” said Vaemar thoughtfully. “You said it is the idea of man becoming a god through his own inner efforts, or having a secret piece of god-ness inside him…” The Protector had gone, leaving them together in what they were coming to think of as “their” room.

“I think that's what it means,” said Dimity. “Salvation by knowledge. Gnostics were 'people who knew,' and therefore spiritually superior beings. Perhaps a sort of race-memory of the Breeder-Protector cycle. But as I said, I'm not a theologian. The abbot once told me that almost all serious heresies are forms of gnosticism. He also said that, given that the universe had been created, it didn't matter much in religious terms where Man came from biologically, what mattered was where we were going spiritually.”

“That Protector would seem to justify this gnosticism,” said Vaemar. “A being turning into a god.”

“I don't think so,” said Dimity. “The kzinti wouldn't say that, would they?”

“No. Our souls go to the Fanged God, and are devoured by Him after a good hunt.”

“And that's the end? It sounds rather bleak to a human.”

“No. The souls of cowards are regurgitated into… well, the human word is Hell. The souls of Heroes go on somehow, but as it said we have only hints about that. It is a Mystery. But the hints are enough for us to have fought wars over them.”

“And I don't think the abbot would say this is a case of beings turning into gods,” said Dimity. “That thing is not a god, it is just a fast calculating machine… less human than a human, almost incapable of choice, almost without the advantages of limitation and imperfection. Mentally like me, only more so. As impaired as I am.”

“No, Dimity, not like you.”

“You are a chess master, Vaemar. Is it not true for you as for me that you come to some point in chess where you no longer seem to be moving the pieces, but rather watching them move.”

“Yes, the moves become inevitable.”

“Choice disappears. My life has been like that—watching equations become inevitable. As I think a Protector sees the world. I do not think this Protector sees it in such terms yet. But it will soon.”

“Was it like that even when you were a cub… a child?”

“I got a lot of my memories back with being on Wunderland and with the treatments… I can say: especially when I was a cub. I did not speak for the first few years of my life, because there seemed nothing worth saying. Why state the obvious?”

“Humans often do. And I think it is another habit we are catching from them. I have noticed we Wunderkzin tend to talk more even when we do not need to.”

“Yes, humans often do. I didn't. I watched it all happen. The tests, the brain scans. I recorded my parents weeping over me as I looked up at them without expression because there was nothing to express, their whispers about 'abnormal alpha waves,' 'Asperger's Syndrome,' 'moron…' 'there are special schools…' 'Love and cherish her…' It was the fritinancy of insects.

“I sat in a playpen in my father's study while he worked, watching him at his keyboard, the equations crawling across his computer screen. They put in swings, and made little tunnels for me to explore and there were all sorts of books and toys that lay on the floor. I sat there and heard Father talk with his colleagues. One of them had a son, a very bright little boy to whom Father gave lessons in calculus. Postgraduate students, too—he took some tutorials with the cleverest of them in his house. I listened in my playpen, and later, sitting on my chair. I didn't do much. I did not speak much but I was puzzled, and eventually angry—why were they so slow? Why did they use such clumsy and incomplete symbols? Why did they not bring down their quarry—tidily, simply, beautifully? At length I decided to find out. That curiousity I had about humanity was the little, vestigial thread I had connecting me to it.

“One day, when I was seven, Father came in and found me at the keyboard. I remember how his face lit up. That was the first time a human's emotions had touched me. “Who's a clever little girl then?” he cried. Then he shouted to Mother: “Moira! Moira! Come and look! She's playing!” Then I saw him lift his eyes. He saw what was on the screen, and I saw his face change. His mouth began to twist, his hands went up to his mouth, and I knew he was fighting back a scream. By the time Mother arrived, he had stopped shaking.

“'We do have a clever little… girl,' he said, taking Mother's arm, and pointing. And already I heard him stumble over that word 'girl.' Girls are human, you see. They both stared at it for a long time.

“'Can it be what I think it is?' But Mother was no longer looking at the screen when she said that. She was looking at me. It must be hard to have the realization hit you in a second that you have given birth to a monster, a freak. Father printed everything off and looked at it for a long time.

“'I think I understand the implications of the simpler equations,' he said. 'I think it shatters a principal paradigm of our knowledge of paraphysical forces… One of the paradigms… At least one…' Then he began to laugh, a strange laugh such as I had never heard before.

“I was getting bored again by that time, so I gave them a lecture. Rebuked Father for his slowness and stupidity. Told him I was angry at the limitations of the symbols he used. It was hard on my vocal chords because I'd used them so little before and that made me angry, too. Wondered at their tears. Thus began the career of Dimity Carmody. More tests, more brain-scans. The special schools—I told you I'd heard them speak of special schools—and everything else. Lessons in how to choose good clothes, for example. How to do my hair. Looking normal is a big part of being normal. Efforts to socialize the machine, the monster, with chess and music, to teach it to relate to human beings. They strengthened the little, little thread that connected me to normal humanity.”

“You laugh. You weep, Dimity,” said Vaemar. “I have seen your eyes when you behold a sunrise. I saw you toiling in the cave to keep Leonie alive as shots and flame flew about you. Never say you are a machine. As for a monster… do I look like a monster to you?”

“No. You are splendidly evolved to be what you are.”

“A killing machine?”

“Of course not! Or that is the start. You are a carnivore, a great carnivore, a mighty hunter, top of your food chain. But you, Vaemar, are so much else as well.”

“Yes. I am, thanks to the successful human reconquest of Wunderland, one of the few surviving examples under any star of an introspective kzin. Monstrous to normal members of my own kind, like Chorth-Captain. But we must not be sorry for ourselves. Would you, Dimity, really be different if you had the choice?”

“It is difficult to say. But I think not.”

“Nor I.”

“The only kzinti I know well are you and your Honored Step-Sire Raargh Hero,” said Dimity. “And I know that Raargh, too, in his gruff old way, is not merely valiant. He can be thoughtful, and chivalrous, as well. I do not forget that I owe him my life, or the pain he got saving me. We are both of species that have a great potential, and a paltry expression of it. But sometimes something shines through.”

“I know you and I are not machines, merely because we can think, or because we are different to the norm of our respective kinds,” said Vaemar.

“You have all the abilities of a young male kzin, and something else,” said Dimity. “You are more than kzin. But in some ways I am less than human.”

“You are no Protector,” said Vaemar. “You have free will. You can choose. You have morality.”

“In some things. Not when I dance with the equations.”

Chorth-Captain entered. He carried more restraining tape, and made them bind one another again. Then he removed the locator implants from under the skin of Dimity's inner arm and from between Vaemar's shoulders. The size of rice grains, the locators were meant to be removed without too much trouble. His claws were too sharp to cause Dimity much pain, and Vaemar simply looked contemptuous. It was obvious from Chorth-Captain's manner that he was doing something he should have done some time previously. He's hoping the Protector won't realize he's neglected to do this before, Dimity thought. And I'm hoping somebody's already traced them and is on their way. But the signal will be very weak. We've got a lot of rock around us, and 60,000 miles of space. But Chorth-Captain, whatever he's been before, has become one inefficient kzin now. He made some show of smashing the locators. Then he released Dimity and left her to release Vaemar.

Time passed. They had few ways of measuring it.

“You are crouched in as small a space as possible. Your limbs seem to vibrate spasmodically,” said Vaemar. “Are you sick? You were not hurt badly? You did not bleed for long. But I observe other differences about your body, too.”

“I'm cold,” said Dimity.

“You will burn energy with that vibration. You should rest and conserve your energy.”

“I can't. I have done so for as long as I can. But this is cave temperature. Deep-cave. I need clothes. These torn things are quite useless. My boots are all right—” she laughed “—but they don't keep the rest of me warm.”

“You may lie against me, if you wish,” said Vaemar. “I will try to warm you. But I warn you seriously not to make any sudden moves. I cannot always control my reflexes.”

She snuggled against his fur. He wrapped one great arm around her and presently she slept. Vaemar had not moved when the door opened again and Chorth-Captain entered. He looked down at the young kzin with disgust.

“Are you chrowling that monkey? I expected little enough of you, but this…”

He turned away. For a male kzin to turn his back on another so might be an expression of trust. But it could also be an expression of fathomless contempt. Vaemar leapt, claws extended, slashing at Chorth-Captain's neck, then striking with an elbow. His claw came away with blood and orange fur, and a short silver tube.

Chorth-Captain did not whirl into the counterattack. He staggered dazedly and sat down, hind legs splayed out before him, as old, mad bears that had spent too many years in zoo cages had once looked. Then he slumped on his side. Vaemar went to Dimity and set her on her feet.

“We were right,” he said. “A zzrou, or its descendant, but capable of controlling behavior as well as action. I have removed it.”

“Is he dead?”

“Probably not. Kzinti are much tougher than humans, and this thing has no wires or roots to suggest it was deep in his nerves or spine. As to the quality of life he may expect, that is another matter. He must live with knowledge of what he has allowed himself to become. The door is open. The catspaw is out of action. Now, perhaps, we only have five Protectors to deal with. Or perhaps more.” He picked up Chorth-Captain's w'tsai. “I feel less naked with this,” he said. Then he dropped it again. “But what use would it be against a Protector? Let him keep it. I will take this, though.” He hefted the beam-weapon. “Now, Dimity-Human,” he said, “you and I have a chance to do deeds fit for a song!”

“Lead, Hero!” she told him.

“Obviously, if we can get control of the ship, we should take it. But I do not think we will be allowed. They are surely monitoring us. But come!”

There was the “ward” with the rows of transforming Morlocks. There were no Protectors to be seen. “Why don't they try to stop us?” Vaemar asked.

“They are probably interested in seeing what we do. A practical lesson in our tactics.”

“That Sinclair field could be a weapon, perhaps. Urrr.”

“What are they doing with it? Growing more Protectors?”

“Chorth-Captain said the rest of the tree-of-life agent was still on Wunderland.” Vaemar peered into the field. “It looks like some small-scale industrial process. Some super-strong materials take a long time to grow, and they could be speeding them up. Mountings for hyper-drive motors need super-strong materials. That is what it looks like to me. Getting ready. But you know more of building the hyperdrive than I.”

“They know of the hyperdrive already?”

“If our knowledge of Protectors is true they have immense ability to correlate. They could learn from the internet. Not everything, but enough to start work.”

Dimity too examined what could be seen through the blue radiance of the field. She nodded after a long pause. “Yes. That's what it looks like.”

“I agree.”

“They don't have the hyperdrive… yet.”

“Anticipation. They believe they will get it out of your mind. Or if not from you, from another.”

“You will ensure I do not live to tell them, Vaemar.”

“If it must be. But it has not come to that yet.”

Two Protectors leapt out of a passage. Possibly the sight of the naked human female breeder halted the first one for a moment. Too fast for Dimity to follow, Vaemar swung up the beam-weapon and fired. The cantaloupe-head of the Protector exploded, hit between the eyes. The other, far faster than even the young kzin, dodged behind the Sinclair field. Vaemar, keeping his claws retracted, seized Dimity with his free hand and dragged her behind the cover of a metal partition. He raised the beam rifle again, waiting for the Protector to show itself. Then he had a better idea. Firing straight into the Sinclair field, he thought, might well have most spectacular results. It might even wreck the hatch cover and open the compartment to space, which would solve everyone's problems. Orlando would carry on his line. As he depressed the beamer's trigger, the lights on its stock died. He pulled the trigger again, harder. Nothing happened. Obviously it was under remote control and had now been deactivated.

The Protector knew it was safe. It stood up, then leapt, so effortlessly that it seemed to fly, onto what appeared to be the housing of the Sinclair field's generator.

Chorth-Captain hit it from behind like a bolt of orange lightning. They fell forward together. Screaming, Chorth-Captain went headfirst into the Sinclair field. His lower body and hind legs, protruding for a moment, convulsed wildly and then went into the blue glow. But the Protector, too, had staggered forward into the field, standing in it up to its thighs.

The Protector did not seem to accept immediately what had happened. It stayed where it was for a long moment, looking down. It was not their kidnapper but one of the more recently changed ones. Stay there! Stay there! Dimity implored silently. It reached up and touched its ears, as though puzzled. It even pushed a hand down into the field as if testing it. Dimity realized the Protector's armored skin and relative lack of pain sensitivity could be a handicap to it. Nerve couriers could not tell it so much about its environment. They're so tough they don't need pain for an alarm signal. Then it gathered itself and sprang out of the field. It should have sprung precisely on top of them. But tough as the Protector was, it still had a circulatory system. In the field its lower limbs and feet had been deprived of blood, died and had been dead for some time. Its lower leg muscles were gone and it fell short. It landed on its feet, but collapsed as it landed, the bones of lower limbs and feet splintering.

As the Protector tried to leap again, both legs and one hand dead, Vaemar closed with it, jaws gaping, slashing with his claws. The swing of its remaining hand was still too fast for Dimity to follow, but this time Vaemar caught it, slashed and bit. Dimity heard his fangs clash on bone. He leapt back, out of reach of the Protector's snapping muzzle. It had two hearts, but its powerful circulatory system was carrying dead and decayed matter into both of them. It continued to stagger towards them on the bony, disintegrating stumps of its legs, its smell alone almost enough to knock a human down as Vaemar grabbed Dimity and dragged her back, springing up and out of the thing's reach. It made another leap after them, fell again, crawled, collapsed and died.

Vaemar turned off the field. He and Dimity looked down for a moment at what remained of Chorth-Captain.

“At least he died a Hero,” said Dimity. “And look! There was more of that control device in him than we knew.”

“No Hero should have allowed such a thing to happen to him,” said Vaemar. “But I will take his w'tsai now. Perhaps I can do him the service of gaining it new honor. And look further! Here is the key to the ship! But there is something to be done before anything else.” He leapt to the doors, closing them one after another. “We may be thankful this is kzin-derived architecture,” he said. “I think we have locked them out for a time. But they will bypass those locks soon.” He turned to the lines of transforming Morlocks and began rapidly but methodically slashing their throats with his claws and the w'tsai. Already the skin was turning into a leathery armor and it was hard work, but Vaemar was quick and strong.

Vaemar saw the horror in Dimity's eyes as he returned to her. He took her hand and touched it against his forearm.

“Remember,” he said. “Fur, not skin.”

“I know,” she said.

“Now we have Protectors whose children I have killed,” he said. “They will not be pleased with us. I think they will be coming soon. I see no escape. Can you think of a solution?”

“To escape in the ship that brought us. You have the key now.”

“Yes. Unfortunately the hatch above it is closed. I can perhaps work out how to open it if the Protectors do not override the ship's controls, but it will take a little time. Unless you can help me?”

“I have not your practical ability with machinery, kzin-based or otherwise. But there is something.” She took him back to the housing of the Sinclair Field controls. “Can you turn on the field again?”

“Yes, it is simple. Why?”

“I think we have a chance of reducing the odds against us. The Protectors are still inexperienced. I am going to stand in the area of the field. When I give the word, turn it on around me.”

“You will die! You will exhaust the oxygen! One can only live in a Sinclair field with special air supplies, to say nothing of food and water. Urrr.”

“I can live for a short time, that is why I say…”

Two Protectors leapt out of the passage. Dimity jumped into the field-area, and screamed, “Now, Vaemar! Now!”

Vaemar threw the switch. Dimity became a shimmering shape inside the blue dome.

Whether the Protectors meant to kill or recapture them, Vaemar was unsure. But they meant business. Their expressionless leathery faces with the Morlock eyes now strangely alight with intelligence were also lit with fury. Vaemar wondered if they were keeping him alive for torture. But the reactivated Sinclair field was between him and them. As they advanced, he saw Dimity in the field flashing almost too fast for his superb eyes to follow. Vaemar crouched, waiting a chance to spring, a chance he knew he would not get.

There were two shattering explosions, so close together they seemed one. One Protector's upper body disintegrated, then the other. Vaemar, head ringing, jumped back to his feet. He seemed uninjured. He stared in amazement for a second, then saw Dimity halt in her meteor-fast movements, fall and lie still. He leapt to the controls and killed the field. Gently, keeping his claws sheathed, he tried to give her artificial respiration, fearful that he should crush her fragile ribs, fearful she was dead. I care so for a human! The surprised realization flashed through his mind.

“Look at me! Look at me! Look at me now!” he sang at her from their old song. She stirred and sat up, gasping.

“It is fun to have fun, but you have to know how,” she completed the quotation with a weak smile at length.

“Are you all right? I learnt the theory of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in the ROTC, but I believe giving it to you would be difficult for me.”

“There were still a few breaths of air,” she said. “There was an emergency tank inside. And some water. They must have had Protectors spending time in there controlling the processes. But it was a pretty near thing!”

“It was you killed the Protectors?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

She pointed to her feet. “I threw my boots at them. I had plenty of time to take aim and work out the trajectories and kinetic energies. They were moving like slugs. And I do still have quite a good mathematical brain.”

“You are a Hero,” said Vaemar. “There may, with good fortune, now be only one Protector left.”

“Yes. Why didn't it attack as well?”

“I suspect the answer is that those Protectors were the last parents of the Morlocks I just killed,” said Vaemar. “Despite the increase in their sapience, they were still Morlocks, still fairly newly changed, and mad with rage. The remaining Protector is the original, the one that brought us here. It has no children of its own, so it can make more Protectors without prejudice to its plans, and, at least until it comes to understand that human reproductive technology could still give it children, its behavior is not unclouded by parental emotion and anticipations. It is the one mature and partly experienced and educated Morlock Protector, obviously by far the most dangerous, and if we do not kill it we will be no better off than before. If it does not come to us, we must hunt it down.”

“That would be quite hopeless, even if we had a functioning weapon. You saw how swift and strong it is, and it is armed too.”

“You would have us ssurrendirr, Dimity-Hero?” Vaemar's human speech slipped as he pronounced the hated word. “Or flee? Urrr.”

“I think we have no choice but to press on. Explore!”

“Hero! Well said!”

“With caution. You have Chorth-Captain's w'tsai?”

“Yes! Let it regain honor in my hands!”

Dimity clicked the trigger of the beam rifle experimentally. It was still dead. “We will have to hope a Hero's w'tsai is enough,” she said.

“I had better lead,” said Vaemar.

Chapter 12

Mechanisms towered about Dimity and Vaemar. Dimity had, with Vaemar's help, improvised a breathing mask, which she hoped would keep out the smell of any tree-of-life, from the tatters of what had been the top part of her suit, and sealed the rents in the rest as well as she might with an all-purpose repair gel from Chorth-Captain's belt. They had obtained a light from the same source. Tracking the Protector by the pain it was radiating had brought them this far.

“Fusion toroids,” she said, pointing. “The energy needed to move this between stars must have been vast.”

“I am glad our kinds did not know too much about such energies in the past,” said Vaemar. “Think of a war fought with bodies like this as missiles.”

Something, too fast for human eyes to see clearly, scuttled away in the dark above them. “The Protector,” said Dimity. “Why doesn't it attack?”

“It was a Protector,” said Vaemar, “but I do not think it was the same one. Dimity, we have been too optimistic, I think. I do not think we have accounted for all the newly awakened Protectors. Perhaps its task is to watch us and report.”

They came to an opening into a vast cavern, filled with machinery.

Vaemar stood unmoving for a moment, then he said, “There are… vibrations in the air… perhaps you cannot sense them… which tells me these motors may not be dead.”

“After scores or hundreds of thousands of years? Surely not?”

“Look at the cavities in the roof,” said Vaemar. “They appear to have been artificially dug.”

“Yes.”

“Except during brief eclipses, half the external surface of this body is always in sunlight, half in the darkness and cold of space. The temperature differentials on the surface must be very large. It is a problem and an opportunity in all space-engineering.”

“Yes. I see what you mean. That would give unlimited electrical power for tunnelling robots. They could extract and refine fuel.”

“It would not, perhaps, take much to keep the engines simply ticking over.”

“Would Protectors think like that?”

“I cannot know how Protectors would think. They are more like you than me. But I sense there is power here. This asteroid was overlooked for mining because its metallic content is relatively low. But I would guess it was metal-rich when the Protectors chose to make it a spaceship. I guess some automated or natural variety of mining worm has been tunnelling and mining in it for a long time.”

“A machine refining its own ore and making its own replacement parts,” said Dimity. “We have nothing outside fiction that can do that for so long or on such a scale. Self-sustaining machinery, processes still carrying on after a million years. And we have no information that Cybernetics was a Protector talent.”

“Obviously, they could have set themselves to acquire such a talent. Dimity, this gives us a glimpse of what mature Protector technology can do! I do not like it… And look! There are lights. They could be solar-powered engines ticking over. Or powered by long-lived fission or fusion processes. Doing essential maintenance, ready to set off a fusion reaction when needed. There are many ways hydrogen could be collected and stored, for example. Or perhaps it has been completely closed down and our Protector and Chorth-Captain have reactivated it.”

“It is as well, as you say,” said Dimity, “that this moon was not properly explored before the end of the war. It could have been a super-weapon.”

“It still could be. I do not know if we should approach anything critical too closely. It may provoke a response.”

“I think we have to provoke a response. The status quo does not favor us.”

Dimity stepped forward cautiously. She gave a cry of fear and surprise. Vaemar leapt, grabbed her with one arm and pulled her back. Then he advanced cautiously and pointed. “Nothing to fear too much. An active kzin gravity-sled. Heavy-duty Naval model. Chorth-captain must have brought it here. We can avoid its field.”

“I am sorry. I am a little rattled. You can handle one, Vaemar?”

“Of course. I have flown one since I was a kit. It was one of the first things Honored Step-Sire Raargh bought when we were living in the farm country.”

“Then let us not avoid it. Let us use it.”

“To fly on? There is not much space for that.”

“To fly on and to fight with. Do you think the Protectors would let us use it? We could do great damage if we could fly. I am sure they would try to stop us.”

“Dimity, I think the God, whichever one has dominion here, has been good to us. You will have to move very quickly. I will board the sled. You will take the copilot's seat and hang on for your life, and pray that these Protectors still think like Morlock Breeders, jumping down on their enemies when they see us escaping. Now!”

Vaemar and Dimity leapt into the sled. From above, two Protectors sprang. As they did so, Vaemar's claws flashed at the sled's controls, flinging its motor into maximum reverse flux. The Protectors, directly above it, were flung straight up. One smashed into the machinery above them, and stuck among it, the other, as though swimming through air, reached the edge of the field and fell onto the sled. It clung with one hand. Vaemar had time for one slash at the hand, removing three fingers and reducing its power of purchase. Desperately he continued to slash at the leathery arm and snapping beak with the w'tsai and his claws. Dimity grabbed the flight-controls of the sled. They skimmed back along the corridor as Vaemar finally cut the Protector's grip. It changed hands. Vaemar grabbed the controls and stopped the sled, keeping the field focused on the Protector. Dimity screamed in its ear and it let go. It flew upwards, seemed to grow smaller and vanished into the blackness above.

“I hope it ends up at the center of the moon,” said Vaemar as they flew back into the first chamber. “Half a mile from any surface. I don't think I killed it, but that will give us time, I hope, to do some real damage. If it was the last Protector. We will have to hope it was. But we cannot continue sticking our noses into the cave, unarmed, in the hope more will come out. We have been lucky so far.”

Then he asked: “Why did you make that noise? Were you what humans call terrified? Panicked?”

“In the caves the Morlocks must have evolved and enhanced every nonvisual sense,” Dimity said. “Particularly hearing. I thought its hearing would be specially sensitive. Sensitive enough to use against it. I wondered why the other Protector did not leap out of the Sinclair field instantly instead of pausing while the field killed it. Chorth-Captain had screamed as he pushed it in, and I think that stunned it momentarily. They must have evolved in the caves to hear the slightest sound—the rustling of insectoids, the tiny bubbling of water's meniscus rising in grains of mud. Evolution towards hearing microsounds. But with never a need to evolve a defense against too much sound. I realized that just now.”

“Dimity, you do not disappoint. Now what?”

“We can get away and do real damage at the same time.”

“How?”

“The gig has a gravity-motor.”

“Yes.”

“And a reaction drive.”

“So I saw when we came here.”

“I do not need to draw you a diagram, then?”

Humans who had spoken so to kzinti before had not lived long to regret their insolence. But Vaemar sprang to the ship, Dimity following.

“We still cannot get out,” said Vaemar, as the door closed behind them. Chorth-Captain's key had worked but he punched in an electronic lock as well. Both Vaemar and Dimity had noted the locking and unlocking sequence earlier. “You must bear with me with patience here,” said Vaemar. “No monkey-rattling… Dimity is not rattled any more?”

“At least we have a weapon,” said Dimity. “Let us use it.”

“Danger?”

“Hero!”

“Urrr!”

The controls were built in duplicate, in sizes to be used by either Protector or kzinti hands, and Protector hands were very similar to human. As Dimity cut in the gravity-motor, thrusting it downwards, Vaemar fired the reaction-drive. Incandescent plasma gas roared out. The ship shook, but remained balanced between the two forces.

A second was enough. At a gesture from Vaemar they killed the two drives together. Cautiously, they cleared a viewport. Nothing could be seen but blackness, with flames and points and bars of red-hot wreckage fading in it. Even with a powerful searchlight they could make out no more through the smoke for some time. When it cleared somewhat, all that they could see of the inside of the Hollow Moon about them was a charred, melted, ruin.

“We have done it, Dimity!” said Vaemar. “We have killed at least five Protectors, though they took our weapons! Urrr!” A snarl of triumph rose in his throat.

Dimity knew instinctively not to interrupt the young kzin's rejoicing too soon. Analyzing this knowledge, as she always analyzed her reactions, she realized they could not have done what they did had there not been a psi bond of some sort between them. It did not surprise her greatly. Vaemar's Ziirgah sense was a rudimentary form of proto-telepathy which most male kzinti possessed and she knew her own brainwaves were abnormal in several ways. They had acted and planned together almost instantaneously and partly without being aware of the fact.

“Now it is a matter of getting out,” she said at length. “The hatch above us is still closed.”

Vaemar turned to the control panel again.

“In the absence of Protectors I think I can open it from here,” he said. “I need but a little time to study the controls. Normal procedure for a ship like this when leaving a space station is to rise on the gravity motor when the lower hatch is opened, have that close behind us and then open the upper hatch. For obvious reasons both hatches cannot be opened together.”

“We can do that from here?”

Vaemar operated a set of switches, watching lights sliding across a screen.

“Yes,” he said. “And I find that disturbing. It suggests the mechanisms of this installation are less damaged than they might be. I hoped to blast our way out with lasers or armor-piercing shells.” He gestured at another control panel. “I should have realized a Protector would have built strong. But it raises a thought in my mind that the Protector may have survived. Or there may be more Protectors than we knew. This place is complex. I am sure now that there are control centers we have not touched. They must have built many redundancies.”

“Well, let us run the reaction motor again as we leave, however we get out,” said Dimity. “That will leave their possible survival, trapped in this damage, an academic matter until we summon security forces to make sure. Even a Protector can hardly cross space without a ship or a functioning motor. Vaemar, I hope we have done both our kinds a service this day.”

“The hatch is opening,” said Vaemar a few minutes later. “I think we should go as destructively as possible.”

Dimity slid into the couch beside him. Again, one operated the gravity motor and the other the reaction-drive. On a pillar of incandescent plasma-gas the ship rose, slowly, out of the tube which led to the surface.

“I can't hold it!” Dimity cried. “We're in a gun-barrel. The ship will implode!”

“All right! Let it go. I think we have done what we can.”

A dark tunnel, a growing circle of light. Space suddenly infinite about them, the disk of Wunderland hanging huge in the meteor-streaked blackness. Behind them, fire venting from the hole in the hollow moon, fire which they hoped had burnt out its core and everything in it.

“Home!”

“Home!”

A green light blinking on the control panel—the kzin color for danger. Vaemar's claws flashing on the keyboard.

“The ship identifies another engine starting,” he said. “The signature is that of a kzin Rending Fang-class fighter. It is behind us.”

“The Protector!”

“I suspect so. In Chorth-Captain's ship.”

“Use the shielding!”

“Dimity, I am trying to discover how. I know how to pilot kzin craft, but the Protector's innovations are new to me. Throw the gravity motor into parallel with the reaction-drive. We need speed!”

“Can we fight?”

“This is a naval gig. It has stealth if I can find it, but it is not built for speed. Nor has it adequate weapons to take on a fighter. We cannot ram. We must run. Fly the ship, Dimity, while I track the stealthing commands… you must dodge.”

They flew, firing missiles and decoys behind them. Vaemar gave a snarl of rage and stabbed with one claw point at a dial in front of Dimity in the pilot's seat.

“Another source of neutrino emissions! Another engine starting! Not a gravity engine. Nothing this boat's brain recognizes. Dimity, I think we have been over-optimistic about the number of Protectors on the Hollow Moon and the damage we did. It is still under control and I think it is either moving or preparing to fire at us. I guess there are several Protectors still alive in it. I will launch more decoys.”

He stabbed at another switch. “The God be thanked that the mechanisms on this vessel have not been altered from Navy standard too much. The decoys operate. Now, Dimity, fly as you have never flown before! Use that brain of yours to fly in random variations a Protector cannot anticipate.”

Chapter 13

“That must have been one of the shortest peaces in history,” Arthur Guthlac said. “At least two kzinti ships are barrelling in. The defense satellites are preparing to fire. But I've asked them to hold off for the moment. They won't hold long though. They could be chock-full of multi-megatonners, or something worse.”

“Why hold, then?” Cumpston asked.

“They appeared on the screens out of nowhere. Or rather from the vicinity of the Hollow Moon. I hope they might not be an officially-sanctioned attack by the Patriarchy. Why would the Patriarchy attack with only two small ships?”

“Maybe they're freebooters, or fanatics defying orders. Maybe they don't know of the treaty.”

“And maybe that's what we're meant to think,” Guthlac said. “They've only attacked with two ships to make it look like it's unsanctioned. To make it deniable. You know how much destruction two ships could cause. Then, while they're saying it was nothing to do with them, they attack with everything they've got. The fact they were only just picked up suggests they've got a cloaking technology we haven't. What if they've got a whole cloaked fleet past our outer defenses? What if there are a few hundred cloaked battle-wagons ready to follow them?”

“That doesn't sound like the kzin Navy,” said Cumpston. “If they'd got a cloaked fleet in close, I think they'd attack with everything they had. In any case, I don't want to start the war again if there's the slightest chance of preventing it.” New data crawled across the screen. “A gig and a fighter. That's an odd combination for a fleet attack. The signatures of both are funny, thought. And the maneuvering doesn't make any sense.”

“You're making it sound more and more like a diversion.”

“It looks to me as if the gig is taking evasive action.”

“At least let's find out who they are. Kzinti on the attack like to tell their enemies their Names, if they've got them. I'm going to call them up. That can't do any harm. And in the meantime we're closing with them. Stand by to help Hawkins at the main guns, Michael.”

“There! There!” Cumpston's finger stabbed at a new light on the screen, a light that triggered a howling audio alarm-system. “That's the signature of a kzinti warship all right. A big one. Coming in fast… a heavy cruiser at least.”

“Got it!”

“It still doesn't make sense,” Cumpston said. “It's not a coherent attack. A cruiser, a fighter, a boat…”

“Who knows why the pussies do anything? I thought I knew them, but this…”

“I thought I knew them, too. Some of them, anyway.”

Both men looked at the clock. At the rate they were closing, both knew they probably had very little time to live. Waiting for reinforcements was not an option. They had alerted the ground and orbital defenses. Now all they could do was cause as much damage as possible to the kzinti strike-force before it hit the planet. Both had seen the silent annihilation of space-battles many times before. Small craft were dropping from the Tractate Middoth: flying bombs to either destroy by detonation or to pump X-ray lasers.

“I'm getting another signature!” Guthlac's voice was tense but controlled. “Another ship!” Then he gasped, spat a curse. “The bastard is HUGE!”

“My God! It's the first attack on Wunderland all over again! A single giant carrier.”

“Better cloaked.”

“It would be. They've had sixty-six years to improve the technology. Well, it looks like the war's on again for young and old, as they say. I'm sorry, Arthur.”

“I'm sorry too.” Then, “Michael…”

“Yes?”

“Gale's down there.”

“I know. Arthur, do what you have to do. We're soldiers.”

“How does a Hero's Death appeal to you?”

“I don't think we've got much choice. It's been on the cards a long time.” His finger ran down rows of switches. The lights of armed firing-circuits glowed. The leading kzin craft, the smallest, was getting close. It was already in range. Small, but capable of carrying a stick of multi-megatonners of its own. Deal with it, then turn to the great carrier. If Tractate Middoth survived that—and it would not—the cruiser next.

“Ssstop!” Karan's nonhuman voice jolted them. She was standing, trembling. She had pulled out the plasma injector. She appeared to be holding herself upright by her extended claws dug into the fabric of a seat-cover. Her eyes had a strange, unfocused look. She appeared still half conscious, possibly delirious. Just what we need, thought Guthlac, going into battle against hopeless odds with a delirious kzinrett loose in the ship.

“Vaemar! Vaemar is there!”

“How do you know?”

“Karan knows! I know.”

A delirious kzinrett. Was oxygen-starvation affecting her brain? But all kzinti had a sense from which the talent of the telepaths was made. Among nontelepaths it was extremely limited and did not work to cross the distances of space. But… Karan was Karan. And, Guthlac thought, Vaemar was Vaemar. Neither of them were ordinary kzinti.

“The locators are dead,” said Guthlac. “They say nothing. But this is close to the last position we had from them!”

“That's not a ship! It's a moving moon!”

“Vaemar is there! He comes!” Karan screamed.

“The boat must have picked us up,” said Cumpston, “but it's not firing at us. It's taking evasive action, all right, but it seems to be evading the fighter.”

“Shall we try a com-link?”

“Yesss!” Karan leapt as she spoke. Not a great leap for a kzin, at least not one in good shape, but she was between the two men at the command console. Albert Manteufel sprang from his chair, drawing a pistol, but Guthlac motioned him back. In any event, gunplay within a spaceship was seldom a good idea. Karan spun to face them, claws out and jaws in the killing gape. Her knife was out, though the hand she held it in was trembling.

Cumpston and Guthlac were veterans of many battles in space as well as on the ground, battles often faster than thought, in a realm where only certain instincts and intuitions given to a few could offer hope of survival, controlling machine-enhanced reflexes beyond the frontiers of the purely physical, swifter and more subtle than any dance of bodies or equations. Both knew, too, the potential treachery of instinct. They stayed their hands now, as Karan operated the com-link to the flying, twisting speck on the screen. Weak as she was, her claws flashed too fast for the humans to follow, and much too fast for them to interfere with.

There on a screen was the cockpit of the gig. Flying it were Vaemar and Dimity. Karan collapsed.

“A dreadnought!” With shriek of ecstasy and blood lust Kzaargh-Commodore leapt onto the great kz'eerkt-hide battle-drum, sending its call booming throughout the ship. Was this what Chorth-Captain had somehow achieved? Already Night-Lurker had identified Chorth-Captain's fighter and gig. How had he done it? And what were the fighter and gig doing? Distracting the monkeys before the dreadnought's terrible slash ripped the guts out of their planet? But it mattered not. “The Patriarch's battle-fleet has joined us!” This was no time for thoughts of how so mighty a consort might have penetrated so deep into the Centauri system and so close to Wunderland undetected, nor for the unworthy thought that so mighty a consort would take most of the glory from a mission that a moment before had been a matter of lone heroism. His crew of Heroes roared an equally enthusiastic response. That they might be perhaps less concerned with Kzaargh-Commodore's glory and more with their own suddenly enhanced chances of survival was not a thought for that moment either. Night-Lurker barrelled in, closing with the strange gigantic vessel.

Bigger than all but the biggest dreadnoughts. And camouflaged as Night-Lurker itself had been. The minds of the great strategists of the Patriarch's General Staff had thought like his own.

There was no further need for radio silence. It would be sensible to co-ordinate plans with the great carrier. “Call them!” he ordered Captain. He stood posed before the com-screen, Captain at a respectful distance behind him.

Com-screens on Night-Lurker's bridge and in the Hollow Moon blizzarded briefly with light and cleared. Kzinti and Protectors saw one another. Each lunged instantly at the firing-buttons on their consoles.

Night-Lurker flung itself into evasive action, firing as it turned. Its heaviest punches included disrupter bomb-missiles. They were not in the class of Baphomet but powerful enough. Kzaargh-Commodore had taken the decision to fire, and fired, almost as fast as it was physically possible for a living being, even with motor-neurone enhancement. However the Protectors in the Hollow Moon were slightly faster.

Night-Lurker glared fantastically in the heat of beams for seconds as its layers of mirror-shielding boiled away, a red, then blue, outline of a kzin heavy cruiser. Its disrupters hit the Hollow Moon, burrowed through its shell and exploded. The Hollow Moon vented gigantic plugs of rock and blew apart. Night-Lurker exploded simultaneously.

The gig was perilously near the second explosion. Impact at such speeds with practically any piece of debris, however small, would be the end of it. Guthlac in the Tractate Middoth spread the lasers as far as possible and fired them to sweep between the blue-white sphere of the explosion and the little craft, hoping to at least reduce the flying wreckage. Smaller explosions sparkled and flared. The gig remained. Flying like a wounded bug, it turned and headed towards them. The Rending Fang fighter had disappeared again.

Chapter 14

Paddy Quickenden looked up from the deep-radar screen.

“It looks like an ants' nest,” he said “Things are boiling in there.”

“There's usually a lot of activity in the caves,” said Leonie. “Let me see… But yes, things are boiling. There are sizeable creatures moving—bipeds.”

“Humans… Morlocks,” said Raargh. His claws extended.

“We can't see much more from here,” said Leonie. “We'd better land and take a look.”

“What, go into the caves?”

“With modern motion-detectors and Rarrgh's eye we should be able to see anything long before it gets near us. We both know the caves.”

“I don't,” said Paddy. “But I've lived underground most of my life.”

“I'm not letting you near these caves,” said Leonie. “And there's no way I'd leave the car and the com-link unattended. You'll stay in this car, with the canopy closed and weapons cocked. But be ready to let us in if we have to get back in a big hurry.” She opened the com-link and spoke to Nils Rykermann briefly. She was already suited up as she landed the car in a small limestone-sided valley. She and Rarrgh leapt down and disappeared into one of the cave mouths.

Paddy settled himself before the console. The car's weapons were ready. Like all spacers, he was experienced in waiting. The broken limestone walls and pinnacles, “honeycombed, honey-colored” with small red Wunderland trees on the valley floor, and sprays and creepers of other red Wunderland vegetation, made the place seem like a wild, dishevelled garden, peaceful and, from within the car, silent, though instruments picked up the sounds of small animals and the murmuring of a tiny stream. This is a lovely place, he thought. Let me help Dimity find peace, let me cure her of what is torturing her, and she and I—and our children—could live on this world forever. They need spacers here, more than We Made It does. There could be a place for me here in paradise with the woman I love. He thought of Leonie, heading fearlessly into the cave with the great kzin. He could see them now on the deep radar, a large and a small figure, moving down the tunnel into the darkness and what lay beyond. How lucky Rykermann is to have such a wife! Well, this is paradise around me. Let me enjoy it for the moment.

Leonie and Raargh were both veteran cave fighters. Their checks of weapons, lights and other gear were fast, automatic and thorough. Both could read the ghostly, ambiguous shapes of tunnels and cavities on the screen of their small deep-radar as easily as a road-map. Raargh touched the lower right quadrant of the screen with a massive claw. There was movement, a lot of movement.

“Looks like battle,” he said. His infrared-capable artificial eye was ceaselessly scanning the cavern, especially the roof, as he spoke. They set off into the darkness. Raargh's artificial eye, seeing deep into infrared, guided them, but there were faint patches of luminosity here and there as well. Possibly Ferals' work, Leonie thought. They had learnt to crush and treat the shells of small crustaceanoids from the streams so as to make a ghostly radiance.

“Smell strange,” Raargh said after a while. They were passing a complex of tunnel mouths.

“Tree-of-life?” Leonie wondered. The faceplate of her helmet was firmly closed. No point in asking Raargh, but the old kzin knew the ordinary smells of the caves. Something strange was almost certainly something new. She did not want reports of any new smells. All she could do was check her mask again. If even a few molecules got in… But, whatever it was, it was evidently limited to a single tunnel, and later Raargh reported it gone.

The com-links allowed them to pick up one another's voices, but no natural sounds reached them. In the darkness of the caves, even with artificial aids, it was a claustrophobic experience. Leonie ordered Raargh to take hold of her.

“I am going to take my helmet off,” she said. “If I smell tree-of-life I will become mad. You must disarm me, restrain me, and carry me back to the car.”

She removed the helmet slowly. No new smell assailed her. There was nothing but the cave smells she knew so well, mainly limestone and biological processes of decay, and the wild, gingery smell of the kzin keyed up for battle. An instantaneous flashback: that strange, exciting, terrifying smell on Raargh the first time they had met, when in these very caves she, as she had obeyed an impulse she hardly understood to help the broken-legged kitten that had grown into Karan, had dug Raargh out of a rockfall with her beam rifle instead of killing him.

A flashback gone in an instant. Evidently no tree-of-life here. But ahead, sounds of battle. Ahead, dim tunnels, lit distantly by the reflected flashes of explosions. Screams. The rattle of a Lewis-gun, cut off abruptly.

Raargh leading, holding his prosthetic arm before him in case of Sinclair wire, they hurried on.

Tractate Middoth's com-screen cleared again, restoring communication with Dimity and Vaemar in the gig's cabin. Karan yowled. A sweep of Arthur Guthlac's hand killed the row of firing switches.

The gig steadied in its flight and approached the Tractate Middoth, matching its course and its now reducing velocity easily. Dimity explained to Guthlac and Cumpston what had happened. There was damage to the gig, damage its meteor-patches could not cope with. It was losing air. They would have to be quick.

Even without its Protector-built improvements, ship-to-ship transfer in space was one of the primary roles the gig had been designed for. A tube was extended between the two airlocks. Still, with safety-checks on the two sets of drive emissions, the transfer took some time. There was a kzin-sized spacesuit in the pilot's place on board the gig, but the Protectors' were in a locked compartment. Vaemar made Dimity put on the kzin suit as the air-loss got worse, though she could only just move its vast, semi-rigid limbs.

Dimity and Vaemar crossed, Vaemar greeting the crew of the Tractate Middoth and Karan with the restrained dignity the situation demanded. Dimity sought wearable clothes. Guthlac indicated somewhat nervously to Vaemar that Karan was there very much as a result of her own insistence, and told of the part she had played. “She has saved my life before,” Vaemar said. Karan, now somewhat recovered but shaky and mentally as well as physically weary, greeted Vaemar with a mixture of pride and shyness and a good deal of mutual grooming. Cumpston sent a message to Wunderland suggesting the defenses be reduced from red to orange alert. They gathered around the control console. There was no trace of the Protector's fighter.

“The beam was only on it a moment,” Guthlac said. “Then it disappeared. Not exploded, I fear. The Protector must have deployed a cloaking device.”

“Why didn't it continue attacking the gig from the cloak, then?—I guess that would have betrayed its position.”

“I guess. The energy required for cloaking like that must be prodigious, anyway. Maybe too much to cloak and fight at the same time. At least for now. I expect given time a Protector could improve such things. And there would be no point in such an attack now. If it thought the gig had broadcast to the system, destroying it would be a waste of time.”

“What matters is that it's still out there somewhere. A Pak Protector with a spacecraft, knowing there are hyperdrive ships in this system for the taking. We've alerted Tiamat and the Swarm, but given a Protector's cunning and resourcefulness, I doubt that's enough. And we don't know what surprises it may have prepared for us.”

“The Protector has to get back to the Morlock colonies sooner or later,” said Dimity. “That's the only source of breeders, and where the remaining tree-of-life is. Now that we're hunting it, and the system's alerted, I don't think it's got too much chance of pulling off a successful surprise attack on its own anywhere else. Not till it makes and organizes more Protectors.”

“It's also, as far as we know, where most of the nukes are. And the Rending Fang class are aircraft as well as spaceships.”

“What have we got at the caves now?” asked Vaemar.

“Paddy and Leonie,” said Guthlac. “And Raargh.”

“Get after it!”

“What craft do they have?” asked Dimity.

“A car. An ordinary flyer.”

“Not much to stop a Rending Fang.”

“I'm ordering them to try.” Guthlac touched the com-link's face again. “At all costs.”

A pair of humans blundered up the passage towards Leonie and Raargh. They stumbled and fell as they approached. Young ferals, streaming blood, heads and shoulders covered in the lacerations and bites of Morlock attacks. A group of Morlocks followed them. Before Leonie could speak, Raargh shot the Morlocks down. The humans regained their feet and continued on at a staggering run, ignoring Leonie's shouts to them. She did not know if they saw Raargh or not, but she guessed that to them kzinti were far more terrifying than Morlocks. There was no time to try any other communication. Rarrgh and Leonie advanced cautiously. They went down, crawling and wriggling forward on the muddy cave floor, old instincts hiding them in the shadows of pillars and columns. The sounds of fighting stopped.

The tunnel led to a great “ballroom” cave. White and crystal rock reflected fantastically a few smoky, primitive lights. By these lights and their infrared, Raargh and Leonie saw where the fight had been.

Both could read a recent battlefield as easily as a book. This one, they saw, had been short and one-sided. Dead humans lay everywhere, along with some smashed weapons, including modern beamers. They were young, dressed in dirt-colored rags. Ferals. That would have been obvious even without the primitive facial tattoos.

Weapons ready, they examined the bodies as they might. Most of the ferals had been killed quickly and efficiently with broken necks. Few had the characteristic head-and-shoulder wounds of Morlock attacks. There were twisting, random trails of blackened or melted rock cutting into walls and columns that suggested weapons fired unaimed and with their triggers held down by dead hands. Raargh and Leonie had seen such things before, but here it seemed an unusually large number had died without getting off an aimed shot. Among the bodies were several wearing the grey uniforms of Wunderland police. They had died with their hands tied. Prisoners. And others whose clothes suggested they were farmers. There was also a much larger bulk: a dead kzin, killed the same way. His scars, greying fur and a prosthetic leg-brace suggested an old soldier. He too had died with his hands and claws tied with tape like a prisoner.

“This one worked on a farm with humans,” said Rarrgh. “I suggested it to him. Told him we must make new lives. Now I must meet those who have done this. Honor demands it.”

“Protector's work,” said Leonie.

“There!” Raargh pointed.

Not all the ferals had been killed with such quick and smart thoroughness. And one, Leonie saw, was still alive. She ran to it.

“Keep watch!” she told Raargh.

The feral would not live long, she saw at once. But it was conscious. It had some sort of unfamiliar bite, perhaps a Protector's horny beak. There would be little time for words. She squatted by it. By him. A male. She stanched the bleeding as well as she might. Her own clothes were of modern fabric, too strong to tear, but the feral's own rags made bandages of a sort. They were impregnated with virulent cave dirt, scent-deadening Rarctha fat and who knew what else. She sprayed them with coagulant, knowing it was useless, and administered an anaesthetic. There was no point in breaking out more of her small medical kit, and her years of guerrilla fighting had conditioned her powerfully against using such resources on the dying.

“What happened?”

He did not speak. She knew well enough that these ferals tended to regard all other humans, let alone any in the company of kzinti, as enemies. Savage, worse than sociopathic, there was ample evidence that they were often cannibals. And she would have little time to try and reach him.

“We will avenge you!” That might do it. Deliberately she made her voice as soft and feminine as possible, leaning forward so he might see the curve of her breasts. Intuitive, instantaneous psychology, perhaps totally wrong. But these ferals had had mothers.

“Creatures you could not fight?” she asked. “Too strong, too fast?”

That reached him. He nodded, raised a feeble hand to touch her.

He spoke. “Like Morlocks, but not.”

“Creatures you had not seen before?” Another nod. “You said not Morlocks? Not ratcats?”

A gesture. Leonie saw the body of a dead Protector lying in the shadow of a stalagmite column. Though it was instantly recognizable its head was shattered. It must have leapt or run into a blast or beam from one of the ferals' weapons.

“There were more like that?”

“Yes.”

“The containers? What happened to the containers?”

“Hold me.”

Leonie put her arms around him.

“They took them.”

“Down there?”

“Yes… prisoners, too… We killed as many of the prisoners as we could before the Morlocks and the other things took them. But there were many prisoners.”

Leonie wondered what Morlock Protectors would want with human prisoners. But she remembered the need they would have for teachers. Prisoners would be almost as crucial as tree-of-life. And both Protectors and Breeders would need food.

He stroked her, whispered “Mother,” and died. Leonie moved to close his eyes.

From the darkness behind them a group of Morlocks leapt. Raargh turned on them as they struck, slashing and roaring. At such close quarters neither Raargh nor Leonie could use their rifles, but Raargh's prosthetic arm did service as a bite-proof club, quite apart from his own flashing teeth and claws. They were armed with their usual pointed crystal rocks, but a few more modern weapons as well. Rolling away from their attack as she had learned long ago, Leonie saw other shapes, the quasi-human shapes of two Protectors, the cantaloupe heads and swollen joints unmistakable. They were crouched atop a low rock, poised as if to spring on Raargh and her. Raargh's leap at one Protector, Morlocks still clinging to him, was heroic. The Protector bit at his arm, not realizing it was metal. Its beaklike jaws jammed for a moment in the wiring, current from its power-enhancement crackling, sparks arching and dripping. There was no time for Leonie to take aim at the second Protector. She held the trigger of the beam rifle down, swinging it in a scything arc, cutting the Protector off at the thighs. Raargh was still fighting the first Protector. The old kzin roared with rage, almost deafening her in the confined space. His w'tsai flashed. The Protector's leathery skin could turn most blades, but Raargh's w'tsai was monomolecular-edged and was wielded by a master. He drove it into the Protector's ear and worked it about. The Protector kicked and fell away.

The Morlock attack broke up. Those that had survived Raargh fled, leaping up into the suspended forest of stalactites. A few flung their traditional missiles of rocks and crystal shards, but Leonie was fast enough with the beam rifle to zap these in mid-air. Upper-body's still got some dexterity when it needs it, she thought. She also hit a Morlock as it was fumbling with a rifle retrieved from some old battleground in the caves. It was, Leonie thought, strange that these Protectors should use breeders as fighters. It was not the impression Brennan had given of Protector behavior and drives. But Morlock Protectors were not Brennan, and perhaps these Protectors were so thin on the ground they had no choice but use their children. A few Morlocks rallied and counterattacked, but were still unskillful with the few modern weapons they had and could do little as she and Raargh killed them. On the other hand, she could see they were learning unpleasantly fast, already becoming acquainted with covering fire. Even without Protectors, up against less experienced enemies, and in any case with the passage of a little more time, they would be formidible. Then they were gone, bounding away between the shadows and rock pillars into the darkness. She finished off the second Protector, which was still pulling the upper half of its body along the ground towards Raargh with its arms.

Wary of what might still be in the darkness, she leopard-crawled to Raargh. The old kzin was spitting and cursing. His prosthetic arm was badly damaged, she saw, and when he tried to stand his right knee gave way and he fell forward. Leonie remembered he had been wounded in his knees long before. Her light showed blood and a gleam of bone. She applied her last field-dressing. There were sounds diminishing in distant tunnels.

“Leonie,” said Raargh, “I cannot run. You must go on alone.”

“There is no need. Our mission was reconnaissance. We know what is here and what is happening here. Our job now is to tell the others, not for one or two of us to fight Protectors and Morlock bands alone.”

“We attack!” Raargh cried. Leonie knew the kzin attack-reflex well. A kzin, like the Protector she had just killed, would crawl to its enemies if that was the only chance of a final slash or bite. But Raargh could inhibit that reflex when his wits were about him. It was why he had grown old. He was not going to be much use crawling into battle on two functioning limbs.

“Is that what you would tell Vaemar, were he here?” she asked him.

Raargh was silent for a moment. Then “You are bleeding,” he said. “Still you must leave me. Go and report. Urrr.”

Leonie touched the leg and felt it give. The webs of interlocking and reinforcing cartilage might help it a bit, but the bone was gone. She saw something too she had never seen before—a spasm in the old kzin's arm and face that could only be unbearable pain.

“We have both had worse wounds,” she told him. “Use the rifle as a crutch. Let us get back to the car.”

“No! Dishonor! I stay and cover your retreat from Morlocks.”

“You have done that once before in these caves. But there is no need this time. Come! Or we stay together here till Morlocks and Protectors return!”

Leonie's years as a guerrilla leader had taught her kzin as well as human psychology. She allowed the old kzin to lurch and hobble painfully around to collect the ears of the Morlocks he had killed. He tried to cut or wrench off some part of the Protector he had killed as a trophy additional to the conveniently large ears but she did not see the details. Then grumbling, sometimes mewing involuntarily like a cat in agony, leaning on his rifle, Raargh limped slowly with her back towards the daylight. She resumed the helmet briefly as they passed the tunnels where, she guessed, tree-of-life had been stored. She supposed the Protectors had taken it, along with all the weapons and other assets they could gather, deep into the great cavern system. They would be back soon.

There was no sign of the young ferals who had gone before them, and who, Leonie knew, might regard either a uniformed human or a kzin as equally their enemy. She told Patrick they were coming and to be ready for take-off.

Rarrgh moved with more difficulty as they went on. Leonie's suit had enhanced power joints, or it would have been quite impossible, but even so she could barely support part of his huge weight. Work, legs! she commanded silently. You are Leonie now! She knew kzinti could discipline their bodies to a literally superhuman degree and if they slowed down in a combat situation they were in a dire way indeed. She was surprised at what her new legs could do, and thought briefly that her old legs, injured by kzin claws and repaired by primitive surgery, could not have done it. I wonder if she was an athlete? Then: Not a really useful thought at the moment! Get a life! But the tunnel, which they had descended so easily, was a different matter to ascend with Raargh in such a condition. A desperate call from Patrick to hurry did not help. Finally they had to stop.

“Raargh legs no good,” the old kzin muttered disgustedly.

“Legs heal.” Leonie told him.

“Raargh finish. Raargh die.”

His leg injuries were not fatal. But Leonie knew that kzinti, who preferred to die on the attack, could also die of shame.

“No, Raargh not coward! Urrr!”

“Raargh might as well be dead. Cannot attack! Cannot support Leonie-Comrade. Go to Fanged God now before shame deeper.”

Raargh's natural eye was turning a peculiar violet color. The pattern of his respiration was changing in a way Leonie had never heard in him before. But self-induced death for a kzin could be very quick. Leonie had seen it during the Liberation.

“Did Leonie dig Raargh out of rockfall for nothing?” she asked in the Mocking Tense that it would once have been instant death for any human on Wunderland to use towards a kzin. “Did Leonie trust Raargh for nothing? Does Vaemar wish Raargh to die? Do Raargh's kits not wish to have Rarrgh hunt with them again? Will others rear Raargh's kits and chrowl Raargh's harem? Urrr!” She saw the fury and agony in his eye, but he made another effort.

“Legs can be repaired,” she told him. And then: “Remember it is Leonie who speaks. Remember what happened to Leonie's legs in cave! Leonie, manrret, lived with Raargh's help! Leonie walks again!”

There were times when she had scratched the old kzin's ragged ears in a gesture of comradeship. But she knew better than to touch him in such a manner now. Then, greatly daring, she stood before him and placed her hands on his shoulders. “You will not desert Leonie!” The Tense of Military Command. My instinct was to use the Imploring Tense, she thought. Slowly his breathing changed again.

“Leonie survived worse than Raargh,” he admitted at length. “Raargh will not be shamed,” he added in a different tone of voice. Slowly and painfully he stood and hobbled on. Leonie let him lead. Was that what it was for? She wondered. So I could talk a kzin into living? And then she thought: But Raargh is a special kzin. It took a long time, and there were more calls from Patrick.

Patrick opened the car's canopy as they emerged from the cave mouth into the daylit glade. He stood up in his seat and jumped down, hastening towards them.

“Get back in the car!” Leonie cried out. “Stay in the car!”

The rock hit him on the side of the head. The blow could have shattered his skull had he not been wearing earphones. He staggered and fell. Leonie fired at the rock's point of origin, a stand of tall grasses by the little stream. Patrick, streaming blood, began to crawl back towards the car as the grass flashed into flame. A dozen ferals burst out of the grass. They were armed with at least one strakkaker as well as rocks and an ancient Lewis-gun. They converged on the injured Crashlander.

Patrick bought up a handgun and fired, hitting the feral with the strakkaker. I forgot he was a Spacer flashed through Leonie's mind faster than she recognized the thought. Raargh swung upon the rifle-crutch and fired in a blur of speed. Leonie knew what his marksmanship was like. His first shot shattered the Lewis-gun, probably killing the gunner, but his second he fired not into the ferals but ahead of them. They went down, out of sight behind the bank of the stream. Patrick stumbled back to the car and pulled himself into the cabin as Raargh and Leonie laid down covering fire.

Something was happening in the sky to the southwest, a ball of purple radiance travelling like a meteor, heading towards them. Patrick was taking the car straight up.

The thing in the sky—a purple spider, a retinal disorder, a chip of cauliflower—expanded, shimmered to a shape Raargh and Leonie knew well. A kzin Rending Fang-class heavy fighter, heading towards them, landing gear down.

The car dodged and swerved in the sky. It was above the big fighter, which was now coming down for a landing on its gravity-motor. The car hovered for a moment. Then it dived vertically. At seven hundred feet car and fighter collided with a shattering explosion. With strength she never dreamed she had, Leonie flung herself at the bulk of the kzin, pushing him back into the shelter of the cave mouth as fragments of white-hot wreckage rained down about them.

Amid the falling wreckage was the dark shape of an escape capsule. It hit the ground and opened. The Protector sprang out and rushed towards the cave mouth. Raargh and Leonie had both dropped their rifles, but Raargh had his w'tsai out. The Protector snatched them up and, straightening, and ran straight at the w'tsai, but at the last instant twisted in its stride, dodging so that Raargh's slashes with blade and claws slid off its leathery skin, doing little damage. Raargh tried to strike as he had struck in the cave, but missed, and he could no longer leap. At the same time the Protector struck out at them, knocking them both against the cave wall. Then it was past them, a leaping spider-shape disappearing down the passage into the darkness.

“Now ribs broken,” said Raargh. “It will not stop Raargh fighting!”

“I think I may have broken a couple, too,” said Leonie. “Why did it not kill us?”

“Hands full. It had our weapons.”

“Why did it not kill us?” she asked again.

Raargh voice was different when he answered. He was the senior sergeant contemplating a military problem again.

“I think, Leonie, it believes it does not need to kill us.”

“A foolish thing to think of Raargh and Leonie!” she told him ringingly. Raargh had little more than torn stumps of ears projecting from a complex of scar tissue, but he raised them in a signal that to her was eloquent enough.

“Feral humans return,” said Raargh.

The surviving ferals were approaching the cave mouth in a semicircle. Their major weapons were gone, but they were still armed with rocks, which Leonie knew they could throw as accurately as Morlocks. Several new fires were burning where the wreckage had fallen in the vegetation, and a pall of dark smoke was rising to cover the sky above the glade. Raargh scrabbled across the ground and retrieved the w'tsai knocked out of his hand.

He should have killed them when we had the chance, thought Leonie. But he seemed to be trying not to kill humans. It was as if the shadowed walls of the cave and the sky beyond were turning a uniform white with the agony in her chest. Thinking was difficult. I don't think I can fight at all. They are not going to have mercy on me or a kzin. One human knife, one w'tsai, and one old kzin to wield it who's now very knocked about. This is real trouble. To survive more than fifty years of war to die at the hands of human children…

“Friends!” she managed to call. The ferals continued their cautious advance. She called again, without response. She had a knife. They had knives as well as rocks.

Suddenly they stopped, and fled, scattering into the vegetation in all directions. A moment later she too heard the sound of a ship in the sky. There it was, not shielded like the Protector's fighter. Arthur Guthlac's Tractate Middoth. It touched down, jets of foam smothering the burning vegetation, and armed figures leapt from it. Hunched over her broken ribs, she staggered out to meet them.

“So we have tree-of-life, Breeders and Protectors all together again in the caves,” said Cumpston. “Along with who knows how many prisoners. There are people missing from some of the tableland farms, and most of the feral gangs round here have vanished.” They were hovering, looking down at the great escarpment from several hundred feet.

Arthur Guthlac took a deep breath. The faces of the humans were grey. Strain, exhaustion, defeat.

“Only one thing to do if we're to keep the chain of command intact,” said Guthlac. “We report to Early. He and ARM were pretty definite that he was to be informed before any major decisions are made.”

“Not a good idea, when dealing with Protectors. We can't afford the time lag. Every minute we waste is giving the Protectors more of the time they need to learn and organize and make defenses and multiply themselves. And they've Number One back with them now.”

“We're stuck with it. ARM has become desperate about losing control of the situation… of all situations. And they've made pretty unambiguous threats about what will happen if we break the chain.”

“I'd like to see them threatening Protectors. How long will reporting take?”

“You know Early has left the system. I can't tell you where he is. We can send him a signal via a hyperwave buoy. That will take several days. Several more for orders to return.”

“Have we got several days?”

“I think not. The alternative is to send in an infantry force to clean them out.”

“It would be fighting Protectors. Protectors with weapons. They may be newly changed, but they learn very, very fast. And during decades of war the kzinti were never able to quite clear out the caves. Neither were we. Nils and his students haven't got them all mapped even yet, I believe, Leonie?”

Leonie nodded. The pressure bandages helped greatly, but it was still painful to talk.

“And hostages. They've got hostages. We're only just starting to learn how many.”

“I've got all the forces I can muster on the way,” said Guthlac, “and Nils has been onto the Wunderland authorities for their troops. There are local militias organized, too, and they're heading for the caves.”

“Lambs to the slaughter,” said Leonie.

“There are weapons,” said Cumpston. “Dimity says sound affects them. Fly over a sonic drone.”

“It wouldn't penetrate.”

“Our people have police sonics.”

“So did the police they grabbed. Protectors are tough. Sonics may discomfort them but I don't think they'll stop them for more than seconds. We might render them unconscious with directed sonics if we knew their brainwaves. Unfortunately we don't know and haven't time to find out. Shouting at them won't be good enough.”

“There are a lot of other things. Nerve gas. Spectrum radiation.”

“They're coming with the troops. Unfortunately a lot of our nerve gas supplies are kzin-specific and as for the rest—well, there are the human hostages.”

“If they have intelligence—and they do—they'll be dispersing now.”

“You've got weapons here.”

“Most of them are for use in space. We can blast away at the limestone while they organize. It won't be long before they're shooting back at us.”

Dimity Carmody's fingers had been running over a keyboard on the main control console. “Arthur,” she said. “Take us up higher. Fast. Put some southwest in it.”

“How high?”

“Just keep going.”

“Why?”

“I'll explain in a minute.”

The Tractate Middoth rose, drawing away from the caves. Higher.

Below them, from first one and then scores of openings, smoke and fire jetted from the escarpment and the limestone plain above it. The profile of the ground seemed to bulge. A fireball erupted, and another, and as they watched the whole scarp of the Hohe Kalkstein went sliding down into ruin.

“Fly!” roared Guthlac. The Tractate Middoth flashed away.

There was another explosion and a greater fireball, incandescent, blue-and-white-cored, burst from the seething ruin. It boiled into the sky, transforming into an orange-and-black cumulus, hideous and obscene to the watchers in the Tractate Middoth as they raced desperately upward into the clean stratosphere and away. Other fireballs followed.

“I kept the code numbers and detonation keying for the nukes,” said Dimity. “They were in Vaemar's computer. It's all over now. There was nothing else to do.”

“I'll call defense HQ,” said Guthlac. “They'll need to get decontamination teams to work fast. And before they signal a retaliatory strike on every kzin ship and world in reach.”

“But why didn't you say what you were going to do?” asked Vaemar.

“I didn't see why you should all have the responsibility. It's all gone now. Protectors, Morlock, ferals, hostages, the whole cave system and countless species. A swathe of human farms and hamlets. Your rapid reaction teams. Your militia. A bewildered Protector who wondered about God. Did you want to live with that?”

Dimity looked up into Vaemar's eyes and read his expression.

“I am very close to being a Protector,” she told him.

She put his great hand with its terrible razor claws on her forearm.

“Skin,” she said. “Not fur.”

Chapter 15

“I pronounce you man and wife,” said the abbot. “You may kiss the bride.”

Hand in hand, Arthur and Gale Guthlac walked from the monastery chapel, surrounded by their friends. Each in turn came to them and laid a wreath around their necks, the three intertwined colors of vegetation from three worlds that grew on Wunderland now: red, green and orange. Gale's children had arrived from the Serpent Swarm. Guthlac's crew had no swords as would once have been ceremonially drawn to make an arch for the couple to pass under, but they presented arms.

“Have you heard from Early?” Rykermann asked Cumpston as they crossed the garth.

“Yes. He didn't betray much emotion about what happened. It's a fait accompli, anyway. And the Protectors are gone. ARM is busy with other things. I imagine they are things that include us, and the Wunderkzin. But I'm tired of being one of ARM's catspaws.”

“I should think there have been worse jobs than becoming Vaemar's friend,” said Rykermann. “Even if he does thrash you on the chessboard.”

“I hope I'll always be Vaemar's friend,” said Cumpston. “But I feel a change in the whole course of my life is coming upon me.”

“For what reason.”

“I don't know. Just a feeling. Something very new.”

“I didn't know you were foresighted.”

“Neither did I.”

“I sense certain things too,” said Rykermann. “Dimity… Vaemar… whatever bond is between those two will not be broken.”

Arthur Guthlac, Gale, the abbot and two of the monks were laughing together at something. Orlando and Tabitha had lost little time after the ceremony in wriggling and clawing out of their ornate formal garments and were leaping through the long grass together after flutterbyes. Nurse, who, it had been decided, was indispensible whatever he charged, carried a bag of buttons for their claws.

“So it begins, perhaps,” said Rykermann. Now, with Leonie's hand in his, he realized that he was looking at Dimity without hopeless pain and longing. Not because of what she had done, nor indeed because he loved her any the less, but because his love for Leonie filled his heart, suddenly, strangely, and with a depth and fullness he had never known before. She had been near death with him many times, but this time, watching her enter the Protectors' caves with only Raargh, as he himself prayed desperately over a console of screens, had been different.

“Strange,” he said. “This was where it all began so many years ago. I had flown out here because the monks had sighted a strange creature, a big catlike thing that didn't fit into the ecology.” He remembered giving the strange orange hair he had found to Leonie, his graduate student, to dissect. Thinking of her as she had been in those days, he realized something else. Her walk was as it had been then, no longer clumsy.

“So it begins,” echoed Colonel Cumpston, as he followed, escorting Dimity. His gaze wandered to Vaemar, resplendent in gold armor and shimmering cloak and sash of Earth silk, who, with Karan, Raargh and Big John, was pointing to one of the monastery fishponds. The juvenile Jotok he had helped save in Grossgeister Swamp were growing and joining. Orlando had fished one from a pond and was waving it playfully at Albert Manteufel. Don't pretend to be scared, Albert! Cumpston tried to telepath him. Don't pretend to run! But Guthlac's pilot was a veteran and knew better than to do any such thing. A growl from Raargh and a gesture at his proud new possession—a second ear-ring for his belt, there being no room for more ears left on the first—and the kitten snapped to attention. Another growl and warning cuff from Karan and the Jotock was restored to the water.

“Hope. Perhaps joy. Perhaps, truly… peace. For this little world at least,” Cumpston said. As with Guthlac and Rykermann, many lines of strain and weariness seemed to have gone from his face. Reports from far-flung ships and bases were that the peace was holding. At this moment, for this moment at least, humans and the kzinti Empire were sharing a universe.

The group of friends drew together. Vaemar drew Rykermann aside for a moment.

“You love her, I know,” he said.

“Yes,” said Rykermann. He had never heard a kzin use the word “love” before, and wondered what Vaemar's conception of it was. But he knew who he meant.

“I think I understand,” said Vaemar. “I say that to you alone. Speak it to no other human. She has taught me a little of that… but she must go her own way.”

“I know,” said Rykermann. They drifted apart in the flow of the company.

Dimity had known Cumpston since her return to Wunderland eight Earth-years previously. He and Vaemar had made the counterattack that had relieved their desperately outnumbered group in the fight against the mad ones. But now it was as if she saw him for the first time: a hardened warrior and leader, yet a man whose kindness and patience had done as much as any to bring peace to this tortured planet. That unnatural blend of human qualities that made up the knight.

The wedding party drifted through the monastery gates into the meadow spangled and starred with its multicolored flowers. Brightly-colored creepers covered the last few outlines of what had once been a refugee shantytown. Two pavilions had been set up, food laid out for two different feasts, and a couple of great kzin drums. There would be dancing later. Orlando and Tabitha were looking forward to that.

Vaemar again approached Rykermann and Leonie as they walked. His eyes followed Rykermann's to Dimity, her hand moving to take the colonel's.

“I know she had to do what she did,” he said. “I know more about the Pak, the Protectors, now. There was no choice.” He muttered something about a dream that Rykermann did not hear clearly.

“We humans have come a long way from the Pak,” said Rykermann. “How far will we go? What will we become?”

And then: “What will we all become.”

“That, I think,” said Vaemar, “is a very good question.”