The Man-Kzin Wars 12

Prologue

Avgvstvs, A.V.C. 832

Jegarvindertsa gestured with two of their arms at small details in the center of the picture the ship's roving cameras presented. Another of their arms enlarged the section, filtering out the vast plume of black smoke and ash clouds.

Under the organization of uniformed members of their own species, the surviving bipeds from the towns the volcanic eruption had destroyed were lining up to receive food.

Others, with weapons and without, were setting up temporary wood and fabric dwellings with material being unloaded from primitive oar- and sail-powered sea vessels and beasts of burden. Some bipeds, evidently injured, were being carried on litters. Details could be seen clearly.

In the days of their trade empire the Jotoki had dealt with many worlds, and not all the knowledge of sapients' behavior which they had accumulated then had been lost in the generations of long and terrible war. Following age-old procedures that had become almost reflexive, they had sent down camouflaged cameras and listening devices among the aliens, had translated their speech and recorded their organization, economics, sociology. There were still a few among the Jotoki remnant whose trades included the once-proud occupation of alien sociotechnician. Despite these beings' unpleasantly suggestive appearances and primitive technology, it was obvious to the watchers what was going on.

“They cooperate. They have organized disaster relief as well as a military caste. This is a civilization.”

Jufadirvanlums's mouths formed into shapes venomous with disapproval: “You would still have us recruit more alien mercenaries.” It was a statement. An accusation, not a question, part of a long-going debate.

Jegarvindertsa raised themselves on two arms. Their gesture was in the affirmative. “What else are we to do? Half the gun mountings in our fleet are unserviced. Our asteroid miners can still fabricate infantry sledges, and we have no infantry. Do you think we can fight a war against the cursed ones without troops to ride them into battle? A war of machines? Have our failures shown you nothing?”

“And have you learnt nothing? 'The finest security force the spiral arm can give,' our ancestors said when in their mad folly they trained the cursed ones.”

“These are different.”

“How can another Iron-level culture whose members revel in killing one another be different? They even look enough like the cursed ones to suggest they come from the same spores!”

“These are omnivores. They have cities of a sort. And laws.”

“So had the cursed ones, when those-whose-names-are-obliterated first recruited them, to our ruin.”

“These are, we maintain, different. See how these organized ones even seem to feed their own poor and unfortunate. They have rudimentary medicine and public works. Like our own ancestors, they are seagoing, and you will observe that some of those ships, at least, are built for carrying cargo—they are for trade, not war.”

“They have no shortage of war.”

“What use would they be to us if they were herbivorous pacifists? But their military culture is not only tough and versatile, it's well disciplined. Institutionally disciplined. The fact they have uniforms shows that: Their ranks are indicated and they depend on more than mere physical strength to see orders are obeyed. They give their slaves rights: They cannot be killed or mutilated without process of their courts.”

“In theory!”

“In theory, at least. They have art and poetry—a little—that is more than merely battle songs.” Their voice changed as another segment took up the argument. “Also, they have administrative ability, unlike the cursed ones.”

“All of which will make them more dangerous enemies, when they turn against us.”

“Have you no more sense than when you were tadpoles? Our progenitors dealt with many races in peace, successfully and to the benefit of all. Our civilization was not for us alone. And long it endured. Here, on a barbaric planet, we see others who have a civilization.” They fiddled with the viewer. “Now there is something interesting!”

They increased the magnification: “You see those beings that have a place of honor, the trumpet players. What is it they wear about their upper segment? The skin of a creature that bears a strong resemblance to a certain other creature we know too well.”

“You would have us risk too much. Better to flee at once with all of our kind that are left.”

“We have no choice. We must have more troops!”—repetition had always been an important arm of rhetoric for Jotoki when both speaker and listener had five brains, one or more of which might be distracted—“We have fought for millennia as the cursed ones gathered strength, suffering defeat after defeat, losing planet after planet. Only the size of space has saved our remnant so far. Our whole civilization trembles on the verge of extinction. And we, we are its trustees!” Their arms waved in frustrated anger. “Look at this ship! How many dry and empty breeding and sleeping ponds does it contain? How many of our guns and machines are working with jury-rigged servomechanisms? We expect mechanisms to make combat decisions! Our machines can build us more ships, as long as computer memories function and there are planets and asteroids with metal in them. We cannot reproduce so easily, or train tadpoles in a single cycle! We spread ourselves thinner and thinner among our escorts, our gun turrets, our fighters. We are a fleet of shell crews propped up by mechanisms.”

“If we had the Trade Council—”

“The last of the Trade Council, may we remind you, has long been eaten. We and our dwindling armsful of worlds remain. The last of the Jotoki to stand.”

“The last we know of.”

“It comes to the same thing. What choice do we have?”

“And do you think iron-using primitives can help us in space battles?”

“Eventually, yes. We also need to hold planets as well as take them. That means infantry, and it is infantry that we lack.”

“If we must take them, we must take them from somewhere remote. Leave no witnesses to tell the cursed ones when they come of our presence.”

Jegarvindertsa gestured at the scenes of devastation the cameras were still recording.

“Did you see the boat that was nearly destroyed when it rowed too near the eruption? It was one of their more elaborate and ornate craft. Were those on board actually investigating the eruption from abstract curiosity? The one who went ashore from it, who walked toward the eruption and died on the beach: He was richly dressed by their standards, and had attendants. We wish we had picked up his last words… Did we see a primitive martyrdom for science?

“They fight wars to stop barbaric customs among the tribesmen on their own frontiers,” they continued. “They actually expend their own soldiers for an abstract idea of civilization.”

“And enslave those they conquer.”

“Doesn't every intelligent race before it learns economics? But they allow some of their slaves freedom eventually. They are traders, like us. Real traders. Merchant ships, warehouses, currency, courts. We say these beings actually care about civilization.”

“They care about gold.”

“So do we. So do you. Those who care about gold we can deal with. But we will say another thing. These beings are resilient. Their barbarians beat them occasionally but they always come back. We have a little time. We can watch them awhile.”

Both Jotoki entities were using all five of their linked brains. The argument went on, as the world turned beneath them.

I

AD 2554

“Basically, I am a dealer in exotic slaves.” The tall kzin drank with an expression of relish from the goblet of vatach blood his host had offered. “Like that one.”

He gestured to the shackled female human who squatted, trembling, at his feet. The creature flinched at the gesture, its wide terrified eyes darting back and forth between the great felinoids as if it was trying to understand their speech. There were drops of skin-excreted liquid on its face, and its chest heaved. Both kzinti could sense its terror, a stimulant to kzinti senses.

The Marquis Warrgh-Churrg, largest landowner of the planet of Kzrral's main northern continent, regarded his guest with a look of moderate surprise. He reclined at ease on a couch, like a smaller, softer, indoor version of the stone foochesth that were a feature of some kzinti parks.

“Between worlds? I would not have thought there was a living in it. We have not found much trade along those lines worthwhile since the war losses to our spacecraft.” There was nothing obviously threatening in his words or the tense he employed, but lying half-curled on the fooch his huge bulk dominated the room and all within it.

“It is not necessarily a good living,” replied his guest. “These are difficult times. The Patriarch has said that a Hero's duty now is to survive and the duty of us all is to rebuild our strength as a race for the… future. Noble and Dominant One, I trade”—the Hero's Tongue carried an inflection of distaste—“in other high-value items too, precious stones, rare elements, W'kkai puzzles, silk from Earth, even bulk gold if there is enough marrgin in it. Liquors, perfumes, and cordials too, at times. I hope that before I leave I may present you with a few samples and recipes in some return for your noble hospitality…”

The magnate inclined his great head.

“But rare slaves are the mainstay,” his guest continued. “Trained, clever ones. As you are aware, the prime sources of monkeys are lost to us.”

“You profit from the misfortunes of our kind? Do you have bulk gold in your ship at this time, then?”

“I make a living from mitigating those misfortunes, enabling Heroes to live as Heroes should despite the worst the monkeys can do. Though we were long ago driven from Ka'ashi, we still have upon some of our own worlds a few breeding colonies of such slaves who were brought there before the truce. It is a trade the humans”—the Hero's Tongue carried an even stronger inflection with that term, black lips drawing back to show a collection of daggerlike fangs—“would not approve if they knew of it. But yes, Noble and Dominant Marquis Warrgh-Churrg, I have a little gold. Largely monkey-minted coins. You may imagine how I acquired them. Not all humans are sufficiently wary of us in these times.”

“What if humans should come upon you in space?”

“Space is large. There is little chance of that. And after all, we are in a state of truce. But should they do so, I trust I have not forgotten the heritage of my Sires.”

“You have kittens? Surely they would grow old and die while you were between worlds. You would not see them.”

“My kits must fend for themselves for long, as in the olden time. As I say, and as we all know too well, these are difficult times for many of our kind. But there are ways to save time.”

“You have a hyperdrive?” There was a sudden sharpness in the other's question. There was tense silence for a moment between the two, broken only by the splash of water from the fountain that dominated the court: a great golden bowl, held aloft on the sculpted backs and shoulders of four golden humanoid slaves. The wide-eyed human flinched and sweated. The off-world kzin twitched ears and tail expressively, replying in a tone submissive but urbane:

“Not I personally, Honored Host. You have seen my ship. But yes, your observation is shrewd and correct. My principals on my homeworld have access to one of the few hyperdrive units which the humans allow us and are aware of, though whether they know the use we put it to is another matter. We pay them a large bribe not to take excessive interest in us—monkeys, as you know, have little or no honor—but it sadly inflates all our operating costs. However, it makes long journeys feasible. At present it is parked several weeks away.”

“You are not your own master, then?”

“Only as far as ship captains usually are. I report ultimately to others.”

“A telepath could show us your superluminal ship's location.”

“Only if he could read a mechanical brain. It is encoded in my own ship's computer. And that will self-destruct if tampered with by anyone unauthorized.”

“Such difficulties have been overcome before.”

“I doubt they would be in this case, my principals are very security-conscious. Perhaps even overly so. But my alive and physiologically healthy presence in my ship is necessary for it to respond to the activating code words and pattern-recognition logic. Coercing me or using parts of my dead person to gain access would be futile.”

“The Patriarch has few hyperdrive ships. We lost most of our ships in the wars, and the accursed UNSN has informed us what their response would be to any large-scale rebuilding program.”

“The Patriarch's Admiralty keeps such things for military purposes, and its security is strict. It has, I am sure, a building program for a fleet that will one day enable us, at last, to… Urrr. The humans allow us a token fleet, presumably thinking that such a scrap will satisfy us…” His voice trailed off. After the Second War with Men, humans had greatly restricted kzinti access to the hyperdrive again, but any kzintosh knew what the Patriarch's fleet would be looking to do one day.

“However, Dominant and Feared Warrgh-Churrg, if I cannot offer you the technology of the hyperdrive, I can perhaps offer you a profitable trade. On my way here I noticed human slaves in the streets. As other visitors have told me, you have kz’eerkti on this planet.”

“Kz’eerkti? Yes.”

“Like this one?”

“The same sort of thing, yes.” Warrgh-Churrg made a negligent, regal gesture with his tail at the sculptures and to one of the floor mosaics, showing somewhat stylized humanoids and other beasts arranged with hunting and leaping kzinti amid fylfots and patterns of battlements and teeth. His tail wave also took in a couple of stuffed specimens bearing another golden bowl and one posed in a fighting crouch with its puny fingers extended and its mouth open to scream. His hall was further adorned with the heads of several species, kzinti among them, but also a fair-sized troop of simians. “Got a few live ones around too.” His gesture also took in a live simian in slave's drab peering at them from a distant archway. It turned and fled from sight.

“You hunt them?”

“Oh, the wild ones, yes.” Warrgh-Churrg indicated his trophy belt, adorned with a proud showing of dried simian ears along with kzinti ones, taking in as he did so the similar but smaller collections on his guest's belt.

“Are they intelligent?”

“They are trainable, clever like trained Jotoki, but less reliable. Unless caught as infants, they are not trusty slaves. But,” he added, “trained up young they can be useful.”

“Where do they live? In the forests?”

“Mainly in the south. The forest belt and the hot savannah beyond. Probably also in the badlands.”

“Are they common?”

“I have not counted them. I chased them when I was a kit, as my own kits do now, and still I hunt there sometimes when I visit my southern estates. Some southerners hunt them regularly.” Warrgh-Churrg's body language indicated that while he was pleased to display the visible signs of affluence in his palace, his interest in the kz’eerkti habitat was less than overwhelming. His guest adopted a tense-of-polite-request, humble but not too humble.

“Forgive my curiosity, Noble Host and Marquis Warrgh-Churrg, but my interest is professional. How did they get here?”

Warrgh-Churrg shrugged his ears in a dismissive gesture.

“We had Heroes in the first fleet to Ka'ashi. Some may have returned with kz’eerkti slaves. I had relations among them. And other Heroes came later. Possibly new slaves mixed with the locals…

“Some of the landowners want to get rid of them altogether. As slaves, the adult-caught ones are never very reliable. We tried castrating them and removing their teeth and fingernails, but we found that, often enough, that only made them more savage. And, eunuchs being eunuchs everywhere I suppose, they often joined with our own kzinti eunuchs in the harems and elsewhere to plot and spread disloyalty.”

“Still, on other worlds human slaves can command a very high price now,” Trader told him. “My principals have the resources to buy many if they are suitable—whole troops of them. They would send ships to collect them. They are still popular on Kzinhome.”

“Even after the monkeys burnt our fleets and took Ka'ashi back?”

“They took more than Ka'ashi in the First and Second Wars. But exactly. That is a large part of the reason why human slaves are in demand, apart from the sport the best of them can give in the hunt. It reminds us in these unfortunate times that they are not all-conquering, and that times can change. You may have a great source of wealth here.”

“I have much wealth already, Trader.” Warrgh-Churrg again gestured expansively about the room, heavy with gold, hung with lustrous purple, panels on floors and walls bedizened with intricate stones, their tiles slanted minutely to catch the shifting sunlight in changing pictures and patterns.

“Feared Warrgh-Churrg, that is plain from the magnificence of your abode and of your hospitality. Still, perhaps there are things I can offer… with trade between the stars so limited by the cursed kz’eerkti…”

Warrgh-Churrg nodded, his ears and tail twitching thoughtfully.

“Urrr. I will speak to Estate Manager. We will perhaps discuss this later. Now I shall prepare for the entertainment tonight.”

“I am looking forward to it. I respectfully seek your leave to return to my ship and prepare on my own account, that my apparel and grooming may be less unworthy of your hospitality.”

Trader bent while Warrgh-Churrg sprayed a little urine on him, an archaic lordly gesture signifying to all kzinti that he was the magnate's guest and under his protection. Trader exposed his throat and belly in the equally ancient ritual gesture of submission and Warrgh-Churrg dismissed him with a gracious flick of his tail.

The offworld kzin departed with decorum, striding through the great doors and down the wide snowy street toward the space port, the bowed, shackled human scurrying behind on its lead.

II

The inner door of the airlock closed behind the kzin and the human. Both moved differently as they stepped into the main cabin. The gravity-planer, running with a low, continuous purr, reduced gravity here to 61 percent of Earth, the gravity of Wunderland in which both had been born and grown up. The human removed her shackles and they sat down together in the control cabin. A touch on a keyboard opaqued the windows.

“Ginger, did I do all right?” asked the human. She rubbed her chilled bare feet, and slipped out of her brown slave's robe and into a modern fabric overall.

“I thought you acted convincingly scared,” said the kzin in Wunderland-accented English. “A veteran couldn't have done better.”

“I wasn't acting! I was bloody terrified!”

“I know. So was I. It's a scary job. You'll get used to it.”

“I couldn't feel I'm much of a replacement for Simon.”

“Simon was good. A good partner as well as a good friend. But you'll learn…

“There's a first time for everyone, Pet. First time for piloting an air-car solo, first time for a soldier in battle, first time for walking into a kzinti palace on a kzinti world with a lie. You'll get used to it.

“Bloody vatach blood! I need a civilized drink,” continued the kzin as he dialed a bourbon and ice cream, “I think you do too… You followed all that, Perpetua?”

“Pretty well,” said the woman. “So you've got a party on tonight.”

“By the Fanged God! If he wishes to test his son, I hope I can survive it! And Zianya! If the Bearded God also loves me, let there not be Zianya!” Zianya were semi-intelligent animals, highly esteemed as a delicacy on kzinti worlds. The important thing was that they be torn to pieces alive at table. Their anticipatory terror and subsequent death-agonies with the first tearing bites set up a hormonal reaction that gave what was generally considered a particularly delicious flavor to their meat. “They make me sick!”

“But that's hardly the important thing.”

“No. There are kz’eerkti here, even if he's a bit vague about them.”

“He's obviously not too interested in monkeys.”

“His body language suggested he may be more interested than he lets on. He wants to establish it's a seller's market. But he said of the slaves from Wunderland that 'they mixed with the locals.' Odd. Very odd. They would hardly have just let slaves go to breed in the bush.”

“Perhaps they escaped.”

“Even so. But odder than that… 'mixed with the locals'? What locals? Convergent evolution? And mixed how? Could they interbreed? From different planets? Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

“No, never. But is that what he was suggesting?”

“I thought it was ambiguous,” said the kzin, “but if he means the humans from Ka'—from Wunderland… mixed with the locals… It sounded as if he meant 'interbred.' I'm aware of problems with dialect, but yes, I think that's what he meant.”

“You know, he didn't specifically say that they'd brought Wunderlanders back. Maybe he was just getting your interest up. I mean, convergent evolution can hardly be that convergent! Creatures from different planets—different stars!—can't interbreed.”

“Well,” laughed the kzin, rippling his ears, “Simon and I always said we could trust each other with our wives.” The laughter ended.

“How is his wife?” the human asked.

“I saw her before we left. I think she'll be all right. She's strong. But he's a loss. Simon the Simian.”

He touched a pad on the control console with a black, ripping-chisel claw and a hologram of the planet shivered into shape above it. Kzrral's polar and subpolar continents were colored green, with ice fields in the polar regions and mountains. It was 1.2 times the diameter of Earth, but with a smaller iron core giving it comparable gravity. It was warmer than Earth overall, though with extensive temperate zones in the high latitudes. A telltale far in the north of the largest continent marked the main kzinti settlement and their own position. At latitudes lower than 30 degrees savannah and then jungle belts were indicated, turning to wastelands while still many degrees from the equator; there, the seas steamed, and only a few mountaintops rose above ceaseless convection storms. The south pole was landless, though there was a small cap of water-ice sitting on the shallow seafloor, and some minor landmasses in the southern ocean. The planet was mostly hotter than Earth or Wunderland, much hotter than Kzinhome. Perpetua thought for a moment how fascinating a human biologist might find life-forms adapted to live in or pass through those near-boiling equatorial seas and steam-heated lands.

“In the tropics there could be anything,” the kzin commented. “Kzinti wouldn't have much interest in it.”

“Unless population pressure forced them into the tropics.” Perpetua was tentative. A human-historical specialist, transferred out of academia as human Space geared up for another possible war, kzinti culture was all still largely academic for her. She had, she felt, reason to be tentative. Her experienced predecessor had either overestimated his own knowledge of that culture or been unlucky.

“Not a problem here. There are about a thousand estates on this continent, and they haven't yet occupied all the prime hunting territory by a long way yet.”

“Quite a small population.”

“About twenty-five thousand males in the whole northern hemisphere. Plus several times that number of females, of course, and kittens.”

There had been quite a lot more before, and there would be again, as soon as the kittens grew up. Kzrral had lost a lot of males in both wars, as well as most of its spaceships. The economy was still a long way from recovering from that loss. The kzinti had come as colonists with their own spaceships, and before the wars they had never needed to build a great new spaceflight industry with the communication that led to.

“Always a backwater planet, relatively poor in mineral production—nothing to attract a huge population, and a good incentive to the kzinti already settled here not to welcome others. Why open up your world to competitors for territory?”

“Military security? A bigger population means you can support a bigger army.”

“Against whom? We met everything in space and swallowed it up. No one was going to attack us! Worse luck, a lot of kzinti thought—no space-traveling races with the warrior skills to give us good sport. Well, we know better now. As for the Patriarch's regular forces, there would be no point in building up armed forces to defend against them. If they wanted such a planet they could take it. No doubt communications with the homeworld emphasized how mineral-poor it was, and presented the local kzinti as a loyal garrison of Heroes holding it for the Patriarch in case of need.

“I'd say this planet, with its wide continents in the cool-temperate zone we like, became a kind of paradise of spoiled, land-rich kzinti. Plus one small city for those who liked business or recreation there, also supporting one spaceport. There are a number of such worlds in the Patriarchy.

“Then, as the First War with Men got under way, a lot enlisted in the Patriarch's Navy. Of course freebooters also took off in their own prides seeking Names and riches, and relatively few came back at the end of it all. It cut the breeding rate, too, because a lot of the survivors had their genes scrambled by radiation, but weren't about to give their kzinretti to anyone else to breed from. Fertile males tried to steal kzinretti when they saw the sterile males holding them, and that led to more fighting. I'd guess that Warrgh-Churrg expanded his lands by incorporating estates that had no heir powerful enough to hold them.

“Anyway, you understand that population pressure is not usually a problem on kzinti worlds. A good war is population control and fun at the same time. Did you know that the First War with Men was the first time in a long while that the kzinti population of most of the planets involved actually increased? They stopped fighting each other and stopped killing surplus kittens.”

“That's a thought.”

“It was a thought for many of us on Wunderland, when we worked through the implications. It was a thought that was present at the birth of kdaptism: Stop fighting, and life is longer and better.”

“Well, obviously.”

“Only in hindsight. Most kzinti don't grasp it even yet. I might remind you it's a fairly recent concept among men, too.”

“Not all that recent.”

“To be willing to die for peace? And not just in ancient legends?”

“Kdaptists will do that?”

“Did you get any training?” Ginger exclaimed.

“A little. But they said there wasn't the time or resources. With the probability of another war so high… They said to ask you.”

“That's what they told me, too, when I protested about an inexperienced partner: 'Get them out while you can! Teach her on the job!' If it makes you feel better, however, it's been said that in this job, like any other sort of martyrdom, mere willingness is a very large part of the qualification.”

“It doesn't make me feel a great deal better, actually. Martyrdom is not my first ambition.”

“It's not invariably a volunteer job. Kdaptism first spread during the aftermath of the first human victory on Wunderland among those—computer nerds and telepaths, a lot of them—who suddenly realized they were sick of being barbarians. And a few officers and soldiers who'd listened to Chuut-Riit and had lived with human slaves, later led by at least one genius in the form of Vaemar. So you had kzinti on post-Liberation Wunderland who gave themselves names like Mister Robinson, and eventually kzinti like me, who probably talk too much even if we still have secret self-conferred kzinti Names that we cling to. It's less a religion than a set of attitudes and a long-term… well, perhaps 'dream' is as good a word as any. Whatever it is, it's all another reason I'm glad great-great-grandsire stayed on Wunderland after the First War.”

“You don't envy Warrgh-Churrg, then?”

“I told you, he scares me… I wonder what he'd think of a kzin who admitted fear to a monkey?”

“That's quite a thought. I think I'll have a drop of that bourbon myself. Any sign of kdaptism here?”

“None that I can see. The most visible signs are of vehement persecution, of course. The Blackfurs—priests—have always had the attitude of the Inquisition. With the ability to smell heretics.”

“Well, if there are any here, I hope they don't have a nose for you either.”

“Unlikely. We're rare, and very rare off Wunderland.”

“They have Jotoki here. They're an exotic species.”

“They have them pretty well everywhere in the kzinti worlds,” said the kzin. “Useful creatures. Prey animals and mechanics in one! And the feral ones cunning and dangerous enough to give Heroes decent sport. A hint of what humans might have been if the wars had gone differently. I'm glad they didn't.”

“I know that, Ginger.”

“Anyway, it seems there is something in the reports. Despite Warrgh-Churrg's lack of specificity, there may be unrepatriated slaves here. What did you think about the ears? I didn't want to be seen looking too closely.”

“They might be human. But it was hard to tell. The slaves we saw shuffling round might have been human too, under those sacks they wore—I didn't see that they weren't, anyway.”

“I'll have to get on a hunt.”

“Will that be possible?”

“I don't know, but I don't see why not. A part of hospitality, and it could be very beneficial for him. He likes gold. I could see that, all right. And his ears twitched when I mentioned that I trade in it.”

“He certainly seemed to have plenty of it around.”

“Which is an infallible sign that he wants more. Excuse me, Perpetua, I'd like to brush my fangs. That vatach stinks. As if his piss wasn't enough to put up with!”

“Won't they be offended?”

“Let them think it's an exotic offworld custom. They expect offworlders to smell funny. Mark you, this place smells odd to me itself.”

“How do you mean?”

“It's hard to say. The closest I can come is, it's not pure kzinti. Or not any pure kzinti I know. The large windows are the most obviously strange thing. I've never seen that in a major kzinti dwelling before.”

“Different worlds, different styles, I suppose.”

“Even the Patriarch's palace wouldn't have them so close to the ground. He must be very confident.”

“Aren't all kzinti confident? Or fearless?”

“They try to be. If they have fears, only Telepaths know about it, which is one reason Telepaths of the Patriarchy are hated and despised—and short-lived. But big windows are a definite cultural statement… Our footprints in the snow as we came back—there was something odd there too, but I can't get my claws into it… Apart from a few slaves, who did we see as we returned?”

“Other kzinti.”

“Yes, and they took you for granted.”

“I hadn't thought of that!”

“Human slaves are not rare. Well, that may be understandable… But there was something else. By human standards kzinti culture is pretty uniform, with some local variations, but I get a feeling that there is something different here, something non-kzinti…” His voice trailed off.

“Can you be more precise?”

“I'm trying… gold… there's something… You don't really walk like a slave.”

“I'm sorry.”

“It could be fatal for you on some—probably most—kzinti worlds. But here you hardly rated a glance.”

“I didn't realize you were watching like that.”

“We must always watch like that! In this job the vigilant and the dead are the only kinds of operatives they are—though sometimes the vigilant are the dead all the same. Anyway, we've used fang paste for five generations and I'm not changing now.”

“What if there is a telepath?”

“It would be dishonorable to use one on me unless he can be certain I've lied about something significant. And you may have noticed I've told as few direct lies as possible in case his ziirgrah picks them up. Even the occupation 'slave trader' can, with rationalization, be translated into something approximating the truth, since the Heroes' Tongue has no expression for our particular task.”

“And does your own ziirgrah pick up anything?”

“This feeling of oddness, which, no, I can't be more precise about. And that he's keeping a lot back. When I mentioned 'honor'—which was a mistake, by the way; it's slightly bad form to talk about honor to a noble kzin—I felt an odd stiffening. As if he's doing something his own sense of honor is not entirely happy about. I must say that doesn't surprise me much. Any noble kzinti house tends to have plots and secrets, the more subtle and complex because kzinti hardly ever actually lie outright. It makes for certain tensions.

“But I can't see that any plots are remotely likely to be anything to do with us. I don't feel more suspicion emanating from him than kzintoshi usually feel in the presence of strangers like me. But if I feel anything I'll leap it back here and we'll be off. You'd better keep alert in case we have to move quickly.”

“Don't you worry about that, I'll not be goofing off. A human doesn't on a kzinti world.”

“It would be bad manners—and theft—for anyone else to eat you, unless I get into a duel and lose. Then my property becomes my conqueror's. But we may have to take off in a hurry. By the way, I take it you've noticed these.” He pointed to dots of orange light circling the hologram of the planet.

“Orbiting spaceships.”

“Yes, they still have a couple of battle wagons, though they look dead. My guess is they're either laid up or have small maintenance crews on board.”

“Two ships aren't enough to do much.”

“They're big enough to be carriers. And even if not, if they've got weapons systems functioning—and these are kzinti ships we're talking about, so they will have if they're alive at all—they could make any takeoff hairy. If you do have to lift on your own, keep well away from them.”

“The alarms are set. All the cloaking devices are ready. And the missiles are armed.”

“Good. But I don't think trespassers will be a problem. Now that I've been pissed on I'm formally Warrgh-Churrg's guest… though he might send agents to check if I'm telling the truth about the hyperdrive.”

“That's a cheery thought. So I'm to wait here tonight listening for the pad of little cat feet while you're partying?”

“Yes. It goes with the territory. Keep your eyes on the sensors and lock yourself in the furthest possible cabin if anything gets in. At discretion, you are to take off. That is an order, by the way, and I'm formally recording it as such. You have your suicide pill if need be. It's unfortunate that buildings here are much closer together than they usually are on kzinti worlds, but you've got a clear field of vision round the ship… I wonder why the architecture is different?”

“Yes, now that you mention it, it looks different even to me.”

“But if you think I'm dead, or it seems I can't get back to you, take off fast. I gather they have too few deep-space ships left now to keep many simply sitting around on standby, but the fact we've seen none docked doesn't mean there aren't any—from what he said, they have a few at least—and there are aircraft that could pursue, not to mention beams and missiles, plus whatever war satellites they may have put up in the past. I'm nearly sure those ships they've got in parking orbit are empty, or have only maintenance crews at most.” The kzin wrinkled his ears thoughtfully. “But if we do have to run, they will wonder why we affected so much interest in the kz’eerkti here.”

“But they won't know. The kz’eerkti will be no worse off than they are already.”

“That's probably plenty bad enough, Perpetua. I think he'll let me join a hunt. Don't talk to me in English anymore. From now on I've got to think in the Heroes' Tongue.”

“Good luck, Ginger.”

“A Hero does not need luck. Snarr' grarrch.”

“Urr.”

III

Sunset had deepened into night. The gravity vehicles halted near a small observation tower.

Ginger, known to these kzinti as Trader, disembarked from the car which Warrgh-Churrg had lent him, and joined Hunt Master, Estate Manager, and the other local gentry, including one with the accouterments of a full-Named noble, grim-eyed, his jaws set in a permanent snarl. A couple of eights of kzinti youngsters, proudly bedecked with the time-honored weapons of the hunt and with minor, kittenish trophies, frolicked around them. A small squad of guards with modern weapons deployed around the vehicles.

Hunt Master gestured to the others to follow him in single file to the crest of the slope. Trader spat a command in the slaves' patois to the human squatting in the shadow of his car. It prostrated itself and crept back into the vehicle.

Silently, the felinoids moved through the tall grass up the ridge. Three moons, small but with brilliant albedo, cast a bright light and confused patterns of shadow. From the crest there was a panoramic view across a wide valley and plain, to a distant slope dark with vegetation. Instinctively, they had gone down on all fours, crawling forward with bellies to the ground, tails twitching.

“Kz’eerkti country,” Hunt Master said. He touched a stud on his helmet and vision-enhancers slid over eyes already far better than those of any human. The other kzinti copied him. “See there!”

The beam of his laser, set to illuminate rather than burn, touched what the others recognized as a scatter of brown, weathered bones on the other side of the river that ran below. It jumped to light other such jumbled heaps nearby. Here and there round, small-toothed skulls stared back at them—convincingly human.

“You recognize the bones of kz’eerkti? Indeed. But it is my duty to point out to you that not all the bones that lie under the sky were owned by monkeys.” His laser touched upon what was plainly a kzinti skull, broken and weathered. There was a stir and growl among the youngsters who had been following his pointer. A respected warrior who died in battle might expect his bones to be recovered by his companions or sons for installation in an ancestral shrine. An unblooded kit who perished in his first action far from home often left his bones where they fell.

“Kz’eerkti killed a Hero on Kzrral?” asked one kit, in a tone of outrage that provoked a ripple of amusement from some of the elder kzinti.

“Kz’eerkti have killed many Heroes,” Hunt Master replied. “And even more kits. And they have killed not only on Kzrral. Look and you will see. And at present we are but at the marches of one planet's Monkeydom. Look, cubs, and be wise. You too, offworlder. I do not know if the kz’eerkti of this planet will make the slaves you desire.”

“When do we see them, Respected Hunt Master?” asked a cub, jumping and rolling on the ground with excitement.

“Probably soon after we cross the valley and climb the next slope into the trees. Be sure, youngster, that they watch for us. You see how short the grass is on the slopes beyond the river? The monkeys burn it to deny approaching Heroes cover. Now arm and armor yourselves as I have shown you.” The hunting kzinti's rifles were powerful and accurate repeaters, but antiques for all that: solid-bullet projectors with chemical propellants, rifles in the literal sense, not beam-weapons. The kits were given a few scraps of leather “armor.”

“By the standards I am used to, these indeed seem fierce kz’eerkti, Respected Hunt Master,” Trader remarked. He passed Hunt Master a generous flask of shrimp-flavored bourbon, part of his stock. “But surely they are no match for modern weaponry,” he continued. “I wonder you do not simply wipe them out.”

“If we use modern science in the hunt—real body armor, overly enhanced heat and other sensors, beam-weapons—where is the sport in that, Trader?” Hunt Master replied, disposing of the bourbon in a single, gracious swig. “Where the training of kits? We might as well simply missile them from the air or from space. Besides, we have come to realize that exterminating a cunning and warlike species would deprive us permanently of both a valuable training asset and a rewarding game. The world would be duller with no kz’eerkti.”

“I have heard some of our ancestors regarded the Sol monkeys so. Until they deployed relativistic weapons and acquired the hyperdrive.”

“These aren't like that. I have studied them. Indeed to conserve the species, I have often allowed young ones and pregnant females to live when, hunting alone, I came across them.”

“Do they ever cross this valley?”

“They go as far as the river, but they never cross it in force. If they did, I suppose it would become a matter of exterminating them. They would be a menace to other game. Rogues or single scouts do cross though. I've found monkey droppings this side of the river a few times. I also found individuals, including that one.” He pointed to a weathered skeleton scattered in the grass nearby. “Old villain! He got careless. But when they cross they don't usually attack or draw attention to themselves. I think they spy out the land, with a little thieving. As it is, they occupy only some fringe wooded country here and roam south into the hot savannah and deserts beyond.

“I do have some supplies of special body armor,” Hunt Master continued. He could not ask Trader if he wished to avail himself of this without implying an insult to his courage. Kzinti had dueled to the death for saying less.

Trader replied with a casually polite ear twitch, as if Hunt Master's words had been a mildly interesting pleasantry about his collecting hobby, rather than a potentially dire test. Now that they were ready to move, Hunt Master glanced quickly over the kits' armor and weapons.

These were sprigs of landowners and various, mainly minor, nobility and he was tasked not only to train them but also to protect them to an elementary extent. However, any young kzintosh, once weaned, was expected basically to look after himself, and even the games and competitions of young kits were often and deliberately lethal. Apart from the sheer enjoyment, a large part of the purpose of hunting dangerous game on all kzinti worlds was to teach youngsters by experience the difference between the quick and the dead. It was never expected that all would survive their teaching, and a Hunt Master who trained kits without casualties would not be doing his job. Those who survived would be fit for proper warrior training.

“I leave the bones here on purpose,” Hunt Master remarked to Trader. “They serve as a valuable reminder.”

Weapons at the ready, the kzinti spread out and descended into the valley. Silent as they were, a few small animals scuttled away at their approach and some flying creatures burst noisily into the air out of the low ground cover. The kits, and one or two of the older hunters, leaped at these tantalizing things. They splashed through the wide, shallow river at the valley bottom. All kzinti hated getting wet, and across the deeper channel in the center there were crude fords and weirs of stones that they might have used for stepping, had not Hunt Master stopped them. He had a small rocket gun that fired lines tipped with articulated-tentacle grapnels.

“Fools!” he snarled. “Do you not think the monkeys know the paths? Did they not place the stones? May they not have fixed weapons sighted on each one?” He cuffed a kit marked with four white stripes on its side, who had been first to the river. Some of the kits looked thoughtful as he hurried them, clutching the lines he'd fired across, at points which he selected apparently at random. Once across the deeper channels he kept them on all fours until, wet and foul-tempered, they assembled in a concave bay of dead ground on the other side.

“There,” said Hunt Master, “is a sign of kz’eerkti territory. They scratch it on trees and rocks sometimes.” He pointed.

“They seem to think in terms of a frontier,” Trader remarked. He memorized a copy of the sign.

“Yes, very much so. As I have said, it is as well for them that they don't make excursions in force beyond it.”

One kit, falling back with a flying creature clutched triumphantly in his claws, disappeared into the ground with a scream, abruptly cut off. Hunt Master strode to the spot with grim deliberation. The kit lay bleeding in a pitfall, already dying, the wooden spikes at the bottom driven through his body. The spikes were triangular in cross section, with what looked like grooves down each face: a wound couldn't clamp shut, but blood could get out freely. One could be lethal in the right spot. The pit held more than sixteen.

“I have already said the kz’eerkti came as far as the river,” Hunt Master told the other kits. “You see now that you hunt real game.”

Krrar Landowner, the sire of the dead kit, furious and ashamed, dashed forward, then fell. A dozen arrows whistled at them. Kzinti reflexes preserved all except one Hero, younger brother of Krrar Landowner, who was struck in the forearm. Rifles blazed into the bushes from which the arrows had been fired. Hunt Master, crouching, ran to the fallen kzin and kicked the vegetation away from around him. A stout rope had been stretched a little way above the ground.

“Stop wasting ammunition,” Hunt Master said. “There are no kz’eerkti here. Remember the Fanged God gave you ziirgrah and be proud to use it!” Ziirgrah was the rudimentary telepathic sense all kzinti possessed which, properly used, allowed them to sense the presence and emotions of game—the terror of Zianya at table was an instance—and which in the case of certain rare kzinti could be developed with drugs and training into full telepathy. Since telepaths were not warriors but among the most despised and downtrodden of the kzinti castes—the condition had unpleasant side effects—many kzinti now felt ziirgrah was something very impolite to mention. Hunt-Master plainly had no such inhibitions.

“It was another trap, long-set,” he told the kits, who were now standing round-eyed and silent, their earlier exuberance greatly modified. “There are many such. This place is well defended.”

The arrow had been double-barbed, and was securely lodged in the forearm of the wounded kzintosh, who was dripping orange and purple blood copiously from severed veins and arteries—competent weaponcrafting again, as an ordinary wound would have squeezed down to a trickle. Hunt Master inspected the damage.

“I advise you solemnly to return to the cars for treatment,” he said. “I cannot remove this. Tendons have already been cut. Further, I smell poison.”

The wounded kzintosh snarled curses at his elder brother. Krrar Landowner, already furious, drew his w'tsai and the two flew at each other. They rolled down the slope, slashing and screaming.

“We are doing well, as you see,” said Hunt Master quietly to Trader. “Two or three casualties already and not a sniff of a kz’eerkti yet, though that noise will certainly have alerted every monkey for miles around. See there!” He pointed to a hole in a jumble of rocks ahead.

“A cave. Should we investigate it, esteemed Hunt Master?”

“That cave, Trader, is one of the openings of a tunnel system the kz’eerkti dug. We entered it when first we became aware of it.

“The main passages were quite spacious. Big enough for a warrior to pass through easily, even with weapons. We soon realized it was a labyrinth of tunnels below tunnels. What we did not realize was that it was threaded with other tunnels, too small for a Hero to crawl into but quite big enough for a monkey. Many Heroes died in that system.”

The shiver of loathing Trader gave was completely genuine. The ends of his whiskers and the muscles of his flanks tingled at the thought of unyielding rock and earth pressing against them so on either side. Like most felinoids, kzinti loved exploring likely holes and caves but hated spaces which held and confined on any terms other than their own.

“Finally we mapped it, more or less, with ground-penetrating radar, then sealed up all the exits and pumped in nerve gas. There were some, I may tell you, including Noble Trrask-Rarr, who wished to simply turn the whole hill over with a nuclear strike. However the lands of Honored Warrgh-Churrg and others would have been in the path of the fallout… There was talk of building ground-piercing conventional bombs but it was felt that it was not worth tooling up factories for such a one-off use. We turn multifrequency masers on it at irregular intervals and, we hope, cook any monkeys inside. Now and then they come running out, which can be amusing. We wait for them, but on occasion they have ambushed the waiting party… What do you think of your monkeys now?”

“I thought they were tree-swingers.”

“Only among other things. The kz’eerkti have unblocked that entrance again recently. No, I do not think we will enter it on this occasion. I was in the tunnels before, and from now on I will allow some other Hunt Master the glory of discovering what surprises they may have installed in there, and how deep they may have dug. Further, our radar shows there are big natural caves further south. They might link up. I believe in hard training but there is no point in throwing kits away for nothing.”

“What surprises did they have before?”

“Too many. Not just poisoned arrows and stakes in the darkness. Roof collapses, gases of their own—not as effective as ours, but worthy enough in a confined space—fire, those swords and knives they use, and, increasingly, guns they took from our own dead—or at least I hope they took them from our dead. There were feral Jotoki, too. They cooperated with the monkeys.”

“Strange,” said Trader. “I know of feral Jotoki on many worlds, in many hunting preserves. But unless they are trained young they are solitary and savage. I have never heard of them behaving cooperatively before, least of all with another species. Anyway, it seems these monkeys of yours are smart.”

“I doubt you'll find them good slaves. At least, not without a lot of breaking in and culling. However I have not had the opportunity to travel to other worlds and I do not know what the fashions may be. Perhaps some like savage little animals for their own hunts.”

“Kill them all!” snarled Trrask-Rarr. “Why tolerate a plague on our planet?” He glared at Trader and Hunt Master as if defying them to say differently. An insult or an aspersion cast by one kzin on another could explode into a death duel in an instant, but the full-named Noble knew both were under the protection of Warrgh-Churrg, and an attack on his people would be an attack on the magnate himself.

Trader, avoiding any overt gesture of either insolence or subservience to the snarling kzin, made a diplomatic answer: “It can be difficult to throw things away sometimes.” It was about as far as he could go in exploiting Warrgh-Churrg's protective power; and the association of kz’eerkti with inedible offals did seem to amuse Trrask-Rarr.

“You said, you hoped they had taken guns from your dead,” Trader prompted Hunt Master.

“Yes. They certainly shot at us with guns; the alternative supposition is that they made their own. I like that idea less.”

“Do they have any technology?”

“Some. They sometimes wear pieces of metal armor, so I suppose they have smelters somewhere.” There was no interest in Hunt Master's voice or body language. Kzinti were as curious as any other cats when on the hunt, but sustained abstract curiosity was a fairly rare trait in them—their intelligences could be very high, but their culture militated against the survival of intellectuals.

“How good could their armor be?” Trader also betrayed no great interest. “You understand their level of competence may be of professional importance to me—and of benefit to this planet, if they are acute enough to be an exportable resource. I have spoken to Honored Warrgh-Churrg but you are the expert and on the spot. Would you say they could be as technologically capable—potentially—as trained Jotoki, for example?”

“I could not say. Their armor is metal alloys. But you may find pieces of it lying around if you wish to see it. There have been hunts here for a long time.”

Hunt Master's keen eyes lit on something on the ground. He picked it up and handed it to Trader, bending the flattened, corroded metal back into its original shape with his powerful grip. “This looks as if it was one of their helmets once.”

“Worthy Hunt Master, may I keep it to examine?”

“It is of no use to me.”

“A Hero collects his enemies' ears for trophies,” Trader agreed. His own eyes now recognizing what they sought, he too bent and collected a few more scraps of metal from the ground, stowing them in a belt pouch. He also, as Hunt Master turned away, gathered up a few scraps of weathered bone.

Estate Manager screamed and leapt to one side. There was the sudden unmistakable whistle of a flight of arrows and a sudden turmoil in the bushes on the crest above them. Kzinti screamed with rage and pain, kzinti rifles cracked. Dim shapes could just be made out high in trees too slender for full-grown kzintoshi to climb. A couple fell.

“After them, kits!” cried Hunt Master. “Win your first ears! Anticipate their counterattack and destroy it!”

The youngsters, ululating joyously again, raced for the trees through whose upper branches the shadows of kz’eerkti were fast disappearing. Another flight of arrows made them pause for a moment, but a running kzin among the whipping branches was too fast to be any sort of target. Estate Manager, who had got into the spirit of the hunt by sporting a crossbow of antique design, fired several bolts in rapid succession. The solid thump of a bolt finding its home was followed by a dead kz’eerkt plumping to the ground.

The kz’eerkti screams were not meaningless animal noises, Trader realized. They were taunts and insults in the Hero's Tongue: “Come and get your Name! Come give your ears for my trophy belt! Piss-Licker! Arrow-Target! Coward!” Females too joined in, exploiting all the Hero's Tongue's truly remarkable resources of deadly insults: “Come watch me shit half-digested vegetable matter down on your ancestors' shrines!” At any rate they were effective, kits breaking away and rushing shrieking into battle. Trader saw the white-striped kit completely out of control, screaming meaninglessly. As they passed he found himself fighting down an atavistic impulse to join them.

A couple more adult kzintoshi had been wounded by the first volley: Rress Landowner, and a Senior-Fixer-of-Computers, here in honor for what must have been immense competence. Hunt Master sent them back to the cars with a peremptory voice that brooked no denial. When the hunt turned to battle his orders compelled even nobles of partial Name. Trader followed him to examine the fallen kz’eerkti.

They were pale-skinned under the dirt on their bodies, and, for kz’eerkti, who tended to be spindly and fragile, they were tough, wiry-looking specimens. A male and female. One was dead, killed either by the shots that had brought them down or by the fall. The other was thrashing feebly in terminal “shock,” that mysterious alien condition. Hunt Master gave them a cursory glance.

“None of the old-men monkeys I'm after here,” he said.

“You know them?” asked Trader.

“Most of the local old stagers, yes. I've even picked up a few words of their language over the years.” He bent and placed the sucker of what looked like an electronic book on the mouths of each, holding the dying female still with his extended claws.

“DNA readouts,” he explained.

“What do you need them for?” Trader asked with rather elaborate casualness.

“To see if these are part of a local troop or if they've moved here from somewhere else.” He dropped the female onto the ground and bent his gaze to the readouts. “Yes, these are locals, related to others I've got recorded here. If a big new kz’eerkt band moves into the area it's as well to know about it.”

“You are very thorough, Skilled Hunt Master.”

“Got to know your monkey. I pick up what I can about them when things are quiet. Not like Trrask-Rarr.”

“The Full-Named one? How so?”

“He's a Noble coming down in the world. To add to his troubles, the monkeys have raided his lands and destroyed some of his hunt-beasts' pastures. Not a great thing, but he hates them. I mean really hates them.”

“Have any in the hunt used telepaths?” That was a delicate question. No fighting kzin liked admitting association with telepaths. They had mainly military uses, and to suggest to a hunter that he accepted aid from such despised creatures might be taken as an insult. Hunt Master, tough, hulking, hard-bitten, and scarred, with a good collection of kzinti as well as simian ears on his belt ring, did not look like the sort of kzintosh one would duel lightly. However, perhaps because of his orders to cooperate with the trader, he evidently decided to take it as a mere professional question.

“No. One picks things up. They shout insults, sometimes the kits shout things back. One follows tracks, spoor, droppings, you pick up some knowledge of their ways. Where they'll hide, where they'll ambush, where they'll dodge and flee, whether they'll use poison or pitfalls, how they'll provoke the kits. Some of the rascals really have personalities of their own. You come to know which are likely to arrow you from behind, which to dig pitfalls, which may stand and fight. But it's Marrrkusarrg-tuss I'm really after.”

“Who?”

“Their local leader.”

“They have Names?”

In the Hero's Tongue the word “Name” had huge significance, something far beyond “Title” or “Honorific” or “Designation” or “Description.” A partial Name signified Nobility, the highest Valor, and Heroism, a limited right to breed. Names had to be earned or won and not even the Patriarch's offspring were given them at birth. A Full Name signified these things with a quantum leap of intensity.

The idea of any non-kzin having a Name was, to a kzin of the old school, a contradiction in terms, though after two wars devastatingly lost to the humans some kzinti attitudes were changing, and not, Trader thought, only among the Wunderkzin—the Kdaptist families of Wunderland, like his own. Kzinti had, for purposes of identification and communication, in their first major war against a spacefaring enemy since they overthrew the Jotoki millennia before, come to identify human warships by their own odd names: Missouri, Graf Spee, Ark Royal, Yamato, Blue Baboon, Male Mandrill, and so forth, and individual humans as well: simply to refer to “the monkeyship” or “the dominant monkey” had been unsatisfactory for military intelligence purposes. But on a backwater planet like Kzrral he had not expected the old ways to have altered so.

“They give themselves names. To tell one another apart, I suppose, since they cannot smell and their sight and hearing are poor,” Hunt Master said. “It seems the easiest thing to do. Since they attach no honor to them there is no dishonor in us using them.”

So even in these circumstances they are subverting your culture a little, Trader thought.

He left the bodies to the trophy-takers and they hurried on to follow the hunt on foot. In the dark trees ahead and above them was a confusion of cries. Another young kzin fell not far away, fangs and claws tearing at a monkey that in turn still slashed with a knife that looked the size of a w'tsai. There was also a commotion on the ground under the dark bushes away to the left. Trader, night-eyed, saw three young kzinti struggling on the ground with the shapes of Jotoki. Hunt Master must have seen it too, but he affected not to notice. Young kzinti caught and killed—or were killed by—their own prey. Trrask-Rarr was dismembering another simian.

“They're certainly tool-users,” said Trader.

“Oh yes, there's even a lot of standardization in their gear.” They crossed to the combatants, who had fallen silent.

“I'd like to get one of those knives of theirs. I will gladly part with a piece of gold.”

“Take that one, then.” He gestured at the two still forms of kzin and simian on the ground, locked together in death. “Neither of them will be needing it again. Two pieces of gold.”

“Indeed, it does not become me to offer a warrior such as yourself less than a fair price. Two pieces it shall be.”

A crescendo of simian and kzinti screams filled the night. Again the whistle and thump of arrows came to the felinoids' ears. There was the roar of kzinti rifles.

“That sounds like their counterattack,” Hunt Master said, “as I warned the kits.”

“Counterattack? Is that common?”

“The monkeys often have a reserve waiting. They watch and see what they're up against. If it's seasoned warriors they pull back. If it's kits and youngsters they'll wait till they are engrossed in the chase and scattered, then come up. You see a kit who collects kz’eerkti ears here can feel he's earned them.”

“It sounds like a properly organized military culture.”

“It is. Well, Trader, how does their potential strike you? Nice house slaves for Kzinhome? Decorous tenders of the Nobility's harems? Would this—” he turned the female over with his foot, its bloody head and slack, splayed limbs flopping and twitching. “—have made a groom for the Patriarch's favorite kzinrett?”

“I suppose it's a matter of catching and training them young, like Jotoki…”

“There!” Hunt Master leapt vertically, claws slashing at something like a huge black starfish in the bushes above.

“Speaking of Jotoki,” he remarked, disentangling himself from the pieces, “there was an old rogue. Ready to drop on us. Well, Jotok and monkey meat for all survivors tonight!”

IV

“Seven kz’eerkti dead at least,” said Ginger as he reentered the groundcar and closed the hatch, “and eleven kzinti—though eight were kits on their first hunt, and of course it's important to cull the unfit early. But from the kzinti point of view, not a very successful kill ratio. There might have been more kz’eerkti dead that the others carried away. But a successful night for Warrgh-Churrg.”

“How so?”

“One of the adult kzinti who died was a small landowner. He had an estate that borders on Warrgh-Churrg's and owed him money. Warrgh-Churrg will pick it up without trouble now. Plus the harem, of course, and the kits if he should happen to want them—and the deceased landowner's eldest kit was among the other dead. A fairly easy night's work for Warrgh-Churrg, letting the kz’eerkti expand his estates for him.”

“But a casualty ratio like that? There was nothing like it in the wars, even when human troops were well equipped. How do you account for it?” asked Perpetua. She had kept the car locked in Ginger's absence and herself crouched down inside it, well out of the sight and the attention of the guard—and especially of the furious wounded kzinti as they returned.

“The kzinti sought out the kz’eerkti on their own ground, as usual, and the kz’eerkti had well-prepared traps and ambushes—”

“As usual.”

“Tactless, Pet. These kz’eerkti were exceptionally tough with it. And the kits, also as usual, were overexcited, overeager and inexperienced.”

“And nobody told them?”

“Hunt Master believes there's no teacher like experience. Between you and me—which is a rather silly phrase in these circumstances—I think Hunt Master had directions to get a few knocked off. With modern life most affluent kzinti households grow up with too many male kits unless they are thinned out one way or another—and this helps thin out the slow and stupid, as well as the overeager who might grow up to be a nuisance by challenging their fathers. It's a rough and ready system, though. Among the kits who survived tonight were some I'd marked down as not the brightest.”

“It sounds a pretty unstable society.”

“It is, once you come to see it a certain way. Why do you think you humans keep winning wars? One reason my great-grandsire and a few others threw in their lot with humans after the Liberation was because they could see kzinti technology and culture were so grossly out of sync. We're barbarians with high technology, and we're lucky we didn't exterminate ourselves before space travel gave us elbow room.

“Perhaps you understand now something of what I was trying to explain before, about me. We Wunderkzin families are called the ultimate traitors to our species by the Patriarchy, but we believe we carry the best ultimate hope of our species' survival, because we see that hope as encompassing a society where half the male children don't have to be killed in the process of growing up; and where there are other ends in life beyond war and hunting. But I'm getting off the point.”

“I don't mind, it's all new to me still. I'm eating it up.”

Ginger curled his ears at her briefly, then said, “You omnivores have some disturbing turns of phrase. Anyway, Hunt Master limited the technology they used—with modern weapons and detection equipment it would have been a different story and no hunt at all. The kz’eerkti were tough for humans, and had resourcefulness and cooperation. And those Jotoki cooperating with them were very aggressive and well trained. They accounted for several of the young kzinti on their own. Also, they're good in trees; I think it was a Jotok that acted to create a diversion in the branches, to draw the hunt away from the human withdrawal. I've not known them to cooperate with another species before, apart from those specially trained by kzinti slave masters.”

“Kz’eerkti on Kzinhome don't speak, do they?”

“Not really. A variety of squeals and grunts. I guess if any evolved speech or intelligence in the past they would have been jumped on pretty quickly.”

“And yet these talk?”

“Oh, yes, no doubt about it! Damned cheek, some of it! I heard one of them calling me a—Well, I won't go into that.”

“Are they truly human?”

“That's for you to say. They certainly seemed to have the usual number of fingers and toes and nipples and things. I kept some tissue samples when they passed out the monkey meat afterwards, as well as some old bones. Here.”

“Thanks. How delightful.” Perpetua placed the fragments into an autodoc.

“Somebody's got to do the job. And this—” Ginger produced some different tissue—“is a sample of the local Jotoki. Better analyze that too.

“And there are these.” Ginger's clawtip stirred the metal fragments spread on the table.

“Smelted, refined, tempered metal.”

“Yes. Smart. I'd like to have seen the heads better, but the brain cases looked big. I did get a look at a female's pelvis during the feast, and the birth canal looked big enough for a big-brained head to pass. As far as I know human anatomy, it didn't look unusual. It tasted like ordinary monkey meat. It had a fetus but I couldn't get a good look at that in time.”

“… I see.”

“Are you unwell?”

“No. Excuse me; I forget sometimes… This helmet: it ought to fit a human head. More than that… there's something about it I can't put my finger on. Anything else?”

“I think I've told you most of it, the tunnels and traps and so forth. There were only two kz’eerkti females killed. Maybe that was just chance, but it suggests most of their fighters are male, which suggests moderate sexual dimorphism. What else… We passed a sign just after we crossed the river. I memorized it. Let me see—yes. It was like this.” He copied some marks onto an old-fashioned pad. “Hunt Master said kz’eerkti used it for marking their territory.”

“Hmm, it looks like writing… Why not just zap them from space, or nuke them?”

“If they were going to do that, they should have done it right at the beginning. As a race, we don't like admitting it when we've got a problem. You must have noticed. Further, if too many young males survived there would be a higher level of endemic civil war for territory, especially now without the space war to draw them off. Civil war and generational blood feuds are endemic at a fairly low level anyway, but without a high death rate from other causes—such as hunting—among the young it would escalate. It's an acceptable loss rate, especially without the space war. But I'll tell you something else: There's something odd about Hunt Master. It took me a while to work out what, because it's something you find only relatively rarely among kzinti, but now I'm sure of it: He's a crook.”

“As you say, rare in kzinti. Or so all my reading tells me.”

“All successful nonviolent crime depends on the manipulation of appearances. That's what he's doing. I think he got a couple of kzinti killed deliberately—adults and kits. No honorable trainer, no matter how lethal and ruthless as a trainer, would do that when leading them in the face of an enemy. You see the difference between the two situations?”

Perpetua nodded.

“My ziirgrah sense isn't comparable to telepathy, but it's pretty good.”

“Then why don't the local kzinti see it?”

“Maybe they don't know what to look for. Weathered old kzintoshi like Hunt Master—tough and hard-bitten even by kzinti standards—tend to be limited in imagination, but almost icons of propriety.”

“And another thing. Even if it's not a question of space-based lasers, why not just push in with modern weapons and take the kz’eerkti territory?”

“You feel how hot it is, this far south? I imagine that's why Warrgh-Churrg is content to let Estate Manager run this place while he lives it up in his northern palace. As a marquis he should be living on and dominating the borders personally—the responsibility of guarding them goes with the title. But we're really past the edge of the temperature range which kzinti like. Not too much further south the trees give way to the savannah and then hot desert and mountains. With this planet's small axial tilt seasons hardly exist and south of here it's always hot. The slow rotation accentuates the heat during the day. Further south again and you're in unending tropic rain and steam. Conditions as horrible for kzinti as you can get.

“Kzinti don't want the badlands when there's ample land in the higher latitudes with a cooler climate. Besides, deserts don't breed enough game or support big-bodied prey. Who wants to eat rodents or telepath food?

“Also, we have here a fairly plainly defined frontier. Further west the river broadens into swamps and deltas which kzinti also don't like, and then on to the sea, which they have very little interest in. With three moons you get hypertides often enough to make building near the sea unattractive anyway, and at low tide there are vast shallows, too shallow to navigate with a sea ship, right out to the continental shelf… Odd, that. The river should have cut a very deep channel through the shallows by now…

“Further east, where the aquifer that gives birth to the headwaters of this river rises, the frontier peters out into mountains and desert, of no use to anyone.

“Of course, the kzin could attack anywhere if they were fighting a war of extermination, whether on foot or with mechanized forces, but that's not their purpose. But basically, as I said, it suits them to keep the kz’eerkti for sport and training. Hunt Master said something to the effect that life would be boring without them… Apart from the fact that he'd be out of a job—hunting and getting paid for it!—that any kzintosh would envy.

“The kz’eerkti tunnels puzzle me, though. Hunt Master said a nuclear strike would poison the surrounding land. But you could smash them effectively enough in other ways. Drop heavy conventional bombs on them, for example, or scatter mines at the entrances. You wouldn't even need smart munitions, let alone advanced weapons like disintegrators or walking doomsday dolls. Holding back like that doesn't fit in with kzinti ruthlessness toward an enemy.

“But it does fit in with the pattern of kzinti behavior toward game species on other worlds: We're not bad conservationists, actually, especially where good hunt-beasts are concerned. Better than you've been, as I read Earth history—but of course you can eat anything you find, so why would you bother?

“And it fits with what seems to be an immutable in hunting cultures: When you're dealing with a clever, hardy prey species in difficult hunts, a prey species capable of retaliation, a kind of empathy often develops between hunter and prey. Some of the terms Hunt Master was using for the kz’eerkti have a color of affection about them, the kind a kzintosh in benign mood might use for his naughty kittens. You may have noticed Warrgh-Churrg had some stuffed kz’eerkti specimens as well as heads mounted on his walls?”

“I could hardly help noticing. I didn't get a close look, though.”

“Probably beasts considered noble—hard to kill, or somehow courageous Ya nar Kzinti. Further, I gather there's occasionally something like a tacit, informal truce between kzinti and kz’eerkti. You'd probably die if you bet your life on it, but I gather from Hunt Master there are times when both species are a little less aggressive toward each other. That's the liver of what puzzles me: Toleration is not a kzinti trait. We conserve species, and we know dead slaves fetch no food and work no factories, but we don't stand any nonsense.

“The mechanics of it I don't understand. And I may be wrong anyway. It's hard to interpret the nuances of body language and ear twitches in a strange culture.”

“You say the kzinti don't want a lot of Kzrral because it's got a lousy climate. Surely with modern engineering they could change a lot of the climate, or build large-scale habitats?”

“At this stage it's not worth the effort and expense, not with the present population, and land for all the nobility. Most of those on the hunt had only partial names, indicating there isn't much difficulty in becoming at least a modest landowner. Kzinti government and administration are pretty sketchy on any planet. We don't like paying taxes, and without a lot of slave labor we're not much good at large-scale cooperative projects except war—and you've shown us we could be a lot better at that.

“As a matter of fact,” he went on, “since we've begun to study what Vaemar once described as 'those strange Human disciplines'—economics and economic history—we've come to realize many of our wars weren't for hunting territory, or perhaps even glory, but to acquire slaves to pay our taxes for us. Thanks to the Jotoki giving us the gravity drive, we got into space without ever realizing little things like the fact that slavery creates unemployment—and is inefficient to boot. Once we defeated the Jotoki, we nearly exterminated each other because we saw the universe as a glorious prey we could simply drag down and feast upon. If we'd understood economics and administration better, I don't know if you'd have beaten us, hyperdrive or not… One of history's many ironies: None of our enemies came as close to destroying us as the Jotoki did, simply by giving us high technology and powerful weapons so we never had to develop an intellectual or scientific culture… There, how's that for a human thought?”

“Human thought?”

“We Wunderkzin are taught to think like humans. We've had a tradition of good teachers, including Dimity Carmody herself. But there's something else: I'm a Kdaptist and a Wunderkzin whose family have been in close contact with humans—and not as conquerors—for several generations. We are the least aggressive, least xenophobic, kzinti that there are: We know we are not typical. Perpetua… ?”

“Yes?”

“You understand, don't you, that I am not a telepath?”

“Of course! I would never dream of thinking of you as such a thing!”

“It is just that, although I am no telepath, my ziirgrah sense is a little more highly developed than that of an average kzintosh.”

“My friend, I accept that you are no telepath. I am glad of all the senses the God gave you.”

“It is an embarrassment to me. Nonetheless, I cannot ignore its input. There was more going on at the hunt than there seemed.

“It took me a little while to realize how these kzinti are not typical in several ways. I can see all the reasons they tolerate the presence of wild humans or kz’eerkti or whatever they are on their planet—they all look good and sensible reasons to me, but when you remember this is a kzinti planet, with a kzinti culture, it smells odd somehow.” He knotted his ears in thought. “Small things. Even the way Warrgh-Churrg lay on the fooch.”

“The couch?”

“Yes. Kzintoshi normally rest on them after the hunt, when relaxing in hunting preserves, and in the company of members of their own pride, but not as a rule indoors and in front of strange kzintoshi. It makes it a little more difficult to leap up if one has to react to a sudden attack. It's a small thing, but it's part of that slight feeling of oddness. And another thing: The audience chamber was stone, wasn't it?”

“Yes.”

“Red sandstone. The sort of re-creation of Old Kzin I've seen on a dozen kzinti worlds. The sort Sire and I have ourselves at home on Wunderland for that matter. But the floor was different somehow… I know! You should have felt it with your bare hairless feet. The temperature changed! In the audience chamber it was warm.” Ears knotted again. “But what can that mean?”

“He doesn't like cold feet?”

“But is it significant? Kzinti distrust too much comfort. We like luxury when we can take it, but are hostile to anything that might soften us. But as I was dodging arrows in the night out there I realized what one of the oddities at the spaceport was. The thing I was puzzling about immediately afterwards and couldn't quite get a fang into. We left footprints in the snow…”

“I remember! I was worried I'd get frostbite! But a slave has to know her place.”

“The point is, both when we went to the palace together and when I went to the banquet later, I saw human footprints without kzinti footprints beside them. Coming back to the ship after the banquet I saw one or two human slaves abroad, at night and unsupervised—and they didn't flee at the sight of me. Warrgh-Churrg has human house-slaves. We saw that. But he said almost nothing about it, despite the fact human slaves were the very subject of our conversation, and ostensibly the very point of my visit to this planet. I saw a couple at the banquet, too—they were carrying food and so forth, and I supposed they cleaned up afterwards—but none of the kzinti referred to them.

“Talk about humans as prey animals and sport, yes! Have human trophies on the walls. But to talk about humans as house slaves, as waiters, perhaps as errand-runners, as the cleaners of those trophies—a sort of tacit taboo. That's one of the oddities. Once or twice at the banquet human slaves came bearing meat to me and those near me, and what my ziirgrah picked up from my fellow guests was a faint suggestion of an emotion I've encountered in humans often enough but not with kzintoshi—embarrassment! That's something I've never encountered on a kzinti world before. Have you ever heard of an embarrassed kzin?”

“You're cats. I've never heard of an embarrassed cat of any kind. It's practically a contradiction in terms.”

“It's something to bite at. I feel there's meat there.”

“Uh-huh.” Perpetua was absorbed in her examination of the inscription and the helmet. “I'm certain this was writing. What's more, these characters are derived from West European letters!”

“So they are from Wunderland. Not a convergent native species.”

“That's right, but… this language isn't English, or Wunderlander.”

“Let me see. If these marks had been linked when new, then the characters… 'Nihil… proficiat… inimicus… '” Ginger spelled out the words carefully. Human and kzin shook head and ears in puzzlement. Perpetua turned to the helmet.

“What's this?” She pried at the rusted metal. A flake of something fell into her hand. “It's… paint?”

“Yes. And look at this piece.”

“What about it?”

“First of all, those are beads of glass. They have a sense of decoration. More than that, they have a technology for making glass. Glass is difficult. Oh, that's just the beginning. Look at this! Look closely now!”

“How did they do that? They have no smelters.”

“Haven't they? Hunt Master took it for granted they have them somewhere.”

“We're talking high-temperature metallurgy here, not a few molds in a charcoal fire to make bronze or something—though even that would be significant enough.”

“Maybe the Jotoki made it,” said Perpetua. “They had high technology. Their gravity motors got as close to the light-barrier as one can get without the hyperdrive shunt.” Ginger knotted his ears down in a gesture of puzzlement.

“You've got to train Jotoki young, practically from the time they're tadpoles. Feral Jotoki are feral forever. But human or Jotoki, if they had smelters, even primitive ones, kzinti satellites would detect the smoke plumes—for that matter, since practically all kzinti satellites have military capabilities and military sense enhancers, the heat sources would stick out like the Patriarch's testicles after a battle!”

“You're a kzin. You're allowed to say that?”

“It implies no disrespect, quite the reverse. But setting our cultural differences aside, I have the idea reinforced that these particular monkeys have more to them than meets the eye.”

“Did you get any idea how many there are?”

“Hunt Master says there are different troops, and he doesn't know how far south their territory extends. I doubt he's got the means to count them.”

“Would someone lend him a satellite?”

“If they were a major threat the high-tech response would be quick enough. As it is, who cares?”

“Could the monkey lands reach the equator? Maybe even into the southern hemisphere?”

“I doubt it. Near the equator it's too hot. The seas nearly boil. But they might extend a long way toward it. You monkeys are adaptable and sometimes tougher than you look.”

“This whole situation could pose us problems. We've got the bullion to buy individual unrepatriated slaves from individual owners and the ship to get them home. But this sounds like a much bigger business. It'll mean putting repatriation on an industrial basis.”

The autodoc beeped. Colored blocks appeared on its screen.

“Human DNA,” said Perpetua. “So these are runaway slaves, not a native species. In fact, I'm taking it closer… now this is odd, very odd.”

“What?”

“Look at that profile. What was the principal source of human slaves?”

“Wunderland, of course. They were shipping them out in herds—sorry; wholesale—during the occupation. Very few from other planets. There aren't many prisoners from space battles.”

“Exactly. And Wunderland was settled by a North European consortium with a few Japanese and South Africans. Of course the whole human race was getting pretty mixed up by that time, and racial profiling can be misleading in any case. But Wunderland DNA tends to be recognizable, simply as coming from a particular melting pot. Here, though, according to the templates a lot of this DNA profile is far less variegated. As if it's from a population that's been separate much longer than Wunderland. And I see Southern European—Iberian, Italian, a bit of North African; plus either Irish or very old Scots. And a surprisingly strong presence of something that the library shows looks close to old Welsh, but not quite.

“Certainly there are Celts and some Anglo-Saxons on Wunderland, but the rest are minority groups; and I doubt you'd ever find a DNA profile like this anywhere there. I've tested the fresh meat and the old bones—which are from several different individuals—and they're all about the same. This is a homogenous population, and it's significantly different from Wunderland's.”

“They are not from Wunderland?”

“Impossible. There's no Goth strain at all. Even the isolated, backwoods communities there are descended from people who came in the original slowboats, and the only colonists with no Goth ancestry were Japanese—which isn't even hinted here.”

“What about the slowboat that disappeared?”

Perpetua shook her head. “Lost Travelers' Day hasn't been observed rigorously since before the First War, but it's still marked on calendars—on the anniversary of the day Wunderland's telescopes saw the Evita Peron blow up.”

“What if that was faked?”

“Its colonists were descendants of North European refugees. There'd be Goth.”

“Oh. And what of the Jotoki?”

“The Jotoki do seem to be the same kind as on Wunderland, but you did say you find the same on practically every kzinti world.”

“Urrr… This helmet,” said Ginger. “You say there's something else about it?”

“Yes. Connect your notebook up to the ship's library. I want to ask it some questions.”

“What do you think that helmet is?”

“I need to check our encyclopedia, but—” she called up a picture “—you see the attachment for a crest, the cheek guards, the lobster tail at the back?”

“Lobster! Don't torture me, you tree-swinging sadist! Where will we get lobsters on this damned world!”

“Not a real lobster, you stomach-ruled furball! See the armor of overlapping plates that protects the back of the neck?”

“Yes.”

“We had to relearn military history when your ancestors jumped on us.” She stabbed with one finger at the picture on the screen. “Do you see?”

“There is a resemblance, I agree… 'Roman'?… 'Ancient Roman'?”

“What do you think we should do, Ginger?”

“Explore further.”

“How easy will that be?”

“I've already paid Hunt Master to let me make a private expedition. I don't know that he actually had the power to permit or prevent me—it's up to Warrgh-Churrg while we're on his land—but it's as well to keep on Hunt Master's good side.”

“I know it's an insulting question, and forgive me, but isn't that dangerous?”

“They would call me—to put it politely—a strange kind of kzin if they knew all about me, but I am a kzin for all that, Perpetua. Danger doesn't enter into it. For that matter I'm looking forward to the hunt. You'll never breed that reflex out of us!”

“I'm not one who would want to. I've got to admit life on Wunderland would be duller if some of you furballs hadn't joined us and kept some of your little ways. But, it's partly my own fear I speak from. I don't want you dead on the end of a kz’eerkti spear. Who wishes a friend to face danger alone?”

“Cheer up! Naturally I shall take my tame monkey with me, as bait and interpreter. I won't be facing it alone!”

“Thanks, furball!”

“Quiet your trembling heart, tree-swinger! This time we will be taking full body armor, sense enhancers and modern weapons. Even Hunt Master could hardly call me a coward for that, venturing deep into kz’eerkti territory with only my own ape in tow! And we'll be flying, not walking.”

“And as another ape once said, 'This is another fine mess you've gotten us into!' I'd be better off going in alone.”

“Hunt Master would never stand for it. Nor would Warrgh-Churrg. If he found out, I'd probably be dueled for letting a monkey go loose without permission; and you'd find a very hungry reception committee when and if you returned.”

“You won't tell Warrgh-Churrg you're going?”

“I think that is probably not necessary. We'll make it a quick look in and out.”

“Won't he be offended?”

“Hard to see exactly why he should be. He's not the only landowner and the kz’eerkti lands are unoccupied. And I did pay him gold for the hire of the car.

“Anyway, you can learn some of the language. I had Hunt Master teach me all the local kz’eerkti words he's picked up, and you'll be learning them tonight.”

“What's their word for 'sword'?”

Ginger's vocal cords did something difficult. Without microsurgery in his youth it would have been impossible.

“Gladius,” said Perpetua. “The Latin hasn't changed much. It's a useful language, though the numeration system is hopeless. It should be possible for us to improve on Hunt Master's vocabulary.”

“You recognize it?”

“An old Earth language. English and Wunderlander are full of traces of it. You said that Hunt Master called one by a name?” Perpetua found herself suddenly a little shy of saying such a thing to a kzin. But another feeling was stronger than embarrassment.

“Yes, Marrrkusarrg-tuss.”

“Could it have been 'Marcus Augustus'?”

“I suppose so.” He passed her a disk and sleeper's headset, standard equipment for absorbing a new language quickly. “But here's the dictionary. Learn.”

“Thanks. And you'd better do the same. But I do know some of the words already… I wonder what could have happened?”

V

Their car crossed on low power to the scrub woods on the southern side of the river.

Once out of sight of the kzinti on the northern bank they halted and reconnoitered. The land about seemed still and empty, and they picked no body-heat signatures from large live animals. They waited for a time without result at the scene of the recent fight.

Perpetua changed into the robes which the car's machine shop had made the previous night, worn over light formfitting body armor. Ginger, this time also in armor with modern sense enhancers, scanned the area ceaselessly. Insects buzzed and the air smelled strongly of recent death close by. The kzinti kits' bodies they found had been stripped of gear and lacked ears but were otherwise more or less whole. Now in daylight, they saw many bones old and new littering the area, making it look like the kzinti hunting preserve it was. They closed the car's hatch with relief.

“They haven't been too mutilated,” said Perpetua.

“No, that would be too much of a provocation. Grounds for a war of extermination.” They flew on over taller trees.

“Look there!” There was a stirring in the vegetation below. A heat sensor began flashing.

“Probably kz’eerkti. What do you think we should do?”

“Ignore them for the time being. Let them see we're aware of them but not attacking.”

“We could drop them food. Show them we're friendly?”

“They'd think it was poisoned. Kzinti aren't friendly.”

They flew round the vegetation, seeing movement, slow to the kzin's eyes, fast and fleeting to the human's. Then the car headed south.

There was no obvious or sudden change in the landscape below, and an hour later they were still flying over green-looking country, quite well-grown with trees, even if these were more widely spread.

“I'm surprised the kzinti haven't taken this for themselves,” said Perpetua. “It looks fertile enough.”

“I'm not so sure,” said Ginger. “Or rather I'm sure it isn't. According to the map the coastal hills south of the delta make a rain shadow, and even without them the rainfall would be poor anyway. Those plants that don't have spiny leaves have shiny ones, and they are keeping them turned edge-on to the sun. I'd say they'll have every kind of moisture-conservation mechanism you can imagine, and this is a green desert with perhaps an occasional cloudburst. Look there.” He pointed to something Perpetua could barely see. “Dust devils blowing about. Land here and I'd say you'll find that grass is hard dry spines, growing out of dust. And have you seen any surface water since we left the river?”

“I can't say I have.”

“Or large animals?”

“No. Blurred signs on the sensor that suggest burrowing life-forms. But the kz’eerkti live here.”

“The kz’eerkti aren't native,” said Ginger. “And, as my species found to our cost, they are the most adaptable creatures known in space. I'd say all the native animals in these parts are small, also highly adapted to moisture-conservation. In fact, they are quite plentiful and I've seen a few already, even if you haven't. But not much meat or sport for kzinti. But in any event, have you seen any kz’eerkti?”

“No. Where are they anyway?”

“Hiding, I suppose. Hills coming up. Notice anything else about those dust devils?”

“Like what?”

“The color.”

“They're red. So is the soil that I can see.”

“Yes, red and dusty. Filled with iron, I'd guess. This is old country. The mountains are eroded here, though they're sharp enough further south, where the tectonic plates collided more recently.”

“Is that significant?”

“Perhaps not in terms of our mission. But it does mean the country could be rich in minerals. Especially in the vicinity of the rivers. These are the roots of mountains we are flying over, exposed anticlines and synclines. I can see granite in those outcrops, quartz and limestone. Traces of other minerals, too—jasper, copper, and more than traces of gold. This planet is bigger than Earth but has a much smaller core. I speculate that core formation hasn't progressed as far, taking fewer heavy elements out of the crust.

“You might have kzinti mines here if the local moons weren't so mineral-rich,” he went on. “In fact I'd say they have mined it sometime in the past—see those low mounds? They look to me like the spoil of mining dumps, but somebody's spread them out as if to hide them. I desire that we had our own ship, with its deep-radar.”

They flew on. A cloud of dust below resolved itself into a group of fleeing animals, vaguely caninoid, certainly carnivorous.

“Pack raiders,” said Ginger. “There must be prey for them.”

“And there's a river,” said Perpetua. “See that line of darker trees?”

“I saw it ten minutes ago. But as we get closer you'll see its bed is dry sand. Dig in it and you probably will find water eventually. I'd guess that, apart from the aftermath of the occasional cloudburst, the rivers in this country flow underground.”

“There's a big hole.”

“And there are others—see, they are in a line. I'd say it's a series of roof collapses in a big cave system. Mines and caves—they probably join up… I would expect more vegetation. It seems to be concentrated around the riverbeds. Perhaps they divert water from outlying areas with underground tunnels, to grow heavier cover?”

“Maybe that's another reason we don't see kz’eerkti. They'd use the cave lines for travel, too.”

“How far would cave lines reach? I suppose that's like asking: How long is a river? But when you look there are a lot of sinkholes, and they do seem to follow lines. Still, collapsed tunnels would transport water.”

“Yes. And the lines don't look entirely natural. There are a lot of odd things about this planet.”

“Want to land and investigate?”

“Not yet, thanks! We'd better get the big picture first.”

Ginger crouched forward, ears spreading and knotting, tail rigid. “Let's get a bit of height well before we reach those hills,” he said after a time. “There's something about them…”

“What do you mean?”

“I'm getting something from my ziirgrah now. It's hard to define… but there's a lot more than one pair of eyes looking at us. They're in those hills.”

“They can hardly hurt a car like this with bows and arrows.”

“They are an unknown,” said Ginger. “Don't you think unknown means danger, on a kzinti world to boot? We're going up.”

“All right. And I have suspicions of my own.” The horizon widened dramatically as the car climbed. Perpetua pointed. “See there!”

“By the Fanged God! Stone walls!”

“And see there! Real mining dumps!”

“Warrgh-Churrg hass been falsse with uss. Why did he not tell uss of thesse thingss? Urrrgh!”

“Careful, Ginger!” The hissing in her companion's accent was a danger sign to Perpetua. Outright lying between kzinti was a mortal insult, and, unlike some other mortal offenses, such as open taunts and mockery, the worse because it was rare. “If he has been economical with truth, so have we… Calm, my friend.”

“S-sorry. But he must have known. Satellitess would have shown. And these have been here long.”

“There's no point in hanging about up here. We'll have to go down,” said Perpetua after they had examined the scene for a while.

“They'll see it's a kzinti car.”

“But if a human gets out of it? And a human female should look especially harmless.”

“It's a risk for you.”

“We're paid to take risks. Should we take her down slowly? Give them a chance to get out of the way?”

“Or a chance to prepare some really nasty surprise for us?”

“We've detected nothing on the instruments. But descending slowly might show we mean no harm.”

“If you were fighting the kzinti on a kzinti planet,” said Ginger, “and you saw a kzinti craft descending, fast or slow, would you think it meant no harm?”

“I take your point. But look at that!”

“A statue! Of a kzin!”

“Not just a kzin. See the length of the fangs?”

“Does that mean anything?”

“It might. The God has such fangs. I don't understand… Perhaps we could broadcast an audio signal to them,” said Ginger. “Tell them we come in peace. If the translator knows enough of the language yet.”

“I think I know more of the language than the translator.”

The car descended, its bullhorn shouting a message. Perpetua, in a white robe with narrow gold edging, which covered her body armor, alighted. The car rose and remained hovering above her, beyond the reach of primitive weapons. One hand upraised in a peculiar gesture, Perpetua walked toward the dark, rectangular apertures in the stone wall.

At first everything seemed deserted. Then, cautiously, a small group of men appeared. Ginger, watching from above, saw them exchange a complex pattern of arm movements, and, gathered round Perpetua, move back into the structure. He waited. In ancient reflex his fur rose and fell to compensate for the movement of his breathing. Then Perpetua's face appeared on the communicator.

“Come down,” she said. “Their leaders are here, and I think I've convinced them you're foederati—an ally. They seem prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt for the moment. Bring no weapons but your w'tsai. They expect that. Keep your communicator on. Tread carefully. We are being met by none other than Marcus Augustus himself.”

VI

They were led by two humans, one introduced as Marcus Augustus, in white robes bordered with purple strips. Others followed, carrying long knives, and other things, hidden under clothes, that were plainly weapons. “What is that?” Ginger asked Marcus Augustus, pointing at the statue.

“Why, your Feline god of course. We promised to give him worship in our Pantheon in return for certain favors.”

“Fair enough,” Ginger mused. “There are kdaptists who have become Christians. And did he actually grant those favors?”

“Obviously. We are here and alive.”

“How did you know the Fanged God looked like that?”

“Some of our slaves make statues of him for kzinti nobles.”

“I see… I think,” said Ginger, “that perhaps I am beginning to understand a little more.”

Marcus Augustus nodded and moved ahead.

“I see at least three classes of humans here,” said Ginger to Perpetua.

“Classes?”

“Yes. A concept we got to know fairly well on Wunderland. We haven't exactly been top dogs—top cats?—the whole time, you know. You get to recognize these things. The humans in white and purple are the bosses, of course. The ones with the checkered trousers and the funny hair seem an intermediate class. And there are slaves.”

“Slaves?”

They were led out the far side of the building, which proved startlingly small. Now they were moving though a mass of closely spaced trees, the needle foliage obscuring the sky. It was a tight fit for Ginger in spots.

“Yes. Look at their clothes. More importantly, look at their gait. I may know more about some aspects of human society than you, and I would say this is not one of your democracies. And if they're fighting a war against modern kzinti with the odd patchwork of technology we've seen so far, I'm not surprised. You don't fight a species war with majority resolutions.

“But slave societies are always looking for more slaves,” he continued. “They may see us in that category. Not me, perhaps. If they know anything about kzinti they'd know we don't make slaves. But you… who knows? And by human standards of beauty you are attractive. A good prize. Keep your weapon handy.”

“By human standards of beauty? I suppose that's a compliment?”

“Personally I like long whiskers, and fur with a pleasing alternation of orange and yellow stripes, among other things. Four nicely shaped teats help, too, and muscular haunches, not to mention the right smell. But be alert.”

Marcus Augustus halted them, glanced at the sky, took a step to the side, and disappeared.

Ginger's ears opened like Chinese parasols. The man had walked inside a tree.

No; a colony of trees, grown together.

It was a really tight fit getting in. Warrgh-Churrg very likely didn't know about this; an uninvited kzin entering here would not be seen again, except possibly as a rug.

“We kept records,” Marcus Augustus said, “and the Jotoki gave us better books than scrolls and wooden boards for writing on. Our ancestors were the Ninth Legion, the Hispania. You don't seem surprised.”

“I guessed it might be that,” said Perpetua. “The legion that marched north into Scotland—ah, Caledonia—from Hadrian's Wall and was never seen again.”

“You know that!” Marcus Augustus jumped forward, clasping Perpetua's arms with both hands. “But… with time-dilation effects… from Earth's point of view… I'm not sure, but it must have been thousands of years ago!”

“About two thousand five hundred years, almost.”

“Then—Does Rome still stand? Our battles were not in vain? We led the felines away?”

“She is still a great city, but much has changed.”

“Was Rome conquered?”

“Not by the kzinti. Only by other humans. And the Human Empire in space that defeated the kzinti is the heir of the empire of Rome. You see I know your language.”

“I suppose Earth has got old.”

“Old enough to build spaceships of her own. We come from a colony at Earth's nearest star.”

“That is good to hear. And the felines?”

“We fought long wars. We won. Now some, like my companion here, are foederati. Didn't your people recruit Germans? But you spoke of time dilation. You know how time is related to the speed of light?”

“Of course. The Jotoki taught our ancestors… How could you have traveled so far?”

“We travel faster than light.”

“It cannot be done!”

“It is how we beat the kzinti. They were a great empire when the leading edge of their wave of conquest reached Earth and its colony worlds and attacked them. We almost perished. Then the hyperdrive came to us.”

“I cannot think you are lying. If you were but a kzinti puppet you would not know so much about us.”

“So what happened?”

“Do you wish to hear the story firsthand?”

“Firsthand?”

“I told you. We—and the Jotoki—have good records.”

He led them to another room in the underground complex, inviting Perpetua to recline on a human-sized couch. Other couches were pushed together for Ginger. Somehow well-used libraries have something of the same atmosphere in every culture. He touched a panel and a screen came to life.

“Behold Maximus Gaius Pontus of senatorial rank, strategos of the Hispania.”

A man with an aquiline nose, a peculiar mark burnt between his eyebrows, sat in a carved wooden chair, speaking into a camera.

VII

This record is for posterity. Wherever that may be. At least I need not fuss with scribe and scroll, or fear that mouse or termite shall devour this disk. I will begin when I traveled north with a bulla of authority to take over the Ninth Legion at Hadrian's Wall.

It was, I thought, a remote (Ha! Remote!) and desolate place, though I traveled north toward Caledonia in some comfort. I had campaigned in far worse conditions. There were towns at first, with stone buildings. Then villages, then straggling huts, and finally just the carven milestones and tombstones beside the road. A draft of replacements, specialists, and some civilians accompanied me and my escort.

Old Crassus was a hard taskmaster to the convoy. He had to be. The civilians and women traveling with us in creaking wains were a hindrance and a peril. We did not let the emptiness of the land deceive us into thinking that we were unobserved. We knew the land was alive though it seemed desolate, and we avoided or hastened through limestone country for we knew it meant caves.

With the legionaries not only singing their usual interminable marching songs about the venereal charms of Lalarge, but with women actually present, there were potential discipline problems. Crassus routed women out of their lines when we made camp at night, stuck to our predawn starts, and generally made himself exceptionally hated even for a ducenarius. He was as tough an old stick of gnarled vinewood as his own cudgel, and I had little to do but look impressive. I also began dictating an account for the old man to Publius, my secretary.

We saw nothing really strange, apart from moving lights in the northern sky: some like drifting stars, some larger and nearer, one huge like a second moon. Sometimes they formed patterns. No one, including the veterans and merchants who knew this country, had seen anything like them before, but at that time they did not trouble us. We were more concerned with robbers and broken men nipping at our heels, or even attacking in force if there were enough of them or if the Scots had landed to encourage them against us. But we reached the wall at Borcovicus with little trouble, apart from a few arrows fired into the camp one night.

Winter is the defining fact about the wall. The climate is even worse than the rest of Britain, with its cold drizzling rain so many days. On the wall you have wind-driven sleet month after month, and dream of walking in the sun under a purple sky in the olive-groves and vineyards of Tuscany, or quaffing the wine of Melita amid the bee-pastures of its flowers (though I have seen more than purple skies since then). Troops from Germany regard it as a soft billet after the winters they have there, but for Spaniards like the Ninth it was very much a hardship posting. They had done their best to modify it with baths and barbers and brothels, but they wore padded woolens under their armor and shivered.

Still, the bathhouses were a credit to several generations of military engineering, and the Principia was well lined with woven rugs. Further, the day after our arrival was actually fine, with blue skies and wide views. Those rolling hills of red and brown heather had a kind of beauty under the sun.

The prefect, Bassus Septimus, was the type I expected: weather-beaten and wind-bitten, eyes permanently narrowed from squinting across heather and into sleet, an old sandal-leather man. He had a keen eye for his own comfort but he was a competent veteran who knew the land. I had seen plenty of the type in Gaul. The officers and senior centurions I met were much the same. Some think our officers are fops and amateurs, but these of the frontiers were not, and those who think that way might find it difficult to explain how we have ruled an empire of four thousand cities and forty-four provinces with swords, spears, and animal power.

The men were legionaries, and when you have said that you have said all. They were the drilled, disciplined troops of an empire that was an island of civilization in a world that was a welter of barbarism. They were versatile soldiers and engineers, who could fight barbarians or other Romans by land or sea, build walls and siege engines which I then thought gigantic, drain marshes, drive roads and bridges through wilderness, calculate to a fraction what pay they were owed, fight fires in multistory tenements, plow the land to feed themselves in any climate or distribute food in a famine. Versatile.

I thought that then. How much more do I think it now!

Some said we ruled the world, but we senior officers knew better: We had silks from China and merchants' tales from further yet. The Greeks had measured the sphere that is the world and we knew the size of it. That helped me understand much later, but for the moment, if forty-four provinces sounded large, and it was, the Barbaricum, we knew, was larger.

I tried from the start, as they were presented to me, to remember as many names as I might but knew it would take some time to tell the centurions apart: they looked as if they had been hammered from the same metal in the same mold by the same smith; as indeed they had been. Our army was full of such. I knew that later they would become individuals to me. Sooner rather than later, if we saw action.

Bassus took me to the wall. He was worried, which was part of his job, but he was also more bewildered than I had often seen such a one.

“Patrols have disappeared before,” he said. “They go too far and the Picts suddenly decide they would like the armor and weapons of the metal men. Or they run into a few boatloads of those cursed Gaels from Hibernia. But sooner or later we always hear from our spies what happened.

“Anyway, the local Picts are on their way to being civilized—we've sent enough punitive expeditions to teach them that attacking the metal men was not a good idea, and I can drink with the local chiefs without all of us keeping our hands on our swords or even needing a poison-taster. It's become not much more than a bit of sport for us to fire arrows at each other when they come to steal blades from the ditch.

“Now, nothing. No patrols returned, no spies, and no Picts. We have a frontier scout force beyond the wall and no word from that either, though of course it's sometimes gone for weeks at a time. That wolf pack hardly drills like Praetorians—I commanded an ordo of them a long time ago—but they know the country and they fear nothing in it. If it was an attack by the Caledoni they'd report it as such. That's what they're there for. This is something different.

“Also, the spymasters and political officers who work among the Northern tribesmen know their business. They don't last long otherwise.

“Look!”—he gestured across the vast sweep of heather—“not a wisp of smoke anywhere. There are Pictish villages beyond those hills. Normally on a day like this you can see the smoke of their fires. But they've cleared off. No word. I don't know why, unless the tribes are gathering in the highlands for some sort of mass descent.”

“Would they be capable of such organization?”

“Did Varus ever wonder such a thing?”

I had spoken of Varus with the old man and I wondered now that his name still seemed to keep cropping up after more than a century. Perhaps it haunted every frontier commander. I wondered how often it was mentioned on the Rhine, or in those distant red deserts of sand where our legions wait for the Parthians or Persians.

“Anyway, they're gone without a word,” he continued. “After the patrols we'd lost I wasn't taking any chances. I sent a strong force to investigate, with orders to turn back at the first suspicion of trouble and not to march north beyond sight of our beacons. They reported the Pictish villages deserted. Nothing else, except those lights in the sky.”

“I thought you always saw them in these parts,” I said.

“That's the aurora borealis, the northern glow. The further north you go in Caledonia the more you tend to see it, in winter anyway, but it's nothing like these. These moving stars are new.”

“Pictish gods?”

“I've been a soldier a long time. I've never seen gods like that.” He too had the brand of Mithras on his brow and knew the mysteries. “We have all sorts of religions here, even Jews and the fish-worshipping Christians. Gods from Spain and Syria and Melita and places only the gods themselves know. But no one has a god that is a light traveling in the sky. Some of them are frightened, I think, and they'd show it, if they weren't more frightened of me and their centurions.”

I didn't like the idea of a legionary frightened by anything but his own superiors. It should be what the philosophers and logicians call a contradiction in terms. “So what do you think?”

“Since it's futile to speculate about gods, I speculate about men, which may be just as futile. I think what I told you: that the tribes are gathering for a massive attack southwards. If they breach the wall, there's nothing to stop them before Eboracum. And that's not much more than a shell, now that we've brought the Ninth here. They'd take it. Then they'd either straggle back to Caledonia with their booty or they'd go on. I think they'd go on.”

“Why?”

“You don't fire siege ballistas at a hare in a field. An attack to punch through the wall isn't just to plunder the northern marches and return. They'd be aiming for Londinium and the channel—to chuck us right out of Britannia. It would be more than brigandage and piracy, it would be politics. If the Gauls cooperated with them, and the Germans…” He made an eloquent gesture.

“The Britons tried it themselves once,” I reminded him. “It didn't do them any good. Two legions brought them to bay and wiped them out.”

He had been in Britain longer than I and knew more of its history.

“They were disunited and had bad leaders,” he said. “Another attack may be better led. And they know us now. They're not going to flee in panic at the sight of a Testudo, and they know better than to close against a legion with short swords in the field.

“Even if we could beat them in a pitched battle, that wouldn't solve it. If I commanded them, my tactic would be to dodge our field army, and wear down our supply trains with ceaseless harassment. They can live off the land better than we can. Nip off isolated forts and garrisons and ambush the relief forces. Then melt back into the forests and dare us to follow them. Only this time they would be taking cities, not mile castles. Harassment happens all the time in wild country, of course, but think of it on a far bigger scale. Then, when we're scattered and worn down and Londinium says the money's running out and we can't pay our auxiliaries, they launch a main-force attack.”

He waved again to left and right, at the miles of wall marching across the hills and valleys to east and west and out of sight. Here and there the helmets of pacing sentries shone as they caught the sun, seeming to slide atop the stonework. It was new, almost unweathered, and majestic. A colossal statement of the might of Rome.

“Look at the wall itself. Our garrison is stretched from sea to sea, from Luguvallium in the west to Segedunum in the east. Our problem here is the problem of the Empire in miniature: they can attack when and where they choose. We have to try to be strong at all points at once and we can't be. Where is our central reserve?

“We have better tactics and discipline, but we have to spread the grease on the bread very thinly. This wall looks impressive but it's largely a bluff. See that sentry?” He pointed to the glittering bead of a helmet visible above the rampart of the next mile castle. “Twenty men and a decurion are sometimes all we've got in a castle, along with their women and camp followers. We rely on our spies and scouts to warn us when an attack is coming so we can concentrate our forces to meet it. But one real punch, delivered without warning, could go through a weakly garrisoned section like wet parchment. Especially if they had help from the other side—we can't watch all the coast to know what landings may take place beyond our lines. This wall is trying to do something too big for it.”

“And once they were through?”

“We'd attack them from east and west, of course. Cut their communications. We can handle a big attack. But not an all-out attack by all the tribes, and not at too many points simultaneously. I'm not saying they would inevitably throw us out of Britannia if they tried—you know how good our boys are—but they could do a lot of damage, and leave us that much weaker when they've bred up enough to try again.”

“So what do you recommend?”

“Find out whatever is happening and nip it in the bud. One thing on our side is the fact that these tribesmen take a long time to assemble. Not just their people. Even some barbarian chiefs know now that you've got to get a commissariat together for a serious war far from home. That puts a delay on them.

“We've wasted a lot of time already, but I'd say hit them now, at once, with everything we're got. You've got the Ninth Legion. And we're not Picts and Scots. We can march in strength at short notice. Break the back of the thing with one quick stroke. Kill and return.

“Whatever happens,” he went on, “don't let the Caledonians make a massed charge from close by. A long-distance charge across the rocks and heather you can break up with javelins and artillery, perhaps—and we have put a lot of emphasis on making sure the scorpions and other light artillery can be worked quickly. But get a horde of the screaming red-haired devils leaping at you from a quarter-mile away—and they like to hide in ditches and wait for you—and you're in real trouble. More than one Roman formation has come to grief at the wrong end of a Caledonian charge. Men and women, shrieking, half-naked, foam on their mouths. Between you and me—” he lowered his voice, as though we might be overheard in that windy, empty place “—enough of them, and they might give a full legion a hard time.”

“And the flying lights?”

“Maybe they've stuck swans' wings on chariots. I don't know. But I'm sure they're not ready to attack yet. Otherwise we'd see them now. They aren't good at patience. But if we find the tribes mustering and break up an attack before it's delivered, then it's a Triumph for you.”

From the way he said “Triumph” I knew he meant it in the particular as well as the general sense. That could lead to other things. He probably thought that I, like so many of my rank, felt a bit more purple would look well on my cloak and toga; and perhaps he wasn't wrong.

“And if we don't find the tribes mustering?”

“We come home. We've given these loafers of ours a good exercise and we've shown the Picts the reach of civilization.”

So we talked. I repeat this talk because I remembered its arguments many times in later days. I inspected the men as we prepared, and met some of the scouts as they came in. Gaunt, keen-eyed frontier wolves they were, battered and scarred by weather almost as much as by battle, they made me think uneasily on what the philosophers had written, of how luxury and soft living could corrupt, of how Rome was allegedly going soft at the heart. Still, we were its hard edge yet. I thought of the pleasant villas and smiling vales of the south, even here in Britain, of the farms of Tuscany, and reflected that civilized men must be guarded by less civilized ones.

Still, I felt no guilt about relaxing with my officers in the bathhouse that night. We would not, we knew, enjoy them again for some time.

Normally, despite the prefect's bravado, it took a legion time to prepare for a march. Six thousand fighting men and their auxiliaries are not easily uprooted. But the Ninth had only just arrived. It was rested but not settled down, and anticipating any possible siege the granaries and warehouses behind the wall were kept filled (crucifixion was a deterrent to pilfering). It could be quickly resupplied from them.

So once again, a few days later, it was our usual predawn start. A whole legion this time, the aquilifer with the Eagle and the significers in their leopard skins bearing the legion's battle honors at the front of the column. (Though not quite at the front of the force—we had scouts ahead of us. Unlike Varus.)

The wall appeared even more imposing looking back at it from the north, without the straggle of civilian dwellings along its southern side: a grim, hard rampart of civilization. New as it was, it seemed to have been standing since time began. And Mithras knows, a legion marching with its Aquila and its standards going before was a sight to see!

The country looked superficially the same as the hills and heather moors to the south, but felt different. There was, if you allowed it to get to you, a feeling of nakedness, knowing that we were outside the wall, beyond the Roman World. Even that column of armored men looked small in the vast purple heather country, under that sky. It had been different in Gaul, where there was no such obvious rampart, though perhaps crossing the Rhine would have felt like this. For a moment the sight of the wall marching east and west to the distant hilltops and out of sight filled me with pride, as when, a boy on my first visit to Rome, I had seen the great buildings of the capitol. And again I felt, as I had then, a sudden stab of feeling like despair and death, a feeling the poetry of Virgil echoed for me: “Man can do no more!” The god of the Jews was gaining converts in Rome now, I had heard, and I thought I knew why. We had need of a god to save the world, more powerful than our little godlings of sanitation and so forth, our pantheon of deceased emperors… I set my head to the north, and I think I betrayed nothing in my face.

We were in Britannia Barbara, part of the encircling, ever-threatening Barbaricum, where anything might happen.

But nothing did, for the rest of that day. We passed the Pictish villages, with their cold hearths, some dead livestock around and a few hungry dogs and wildcats scavenging. I was interested to see that the Caledonian wildcats, great fanged things, easily kept the dogs at bay. Crassus said it was odd the Picts had abandoned their livestock. Our scouts looked for tracks, but too much rain had fallen for anything to be made out apart from their general route further into the north and the hills. We had the scouts, both on foot and mounted, and the auxiliaries, spread out far and wide. We saw and heard nothing human.

We didn't have to entrench ourselves that night. There was hard-standing for a camp a long day's march north of the Wall. (Though calculating a day's march was fiendishly difficult in that country, where the sun seemed to shine almost all night in summer and was gone as soon as it had arisen in winter. As a worshipper of Sol Invictus I had wondered sometimes why that happened. Now I know!) There was a ditch and walls ready for our use if we supplied the stakes for the palisades and our soldiers used their entrenching tools to repair the erosion. There were a few sheep grazing inside it, and in that uncanny emptiness and silence we were glad to see them as tokens of the world we knew. The cooks soon had them on spits.

It grew dark. The night sentries were posted. A nearly full-strength legion and its auxiliaries, six thousand fighting men, plus a well-trained and armed servant for every four men and a straggle of camp followers who could also heft arms if necessary, need not normally fear attack—rather anything in the rest of the world should fear them—but if the Caledoni attacked in force, who knew? And I thought again of Varus.

With Crassus, the other senior officers, and the pilus primus I inspected the lines. Scouts from outlying pickets came and went. We had brought extra scorpions and set them up around the camp.

The Picts attacked at dusk. There was a shower of arrows and confused shouting and screaming from an outlying picket. The men were standing to and ready. Three cohorts went for them and drove them into a prepared killing ground. They charged—they always charge—straight into our scorpions and as they floundered in the ditch we poured bolts and arrows into them.

I did not, I thought, have Varus's problem. It was no overwhelming force that attacked us, but an ill-armed, ill-commanded rabble from several different tribes. When I had some of the survivors brought before me and questioned, they seemed confused and terrified. They claimed we had attacked them, and carried off their people. They had attacked an entrenched legion because they were desperate. They must, I thought, be desperate indeed. It made no sense. Still, a couple of crucifixions would do them no harm and the rest would earn something in the slave market. Then the prefect pointed.

For a moment I thought it was a fiery serpent. Then I realized it was but a line of torches carried by men: but a long line. The Caledoni had crept upon us in the dark in force while a few of their number created a diversion.

I gave thanks that we were prepared, and by no means taken by surprise. But no battle against a wolfish people like the Caledoni, fighting at a time and place of their choosing, is a certain thing. And as a strategos should not, I fretted myself at that moment with fears about events I could no longer control. What if this was but a greater diversion, while other barbarians attacked the wall?

I looked impassive enough, as I rode forward through the camp with my staff officers and gallopers. Drums were rattling with the trumpets now, and as missiles and bolts began to fly I saw the shields going up as a testudo was formed. I gave thanks again for those centurions who needed no more than a word of command. The testudo would give protection from the arrows, spears, and the lighter missiles.

Then Roman and Caledoni stopped together.

The stars had changed again. Great lights moved in the sky, forming strange designs. Across a drifting cloud there appeared the picture of a Roman soldier in full armor. It was projected, I know now, by an ordinary sword-light, but the effect on all may be imagined. The gods themselves, both sides thought, had intervened. We Romans accepted this with pleasure and surprise, but also as something no more than our right, and certainly not as something to break discipline over. I knew Mithras was a good god for soldiers and was gratified. The Caledoni, as might be expected, too terror-stricken to run, stood wailing.

The testudo moved upon them, then dissolved into men with flickering swords. Rank upon rank, the legionaries advanced like the vast single-minded engine they were. They cheered and at the command surged forward. But it was a disciplined surge. The javelins of the front ranks flew in a dark mass, their swords flickered stabbing like the tongues of vipers. Crassus had not had them blacken the blades for night work, thinking the enemy ought to see the steel, and Crassus had been right.

As the Picts went down squealing, I thought: “This will buy peace south of the wall, peace for Eboracum and Londinium. I have vindicated Hadrian's decision to build the wall.” Hadrian was reported dead but his successor might appreciate my contribution to the imperial numen.

Then the Jotoki ships began to descend. With their double torsion, scorpion bolts can penetrate iron armor, if not the molecularly bonded ceramics the Jotoki used. The Jotoki were forbearing. They burned the bolts in flight with sword-lights until we had no ammunition left, then began to talk to us. They fired a plasma jet to emphasize their words.

The Jotoki had done this, or something like this, before. They picked up a fair number of our womenfolk, and civilians, specialists, and other auxiliaries from the wall, and some Pictish villagers.

They say there are Roman soldiers garrisoning forts in China, who found their way there after their detachments were cut off by the Persians. It is easy to change masters when you have no choice in the matter.

Perpetua held up a hand. Marcus Augustus paused the film.

“This makes no sense,” she said. “I have been searching the records in our ship's library. It's had all the major encyclopedias read into it. We know the Ninth Legion, the Hispania, marched north of the wall—it was newly built then—into Caledonia and was never seen again. But we know nothing of Jotoki raids along Hadrian's Wall.”

“What should we expect a primitive Earth historian to say?” asked Ginger. “That giant starfish came from the sky and picked them up? He'd be kept in a little room at the top of the castle. House, I mean.”

“True enough. Perhaps it does make a kind of sense. Hadrian's Wall was suddenly extended and fortified about the time the Ninth Legion is said to have marched north. Then, after quite a short time, it was abandoned, and another work, the Antonine Wall, was built further north again. That was abandoned, too, after quite a short time, and the Romans fell back on Hadrian's Wall.

“The Romans put a huge effort into fortifying it and manning it—for about three hundred years. I gather scholars still disagree as to why. Maybe somebody did say something. And what of all the magic surrounding Arthur? Merlin and the flying dragons? And the Celtic myths? Flying, enchantments, magic weapons? Chesterton wrote in his history: 'Suddenly the soldier of civilization is no longer fighting Goths but Goblins.' After wars and invasions and race migrations, centuries of near-illiteracy, changes of languages, in a couple of non-technological millennia, what else might you expect to remain by way of memory of a Jotoki recruitment effort?”

“Millennia,” said Marcus to Perpetua. “Two and a half thousand Earth years, you said.”

“Yes.”

“About nine hundred have passed for us, as far as we can tell. We traveled fast.”

“Then you didn't come directly here?” Ginger broke in. Marcus glanced at him but did not deign to reply.

“That is why your language has changed so little,” said Perpetua quickly. “That and the fact you had no tongues of human invaders to overlay it. On Earth, six hundred years after your ancestors left, there were still fragments of the Western Empire extant in France. Latin was long the language of government and scholarship—where there was government and scholarship—and of the Church in Europe. The ruler in Ravenna still styled himself 'King of Rome, Emperor of the West,' and the Eastern Empire still had centuries of life ahead. You are almost contemporaries of Boethius.”

“We are still Romans! However far we have traveled! In the Mithraeum the Mysteries are still enacted. We honor our various gods. There are Jews in our ranks still, and fish-worshippers, but we have kept faith with Rome.”

The picture resumed.

You to whom I leave this story will know much of the ships that travel between worlds. I need not tell you of our awe and amazement, our initial disbelief, our wild thoughts that we were dead and in a Hades unlike any we had imagined, as we were taken aboard the great warship that the Jotoki named the Hard Bargainer, and its consort, the Shrewd Merchant, while about us flew as escort the Five Arms of the Wise Trade Councilor. These things you may imagine. But Roman or Caledonian, we were warriors, and we behaved as warriors. The centurions maintained discipline among our legionaries and civilians. The Caledonians wailed and howled in the manner of barbarians, but when they saw it availed them nothing they became tractable.

It was great good fortune that our political officers already knew the Caledonian chiefs and we could speak together. Thinking I had knowledge in the matter the Caledonian chiefs agreed, grudgingly enough, to place themselves under my direction. They, being barbarians, were of course far more overawed than we. But we saw that we were all human and that bound us together. The gold the Jotoki gave us helped, and the glass and beads and mirrors for the women, both Roman and Caledonian.

Meanwhile, we were heading away from Terra, our world, at a speed which the Jotoki told us was close to the speed of light itself, to do battle. The Jotoki had shown us representations of our enemies: great beasts like lions or Indian tigers, but armed as the Jotoki themselves were armed, with weapons of flame, and traveling like the Jotoki through the skies.

We had little love for the Jotoki then, though they fed us and clothed us and spoke to us in our own language (though at first only through images, not daring to confront us in the flesh). But then we realized that something the Jotoki told us many times was true:

Better we fight these felines far away than have them fall upon Terra.

The Jotoki told us first they were taking us to a new world to train us with new weapons and tactics to fight creatures which menaced them and which, if unchecked, would conquer our own world and Rome itself. After the campaign they would, if they were able, return us to our homes. We obviously had no choice but to believe them and obey.

Before we were placed in the chambers of deep sleep the Jotoki began to teach us of the heavens. They explained that they were traders and had taught other races before us. Once, said Jegarvindertsa, who talked to me most, they had tried to spread civilization among the stars.

“ 'Civilization is our business.' Those were the old governor's words, when we marched north to the wall,” I recalled.

“You defend civilization now,” said Jegarvindertsa. “This is but Rome writ large. It has been said there is only one civilization, and all civilized beings are a part of one another, almost as we Jotoki are compound entities. Are you afraid?”

“When I campaigned in Gaul and Caledonia we had short swords and javelins, and our armor was iron and leather. Now… why should I be afraid?” I had seen and tried some of the Jotoki weapons then, and certain of our centurions and other instructors had begun practicing with them.

“Yes, your weapons and armor are very different. But so are your enemies.”

I knew those enemies now. The Jotoki had shown me holographic eidolons of them. We fought for the gold the Jotoki gave us, and we fought because they had really given us no choice. We could hardly march home! But we were also more than mercenaries and slaves. How small and provincial our skirmishes against Germans and Gauls and Picts seemed now!

“Let's get at them!”

“You and your people have learnt a lot in a short time,” said Jegarvindertsa. “If we had found you earlier things might have been very different. As it is, we still might turn the tide. But we have a long way to go. We are close to the speed of light, but still you must pass time in sleep. As you sleep you will learn more.”

I thought then, with my newly acquired way of looking at things, that the Jotoki use of the word “tide” showed they had once been wide-ranging sailors on their own world before they went into space. It was not long since we Romans had come to know of tides. Caesar himself had not understood, during the first Roman expedition to Britannia, the difficulties and opportunities a tidal beach on Oceanus Atlanticus presented. Well, that was not surprising.

Did we sleep long or short? There was a period of black nothingness, and then the chambers that enclosed us were opened, and the Jotoki assembled us on the great deck of the ship. As the men were mustered, Jegarvindertsa led me to the pilot's tower.

There was a jump and a flickering in the image. Centuries had corrupted some of the data.

“This is the story of our forebears' first great battle with the kzinti,” Marcus said. “It is told to all our children. When the Jotoki awoke our fathers from sleep they told them that feline ships were closing upon them.” The picture resumed.

“I think they will board us,” he said.

“Then stop them.”

“That will not be easy. If we were part of a proper fleet, and if we had not lost so many Jotoki in battles already, ship-to-ship battle would be right and proper. But there are too few of us to fight this ship properly. We might engage one or two enemy ships, but if we looked like winning the others would simply use missiles or beams against this ship and we should all perish.”

“What do you intend to do, then?”

“Let them board. We shall not resist them in space with the heavy weapons. Jufadirvanlums might think differently, but they sleep still. We shall not waken them.”

“And then? You would surrender to these monsters?” For a moment I thought it strange that I should be calling other creatures monsters to a Jotok, but I had become used to Jotoki appearance now.

“No. You and we will fight them. We do not like it but we see no other choice. Their numbers are not great and their discipline is not good. We will fire but a few weapons at first, lest they suspect a trap. All, we think, will board, eager for loot.”

“Yes! The new weapons! The plasma jets and beam-rifles!”

“A few. But used inside a spaceship at maximum power they would do too much damage. I know a couple of squads have begun training with them and we will use them on low power, but most of your men must fight them as they know how to fight.”

The sketchy Jotoki resistance at the airlocks was hardly heard as we deployed the troops. I heard one legionary complaining to a centurion: “I thought only condemned criminals fought lions and tigers in the arena.”

And the centurion's answer: “These are not lions or tigers, this is not the arena, and we are not criminals. Now stand firm or feel the weight of my cudgel!”

The ship we traveled in was vast. I thought that the felines who attacked it did not lack courage. It dwarfed their own vessels. They did not know how few Jotoki it contained.

But they did not know it contained the Ninth Legion, either.

Beside me Jegarvindertsa pointed to a screen that monitored their progress.

“See now why I made the resistance so light! They think the few Jotoki that died at the airlock or fled before them were all the armed Jotoki aboard.”

“Explain.”

“They are slinging their weapons. They look forward to slaying the rest of us with fangs and claws alone.”

“They can unsling them again.”

“Yes. And they will do it quickly. But perhaps not quickly enough. This is no open plain where they can watch an enemy approach.”

I had seen many images of the ferocious ones and liked them no better as I watched them on the screen now, marking their approach through the ship's corridors. Like tigers, but larger, heavier, with strange pink tails and mouths full of long fangs. Our trumpets began to sound, and the standards went up. Forward went the aquilifer, bearing the Eagle of the Ninth.

They burst into the troop deck. Trained to count enemy in battle, I saw there were not many more than a hundred, but as they poured in their sheer size and hideous appearance made their numbers seem more than they were.

The sight of our legion, drawn up in armor, halted them. Our trumpets screamed, and a shower of javelins hurtled through the air at them. They moved fast, but not a few of the javelins found their marks. But there was no time for conventional battle tactics. Even as the javelins were still in the air, the legionaries were rushing them.

Few had begun to train with the Jotoki fire-weapons and these, set to the lowest possible charge, they plied manfully against the creatures, filling the ship with black choking fumes and the smell of burnt feline flesh. A full charge of those plasmajets would have destroyed man, Jotok, feline, and probably ship alike.

The battle was terrible. The first rank of legionaries died to a man. I have seen men fight beasts, even lions and tigers, once or twice in the arena, but it was never like this, heads and limbs torn from torsos and flung into the air like rubbish by demons twice the height of men, whose claws flashed like lightning, rending and unstoppable! But the legion and whatever gods they worshipped had taught them to die aright, and they took some felines with them. They stopped the rest from drawing their weapons before the second rank struck. The men of the third rank threw their second javelins into the feline ranks and advanced at the rush. Orders were futile, lost in the screams and roars of men and felines. I thought, even at that moment, that we must have the Jotoki build amplifiers so orders might be given in the chaotic din of battle with such creatures.

Some javelins struck the felines and rebounded broken from their armor and garments. Others, not armored, were pierced by them but came on as unmindful of their wounds as Assyrian lions or German savages. But the javelins bent as they were meant to, and their trailing butts impeded the enemy even as the points tore about within their wounds and made the purple and orange blood spurt. The sheer horror of their appearance and their deafening screams and roars might have made the bravest quail, had they not been legionaries who faced them. I have heard wounded lions snarl and roar to shake the very air but nothing like this.

Then, screaming their battle cries, blood-maddened, the Caledonians poured in. If the kzinti had been beginning to get the measure of Roman tactics, this savage onslaught caught them off-balance. Their claws slashed, sending red human blood up in fountains as they went down, but go down they did.

Oh! the felines proved hard to kill. And oh! the Caledonians died, but what a way to die! How I wished the effete fools who pay to see criminals torn to pieces by beasts had been here! Better still, if they had been thrown into the first rank of the front line!

I saw a knot of legionaries about the aquilifer with the Eagle that swayed above the mass. The kzinti must have sensed it for what it was, for a group of them leapt upon it. The Eagle fell. As commander I knew it was not yet my place to fight hand-to-hand—my job was to direct the battle and to die well if all was lost—but it was hard to hold myself back at that moment. Legionaries in plenty rushed into the slashing claws, their own swords slashing, and a great shout went up from all the ranks as we saw the Eagle of Rome rise above the press again!

The legionaries lacked nothing in death-defying courage, but the Caledonian charge simply passed through them. The felines had their own beam-weapons out now, and one beam-weapon, wielded by a ferocious beast at close quarters, is the equal of many swords and axes. But on the human sides there was ferocity too, and those of our own who had the new weapons flinched no more than did those who had the ancient steel of our fathers.

In the way of all fights, I do not know how long it lasted, but end at last it did. The deck ran deep in blood. Humans, even armored legionaries, had been torn limb from limb. Legionaries lay dead in dozens, Caledonians in hundreds—more than half their men were gone. But all the felines were dead or dying, and their purple and orange blood mixed with the red of the humans. I have always had one weakness: I weep and shake a little after a battle, I know not why. But I wiped the tears away.

The Jotoki mechanisms whined and roared as they strove to clear the air. Our legionary doctors hurried forward to tend the wounded, and so did certain Jotoki.

Other Jotoki hurried to secure the kzinti craft.

“Twenty times five kzinti dead,” said Jegarvindertsa. The Jotoki counted strangely, but any might see that our human dead outnumbered the kzinti several times. “Also we have captured four kzinti spacecraft. There are tadpoles in this fleet's few breeding ponds who will live to join together and grow sentient because of this victory today. Strong and valiant are the legions. Yes, and your barbarians, too.”

“We lost too many. It was a Pyrrhic victory,” I said. The one saving grace, I thought, was that the Caledoni had lost far more than the legions, partly because they had charged into battle without armor. There would be a supply of red-polled widows to keep our men happy.

“You will not have to fight again without modern weapons and armor,” Jegarvindertsa said. “That was the misfortune of war. Be proud that you conquered at all.”

There was no more time for talk then. As always after a battle, my duty was among the wounded, raising their spirits (and indeed with the medicines and physicians of the Jotoki, much more could be done for them than I would ever have believed possible), cheering the surviving legionaries with promises of promotion and decorations, inventorying the stores with the quartermasters, and consoling widows and orphans. We had had a shortage of women previously. Now we had a surplus. I suspected that with our next battle the surplus would grow larger. I also noticed that some of the Caledonian women, now that they had been washed and decently dressed, some in the Romano-British style, were by no means uncomely, with their red hair and their muscles and bodies hardened in their hard country. The first mothers of Rome must have been women like these. The Caledonian chiefs had, sensibly, taken the comeliest women for themselves. A number of these were now among the widows.

I had much to do and learn, and it was some time before I had a chance to talk at leisure with Jegarvindertsa again.

“Next time they board, use gravity traps,” I told him. “Direct them into spaces on the ship where you have previously hidden gravity engines, then activate them and crush them. It will save us men and Jotoki.”

“Did you think of that by yourselves?”

“By myself, yes.”

“We are astonished. We did not think of that. We sorrow we found you so late. We hope we have not found you too late.

“You are warriors yet administrators too. And for primitives you have a remarkable capacity for abstract thought. Who else in a culture with your technological level would have a god of excrement disposal? And a military system with NCOs as its hinge, specialized engineering corps, and books of strategy? To say nothing of the systematized disaster-relief that first interested us in you.”

“We are the heirs of Troy, so Virgil tells us. The Hero Aeneas founded Rome.”

“Yes, that is odd, too. Your art. Something gave your kind more brain than you had any obvious need for. That is true of all spacefaring races, of course. It is one of the Great Mysteries. But you are mystery beyond mystery. In shape and physiology, you are like the kzinti. But in some aspects of mind you are more like us. Our kinds have both tried to be bearers of civilization in a Barbaricum. We are an old race, but we have found traces of other civilizations that rose and perished long ago, across a waste of time which you could not conceive. We did not intend to follow them into oblivion. We had poets and thinkers, once, who wrote of the Jotoki Mission, and celebrated the Jotoki who died to bring civilization to barbaric planets. We thought well of ourselves. We brought happiness and prosperity to many worlds.”

“Where are those worlds now? Will they not come to our help?”

“The kzinti have them for hunting territories and their inhabitants as slaves or prey. We unleashed huge evil on the galaxy. It would be better if we had never been.”

“You did not know.”

“We should have. We had the science, the civilization. We should have had the foresight. There is a great virtue for traders: strict attention to business. And there is a great vice of traders: too little attention to anything else. We learned too late that in our way we were as unbalanced as the kzinti.”

“But now you know better?”

“Yes. Too late. We have lost too many. We fight a rearguard action without hope as the kzinti devour all we created… We did not do it all for ourselves, you know, though profit was the engine that drove us. Yes, we wanted wealthy and prosperous customers and trading partners—was that evil? Prosperous customers rather than slaves? We lifted species from savagery and barbarism, added a cumulative total of countless billions of years to the lives of individuals alien to us, created security and happiness… our mistake was to assume that given knowledge and instruction, the kzinti would be the same as other species.”

“What can one legion and the people of a few Pictish villages do against such an enemy?”

“You are an… experiment. Some of us wanted no more alien mercenaries. If you are good enough soldiers to beat the kzinti, and faithful, we may recruit more of you.”

“Raid Earth again, you mean? To enslave more?”

“No. We are not slavers, however we may seem to you. We recruited you as we did because we had little choice in the matter. When we return to your Earth we will release you from our service with fair pay—enough to make you more than rich for life—and trust you to recruit for us. We know that enslaved conscripts do not fight as well as freely enlisted men.”

That was true enough. It was one of the principles on which Rome had built her Empire.

“Besides the gold, you will have the products of our science and medicine. And I think I can promise that you will be rich in stories to tell your children.”

That was worth pondering too. Rome with Jotoki weapons would be invincible indeed! Providing—and here a thought came to chill the heart—providing its enemies were no more than men! But I thought of another matter.

“By the time we see Earth again, we will be too old to make sense,” I said.

“We trust not. First, you will spend time in deep sleep if needs be, and will not age. Second, we travel at near the speed of light. There is an effect at such speeds so that time seems to change. You will find when you set your feet on Terra again that less time has passed for you than might seem… Now, we must leave this region before kzinti reconnaissance returns.”

But when we spoke again things had changed. There was news of other battles, more feline victories. It seemed that we would not be going home yet. When I spoke with Jegarvindertsa a few weeks later there was a change in their manner. There was less talk of possibilities of victories, or even of prolonging the war, now, more talk of fleeing. “We found you too late,” they said. “There is nothing left on the ledger but to try to save some last poor remnant of our kind. We do not know if we can keep faith with you.”

I showed no feeling or emotion. I had my sword by my side, and it occurred to me that the best policy would to plunge it into them then and there. Some of us had learnt something of spaceflight by then, and I thought that with a scratch crew we might still be able to get the ship back to Earth. Take the consorts by surprise and destroy them without warning.

Men had achieved such things before. I remembered the Greek story of Xenophon's march to the sea, of Odysseus and his wanderings, fighting perils and monsters. Better to die trying to get home than be lost in the stars forever. But I would try to learn a little more before I struck.

“Where will you go?” I asked.

“The universe is big.”

“So I have learned. Would they follow?”

“We can accelerate to near light-speed. But so can the kzinti. The longer start we have the better.”

“Where will you go ultimately? Would you head for another star cluster? Another galaxy?” I talked of these things easily now.

“It would take too long. Even if we put ourselves into hibernation, as we usually do, the air would gradually leak out through the hulls, atom by atom. Our automatics would fail, micrometeorites and free hydrogen atoms would erode hull material at last. In any event, our life systems would eventually disintegrate. So would our bodies, in hibernation or not. And so, at last, would the hulls of our ships. We can travel far, but there is a limit.”

“Where will you go?” I pressed them.

“Our friend, if we do not tell you, you cannot reveal it under torture.”

“I am a Roman still. I do not fear torture.”

“Forgive us, but you have not experienced kzinti torture. In a matter as important as that they would not hesitate a moment. Also you know they have telepaths—think what it means to be tortured by a telepathic race, and pardon us if we do not entrust you with our most priceless secret. But perhaps we are not clear yet ourselves. We must seek among the stars for the furthest that it is practical for us or our tadpoles' tadpoles to reach.”

“You will go and leave us here? To fight the kzinti alone and without hope?”

“No. Only a few of us will go. Enough, just, to crew the ships and care for the tadpoles. The rest remain to delay the kzinti.”

“I see. Like Horatius.”

“Who?”

“A hero of our people.”

“If we defeat the kzinti, we buy not only the survival of our kind, but also the survival of your kind, perhaps. Conquer them, and you will have the ships to go where you will. Back to your own planet, perhaps. The kzinti will strike your kind sooner or later, but if it is late enough, perhaps your kind will have science enough to fight them.”

“You really believe that?” I thought of the onagers and javelins of the legions and of Rome attacked by kzinti weaponry. Hannibal and his elephants had been hard enough to subdue. And the cold hand that had touched my heart at a certain vision touched it again—kzinti falling upon Earth, upon the towns and cities of the Empire, of legions marching out with eagles and trumpets and small swords and javelins to fight sword-lights and plasma cannon. All the Empire, all Terra, turned into a vast arena for humans to be hunted by beasts. Forever. Delay them, he said. But could we delay them or divert them long enough?

“All things are possible,” Jegarvindertsa said. “You have barely begun to discover metal alloys, but your military and civil organization are amazingly advanced—we traded with many primitive races and we know potential when we see it.”

Their strange eyes with their pupils like crosses looked deep into my eyes. Somehow—perhaps Mithras Himself spoke to me—I knew that I stood at one of those moments when the decision of a soldier may change all the world. Mithras had been a soldier.

“You have seen the star maps and you know we speak truth.” Jegarvindertsa said. “Your world, your Terra, lies that way. We intend to flee. We think the kzinti will pursue us. We will draw them away from your Terra, a sector of space which they would otherwise reach within a few generations real-time.”

“But you have shown us how the kzinti advance everywhere.”

“In some directions faster than others. But the longer the kzinti are delayed, the better the chance we will have of escape. Which means leading their empire away from your Earth. That is also buying time for your kind to develop defenses of your own.”

“Spaceships? Beam-weapons?”

“One day, perhaps. Why not? Your kind have the brain for arches and aqueducts, maps and mathematics and even a bureaucracy. That means, we think, you have the brain to build spaceships. We do not know why the gods gave your kind—plains-dwelling apes—so much brain, though they also gave it to us, colonial amphibians, and to the cursed cats. There is more brain in each of us than you—or we, or they—ever needed for mere survival. But if it happened once, if can happen again. Perhaps it is a condition of amphibianism.”

“But we are not amphibians! We are not frogs or sea creatures!”

“You have poetry, art, philosophy, as well as arches and aqueducts and armies. You have religion. That makes you amphibians. That is why we argued against Jufadirvanlums that you be recruited.”

“The felines appear to have all those things too.”

“Yes. That is a part of the mystery. Those barbarians have a glimmering of something else as well. We have tried to civilize them and failed. Now nothing remains for us but to fight to ward off our final destruction by them. We, and the species we brought forward into the light, are doomed to be but their slaves and prey. And yet, perhaps, one day far beyond our vision, you may be the agent that…” They stopped, and their strange eyes took on a yet stranger cast, as though they were focused upon some faraway light.

“Yes?”

“Perhaps, perhaps… one day… you will civilize them. We cannot.”

“We have civilized Greeks, and Gauls, and Britons. A few Caledonians. Even a few Germans. But for how long? I do not know.”

“You are physically more like the kzinti than we are.”

“I am surprised you recruited us, then.”

The strange mood was broken. Jegarvindertsa laughed.

“My dear Maximus, that was precisely the reason we did recruit you. That and the fact we were desperately short of mass for our fighting units anyway. But it was the argument we—that is, this five-unit of the Jotoki, comprising the group-individual that is Jegarvindertsa—put before the poor makeshift that has replaced our trade council.”

The strange mood was broken. But I left my sword sheathed. I knew now what the Ninth Legion had to do. The old man had often spoken to me when I was a child, of the ultimate duty of dying for civilization. I wished my task had been so simple and easy.

Again the picture jumped.

A strategos does not lead a Legion on foot. Nor did I now. For all that had changed, and for all the Jotoki learning machines had taught us, our legionaries still remembered something of Roman tactics: scrupulous preparation, and then a thrust in the right place—use the sword for the thrust into the belly, don't waste time slashing at the armored head and chest. We dealt with the felines in the same way. The vanguard of their ships rushed at us, and we passed between them to attack from behind.

The kzinti gravity polarizers were as good as ours, as were their beam-weapons, but when the legions had fought barbarians it had been feet and hooves against feet and hooves, and swords and spears against swords and spears. When, with their scout ships and fighters smashed, we closed on their line of capital ships, it reminded me of tales of fighting in the arena.

We had learnt not to attack the heavily armored weapons turrets, or the strengthened prows, but to burn into the sides. Damage in the vacuum of space multiplies itself. The first felines I saw then were bodies flying into space when my beams tore into the semi-globular belly of a great feline warship.

We cut their line at two points, using their own speed against them and allowing their van to fly on until it could return and join the battle. By the time they did, the line was in chaos.

Human barbarians often keep attacking though it is plain they have lost the tactical upper hand, and have no concept of a fighting, strategic withdrawal, fighting instead as a furious disorganized mass, each unable to support the other. The kzinti were much the same.

There were gaps in our ranks—there always are after a battle—when we flew back to the carrier, but there was wine and women and feasting too. The Jotoki poured freshly minted gold on us, still valuable even though they had a technology for transmuting metals. I had read Caesar's Commentaries and imagined how he would have relished being here, lecturing the Jotoki on how to improve their space tactics and quietly plotting to take them over. It was then that I began to write this commentary of my own.

And we fought. Many times, crossing distances I cannot grasp even now, to strike in unexpected new places. And we won, many times.

Not always.

We must have missed a survivor once, who told the tale.

Finally we found kzinti who were ready for us.

Then, with our fleet slashed by kzinti claws, it was ground fighting again. We of the Ninth—the Caledonian cales were mostly expended by then—and what Jotoki could be spared.

A couple of the Jotoki ships, almost empty, with only the barest shadows of Jotoki crews, escaped. We bought them that chance of escape at the cost of our own. I do not know where they went. But perhaps they led the kzinti away from Terra as they promised. Perhaps they escaped and bred their little swimmers again.

We were left behind to divert and delay the kzinti like Horatius on the ground, defending the abandoned hulks of most of the Jotoki ships. Jegarvindertsa were one of the Jotoki who remained with us. The kzinti had withdrawn at last, but we knew they would soon be back, with fresh legions of their own.

Again the picture flickered and jumped.

“We have lost everything and there is no hope. We die here on a strange, cruel world. Well, we can still die like Romans. We are not strangers to hardness. I suppose we had better kill the women and children first. We will not give them to the beasts as if they were criminals in the arena.”

“It may not be necessary to die at all,” said Jegarvindertsa. “We still have other weapons.”

“I see none. Can we fight the felines with short swords?”

“No. With gold.”

“I do not understand.”

“We will hide. Human and Jotok together. There is gold on this world, and we know the kzinti like gold as do so many species.”

I did not understand.

“This world has underground rivers.” I did not then know how he knew that, but I accepted that he did. “Many could hide in the wilderness, where kzinti believe nothing could live, for a long time.”

“The felines would hunt us out. I do not want to die like criminals I have seen, fleeing and hunted by lions in pits and cellars under the arena.”

“There are caves. We Jotoki might even breed there. It is unfortunate we are unlikely to have more than a little time to deepen them further.”

That gave me a thought. I have seen the mines on my Sardinian estates. “Use your gravity engines, then. With them and Jotoki weapons you can break and move great masses of rock very quickly. You can enlarge the caves, join them up, and you can dump the spoil in the sea where it will not alert the enemy.”

The kzinti returned in strength. We hid and fled. The kzinti hunted and captured and killed as they might. And then they began to see this world had much rich land that supported the game and hunting they craved. Perhaps they thought us all dead.

Another gap. Then a new speaker took up the story. He looked enough like Maximus Gaius Pontus to be his son—Perpetua realized he almost certainly was his son—but, like a number she had just seen, with red in his hair, that suggested something other than Latin in his parentage.

Gold was left out for the kzinti. It came to be seen that when and where gold was left out, the kzinti would take it and not attack. That was the first real victory.

There were other things we left—platinum, precious gems, carvings… slowly, the kzinti began to take it for granted that these would be left for them in certain places. A human bringing them would be unmolested, and allowed to depart in peace. It took decades. It was the first modification of total war…

“Total peace was too much to expect,” said Marcus Augustus. “We settled for the best that could be hoped for: low-intensity, contained conflict along defined borders while we bought peace elsewhere.

“But there were two things to note: We brought the kzinti gold and other tribute on our terms. We were not slaves but, tacitly at least, trading partners as well as game. And slowly, slowly, as they became used to luxury, they became dependent on us, used to the luxuries we could provide, even as they hunted us. At last, it was our artisans—brave ones, those—who offered themselves as slaves and who installed hypocausts to warm their floors in the long nights. Over the centuries, we have got as far as you have seen. A fragile, unspoken, imperfect modus vivendi far too fragile ever to put to a real test.”

VIII

Marcus Augustus looked steadily at Perpetua. “And now men make allies of the kzinti?” His expression did not indicate that he considered this probable—nor particularly desirable.

It seemed like a very good time for Ginger to switch on their translator's active function. “Not all kzinti,” he said, the speaker startling Marcus for a moment. “I am what the humans sometimes call a kdaptist. Kdapt-Pilot was a Hero of noble birth who had the radical inspiration that peace was better than war. He found followers after the First Defeat. Some fought on the human side in the Second War with Men, simply because Men were the only ones who were trying to establish peace.”

“Indeed.” The translator carried overtones well; which was not to say agreeably.

Ginger said, “I don't know it all, but there's a poem. About the siege of a base on an asteroid orbiting Proxima Centauri. A human wrote it.” He half-closed his eyes and ears, and began to recite:

Marcus Augustus cleared his throat. Then he cleared it again. “I must speak with you sometime soon, of Horatius,” he said at last. “Excuse me a moment.” He left the chamber, not wishing to show his face just now.

The translator had carried overtones very well indeed.

Ginger switched it off as Perpetua said, “Quick thinking.”

“I got up and read some of their literature last night. Learning sets cost me sleep. How are we going to get them out of here?”

“The slaves, you mean?”

“The ones here too.”

“The slaves?”

“All of them.”

“What, every human on the planet?”

“It's the only way to free all the slaves,” Ginger said reasonably. “Otherwise the kzinti and the patricians will just make more slaves.”

“You're certifiable. There must be thousands.”

“Probably about fifty thousand,” Ginger estimated. “Certifiable as what?”

“Demented. Any psychist would recommend you for treatment at public expense. We might get one percent out on our ship if we packed them in in stasis, if we had a stasis field, which we don't.”

“We'll need more ships, certainly,” Ginger agreed.

“Stop agreeing with me when I'm arguing with you! Even,” she said, breathing hard, “even if we had the ships, we've got no pilots, no fuel, no weapons, and no destination we could reach before we were caught! And we don't have the ships, and we don't have the money to get the ships!”

“It is possible these problems may be overcome,” said a synthesized voice.

They both looked up. A Jotok was settled in the web of branches overhead, two tentacles holding an oblong metallic device that had clearly been repaired many times.

Marcus Augustus hadn't been surprised by their translator for very long, Ginger recalled. “What are you doing here?” he exclaimed, beginning to be offended.

“We live here,” said the Jotok.

“I mean in this room!”

“So do we. We are Jinvaretsimok, senior archivist.” The Jotok swung down by one tentacle and landed on the two free ones. “Tradition tells us that most problems are the result of insufficient money. This should not be the case here. If there are aspects of the problem that money cannot solve, perhaps something else will prove applicable. May we hear more about the circumstances?”

IX

Once they were back in the car, the first thing Perpetua said was, “Incredible.”

“Having never spoken with Jotoki who have been free for the past nine centuries, I am in no position to judge,” Ginger remarked. “At least now we know why they've never been found. I hope my sense of smell comes back. I wonder what those trees are?”

“Cedar,” she said absently. “From Earth. Must have intended the wood as trade goods… I meant all that gold is incredible!”

“I suppose the Jotoki had to find something to keep themselves busy for nine hundred years,” Ginger said.

“They certainly haven't been sitting on their hands,” Perpetua said.

Ginger thought about it. “Yes they have,” he finally said. “Where else could they?”

“It's a metaphor,” she said.

“Oh.” Ginger, like most Wunderkzin, understood metaphors, though many other kzinti simply found them annoying—a race which occasionally resorts to disembowelment in the course of reasoned debate has little motivation to search for subtle means of expression. “Would that be why Marcus Augustus warned me against garlic? An unusually obscure metaphor?”

“Garlic? When was this?”

“When you and Jinvaretsimok were talking about how to get hold of phase initiators.”

“Garlic,” she said, puzzled. “I have no idea. Maybe they've bred poisonous insects that attack anything that smells like it? They certainly had plenty of other schemes in the works!”

“Not that one,” Ginger said positively. “The kz’eerkti on the hunt had been eating it, and so had the Jotoki. The local kzinti have actually developed a taste for the stuff.” He blew out air through his mouth to expel the memory of the taste of a particularly concentrated mouthful.

“You never mentioned that.”

“I noticed the details were troubling you. Arm yourself. The car is not going where I'm telling it to.”

Perpetua leaped up to look out the windscreen, then got down and opened an access panel. Then she said, “There's something that's probably an autopilot override, and a transceiver, and a booby trap in case I try to remove them. I think somebody can hear us.”

“Let me in there.” Ginger got down and looked it over. It was a good booby trap. It wouldn't blow up the car; just the control circuitry, crashing them. “Well, this is hopeless,” he said, picking up a pad to write her a note.

The car landed in the courtyard of Trrask-Rarr's castle—an almost traditional structure—and shut down. The troops standing by kept it covered, and Trrask-Rarr went to the hatch himself and opened it.

Trader was on the deck, using his w'tsai to hack frantically though a mass of seat restraints he'd evidently tried to make into a net. He seemed pretty well immobilized. Trrask-Rarr stepped in, amused, and the monkey appeared overhead, head down, and dropped a bomb on him.

It was a can of emergency patching foam, rigged to burst open; and, as it was designed to do, the foam stuck to everything it touched. Trrask-Rarr tried to take a swing at the monkey before the stuff could set, but Trader turned out not to be tangled, naturally, and whipped the webwork around Trrask-Rarr's arm and jerked it off course.

Trrask-Rarr inhaled deeply and held his breath until the foam went rigid—not long—then exhaled, disdaining to notice the yanks on his fur as he breathed.

The monkey dropped down, landing on its feet as they always seemed to do, and said, “Please excuse the poor hospitality.” In formal Kzin. Not a bad accent, either. “We are still recovering from the interruption in our efforts to arrange the removal of all kz’eerkti from Kzrral.”

It took Trrask-Rarr a moment to absorb this. He stopped planning the details of their vivisection and said, “I'm listening.”

“May I offer our guest some solvent?” said Trader, putting Trrask-Rarr on the spot.

Soon, bound by hospitality and his honor, instead of the less-definitely-confining hull-repair material, Trrask-Rarr was brushing conditioner through his fur and taking in the most amazing scheme he'd ever heard. The monkey kept speaking without permission, but as Trrask-Rarr was now in the role of guest, and Trader didn't object, he treated this as if it were normal. A Jotok was brought in to remove the monitor and override, and worked as they discussed the plan.

The two of them were engaged in an effort to collect humans from wherever they were being kept as slaves, for some reason—it might be a religious ritual, if it mattered—and, working to that end, were practicing subtlety and deceit on Warrgh-Churrg. Successfully, so far. Still, they had never encountered such a large human population, and were unprepared to deal with it. The feral Jotoki, however, sneaking little beasts, had worked out plans for all kinds of situations, and had one that could be adapted now. Once he heard it, Trrask-Rarr immediately pointed out, “Warrgh-Churrg doesn't own the ships in orbit outright. He'll need to buy out the other partners before he'll agree—he wouldn't do anything that he thinks benefits them.”

“The Jotoki can provide the gold,” Trader said.

“Not without a reason he'll believe. But if you give me the gold, I can claim I captured it on a raid, and use it to buy land from him.”

“You'd need to do a real raid,” said the monkey—their many faults didn't include stupidity.

“Of course,” Trrask-Rarr said tolerantly. “Have them collect it somewhere and flee at our approach. I buy land, Warrgh-Churrg buys out the ships and starts refitting them, and you take his gold and go off to wherever you go, and bring back what you need to.”

“Aren't you concerned about the possible consequences to the Patriarchy?” said the monkey, then leapt back when he grinned at it. (Not stupid at all.)

“If the Patriarch desires my assistance,” Trrask-Rarr rumbled, “let the Patriarch send an investigator to find how Warrgh-Churrg's Hunt Master managed to get my two best sons killed but bring the foolish ones back alive. Warrgh-Churrg is using kz’eerkti to weaken every clan but his own, which means he's acting against the Patriarchy himself. Anything that keeps him from doing that helps the Patriarch.”

They discussed money. It was going to be expensive to buy back the land that should be his—more than the ships cost. Trrask-Rarr didn't like the idea of Warrgh-Churrg having the surplus, but the monkey said, “If we get you more gold than that, you can spend it on other things after you buy the land, and prices will go up.”

“Why should they do that?” said Trrask-Rarr.

“Inflation. More money in circulation,” said the monkey unhelpfully. Trrask-Rarr puzzled over the images this called up.

“Everybody will want some,” Trader explained.

That was reasonable. “So the ships will cost more,” Trrask-Rarr said, to be certain.

Both agreed. “Parts shouldn't. Refitting will, though,” said the monkey.

“I doubt the slaves will be getting higher pay,” he said ironically.

“Supplies.”

Trrask-Rarr ran the brush along his leg, then turned to the Jotok that had been waiting nearby for a little while and said, “Report.”

“Potent Trrask-Rarr, the adjuncts are removed. Shall we do engine maintenance, so as to provide evidence of why a landing here was necessary?”

“Yes. Good thinking.” As the Jotok left, Trrask-Rarr said, “Marrrkusarrg-tuss was very probably warning you not to go on another hunt when he warned about garlic, Trader. They eat it constantly, and no doubt another group of assassinations is planned.”

“I… don't think Warrgh-Churrg makes direct arrangements with the kz’eerkti,” said Trader doubtfully.

“Of course not. I don't make them either. And yet, arrangements seem to have been made,” Trrask-Rarr said dryly.

“Urr. I see what you mean. I believe the press of business will be too heavy for me to join another hunt in any case.”

“Of course. So: First you propose the plan to Warrgh-Churrg, then I get the gold and buy land. He buys out the ships and sends you for what he needs, and the refit begins… ?”

“While we're gone,” the monkey said.

“Urr. Good.” He was beginning to understand how Trader could put up with it: The monkey tended to be interesting. “When will you get back with the key parts?”

Trader and the monkey looked at one another. “Two hundred days?” Trader hazarded.

“Two hundred!”

“We'll have to go to more than one place,” the monkey said, misunderstanding.

Trader got it. “Trrask-Rarr was expecting it to be longer,” he explained. “It's hard to get used to how fast hyperdrive is.”

“Oh.”

“It occurs to me that the fastest way for the Patriarch to learn of Warrgh-Churrg's folly would be through you,” Trrask-Rarr said. “Have you some means of contacting someone who can reach him?”

“Somebody will have it,” the monkey said confidently.

X

In the circumstances, it was reasonable not to discuss anything in the car on the way back, and Ginger was too busy flying to hold a written conversation. Likewise there was no sense in talking in Warrgh-Churrg's car hangar, nor in the open; so by the time they were back in the ship, there was a certain amount of pressure built up.

As soon as the airlock had cycled, Perpetua burst out, “That Jotok mechanic was a spy for the Romans!”

Ginger, who had his own revelations to make, stopped. “How do you know?”

“It spoke with the same accent as Jinvaretsimok's translator.”

“Are you sure?”

“Ginger, have I ever disputed your sense of smell?”

“Urr.” He thought about it, then added, “No offense was intended.”

“Thank you,” she replied, a little startled. “So now we know how the car got bugged.”

It took Ginger a second. “They all work together!”

“Sure. Trrask-Rarr's Jotoki talked to Warrgh-Churrg's.”

“That'll save us some time,” Ginger said thoughtfully. “The gold-theft ruse is probably being arranged already.”

“Hadn't thought of that… You know, the male population of the original colonists must have been almost completely wiped out.”

“They all smelled about the same on the hunt,” he agreed. “Hunt Master had to use instruments to check for outsiders.” Then he said, “How did you know?”

“They pronounce the 's' at the end of a name. That was out of fashion by the time of Julius Caesar. Most of the first generation must have learned Latin in written form, so that means the Caledonians—and their men had an even higher casualty rate than the Romans.”

“They did, didn't they?” Ginger was a pacifist, but still a kzin. Somebody else's casualty rate had not particularly commended itself to his attention. “Did you notice the floor was warm there, too?”

“Well, it is the tropics—hey,” Perpetua said, frowning.

“ 'Hey' indeed. We were in a tree. Trees are cool.”

“A hypocaust in a forest?”

“If that was a forest, a farm is a meadow. Those trees were planted just where they wanted them,” Ginger said, “and now I know why their industries have never been detected. The foundries are underground, and they use the water from that dam—”

“What dam?”

“The one we walked through,” he said, surprised.

“That was a dam? Where was the water?”

“Underground,” Ginger said. “Where most of the dam was. They must have been a couple of centuries diverting the entire aquifer into that channel. It'd be why there's no offshore trench—the runoff must be spread out to blur the heat signature.”

“You just happened to notice that?” Perpetua said incredulously.

“No, of course not, I was paying very close attention,” he said. “The way you were to the language and culture. It's called perspective. It's why we're a team, Pet. And why it works… their industrial exhaust gases must be cooled and filtered with water, and they probably use slag and ashes to neutralize the acids that makes… Remember what I said about humans and conservation? I was right but I was wrong. Omnivores aren't much motivated to limit their effect on their environment, but humans do turn out to be awfully good at concealing it. If they want to. These do, and they're making more effective use of their resources than any culture I've seen, human or kzinti. Hunt Master couldn't very well say much, but the idea that the humans he was hunting might be making their own firearms worried him. I think they do, and I think they could do a great deal more if they wanted. I think these hunts are used to cull out weak and stupid humans, too—except that the humans are really doing it, not corrupting the system.” His tail lashed once.

“I wonder if that was Warrgh-Churrg's own idea,” Perpetua said.

“I'm off the scent.”

“Well, if the Jotoki are all working together, what about the humans? During the Occupation there were some Wunderlanders who managed to talk their masters into some amazingly bad plans. And that was after just a few years' acquaintance.”

Ginger's tail lashed again. “I now find myself less enthused about rescuing them. Some kzinti's only virtues are courage and honor. It's consistent with what I've read of Roman history, too.”

“Huh?”

“They raised the children of potential rebels in the homes of Roman nobles. Disgraceful. No respect for heritage.”

Every so often Perpetua was forcibly reminded that her partner was an alien. His regarding Rome's most brilliant peacekeeping innovation as a betrayal of family values accomplished this now. “Oh. I didn't know where, but I knew they had to have decent industrial technology.”

“The lamps?”

“No, M—what about the lamps?”

“They gave white light. That takes superior refining techniques. The thorium that goes into lamp mantles is found with other things that are hard to remove, and those would have made the light yellow.”

“How come you know so much about thorium?”

“It can be bred into fissionable material. I got interested in its other uses when I was a student.”

“Why did you want to know about fissionable material?” she said, a little alarmed.

“I didn't, particularly. It's just used in making weapons.” Seeing her expression, he said, “I'm a kzin! Do I get all suspicious because you know how to cook things? I mean, you might be planning to boil me up, right?”

“Meat isn't usually boiled,” she said, her expression one of distaste.

“Aha,” he said archly. “You've been thinking about this, then?”

Perpetua made a strangling noise in her throat, then said, “Behave.”

Having made his point, and enjoyed it, he recalled what he'd been saying. “So if it wasn't the lamps, what?”

“Marcus Augustus didn't talk down to me, and the female slaves we saw were treated about the same as the males. You surely know that humans die easily. Well, pregnant female humans, in a society without high technology, die really easily. Women tend to be regarded as property unless they're aristocrats, and even then they're not included in serious discussions. Nothing that'll endanger them, see?”

“Not really.”

“I guess you'll have to take my word for it. He didn't treat me like I was helpless, so he's used to women who aren't.”

“Oh, now I see.—I think that purple dye was synthetic, too.”

“You can see purple?” she said.

“Of course,” he said, surprised. “Why not?”

“Well, Kzin's sun is a lot redder than Sol. I'd have thought it was outside your range.”

“How are we supposed to tell if a kill is diseased?” he said. “Liver color is everything.”

“Oh.”

Ginger reflected for a moment. “I never thought about it before, but now that I do, purple tends to look brighter than other colors. I suppose it doesn't show up well on Kzinhome. We should make a note of that; it could be useful to someone.”

“How?”

“Well, say if someone is trying to hide from kzinti aerial surveillance in a garden, he'll want to look for violets. They'll blot out what's around them.”

Perpetua frowned, but plugged in a pad and began writing. She was far from the first, of either species, to find such things counterintuitive. (During the Second War, when there was real combat rather than conquest, it had taken considerable time for the combatants to realize that human eyes identify shapes, while kzinti eyes detect motion—so that, at first, both had used camouflage gear that was guaranteed to stand out to the enemy's vision.) When she finished, she said, “It occurs to me to wonder what the Romans are planning that they haven't told us.”

It had evidently just crossed her mind for the first time. Every so often Ginger was forcibly reminded that his partner was an alien. “We just have to present them with nothing but specific courses of action and explain it as force of circumstance,” he said, as if he had thought it up on the spot.

“I suppose,” she said, looking something up. “I hope things go quickly. It's going to be summer soon on We Made It.”

Ginger thought about it. “How does that affect us?”

“It's hard to land in a wind traveling twice the speed of sound.”

“Why would we want to?”

“Aren't we going there for hyperdrive parts?”

“What? No. Earth,” said Ginger, confused.

“Earth? How are we supposed to keep the ARM from finding out?”

“But that's who we have to get them from,” Ginger said. “They're the only ones who would keep it a secret. If anybody else found out about the Romans, they'd never be left alone again. The ARMs will keep it a secret, because they keep everything a secret.”

“I don't… If… But… Give me a minute here.”

“Certainly.”

Perpetua sat and thought it through. Finally she said, “Why would they help us?”

“To reduce the Patriarchy's capabilities, which is one of their constant goals, without having to go through channels. I know some of the flatlander veterans who settled on Wunderland, and more than one has joked that the UN bureaucracy was a kzinti plot. I'll give you an example—and I had to see records of this before I believed this fellow wasn't making fun of me, so I know it's true: Chemical firearms, delivered in response to a properly logged requisition, arrive without ammunition. There's a different requisition to be completed, for ammunition without which the firearm is useless. This procedure is still in use. My Name as my Word.”

Perpetua, who had lived with human government all her life and didn't see what was so odd about the story, said, “I'm convinced that's true,” which was meant to please him, and did. “Maybe it will be enough to get them to agree. We can try.”

Warrgh-Churrg summoned Trader the next day, and when the offworlder arrived (without the monkey) demanded, without formalities, “You went for a look at the kz’eerkti, and had to land at Trrask-Rarr's castle with a breakdown. Did you say anything that might have let him know where they kept their gold?”

Trader froze, his ears cupped and swinging slowly from side to side: genuine surprise. “Feared Warrgh-Churrg, I don't know where they keep their gold,” he replied.

“They don't,” the satrap snarled. “Trrask-Rarr has it. Made a sudden raid this morning on a cavern deep in the wasteland, and when a wall caved in his troops found a stockpile.”

Trader settled himself slightly and said, “Dominant One, did he take any slaves?”

“Not one. They'd cleared out, almost as if they were warned…” Warrgh-Churrg glared at one of his own slaves, standing in an alcove, ready to fetch on command. The kz’eerkti very properly stayed in its place, but began to smell panicky.

“The reason I ask, Fully-Named, is that there are far more kz’eerkti out there than I had even speculated, and with that quantity of gold I thought he might be interested in taking part in a major shipment.”

Warrgh-Churrg abruptly looked at the eyes of Trader, who ducked. “Why would he need gold to do that?”

“There isn't enough room on my ship for that many slaves. It would be necessary to obtain one or two large ships, possibly equipping them with hyperdrive if the price was right.”

“You had implied that you couldn't get ships with hyperdrive,” Warrgh-Churrg said, growing dangerous.

“I cannot. But most of the parts for a hyperdrive can be fabricated, and the key parts are available as spares. I never had enough money to do it, but if Trrask-Rarr has that much gold—”

“He's spending it,” Warrgh-Churrg cut him off. “Buying land his sires once held. Suppose someone already had a large ship. Or two,” he added offhandedly. “What would hyperdrive parts cost?”

Ginger was pleased to see that Perpetua had a shattergun aimed at the airlock door as he came through. When she saw it was him, she safetied it, set it down carefully, and ran up and grabbed him around the middle, to his great astonishment. She held him very hard, as human strength went, and after a few seconds he began having the strangest urge to wash her head like a kitten's. This gave him a hint about what she was doing, though, and after a little thought he patted her head, a gesture much used in entertainments. It appeared to help. She let go and looked up and said, “You're okay.”

“I'm okay,” he agreed. It seemed better than I know. “I have been cleverly talked around into going to purchase hyperdrive parts.”

Perpetua began laughing. It took her a while to get it under control.

The gold began arriving two days later.

XI

The trip to Earth took almost ten weeks. As usual, they spent a lot of time playing games; as usual, Ginger almost always won.

The dangerous part of the trip, at least in Ginger's estimation, had been right at the start, when they were depending on pursuit countermeasures to stay intact. Perpetua, however, grew more uneasy the closer they got to Earth. She didn't say anything about it, but she was at least partly conscious of it: She bathed more often, sometimes twice in a day. (He in turn was not conscious of the fact that his tail began lashing when she smelled upset; but she was. She was trying to keep at least one of them calm.)

He would never have asked why. Such an assumption of authority over her mental state would have been treating her as a subordinate, and she was a friend; more, she was a Hthnar—something humans translated as Battle Companion, a term which did express the concept if given sufficient thought.

However, she was also a human, and therefore weird, so one day she suddenly decided to explain. “I don't trust the ARM,” she said when he showed up for his watch on the mass detector.

“Good,” he said agreeably, steering them around a fuzzy patch that was probably nothing much. (The thing worked better for him than for her. Its manual spoke of psionic aptitude and something called the Copenhagen Interpretation, but to him the matter was simple: It was a hunting device.)

“That's why I've been so worried. They were the ones who got Wunderland conquered, you know.”

Ginger cupped an ear at her. “I'm pretty sure the Patriarchy was involved too.”

She snorted. “They suppressed weapon technology and rewrote history books as propaganda, so everybody believed that no civilized being was capable of making war. When the first reports of contact with the kzinti came in they suppressed those too, as disruptive.”

“I didn't know that!” he exclaimed.

“It's not something humans are proud to discuss,” she said.

He had no idea what to say—before confiding something that potentially demeaning, a Hero would want hostages. However, she continued almost at once.

“They're perfectly capable of suppressing knowledge of the Romans and keeping them all for study somewhere,” she said.

“They'd want them off Kzrral first, though, right?” Ginger said.

“I would think so,” Perpetua said, sounding puzzled.

“Then we'll be fine. I won't make a final plan until we've left Earth, so they won't be able to get it out of us.”

“You haven't decided what to do after we have the Romans?”

“What would be the point? We don't have them,” he said, honestly puzzled. “We don't even know if we can get the hyperdrives here.”

“What? You acted so confident!”

“I'm a kzin. I am confident. I may also be wrong.”

“I'm starting to get a glimmering of why we won,” she muttered, walking out.

Ginger thought about that for a while, but couldn't see the connection.

They'd dropped out of hyperspace and were moving into Sol System, and Perpetua was trying to ease her own tension. “… and the Herrenmann says, 'Never mind the thanks—repeat the instructions!' ”

Ginger was just starting to laugh when the hyperwave spoke up: “Incoming ship, identify yourselves.”

Ginger tapped the mike. “We're the Jubilee, out of Wunderland,” he said in quite good Flatlander. “Who are you?”

“Triton Relay Customs Station. Are you carrying any fissionables or bioactives?”

“No, but if you make a list we could come back,” Ginger said cheerfully. Perpetua's eyes went wide and she clapped her hands over her mouth as he continued, “We'd like to talk to an ARM.”

The Belter Customs officer said, “Why?” He sounded honestly perplexed.

“To engage in commerce.”

“With the ARM? You'll walk out smiling and holding two coat hangers.”

Ginger looked at Perpetua, who was no more enlightened than he. “Nevertheless.”

“Well, I'll pass the word.—I advise against joking with them,” the voice added. “There's a flatlander law against ARMs laughing at any jokes but their own.”

“Thanks,” Ginger said, and cut the mike.

“You don't ever joke with Customs, have you taken leave of your senses?” Perpetua exploded.

“No, but hopefully you won't be the last to think of that,” Ginger said. “It may help. The idea came to me when I heard that silly question—as if a smuggler of murder supplies would be surprised into blurting out a truthful answer.” His ears waved, once. “Suddenly I thought of a way to cope with human bureaucracy.”

“I'll talk to the next one!” she said.

A com laser found them about an hour later. “Attention Jubilee, this is T.C. Smith, senior agent, ARM ident RM35M4419. I am the ARM officer at earliest available rendezvous, presently at Juno, coordinates follow. Be seeing you.” A datastream beeped in and was recorded.

As Ginger altered course, Perpetua sent, “Senior Agent Smith, this is Jubilee, we will arrive your location—” Ginger showed the figures “—in about twenty-nine hours.” She set that to repeat, then said, “He sounded positively friendly.”

“I've heard that ARMs are all supposed to be kept insane,” Ginger said. “Perhaps he welcomes the company. I wonder what he's doing at Juno?”

“Why, where's Juno?”

“According to these figures, it's an asteroid. Not under ARM jurisdiction.”

Perpetua looked for herself, because she had to—if a kzin had done so it would have been insulting—and said, “That's weird.”

Juno Traffic Control had them lie off two thousand kilometers, and at that the region seemed pretty busy. “There must be five hundred ships here!” Perpetua said wonderingly.

“About half with their drives aimed at us,” Ginger commented. When she stared at him, he said, “We are of largely kzinti design, after all. And Belters who trusted strange ships in either war probably didn't survive long enough to teach the habit to anyone.”

A tanker began signaling them. Perpetua acknowledged, and the speaker said, “Smith here. You need any fuel?”

“No, our planer is rigged to scoop up ambient hydrogen constantly,” she replied, and Ginger stuck his finger in her mouth. She spit it out, cut the mike, and said, “What are you doing?”

“Not revealing capabilities,” he said. “How did you people last long enough to get to space?”

She glared, then switched back on. “Are you in the tanker, or relaying?”

“In. Permission to come aboard?”

“Granted.”

The tanker moved alongside and extended a travel tube, and presently Smith came through the lock with a parcel bigger than he was. “Great, gravity,” he said, taking his helmet off.

He was one-gee short, and blond as a Herrenmann, but his skin was quite black, at least on his head. Also, his pressure suit was decorated with the head and shoulders of a pale-skinned man in an odd-looking cap, with a bill in back as well as in front; the man was smoking a curly pipe and holding a magnifying glass before one eye. Perpetua, who had spent the past day learning something about Sol Belter culture, said, “Just how long have you been at Juno?”

“Open curiosity, that's refreshing! Just over eleven years now. Well done. Junior assistant to the second deputy secretary of the consul.”

“What does that mean?” Ginger said, stepping into view.

“I thought you sounded like a kzin. It means by the time I'd accumulated enough procedural complaints to be retired, my pension would have come to more than I get in salary, so they sent me where I couldn't annoy anybody worse than they normally are.”

“What does T.C. stand for?” Perpetua said.

“The name of a classical author. I come from a long line of subversives, and I joined the ARM to stop being inundated with the material. So what do they do but put me in Propaganda. Where can I put this?” He indicated his parcel.

“What is it?” said Ginger.

“My official weaponry. If you want to search it, don't press any switches. Can I use your shower? I've spent the past day suited up and reading the manuals on all this junk.”

“Why'd you do that in a pressure suit?” Perpetua said.

“The display's in the helmet.” He grimaced.

“Through there,” she said.

As he departed, she murmured, “Wonder what the complaints were for?”

“Throoping!” he called back up the passageway.

“Good ears,” said Ginger. After the refresher had opened and closed, he added, “What's 'throoping'?”

“No idea.”

The ship's database defined it as Intra-bureaucratic use of sarcasm and absurdity to point out, refute, and if possible punish extreme foolishness. Context invariably implies the sole voice of reason speaking with total lack of concern for consequences. Origin artificial, circa 1950. “Interesting concept,” Ginger said, opening the parcel. “But does it work?”

“They must have had some reason for sending him here,” she said. Then she fell silent.

There was a slug gun, a folding multibladed hullmetal knife, a hullwelding laser with a huge battery, a variable stunner, small grenades of assorted types both lethal and nonlethal, interrogation drugs, flare goggles, and impact armor; then there were the concealed weapons, like the dartgun rings, and the watch with its loop of Sinclair filament. “Interesting,” Ginger said.

“A man arrives equipped for piracy and you call it 'interesting'?”

“No, what's interesting is that it's all newly opened. Still smells of packing foam. Never been used.”

“And he must have brought it all with him eleven years ago,” Perpetua realized.

“Oh?”

“The Belters wouldn't have allowed the ARM to establish an arsenal. They're as touchy about independence as Wunderlanders, and they've actually got it.”

“Urr. Good for them.”

They sorted things out into weapons, probable weapons, probable nonweapons, and who-knows-what. The last category included an elaborately sealed box of what was labeled as ordinary candy, three packages Perpetua thought looked like inflatable boats, a first-aid kit that included a small electric drill, and a sculpting rig that included an amazingly elaborate set of vibratory controls for one standard cutting bit, plus a headband with a heavy cable attaching it to the controls.

They were still puzzling over that one when Smith came out and said, “That's a touch-sculpting rig. You got some odd controls on your dispenser. What's with the sorting arrangement?” He was wearing clothes he certainly hadn't had under his suit.

“Weapons, possible, likely not, unknown,” said Ginger, pointing.

“Oh, put everything in weapons,” he said. “The Outfit makes a big deal over being able to kill anybody with anything. Except the candy; I got that from a woman when I said I was leaving… maybe you should just put that out the lock.”

Perpetua and Ginger exchanged a glance, and Perpetua said, “Um, are you a paranoid?”

“No. But she is.”

“Wish we had a stasis box,” Ginger muttered in Wunderlander.

“Three right there,” Smith replied, with a horrible accent. He pointed at the “boats” and said, in Flatlander again, “So what did you want to talk to an ARM for?”

“Ah,” said Perpetua. “We're engaged in rescuing humans in kzinti custody. A couple of thousand years ago, the Jotoki recruited some Romans as mercenaries, north of Hadrian's Wall—”

“The Ninth Legion was abducted by aliens?” Smith exclaimed, then burst out laughing.

It took him some time to calm down. While he was wiping his eyes, Perpetua said, “You just happen to know all about the Ninth Legion?”

“Well, I guess I do now,” he said, chuckling.

“Why is that funny?” Ginger said.

“Kind of a personal joke. Fission Era mythology was full of stories of people being abducted by aliens, and I got exposed to a lot of it as a kid. I gather you've found their descendants?”

“Yes… this seems like a funny coincidence. It's kind of obscure,” Perpetua said warily.

“No coincidence at all. I told you, I'm in Propaganda. Most of it's historical work. You have to know what you're lying about.”

“Oh.”

“So where do I come in?”

“Well, there's thousands of them, and the planet they're on has two old kzinti troop carriers in orbit, so we've put together a plan to steal those, load up the humans and Jotoki, and escape. The thing is, they're slow ships. We needed an excuse to get to them, though, so we've gotten the owner to hire us to install hyperdrives in them. So we need phase initiators—everything else can be made there.”

“It takes about a thousand man-hours to shake down a new phase initiator,” Smith said, “and that's in a drive whose other parts are known to work together. You need two complete hyperdrives. No way I can make those just disappear; what have you got to trade?”

“Gold. You'll do it?” Perpetua said, astonished.

“Oh, absolutely, I love the idea. Gold, huh? Not many people… hm. I may know somebody on Mars.”

“Mars?”

“Mars. Fourth planet. It's on the other side of the sun just now, so it'll be, oh, three days to get there with this rig.”

“More like two,” Ginger said, getting up.

“Not unless you plan to skim the sun.”

“Three,” Ginger agreed.

“How did you decide to believe us so quickly?” Perpetua said at their first meal.

“VSA implant,” Smith replied. “Voice stress analysis. Lie detector. I don't have the kind of brain chemistry that can be tweaked into continuous heavy-duty intuition, which is what most ARMs rely on.”

“I thought they were paranoid,” she said.

“That's the term for public consumption,” he agreed. “Keeps 'em nervous. The ARM doesn't have the omnipotence it had before the wars, so we take any advantage we can get. Untrained, unchanneled paranoids did a lot of damage in the past. People remember that.” He grinned. “We remind them regularly.”

“Oh,” she said uneasily. “What's Mars like?”

“Cold,” he said. “Dry. Less of both with each generation, though. The residents are gradually terraforming it. Before the wars it was a real hole. We used it as a dumping ground for troublemakers—writers, roleplayers, history buffs.”

“Who lives there now?”

“Same people. Just not brainwashed. They like it. Don't ask me why. Part of the whole fantasist culture.” He took a bite, chewed, swallowed, and added, “Not brainwashed by us, anyway.”

He grew gloomy and avoided conversation for a day or so.

In the middle of the third day he suddenly told Ginger, “There's people on Earth who think the ARM made the wars up.”

This was apropos of nothing whatsoever, and ridiculous to boot; Ginger said, “What?”

“There are people who earnestly believe the whole interstellar war story is just a huge juice job. That is, all the death on Wunderland was something we caused ourselves, and we're blaming you to discredit you so you can't expose us.”

Ginger thought about that, then said, “That's crazy.”

“True. With eighteen billion people on Earth you get all kinds. At the other end of the spectrum of insanity you get the tweeties—that is, people who think the kzinti are responsible for everything that goes wrong, and this literally includes poor weather.”

“What do you do with people like that?” Perpetua wondered, and Ginger realized it was a good question—they wouldn't simply get killed in the course of their daily affairs.

“Unless they're really deranged, ignore them. They're not that numerous.”

“And the extreme cases?” she said.

“We recruit them into Technology Restriction.”

Her initial laughter died down as she realized he wasn't smiling.

“There's a placement test after you qualify for the ARMs,” he said. “They give you a little sliver of soap and a sheet of paper, and you're supposed to write down five fundamentally different ways to kill someone with the soap. There are only four. You can poison him, lubricate something to cause an accident, use it as fuel for combustion or explosive, or stuff it down his throat to strangle him.”

“Bludgeon,” said Ginger.

“It's too small. If you think of a fifth method, you're qualified for Technology Restriction. Usually.” He half-smiled. “I wrote down a fifth: 'Force him to concentrate on the thing until his head explodes.' They put me in Propaganda.”

Amused, Ginger said, “So what's the fifth?”

“Oh, they never tell anyone outside TR Division that.” He put on an expression of grim, heroic concern: “'There's an awful lot of soap out there.'” He laughed at their incredulity, and nodded vigorously.

“I'm surprised you still have fire,” Ginger said.

“They're more or less resigned to fire,” Smith said thoughtfully. “But I'm fairly sure they'd like to crack down on bronze.”

XII

As they made the approach to Mars, Smith told Perpetua, “We want that white spot on the equator.”

“Right,” she said nervously—she hadn't made many landings. Then she said, “Are those clouds?”

“Yeah. Set down outside the northern edge, there's water under the clouds.”

“A lake?”

“Actually the locals call it 'the Sea of Issus.' Literary reference. The ARMs call it 'O'Donnell's Surprise.' Bartholomew O'Donnell got his degree in exotic physics right at the start of the First War and came up with a proposal for more effective bombs. In those days they were desperate for something they could make quickly, so they gave him research facilities and plenty of room.”

“What happened?” Perpetua said.

“All his notes and designs were in his lab, so nobody really knows, but the general consensus is that he succeeded. He had this wild notion that he could cause natural thorium to spontaneously fission—”

“Uh-oh,” said Ginger.

“Well said. Fission into iron and nickel and a whole lot of beta rays. The prospectus called for never having more than a nanogram of thorium in his field generator at a time. My guess is the generator produced a somewhat larger field than he expected.”

They were descending toward the settlement by then. It was on higher ground than the cloud layer, which looked thinner up close. That seemed to be about ten times the diameter of the lake, which radar said was about four kilometers across. “Some blast,” said Ginger admiringly.

“There was an automated monitor on Phobos—that's the nearer moon, it was passing almost overhead—that was able to relay a picture of a big circle around the base turning X-ray blue before it melted.”

“The orbital monitor melted?” said Perpetua.

“Phobos melted. A lot of it, anyway. The monitor evaporated along with that side of Phobos's surface. Recoil kicked Phobos into a less eccentric orbit, as a matter of fact.”

Ginger said, “At a planet's surface, thorium can be easier to find than lead. You're lucky he didn't sterilize the system.”

“I know. The affected area was a bit over half a kilometer across—pretty sharply defined, in the pictures. The blast was later calculated at something like thirty thousand megatons. Popped every dome on the planet. Land by that big one, it's the Customs shack.”

Perpetua was settling Jubilee when Smith abruptly said, “Damn, come back up and move us to the other side of the dome.”

She took them up smoothly and shifted position, then said, “People?”

“No, some kind of plants. This whole region is in a depression, not just the lake and clouds. Pictures taken right after it happened show this hemisphere looking like somebody put a bullet through a sheet of glass. This area was scooped out, and even up here it has ten times the atmospheric pressure you'd find at the antipodes. Still not much, but they've been trying to breed grass that'll survive it. Either they've succeeded, or they dumped in another ice asteroid when I wasn't paying attention. Here's good.”

They suited up and went outside. There were smaller domes clustered about the Customs station, and various people had already come out of these, holding guns in a conspicuous fashion, not quite pointed at them. They paid a lot of attention to Ginger.

Smith held up an ARM ident and triggered its flasher, then said over the common channel, “If it's your intention to start fighting the next war now, by all means let me know so I can start conscripting troops.” People began to disperse.

“What do you expect people to do when they see a kzinti ship landing?” somebody said defensively.

“Around here? Raise meat prices.”

There was some grumbling, and another voice said in amused tones, “There's still time, Kate.”

“Aw, shut up,” said somebody else.

Smith signaled for the private channel and said, “Don't say anything you don't want heard. Sooner or later someone will break the encryption.”

“ARMs?” Perpetua said.

“Hobbyists. These people are all obsessives. This place is still a dumping ground for lunatics—it's just that now they're self-diagnosed.”

“You grew up here,” Ginger guessed suddenly.

“Yes, didn't I say? I didn't. Yeah. I started working out very young.” The gravity was about two-thirds that of Wunderland; he must have started wearing a weight suit well before puberty.

As they went through the airlock—the biggest they'd ever seen—Perpetua said, “You wanted to join the ARMs that young?”

“I wanted to leave that young. The ARMs had the best deal.”

“Were there any survivors of the blast?” Ginger said.

“Everybody except the ARMs survived,” Smith said. “The exiles lived on the other side of the planet, but they heard about the project and started wearing pressure suits all the time, and keeping their kids near them with bubbles handy. The ARMs made fun of them, until Blowout Day. Then they stopped.” The inner door opened, and he and Perpetua took off their helmets, while Ginger folded his back.

“Any fissionables or bioactives?” said a bored-looking man with beige skin and a green-and-yellow suit. The suits outside had just been green.

“Okay. How much?” Smith said.

The man frowned, then saw the ARM ident and grunted. “Get your own,” he said, and waved them by. As they passed, he said, “Hey, why is he wearing a military suit?”

“What do you mean?” Smith said.

“No tail.”

Ginger had never thought about it before, but it made sense; the convenience of being able to stretch his tail for balance would make the suit more vulnerable. This was simply the only design anyone on Wunderland had ever seen.

“So nobody will suspect he's a spy,” said Smith.

Ginger and Perpetua both stared at him, but the Customs inspector just snorted and waved them back into motion.

They went through another pressure door, but before either of them could say anything to Smith, somebody said, “Hey, Waldo, what's the password?”

Smith, in the lead, stopped, and slowly turned to the group of five men to the left of the doorway. “There's a new one,” he said, in a low voice. “It's, 'I'm not an unarmed child anymore.' ”

He had been a mild, affable companion for the past three days. Now Ginger smelled murder.

Since humans who fight for trivial reasons are typically of inferior intelligence, it was a common error to suppose that kzinti were rather dim. In fact, they averaged somewhat brighter than humans, due to intense competition for mates; but for the same reason, they just didn't care.

But Ginger had a responsibility to see to. “Excuse me, sir,” he said to Smith, “but you did say back at the embassy you wouldn't kill anyone else until you found me another job.”

Smith turned sharply, staring. “What?”

Ginger moved, quickly and smoothly, out of Smith's reach. “I realize these aren't kzinti, Mr. Smith, but you did say anyone, sir.”

The five men had already dwindled to two, the others having worked out the implications at once. Smith blinked a few times, looked back at the remaining two, looked at Ginger again, and nodded. “Fair enough.” He turned to face the pair again, and said in a declamatory tone, “'Would you buy it for a quarter?' ”

Both of the men had the smoothness of motion that indicated a human past 100, but Smith must have been nearly that old himself; and while he was no Hero, compared to a low-gee build he looked like a Jinxian. One was whispering frantically in the other's ear; Ginger was able to catch the phrase “ARM Commando,” this being one of the first terms he'd learned in Flatlander. The one being spoken to was shorter and solider, but not in Smith's shape.

That human looked at Ginger, then at his own companion; then he said, “Uh, pass, friend.”

As they went by, Ginger thought to hear a suit's recycler start up. He didn't look—he was pretty certain whose it was, anyway.

They were in a broad inner space, like a courtyard, only with no gun turrets. Smith led them through it, past unlabeled pressure doors, to a door just like the others, and started it opening. Perpetua, who was just getting the idea that she'd come very close to being held by the UN as principal witness, started up an innocuous subject: “How did this settlement get started?”

“After the Blowout one of the old lifers talked people into gathering everything up and bringing it here. More air and water. They stayed up here because it wasn't stable down lower. Still isn't. Once a habitat was set up, they formed a government and petitioned the UN for membership before the ARM thought of jamming them. The ARMs try to keep people from hearing more than absolutely necessary about this place, but it's really popular with smugglers since the ARM moved in on Luna,” he said.

“What was this lifer's name?” Ginger said, impressed—he was picturing what the weather must have been like for the migration.

“He didn't know. He dated to brainwipe days,” said Smith. They entered the door, and he closed it; abruptly the floor began to descend. “There are stories that he was actually Raymond Sinclair, but I checked ARM records, and Sinclair was murdered years before the Founder arrived. He seems to have been something of an invisible man—the Founder, that is. Have you ever heard of the Tehuantepec Canal?” They hadn't. “Okay. On Earth there's an ocean bordered by two continents, and one of the two is kept from freezing solid by an ocean current from the other. Now, the sun has been abnormally cool for thousands of years, and keeps getting worse by stages. The warm current started to give up most of its heat in hurricanes as a result. Sharper gradient, see? What the Founder appears to have done, to get arrested and brainwiped, was make secret arrangements with local officials and investors to blast open a sea-level trench at a place called Tehuantepec, where two oceans weren't separated very far. The ocean to the east was the one with the current, and the one to the west was cooler, with a higher sea level. Water washed out the trench, and mixed with the warm water, so it got stirred up and wouldn't stay put long enough to let hurricanes form. They need still, saturated air. The ocean current wound up transporting more heat than it had in a thousand years, so everybody was saved. But the man responsible had already been brainwiped, so the ARM made his records vanish and claimed it was their own project. The Founder turned out to be one of those people who does really well in low gravity, so he was still here a couple of centuries later for the Blowout.” The elevator stopped. Another door was now visible.

Perpetua began, “That is the filthiest—”

“Who goes there?” said a speaker over the door.

“A true believer,” said Smith.

“What do you want?” said the speaker.

“To do one thing.”

The door began opening. “Surely they didn't call him Founder all the time,” Ginger said, and stopped to gape.

The cavern before them had to be artificial, its lining fused dust; but it looked like an enormous natural cave, bigger than the dome they'd landed by. There were gardens, with trees, and light sources in the roof that made it about twice as bright as on the surface. In the center of the cavity floor, hundreds of meters away, was what looked like a big rock formation with its own cave opening; a waterfall trickled down one side over a couple of pretty good bonsai. There was a sign above the cave opening:

“No,” said Smith. “They called him John Smith.”

“Your ancestor?” Ginger said.

“Who knows? Lots of people on Mars took the name Smith after the Blowout. Classical allusion. In his case, though, it was just a standard label for someone whose name was unknown.” He led them toward the rocks.

“ 'Toxic dump'?” Perpetua said, alarmed at the unfamiliar term.

“Another ancient reference. People didn't use to reduce sewage and garbage to simple organics with superheated steam. They just left things in pits.”

“How did they make plastics?” wondered Ginger.

“The raw materials originally came from underground.” Smith paused to look at Ginger. “Your homeworld hasn't had petroleum for about ten thousand years, has it?”

“Wunderland has petroleum,” Ginger said, surprised.

“He means Kzinhome,” Perpetua said. “Like his is Earth.”

Smith scowled, and Ginger snorted amusement. “I see. Probably not. What did people do about the smell?”

“Lived somewhere else,” Smith said.

“The fellow who first began mining those pits must have gotten awfully rich,” Ginger speculated as they got to the entrance. There was a door a little ways in.

“No, on Earth it's a branch of government. There's still some garbage fortunes in the Belt, though,” said Smith, lifting a sign that said scoppy fever and tapping the keypad underneath. The door opened, and he went in first.

They heard, “What the hell do you—Waldo!”

“Hilda!” Smith replied as they moved into better lighting than the entryway's.

After a short silence the woman said, “Theo. Good to see you. What do—Theo, there's a kzin behind you.”

“Yes, he keeps me out of trouble. I gather Larch is still mooching off his mother.”

The shop was something out of Davidson, with counters and racks and display cases crammed with unrelated oddities. There was actually a stuffed crocodile up by the ceiling; it must have been ruinously expensive. The woman behind the sales counter was very tall, like most other locals, and beige, but with hair going gray and lines at the corners of her eyes. “Yes,” she said, watching Ginger. Then she pointed at him and said, “Don't think you can try your telepathy for a better price. I'm a junk dealer, the only thing that works on me is money.”

Smith held up a hand in front of Ginger—unnecessarily, as Ginger was too astonished and offended to speak—and stepped forward to tell her in a very low voice, “Mom, first of all, it was the Slavers who used telepathy to control minds; second, damn few kzinti are telepaths; third, none of those have Names, which he does, indicating high social value; and fourth, telepaths are all addicted to a drug that enhances the facility and destroys their health, so you've just done the equivalent of greeting a total stranger by calling him a wirehead.”

She opened her eyes wide, then closed them and kept them shut for a bit. She hunched down about a handspan—human handspan—and her face changed color, getting lighter in some places and darker in others. She took a deep breath, opened her eyes, and said in a low voice, “Sir, I apologize. Please feel welcome.”

“Thank you,” said Ginger.

There was a moment of awkward silence. Perpetua broke it by saying, “Was Larch the short one?”

Smith gave her a stare, then apparently realized that she was shorter than every person they'd met except one, and said, “Yeah. Hey Mom, you should have heard Ginger. Managed to convey the idea that I was some kind of trained killer.”

“You are a trained killer,” said his mother.

“I don't go around single-handedly massacring groups of kzinti when I get offended, which is what he implied.”

“Of course, you couldn't talk about it if you did,” she observed with a straight face.

Smith sighed heavily, then said, “How quickly I recall why I don't drop by more often. We need two hyperdrives.”

His mother gave an incredulous chuckle—a little late, Ginger thought. “You want inertialess drives along with those?”

“It's Marley Foundation business.”

Her manner changed utterly. She leaned back, her face grew still, and her eyes narrowed. She said, “What have you done for it?”

“I got transferred to the Belt eleven years ago. Check funding and dates for the Outback Restoration Project.”

She nodded once and went through a door. Ginger heard tiny clicks from different parts of the room they were in, and held quite still. Perpetua said, “T.C., what's going on?”

“The Marley Foundation is a private charity dedicated to saving people from foolish planning, often their own. Very old. I was assigned to investigate them and wound up joining, about fifty years back. Twelve years ago there was a big ARM project to clear out the Australian Outback—a large desert—so it could be preserved in its natural condition, without a lot of tourists coming in. I was in charge of selling the idea to the voters. The thing is, there were people who'd been living there for thousands of years, and they couldn't be expelled—they were arguably part of the natural condition. I went and talked to a lot of them, and we cooked up a plan. I sold the ARM on the idea of making them official caretakers of the region, and I arranged to supply them with plans and equipment, and as soon as they were put in charge of the region they cut a channel from the sea to the middle of the desert. Logarithmic spiral, uniform grade, so Coriolis force caused air to move up the channel of its own accord. Water condensed out as the air rose, and a little stream formed. In another century it'll be a pretty decent river. They didn't particularly like the desert, you see. They were just the descendants of people who knew how to survive there.”

Perpetua was openmouthed and shaking with silent laughter. “How did they mask the explosions?” she finally got out.

“Oh, I gave them a couple of disintegrators.”

“That's the shape!” Ginger exclaimed, making them both jump. “This cavern was carved with a disintegrator, wasn't it?”

Smith recovered and said, “Yeah, they didn't have too much intact dome material. Bored down, ran an air tube in to blow the dust out, and had another disintegrator up on the surface aimed at the falling dust. Opposite charge, so when it came down it fused to the ground.”

“And the current fused the wall of the chamber,” Ginger said, as pleased as if he'd done it himself. “There are caverns back home that humans carved that way during the Second War, with openings a kzin couldn't get a leg into. A lot of invaders died after passing by one of those.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Perpetua.

“How come it took you so long?” Smith wondered.

“This one's a lot bigger,” Ginger said.

“Never saw one with trees in it, either,” said Perpetua.

“True.”

The proprietor returned. “Excuse me; what's your name?” said Perpetua.

“Joanna.” She seemed a little startled, but went on with what she had come back for: “This way.”

“Perpetua, and Ginger.”

“How do.”

They followed her into a back corridor, then into a cramped chamber which looked like a storeroom for things too odd to keep out front—which was saying something. Ginger just had time to notice that while things sat on the floor or hung on the walls, nothing on the floor leaned against a wall. Then the floor descended.

The elevator was slower than the one before. “I keep meaning to study tap dancing,” Joanna said after a while, for no discernible reason.

T.C. seemed to find it funny. “Another archaic reference,” he told them. “One reason the ARM presence here is so thin on the ground. They have to do constant data searches to find out what people are saying. Usually just conversation—drives them nuts.”

The light was from overhead, and grew fainter as they went down. The walls ended, leaving blackness at the edge of the floor. They were in a big volume, and still descending. Ginger's tail tried to lash.

When they stopped, Joanna said, “Basement dungeon, everybody out.”

“As I said,” T.C. remarked, but didn't go on.

When they were off the platform, lights began to go on.

This took a while.

Eventually Ginger said, “Why don't you all live down here? There's more room than all the domes.”

“We do. Different families have their own caverns, but they all connect up—how do you think we got this stuff down here?”

The equipment could have made up a well-equipped multifunction carrier—troopship, fighter station, hospital, and kzinforming—though the assembled hull sections would have given it an awfully odd profile. And extra nacelles would have had to be custom-made for all the weaponry. Possibly a tertiary power plant to supply them, too.

“This way,” Joanna said, interrupting Ginger's reverie. They stepped onto a slidewalk, one of many, and began moving through what might have been the toy box of a precocious infant Titan. “What do you need two hyperdrives for?” she said.

“Equipping a couple of transport ships to evacuate a lot of humans from a kzinti world,” T.C. said.

“And Jotoki,” said Perpetua.

“What's that?” Joanna said.

Ginger and Perpetua stared at her, speechless with astonishment.

“They look sort of like starfish,” T.C. said. “They don't come to Sol System much,” he explained to the Wunderlanders. “The ARM harasses them about what they can sell.”

“They're aquatic?” Joanna said.

“Amphibious, if I remember right,” T.C. said.

“They have an immature aquatic stage, and five sexes,” Ginger said. “Each limb starts as a separate nonsentient creature. They meet and join at maturity. They develop intelligence just before they breed.”

“Oh,” said Joanna. “Just the opposite of us, then.”

They had to get off to go back and get Perpetua; she was laughing so hard she fell off the slidewalk.

Once they were going again, Joanna asked T.C., “You two up to something?”

“Mother,” he said.

“Well, I just don't like surprises.”

“Neither do I, so keep the next one to yourself… Great Ghu, where did all these come from?”

There were five complete hyperdrive systems, and parts to make up perhaps a dozen more. Two of the complete hyperdrives would need extensive rework before use—there is something distinctive and disquieting about a functional hyperdrive, at least to most organic intelligences, and those two systems didn't have it. Of the working ones, one was immense—about the right size for the hypothetical ship made from everything in the cavern. The other two were about of a size, but not much alike in appearance. One was clearly human design. The other… “Who made that?” said T.C.

“Beats the free ions out of me,” said Joanna. “Came off a smuggler that piled in about nine years back. Notice how all the parts are linked to a central armature, so you can disconnect them without them floating away?”

“Pierin,” said Ginger. “I've never met one, but they're supposed to do things like that. Incredibly fussy about details. Very good at war, the Patriarchy still isn't making much progress against them.”

“They're warlike?” Joanna said. She sounded surprised.

“Did you think we were the only ones?” Ginger said, and he definitely was surprised.

“Well, yes. I thought you were found by some peaceful species and got to space by conquering them.”

Ginger snorted. “We were found by the Jotoki, but what they wanted us for was to be mercenaries. If there's a 'peaceful' race advanced enough for star travel, I've never heard of them.”

“There's the puppeteers,” said Joanna. “They never attack anybody.”

“Funny how you never hear about anyone attacking them, either,” Ginger said. “How much for these two?”

“How much would you like to pay?”

“Nothing. Thanks, where can we hire a lifter?”

Perpetua and T.C. merely stood by and watched the two traders at work. Due to his combination of predatory shrewdness and disconcerting honesty, Ginger was even more effective at bargaining with humans than with kzinti. It threw off human merchants to have their claims taken with apparent seriousness; it slowed them down, forcing them to think about what they were actually saying.

There was another consideration. “Mom,” T.C. interrupted after about ten minutes' chaffering, “has it occurred to you that he literally has a nose for just how low you'll go?”

Joanna stared at her son, then looked at Ginger.

Cats always look like they're smiling.

Joanna grumbled something inarticulate and named a price.

“Done,” said Ginger.

“I can rent you a lifter,” Joanna began.

T.C. sighed loudly—and theatrically—and then told the Wunderlanders, “My treat.” He opened one of his suit pockets and undid a sealed container. Inside was a tiny vial of yellow powder, resembling pollen.

Joanna said, “Is…” and trailed off.

“A gift from Aunt Sophronia,” her son said.

“Where did it come from?” she exclaimed.

“Jinx,” he said, as if to a small and unclever child.

“I know that,” she snapped.

“T.C., no,” Perpetua said. “We can't let you give up your boosterspice.”

He looked blank. Then he dug out four more vials. “Where do you think confiscated contraband ends up?” he said.

The quickest way to effect the trade turned out to be bringing Jubilee into the cavern. Perpetua didn't even think of doing the piloting for this. Ginger brought the ship through the series of hatchways and chambers not only safely, but symmetrically—that is, with almost identical clearance on all sides. (Locals in pressure suits stood around clapping after some of the narrower turns.) After he set the ship down and the cavern door began to shut, he turned to T.C. and said, “Breathe. It's very distracting when you stop.”

Joanna ran the cargo lifter herself. She paused to stare at the gold. “I've never seen so much,” she said softly.

“Sol System uses a power standard, don't they?” Ginger said.

“What?” she said, startled out of reverie. “Yes, of course, what else has a value that can't change?”

“Nothing I know of. I was just wondering why gold is still so prized.”

“Eighteen billion flatlanders watch a lot of television,” she replied. “The only stuff that makes better connections is superconductor, and that can't be laid down only one atom thick.” She started the lifter loading. “This planet with the refugees—” (she hadn't been told they were Romans) “—does it have a lot of volcanoes?”

“I don't believe it has any,” Ginger realized.

“That's weird,” she said.

“Why? Jinx has no volcanoes.”

“And no gold. I was wondering where this stuff came from. Quartz is out.”

“There's quartz,” he said.

“Must be old, if there's no geological activity.”

“There's hot springs,” he recalled.

She paused the lifter and said, “It's going to bug me.” She did some searching on its control screen, then said, “Calaverite and sylvanite. Gold ores found in upwelling deposits from springs. Huh, no wonder the humans haven't been rooted out!”

“What do you mean?”

“They're tellurium compounds. Any refining process would produce huge amounts of tellurium residues, and that'd definitely keep away anyone with a nose like yours!” She started up the lifter again and got back to work.

“Why?” he said to her back.

“They reek. Smell just like garlic,” she called over her shoulder.

Once Jubilee was back outside, T.C. wandered around while they spent some of their gold on extra supplies. They were just coming in for another load when he showed up and said, “You guys have to go now. The ARM has figured out you're buying starship parts, and they'll have a ship here in five hours or so.”

Ginger just nodded, but Perpetua said, “You're doing this without permission?”

They both looked at her, and T.C. told Ginger, “Look out for her, will you?”

“She doesn't need it, she's just surprised sometimes,” Ginger said. “Before we go, tell me: Where did Joanna locate a tank of lobsters for sale?”

Smith just spread his hands. “She does that.”

“Yes, but how?”

“I've always assumed some sort of pact. Look, no fooling, you need all the head start you can get. I'll stay here and get a ride from somebody.”

“Will you be in much trouble?” Perpetua said.

“You kidding? If they fire me my income goes up eight and a half percent. Go, shoo.” He made brushing motions away from himself.

On a sudden impulse Perpetua stepped forward and kissed him. She took her time about it. When she let him go, Smith said faintly, “Cogswell.”

“What?”

“My middle name. You better go.”

Jubilee had a fusion drive along with the planer, and using the two together gave an acceleration of just under thirty-one gees. They left atmosphere on planer alone, then boosted straight down from the ecliptic until they could get into hyperdrive. The planer couldn't be used to compensate for all the fusion thrust, so they put up with as much as they could stand—about two gees. It was worse for Ginger; Perpetua had a tank of water she could float in.

The transition to hyperdrive was blissful relief.

“What was that kiss about?” was the first thing Ginger said when conversation was worth trying. “You weren't interested in mating with him. I'd have noticed.”

She smiled. “No. But I thought he'd enjoy thinking so.”

Ginger thought about that. He suspected there was an insight to be had into human thinking.

“Hey, he left us his stuff!” she exclaimed.

“Well, don't open anything.”

“Of course not. But he could have got it out in about a minute. I must have done a better job than I thought.”

Definitely called for more thought. He'd have a few days before they got to Wunderland.

Finding a spy to inform to shouldn't be difficult. There were markhams everywhere, it seemed sometimes.

XIII

Old Conalus Leophagus, whose scars were mute testimony to the standard that had won his family their surname, walked with a marked limp until he was near his commander's workroom; then he straightened and strode as befit a herald. Outside the groveroom he coughed for attention; then he coughed a lot more.

Marcus Augustus came out and guided him in, bent over and gasping, to a seat with a back, and put him in it. The Jotoki leader, Kaluseritash, who had been coordinating plans with Marcus, opened a medical kit and got out a patch, which they slapped onto Conalus's neck. “You should not be performing extra duties,” they said sternly.

“I wanted to be the one,” Conalus wheezed, the adrenaline opening his lungs already, “to give the news. Caesar, the hyperdrives”—he pronounced the foreign word carefully—“are being installed even now. The crews will be ready to steal the ships as soon as we can start our diversion.”

“Well done,” said Marcus. “Ask each legionary if he is certain, then tell them: the morning after tomorrow. And Conalus… are you certain?” he said, a little sadly.

“I am, Caesar. I am too weakened to hold a shield on the line, but I can kill one more kzin this way.” He grinned abruptly. “Maybe two or three. I'm a big man.”

“So say the women, too,” Marcus replied, and they laughed together for a moment before Marcus Augustus sent the man who taught him swordsmanship out to die.

“Trader, your resourcefulness is truly astonishing,” Warrgh-Churrg said, admiring his reflection in the stasis box. “I accept your opening offer.”

“Thank you, Potent One,” Ginger said, astounded and not a little concerned that he'd underpriced the thing—oh, well, they had two more. “It might be best not to deploy it before opening of outright hostilities.”

“Deploy?”

“On your flagship?”

“Ftah. This thing guarantees fresh meat whenever I want! What is it?” Warrgh-Churrg snarled at the human messenger who had just crept in.

“Warrgh-Churrg, there is an attack by ferals on your hunting estate,” the messenger quavered from the floor, emphasizing his entire Name, as was wisest when delivering really bad news.

“Fools. What part of the border?”

“All, Warrgh-Churrg.”

“WHAT?” he screamed. “How many?”

“The immediate report was more than five sixty-fours, Warrgh-Churrg.”

Warrgh-Churrg howled red wrath. “Trader, do you wish to go on a hunt?”

“I wasn't expecting to leave my monkey alone that long,” Ginger said. “It gets into things…”

“Fine, go to your ship! You, tell my bursar to pay for this!… I'll be using this at once,” Warrgh-Churrg said with some satisfaction. He switched off the field, then folded the container and left with it.

The messenger peeked after him when he was gone. Then he looked at Ginger.

And winked.

Slave Instructor was overseeing circuit tests of the new installation when the emergency call came in. He listened to his helmet speaker in growing amazement, then announced to his gang, “Down tools, we're stopping work to go planetside.”

A human slave with a welding laser raised his visor. “Master, I've got the gravity planer working well enough to take the ship there directly.”

“That hardly matters to me,” Slave Instructor said haughtily.

“True,” said the human, lowering his visor again.

Slave Instructor just had time to notice the other humans and the Jotoki covering their eyes before the laser flared.

They were in zero gee. Slave Instructor's last sight was an inverted view, of a kzin, in space armor, arms flailing, looking very foolish without a head.

The loading might have been practiced every day. In a sense, it had been; a legionary's life was one of constant drills and exercises, almost all of them (up to now) for things that never did happen.

The Jotoki had maintained piloting skills with tenderly preserved simulators.

The noncombatants—meaning the very young and the crippled, for everyone else fought—had centuries they were attached to, and if some became confused and didn't form up with the troops, they were found. A number of children were found in favorite places they didn't want to leave; but they were all found.

There were others who were normally noncombatants…

Warrgh-Churrg had commanded that he be uninterrupted in the hunt.

The ferals didn't provide much sport, but they displayed astounding destructive capabilities. A favorite tactic was setting a grass fire upwind of a herd of zianya. This had the added effect of overloading the ziirgrah sense, making the humans harder to pay attention to.

The hunt took eleven days. Messengers for him—all kzinti—had been sent back to his palace to await his pleasure.

When Warrgh-Churrg's cargo carrier, bearing tons of fresh meat in stasis, landed in his courtyard, the first thing the Marquis saw on emerging was Trrask-Rarr. The lordling appeared to be sunning himself. Warrgh-Churrg—who had been getting a little twitchy just lately—was too startled to be angry. He ambled over to where his rival lay and said, “What are you doing here?”

“Being courteous,” Trrask-Rarr literally purred. “I was certain you wouldn't want to hear this from someone you liked. The humans and Jotoki are gone.”

“Have someone round them up,” Warrgh-Churrg told Hunt Master.

“They're gone, Warrgh-Churrg,” chuckled Trrask-Rarr. “They took the ships you rebuilt for them, and they left. The only ones left on the planet are in your meat locker there.”

He was far too pleased for Warrgh-Churrg not to take offense. He took a deep breath and began to crouch, and a voice from the donjon gate called, “Warrgh-Churrg, I have come to guide you on a journey.”

He froze, and slowly turned.

Great golden eyes in a face of deepest black confronted him. More golden eyes were tattooed on the ears and the tail.

His tail drooped and lay on the ground. “Holy One, your Name?”

“I am Nabichi,” said the Blackfur. “You are called upon to share your wisdom and be instructed in turn.”

The Question, and death by torture. “But why?”

“Your plans were revealed earlier, though not in time to prevent the theft of the slaves. We will learn where you have had them taken, be assured.”

Warrgh-Churrg sagged all over, and followed the Inquisitor of the Fanged God out the castle gate, to his doom. There was really nothing else he could do.

Trrask-Rarr bounced to his feet and said, “Show me those supplies.” When the stasis box was opened, he took a long sniff and said, “Already seasoned. How very thoughtful. Invite the other lords to a feast tonight. I am celebrating the ownership of my new castle.”

The ships had to break out of hyperspace periodically to communicate for course adjustments, as Jubilee had the only hyperwave. There were meetings of leaders at those times. During the fifth such stop, Ginger found time to tell Marcus Augustus, “I figured out about the garlic.”

“I am impressed.”

“Not as impressed as I am. You've had it planned for how long?”

Marcus looked surprised and said, “I don't know.” He looked at Kaluseritash.

“About three hundred years,” said the Jotoki leader.

“What about the garlic?” Perpetua said.

“They've been eating garlic before going out to fight kzinti,” said Ginger, “to get their enemies accustomed to the smell. Their gold ore was combined with tellurium. It's a poisonous metal. One of the symptoms of tellurium poisoning is 'garlic breath,' according to Jubilee's database.”

Marcus took over. “It tends to accumulate in the liver. A man can build up a tolerance for it, but it makes his lungs collect fluid.” He looked distracted for a moment, then went on. “We had hundreds of volunteers—men and women too old or injured to fight very well or for long, but who wanted to strike one last blow.”

“As did we,” said Kaluseritash. “Anyone who eats them will suffer massive neural degeneration and circulatory disorders, and if lucky will die.”

Perpetua was very wide-eyed. “You had that planned for three hundred years?”

“ 'Use any weapon you can make, and make any weapon you can use.' Brutus Leophagus,” said Marcus. “I hope it isn't much further to Wunderland. Metal walls disturb me. Are there caverns? It will be some time before we have trees growing properly.”

“There are,” Ginger said dubiously, “but there are dangerous native creatures in them. We thought we had killed them all, but the caverns stretched further and deeper than we knew. You might want to dig your own with disintegrators.”

“Disintegrators? Are these weapons?” Marcus said, interested.

“Not very good ones. Too slow. They're used for digging and large sculpture,” said Ginger. “They work by decreasing the charge of atomic particles, positive or negative depending on how they're set.”

“What happens when you have one of each kind side by side?” said Marcus.

Ginger looked at Perpetua. Perpetua looked at Ginger.

“I think you'll be very welcome when the next war starts,” said Perpetua.