The Wunder War

Prologue

The ship flew in like a drunken bat, an automatic distress beacon shrieking. It did not respond to signals.

When they came within visual sight they saw it was grossly damaged, and plainly not under maneuvering control.

When they boarded the ravaged ship with its crew of crumbling, desiccated, drifting corpses, some in strange costumes, the only survivor they found was a head-injured woman in coldsleep. They slowed it and stopped it just before it entered the deadly embrace of one of the outer gas-giants.

The ship had come a long way under its autopilot from the general direction of either Sol or the Alpha Centauri System. The oddly shaven-headed man who must have instructed it as he died still floated with a freeze-dried hand on the controls.

But they tested the hull metal where they cut their way in and found that, if it had come from Earth, it must have been a very old ship before it started.

There were many dead. Far more than a normal crew. This was as packed as a colony ship, more packed, indeed, for a large part of a colony ship's complement would have been frozen embryos. Nor did it carry the vast array of stores and supplies a colony ship would have had: almost nothing but people and hibernation cubicles and bare provisions for a skeleton crew of watch-keepers.

They were tough spacers who boarded the ship, and most had seen death in space before, but still this was especially horrible and upsetting.

Apart from the strangely costumed and coiffured men, a large number of the dead were women and children. The hibernation facilities could have just accommodated them all and looked as if these had been being prepared for use when disaster struck, but only the one had been activated.

It was easy to see but difficult to understand what had happened. It had been sudden. Perhaps the ship had accidentally crossed a big com-laser near its point of origin. A laser—a big one—had burned through the rear of the hull and opened one compartment after another to space, punching its way through hull-metal and human tissue indiscriminately. But if that was what had happened, why had the ship or the station that had fired the laser not come to its rescue?

Anyway, it had stopped short of total destruction, and a few emergency systems were still working, including the beacon that had signaled its arrival.

The damage had caused short circuits and fires that had raged even in sealed compartments until the last oxygen in the life-system was consumed. The logbook was melted slag. The last minutes of life aboard the crowded ship were better not imagined but must have been mercifully brief.

The activated coldsleep unit was damaged and operating with a backup of questionable efficiency. They took the woman down to the surface, and tugs with electromagnetic grapnels moved the strange ship into a parking orbit.

Even if the woman had not been head-injured to start with, brain-death seemed a near certainty. When they checked the brainwaves' readouts with their own equipment they were astonished by their strength.

They were careful, and took a long time healing her and bringing her back to consciousness. The people of We Made It were sometimes painfully aware of being a colony, without the vast medical and scientific resources of Earth or even Wunderland, but their science was still good. The robots of twenty-fifth-century nanotechnology—comparable in size to some large molecules—crawled into her brain, and when a net of them had been formed whose neural connectivity made a whole that was far greater than the sum of its microscopic parts, they sought to trigger a memory. Sensors, receptors, cognitive and motor response units more delicate by far even than those used in normal reconstructive nerve surgery linked their impulses.

It was a new technology and imperfect. The watchers saw some of what little was left of her memory translated into flickering holograms. There was a jumble of images, including, quite clearly, a scene of a sidewalk café and a man with a lopsided yellow beard under an open sky.

It looked to those who examined it like something from a picture book of old Earth, though it was not a Flatlander's beard. The tiny robots sewed and spliced and healed a little and crawled out of her brain. They would wait before applying nerve-growth factors so new neuronic connections would not interfere further with the grossly damaged, immeasurably delicate and diffuse network of connections that created the hologram of memory.

The woman's brain continued to puzzle them, even when they had repaired it as much as they might. There were few pictures but many abstract symbols.

They tested her DNA but that told them nothing save that she was of human stock originally from northern Europe. They brought her back to consciousness.

She could speak only in broken sentences when they began, gently, to question her in the hospital at We Made It.

Chapter 1

2367 a.d.

Around me as I flew, the evening sky of Wunderland was full of light. Alpha Centauri B was so brilliant in its time as to cast its own sharp shadows at dusk and to fill the air with color, yet at an average of 25 AUs easily distant enough to be looked at with the naked eye.

There too was the red jewel of Proxima and the diffuse, braided lines of the Serpent Swarm. There, a routine sight in this system, was the sliding and flash of meteors, plus a couple of fair-sized moons and other smaller satellites, natural and artificial. There were other points of light that were in fact potato-shaped stony worldlets of various sizes, some carrying loads of instruments, the axled wheels of the old spacestation, the squares and rhomboids of advertising signs (hardly used now—they proved unpopular and counterproductive), high aircraft and spacecraft, and, higher still and parked in their plodding orbits, the old slowboats that had brought the original colonists.

The towns and city too had their high points of light, not because population pressure in a limited space had forced them upward—Wunderland's chief cities were still quite small—but because .61 Earth gravity made for both high but easily conquerable hills and a few relatively inexpensive architectural flights of fancy.

Wunderland. Humanity's first interstellar colony was well-named, I thought, watching the landscape pass below me, high crests and ridges still lit by the rays of setting Alpha Centauri A, mountainsides glowing. I had seen pictures of Earth, and understood again the delight our ancestors must have felt in their first days and nights on this new world.

Not a new thought but still a good one. With its towering hills and mountains, sparkling seas and lush life, its forests, parklands and savannahs where the red-gold of the local vegetation now mixed with the green of Earth plants, its brilliant sky, a gravity that gave good health, good looks (if we exercised hard) and long life, it was impossible to imagine a more wonderful place. Someone had once compared it to the valleys of Malacandra in C. S. Lewis's ancient fantasy Out of the Silent Planet, and noted how Lewis, even if his Mars was a billion years or so behind the times, had anticipated the effects of low gravity on waves. The frustrations of my personal life could be seen in their proper perspective as I flew over that glorious landscape, under those stars.

I have often remembered the details of that night, and the contentment I did not then know I felt. In fact, I was relieved to be getting away for a few hours from my own thoughts and from the political intrigues and pressures that were becoming more and more obvious between Herrenmanner and Prolevolk on the one hand, and Teuties and Tommies on the other, with the déclassé jumping about on the edges.

Because of the frequency of meteor impacts, our fathers had been wary of building near the coast, but we had a good meteor guard force now, with sensors and big rock-blasting lasers mounted in spacecraft and also on the ground, and Circle Bay Monastery stood on a headland, high on the rim of an old crater.

To the west a wide swath of open parklike country swept down to merge with the outer marshes of Grossgeister Swamp. There were ponds and limestone caves, some with odd populations descended from sea creatures washed inland by ancient tsunamis. To the south-east were hills and, seeming far away but still just visible from the air, the diffuse glow of München against the sky. As the night deepened the lights of scattered hamlets and farms were spilled beads rolling to the horizon. A sudden bright plume of orange smoke climbing starwards indicated a takeoff from München spaceport. It had, I thought, been unusually busy lately.

München had been called New München immediately after its settlement, and its river the New Donau, but the prefixes had fallen out of use. The other München and Donau were more than four light-years away, and there was little chance of confusing them.

There was the outline of the monastery ahead, dark walls and lighted windows, growing larger as the autopilot shifted into descent.

I brought my car down in the monastery courtyard. The abbot was waiting for me, visible from a distance as a spot of red light. He had taught me at school, and I had used the monastery as a base for collecting expeditions in the past. We knew one another well.

“That's where it was seen,” said the abbot when I alighted and we had exchanged greetings. “It vanished down there.” He gestured with his cigar to a grove of red Wunderland trees near the outlying margin of the swamp, dark in the night shadows.

“Did you watch the area?”

“Not continuously, I'm afraid. We thought the best thing was to call you. We kept an eye on the trees during the day, but there doesn't seem to be anything there now. Unless it's good at hiding. But it would have to be good. Some of the brothers aren't bad hunters.”

I scanned the grove with my nitesite. There were a few dull red points in the dark of the trees showing the body heat of small animals. Nothing much bigger than a large rat or perhaps a Beam's beast, but some of the Wunderland reptiloids, even the big ones, were cold when resting. So close to the swamp, it was as well to be respectful of what might be out after dark.

“Well, I'm not going in there now.”

“Of course not. But you'll take a drop of wine?”

The monks of Circle Bay Headland made their own wine in the old way. It was famous and expensive and part of the reason I had not waited and flown out in the morning. The abbot was a good host, and the guest rooms were comfortable in an old-fashioned style. We crossed the wide lawn of the courtyard to his study.

“Something like a big cat, you said. Who saw it?”

“Three of the Brothers. Peter, Joachim, and John. They'd been fishing in the marshes. They wrote down their impressions separately, as you asked. All emphasized cat.”

I knew them quite well. Brother John was a trained reptiloid handler and had come collecting with me; the others were horticulturists with a good bit of botany and a good deal more zoology than most, even by the standards of an educated and intellectually curious community that lived largely by farming on what was still a comparatively new world with two competing and adjusting biosystems. All intelligent and reliable men.

“And it was how big? Not a tigripard?”

“No. Not a tigripard. It was big, bigger than a man, bigger than an Earth tiger, as far as I know, and far bulkier, and they said it ran differently. Sometimes on four legs, undulating like an Earth weasel, sometimes—and this is odd—on two legs. Nothing that they recognized as either a local or an Earth creature.”

“And it didn't attack them.”

“No. But it was plainly a carnivore. They didn't get to see it for long, but they said there was no mistaking the teeth and the limbs.”

“And nothing local, you say?”

Some of the bigger Wunderland animals, like gagrumphers, were—appropriately for Alpha Centauri A's planet—centauroid in form, but they generally went about in herds and with all six legs on the ground. In any case, gagrumphers were herbivores and placid unless threatened. And as far as large animals go, even creatures as evolved as humans can generally tell herbivores from carnivores instinctively at a glance. It's deep in our genes.

“Definitely not.”

“Everything we know about evolution says such a creature wouldn't evolve in this ecology,” I said. “Predators don't grow bigger than they need, and the native prey-animals all around here are quite small. If there was anything big enough to jump on adult gagrumphers, we'd know about it by now… we'd have seen anything really big long ago. On Earth nothing preyed on elephants, at least not healthy ones.”

“I know. But you said the native prey-animals. We've introduced equids and cows and sheep and pigs. That might attract visitors from farther afield. What's in the hills and the forests? You haven't got the whole planet classified yet, have you?”

Wunderland is smaller than Earth but a good deal bigger than Mars. The last I heard, even the surviving vestiges of Martian life had had their mysteries. “I might say: 'Give us a chance!' It is a whole planet!” I told him.

“And things can grow bigger in water, can't they? We've got both the sea and the swamp not far away… But they're sure this was not a water dweller. I told you I had something odd for you.”

Something odd. It gave me a sudden queer shiver. Sometimes we remembered that, if Wunderland was wonderful, we were also still alien intruders upon it.

“The cat aspect is strange, certainly,” I said, “Even a tigripard isn't very catlike. But this sounds more like the persistence of an Earthside myth than anything else. Many wild places on Earth had legends of solitary, wild giant cats that had no business being there—there were sightings, even photographs, of the Beast of Bodmin in England for centuries.” Cryptozoology was one aspect of Earth history I had to know something about—the habits of a lot of Wunderland's fauna might be described as cryptic. “They were probably actually big wild dogs that had turned sheep-killers, plus sightings of domestic cats that had gone feral and bred a bit bigger than normal, or surviving Felis sylvestris wildcats. Maybe there were one or two big felines that had escaped from captivity. But it would be odd to find the same legend here. And they are sure it wasn't a tigripard? They can be quite dangerous enough!”

“No. It was the first thing I asked them. They are quite sure. I don't want to overreact, but I thought it could be something special—which can mean specially dangerous.”

“If it's unknown, it could be dangerous. What looks more harmless than a Beam's beast? They caused a lot of casualties before we got the measure of them.”

We passed under an arched doorway, through an enclosed space I had learned was called the Garth, through another arch with a brass-bound wooden door in a lower wall and entered the abbot's book-lined study.

The Catholic Church, like some of the Protestant denominations, had been supported on Wunderland by a large and wealthy congregation once, including some of the Nineteen Families. The monastery buildings had some extravagant architectural follies from those days, including sections of battlemented wall and a high tower that could have come from Neuschwanstein. The monks' private quarters were austere while eschewing extremes, but the abbot had to be something of a politician now, and entertain. As the church's support declined, paradoxically, he had to show influential visitors more than a modicum of comfort.

Well, I wasn't sorry for it. The monastery's past generations of abbots or whoever had made these rooms had managed to combine comfort with a rare feeling of stepping into an almost museum-exhibit-like past. But it was part of a still-working institution with a life, a poetry, if you like, that no museum can achieve.

I was glad there was such a place on Wunderland, where every human structure was relatively new. There was an antique open fire burning in what the abbot had told me was called a “grate,” old chairs that one wouldn't want to sit on for long but which reminded one of how our ancestors sat, as well as comfortable modern ones, a really ancient ornate “clockwork” clock, a shelf of antique-looking paper books in red and gold beside the computers, a crystal decanter on a side table. It seemed odd to talk of unknown dangers in such surroundings.

“You have weapons?”

“A few.” He waved around the room: “You know we like old things. There are a couple of antique shotguns we use as fowling pieces, and the collecting guns.” A ginger kitten jumped onto his knee as he sat, kneading the folds of his robe and purring raucously as he stroked it.

“Also, of course, we need them when we have to kill a badly injured animal or one of our own beasts for meat. We're old-fashioned in just about all ways, you know.”

“I remember the first time you fed me meat from an animal you killed,” I said. “It took me a bit of getting used to. A useful accomplishment for a biologist on field trips, though.” We both laughed at the memory of my rush to the bathroom the first time I saw—and then realized—what was on my plate. “Sometimes I thought you were toughening me up deliberately.”

“I was.” There was something different in his voice for a moment that snagged my attention. Then he resumed his usual slightly pedagogical manner. Perhaps one's old teacher never quite gets beyond teaching, I thought.

“I've said it is part of the churches' duty not to move with the times, though not all the secular brethren agree with me. Oh yes, and we've got some modern strakkakers in case we encounter dangerous creatures like Beam's beasts or tigripards at the sheep…

“Or, between you and me,” he continued, “in case we are attacked by humans, who could be much more dangerous. We've got a few bits and pieces in the Treasury and round about that might tempt thieves.” The clockwork clock, I thought, must be just about beyond price for some rich collector. But who would know how to maintain such a thing?

“Using strakkakers against thieves sounds pretty draconian!” The strakkaker's blizzard of glass needles would turn a man into an anatomist's instant diagram. Even police only carried them in emergencies.

“We wouldn't, not in the first instance. But if anyone broke in, we might have to defend ourselves. The Papacy has always taken the long view about weapons technology. It was the Bull Romanus Pontifex that gave the charter to the age of European exploration.” He loved to lecture, I knew. When I was a child he had spent a lot of time with me after school and guided me towards my career. “It was a pope who tried to ban the crossbow. And it was a pope who tried to ban the sale of the noisy, inefficient stonethrowers called cannon to Africans in 1481. We knew they wouldn't stay at that state. But the ban didn't stick and the Moorish pirates were using them in galleys to dominate the western Mediterranean not much later…” He took a sip of wine. “We're aware our isolation could make us vulnerable.”

“It's an isolation a lot of people would envy. I know I often do.”

The abbot laughed. “I'm well aware of it. We're short of monastic vocations, but there's a long waiting list of people wanting to come on temporary retreats here. A lot of people seem to get something out of a retreat. But they want the tranquility without the discipline—or without the religion at all… without the religion at all,” he repeated, and the laugh went out of his voice. We were both silent for a slightly awkward moment. “They'd better make the most of it while it lasts,” he added.

“I thought you were planning to be here forever.”

“That's what I'd like, but I have to look at the demography. Christianity is dying on this world, as it is on Earth. Life's too easy for most people to feel the need of a religion… a little mild pseudo-Buddhism among some of the urban young, perhaps. But we've talked church history before.”

I nodded. On Earth, when people mentioned the Holy Office today, it was generally a slang reference to one of the more secretive departments of ARM, Earth's technological police. Was I right in a vague notion that about the time the last slowboat-load of colonists left Earth, senior church figures had been taking up day jobs? Did it matter? Earth was a long way away. We Masons, who were required only to believe in a Supreme Being, and had a life of our own in our lodges, had an easier job surviving on the whole, but we too had had our lean years.

“I love coming here,” I said. “I could never be one for the discipline of the monastic order, but a furlough among all this is pure contentment.”

He filled our glasses from the sparkling crystal decanter. The wine shone ruby in the firelight. Perhaps my too obvious appreciation of this luxury touched a nerve.

“We're not a very disciplined society, are we? Not a very tough one,” he said. “Also,” he went on, “there's this political trouble. How much do you know about that?”

“Not much. But more than I want to. We've got a whole world—a whole system—thinly settled. Huge tracts of land still for the taking, huge tracts still unexplored from the ground, if it comes to that. Habitable asteroids, Centauri B close by, even the Proxima system to settle if we want to live in bubbles under a red sky. What reason is there for us to fight?”

“The reason that we're human. It's not just Herrenmanner and Prolevolk. Teuties and Tommies fought systematically on Earth once, you know.”

“I've heard about it,” I said. “I don't know the details.”

“Not many do now. Earth is censoring its history in a big way, and though we did bring some records of our own there seems no reason for us to advertise the story of Earth's past…”

“It's not likely to come to fighting again, anyway. Not in this century. We aren't savages.”

“Not in the old sense, I grant you,” he said. “Not wars and armies and so forth.” We both laughed at the absurd image. “But there are other forms of violence. Just lately… people have disappeared, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I say. Von Frowein, a senior councilor. He went on a camping holiday a couple of weeks ago and never came back.”

“Didn't they search for him?”

“Yes, and they didn't find anything. He had the usual telltale beacon on him, standard equipment for lone campers, and there wasn't a peep out of it—as if it had been deliberately smashed. It gave me a nasty feeling when I learned about that. And there have been others. The police think we are seeing some organized murders—political murders.”

“How do you know these things?”

“I'm not just an abbot, you know. I'm also a bishop—a priest in the secular sense. I hear confessions and… other things. My monks can retire from the world. I can't.” He got up, pushing the kitten gently onto the padded arm of his chair, and began to pace the room.

“Did you ever read Saki?” he asked, looking at me with a sudden curious expression, “An old Earth writer. A heathen, as far as I can gather, but he had a hand for verses:

“He didn't write them as poetry, but as literary artifacts in a short story. Still, they can set one on a certain train of thought.” I knew enough of his manner of rhetoric to know that when he spoke again it would be to quote something he had picked for a reason.

Did he let that last line linger in the air between us for a moment? His glance turned to the blank faces of his computers, and in the soft lighting I seemed to catch something strange there. But it passed. “We—the church, that is—have survived by being ultra-orthodox, archaically conservative,” he said musingly. “Heresy comes too easily if you give it a chance, especially when it takes the fastest message four and a half years to travel between us and Rome. And heresy means disintegration.

“We know our own history. The church very nearly died of tolerance once. Space travel and the scientism that went with it looked like killing us, but it may have been the saving of us instead. We religious weren't backward in getting into Space, you know. The first religious figure to set foot on a new world was an Episcopal lay preacher named Buzz Aldrin.

“As for us, there's a stained-glass window in our chapel with a likeness of Father George Coyne, the director of the Vatican Observatory, who applied for astronaut training in the 1960s. His Provincial is said to have muttered, 'If I let you become an astronaut, George, every priest will want to.' He had a point there. A priest, Georges Lemaitre, first postulated the Big Bang. No, we've never been hostile to space and space travel, far from it. But perhaps that renewal was a miracle, an unlooked-for one, like almost all real miracles.”

“You believe in miracles?”

“Officially.”

“But not actually?”

“We've been here a long time. And I'm not young. The faith flickers sometimes. But you can't cross space without feeling the vastness of the Creation and the insignificance of mankind compared to whatever made it.

“Also,” he said after a moment, “conservatism justifies my own comfort.”

“It's a good life cut off from the world, you mean?”

“Yes. Not so much better here as it might be on Earth, I suppose. Wunderland still has plenty of room. That's partly how I justify it and don't think I'm just a fat selfish old man. We are keeping something alive.”

He fell silent again. I nodded.

“The Church didn't only come to Wunderland to minister to the people here,” he said suddenly, “though of course that would have been more than reason enough. Some hoped we would renew ourselves. I know some say we're in the pockets of the Nineteen Families, but we came here independently—at very considerable cost. I'm told it almost bankrupted the Vatican. It had to be done, particularly as we knew our… competitors… were aboard the original slowboats.”

“What? You mean the Protestants?”

“No,” he said, with a sudden harsh bleakness in his voice that I had not heard before. “Not the proddys, who we've got on with fairly well for centuries now. And not you Masons either, by the way.”

“You know about that?”

“Of course. And the church's anathema still holds, you damned syncretist! I also know most of you are well-intentioned, though if you'll forgive me saying so, some of you may in sober truth be playing with a hotter fire than you know. But I'm getting off the point: when we left Earth, some of us thought it would be for our own good as well as that of our new flock…

“We did renew ourselves, I think, for a while, but… Of course, I have to run this place in the world. I've some idea of the political stresses gathering now. But they are hardly enough to drive people back to the church.”

Although machines and farming robots grew or manufactured most of our food, land which had appeared unlimited when the first colonists had arrived had made for a largely rural culture: a gentle, easy one unlike the hard work and bloody realities of farmers of ancient times, but one that kept us in touch with seasons and open spaces. Despite our heritage of space travel and our modern technology, it made us conservative in many ways—worse than conservative, according to some, though others applauded it. Cities had grown slowly and were still tiny compared to the megalopolises of Earth. But with the establishment of those cities, land values had changed. People had changed too.

The rural life was fine in theory for many but city life was more convenient and exciting in practice. When, after its long gestation as a mere landing field and administrative headquarters, München had begun to look like a real city (it had taken many years for the permanent population to reach a thousand), it had begun attracting natural urbanites and had grown faster and faster. However good communications and virtual reality might be, people wanted to be close to things, and some people wanted to be close to other people. An ancient expression about “rural idiocy” had been resurrected.

The university had been one of the first people-magnets. Some students had wanted cafés and classrooms with other students rather than computer screens in solitary farmhouses. For an eighteen-year-old, the best VR communication with girlfriend or boyfriend lacks a certain something. The university population alone was more than twenty thousand now. Of course it was mainly science subjects that were studied, both pure and applied—the new mathematical transform alone had caused a whole new department to be set up—but there was a growing culture of the humanities as well. A colleague in the literature department had told me that a new poetic movement was writing of rural life with nostalgia. With an urban population growing rapidly, a growing business and professional class and stronger unions, the Nineteen Families were feeling their hegemony challenged as never before. Threat was making them tighten their grip. We still, if one looked at Earth history, had few police even for our population, but I wondered that night how long that situation was going to last.

The increasing political bickering seemed foolish and far away in that pleasant room.

“You won't go out to the people?”

“Do you mean us monks or the church as a whole? That's work for the secular orders. But the Church can't compromise too much on this world. We went that way once on Earth and nearly lost everything. Still, we've lasted twenty-four hundred years and more. Just. I have faith we'll survive… Faith, after all, is my business. Mark you, without being too hypocritical, I do feel the absence of any sort of… test.”

“Test? I don't understand.”

“I'm not sure I do, either,” he said. “Just that I sometimes know things are too comfortable here.”

“I didn't know they could be too comfortable.”

“It's not a material thing. Not necessarily.”

I noticed now an unrepaired crack in the stonework behind the abbot's head. It looked deep and old. Through the window behind him I could see what I knew were the monks' living quarters. Half at least of the rooms were empty now and dark. There was a small pane of glassine missing in the window. I wondered if the old man's faith in their survival was misplaced and hoped it wasn't.

We were proud of our differences from Sol system's rather coldly technological order, from the Sol Belters and their descendants in our own Serpent Swarm, with their slightly inhuman efficiency, and from Earth's crowding and regimentation and its—albeit we were told, largely benevolent and inevitable—control. We esteemed a lot of our own archaisms, including a freedom that Earth would probably have considered anarchical, but were we doing enough to preserve them?

Wunderland, I thought again, would never be a dull world, but it would lose something special if it lost the monks and their quaint, kindly, old-fashioned ways. That thought, I realized, had a patronizing feel about it. This place was more than pleasant: in some odd way it was precious. The whole place was a relic, and in many ways a decadent one—the monks' simplicity was more complex and expensive than ordinary modern life. It would not weather a real storm, but it had charm, and in the world of Wunderland, young, expansive, ripe for the taking in a hundred ways, there were no real storms on the horizon.

I went to bed warmed by that splendid wine, which no chemist could duplicate, and despite the coarse, woven bedclothes, slept well as I always did there, with an herb- and flower-scented garden just beyond my open window. I did not, of course, know it was my world's last night.

Chapter 2

The next morning I woke with the birds and a chapel bell. The monks had already prayed and broken their fast, as they put it, but they were indulgent towards sluggard guests, and there was something put by for me in the refectory. I had trimmed my beard, eaten, and was just finishing a pot of what was surely the best coffee in the Alpha Centauri system when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“Good morning, Professor Rykermann.”

It was Brother Peter. He was already carrying a collecting-gun, and thrust into his belt was a dust-gun with which someone with quicker hands and eyes than mine might shoot down collectible insectoids on the wing. I was a little surprised to see he had one of the monastery's strakkakers slung over his shoulder. Behind him stood Brothers Joachim and John. They were armed as well.

“And a-hunting we will go!”

“Aren't all these weapons rather…” I knew there was an antique word, and it came back to me from some history course. “Overkill?”

“No.”

Normally the monks would be in thoroughly good spirits at the prospect of helping me on a collecting expedition. That part of my work was most people's idea of a holiday. But there was something serious in their faces that morning. I knew them as friends, and behind their politeness and what I thought of as their professional serenity I sensed tension. They didn't argue about the strakkakers but kept them.

There was no point in taking the car. The place where they had made the sighting was only a few hundred meters from the main gate.

Inside the walls were fish ponds and gardens with many Earth as well as Wunderland plants: a lot of these (netted over, as were the ponds, against various large and small flying pirates) were grown for their fruit, but some were purely decorative: casurina trees, cape lilacs, the scarlet of bougainvilleas and nodding palm fronds. Along with the flutterbys, Earth bees were loud. Near the gate the kitten was sunning itself in a patch of marigolds. A couple of bright flags flew on the higher towers.

We walked through the parkland-like meadow of red and green grasses star-spangled with flowers. The monks had a small business making perfumes from nectar, and perhaps that encouraged the flutterbys. They rose about us out of the grasses in glorious multicolored clouds.

But there was an undercurrent of something else. The usually tame animals in the meadows seemed nervous. Apart from the more usual domestic animals, the monks had raised a small herd of zebras for decorative purposes, and their black-and-white variations and heraldic profiles as they grazed usually provided a pleasing contrast with the riot of colours. Today, I saw, the zebras were clumped together, standing in a circle as far away from the swamp and the grove as they might get, the stallions facing outwards.

“This thing we saw,” Brother Joachim told me again, “it's big. Bigger than a tigripard.”

“So the abbot said. But three strakkakers? I hope you're not leaving your house defenseless.”

Brother John, I knew, laughed a good deal. He wasn't laughing now.

“It's not only big. It's dangerous.”

“How do you know?”

“Just because I wear this robe doesn't mean I'm not a hunter.”

“Hunter's instinct, you mean?”

“More than that. Instinct usually whispers. This was screaming: 'Run! Run for your life!' That was even before we saw it… The creature was nightmarish. If we'd told the Father how terrifying it really was, I don't think he would have believed us.”

“I hear what you're saying, and I respect it. You're a hunter, but you're a scientist, too. What was so terrifying about it?”

“It's not easy to put into words. But part of it was that it shouldn't have been there. Look, Professor, a tigripard makes sense ecologically. But this didn't. It was too big.”

“Odd, I told the abbot that last night. But size can be hard to judge at dusk.”

“Not this size. There are the bushes where we first saw it.”

“Yes?”

“It stood twice the height of them.”

“We all agree on that,” Brother Peter added.

“That's more than the height of a man.”

“Much more.”

“It looked like… like a cross between an oversized tiger and a gorilla. There's something else. Something hard to explain. It was… monstrous. It loped away a few moments after it saw us, but—and we're all sure of this—in those moments it was weighing up whether to attack us or not. And it had us at its mercy. If it had decided to attack, we were dead. We knew.” The others nodded.

I thought I understood what he meant. Not from experience but professional observation. A hunted animal knows when it has been marked out as prey. There is a sort of subtelepathic thing, an ability to terrify prey by projecting intent, that is part of a certain type of predator's stock in trade.

And yet… the serious settlement of Wunderland had begun with the arrival of the first slowboat carrying the Families and the core of settlers three centuries before. It had been surveyed before the colonists unpacked, and the most obvious types of big fierce animals, in the immediate area at least, had been found and either eliminated or moved to islands. Since then there had always been natural scientists at work classifying, dissecting, ecologizing…

But relatively few of them, and much of their work was directed to practical matters—agriculture, husbandry, mariculture, genetics, conservation, toxology, biological physics—rather than the fairly self-indulgent pleasures of pure zoological research.

I was only the second to occupy my chair. As the abbot and I had said, we were a long way yet from knowing even all the larger animals on the principal continent of Wunderland—it would be a sad day for me if we ever did!—but this was Circle Bay, only a short flight from München. The Abbott had complained to me that light pollution from the city would soon be affecting the monastery's little visual observatory (a telescope in orbit was beyond the monastery's modern budget and not its style anyway).

The monastery's nearest neighbors were small niche farms, worked by vigilant, reliable robots under minimal human supervision. Grossgeister Swamp was large, not fully explored, known and rumored to be the abode of odd things as well as odd people. But as a scientist I thought it highly unlikely that it contained some kind of giant tiger.

Or was it? Tigers, I remembered, had lived in swamps as well as jungles on Earth. The Sundabands at the mouth of the Ganges had been so infested with them that towers were built for stranded sailors to shelter in. At the southern end of the Malay Peninsula, as late as the mid-nineteenth century, they had regularly swum the Johore Strait to the new city of Singapore to eat workmen. Water would support a big body, too—but the swamp had its own large assortment of strictly water-dwelling predators, including some analogous to Earth crocodilians. I doubted anything like a tiger could compete with them in a watery or muddy environment.

Apart from aerial and satellite surveys, and the expeditions of scientists and fishermen, there was a small population of humans, marshmen and swampmen—“characters,” some fairly dubious—who seemed to like living in the swamp and often made some income as hunting and fishing guides. The swamp was undoubtedly dangerous for the ignorant, and these “characters” would have to be well-acquainted with it. Hard to imagine that a big land-dwelling predator had managed to live so near a populated zone for so long quite undetected.

But was it impossible?

Sometimes, when we were not taking it for granted and speaking of it as our home, even we, the Wunderland-born, tried to make ourselves realize how alien we were. It was good, I thought suddenly, that the first colonists had come in large numbers and, though we were thinly scattered on the planet still, our population was now in tens of millions.

I was glad that when I was born there had been a good scattering of settlements. A small, single colony, like some of the later ones on more distant planets, might well be a terrifying place to be. What was it like for a settler to look up at the night sky from the single settlement on one of the new colony worlds—assuming they had a night sky—and feel himself so utterly alone beyond that single pool of light?

We, and the tough loner humans of the Serpent Swarm, descendants of the tough loners who had first colonized Sol's asteroid belt, were, if we thought about it, quite alone enough.

Reduce the Sol system to a scale model on a large field: Sol is a ball nine feet in diameter. Walk away from it for about five minutes, a fifth of a mile, and you come to the orbit of Earth, a little ball about an inch in diameter. Earth's moon, the size of a small pea, is about two and a half feet from it.

Wunderland, on this scale, circling the nearest of all major stars, is 50,000 miles away.

No good. Draw what picture you like. Know that our ancestors made the journey. The mind still can't really take it in. But we should not be surprised by strangeness here.

Brother Joachim dropped on his knees and pointed to a patch of bare ground.

The tracks were of four-toed, clawed feet. The claws of a carnivore, I was sure. And they were big. Bigger than a human foot, and sunk farther into the ground than a human footprint would have been. Something very solid indeed appeared to have made those tracks. Unless this was some sort of hoax—and I could not imagine why these monks might be hoaxers—it was a creature that was still very heavy in Wunderland's gravity.

Now I saw it had left an obvious trail. A wide swath of vegetation, including small trees, was broken and beaten flat. Its tracks pointed straight for the swamp. I cocked the collecting gun with its tranquillizer darts, meant to be good for both Earth and Wunderland animal physiologies. The monks unslung and cocked the strakkakers. Brother Joachim moved in front of me.

Following the trail could hardly have been easier. As we descended into the marshy ground the prints grew deeper. Clawed-up divots of dirt confirmed the creature had been moving at speed, and here and there were the marks of forepaws… very curious forepaws.

Near the borders of the swamp proper the trail turned aside, towards the grove of Wunderland trees. It entered the grove.

And ended. There was a wide circle of disturbed ground, nothing more. I wondered if the creature had somehow buried itself or tunneled out of the grove. That seemed contrary to everything we knew. And those prints were not from the claws of a digging animal. But Wunderland was not Earth…

I got the car then and we examined the site from the air. The car's ground effect obliterated the trail as it went but we filmed it first. The track from the grove to the spot where the monks had seen the creature became obvious, as did the track back to the grove, and the wide circular disturbance of the ground and bushes there. It appeared plain that the creature had left the grove and proceeded to higher ground near the monastery as if to observe the buildings.

There was no indication of how it had entered the grove in the first place or where it had gone. There was no disturbance to indicate a tunnel or burrow. This was not the cave country of the limestone ranges, there were no cracks or sinkholes, and radar had charted the location of all the shallow local caves long ago. We flew over the swamp's margins, and saw nothing new. Even the normally teeming flying and swimming creatures of the swamp seemed unusually silent and scarce.

The monks and the abbot seemed almost apologetic, but any biologist learns to bear with frustration and delay in fieldwork. I asked them to keep their eyes open and not to hesitate to call me if they saw the odd creature, or any other odd creature, again, and then I flew back to München. But if I was reasonably philosophical about it, some disappointment remained. To have captured an unknown species of large animal, carnivore or otherwise, would have been a very big thing.

And the monks had been good witnesses that there had been something there. Something big and catlike. I was sure they were telling the truth to the best of their ability. Before leaving I had examined them separately and their accounts remained consistent. I wondered if I would ever see one.

The voicemail on the instrument panel lit as I approached the city. I thought it might be the Monastery calling to say they had seen anything new, but it was something that struck me as a good deal odder: the mayor's office. They wanted me right away.

Chapter 3

“I'm frankly somewhat embarrassed to have called you like this, Professor,” Deputy-Mayor Hubertstein said. “I understand you've been on a field trip today.”

“Not much of a trip. But I can't think what this is about.”

“We're setting up rather a rushed conference to put a number of experts in the picture, including a biologist.

“A bit of a possible problem has come up. I've got to tell you straight away, though: this meeting and its… subject matter… are, well, potentially embarrassing at the moment. I know you are a responsible man. You'll keep secret about this?”

“I still don't know what 'this' is, but yes, I suppose so.”

“All right. Come this way, please.”

There was Police Chief Grotius, Captain von Thetoff and another, more senior, officer of the Meteor Guard, with both spacer and Herrenmann written all over him. Others joined us in the capsule that took us up to the Lesser Hall. Most of the seats there were already filled.

A string of my colleagues from different departments of the university. There was Herrenmann Kristin von Diderachs, spokesman (dictator, some said) to the City Council for the Nineteen Families, smooth, confident, plump and complacent, radiating pride and authority, who I had been presented to but who would hardly have deigned to acknowledge me. There was van Roberts, his opposite number for the Progressive Democrats. Some other politicians had cross-party friendships but I knew these two hated each other and were said to be barely on speaking terms even in the Council.

Others I recognized as political figures and industrialists. And in a majority of them the dress, features, and unmistakable body language of the Nineteen Families.

There was The Markham, there was Freuchen, there was Thor Mannstein, there was a representative of the Feynman clan, and there were others: Montferrat-Palme, of an old family coming down in the world, Talbot with his defiantly symmetrical beard, The Dunkley of Dunkley, Schleisser, The Argyl, Mannteufel, Franke, Johnston, Buxton, von Kenaelly, Lufft. Golden or flaxen hair and those mobile ears. A more than usual number of asymmetrical beards with their own subtle identifications and codings of status. But there were other people too: as well as professionals of nebulous status like me (our beards asymmetrical but not blatantly so), there were a couple of obviously wealthy and successful prolevolk and a good number of the new déclassé. Also a man who I knew slightly as one of the town librarians.

I had been vaguely annoyed at having my evening interfered with, and further by being sworn to secrecy by someone like Hubertstein. I hadn't had anything like that done to me before.

As we entered the hall annoyance gave way to curiosity. Not just because of the caliber of those present. With modern communications, any sort of large face-to-face meeting like this was rare. And there was something in the body language of some of those already gathered: Grotius, who called us to order, and Mayor Larsen, who took the podium.

I had met the mayor socially a few times. I had even heard her speak formally before. But never like this. She opened new buildings and presided at civic banquets. She was another mouthpiece for the Nineteen Families. Her speeches were as a rule long on sonorous bromides and short on content. She normally began by working through the titles of the more or less distinguished ones present. This time she did not.

“We have had a warning from Sol system about hostile aliens in space. They have been attacking Sol ships.”

There was a long moment of echoing silence.

“It seems the aliens have no interest in negotiation or communication. They have some kind of gravity control that gives them acceleration and maneuverability which no conventional ship can match. They have matched velocities with ships travelling at .8 lightspeed.”

There was a brief hubbub of exclamations. She waited for it to subside before continuing to state the obvious.

“Of course, this message is more than four years old.”

The hall was on a column, high above nearly all of the city lights, and had a plexidome for a roof. The designers wanted to make the most of Wunderland's sky. Sol was there, easy to pick out as part of a constellation in the new Wunderland zodiac, the Tigripard, made principally from the great “W” of Cassiopeia.

Both Alpha Centauri B and Wunderland's prime moon had set, so that the sky above us was as dark as it ever got. There was the white point I knew was Sol, and Earth was somewhere hanging in that blackness. A blackness that was suddenly strange. Somebody spoke.

“What are these aliens like?”

“Something like big cats. We have pictures.”

The mayor clicked a switch and a holo appeared.

“This was sent back by a colony ship called the Angel's Pencil. It encountered one of them—one of their smaller scout ships, Earth now thinks, and got lucky with a drive mounted in tandem with a big com-laser. It escaped and destroyed the alien ship.” She clicked through other holos. “These pictures have come a long way. They've deteriorated a bit, but you get the general idea. This is the wreckage of the alien.”

She paused. There was a thick, heavy silence as the pictures stood there. Not shock, not horror, I think, not then. We were simply finding ourselves, too suddenly, in the presence of something too large and strange to understand.

“What does a whole ship look like?” That was von Thetoff.

Grotius answered. “We've got that.” The holo changed and flowed into a red near-ovoid thing. “But I guess that if you see something coming at you at .8 light and making inertialess turns, you won't have to ask.”

There was another dead silence in the hall. Whatever we had been expecting, it was nothing like this. Then a score of voices began to rise. The mayor held up her hand.

Another figure stood. I didn't know him, but he looked like a Herrenmann gone physically somewhat to seed and certainly to low-gravity fat. (That was one thing about Wunderland that irked us then: with workouts we could be the handsomest people in the universe but in later life without frequent sessions at the gym most of us tended to become either elongated stick figures or balloons. No world was perfect, some of us thought.)

“Do Tiamat and the Serpent Swarm know of this?”

“They will have got the messages as we did.”

“Have you contacted them?”

“Not yet. Why?”

“Might it not be a good idea. This is surely going to mean some… special executive action.”

“That is the purpose of tonight's meeting.” said the mayor. “To decide what action.” She looked us up and down and there was something curiously hesitant in her manner.

To decide what action! They don't know what they're doing! I realized suddenly, looking from one blank and bewildered face to another. They're making it up as they go along. A sudden, unexpected moment of panic for me, and then a reflection that was somehow calming: Well, the situation is pretty unprecedented. And then I thought suddenly and quite certainly: She's lying. They're all lying. And I remembered my thought of the previous evening of how busy the spaceport had become.

I suppose I'm at the making of history, I decided a few moments later. This could be a late night. The next question, when it came, seemed almost bizarrely irrelevant:

“What do they call them?” Instead of telling the questioner not to waste everyone's time, the mayor answered seriously.

“The aliens? 'Dinofelids' was one idea, but apparently there's already a Dinofelis among Earth's fossils. Not something one would have wanted to meet, by all accounts. The Angel's Pencil crew officially named them Pseudofelis sapiens, and the Earth term now seems to be Pseudofelis sapiens ferox. Bit of a mouthful. However, computers have translated some of their script, and it seems they call themselves”—she had difficulty in pronouncing it—“Kzin.”

Another man on his feet now amid the flurry of whisperings. Without knowing his name I recognized him as a politician. One of van Roberts's allies in the Progressive Democratic Party who had weakened the grip of the Herrenmanner on city politics and were moving to weaken it in the countryside.

“You say this will mean special executive action. What exactly does that mean? More power for you and your friends?”

“It's obvious we'll have to do a number of things. It may mean radical measures. Obviously government must have appropriate powers to deal with an emergency! We are looking at questions of military security.”

“Military!” Another hubbub. It was a bizarre word.

Van Roberts was on his feet: “This is all very convenient for you. What do we know of the bona-fides of this message?”

“You know what interstellar communication costs. Who do you think would send it but the authorities?”

“You mean the precious ARM! Since when have they been friends of democracy? And how do we know the message is real at all?”

Quite obviously people did not want to believe in such a message. There were sudden shouts from all over the hall: “Yes! how do we know it's real!” I saw some Herrenmanner joining in. Somebody should be taking this in hand, I thought. And then I thought: Who is there to take it in hand? Us. Only us. I think it was easier for us than it would have been for Flatlanders to take it in, but a lot of us were stunned, all the same.

“Excuse me!” That was van Roberts again. He pointed to a date at the corner of one picture. “These are more than four years old. Much more.”

“They were taken light-years from Earth. Then, apparently, they were dead-filed for years. It was thought they were some sort of hoax. About the time it was decided that they weren't, other ships began disappearing. Closer to Earth.”

“And if these aliens are real,” someone was saying, “when can we expect them here?”

There was a moment's silence. It was, I thought, one of those stupid and meaningless questions somebody had to ask. The mayor replied:

“Well, obviously, they could be here… now.”

Grotius turned to the Meteor Guard officer with von Thetoff. “Commander Kleist, have there been any… anomalous events that… are worth commenting on in this context?”

Kleist was a tough, fit-looking young man, typical of the somehow almost feral deep-spacer type. But he spoke carefully now.

“There are always anomalous events in a system as full of debris as this one is.”

“The Sol reports say the Aliens have gravity control. Do you know of any gravity anomalies?”

“There have been things on our mass detectors, yes. And we have seen new monopole sources.”

“When and where!” That was Grotius, with a snap in his voice I had never heard before.

“Continually. But more so lately, I must say. As a matter of fact, we've got extra ships on alert now. We can predict meteors fairly well but we thought gravitic anomalies might herald a comet shower. There is an increase in anomalies. Out in the cometary halos at first. But they are moving closer.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“A few days. That's all.” His hand went up to his mouth and his eyes darted to Grotius. I knew he was lying and was not used to doing so. My major feeling was total puzzlement.

“Can't we reason with them?” That was Peter Brennan, much taken up with good works and a bore of planetary and possibly interplanetary reputation, a leading light of the local Rotary Club and also of my lodge, a purveyor of pharmaceuticals.

“With whom?”

“These people?” Only Peter Brennan, I thought, would refer to threatening aliens as “these people.” One of his more futile projects was publishing a small Internet newspaper called The Friend, retailing stories of acts of kindness between Herrenmanner and Prolevolk and between Teuties and Tommies. But he had inherited money and had a good business sense and could afford his hobbies.

The mayor was speaking again.

“One way or another, we here represent the leaders, responsible people and relevant experts of Wunderland who could be gathered quickly. I don't need to tell you that we may be facing a situation that is unprecedented. As soon as the message was received—earlier today—I called Chief Grotius, Commander Kleist, Herrenmann von Diderachs and others who I could reach quickly. Hence this meeting.” I was sure she was lying too.

The mayor continued: “We have agreed that the first thing to do is form a group of interlocking committees to formulate aspects of policy. Recommendations will be implemented by an executive committee composed of representatives of the Nineteen Families, the existing exco including special interest nominees, and the City Council.”

“Point of order, Madam Mayor!” It was one of the politicians. “Giving executive powers to such a committee without the normal procedures is simply unconstitutional!”

“Yes!” From another part of the hall, “With due respect, Madam Mayor, what you are proposing sounds like a simple exercise in administrative lawlessness!”

“We have both a Constitution and a Constitutional Court. Any proposals of this nature should go to that court for a ruling. To side-step Constitutional procedures for administrative convenience is simply the way to chaos!” That another dark-haired, professional-looking man. “I've never heard anything like it.”

“None of us have heard anything like this!”

“That's just the point!”

There were voices rising all over the room. The mayor banged her gavel. I saw her ears were flat and wondered if that was an uncontrollable sign of anger or a deliberate reminder to us that she too was a Herrenfrau of the Nineteen Families. Yet she was speaking in broad hints of the Platt dialect—was that to remind us she also had a foot in the Democrat camp?

“I note your objections. But the point is, I think, that putting some administrative structures into place to deal with this matter may be urgent! The best I can do to reassure you is to suggest that we entrench a provision that the situation be reviewed—radically reviewed if necessary—after one month. By that time we should have more information from Sol and know a bit more about what we are trying to do to solve this tanj snafu.”

That last was Tommie slang. Was she putting that in deliberately also? There was a lot of muttering. Then Grotius played a trump card.

“Before the resolution foreshadowed by Madam Mayor is put to the meeting,” he said, “I should point out that it is envisaged that all invited to be present here tonight will have positions on at least one of the committees. Therefore if anyone is unhappy about policy he or she will be in a position to make a direct input in policy direction.”

That quieted a lot of objections. Most of the people at the gathering were not going to do anything to compromise prospects of their own power, I thought. No politician or Constitutional expert myself, I found I was on something called the Biology Committee and something else called the Defense Committee. Peter Brennan had us set up a Friendship Committee.

It went on a long time. At length I got home for a few hours' sleep.

Chapter 4

I found Dimity Carmody at the Lindenbaum Kafe, sitting at her usual table between the chess players and coffee addicts. With her better-than-fashion-model looks and quietly correct if obviously Tommie clothes among the eternally scruffy students, she was always easy to find, even, or especially, hiding behind those sunglasses she generally wore. I hoped I could talk to her now.

I hadn't always been able to. We had almost been lovers once, and would have been if it had not been for the difference in our intelligences. It was not a good idea to have a gap of more than 40 IQ points between oneself and one's partner. A few halting conversations between us had made that difference painfully clear. She enjoyed coming on field trips with me occasionally, but interaction in the deeper aspects of life was a different matter. I was a professor of biology with some chemistry and physics, and she was… what she was. Well, to use an old phrase, she wasn't exactly a rocket scientist.

Born with an abnormal brainwave, thought to be something in the Asperger's syndrome family, she had now learned to adopt a protective social coloration. It hadn't always been that way. Her father told me she had hardly spoken till she was seven years old. He was an outstanding mathematician and physicist—late in life he had worked on Carmody's Transform—and to have such a child had hurt him badly then, though things improved eventually. Now she could just about cope with normal people. Among her more normal socialization activities, she loved music boxes and had a little collection of them.

She was sitting drinking coffee, something she did a lot of. She didn't play chess, though, and I remembered the embarrassment when the president of the University club, an Aspirant Master, misled by her appearance of normality, had offered her a game here. He thought someone had set him up. She was doodling on some paper, one of her music boxes tinkling quietly on the table beside her. She signed for me to sit down, and stretched absentmindedly, staring at what she was doing. There was an ordinary notebook in front of her on the table, with many Brahmabytes of capacity available and connection to a really big brain if needed, but she was using pen and paper.

As she stretched I was reminded again that, despite the tricks Wunderland's gravity can play on the bones and tissue of the lazy and careless, she was near the epitome of human standards of beauty. Her body was a living version of the marble Venus of Cyrene, loveliest of all the statues of antiquity, who makes the Venus de Milo look heavy and clumsy by comparison, but as she stretched her attention remained fixed on the paper. Behind the sunglasses her face looked vacant. “Big tits and little wits/Do often go together” a rude old poet had once written. But it was not as simple as that. She had a pink hibiscus flower in her hair which, I thought, really made me understand what was meant by that term overkill. It seemed to attract the flutterbys, and there was a small cloud of them round the table, their delicate multicolored wings brushing the gold bell of her hair with its pink headband.

I broke an awkward silence. “What's this?”

Dimity had an almost squeaky voice. A Dimity voice, I called it privately.

“Sums. Difficult sums.”

I was sorry I had asked. Her idea and mine of difficult sums reflected our respective intelligences: embarrassingly different. She went on, with that inevitable tone of patience:

“You know the theories that have been explored here and in Sol System about the ancient stasis fields? That they are somehow uncoupled from the entropy gradient of the Universe?”

“They haven't got anywhere, have they? It's all still just speculation.”

“No. Not unless there's been anything new done in Sol System. But it gave me a notion. It's… difficult to explain… but it's to do with gravity as a function of time…”

“N-space?” I hesitated.

“No. But as you know they learned to open a stasis field long ago on Earth with relatively primitive time-retarding technology.”

“Yes. But the result was a disaster. I'm told there were a lot of casualties. And apparently it was nearly worse.”

“That wasn't the fault of the technology. It was because there was something dangerous inside the field that got out. If we can make time precess at a different rates… well, my theory is that within a gravity field we can't, or not at the scale I'm talking about. But outside a gravity field—I mean a gravity field like the singularity associated with a star… The singularity acts as a massive governor… Look, does this explain what I mean?”

I recognized some conventional mathematical symbols on her paper along with others that appeared to be her creation. Her father had told me once of how, one day at the end of a childhood that had been near-silent near-inactivity, he had found her playing with the keyboard of his computer, and of his flash of hope that she might grow into a normal child after all (“Who's a clever little girl, then?”) which had died as he raised his eyes to the screen. They had published her first paper jointly. After that she had been on her own. His work on Carmody's Transform had brought him praise and when she was given her own department he had helped set it up but he had been little more than her assistant.

“What's that?” I asked, stabbing at random at one esoteric symbol to cover my embarrassment.

“It stands for the occurrence of Miss Bright's Paradox.”

“Miss Bright?”

“Yes. You know:

“But you see”—she pointed again—“I've eliminated it. Or rather I depend upon it: upon the fact that the universe will not permit such a paradox to occur.

“I have always thought that, doing what the tnuctipun did, time could be made to precess at different rates over a much larger scale,” she went on. “You need an engine to generate your second field, of course, which is a problem. Caught between those fields you would be squeezed away from them, like a wet orange seed squeezed between two fingers. I calculate one of the results would be negative mass.”

Stanley the waiter brought us two coffees. The Lindenbaum had deluxe human service in this section and put its prices up accordingly. Gazing at Dimity, he tripped over a neighboring table as he backed away. She went on:

“Within a gravitational singularity, that would be the end of you. You might become something like your own wormhole, millions of miles long, the length depending on how much mass you originally had, and less than the width of a subatomic particle. But beyond the singularity, and if you had a certain velocity, you'd move. Without an increase in mass. If what happens then can be described in terms of physical structure it might be called creating your own big wormhole. A sort of shunt rather than a drive…” She saw she was not getting through and made another attempt. “A matter of getting away from a greater impossibility by being pushed into a lesser one if you like.”

“I don't understand.” But I believed her.

She gestured at the symbols again, as if it was all obvious. She had, as I had thought that sad day when I realized our brains couldn't match, given that phrase “not exactly a rocket scientist” a whole new dimension of meaning.

“If you were moving at sufficient speed already… I think you'd be projected out of the Einsteinian universe… Greenberg was able to tell us a bit of what happened with the ancient drive, the preconditions, but of course he didn't know how it worked, except that the speed had to be sufficient to affect the average mass of the universe. I think the two major achievements of the ancient technologies were connected. The stasis field was a byproduct of their drive technology, or their drive was a byproduct of the stasis-field technology…”

“Does that mean…?” I couldn't say it, somehow.

She paused, and then there was something new that was hard and defiant in her voice, a challenge: “We know the tnuctipun could do it! There would be a bending effect of space and…”

“How fast?”

“How fast do you want?”

“Where do you get the energy?”

“From the Big Bang. Space is still full of it… Look at the rest of the universe as the norm, and the singularities as the exception. In terms of getting from one singularity to another, I calculate—it's on the computer at home—a light-year in about…” She paused. I think she felt herself shy of what she was about to say “…about three days… It doesn't break the light barrier, it shatters it, because once you move into that… dimension or aspect of space you can keep accelerating!”

There had been theories before. The first major modifications to the Special Theory of Relativity were more than four hundred years old. Things happened, or were thought to happen, at the edges of black holes. Nothing practical so far… but it has been done before, once before, by a race within an empire which, it was thought, had controlled most of the Spiral Arm at least and which had vanished before life emerged from the seas of Earth.

“And… that's what you've got here?” My own voice sounded somehow very small. The thing I had sought her out for suddenly seemed almost unimportant—until I put two sets of implications together and then it suddenly seemed more important than ever. I heard another tinkling sound besides that of the music box and found my hands were shaking as I held my coffee cup.

“Not yet. Not for years, I think. Maybe never. We know that with the tnuctipun drive they had to be moving close to lightspeed anyway. Greenberg told us it was the average mass of the universe that was the critical factor. But I'm getting somewhere. So far, the computers support my theorizing. Of course, I had to instruct the computers, but if there's a fault in my instructions I can only believe it's a very subtle one.

“This is the wrong place to do it. A double star means the combined singularity is huge. And the engineering is huge enough anyway. The tools are beyond our technology.”

“Could you build such an engine… eventually?”

“Eventually is a long time. I think I could… recognize one. That's not very helpful, is it?”

I wrenched my mind away from the vision that opened up. I felt I needed her brain's connective powers for something else at the moment. “Could you come with me for a couple of hours?” I asked her. “I want to show you something.”

The markings in and around the grove hadn't changed. “There it is,” I said. “What do you make of it?” I had told her on my abortive expedition of the previous day, though not of the meeting that followed it.

She put away the calculations she had been scribbling at. “An aircraft landed there and took off again,” she said. “That's the most probable thing. A fairly small one, but a good deal bigger than this. Not an ordinary private car. It landed and took off vertically but without chemical rockets—there's no sign of burning—and without jets or sufficient downdraft to damage the vegetation. But it hasn't left a ground-effect trail. That is very strange. In fact impossible.”

“Yes. I thought you might say that. I wanted someone else to confirm it.”

“Maybe it took your specimen.”

“Yes. What I'm worried about is the possibility that my specimen was flying it.”

Anyone else would have been brought up short by that. She took it in instantly.

“In that case it would hardly have made just one landing. Have you looked for other sites?”

“Not yet. There's too big an area to search.”

“Perhaps we can narrow it down. Why did it land here? What's special about this place.”

“The monastery.”

“Yes. Let's say your specimen landed near the monastery because it was curious. Maybe it's landed near other human dwellings. What about the marshmen's shacks? And perhaps the marshmen have seen something.”

I would have asked the marshmen the previous day, except that they tended to be highly unapproachable. On Wunderland, with plenty of good farmland for those who wanted it and good communications, hermits were hermits from choice. We were proud that here, unlike Earth, we respected individuals' privacy. But things had been different the previous day.

I pulled the car's nose up and we headed across the swamp. There was a bit more wildlife to be seen below us today, but it still seemed unusually shy and skittish.

There was old Harry's cabin on Hook Island. Or rather, there had been. There were a few pieces of walls and roof now, scattered about. There was a disturbed area about the same size as that in the grove.

The island had no trees, no cover anything could be hiding in, I thought. I did a couple of cautious passes and we landed.

The monastery garden had been silent but for the insects. This was a silence that was not perfect but of an utterly different quality.

There were the prints, obvious in soft ground. Very big, clawed prints, made by something very heavy. Water oozed into some, and one already had red froggolinas swimming in it. There was a kermitoid with markings I had not seen before… Most of the small creatures around seemed ordinary enough, even if I couldn't name them all. Grossgeister teamed with life in a huge variety of kinds and sizes, including creatures on the larger islands who occupied the ecological niches held on Earth by bear, swamp deer, or cougar. At any other time my professional interest in them would have been more intense. I must get on with my great project of classifying all this, one part of my mind remarked. My work in the caves was a preparation for the greater biological treasures of Grossgeister… I jerked my mind back to what was in front of me.

Tigers in the muddy Sundaband Islands. Swimming tigers. We were standing on a permanent island made by channels less than fifty meters wide. On the other sides of those channels were tall reed beds and other islands with higher vegetation that might hide anything. Part of the wonder of Wunderland was the variety of its animals, descendants of survivors of successive catastrophes caused by major meteor impacts. And the fauna boasted its full share of opportunistic predators.

Could something charge out of that vegetation and across the channel before we could get back to the car? I get the feeling we are babes in the wood here, I thought. I hadn't even a gun. The headland where the monastery stood was only a few kilometers away, but here in the channels of Grossgeister the vegetation hid any other horizon.

The swamp was silent, but, as it were, not quiet when one listened: water rippling and bubbling, the grunts of mudfish, the queer singing of the froggolinas and insectoids. But were these ignorable, day-to-day swamp sounds covering up any others? The sounds of something approaching? Cats stalked silently.

There were peculiar smells in the air, some of them natural odors of swamp vegetation, living and dead. Others that I didn't know.

There were the eyes and nostrils of a couple of small crocodilians in the still water, looking like pairs of floating Bob's Berries or drifting bubbles. In a way the sight was reassuring: the presence of adolescent crocodilians meant the probable absence of big ones. A twin-tailed serpiform thing sailed by with head held high like a periscope. Something very large and white and curved floating just under the surface brought me up short, heart jumping, until I realized it was the marshman's boat. Or part of it.

There has been violence and disaster here, I thought. I had occasionally had dangerous moments on field trips, but that had been different. My assistants and I had always been equipped and prepared. Here I felt prepared for nothing. What am I doing bringing Dimity into a place like this? The unknown is always dangerous. Get her out now! And not just because I love her!

“Nils! Look at this.”

Something metal glittering in churned-up mud, almost buried. A heavy automatic gun, the sort the marshmen used to kill the big crocodilians whose back armor might deflect even the needles of a strakkaker. Useless for specimen collecting, it would leave little of any specimen.

It was smashed. Twisted into junk.

It had been loaded with high-explosive bullets and set for automatic fire at 300 rounds a minute. Three rounds only had been fired. There were the casings on the ground. And there were stains on the recoil compensator and pistol grip that looked like blood. A predator?

“Nothing that powerful fits the ecology.”

“I know.”

“And this is the longest-settled part of the planet. If there was a predator like this here before we'd have known it. You would have seen it in all the other animals. Things would be faster, more powerful, better defended.”

She was confirming what I had thought. But I had needed her to confirm it. I didn't want to damage the evidence before any investigation, but now that I had handled the gun already I thought I had better take it back. It would be easy enough to separate my DNA from anything else that might be on it.

I saw the honker, an electronic fence device to keep crocs and other possible intruders away, including humans if necessary. Honkers were a good deal more potent than their name might suggest, and like most modern electronics they worked perfectly when they were in one piece. This one was in many pieces, strewn in the mud.

Then Dimity pointed again. There was something different in her walk and stance, as though she had changed into something like a hunting predator herself. The café coffee-drinker was not there. Her ears were laid flat back. I had forgotten she had that much Families blood in her. There was a dark pool of what I was now sure was blood, surrounded by froggolinas and covered with small insectoids, scraps of cloth, and, gleaming pinkish-white among them, what I recognized at once as a human femur, cracked open at the lower end, part of the pelvic socket still attached at the upper.

I dropped the broken gun as we ran to the car. I saw another bone fragment in the mud as we passed: it looked like part of the zygomatic arch of a human skull, but I didn't stop to examine it. There were other scattered fragments too, I now saw. I wanted to get back to the city fast, but was still unable to recognize the voice of my own survival instincts. We gained a reasonable height and turned a little farther into the swamp.

“The monastery looks like a fort,” Dimity said as we approached it. “High walls round the courtyard, no windows, the tower, the edifacium like a castle keep. It looks quite defensible. You've even got that.” She pointed to a tall, smooth-lined metal spire that rose out of a small wooden chapel some distance away. “It looks like a rocket or missile ready for launching. And the marshmen's shacks?”

“Nothing like that. You saw what was left of them. Just thin walls and the honkers.”

“That may be the point: it looked defensible.”

The abbot might be a friend and glad to see me on the occasional evening when there was a bottle to be shared. But the monastery was a working organization, and my arrival unannounced in the middle of the working day, and with a woman, might well have been thought inconsiderate. All he said was: “What's wrong?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“You look terrible.”

“There's trouble. We've been to six of the marshmen's cabins. They're dead. We've found… evidence. The cabins destroyed. We're on our way to the police. But first I need to ask the Brothers something. About that thing they saw.”

I showed them a small copy of one of the holos I had been shown the night before. “This is a dead specimen, and not a very good picture now. But is that the same species?”

“Yes.” Three yeses. Three nods.

“Without a doubt?”

“Without a doubt.”

“And it ran from you. I wonder why.”

“It didn't want to alert the 'fortress,' ” said Dimity.

“We had no weapons when we saw it, no guns.”

“It's not scared of guns. And it had already eaten. It didn't want to be discovered, and it probably thought there were too many of you in a building of this size…”

“It thought…?”

“I can only tell you what you have probably guessed for yourself,” I said. “These creatures are—obviously—highly dangerous, fearless of humans, and, we have reason to believe, intelligent.”

“How intelligent?”

“Highly.”

“Where do they come from?”

“We don't know.” That was only too true.

I guessed the abbot must be a clever administrator to maintain an institution like the monastery in the modern world. I had not noticed before how penetrating his eyes could be.

“Let me put it this way,” he said. “Are they going to come horizontally or vertically?” The other monks were hanging on the question. Dimity looked as if she already knew. I didn't see the need for secrecy, but it was still a condition I was bound by.

“I'm not at liberty to say what I think,” I told them. “I'm sure if there is a continuing problem you'll be put in the picture.”

“Thank you. I think that answers my question…

“Before our Order left Earth,” he went on, “the Vatican gave us instructions on what to do if we met aliens. What the theological position was. Did they have souls? It's a very old question, predating space travel by centuries. Saint Paul was quite definite: The Resurrection applied to 'everything in the Heavens and everything on Earth.' The early church writers said we need not worry until we actually knew if they existed or not. To insist that 'God could not have made other worlds' was declared a heresy in the thirteenth century—and that covers alternate or parallel universes as well! Good aliens may have already experienced 'baptism by desire.' Still, it's an area of imprecision.”

“But if aliens do exist, good or bad, you do have precise instructions?”

“We got some pretty comprehensive manuals when we set out. As far as that precise situation goes, I've never had cause to look, though no doubt it exercised our Founding Father when we first landed, along with a lot of other concerns. I'll have to get Brother Librarian to find them. But we have to be orthodox. We're too far from the Holy Father to risk departing from his instructions. Perhaps he'll send us a laser message.”

If Earth's lasers aren't all busy with another thing, I thought.

“Don't go out at night,” said Dimity. “Keep your lights on and your doors locked. Don't go out unarmed even in daylight. Don't go out alone.”

“Now there's something odd,” said Dimity as we flew toward München.

Although ground-effect air cars were common, there was still plenty of wheeled traffic, particularly for heavy hauling. The road we were passing over turned south and led to the industrial districts of Glenrothes and Gelsenkirchen, then on to Dresden (still sometimes Neue Dresden), which had been created deliberately to recapitulate the history of its famous namesake town on Old Earth, and was famous for its experiments in low-gravity baroque architecture and artistic china.

Glenrothes and Gelsenkirchen shared a small landing field well out of the way of the main port's traffic and had some industries based on recycling redundant or obsolescent space material, the equivalent of old-time ship-breaking. Old, material-fatigued or overly damaged spacecraft were disassembled there and their component parts generally taken to München for resale. A spacecraft life system, for example, had all sorts of uses for someone needing a habitat when establishing a new farm, whether on land or sea, and their complex computer hardware and powerful engines always found plenty of uses in things like industrial process control and mining. Sometimes, of course, old ships were cannibalized for new ones.

There were plenty of spaceships getting hard wear in our cluttered and dusty system, filled as it was with minable asteroids, and ship-breaking was quite a busy industry. It reminded me a little, and unpleasantly, of the way criminals had been dissembled for organ banks until modern medicine made such customs unnecessary, which was silly and irrational of me. But possibly others felt the same, because, apart from the fact that it was often a noisy business, it was kept well away from the city.

We were passing over a column of transports carrying parts of spacecraft, the bulk of main engines, including toroid sections of what looked like a ramscoop collector-head, being the most obvious. But on this road it was an everyday sight.

“What's odd about that?” I asked.

“The direction they're traveling,” said Dimity. “They're taking those engines to Glenrothes Field, not from it.”

“I heard there had been a special meeting called last night,” said Dimity. “Would it have been about what I think it was about?”

“I can't say.” Again, that was all the answer needed.

“I told you about the Sea Statue.”

“Oh, yes.” We had talked for a long time after returning from the monastery. She had told me more about the near-catastrophic attempt to open the ancient stasis field discovered on Earth many years ago. I had had a vague idea: What had been learned as a result of “opening” the Sea Statue was knowledge similar to the knowledge in the Dark Ages that the Earth was spherical: A lot of educated people knew about it but didn't talk about it much. “What's the connection?”

“It appears likely that the ancients seeded this part of the galaxy at least with common life-forms.”

“Yes.” We had both studied what was known about the two-billion-year-departed ancient races and their omnicidal war, which wasn't much.

“That's probably why our plants and animals can grow on Wunderland, and why we can eat a lot of Wunderland plants and animals.”

“Yes.” I was beginning to see where she was leading, and didn't like it.

“Tigripards eat our sheep. Beam's beast bites poison us. Advokats eat our garbage. Zeitungers eat our garbage and affect our moods as well… Something that the old SETI people could never have foreseen, but we should: Beings from at least two different star systems have biochemistry alike enough for them to be able to eat each other.”

“So it seems.”

“It puts some of my… mathematical speculations… in a rather different light, doesn't it?”

I had thought that before. But the full implications of what she was saying took a moment to hit me. Then it was like a physical blow. “We've got to get you out!”

“That may not be so easy. Where am I going to go?”

“We've got to get you back to Earth.”

“How?”

There seemed no answer to that. I was beyond regretting that I had basically confirmed to her what the previous night's meeting had been about.

Chapter 5

Despite the seriousness of what I had found, several days passed before I got a chance to see Grotius. I filed a report with the police but received a mere mechanical acknowledgment. Grotius, when I did see him at a meeting of the committee, was abstracted and uninterested. He looked weary and surprisingly aged. My report of evidence of multiple homicides produced little more than a shake of the head.

“I've no officers to spare now,” he said. “Most of them are busy trying to find out how to reinvent the wheel. Or they're at the spaceport, working on the meteor guardships.

“And I need them in the streets, as well as everywhere else. One thing we've learned already is that a bunch of fifty people can't keep a secret. There have been rumors in the streets for days. It'll be on the newscast in a few hours. We can't stop that… We could, actually, but it would do more harm than good. My cops are so busy that I'm expecting crime too. There are almost no police on patrol. We've got a few extra strakkakers in store and I'm issuing them. At least that will look threatening if there's an emergency.”

“How many strakkakers have we got?” That was Talbot.

“I don't know, exactly. We had the one batch made for police needs, plus replacements and spares.”

“When?”

“Years ago. The factory's closed down now.”

“Don't you think we should open it again? Fast!”

“What for?” A pause, then, “Oh, I see.”

“There are police message-lasers, too. We can dial them up to weapons.”

“Really?”

“Of course. It was always in the design.”

“Yes. I see.”

“I should clear it with the council.”

“Later.”

Grotius looked at him, then opened a hand-phone and began to speak fast. The Defense Committee had taken an executive action.

“I've been at the library all day,” said Talbot. “Reading every book on war I could find. There aren't many.”

“ARM went through our library before we left Earth. There are some records of old wars in a general way, even some copies of ancient visual films. There are a few books. But so little that is actually of practical use. They didn't want us building armies.”

“No.”

“I found one on a Japanese attack on some American sea-ships at Hawaii, Day of Infamy. The American ships had guns to defend themselves against flying engines, covered by awnings. An officer on one began untying the lines that held the awnings in place as the flying engines attacked. A cook ran up and cut them with a knife. We have to think differently.

“Grotius, we don't want one factory making strakkakers. We want every factory we can get on line. We want factories making factories making strakkakers. Now!”

“No! Strakkakers aren't the be-all and end-all. They are police weapons of last resort. We may want battlefield weapons, space weapons! Tie up too much of our industrial production in one thing and you lose in other ways.”

“What are battlefield weapons? How are they different from other weapons?”

“I don't know. But I gather they used to have them, on Earth. I've found references to something called a main battle tank.”

“We'd better ask the meteor people. They use big lasers, don't they? And bomb-missiles.”

“Are you seriously suggesting…”

“Yes. Of course I am! There are old launching lasers on Tiamat and down at Equatoria. They're got to be brought back on line.”

Other voices raised.

“Think of the cost! Runaway inflation! We've only got one economy to play with on this planet!”

“We don't want factories for strakkakers! We want factories for plutonium!”

“Whatever for? Plutonium's dangerous… Oh, I see.”

“It's already happening. The Meteor Guard…”

“Shut up, you fool!”

“What trained fighters have we got? Only a handful of cops. They should be training instructors to train recruits!”

“Don't you think they've got enough to do already?”

Grotius turned to me: “Did you overfly the whole swamp?”

“No. It's big.”

“We should overfly it. I said we haven't time to consider homicides, but there may have been other things, things left behind.”

“Aren't we jumping to conclusions?” van Roberts said. “This could be a completely purposeless panic that will do nothing but damage if we let it go on.”

“But the monks saw—”

“The monks could have been mistaken. Or worse. The monastery has always been friendly to the Families, hasn't it?”

“I suppose so. The Order got the land as a deed of gift from the original Freuchens, before they moved out to the Norlands.”

“And I imagine the old records will show that Families paid their passage here!”

“As a matter of fact, they don't.” I happened to know that, because while waiting I had combed the old passenger lists looking for people whose occupations or profiles suggested might have brought useful books or equipment that their descendants might still have. A couple of the Families had brought private chaplains, but there was no record of the monks aboard the original slowboats. He ignored my interruption.

“And they've survived on handouts from the Families since. All that's left of the Church has. It's been very handy for the Families. Keeping people docile by promising them a pie-in-the-sky Afterlife, and at the same time getting rid of landless younger sons by putting them into skirts.”

“That's propaganda, and utterly false! Anyway, there's plenty of land left!”

“Then why do you restrict the sale of it?”

“So there will be someone to work it. Do you want a planet all of landowners starving for lack of labor?”

“That argument might have made sense six hundred years ago. There are such things as machines now! I suppose you spend so little time on your own estates you neither know nor care whether they are worked by robots or peons. You keep the land of a nearly empty world locked up to preserve your own hegemony, and your own rents!”

“Then go to the High Limestone! Go and settle in the badlands! Some people do. Tougher, gutsier people than you, Teutie prole!”

I waited for Grotius to intervene. Then I saw he was asleep at the table. We'll have to bring back electro-current sleep, I thought. Natural sleep is a luxury we may not be able to afford soon. I was tired myself, I knew, and my thoughts were jumping about ineffectually.

“All right,” van Roberts was saying. “So you admit the monastery is in the pocket of the Families.”

“I admit some of the Families have been friends of the Church. That's hardly anything to be ashamed of.”

“And your monks will say anything they're told to, including corroborating your story of hostile aliens!”

“This is preposterous!” I intervened. “They are trusted friends of mine. I saw the tracks, I saw the destroyed shacks, and found human bones.”

“I assume you are telling the truth,” said van Roberts, “but what does it prove? People have lied before. The Families may have got rid of the marshmen one way or another. What evidence are bones of anything—bones you didn't even bring back with you for testing? Apart from more obvious possibilities, they could have come from a cemetery, or a medical school, or even a plastics factory. Didn't monasteries once keep what they called relics of saints?”

“Why should anyone do such a thing?”

“Because the Nineteen Families are losing power. Bring in a police state, a regime of strict social control, and they can keep power forever. In the meantime everyone is panicking.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“The whole tendency of political progress here has been evolution toward a less hierarchical, more representative form of government. This is profoundly regressive. It means increasing coercive authority which means giving the Families further powers.”

“Who do you want in authority? The Families and the council on which you sit or cats with six-inch fangs?”

I looked around the faces. The Defense Committee did not want to believe in the—what was the word?—the Kzin. I did not want to believe in them myself. But I had stood in that swamp. My collecting clothes were stained with the mud and blood of the place… unless… I grabbed my own telephone and shut my house down.

I know the body language of animals professionally. A majority of the members of the Defense Committee were looking at van Roberts as a leader. Not because they all agreed with him politically, far from it. But he was presenting reassurance of a sort.

“We've got our families' futures to think of,” said van der Stratt. “I have a little daughter who I want to grow up in a free and peaceful world. Some of you have children too.”

Grotius woke up. “I'm sorry,” he said. “Too much to do. I've also been reading all the military literature we can find. So many new terms. Everything from electronic battlefield management to caltrops. I really need a whole staff to help me.”

“What's Electronic Battlefield Management?” asked van der Trott.

“What's caltrops?” asked Apfel.

“What's a staff?” asked somebody else.

“I don't like the degree of emotion that's getting into all this,” said Lufft. “It's an unprecedented situation, certainly, but that doesn't mean we can't make decisions rationally. Let's bear in mind the fact we are twenty-fourth-century Humans, the children of a high science, the star-born, and guided by science and reason. We are not primitives and we shouldn't behave like primitives.”

“All battles and all wars are won in the end by infantrymen.”

What on Earth (literally what on Earth?) did it mean? It was attributed to someone with the odd and cumbersome name of Field Marshal Viscount Wavell.

Infantrymen? Infant men?

We were in a dusty back room in the warren of the old Mechanics' Institute, which had once served as München's public library. Hermanson had opened it and was rummaging through boxes of old disks. We were lucky to have an almost equally antique computer that could display them. It had been standing under a dome as an exhibit in the entrance hall.

When the first slowboats had set out from Earth to Wunderland they had carried libraries of Earth historical material. Not much military historical material, though. ARM didn't approve of that even at first. We gathered that things had got even tighter by the time the last slowboat left.

Not that anyone had cared much. Some of the first generation had missed Earth, but why study its history when we had our own world, a wonderful, beautiful and exciting world? We had our own history to make, and life to live on a scale flatlanders could only dream of. The Belters had been humanity's first proud space-born. We, in exalted moments, sometimes called ourselves the Children of the Stars.

Weight and volume had been critical for our migrating ancestors, too, even in craft the size of the slowboats. Practically all books had been reduced to computer disks. Some, over the years, had been lost or corrupted. Some had been reprinted in conventional book form, but these had been largely textbooks of strictly practical matters, of which there were many, or the literary classics. There were books published on Wunderland, certainly—this library and the new and bigger ones were a matter of some pride—but they were our books. And after the frontier, pioneering days, librarianship had largely had to be rediscovered.

General Earth history—unlike the histories of agriculture, ecology, oceanography, physics or computing—had become largely a matter of oldsters' tales, a unit in junior high school. As a university course it had never been popular and soon faded away—it was obviously useless, and most of us had enough scraps of family traditions to think we knew it anyway. Even oldsters who found themselves homesick for Earth had done themselves no favors by brooding over it.

Now we were looking at scraps. And many of them seemed to make no sense. Scraps like “infantry” and related words. Infants? There was something that seemed like a sort of song:

It was English. We all knew English. It was one of Wunderland's main official tongues, but this was also like a foreign language. Wire and mines? Mines? What had mines to do with military matters? There were plenty of mines on Wunderland: the more modern used biologically engineered worms to digest and process rare minerals. “Infanteer” again? Or this: “The niche-warriors of the future will wage information-intensive warfare.” That seemed to be saying something. If only we knew exactly what. And this, that had come up under “weapons”:

We had all been tired when we arrived, and this seemed utterly futile. “Let's see what's in the archives, under 'Military Science,' ” von Diderachs had said, almost light-heartedly. Now half a dozen of us were staring disconsolately at a few boxes of rubbish and fragments. I had been scheduled to fly down to Castledare to address the Rotary Club, and though someone said unkindly that Rotary lunches had not changed in four hundred years and four and a half light-years, I wished that was where I was.

“Here is a fragment from someone called Gerald Kersh, from a book, They Died with their Boots Clean, published about… 1942. Listen:

He paused and drew breath.

“Damp spiders… I'm not surprised.”

“It goes on:

“It seems there is a good deal about our ancestors we didn't know.”

“Blind with gas… blind with gas… I wonder how that would work.”

“On them or us?”

Up came something headed “strategical matrices”—rows of outdated mathematical notations. “Axis of advance”? “Maginot Line”? “Cones of fire”? Was that something like a Bunsen burner? And what did they want it for?

Among the scraps the search of “war” had found us was another piece, of no immediate value, but which I would remember much later:

Yes, I remembered that later.

“I'm worried,” said Peter Brennan. He too had been perusing old texts, trying to sort fact from fiction and put it all into some sort of coherent order. “Listen to this:

“Why does that worry you?” I asked. It seemed an odd thing to arouse his concern among so much else.

“Because… because when I read those words, I realized I would like someone to refer to me as a 'proven warrior.' I don't know why. I'm very uncomfortable about it.”

“Don't worry,” said von Diderachs, “the occasion is hardly likely to arise.”

I looked again at one of the first things I had collected:

I had been too late shutting the house down: The cleaner had got to my clothes, but there was some mud from our shoes on the floor of the car. None of the police forensic laboratories had people available, but I had my own laboratory at the Institute.

Analysis produced DNA fragments: mine and Dimity's, other human DNA that might have come from the island or from previous passengers, a mess of countless Wunderland microbes, nucleic acid fragments and other microscopic biological debris, and a single hair, origin unknown, of an orange color. I had Dimity co-opted onto the Defense Committee.

We would be moving into permanent session, I was told. Apparently it had been decided that Defense was a full-time job.

I was advised to get my senior graduate students to take over my basic teaching. The best of them wouldn't like that, I thought. They had research projects of their own. Or perhaps the best researchers were those who loved teaching too.

I was told to tell them it was the first step to tenure. And, anyway, it was an emergency. I called Leonie Hansen first. It is a dreadful failing for an academic to have favorites, but one can't help picking out the brightest. I told myself my good opinion of her was entirely due to the quality of her work, and not at all because she reminded me a little of Dimity.

Chapter 6

“I've worked out what a general staff is. That's another spoke of the wheel reinvented.”

“I've found a table of military ranks. I guess we should make our police chiefs and so forth generals.”

“No!” said van Roberts, “It's easy enough to see what's happening: destroy every bit of Constitutional law and reform that has been achieved here and install a military or military-industrial dictatorship under the Nineteen Families worse than anything in the first settlement days! For what? An alleged signal from Sol and perhaps an alleged sighting of something by people who are virtually employees of the Families! Flap your ears all you want, but that's what it adds up to!”

“Rubbish! Irresponsible rubbish!”

“Is it?” That was Gretchen Kleinvogel. “We know the Nineteen Families like to think of themselves as the bearers of traditions. What greater ally and reinforcement of tradition is there than militarism?”

“What do you want next, flags and trumpets and regiments?” Van Roberts took this up. “We came to this world to make a new start, remember!”

“The Families formed the consortium that paid for the ships. You came courtesy of us!”

“As your hereditary underlings, so you thought!”

“No one compelled you!”

“The Families and their attached clans make up about eight percent of this planet's population. They have half the places on these committees. Is that democracy or a naked powerplay?”

“It's not a question of democracy.”

“No, it never is, is it?”

“It's a question of leadership, and necessity.”

“And of raising taxes! This proposal to lift lasers onto our moons! Have you any idea what that will cost!”

“The Serpent Swarmers are already installing lasers on their asteroids. We should do the same!”

“If they are doing it, why should we need to? They don't have to haul them out of a gravity well. It's just duplication of effort. Unless, of course, it's your ships that are contracted to do it, your factories that are contracted to build them… I suppose you'll say the emergency means we have to bypass normal government tendering processes.”

“In any case, it's a fait accompli. The ships are gone.”

“There are too many tanj faits accompli. Again and again we hear something has already been done before we're told!”

“Personally, I'm not too happy about the Swarmers having any assets we lack.”

It went on. But a few wheels seemed to be turning now.

“We've got the strakkaker factory back in production.”

“And are we building more strakkaker factories?”

It broke up at last. The various factions on the committee departed separately, several barely on speaking terms with one another. I thought again that a sleep machine would be useful. I had not foreseen how quickly production priorities would change. A whole range of technical and electronic goods had disappeared from the shops.

I was buzzed. It was Leonie Hansen. A dozen others were standing around her. All my graduate students had been working on the orange hair.

“When we took it apart, its cell structure was radically unlike any Earth or Wunderland form,” she said. “Nor does it match anything we have from Jinx, Plateau or the other new colonies.”

“So what do you think?”

“It looks as if the Grossgeister felinoid may have been some sort of scout. It would be better for us all if I'm wrong,” she said. Excitement and exhilaration sparkled in her eyes.

A rosette of light began to blink at the corner of the screen, a signal that someone with a Defense Committee comlink was trying to reach me. I thanked the students and told them to organize a report for the next day.

It was van Roberts and Gretchen Kleinvogel, calling from the lobby, asking to see me at once.

I was not identified with any traditional political faction. What little Herrenmann blood I had would never give me privileges or an estate, but my academic position gave me a place more or less outside the system, not Herrenmann, not Prolevolk, not even middle-class in any conventional sense of that much misused word. Of Teutie background but speaking Tommie and in love, even if hopelessly, with a Tommie too, if it came to that.

Mainly, I had the good fortune that, unlike many on Wunderland, class position did not need to interest me. This wasn't due to lack of snobbishness, simply to my own circumstances. I was comfortably paid, I had absorbing work, and few personal grounds to either resent the system or become involved in it. The one thing wrong with my life it couldn't change. I had watched the political conflict with a good deal of detachment until recently my position as a witness for the reality of the aliens had aligned me with the Herrenmanner.

“We're facing a big challenge,” said van Roberts. “Also, it's probably the biggest single opportunity we'll ever have.”

“I don't understand.”

“These creatures are intelligent, we can agree.”

“Yes.”

“And scientifically in advance of us. We've got various technologies for air and space flight that are good enough, but we've got nowhere with gravity control. Electromagnetic ground-effect technology is a dead-end that way: It only works on small masses close to the surface.”

“So?”

“Creatures technologically advanced should also be politically advanced. They won't have any sympathy for the sort of neo-feudal society we have here. Obviously the entire structure of governance in Wunderland has got to change, and, if approached rightly, they could be allies in that change.”

“I saw old Harry Bangate in the swamp after one of them had eaten him! A couple of bones and pools of blood! I still dream about it.”

“Didn't you also say you also found his gun? And that it had been fired? Perhaps the creature was acting in self-defense. Also, your monk friends said it didn't attack them when it had a chance. That sounds like reasonable behavior to me.”

“Except that as far as we can tell all the other marshmen's cabins had been cleaned out as well.”

“And all marshmen are hunters. They carry guns and live by them. If these aliens look ferocious, look like large predatory animals, then the marshmen would have attacked. I'm not saying I blame the marshmen—I wasn't there—but isn't that a fact? Perhaps the aliens just defended themselves.”

I supposed it was. There were dangerous creatures on Wunderland, and no question, yet, of endangered species. The humans living beyond the well-settled areas had no compunction about being quick on the draw as far as animals were concerned (more than once I had regretted it, finding an unusual specimen blasted into bits). Could these aliens—if everything hung together and there truly were aliens—be, if not like us, still motivated by something no more malevolent than scientific curiosity, and have been attacked?

I sat and thought. Van Roberts had a point. Indeed a better one than he realized: surely a spacefaring culture had to be both cooperative and scientific. Interstellar flight was not for primitives or for what had once been called savages.

Eating bodies? A different culture. It had taken humans a long time to understand the values of cetaceans who were relatively close kin. Dolphins could be savage and ruthless enough, and while their values and ethics were very real to them, studying and understanding them was the work of human lifetimes.

And it didn't, after all, hurt the dead to be eaten. Perhaps it was even some sort of compliment. I had read very recently of the Gallipoli campaign in the early twentieth century. The British and Australians had buried the dead, the Turks had left their bones to bleach on the ground which they had died to defend. Each side in a different way, the author said, was trying to honor them. Honor? It was an odd concept I had never got the hang of, except that it seemed to mean doing the right thing when things were difficult. But there was something more there.

And there had been another old classic author, the great Geoffrey Household himself, who had written that being eaten might be considered “the last offer of hospitality to a fellow hunter.” After all, we were dealing with aliens. Maybe they had killed reluctantly, in self-defense, and eaten the dead to honor them. Maybe—for we had not lingered to investigate the sites thoroughly—those had not been pieces of human bone we had seen, or so I tried to tell myself briefly. But no, I was a professor of biology and knew a human femur when I saw one.

The creatures looked terrifying. So said the monks and the crew of the Angel's Pencil. Well, so did gorillas. And very nearly too late to save the last of the species, gorillas were found to be gentle, intelligent vegetarians, handicapped by lacking a voicebox. Right at the dawn of archaeology the shambling, bestial Neanderthals were found to have been altruistic, caring for grossly deformed and helpless individuals until they died at advanced ages, sometimes burying their dead poignantly with flowers.

Even carnivores that were bywords for savagery in Earth folklore, like wolves and killer whales, were found by scientific investigation to kill no more than they needed. Further, throughout nature on both planets some harmless creatures had evolved a threatening appearance as protection. And sometimes it worked the other way: our poison-fanged Beam's beast looked like a cuddly toy.

They had tried to cook the crew of the Angel's Pencil with some kind of heat induction ray. A tragically mistaken attempt to communicate? No alien had survived to explain. There had been Belters in the Pencil. Sol Belters, like our own Serpent Swarmers, were regarded by flatlanders as paranoid.

I remembered an old lit. course story, a “sequel” by another author to H. G. Wells's late-nineteenth-century classic The Time Machine, which revealed that the horrible, cannibalistic Morlocks had in fact been benevolent scientists trying to communicate with the panic-stricken and homicidal time-traveler. And Wells himself had written of 1914: “Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible.” War and science did not go together, and, we were told, never had—until we started reading those old fragments.

Appearances were against the felinoids, but… surely when humanity established its first interstellar colony it had brought with it some wisdom and experience, some humble recognition of past wrongs to other species and some sense of responsibility to the future? And I remembered that automatic gun twisted into scrap, and human bone in a puddle of blood.

“So what exactly are you saying?” I asked.

“These creatures could be allies in advancing democracy here. We should be communicating with them. Instead of which we are turning out panic-measure weapons. All right, let us say we know they react violently to provocation. Surely, Professor, you can see we may be standing on the edge of either a great hope for this planet or a terrible disaster—perhaps for two species. Civilization is a reality. You're a biologist. You know the mechanics of natural selection. Capabilities don't evolve in excess of needs. How could a carnivorous felinoid get enough brain for space travel? That's not how evolution works.”

That was a point, certainly. But there was an answer to it:

“How could an omnivorous savanna-dwelling ape get enough brain for space travel? That's surely equally impossible.”

I felt vibration through the floor. Another big ship taking off. They were lifting heavy material. From my window I could see construction crews at work on hilltops beyond the city, erecting new launching lasers built from old plans. We were moving now, and by all accounts the Belters of the Serpent Swarm were moving faster.

“The unions are behaving very shortsightedly,” he went on, “A lot of their leadership sees the rearmament program simply in terms of more labor demand and more wages and so are supporting it. I think they're in for a rude shock. Do you know what a bayonet is?”

“I do now.”

“It was described centuries ago as an instrument with a worker at each end. Even capitalists like Diderachs and the Herrenmanner should see the point: money spent on production repays itself and perhaps more; Money spent on armaments may give employment but in the long run it's wasted.”

“It's a lot to think about,” I said. I wasn't lying. The cetaceans that mankind had once hunted and experimented upon and drowned wholesale in driftnets were now trading partners and friends. There were pods of dolphins breeding in one of our smaller enclosed seas, arrivals on the last and biggest slowboat, waiting till their numbers and the numbers of Earth fish grew and they took possession of Wunderland's oceans.

“Think fast. We may not have much time.”

I knew I wasn't going to get much sleep again that night. Pills, I knew by too much recent experience, would only make me groggy the next day, and the doc wouldn't dispense anything stronger without better reasons than I could give it. I called Dimity after a few hours, using a selector so I would not wake her if she was asleep. She wasn't.

I told her my major concern and hope: that a spacefaring race had to be peaceful. This was not a matter entirely of wishful thinking but also of the logic of technology and education. Cooperation and peace were needed to create cultures that could support the knowledge industries—the stable governments, the institutes and universities, the individual dreamers and inventors, and the workshops and factories, as well as the surplus of wealth—that made space flight eventually possible.

“Have you heard of the Chatham Islands on Earth?” she asked.

“Vaguely.”

“In the Pacific, off New Zealand. Very late in pre-space-flight history, in the nineteenth century, a shipload of Maoris got there and ate the inhabitants. The old Maori war canoes had never gone that way, so the islanders had been left in peace. But these Maoris stole a European sailing ship and its charts.”

“I see. Stolen technology.”

“Think of the ancient Roman Empire. Or the ancient Chinese.”

“I don't know much about them.”

“Very low tech, but in their way great achievements. They were built up, one way or another, in periods of relative peace and order. Then savage barbarians came: but they didn't destroy them, they took them over.

“Indeed the Romans themselves seem to have been primitives who took over the heritages of the Greeks and Etruscans, so that you suddenly had a warrior culture, disciplined and armed and organized at a level far beyond anything it could have achieved on its own.

“Human history is full of such cases if you look: technology taken from somewhere else. The point is, human culture or civilization and technology have often been out of step. For all we know, this may be the same thing, on a bigger scale.”

“For all we know… We have so little evidence of anything.” I repeated van Roberts's words: “Civilization is a reality.”

“We wouldn't be the first… Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans… They all had civilization as a reality. Where are they now? I'm only saying it's a possibility that these creatures are out of whack too. I wonder how the Chatham Islanders felt when they saw the clipper ship. But that's something we'll never know.”

“I hope you're right about that last bit.”

Chapter 7

“You know, Professor,” said Kristin von Diderachs, “there's an aspect of all this we haven't fully considered. These aliens may be an opportunity as well as a threat.”

“You've no doubt they are real?” I had been doing another broadcast for the Defense Council. The contents of the script I had been given were reassuring and optimistic, but I was tired and did not feel reassured.

“No. Whatever van Roberts and his merry band of cranks and radicals may say, we didn't fake those transmissions or anything else. And between you and me, I understand things are happening in space already. But even setting that aside, surely you can see that we are treating them as a genuine warning. What else have we all been sweating over? Do they think we want a high-tax regime?”

“Possibly. If it keeps them down.”

“Nonsense. We pay more tax than they do. And how can it help us to increase popular discontent? Have you any idea what the costs have been already?”

“I think I've got some idea.”

“I doubt it. Practically every aspect of industrial production has been disrupted. War production helps create an illusion of prosperity but in the long run it's money thrown away. We are treating these aliens as potential enemies because it's the sensible thing to do. But there's a chance they are not enemies. We should meet them—as far out in space as we can travel—and negotiate. I know there are people in Sol System thinking along the same lines. They've sent us accounts of negotiating games they've set up.”

“How useful are they?”

“They are putting a lot of thought into them. Think what the cats could teach us!”

“Oddly enough, I have been thinking a bit along those lines. So have some other people.”

“That could be hopeful. They could be a big positive influence for order and stability. And order is what we need at the moment. Human occupation of this planet is still vulnerable.”

“I'm well aware of it.”

“This could give us a chance to work together.”

“You mean that in times of crisis people turn to the certain things?”

“Well, yes, partly that. But what I really meant was that… these outsiders could be allies.”

“I don't see…”

“You don't build spaceships without cooperation. That means you don't build them without respect for ideals of order and discipline. Somebody has to give the orders. I've studied Earth history. Would the Greek democracies have got into space? No, they spent all their time squabbling among each other until the Romans took them over and organized them. Remember Shakespeare: 'Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark, what discord follows!' That's a universal truth. If they have space travel they have a scientific civilization, and that means a class-based civilization.”

“I certainly hadn't seen it that way before.”

“The defense preparations are obviously necessary, but for more reasons than one. The Prolevolk leaders aren't all wrong in their appreciation of the situation. Things are starting to break up here. They've got to be set to rights. I'm telling you this so you'll know who to side with when the time comes—if it comes.

“I've studied and thought about history. When the ancient explorers on Earth discovered a new country, it was the people in control they naturally allied with. When Europeans reached the Pacific islands it was the local kings they went to. If the Polynesian kings played their cards sensibly, they could do all right. I've been studying the records. The kingship of Tonga goes on today; there is still a Maori aristocracy and a restored monarchy of an old line. We could learn from their experience, and last longer, perhaps become stronger than ever. If we handle these newcomers properly and have them for friends.”

“They kill people. I've seen the bones.”

“Possibly there have been unfortunate incidents. Tragic incidents. After all, if the creature allegedly seen near the monastery was the same species as were on the Angel's Pencil, they may have reason to approach us warily. The behavior of the Angel's Pencil has rather committed us to a certain situation.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“And after all, can we know what really happened? Who attacked first? They have to be something like us… don't they?”

“I don't know.” It was an argument that had been going on in my own head ceaselessly. Reason said yes, something else said no. I brushed him off and got into my car.

Six weeks had passed. The most obvious change had been the number of ships taking off from the München spaceport around the clock and the number that seemed to land by night. But there were other changes too. We seemed to know as little about keeping security as we did about anything else military. Everybody knew. But there was a strange taboo about speaking of it.

There were new looks on the faces in the München streets, everything from excitement to haunted terror. There were people who walked differently, and people who looked at the sky. There were a couple of ground-traffic snarls, and no one seemed to be attending to them. The Müncheners stuck to some old-fashioned ways, including one or two cops on foot with the crowds. Not this evening, though. The police seemed to be somewhere else.

There were also, I noticed, people lining up at certain shops. Food shops mainly, but sporting goods, hardware, camping, car parts and others as well. I had not seen that before except at the Christmas-New Year's sales.

That reminded me of something else, and I took a detour past St. Joachim's Cathedral. Its imposing main doors were normally shut except when Christmas and Easter produced more than a handful of worshipers. Its day-to-day congregation, such as it was, went in and out through a small side door. Now the main doors were open, and there seemed to be a number of people going up the steps.

There were also some new street stalls set up near the cathedral, and they seemed to be drawing a crowd, too. I stopped to investigate, and found they were peddling lucky charms, amulets and spells.

“This is the plan for something called a Bofors gun. From the twentieth century. One of the Families boasted an eccentric collector who brought it as a souvenir of Swedish industry. It fires exploding shells, but we have calculated that shells loaded to this formula wouldn't damage even the material of a modern car, let alone what we might expect of enemy armor.”

“So?”

“We're building it anyway. At least we have the plans and drawings, and we've modernized it as much as we can. We've strengthened the barrel, breech and other mechanisms and hope they'll take modern propellants without blowing apart. We've rebuilt something from the old plans called a sabot round that may pierce very strong material. We've been able to speed up the loading too, and of course we have better radars and computers for aiming. We'll put modern mining explosive and depleted uranium in the shells and hope for the best.”

“It looks slow.”

“We're linking it with modern radar and computers and powering up the traverse. For a long time the tendency in war seems to have been more speed with everything. But that comes to a plateau. It may be different in space with decisions being made electronically, but infantry fighting can only get just so fast. Even with every electronic enhancement, it seems human beings—and I hope others—have some sort of limit to the speed with which they can make complicated battlefield decisions. And of course it may be that you're often fighting without electronics.

“Further, your own speed can become a weapon against you: run into something too fast and your speed exacerbates the impact. Also you lose control. That's the theory, anyway. At the moment theory is all we've got. The same collection as gave us the Bofors gun gave us this—it's called a Lewis gun. Not as powerful or as futuristic as it looks, but it's quick and simple to make.

“There's something else called a Gatling gun. We were very puzzled by the descriptions until we realized they referred to two guns with the same name, about 120 years apart.”

“The later is likely to be the better.”

“Well, we're trying to build the one we've got some drawings of. We're not sure which one it is.”

“There's another message from Sol System,” said Grotius. He was wearing new clothes now, a gray outfit with an old-fashioned cap and badges at the collar and shoulders. An archaic concept called a “uniform,” meant to make hierarchy obvious and facilitate decision-making and enforcement. Several other Defense Committee folk were wearing them too, chiefly Herrenmanner.

“There's been more trouble. Scientific vessels, ferries to the colonies, robot explorers, have just stopped transmitting. There was still no full public announcement on Earth when this message was sent, but of course they've got ARM to organize things. They let us know so we can do what we 'think best.' They've reminded us about the Meteor Guard and its weapons potential, as though we hadn't thought of that for ourselves. Telling us doesn't compromise ARM's precious security.”

“Decent of them.” We “Star-born” had a somewhat patronizing attitude to the flatlanders of Earth—to all Sol Systemers in fact—but I had never heard them spoken of with such bitterness and anger before. “If they'd told us a couple of months ago it might have been useful.”

“ARM has useful inventions suppressed long ago that they could tell us about. It's like the Roman emperor's reputed last message to Britain as the legions withdrew to defend the Roman heartland: 'The cantons should take steps to defend themselves.' That means: 'Good-bye and good luck!' for those of you who aren't ancient historians.”

“We're setting up distribution points to hand out strakkakers, jazzers, ratchet knives and anything else that can be used as a weapon. But the factories can't keep the supply up.”

“We've said it again and again: tool up more factories.”

“We're trying. There are still so many bottlenecks. All our professionals at this—police, security guards—are being used as instructors. Those that haven't run for the hills. Some have. As for our industrial effort in general—well, we haven't made this public, but more than nine-tenths of our efforts are going to the Meteor Guard forces.”

“In what form?”

“I don't know. I don't need to know.” Another new phrase. There were a lot of new phrases now. “But from what I gather… they are already in action. They have been for a while.”

“So when can we field an 'army'?” Like “uniform,” that was an ancient word that still sounded odd.

“How good an army do you want? We've got armed people at the main landing field now. We're hoping to get cover for major government buildings, roads, bridges, factories, arms depots and so forth next, and then we think we can begin to start with a field force.” The Argyl raised his haggard, sunken face. He had been Tommie-Herrenmann-handsome not long ago. “Meanwhile our General Staff are still trying to speed-read every book they can find that mentions a war. They've worked out why armies were traditionally divided into cavalry, infantry and artillery, and what skirmishers were. Quite a few things like that.

“We're also trying to move assets out of the city. We think that, and the spaceports in particular, will be their first objective.”

“We should be getting machines away. We'll need machines to make weapons.”

“Do you know how complex a modern factory is? It's not a matter of piling parts in the back of a carrier. And we can't spare any. We need weapons now.”

“We've seen nothing more,” said the abbot.

Things had changed in München. The monastery had changed too. If it had looked a little like a fortress before, it looked more like one now. There were new bars on the main gate, and small gaps in the courtyard walls had been repaired with stone.

The lower parts of the windows had stones piled about them, too, and in the tower I could see watchers, presumably armed. Repair work was still going on, with human workers as well as machines. Another strange, archaic spectacle: It seemed indecent to watch humans at this type of labor. I knew the monks did a lot by hand, but these workers were new to me.

“Possible novices,” said the abbot, when I remarked on this. “We've had a burst of applicants recently. We'll see how they like tending a concrete mix for a while.”

“It looks very… quaint.”

“Suddenly new machines aren't available. Anyway,” he went on, “we've seen nothing more, either there”—he pointed to the slope of parkland and the swamp beyond—“or there.”

He pointed to the sky. Another orange column was rising from the München spaceport. Another ship lifting some cargo to the Serpent Swarmers or the Meteor Guard. I didn't know the details any longer. There were new faces on the Defense Council and I was being sidelined, though I was still being given statements to make for broadcasting. In any event, even for people at my level there had been a blackout of real news for more than a month.

And every night now there seemed to be unusual numbers of meteors, even by Wunderland standards, and other strange lights moving in the sky. No one was quite sure when this had started, but many had remarked upon it.

More importantly, while the Spaceport had never seemed busier, all passenger space traffic to Tiamat and the Serpent Swarm, and all other scientific and commercial flights, had stopped. That had caused a lot of anger, and possible reasons, all of them highly discreditable to one or all factions of the ruling powers, formed a staple of the new industry of streetcorner and public-square oratory.

Security was getting tighter, and political disorders, I had heard, were getting worse. There were rumors of rioting.

“You know what we may be up against?” I asked him.

“I think so, Nils. We're not flatlanders.”

“No, we're not flatlanders. We don't live on a tamed world and we're used to dealing with dangerous beasts. Our farmers still have guns. But if we're right, these dangerous beasts have gravity control and spaceships that make inertialess turns. They have beams and bomb-missiles. It's rather a different order of things.”

“I know.”

“Then why bother with this? Strengthening your walls won't hold them off. With the wrong wind, the radiation from one fusion point detonated over München, not even aimed here, could obliterate you.”

“If they want to destroy this world, there's not a lot we can do about it. But why should they? And as for the walls, I might say that if they settle for something less than total destruction, we still have our fellow humans to worry about, as always.”

“Yes,” I said. “That's been brought home to me rather clearly lately.”

“Paranoia is not only believing in nonexistent enemies. It's more commonly believing your enemies are more organized and efficient than they actually can be.”

“At the moment, I'm wondering who our enemies actually are.”

“And wondering what your place in it all is, I suspect.”

“Yes. I was put on the Defense Committee when it was formed but I know no more about defense than any of the others.”

“But probably no less than any of the others either.”

“I don't know that van Roberts and von Diderachs see things quicker or slower than I do. What has a biologist got to do with defense, anyway? Oh, I might think of some weapons to use against an alien enemy—biological weapons, I mean, I've read a little about them lately, but I have precisely one hair to work on.”

“I thought you were getting data from Earth.”

I hadn't known he knew about that. But I realized he must have many sources of information.

“It's stopped. Or at least, I've had nothing lately.”

“Ours, too. Some time back.”

So they weren't as determinedly medieval as they let on. That linked up with something else in my subconscious, but I could not pursue it at that moment. It filed itself away somewhere. He went on:

“We're staying, of course. It's human to want to run, but it seems our vows must have meaning after all. When I've spoken of the people of Wunderland as our flock, you know I've meant it more than half in jest—an amusing archaism from the pastoral days when the Church had a more definite mission and when human beings could really be thought of in terms of sheep needing a shepherd. But it's a poor shepherd who deserts his flock and runs when the first real wolf appears.”

“A wolf?”

“Know that I've also asked myself: 'What if it's more than a wolf? This might be a tiger.' It might also be a poor shepherd who commits suicide. If that's what staying means.”

“And I remember a verse,” I told him.

“Who said that?”

“An old poet called Kipling. It was meant as a war epitaph. It was in one of the old books I've been reading lately.”

“I've not heard of him.”

“ARM didn't like him. He'd just about disappeared from public libraries before the first slowboat lifted. But he was one of the craft, it seems. Our lodge has a small library of its own… Reading!… I feel useless. I make my contribution to the committee—try to say something, but when I do I feel it's a waste of time. Too many cooks spoiling the broth. There's nothing special I can contribute. If I were an engineer, I'd be far more use. Speed matters, and I might be able to enhance human reflexes with biological engineering, but the point is academic. To do anything meaningful in that direction would take years and resources I don't have.”

“I'll have to say I'm glad of that. The Church doesn't approve of BE, for humans most of all. And yet things seem to be happening. I've never heard so many ships taking off. And there are new factories.”

“They are happening with little help from me.”

“Think carefully. Act honorably. And pray. That's all I can tell you.”

Chapter 8

“Can you destroy your work?” I asked Dimity. I could imagine how any other scientist might have reacted to that question. She took it calmly, a little sadly. She understood the implications before I finished asking it.

“I haven't published yet. I can burn the papers. I can clear the computers' memories. I can't forget it. But it's far from finished. Years. And what I've got is only part of it.”

“And we are more years from building such engines?”

“Oh, yes. If we diverted every scientist and engineer we have away from the defense effort, still years before the first proper experiments. And we would need deep-space ships.”

“That's what I thought. We'll never get the resources now.”

“I know.”

“And now I think I know the best thing I can do for Wunderland. We've got to hide you. The caves will do for the time being.”

“I'd like to play my part. Do something more active.”

“I think we'll be active in good time. Right now, you are frankly too dangerous. I think it's time to go. And there's no one we're directly responsible for.”

Dimity was an orphan, thanks to the misprogramming of an air-car's memory for altitude a couple of years previously, and an only child. I was in a similar situation and for the first time in my life I was grateful for it.

We got up. Many shops were shuttered, and one or two burned, the detritus of the previous two nights' riots. There were few people on the streets, apart from the new armored and heavily armed police.

Dimity and I had been the only customers at the Lindenbaum. Stanley, the human waiter who had given it its cachet, waited no more. He and Otto, the proprietor, were doing something that I had also seen at the monastery: filling bags of fabric with sand to build a kind of extra wall. There was something obsessive or mechanical in their movements, and they hardly turned their heads as we left. I thought of the first time Dimity and I had sat here, and the last time, with the flower and the flutterbys. I won't see our café again, I thought suddenly. I'll not see München again. Even tomorrow it will be gone. It gave me the feeling of a sad dream. Something small and dark flashed along a gutter and out of sight down a drain: one of the native animals turned scavenger which we had previously kept out of the city. I had the car loaded with extra supplies and tools, slung in nets all over it. I had also loaded several extra lift-belts. I had kept it at the university, hidden. Some of those supplies would not have remained there long otherwise.

München already looked different from the air. I saw gardens neglected and dying, uncollected garbage. The rioting had been more serious than we had been told. There were more burned-out buildings. The lawns and trees of the Englischer Garten looked dry and dying, and its fountains were gone. Near my own house, water still reflected in the system of ornamental pools, but there too the fountains no longer played. On the streets I saw new, heavy vehicles with the word police on them. But the rioting was not the only thing that had changed the city. For all the infighting, some other things had been done.

Haze drifted from factories thrown up in the last few weeks and put into operation without environmental impact statements or pollution controls. Smoke from heavy, crude rocket boosters hung in clouds. Some lakes and streams were bare brown mud, and I saw garden swimming pools that had been covered over. The householders who had covered their pools tended to have piles of stores in their yards or heaps of raw earth indicating hastily dug shelters.

Once I saw a line of hellish green glare slanting into the sky as a smoke plume drifted across the path of a test-firing laser—at least, I supposed it was test-firing. Heavy power-cables snaked across open ground, some of them superconductors running from hot, crude, hastily built lasers to a Donau that steamed and boiled around them, and there were radio-wave towers whose archaic shapes hinted at the hand and mind of Tesla. On roofs I saw the snouts of the new super-Bofors guns.

Once the city was behind us I flew low to avoid being seen, and not in a straight line.

Eastward there was empty country still fairly close to the city. We flew past the Pergolas Caves, well-known and visited by tourists, past the checkerboard of farms and orchards. The air was clear here, and below us little irrigation ponds and dams, and the fused glass of surface roads, glittered in the sunlight.

There was a brief second of darkness as something passed between our car and the sun. I looked up with a start, but it was only one of the big leather-flappers. There came into my mind another line from H. G. Wells: “Only a rook,” he said. “One gets to know that birds have shadows these days.” Which of the classics had that come from? Of course! The War of the Worlds!

That set my mind running on the old master's work, and its end, so cleverly foreshadowed with subtle clues, in which the invading Martians die of disease germs against which they have developed no immunity. For a moment I wondered if it had not been prophecy, and whether a similar inevitable fate awaited the invaders of our own world. But no. We were invaders here ourselves, and we had flourished and bred and grown. For the universe had been stranger than even the old genius had realized. We knew little of the ancient races that had exterminated one another in space during Earth's pre-Cambrian period, but we knew they had seeded many planets with common microbes and other life from which the more complex forms had eventually arisen. Modern docs could handle any odd exotic bacteria we had encountered.

Wunderland food, both vegetable and animal, was not ideal for us, but we could eat it. So we knew from at least this sample that the life-forms of different planets could eat each other. That brought my thoughts back full circle. “One gets to know that birds have shadows these days.” I had swotted up the old classics for my university entrance, had learned passages by heart. As undergraduates we had dramatized The War of the Worlds as a play. I had been the artilleryman. What had he said, whose lines had been written before men flew at Kitty Hawk, of the humans faced with interplanetary invasion by technologically superior Aliens?

The first men to reach Earth's moon had gone there unarmed. Even the Slaver-Tnuctipun War, when we discovered traces of it, had not shaken the assumption that space-faring races would be by definition peaceful: It had been too long in the Galactic past to bear any relationship to the universe we knew. But what if Wells had got it right, not that these creatures were savage or barbaric, but that they were so advanced that they simply brushed us aside? I would have laughed at the idea, or rather not given it consideration, a little while ago.

If only Wells had not had such a mind for detail, like the passing reference to the multitude of crows hopping and fighting over the skeletons of the humans the Martians had consumed and left in the abandoned pit!

We passed over the long sprawling lines that marked Manstein's Folly, the remnant walls of a fortress and outworks some of the Families had begun in the early days of settlement as a defense post against alien enemies that did not exist on Wunderland. Recently the Defense Council had voted to complete the works with “hardened” defenses and weapons and install a “garrison” there, but it had not been high on an ever-growing list of competing priorities. Now I saw there were some people there, with machines and vehicles.

The sight was not very reassuring. We flew on to the Drachenholen, the great cave system in the Hohe Kalkstein four hundred kilometers farther east.

I had begun exploring the caves with students years before, one of a number of long-term projects, and the university had kept their location unadvertised. But if I had begun exploring them, the emphasis was on the word “begun.” They were not high priority and if they were full of interest for a biologist (one student party claimed to have found footprints of a tripedal creature in one well-concealed cave), so was the rest of the planet.

Thanks to Wunderland's gravity, they dwarfed the Carlsbad Caverns on Earth. And thanks to the many Wunderland life-forms that flew and brought protein into them, they had far richer ecosystems. In a society without modern chemistry, their vast guano deposits would have made rich mines. As it was, they were mainly mined with deep-radar beams, X-rays and collecting-spoons for fossils and theses.

Cave ecosystems on Earth were among the oldest and, if Man left them alone, the most stable on the planet: caves in Australia and the Caribbean islands had similar insectile life-forms, apparently unchanged since both had been part of the ancient supercontinent.

The Wunderland cave ecosystems were old too, I knew, and variegated, but the knowledge gleaned from my small scratchings was tiny. There were largish carnivores in there, including the biggest, which we called morlocks, quasi-humanoid in shape. As far as I knew they did not venture onto the surface or far into the twilit zones near the cave mouths, though they had eyes, large, unpleasant eyes. Still, the university expeditions had been careful. In the twilit zone of the Grossdrache we had established a secure accommodation module along with what should be tamperproof stores of food and other supplies.

We had an outfit of guns in the air-car, personal strakkakers clamped to the doors and a couple of heavier ones mounted on the body. Other things, too: experimental sonics, a bullet projector that was a more powerful version of the monastery's collecting guns, a couple of ratchet knives. All products of the new factories.

The mouth of Grossdrache was partly hidden at the end of a long winding canyon but big enough for us to fly into. I had once thought of putting a gate on it, but decided that it would attract too much attention. Within, it opened into a grand ballroom before dividing and running off into various darknesses. The module, deep in this ballroom twilight, was camouflaged, partly for aesthetic reasons and partly to hide it from any rather stupid hiker or camper who might penetrate this far. I had the doors' combinations but had removed them from the University's computers. A key seemed safer.

The annex module, also camouflaged as a group of large boulders, was big enough to hold the car. I was glad to see a colony of crepuscular-nocturnal batlike creatures (some classicist had called them “mynocks” in tribute to the old Star Wars films) had established a colony on the roof of the storage module and among the columns of artificial stalactites that hid some of its fittings. Unlike their fictional namesakes they could do no harm to us or the installation. They rose in a squawking cloud as we landed, but soon they settled again. They were messy creatures but excellent protein suppliers for the cave food-chain and had stained the roof and sides of the module with their droppings in the most natural manner. There was no reason for an inquisitive human not to think the whole complex a scattering of rocks. Already a drift of guano and dead Mynocks had built up on the ground beside the module, and segmented vermiform things, red and white-banded in our light, were industriously moving this material a link up the chain.

Apart from the chattering mynocks and rustling worms, the cave was still and silent but we kept our weapons ready as we crossed to the accommodation module. The trenches we had dug when collecting fossils were undisturbed.

Everything inside seemed to be in good order. The module had originally been built for space—an asteroid mining project that never went through—with space-standard backup and recycling systems that would have been unnecessary except that they cut out pollution in this delicate ecosystem. When I turned on the main desk I found the kitchen, storage bins, computers, lab tables, bunks, bathroom, and laundry all checked out. It was the best base and hideout I could think of.

“How long do we stay here?” Dimity asked.

“I don't know yet. You stay here until the situation stabilizes.”

“I understand. But alone? I'm not sure that I'd like that.”

“Not alone yet. But I can't think of a safer place for the moment. There are hundreds of feet of rock on five and a half sides of us, and these walls were designed to be proof against meteors and vacuum. I don't mean we have to live inside here long. This is just the retreat.”

“Retreat?”

“An idea I got from the abbot. Somewhere to go when it's a good idea to get away from the world for a while.”

We dialed some food.

“What's going on at München?”

We dialed the news channel. Someone was denying there had been further rioting. She looked drawn and nervous, and twice people crossed in front of the studio camera. Then the transmission failed briefly.

“What's going on in space?”

There was nothing coming from Tiamat, the Serpent Swarm, or any of the satellites in low orbit. The other ground-based channels had a recorded chess tournament, a junior-school model of continental drift theory, a singer, a head talking on dolphin legal concepts, an ancient documentary on Beam's first zoological expedition to Castledare, an exhibition of Neue Dresden China, a Rotary-Masonic luncheon. This wasn't ordinary television.

“It looks as if things really are starting to break up,” Dimity said. The screen flashed with a lightning logo and an audio alarm blared. We knew what that was. An emergency override announcement, usually for the evacuation of some area threatened by a meteor strike.

Karl van Roberts had been arrested. Police were searching for Gretchen Kleinvogel. Emergency powers were being extended.

I keyed into one of the university's own low-orbit satellites, used mainly for ground surveying. (Its deep radar had helped discover the shallower part of this cave-system.) München was easy to find, and with higher resolution I could see fires burning. So it was on again. This looked worse than before.

I had done the right thing getting Dimity away, I told myself. Then I saw other things. The brilliant, flaring green of lasers firing through a clouded atmosphere. I punched the keyboard frantically, trying to get better focus. The satellite's cameras had unlimited focal length. As the picture shimmered I caught the flash of explosions somewhere off-camera. The transmission stopped, and the screen went utterly blank. It was as if the satellite wasn't there anymore.

A local fault? I didn't think so. I fiddled with the keyboard for some time, without result. Then a local alert on the desk flashed and beeped.

I clicked to the modules' own security camera, mounted in the cave roof directly above us, which gave us a view of the whole ballroom.

A cloud of mynocks. A red telltale flashed. Something large moved quickly out of the picture into the darkness of the tunnels. I tracked it with nitesite but it was gone. Replaying the film showed nothing distinct.

“I don't know what it was,” I told Dimity. “Something attracted by our movements, I guess. One of the bigger cave animals.”

“A predator.” A statement, not a question. Cave food-chains have little vegetable matter in them apart from fungus, and few vegetarians, and in any case it is predators that are attracted to movement.

The darkness and walls of rock about us had felt like safety, but I remembered with a creepy feeling in my spine the words of an ancient Earth tale, Rogue Male, again by the underground master Household, that I had studied in the Classic Literature course: “Darkness is safety only on condition that all one's enemies are human.”

“Whatever it is, it can't get in here. You did lock the doors, didn't you?”

“Oh yes.”

“If necessary, the car can fly out and shoot it under control from here. I'd rather not have any shooting here, though.”

“Nils, what exactly are your plans?”

“Fluid.”

“Does that mean nonexistent?”

“Not at all. I suggest we wait hereabouts till the disorders in München are settled. There's nothing useful you or I can do there. Nothing more useful, that is, than keeping you out of danger.”

“What about your students?”

“They are all adults. They know as much about the situation as I do. They're younger than me and I guess on average a lot fitter. My job is to teach them biology, not lead them in rioting.”

“You think they'll all be safe?” She didn't include any name in particular, and such is the human mind that even there for a second or two I dwelt on the implications of that.

“It's out of my hands.”

“Nils, how bad do you think the rioting is? Cameras can lie… give false impressions.”

“Bad enough for us to sit it out here. You might be a prize for either side—Herrenmanner or Prolevolk.”

“And here I'm a prize for you, perhaps?” But she smiled as she said it.

“I'm afraid I'm a little too keyed up to think in those terms.” The desk-screen was flicking from one channel to another, the sound muted. There were the München studios, the blank screen where the satellite had been, and the module security camera.

“Rioting isn't all that's going on,” Dimity said. “There's something happening in space.”

“Our satellite's gone.”

“There's been something happening long before that. I've been watching. A lot more ships have taken off over the last few weeks than have landed again. And some of the ships that have landed have been damaged. When did we last hear anything from the Serpent Swarm?”

“I've not heard much at all lately.”

“I have. You may have been on the Defense Council but I'm a better hacker than you—or a more unscrupulous one. The messages are in code, but I could work out that we and the Swarm have been losing ships. Lots of ships.”

I remembered the fragments of military science and history I had sweated over so uselessly in the preceding months.

“It doesn't make sense. If you mean losing ships to aliens, why put the messages in code? Aliens aren't going to read our language, surely.”

“I don't think it's to stop aliens reading them. It's to stop us reading them. Nils, why do you think you were put on the Defense Council?”

“Why not?”

“What was the point? It was all set up in a hurry, sure, and people were given seats on various committees partly to keep everyone who mattered quiet, but you're a biologist! What were your qualifications? Not anything to do with biological warfare; you can't even start that until you know what the enemy is like, and for all we know these aliens, if they exist, use nerve gas for underarm deodorant.

“You were there because you're Mr. Nice Guy. How many news features have there been, over the last ten years, on your expeditions?”

“Lots.”

“Exactly. You are a celebrity. More than that, a celebrity who is also a scientist. And you've been given statements to make to the media over the past few weeks.”

“Because I'd been on TV often enough before, yes.”

“Because you are reassuring. Those statements were handed to you, weren't they?”

“Yes. I know what you're going to say next, Dimity.”

“You haven't the least idea of the real situation. You were a handsome talking head, who was not identified with any political faction.”

“That's why I've no qualms of conscience about quitting without much notice now. I realized I wasn't doing anything real. Look around you. That's why I'm here. Why you're here.”

“Our culture hasn't much experience of this sort of thing, has it?”

“But we've got plenty of experience of politics, it seems. I thought of us as a young, innocent world.”

Suddenly, I found myself crying. Dimity took me in her arms and I clung to her until the fit of sobbing and shaking had passed. I did not tell her I was crying a little for my own uselessness and a great deal more for fear for her.

Suddenly there were tiny chimes of music in the air. Dimity had brought a little music box from her collection. Heaven knows how she had thought of it, but those single notes, falling one by one, calmed me.

“You need some sleep,” she said. “And you know we're safe. Nothing can reach us here.”

I hadn't cried since I was a child. It seemed (or so I hoped) to release stress of whose intensity I had had no idea. I needed her arms round me to get to the bunk. I must have been asleep before she finished undressing me. “Nothing can reach us here” were her last words in my ear.

Chapter 9

Mechanical sounds. The hummings and clickings of an electronic habitat. I woke with the instant rush I have learned to hate. When I am at peace I wake slowly.

I remembered how much I had broken down the night before, remembered Dimity feeding me some sort of pills and liquid during the dark hours. I had not realized how vulnerable to strain I was. There was, of course, an autodoc in the module, and my first temptation was to make for it. But we might need to learn to exist without docs. I unwound Dimity's arm, got up and went to the desk. I dialed myself something to eat and drink. My beard was suddenly angering me and I cut most of it away.

I didn't want to look at the news just yet. I brought in the security camera instead.

I should have stayed with the news. The drift of guano showed big footprints. Not mine, not Dimity's, not human. But I had seen prints like them before.

I already had too much adrenaline in my system. I brought my pulse and breathing under control. Panic would do no good. We knew there were large animals in the deep caves, not only morlocks—I wished now that we had given them another name—which seemed to have rather more intelligence than dogs, but the modules, built of spacecraft hull-metal, were more than strong enough to keep them or any known Wunderland animal out.

Any known Wunderland animal, I thought, remembering the wrecked defenses of the marshmen's camps.

Would the aliens seek out a place like this? I didn't know how they thought. The behavior of terrestrial felines and Wunderland tigripards gave us two samples of felinoid behavior, investigating holes and caves, stalking before leaping, but these were allegedly felinoids with weapons… weapons that could burn through the hulls of spaceships or these walls around us.

I felt Dimity's hand on my shoulder. She too was looking at the footprints on the screen. One of the troubles with Dimity was that she could so often tell what I was thinking before I said it.

“Do we take the chance it's just a morlock?” I knew it wasn't.

“I don't think we can. And if it's not a morlock…”

“It could be back any time. We can't just wait for it.”

Now that we were looking for them, it was possible to make out more of the footprints on the cave floor. They could be tracked into the deeper passages, but the drier blowing dust near the entrance showed nothing. We followed them to the limit of the camera's range. Then we tooled up with lights and weapons, and took a couple of fight-or-flight pills. Not generally legal, but I had permission to keep them for hazardous expeditions.

We didn't like locator implants as a rule—too much like the sorts of thing Flatlanders went in for—but I had insisted on them for all cave-exploring students and so of course had had to accept one myself. It was in my left arm and about half the size of a grain of rice—no trouble. There wasn't much point in it when there was no potential rescue party anyway, but I made sure the desk was keyed into it in case Dimity and I somehow separated and she got back without me. It showed where I was anywhere on Wunderland.

We left a beacon blinking and beeping on the module, and with electronic locators the danger of getting lost was at least minimal. I was not planning for us to be in the caves long, but I also took some concentrated ration packs, largely from force of habit.

Lower gravity than Earth's meant huge ballroom chambers could form with fewer roof collapses. There were taller, sharper stalagmites, broader stalactites, and shawls, heligtites and fields of flow-stone more luxuriant than any terrestrial cave could show, vast majestic frozen waterfalls frosted with crystal, glittering, mineral-colored wings and curtains and flowers of stone. Limestone-dissolving streams flowed more slowly than on Earth and in less straight lines, with more complex intertwining labyrinths resulting. Bigger caves also meant more and bigger cave animals.

Crystalline surfaces flashed in the light. Insectoids and other small creatures were swift shadows. We turned a bend, and the pulse of the beacon and the faint glow of the twilight zone disappeared. Oddly, I felt far less frightened than I had in the module the night before, and I was still scientist enough to notice the fact. Something to do with an ancient hunting reflex, I suppose.

We had artificial aids but we waited for our pupils to dilate naturally, then splashed through a cold stream, bubbling to a waterfall. We were still in the area of my previous expeditions. There was another ballroom, and several branching tunnels. We had erected a signpost there once, and a small depot with beacons and locators to help the lost. There was little left of it. Morlocks might have broken into the food stores, but electronics should not interest them. They could be all too cunning and intelligent for animals, but as far as we knew they had no real sapience in anything like the human sense.

We saw in our lights a human skull and bones on the cave floor at one point, not recent and all much gnawed and broken, possibly the property of some fool who had ignored the first rule of caving and gone in alone. I knew I had never lost a student, but…

There was a story to be written on humanity's relationship with great caves, I thought. On Earth in classical times and later they were thought to be the abodes of trolls and other monsters, yet tens of thousands of years before that our Cro-Magnon ancestors had penetrated them miles beyond the reach of daylight to create art galleries. Had something happened on Earth, deep below the light of day about 30,000 b.c. that had changed man's relationship with the underworld? Mankind could hardly have guessed then that one day it would find real trolls underground, in caves under another star.

Another star… and that reminded me why we were here, and that morlocks were very much not the only things we had to fear.

I thought of Geoffrey Household again, and wished I did not remember so clearly his words about another man in another cave: “He liked to have space and plenty of light around him and was continually turning round in case the unknown was following him. It was.”

Onward and downward. A long curving passage, through glades of glittering flowstone and rows of stone shawls, stone spears, trumpets, swords, flowers, and fans. There was an unmistakable stink. Our light showed a jumble of jagged holes with piles of bones and rubbish. A morlock “town.” We began to back away as quietly as we could, but nothing seemed to be moving.

Dimity grabbed my arm and pointed. There were eyes in the torchlight, close to the ground, staring, unblinking, unmoving. I spread the beam to flood.

A dead morlock. Very recently dead. And largely eaten. Looking farther, I saw bits of others, all very dead and scattered. So something had destroyed a community of the biggest and most intelligent carnivores that we knew of in the cave-system. And the morlocks themselves, like their fictional namesakes, could be dangerous enough for two humans.

We already had our weapons on full cock. I've been really smart bringing Dimity here, I thought. Well done, Professor Rykermann! Straight into the dragon's lair!

Get on or get out? Whatever was hunting here hunted by smell and sound. It would be silent, and if it was anywhere nearby it would be well aware of us.

The torchlight shone upon it could be a blinding weapon. A literally blinding weapon, I realized, for it had laser options.

“Back away,” said Dimity. “Back away toward the entrance. We can watch each other's backs.”

“Yes,” I said. I had never realized how slow a process backing away would be. Through the stony glades, with their myriad darknesses. There was the stream, the noise of the fall. Then there was another smell, a peculiar, gingerlike smell.

Eyes. Not morlock eyes. Much higher off the ground, two pairs, and the eyes of each pair farther apart. There was a snarling scream that hurt my ears and pale bodies moving. Had I not been keyed up for fight-or-flight, that scream would have paralyzed me.

Our strakkakers whirred. One mass fell, another came at me, hit. I jumped back, rolling under it, still firing, and it went over the fall with an indescribable cry.

Not dead. I heard it shrieking. I headed toward the fall ready to fire again, but it fired first. A bolt of colored light smashed into the cave roof, sending a shower of stone and crystal crashing down after it with a lot going down the fall. The screaming stopped. The creature must have buried itself.

There seemed to have been only two. I bent to examine the fallen creature. The strakkaker had left plenty of it. It was much bigger than a morlock or a human.

Not a cave dweller. The eyes, or eye sockets, were large and could be those of a nocturnal hunter, but they were not a cave dweller's eyes. And I knew what it was.

A big catlike thing, tiger-sized and orange, though with a shorter body and longer limbs than a terrestrial tiger. The bare skull, stripped by the strakkaker's needles, showed a brain-case bigger than a human's. Pseudofelis sapiens ferox.

I had known the theory of what a strakkaker could do, but had not seen the fact demonstrated at close range on a large living creature before. But I was used to dissections. This looked like the surplus material after a ham-fisted undergraduate class had been hacking at something for a week, though even then I thought the bare bones were odd: the ribs, for example, went all the way down, and there were bones that formed struts and braces in a manner that would, I thought, be immensely strong and had no Earth or Wunderland analog. What turned me suddenly sick was an unexpected detail.

It was wearing clothes. A wide belt holding tools and weapons, and a vestlike garment with webbing. That had turned the strakkaker needles and was intact.

“Get the belt,” said Dimity as she stood waving her light about the cave.

Maybe with steadier hands and more time I could have done more. As it was, the torso was sufficiently smashed for me to get free the belt, with weapons, a huge handgun and a knife, as well as some packages in the webbing. As I bent above it I saw spots of dark blood appear suddenly on the naked bone and realized it was dripping from my own chest. Four parallel cuts, not deep and only now starting to hurt, but made by claws that had sliced through modern explorer-gear fabric and which would have parted my ribs had they been deeper. Our belts contained basic first-aid packs. Dimity sprayed the cuts with a bandage, disinfectant, anesthetic, nu-skin combination.

“I should take some samples to study,” I said. “Tissues, organs…”

“I wouldn't worry about that too much,” she said. “I think we'll be seeing plenty more of them. If we get out.”

“What do you mean?”

She pointed with her light. The rock-fall had not all gone down to bury the alien. Our entrance tunnel was blocked.

“It'll take us hours to clear that,” I said. She cocked her head on one side, gazing at the great mass of shattered crystal. We soon saw it would be a huge job to clear it and probably not possible at all.

“It may not be too bad,” she said, “There must be other entrances that the aliens use. Otherwise, we'd have seen their transport and they would probably have moved on the modules at once.”

That was a less cheerful thought than it might have been, but it was something. She twitched her ears.

“The air's still moving. And you can still hear the stream. And we have the locators.”

The locators might be some use. They would tell us where we were in relation to the entrance cave and the modules in the labyrinth, but that was little use if we were cut off from them by tons of rock and they did not tell us what lay between. I did have some memories from previous expeditions. They were unreliable—I had depended on maps and instruments—but all we had now.

We set off, carrying the alien tools and weapons as well as our own. I also carved a few steaks from the carcasses to eke out our rations.

Morlocks tended to travel the caves in packs, and I knew they had a nasty habit of clinging to high stalactites and dropping down on prey from above. However, there seemed to be none around. Unfortunately they were among the least of our worries, and I could guess why they had disappeared.

It is notoriously hard to keep track of time in caves, but when our watches showed several hours had passed, we rested, taking turns to sleep. We dined on pills, soup to nuts in a mouthful. The stream was still flowing somewhere in the background. We should have kept watch, but I knew so little in those days, and we slept.

For years I had thought that to hold Dimity sleeping in my arms, on the edge of sleep myself, would be perfect contentment, which showed how wrong it was possible to be. The idea of sex then would have been a joke—I associated it with calm, relaxation, and good spirits. Sick with fear for both of us, and for what might be happening on the surface, several times I heard sounds far off that were not like the noise of water on stone. I fiddled with the alien weapon, trying various settings without pulling the trigger, and tried not to think about what I might need to use it for.

We pushed on. There was a sort of moss slide which took us, easily enough in that gravity, down a long passage to a ledge above another ballroom cavity filled with tunnels and rock-holes. I flashed a light briefly around it, then doused it quickly and we forced our way back up the slope. The place was another natural morlock “town,” and it stank of them. They were alive this time. Behind us as we climbed I heard morlock barking and scrabbling sounds.

I turned and saw the dim shapes closing upon us. I discovered the alien weapon's trigger needed two pressures, but the first blast from it cut down the first of the morlocks.

The second time I fired at a set of formations in the roof. It dispersed the rest of the Morlocks and more importantly brought down some of the roof behind us in a shower of glittering spears, but anyway we had no inclination to linger. When we paused at the top of the slope, bruised and scraped by sharp and sliding stone, I found I had lost the ration packs.

Two mornings later, by our timepieces, we were hungry enough to try the meat, cooking it with our light. It tasted foul, rank and gamy, but if one did not think about its origins it was possible to choke it down. I remembered C. S. Lewis's Prince Caspian, where children had had to eat cold, and as I remembered, raw, bear-meat, and pretending I was one of them helped. Dimity, I think, could use her mind to override her nerves.

But whether it was the meat of the morlock or the alien or both, we were sick and weak the next day.

I tried to count our mercies, and could think of four: there were plenty of pools and streams of clear drinkable water, our lights, unlike those available to cavers of previous days, would last virtually forever (a less cheerful thought: they would still be burning long after we were skeletons), with Dimity's memory and sense of direction we stood little chance of getting any more lost than necessary, and none of the creatures we feared came near us, though several times we found cave insectoids and vermiforms on our bodies. They have much the same position in the caves' ecology as vultures on Earth, and their increasing friendliness was an omen I did not like.

Two days later a swarm of mynocks flew past us. I had a hard time holding the alien weapon steady in my hands by then, but by waving it about I brought a few down in flames. We ate them ready cooked, but they also tasted vile. Time went on. We played Dimity's little music box, and I think that helped keep me sane.

Once, I was sure, I saw in my light a dim, strange creature of some size disappearing rapidly into a dark hole. I glimpsed it only momentarily, but its odd gait reminded me of the story of tripedal footprints. Once it would have excited me. Now I was only concerned that it was neither morlock nor alien and did not seem to either threaten us or provide food. I followed it cautiously but the passage ended in a blank wall of rock, so smooth it could have been artificial. A hallucination, perhaps.

A few days after that we found ourselves back at our starting place. The dead morlock and the dead alien were still there, the cave insectoids and vermiforms swarming over them. They had just about finished the job of baring the Alien's bones lying in a bed of orange hair. I was thinking a lot about food by that time, and crushed up a paste of them. We were past objecting to the taste.

Dimity tried hypnotizing me to see if I could remember any passages more accurately. No good.

“The air's fresher than it might be,” she said at last. “Is it daylight outside?”

“I think so. Unless our clocks have gone wrong somewhere.” She scrambled up the rockfall. I tried to follow but my chest and arms were very stiff now.

“I think I can see light!” she called. “There's a way through!”

There had been none before. We had searched thoroughly the first day. I got to the top of the rockfall with her somehow. Indeed there were now a few distant chinks and shards of dim light. Perhaps it had settled over time, or perhaps something had interfered with it.

“We can't move any more now.”

“What about the gun? That brought it down originally.”

I didn't know how much charge was left, but there seemed no harm in doing my best with it. I think I would have got us clear eventually but before I had got very far a jarring impact shook the cave. I thought at first of earthquake, and saw myself and Dimity buried under a rockfall. But it was something else. I got clear, dragging Dimity with me, as the glittering crystal boulders spilled and settled further. More rocks fell around us, but there was little we could do about that except press against the wall. Dust hung in the air a long time, but when it settled we saw a gap above the rockfall.

“That was an explosion,” said Dimity.

“Someone after us.”

“No. A long way away.”

“It must have been a big one.”

“Let's go!”

Chapter 10

“Do you know how many entrances these caves have? This whole system, I mean?”

“Lots. A dozen within a few kilometers. But why haven't they just come barreling in? Why did they hole up in these caves at all?” We were splashing through the stream now, back to whatever temporary safety the modules offered.

“I can think of several reasons”, she said. “Watch a kitten with a ball of wool. Cats enjoy stalking until they are ready to leap. They may have found the caves with radar. Maybe their radar is better than ours. Also, they want to spy out the land. Remember the monastery. They don't give themselves away until they're ready. If they are like terrestrial felines, won't silent stalking until the pouncing strike be instinctual? They enjoy lurking, stalking, pouncing. Also, we don't know what's been happening in space. Maybe they are barreling in up there.”

We were back at the modules, fed and rested. We had slept for the better part of two days, and done nothing for a few days more. But their walls now gave little feeling of security. We would have to flee farther, I thought. But where? Just how do you flee from an alien invasion of your world?

Perhaps one of the city political factions had succeeded in making contact with the aliens. The first-aid foam on my chest had now been hardened for a long time, but I guessed further treatment was needed. I placed my hands in the autodoc and it began to click and blink. Probably, I realized, too late to release my hands, it was putting a sedative into my system. It left me feeling as a sedative would: better but lethargic. I sat down heavily and watched Dimity at the desk as some time passed.

“This is no good,” I told her. “I thought this was a refuge. It isn't.”

She was flicking across the channels on the desk. Nothing from space at all now, nothing from München but a brief flicker of a talking head mouthing without sound.

“Our lasers could burn through this wall. So could theirs.”

“I know.”

We had, in a curious way, been happy here in the last few days following our escape from the rockfall: perhaps what the abbot had called a retreat. Irresponsibly or not, I had kept the desk and the television turned off.

“Time to go.”

I turned around in the chair. Dimity set the music box—such a tiny, delicate thing!—on the desk, and its crystal little chimes floated into the air. She was standing in front of me. We reached out to each other and came into each other's arms without a word. She nestled into me and I found myself kissing her hair, her throat, her lips.

On the security screen the mynocks rose in a shrieking cloud.

“I think we have company,” Dimity said.

“We'll get to the car and fly it straight out.”

“Can you manage now?”

“My legs feel a little weak. I can force them.”

“Let's go.”

I found my hands were shaking.

“You take the keys, for the annex and the car. I might drop them.”

“No. Tie them around your neck. I'll need to hold the gun…” She turned the light on the beacon up to flood. There seemed nothing more to do. We opened the door and ran.

I don't recommend running with a system full of medical sedative and an anesthetized chest. I was stumbling like a drunk and thought I would fall at every step. Dimity, holding a strakkaker at the ready and laden with other gear, couldn't help me.

No movement yet but the flying creatures. A horrible fumbling at the annex door, and we were in the car.

We were in the air when we saw it. It came staggering out of the tunnel, bent over one side, one arm and shoulder maimed and shredded. It must have climbed the fall.

It leaped at the car as I pulled the nose up. The claws of its undamaged forelimb scrabbled at the metal, dragging us down, tipping the car. We had not had time or the thought to fasten our seat belts. The car flew lopsidedly for a moment with the creature clinging to it as I wrestled with the controls. Then Dimity fell out.

It had nearly dragged us down by then. We were only two meters above the ground. Freed of Dimity's weight the car rolled up, gyros howling, throwing the creature off. There seemed no sedative in my system now. I wrenched the car around in a tight circle.

Dimity was getting up. She seemed unhurt. The creature was standing on its hind legs. Between Dimity and the circling car it seemed undecided what to do. I dropped the nose of the car and fired the two heavy strakkakers I had mounted on it.

We weren't used to fighting, and certainly not to killing. Whatever this being was, I didn't want it dismantled like the other. I fired into the cave floor in front of it. Then I brought the strakkakers back to bear on its head.

It couldn't have misunderstood. I knew it was fast, but I was also sure that, injured as it was, I would be faster when pulling a trigger was all I had to do. It was “at my mercy” as some old book put it. It took a step backward.

I brought the car toward Dimity, keeping the strakkakers trained on it. She jumped aboard and I gave thanks for Wunderland gravity. The creature seemed to have lost its weapons and equipment. I took the car up to near the cave roof, higher, I was sure, than it could jump in its present condition. It stood staring up at us, with those huge intelligent eyes, and suddenly I realized what I had done.

We had killed—yes, and even eaten—one intelligent alien and maimed another. They had, it was true, snarled and leaped at us in the cave, but… that might have been self-defense. It might even have been an attempt to communicate. Many a peaceful, herbivorous gorilla had died on Earth because its chest-beating display warnings to “leave me and my family and our territory alone” had been taken by humans as a signal of attack, and they had shot. As I had.

The dead morlock? But morlocks were aggressive predators. Who had attacked first? But there was something else there too. I thought again of H.G. Wells's Morlocks, the originals, and the fact, intentional or otherwise, that there was no real evidence in his story that they were really hostile. I thought of ancient science-fiction films like It Came from Outer Space, in which it had turned out that grotesque and horrifying aliens had only wanted to make repairs and depart, and had attacked only in self-defense. We had shot without trying to negotiate or make peace. This creature, or some creature like it, had not attacked the monks when it came upon them in the night.

Perhaps they now viewed the human race with as much terror as we viewed them, and with better reason. Perhaps these were peaceful creatures that had found themselves on a planet of horror. If so, no wonder they had not shown themselves! What would we have done in their position? It was armed. Well, so were we, and we had used our arms first and lethally. All this went through my head far quicker than I can tell it.

They looked carnivorous. Well, I had once had a cat, a gentle old female who moved in with me and whose main desires had been to be petted, to curl up on my lap, and to share my bed, and had who brought me gifts of food filched from neighbors' barbecues as offerings of affection. She had had pointed teeth, too, and claws and, until age overtook her, had been a terror to balls of wool. I am a scientist and I don't anthropomorphize animals or their emotions, but I remembered how, purring and kneading me in bed, that tiny-brained creature had gone against her own instincts and kept her claws sheathed. She sometimes bit my fingers in play, but took care never to break the skin or draw blood. Carnivores, even such perfect carnivores as cats, need not be cruel. Humans' front teeth were for meat-eating, but we were not…

The warnings from Sol? They might mean anything. What had happened light-years away in space might have been an exact parallel to this situation: panicky humans attacking first. We weren't sure what Sol humans were like now. And this creature was in a terrible way, injured and starving—I saw the bones starting through its wasted frame.

It all went through my mind in a few seconds as I circled in the cave, guns trained on the creature. I began to wonder miserably how many laws I might have broken, beginning with the one against murder.

I can't kill it, I thought. I don't know that it even meant us any harm.

It would be right, I thought, to land and try to negotiate with the creature, treat its terrible injuries, make amends. But that was impossible. Too much damage had been done.

Whatever its original intentions, it saw me as an enemy now. I had maimed it and killed its companion, or, for all I knew, its mate. It was much darker than the other creature, almost black, though with a white pattern like an old scar on one side, where its stripes did not match, and some part of my professional mind wondered if this was a sexual differentiation. My clothes were still spattered with its companion's blood. And there might be others coming up the cave system.

There was one thing I could do. Round my neck was the belt I had taken from the dead Pseudofelis, the “kzin.” I had learned little from examining it, but it looked sufficiently like our own equipment for me to guess that it contained utility supplies, including, if there was any parallelism is our species' thinking, medical supplies. I held the belt out and dropped it at the creature's feet.

I had no idea whether or not it could eat our food, but I dropped a package of explorers' rations as well. I raised my hand in a confused gesture of salute, and we headed out of the cave. I felt a deathly misery and guilt as the car shot into the sunlight, like a stake of ice at my heart. “Are you all right? That was a bit of a fall.”

“No permanent damage. I know how to fall. But it was no fun being on the ground with violet-eyes.”

“What else could I have done?” I burst out.

“We're alive,” said Dimity. “We might very easily not be. Those claws were sharp.”

Perhaps I had read too much. I thought of the Ancient Mariner and the albatross, and suddenly knew what he meant by “a woeful agony.” He had confessed his crime to a holy man and begged forgiveness. In the abbot I had an official holy man for a friend. I was not a Catholic, but would it help me to make confession?

Not far away to the north a vast cloud of black smoke was rising into the sky, an intense red flame at its core. Smaller fires were burning around it. Once before I had seen something similar. It looked as if something had smashed into the mountain range from space. That, I guessed, was what had caused the shock and the rockslide that had freed us from the cave.

I gave thanks as the ground flashed away below us and the scarp of the Hohe Kalkstein, looking ominous and threatening now rather than wild and fascinatingly mysterious, dwindled behind.

Briefly I gave thanks. A red warning light blinked on the dashboard fuel gauge. Behind us in the sky was a white cloud. Pierce a liquid hydrogen system and it vaporizes fast. I wouldn't be able to keep the car in the air for long.

Chapter 11

Again we had reason to be grateful to Wunderland gravity. Cars have limited gliding qualities. I kept the car flying as long as I could, putting more kilometers between us and the caves. We landed on a low mesa in arid, deserted country. The Hohe Kalkstein and the Drachenhohlen were a blue line on the eastern horizon, the farmlands still far to the west.

The damage was obvious. The kzin's claws had opened the metal at the rear of the car and at one point punctured a hydrogen fuel line. It was a tiny puncture, barely visible, but with liquid hydrogen fuel under high pressure it was enough. I doubted the puncture could be plugged reliably. The line and its fittings would have to be replaced. We had been lucky to get as far as we had. I had loaded the car with all sorts of spares, including, of course, spare fuel cells, and mercifully I had secured them thoroughly. But it would be a long job.

As I looked at the evidence of the power of those claws I realized again how lucky we had been. Suddenly we seemed to be still all too close to the Drachenhohlen. I had loaded a camouflaged biologist's field tent among the stores and we draped this over the car. It didn't cover it entirely but I hoped it might break up the silhouette. I would like to have had us both checked by the car's doc, but was not sure I could trust it after the rough time it had had.

Perhaps it was thinking of that which caused the sedatives still washing round in my system to kick in again just as the flight-or-fright was wearing off. I began to remove the damaged panels but started fumbling and dropping tools. Finally I gave it up and mumbled that I would have to rest again. When sleeping out in Wunderland it is ingrained in us to search out any cuddly little Beam's beasts and other small but dangerous creatures. I just about managed to inspect the neighboring small rocks, and we placed a couple on the car to break up its silhouette a little more.

Our elevation gave us a good view in all directions but also made me feel unpleasantly visible. We crawled under the tent and Dimity covered me with a blanket. When I next woke up it was night. My chest felt as if it was on fire. Even for Wunderland, I thought, there seemed once again to be an unusual number of meteors in the sky. I felt my head wasn't working well, but Dimity, sleeping apparently peacefully beside me, was something to cling to. The western sky was particularly bright. I could hear thunder and see distant lightning flashes.

Meteors and lightning storms? Lightning storms in a cloudless sky? Meteors visible in a cloud-covered one? I shook Dimity awake just in time for us to see the familiar rhomboid pattern of one of the bigger low-orbit billboards explode in golden fire.

Were there black shapes passing against the luminous band of the Serpent Swarm? They must be either huge or very low.

A burning thing like a tiny comet fell out of the sky and hit the ground with a fierce explosion a few miles to the north. We heard it and then felt the shock-wave.

The mayday alarm on the car began to howl. An emergency call close by. There was still plenty of battery power for the dashboard display. A spacecraft's escape module was descending almost on top of us. With the dashboard telltale to guide us, I picked up its blinking beacon visually with binoculars.

The sides of the mesa were partly eroded, and it was easy enough to jump down from rock to rock. The module landed as we approached and the hatch opened. We saw the pilot jump from it and run. I started toward him, but Dimity grabbed me.

“Wait,” she snapped. “If he's running away from it, don't run towards it.”

She dragged me partly behind the cover of a boulder. The pilot was running more or less in our direction, presumably because our car's alarm unit had fed back to him at least a rough position for us.

A dark wedge-shaped thing flashed out of the sky, swooping low. There was no time to make out details. I saw greenish points of fire flashing under stubby wings. The escape module exploded in a fireball. The dark thing was gone. We heard debris falling out of the sky.

Now we hurried to the pilot. He wore the insignia of a member of the Meteor Guard. He looked about as one would expect a crash survivor to look, and, his first energy gone, needed some help to walk.

“That thing will be back!” he croaked. He was breathing with difficulty. “Get under cover fast.”

“Can it track our receiver?” asked Dimity.

“I don't think so. Not yet. But if they see us moving in the open we're dead.”

Bearing a good deal of his weight and breathing shallowly made it difficult for me to talk as we shuffled back toward the mesa. Dimity asked: “Are they the cats?”

“Yes.”

Burning wreckage was scattered over a wide area. As we climbed into the shadows of the mesa, the same black craft or another swooped down and fired another missile into the biggest piece. We were far enough away not to be involved but the explosion threw us flat.

“Heat. Don't give them heat to home in on,” he told us. Then he added, “If they're shooting up ground targets like that now, it must be just about over… Well, we gave it our best shot.”

He told us to turn off the battery power and all electronics. We laid him in the back of the car under the cover and got his pressure suit off. Space pilots are scrupulously, fanatically clean. This man stank as if he had lived in the suit for days, for weeks. Many spacers are funny colors, often starkly piebald unless they are born black. This one had the space pallor in his face overlaid with dirt, sweat, oil and blood. He looked in terrible shape and again I wanted to use the doc. Again I decided against it. We're all in bad shape, I thought. München hospital will be our next port of call. I wish I had thought to fit a portable shower setup in the car. I sponged his face with a cleaner and something came off, dirt or protection. I recognized Commander Kleist of the Meteor Guard.

At least I had some explorer's brandy. That and a meal was something we could use. Then he began to talk. He was exhausted, shocked and bruised, but he talked.

“We got notice of Outsiders long before even you were told,” he said. “The powers that be on Wunderland didn't tell us too much and the public heard even less. Apparently the idea was that negotiation was a possibility. We were under orders to say nothing.”

“You said little enough,” I said, “when the first Defense Council meeting was called.”

“That was orders. They said there had been some 'unfortunate incident' with Sol ships and if these were the same aliens we would have to approach them carefully and diplomatically. By the time that first meeting was called the fighting had already been going on for weeks. 'There must be no panic'… That was what they kept saying: 'No panic. But let them see we are aware of the problem and are doing something.' Were our people insane?”

“Inexperienced, anyway,” said Dimity.

“We had the meeting you attended, and saw the various committees set up. We know now they'd been landing small parties for some time.”

“We know that too.”

“Not what we'd been watching for. We thought—I don't know if we knew what we thought, but we had some idea they'd approach us with some sort of ceremony. But the overall idea of everybody was that with a little talk they could be friends.

“When something was first detected coming in some thought it might be a new comet. But comets don't maneuver.

“We were excited, of course, and one ship didn't seem to be all that threatening. Some argued that the fact they had sent a single ship was an indication that they were peaceful. Our mass detectors didn't record it as very large, and it never occurred to us that its true size might be cloaked. We took what we thought were precautions. We sent a team of four ships, the anti-meteor lasers ready in case of trouble. I'm alive, so you can see I wasn't with them.

“It was quick. The Outsider ship dropped its cloak. Grew into something huge on the screens, travelling at comet speeds, then with other blips streaming away from it. It was a carrier, full of war craft.

“Our ships didn't last long. The Outsider craft could make turns without losing velocity, where ours had to maneuver with attitude jets. No answers to our signals, no negotiations. That time, none of ours even lasted long enough to get off a shot.

“The only thing that saved the rest of our ships was the distances of space. That and the orbiting laser stations. The outsiders evidently didn't know what those were, and came in range. They had good people on the stations, used to picking off meteors.

“We had fusion-pumped lasers to fire in the paths of meteors, as well as the big cannons. But meteors move in predictable lines. They hit several of that first flight of the Outsider ships before the Outsiders realized what was happening and began jilling around.

“At .8 lightspeed and more, with inertialess turns, they easily evaded any bombs or beams we could throw at them except at short range. The stations went on fighting and got a couple more, but they were all destroyed in a week. Suicide attacks by our ships did no better.

“Then we found at least one sane thing had been done… or I suppose it was sane: The Serpent Swarmers had been alerted, and they came in strong. They always said their meteor defenses were faster and better than ours, and they proved it over the next few weeks.

“But the real point was, the Swarmers had ramjets with them, which we'd never use so close to a planet, and they used the ramscoop fields as weapons. They also had a tactic of turning away with really large attitude jets that they had lashed on and using their drive flames like swords. A lot of them were robots—humans couldn't stand the G-forces. They made a sweep too fast for the outsiders to dodge, but it was the ramscoops that saved us.

“We didn't know if the ramscoop fields would affect the Outsiders like other chordates, but they did. The Outsiders had learned not to attack from behind, and seemed to prefer head-on attacks anyway. They'd come barreling in, and until they wised up the Swarmers had a real turkey-shoot. A squadron of Outsider ships that passed through a ramscoop field was suddenly manned by dead Outsiders.”—He gave an odd laugh.—“Or inside-outsiders as we called them. Look at one and you'll see why.

“Off Tiamat a Wunderland-Serpent Swarm force boarded one of these dead squadrons. They had no time to find out the principles of their drive, though we know it affects gravity fields. But the Swarmers learned to fly the ships and use their weaponry, and they counterattacked. They destroyed more Outsider ships and even damaged the mother-carrier.

“That bought us time. The mother-carrier hauled off and we had a few weeks' breathing space.”

“We didn't know any of this,” I told him.

“None of the craft we captured and used survived the attack on the carrier,” he went on. “But at least with what we had learned from them we were able to duplicate some of their more esoteric weapons—things like bomb-missiles whose detonation, as well as pumping lasers, could be lethal across a huge globe of space, for example. They have a heat-induction ray but we don't understand it. It's too slow for a military weapon anyway.

“We learned another tactic that cost them a lot of ships: strap big attitude jets on our craft and use them to spin like catherine wheels with the main reaction drives still firing. Not only did it give us better maneuverability, but it turned the reaction drive into a swinging sword even they could hardly dodge. We couldn't do it with manned ships—the inertial forces were too great—but we did it with drone craft. We began to win some more. If we'd had more motors, and more craft, and more resources, and more time… but that stopped them for a while.

“We studied their tactics, and an odd thing was, some of their behavior seemed almost as amateurish as ours. More than once they came straight at us, in an undeviating line, when a straight-on attack was the one thing we could meet with a good chance of hitting them. At the Second Battle of Tiamat's Lead Trojan, their big ships came at us in a column. It looked pretty frightening, seeing ship after ship closing with us like that—but what it meant was that we could hardly miss them. It was as if they were unimaginative. Or inexperienced. It didn't make sense.”

We sat in silence for a moment. Something that might have been a meteor but probably wasn't streaked by far above. The scattered wreckage of the crashed ship had just about burned itself out.

“It might make sense,” said Dimity. “Maybe they are inexperienced. At least in dealing with humans…” Her face went slack in a way that I had seen before.

“We took it for granted that space-traveling races would be too intelligent and civilized to fight,” she said. “Perhaps we were nearly right. What if peaceful, civilized space-traveling races are the norm? Or were the norm. There may not be any others left now.

“Given that, the Kzin wouldn't have much experience of war. You need a fighting enemy to teach you to fight. What if when they meet other races they simply devour them. There's no more fight than there is between a tigripard and a lamb.”

“One of the first human ships out of Sol that they attacked was able to beat them,” Kleist said. “It used a com-laser as a weapon. Some of us in the Meteor Guard actually think aspects of our missile technology are as good as theirs or better. It suggests they come from a much cleaner system than this.

“Or sometimes it seemed as if they were not in control of their own minds,” he went on. “Sometimes they seemed undisciplined. We analyzed our own successful tactics, and realized that when we had been, almost unconsciously, provoking them to attack, baiting them, they would often leap and take the bait. Our ace pilots had been doing that, it seemed, by instinct. Someone said it was the instinct of the monkey to tease the leopard.

“At other times they would stalk us like cats. A particularly weird thing was that one of the larger enemy command ships had behaved at times as if its crew or something aboard it could actually read our minds. When that ship was destroyed the tactical efficiency of the rest fell off appreciably.

“We salvaged more of their wreckage, and began to study their drive and everything else. We were putting improvements into our ships. Reinforcements were coming from Wunderland and the Swarm. We got more confident.

“There was even talk of finding where they had come from and chasing them—counterattacking. We thought we had a superweapon in the ramscoop.

“Then they came back. If they had been inexperienced, they had learned from experience like us. They'd got more cunning.

“They avoided ramscoops, and seemed to flee from them. That lured us in. Then we found it was a trick. They generated magnetic fields of their own to distort ramscoop fields, or simply dropped things into them.

“We know they had taken human prisoners and perhaps they had learned things from them. Not just in space. When we killed one of their ships and boarded it we found bodies of human civilians from Wunderland.

“Apparently the Outsiders have been landing scouts in small cloaked ships for some time.”

“I'm surprised. If they are so aggressive, why didn't they just attack in force?”

“Cats stalk their prey. They study the ground before they pounce. It's after the pounce begins that their control goes. This may be the same thing. Some of the humans they took had kept hidden records, hidden in their cages. Apparently the Kzin didn't care. Why should they? They aren't nice reading.

“Our eggheads are puzzled. These creatures are something out of a nightmare: cruel, man-eating, killing, but with science that is in so many ways ahead of ours. It shouldn't have happened, but it has. I'm told there have been quite a lot of suicides among our eggheads… Oh yes, and from the prisoners' notes we found out why they sometimes behaved as if they could read our minds. They can.”

“What!”

“They can. Or a few of them can. Apparently it's rare. But you can tell when they are doing it: a sudden violent headache. It also explains how they came to know our languages so quickly—which they do.”

That hit me like a physical blow, though it took me a few moments to realize why.

“Can it be resisted?” asked Dimity.

“Don't know. The prisoners we know they tried it on were terrorized, injured, starving, tortured already. In no shape to resist. Anyway, that's the war, and it's been going on for weeks… I don't know how long… I think it's nearly over now.”

“We've heard nothing of this,” I said again. “We've been told nothing.”

“What was the point of telling?”

“It might have meant better war production.”

“I think so. Others thought it would lead to 'a collapse of civilian morale.' I think it was their own morale that was actually collapsing. They said there was as much material getting up to us as could be reasonably expected.”

I remembered my speed-reading of the last few weeks, and the attempted defense of Singapore in the Second World War. As the Japanese advanced down the Malay Peninsula towards it, the defending general had refused to construct field defenses in case they lowered the spirits of the civilians. It had not been a good decision.

“If people knew too much, I gather, it was feared they would simply flee into the hills, or mob the slowboats,” he went on. “And then there was that… that one brief shining moment… when it looked as if we were winning.

“There was another matter too, which we found out late in the day: Some of our politicians minimized the threat because they hoped to enlist the Kzin as allies for their own factions in our internal disputes here.”

I wished I could have said I found that unbelievable, but I knew too much.

“Maybe, if we could have duplicated their drive,” he went on, “got factories into production, maybe if we had had a few more months, or a year, we could have fought them on equal terms. As it is…

“Wunderland is their prime target, of course. Anyway, the Swarm is more difficult to subdue. Dozens of inhabited asteroids, with defenses now. But we haven't much left here. Those drives and weapons are too good for us. And they've got reinforcements too. More of the big carrier ships have arrived.”

“They could hardly have been alone,” said Dimity. “With drives like that and what we know about them from Sol. Where there was one ship there would be more coming…

“Tell me,” she asked him, “Is there any suggestion, any indication, that they may have got through the light-barrier?”

“No. They get close to the speed of light. They can match velocities with any of our ships, and of course they are much more maneuverable.”

“Could they have a superluminal drive in outer space and drop into subluminal close to star systems?”

“I don't know. We've not been in a position to observe. There's no evidence of it. Anyway it's impossible. Why do you ask?”

“Nothing.”

“I only saw a bit of what was happening. I'm just a meteor jockey. The fighting was spread all over the system.”

“You must have learned a bit about these creatures. Language, that sort of thing?”

“A bit.” The pilot took a red disk from a pocket. “It's here, what we know. The spoken language is hard to understand, even with a computer, at present impossible to imitate, although some people are trying. The written is a little easier, at least when it's not in war code. It's another of those things we might have got better at with time.”

“Can I play it?”

He shrugged and passed it to her. “I don't see why not. But what do you intend to do now?”

“Repair the car as soon as I can,” I said.

“You can't show a light or heat source. They're still around up there.”

“Well, we can't trek very far on foot, and we can't stay here. In any case, there are almost certainly a group of aliens in the Hohe Kalkstein caves. We know there's one.”

“Kzin,” he said. He pronounced it differently, a snarling cough it made my vocal chords ache just to hear. “They are called Kzin. Plural and possessive kzinti, we think.”

“Oh yes, I know.”

Kleist's nervous excitement was running down now. We were all pretty beaten up, and he and I sank into a sort of doze. Dimity had earphones on, and was playing the disk, staring at the screen. More than once I saw dark shapes, too sharp-edged to be cloud, driving high and silent across the luminous bands of the Swarm and the Milky Way, and more sliding lights that might have been meteors.

Chapter 12

I woke in daylight. Modern cars have complex machinery and neither Dimity nor I were practical mechanics.

“I guess we're walking out of this one,” said Kleist. He added: “That's a Spacers' joke. It's got a bit threadbare lately.”

Repairing the car was an even longer job than I thought. I soon saw that without Kleist we would never have done it. We hoped the daylight heat reflected on the rocks of the mesa would mask what we were doing. We spent most of that day and the next working on the fuel line and its feeder controls, freezing when we saw flying things. We kept a watch in the direction of the Hohe Kalkstein, but though we thought we saw some distant activity on the escarpment nothing emerged from it to come our way. We also thought we saw an ordinary air-car flying well to the north close to the ground, but had no safe way of trying to signal it. It never came back. Alpha Centauri A had set by the time we were finished, Alpha Centauri B rising and casting long shadows in the purple twilight. And in the direction of the escarpment our glasses were definitely picking up lights and movement.

Where to go? I had tried to get Dimity away from München partly to protect her from rioting and chaos and also to protect her knowledge. But there seemed no obvious safer haven now. Kleist insisted he must get back to München, which in any case was the planetside center of the defense effort. (Had it been stupid of us to place our defense headquarters in our major city? I wondered, and came to the conclusion that it had been very stupid indeed.) Then Dimity recalled something.

“You said 'mob the slowboats.' What did you mean?”

“The old slowboats are still intact,” Kleist said. “The Kzin haven't bothered with them for some reason, at least they hadn't a few days ago, and I saw them in the sky last night. Presumably because they are deactivated they don't see them as a threat, or a high-priority target. But they are being reactivated. We're getting people out.”

That they could be reactivated had been firm policy, and every Wunderlander knew it. It was part of our history that when humanity's first interstellar colony was established, the pioneers laid down that the huge spaceships would be kept fully fueled and ready to fly if some unforeseen disaster on the new planet compelled evacuation. They were still there. Closed down and in orbit they required little maintenance, but it had been necessary at first to resist a temptation to cannibalize them. By the time it was obvious that we were here to stay and in any case the population had grown far too big to evacuate, we had factories supplying everything we needed without them. Besides, we might always want to get to Proxima or Alpha Centauri B. Why break up expensive assets unnecessarily?

“Do the Kzin know that?” asked Dimity.

“I think so. Their mind-readers know a lot… During the breathing-space, the happy time after the Swarm reinforcements came, we got crews and fuel into them,” he said. “It seemed the unforeseen disaster was well and truly upon us, and we could at least get several thousand people away. They're virtually useless as warships, anyway.”

“Where would they go?”

“Back to Sol, I guess. Sol System should have been able to cobble together better defenses than we have. They've had more time and they've more people and factories, and their Belt has good technology, even if flatlanders think like sheep.”

“Wouldn't the… Kzin just destroy the slowboats?”

“They haven't so far. But maybe it's a cat-and-mouse game. We found in one of our own old texts—Sun Tzu's Art of War—that an enemy should always be left with an apparent escape route as a disincentive to fighting with the courage of despair. But they're hard to understand. They fight without any concept of mercy, but they've also pulled their punches a few times. They could have smashed Wunderland's cities from space, or vaporized the major bases in the Swarm, but they've held off. They seem to be trying to do as little damage to infrastructure as possible. We don't know why.”

“What do you know,” asked Dimity, “about their concept of humans?”

“Very little.”

“You say they have no interest in negotiation. Do they accept surrenders?”

“They have, yes. They have taken human prisoners. We think… It's horrible and bizarre, but we think they eat them unless they've promised otherwise.”

“When do they do that? Promise otherwise, I mean.”

“Perhaps sometimes if the humans have useful skills. Once or twice when humans have been in relatively strong positions they have bargained and seem to have kept their bargains. But that hasn't been often.”

“So they don't look on humans simply as vermin to be exterminated?”

“That's hard to say. We've got a little of their language. Their word for human is kz'eerkt, which seems to mean 'monkey.' There must be monkeys or analogs on their homeworld. They refer to our ships as 'monkeyships.' ” Kleist closed his eyes for a moment and frowned as if remembering something difficult.

“There was one odd incident: One of our ships was cut off and surrounded by a kzin squadron. It had expended its major weapons and the kzin boarded it. It was a big ship, a Swarm passenger liner originally, and they fought from cabin to cabin for days. At the end the surviving humans made a last stand on the bridge deck. Some of the com-links were still working and broadcasting what was happening to the fleet. We saw and heard the last fight when the kzin broke through.

“They killed the humans pretty quickly. In hand-to-hand fighting we don't stand a chance against them. The last surviving human detonated a bomb. Only a small one, but he must have taken a lot of kzin with him.

“That put the picture out, but we still got sound for a while. We think we heard one of the kzin say something we translate like 'brave monkey' or 'worthy monkey.' But I'm not sure.

“As far as we can gather, they honor brave enemies, if not to the extent of sparing their lives. Is that what you mean?”

“Perhaps a little. But if you were about to get control of an industrialized world,” said Dimity, “would you smash up its factories and industrial plant?”

“No. Of course not.”

“And nor do they. That means they're coming to stay. Their build suggests they come from a world with heavier gravity than Earth, and a lot heavier than Wunderland. This would be pleasant for them. They can breathe the air. Of course they are coming to stay—what price a whole habitable planet with industrial development ripe for the taking, with light gravity and meat on the hoof as bonuses? They landed scouts. They know something about human biology and morphology. They want to keep our planet, and it follows that they also want humans to work it… Do you have any evidence, or any intuition, that they act more or less independently than humans?”

“More independently, definitely. Tactically they sometimes fail to cooperate with each other to a surprising degree. We'd all be long dead otherwise.”

“Cats are generally independent-minded. And you think they know what the slowboats are for?”

“I think they probably do. Does it matter?”

“It could. If they think they are industrial assets of some kind—major asteroid miners or something—they might be reluctant to destroy them. And if they think they are refugee ships…”

“Once they see them leaving the system they'll be after them,” I said.

“Not necessarily. Not if they got a long enough start. I'm trying to think like an intelligent cat, with a cat's independence. Go after a slowboat and yes, assuming you found it, you'd catch it. A slow obsolete ship technologically inferior to your own and useless except for its own specialized purpose. You might have a feed. But then you'd have to turn around and come back. Meanwhile, the other cats are all grabbing the choicest parts of the planet.

“Like terrestrial lions at a kill, or tigripards here: Would one leave a big kill that was already warm and bloody on the ground, with the rest of the pride lined up and feeding, to chase after a rabbit? Probably not. At least, we might as well think that way.”

“I hope you're right,” I said. “Anyway, you're going to be a slowboat passenger.”

“Me?”

“Your drive theory. Humanity's got to have it. The Kzin must not.”

“There was talk of drawing lots or something” said Kleist, “but I don't know if there will be time for that. What drive?”

“No, it may not work,” said Dimity. “Besides, if you don't know, you can't reveal it under torture.” I had been about to tell him what I knew of it.

“Yes,” he said. “They're good at torture, except they don't seem to understand shock. As far as we can gather they tend to kill the victims too soon. That annoys them. But I suppose they are learning.”

“So we head for München and the spaceport. And hope we get there before they do.”

“Fly as low as you can,” said Dimity. “We don't want to show up on radar and get shot down by our own people.” The subject of torture had left me rather preoccupied. “Don't head straight for the city. Hug the contours of the hills and trees.”

“We'll have to slow down,” I said.

“We should slow down anyway. Both sides will be looking for war craft, and they travel fast.” It was a relief to be moving again, anyway.

Sunset seemed unusually prolonged for the season. There were also sounds in the air that puzzled me. As we headed toward München we saw lights streaming up from the surrounding hills, lights in the sky, rising orange blossoms of fire, with the diffuse background glow of that strange slow sunset behind them.

It was like no light I had seen before: a wavering, pulsating orange glow.

Something moving in the sky against the glow, something black. Kleist grabbed my arm.

“Kzin aircraft!”

I wrenched the car round in a tight turn. The dark shape turned too, with a deliberation that was somehow terrifying in itself, and began to move towards us.

“What weapons do we have?”

“Personal strakkakers, a couple of big ones mounted on the car, some bullet projectors. Flashlight lasers.”

“No use. Glass and teflon needles won't stop that thing.”

“Ram it!” said Dimity.

“That means the end of us.”

“We bail out with lift-belts. Keep the strakkakers by you.”

Instinct had taken over my fingers. I had the car close to the ground, jigging violently from side to side. Our pursuer had lost height too, and was closing with us. I estimated it would be on us in two to three minutes.

“They like to get in close,” Kleist said.

“Then get belts on, fast!”

Desperate fumbling. I programmed the car to fly steady and stop in two minutes. Then we stepped out, three hundred feet in the air. We fell for another two hundred feet or so and then the ground effect of the lift-belts operated and we hovered. There was the alien craft, big and black and fast.

Some instinct made me shut me eyes and throw my hands in front of my face. It hit the car with an explosion that deafened us and painted multicolored light across my eyelids. A blast of hot air knocked me spinning away.

There was the alien craft, stopped in midair. There were flames curling up out of its front part and its nose was dipping. It was sinking, quite slowly, toward the ground.

A hatch opened in its side, and we saw dark bulky shapes emerging. So they had lift-belts too. Of course they would, and with their gravity technology they would be better belts than ours.

There was the whirr of a strakkaker in the air behind me and a hideous scream. The first of the creatures became suddenly fuzzy in outline, and then disintegrated, leaving a half-skeleton hanging in the air.

Two others followed, fast, and they were shooting as they came. The exit port was their point of vulnerability. Kleist and Dimity had their strakkakers trained on it, and though the aliens were fast, they couldn't get through the glass needles.

But a strakkaker has a limited magazine capacity. I heard theirs fall silent, and brought up my own, ready at the movement I could see beyond the hatch.

More alien shapes, horribly bigger than men, were maneuvering something out of the hatch, and leaping onto it. It was rectangular, and I thought idiotically for a moment of a flying carpet, realizing it must be some sort of evacuation vehicle.

Whatever it was, it seemed to be an emergency device only, like a sledge. The aliens on it must, I thought, be dazed and injured by what had happened, but there was no opportunity for mercy now. They were still carrying weapons, and, though the flames of the burning craft in the air beside them must have affected their night vision, they would surely be able to see us soon. I fired the strakkaker again in a long burst, and swept them off the sledge as the two craft separated. I realized the fact that the strakkaker, unlike a beam weapon or bullet-rifle, had no betraying flame might be a great advantage.

The main alien craft was falling faster now, and breaking up, pouring fire from several ports. There was an internal explosion, and it dropped like a stone, exploding again as it hit the ground and scattering wreckage.

Our own lift-belts were bringing us down, too. They were emergency devices only, with limited power, intended at altitudes like this to slow a fall more than to fly. One of the floating aliens was still firing a beam weapon, but it was either dead or badly wounded, for the bolts were flying at random. I raised my strakkaker again to finish it.

I fired a burst of a second or so, and the gauge clicked on empty. But the thing dropped its weapon. I thought I heard it scream, but between the deafening explosions and the flames I couldn't be sure. I marked where the weapon fell, though, as my own feet touched the ground. The others landed nearby. I was amazed we were all alive.

Kleist and I lifted the alien weapon between us and we staggered away. There seemed to be something still moving in the wreck of the alien craft, and I thought there might be explosions still to come.

“They were trying to capture us, weren't they?” said Dimity. “That's why they didn't shoot at first.”

“They often try to capture if they can,” said Kleist. “It's better not to let them…

“Well,” he continued after a moment, “at least it should be difficult for them to find us now. Have either of you got any metal prostheses in you?”

We hadn't. The small locator implant in my arm was plastic.

“Good. Get rid of the belts, and any electronic gadgets you've got on you. Watches, calculators, pocketbooks. They can detect electronic activity in space. I don't know how much metal their detectors need, but why make it easy for them? And they can use the heat-induction ray to cook any metal parts you have inside you while you're still alive. I've seen it happen…”

“Are we worth coming after?” I wondered if it would affect plastic and decided I could cut the locator out if I had to. It had already buzzed and vibrated once, which I did not like at all, but then had stopped.

“If another ship saw anything of what happened, they'll come. They're big on revenge, we've noticed.”

The alien weapon had an orange light glowing on one side.

“I hope that's to show it's charged,” he said. He broke off suddenly to cough. “I hope it isn't calling them… Funny, it's got a trigger like a human weapon. Convergent engineering…” His voice was becoming rambling.

“You're hurt,” said Dimity. “I ought to look at you.”

“No time now. We're dead meat if the pussies find us here. Got to get out of the area.”

“Where do we go?” My question. I was feeling numb and stupid. The caves had proven no hiding place. But we were still in arid open country. I wanted to get away from the terrible sky.

“We still head for München.”

“Where is it?”

“There.” He pointed to the glow in the sky. “See the flames.”

I suddenly understood what that glow meant. It looked as if the whole city was burning. Now that I looked, I saw shifting green lasers passing through smoke-clouds. We were still on high ground, and had a long view and wide horizons.

There, too, apparently crawling across the ground toward us, were lights. In my glasses they swam into focus as a column of vehicles.

“They're fleeing out of the city,” said Dimity. “But why don't they scatter?”

With higher magnification we could make out details. Some of the vehicles had laser and other weapons mounts and some of them were shooting beams and bullets.

“They must be holding together on purpose. Strength in numbers. They're still fighting.”

“Not enough strength, not enough numbers. The kzin can pick them off at leisure.”

“Why don't they, then?”

“They're cats. They like a bit of sport,” said Kleist. “Sometimes, and until they get tired of it. See there!”

There were other vehicles on the ground moving toward the human column from the north. Quite different vehicles.

“Those will be kzin ground forces. As far as we can gather, they like a bit of personal combat. I'd guess they'll call in a strike from space when they've had enough.”

The kzin vehicles were advancing in a broad line. They seemed to ignore natural cover, and they were in a relatively concentrated mass. They were pouring out fire but lasers and guns firing from the more dispersed human line were hitting them. The area around Manstein's Folly was also sparkling with gunfire.

“I've seen that in space,” said Kleist. “It's another reason we lasted as long as we did. They play around for a time and then something snaps and they just charge in headlong. No sense of tactics, once an attack actually starts. If we had aircraft to give support now we could make a real mess of them.”

“We have an aircraft,” said Dimity. She pointed to the kzin sledge, still floating above the wrecked vehicles on the ground, dead kzin hanging in the air around it. “There should be enough power left in three lift-belts for one of us to reach it. I'm the lightest.”

“Could you control it?”

“It must be simple enough.”

“No,” said Kleist, “I'll go. I've seen some of their instrumentation.”

“Some of those dead kzin have weapons,” said Dimity. “Get them if you can.”

Chapter 13

The kzin sledge was simple to fly. Its small motor was controlled by a wheel and joystick: left, right, up down. Even a monkey could understand them, especially a monkey used to flying aircraft. The motor was making a loud purring noise, but we had no idea if that was normal or not. It was a lot more stable and powerful than a human ground-effect car, further evidence of a terrifyingly advanced technology.

The sledge was armed, too, with a beam projector heavier than a personal sidearm. If we had not shot the kzin before they brought it into action we would have been wiped out in short order. The kzin sidearms we salvaged were heavy enough.

“I think we can make one pass,” said Kleist.

There were recognizable kzin and human lines now, and enough smoke to show the shafts of beam weapons. One end of the human line seemed to be anchored at Manstein's Folly. As we approached it the human fire increased. We still had our pocket-vision enhancers and they showed some details.

There were recoilless guns, copies of an ancient design, mounted on small vehicles and firing rocket projectiles, firing and moving. A few of the human super-Bofors guns, hunkered down behind rocks and gully walls, were throwing out lines of shells as well. Some of these glowed in the air. Their explosions looked feeble, and I couldn't think they were doing much good, but perhaps the sight of them was cheering. There were a number of kzin vehicles wrecked and burning but most were the victims of beam-weapons—probably the adapted police message-lasers. Beams passing through swirling clouds of smoke created a surreal effect in the night.

I remembered a statement in my hasty reading on strategy that for a general to retreat into a fortress was an act like grabbing hold of the anchor on a sinking ship. On the other hand, this half-repaired straggle of ruined walls and ditches was hardly a fortress.

The human fire seemed to be concentrating on the kzin machines. The higher these flew the easier it was for them to fire back, but the better targets they became. Mostly, they kept very close to the ground. We could just make out the shapes of the aliens leaping down from some of the nearer ones. We saw two or three get hit by fire, crash, and burn.

The kzin were throwing missiles and beams the other way, and to effect—the human line was being torn up from end to end, and the route of the human army was marked by the burning wrecks of vehicles. I saw the white flash of a molecular-distortion battery rupturing among the explosions, a big one that must be near full charge. Not many near that would survive. And as we approached there were more of the smaller dark shapes—kzinti advancing on foot. Either they didn't notice the sledge against the night sky or took it for the kzin vehicle it was.

Then they did see us. I can only guess they sent some identification call or challenge to which we did not respond, but a second later they were firing at us. Kleist fired back and took us down in a steep dive into a dead area behind a long rock ridge, beams passing above us.

“No good,” said Kleist. “They've too much firepower. We'd never get through. And, in case you didn't notice it, the humans were firing at us as well.”

“We've got to do something to help.”

“Let's get to the human lines.”

“Won't they see us coming and shoot us?”

“Try the communicator. Let's hope they've got one functioning at their end.”

During a partial lull in the bombardment we found Grotius, von Diderachs and van Roberts in the ruined “keep” of Manstein's Folly. There was an odd flag flying from a pole above them, an outline of a man holding a lightning bolt and standing on two feline heads.

Neither party recognized the other at first, not merely because they were still wearing the filthy remains of those “uniforms.” We had all changed. Von Diderachs with a bloody cloth bandage around his head, his proud beard cut away, looked Herrenmann leader no more. They were huddled around a table with an old-fashioned paper or fabric map, spread on it. Van Roberts was shouting into a communicator.

“Fire and move! Fire and move! Their radar can track your launching points!” Something must have happened because he stopped shouting and shook his head. “Fools.” Then again, “Disperse! Disperse and fire!”

Human were running and firing from widely separated points, never staying in the same place after they had fired. Still some did not move quickly enough to avoid the returning fire. There were heavy automatic guns in armored cupolas that rose, fired, and retracted, installed as part of the restoration of the fortress. But none seemed to get off more than a few shots before the kzin fire found them and destroyed them.

Another group of humans rushed up to the wall and leveled a heavy beam weapon but didn't fire. None of them looked surprised to see us. I suppose no one had any emotion left. Von Diderachs took in what was left of Kleist's pilot's outfit with the comment, “A professional. But we're all becoming professionals now.”

“What are you doing?”

“Buying time. Time for the evacuations. The lucky ones get to the slowboats. The less lucky may get out of the city. Peter… Colonel Brennan is taking some guerrillas to the hills.”

Whump! Whump! Whump! Three muffled sounds, almost like implosions, from somewhere farther down the human line, followed by the white light of MD batteries exploding, then a much louder explosion from the same direction. Van Roberts spoke into the communicator again.

“They got under cover in time. That was a human team. We're running out of smart automatics. Three rounds off from the mortar and they're still alive.” Then: “Disperse! Disperse! Let them clump together!” I could see more humans scattered up and down the line now, crouched behind rocks and old walls and too scattered to be picked off easily.

“How long can they last?” I asked Kleist.

“I told you. Till the kzin get tired of playing.”

“The Tesla Towers did some good at first,” said Grotius. “The waves seemed to upset their motors. Then they knocked them all down. They found the naval base we were trying to build at Glenrothes Field and nuked it, but they fought for a while on foot at the perimeter first… The last of the garrison got a message out… and it was a low-yield nuke… nice of them.”

“You see we're cooperating now,” said von Diderachs. “A little late in the day. Herrenmanner and Prolevolk, Teuties and Tommies. And I'm a general, like some of my distant ancestors. Do you know how recently we didn't know what a general was?” He laughed and laughed and then began to weep. Grotius slapped his face.

Suddenly the fire from the kzin heavy weapons stopped.

“Thank God!” gasped Kleist. He too was looking all in now.

“Don't be too quick to do that,” Grotius told him. “The only reason they'd raise the bombardment is that they're sending in infantry. They like a bit of that,” he added, evidently for me.

“Call in the picket! It can't do any good now!”

“Too late! Look!” From a depression in the ground beyond we saw a confused fight: bombs and beams. There was a hammering of gunfire.

“Poor bastards, poor tanj bastards,” muttered Kleist, ceaselessly.

“Artillery!” van Roberts was shouting into a communicator. “On top of them! Put it right on top of them. They're dead men already.” The whole depression seemed to explode as human heavy guns converged on it. I saw kzin and human bodies, whole and in pieces, hurled into the air.

“Here they come!”

“Stand to!” shouted von Diderachs, his weeping fit gone. “Infantry, rally to me!” To my surprise a man nearby began to beat with sticks on a little drum slung on his hip. It must have been a prearranged signal, because other humans sheltering behind scattered rocks and ruins began to converge upon it in crouching runs. Something that could not be blocked electronically.

A couple of robot guns and lasers, very new things that sought their own targets and took their own cover, were jumping and blazing, their muzzles dancing faster than the eye could follow. If only we had had more of them!

There were bigger lasers than I had realized, crude, strapped-together things, some with hideously dangerous unshielded conduction cables snaking across the ground.

The weapon at the wall began to fire. Other humans dashed forward, some bent in a crouch, hunched over the weight of the Lewis guns that they fired as they ran. There were a lot more humans scattered about the rocks and ruins than I had realized, and for a second I felt cheered.

There were the huge forms of kzin, carrying heavy arms, dashing across the open ground toward us, firing and snarling as they came. And they were fast.

Most of them seemed to be naked but for equipment, and under the light of Alpha Centauri B their brilliant orange fur made them stand out as targets. Human fire met them, strakkaker needles—which seemed to do little good against whatever the clothed ones were wearing but made straw and skeletons of the others—exploding Bofors shells, beams, bullets. A human would have tried to dodge that fire or to take shelter behind some ridge of ground, but the kzin kept coming straight at us. I thought at that moment that any space-traveling race would have a science of hard materials and wondered that they did not all wear armor. With the primitive and makeshift propellants we had, largely copies of antiques, our missiles would have bounced off modern armor like raindrops. Further, it would have camouflaged their brilliant coats.

There were a few coils of barbed wire and razor wire in front of and among the human defenses. The kzin for the most part leaped over it or charged through it, but some were funneled between lanes of wire into compact masses and into killing grounds where fixed guns were targeted.

I found that without conscious thought I was firing the heavy kzin sidearm. Dead kzin were falling and wounded kzin dragging themselves along the ground. Von Diderachs's mouth was open and he was screaming something, but the only thing I could hear in the explosions and the feline shrieks and roars was the scream in my own throat. There was one kzin in glittering armor ahead of the rest: I fired futility at the armour as it scrambled over the rubble and then at the junction of head and neck, decapitating it. I saw another kzin staggering and screaming, its feet transfixed by what I had learned were caltrops.

There were another mass of kzin, funneled by lanes of wire into a compact group.

“Clear the front for the claymores!” came a mechanical shout.

A moment later I found out what this meant. Directed explosions shredded the mass of kzin. But more came on, dodging the killing ground. They died in heaps, but more charged in.

The close-packed kzin leaped the wall and crashed into a counter-mass of humans that swirled apart to let them pass.

Evidently expecting the humans to stand and fight, the kzin seemed momentarily puzzled. The humans were around them, pouring fire into the mass of them from every side, slashing with beams. It lasted only a few seconds, but by the time the kzin leaped scattering into the humans there were far fewer kzin. I saw more kzin leaping the wall, and Dimity, Kleist, von Diderachs and I shot them down. They seemed obsessed with charging into the battle and hardly even looked about them. Certainly they did not count the odds, though now the humans were swarming in.

Nor did some of the humans. I saw one human, a huge man, a giant, rushing at the kzin swinging a farmer's sledgehammer. But he seemed less of a giant as he approached the towering kzin. His blow with the hammer hit one in the ribs. It staggered back but did not fall as a man would have, then it grabbed him with one hand and took him apart with a few slashes of the other.

I saw two other kzin charge from behind one of the human gunners manning a recoilless gun. The human had no time to swing the gun round but fired it anyway, blasting one kzin to bits with the rocket exhaust, leaving the other burned black, eyeless and screaming.

A heavy industrial earth mover smashed through the rocks, driving into the kzin, guns firing from its windows and from a cupola on its cabin roof. The kzin charged at it. Some were mashed screaming under its blade, others boarded it and smashed their way into the cabin. The driver must have had a self-destruct.

More kzin crowded on flying sledges like ours. Bunched together like that they were impossible to miss, and a rapid-firing gun on the hill behind blasted them away. One sledge crossed a laser beam and exploded, the others flew on, empty.

Thought is too quick to describe, and somewhere in my mind flashed the memory of Kleist's words: “They don't have much experience of war.”

One group of kzin still advanced in a purposeful body toward the ridge and ditch behind us. I saw van Roberts waving his arms in another signal.

“Now!” shouted van Roberts.

The kzin reached the edge of the ditch and hesitated. Humans hidden in it shot them down as they stood against the skyline. Strakkakers whirred and were drowned out by the ear-splitting rattle of the Lewis guns, human and alien screaming and the smashing blasts of the kzin sidearms and the claymores. There were dense clouds of steam from weapons' cooling-systems.

Another mass of kzin charging up a trench became jammed together. A pair of humans jumped in front of them, firing a Lewis gun and a beam weapon into the mass of them, back and forth, up and down, like two gardeners with hoses.

I saw a group of kzin and humans hand-to-hand, the humans flung and falling in explosions of slashing claws. The group reeled onto the naked conduction cable of one of the big lasers and died in a flash of blue-white fire.

Another fight was going on around the flag, kzin hacking with knives, the huge blades whirling quicker than sight among the humans clustered there. I saw the flag sway on its pole and fall, then a green beam waved through them and another human rushed forward into the dying mass to raise it. Another kzin leaped at him and a strakkaker beside me—Dimity's—dismembered it in mid-leap. In hand-to-hand combat a kzin could tear any number of humans apart, but they seemed unable to realize how much weapons evened the odds.

There were exceptions. “So you're a smart one!” I heard Dimity's voice as she spotted and picked off a Kzin avoiding the battle and advancing in the concealing shadow of wall.

The fighting had dissolved into a series of savage, shrieking brawls and blastings among the wreckage. In glimpses as I ran from cover to cover I saw a human and kzin rolling together, the human actually attempting to bite the kzin's throat for a second before he was shredded by its claws. I fired into the mess, then got to the now unmanned weapon on the wall and began firing up and down the kzin line. I reckoned that if they saw us still firing back they would think their attack had failed and not send in more support. The kzin bombardment resumed but half the casualties it caused seemed to be among their own.

Behind us something was happening. In the flash of an explosion I saw more kzin leaping up another approach trench. They had taken the defenses in the rear. I shouted and grabbed at the man nearest me, with one of the Lewis guns. He fired off the antique weapon's entire drum of ammunition, checking them till I managed to drag the big modern gun from the wall around and join in. Another kzin charged at me and, spinning the gun desperately, I cut it in two. Another conduction cable took out a line of them, the screams of the burning kzin briefly drowning all other sound.

I don't know how long it took. Finally the firing stopped. The kzin were down and dead. So were most of the nearby humans, though they had begun by considerably outnumbering the kzin. I seemed unable to take my eyes away from naked protruding white bones and worse things. This part of the line at least was largely depopulated. Someone was beating the drum, irregularly, and a few more humans were stumbling up to the breach. Others were collecting the human and kzin weapons and dragging them up to the wall. Clouds of steam and the stenches of burnt flesh and disemboweled bodies.

Van Roberts, Grotius and Kleist were nearby. I won't go into details, but only van Roberts was alive, and he was plainly dying. Even after all that had happened, up to that moment I had not realized what the felinoids' claws could do. I think it was because I was used to dissection that I didn't vomit. I still had some pain-killers in my belt and gave him most of what I had. Dimity and I tried to tie him together, though it was obviously pointless. I thought to hold his head so he couldn't see what had been done to him, but he had no strength to move it. Von Diderachs came and squatted by us. He was pouring blood where a couple of fingers and half a hand had been sliced away, but I don't think he noticed till Dimity stuffed some sort of dressing against it.

“Goodbye, Rykermann,” said van Roberts. “Look after what you can.” He took Dimity's hand and stroked it for a moment. “Fly!” he told her. She was soaked in dark liquid and I thought she was bleeding profusely but then it showed purple in the light and I realized that it was kzin blood.

“Time. Remember buying time is what it's all for. But when it's finished get out! Head for the hills!” van Roberts told von Diderachs. “Save yourself!”

“What for? I'll be with you soon, Roberts.”

“You're not a bad fellow for a Herrenmann,” van Roberts said. “God… God be with you and all of us.”

Von Diderachs nodded. He touched van Roberts's cheek for a moment, then walked back to the wall.

Van Roberts plucked at my sleeve. We knelt beside him, clutching his hands.

“Remember, Rykermann, they're not good tacticians.” he said, “They're too hasty. They can be fooled.”

He struggled to raise himself and shouted in a stronger voice: “Don't send the colors to the rear yet! They are still our rallying-point! Don't let the kzin capture them!” Then he died. We pulled some cloth over him.

I heard single shots and saw humans walking about killing wounded. Human wounded as well as kzin. They were stripping the bodies. Less hideously wounded humans tied up in bloody fabric were making their way back to the wall and the guns.

“Use strakkakers, you fools!” shouted von Diderachs. “Save your heavy ammunition for the kzin!”

I saw two small humans struggling to lift a huge kzin sidearm and realized they were young boys. A kzin in gold armor, obviously one of their leaders, horribly damaged by an explosion, unable to leap or use a weapon, stood propped against a wall screaming as if inviting someone to kill it. Presently someone did. Another kzin, dying, used its last strength to hack at the ears of the human that lay dead beneath it. A heavy gun was firing in the direction of the kzin lines, but the gunner's hands that squeezed the triggers were attached to no body.

I saw a man, a politician who I recognized vaguely from the early meetings, standing in front of a pile of containers. Another man seemed to be arguing with him.

“I can't release more ammunition without the authorization of a competent officer,” he was saying.

“No, sir, I understand,” said the other man, “but this is an emergency.” Something in his voice seemed to alarm the first speaker.

“These are all the supplies we have. Show me some credentials and I will release them.”

“Yes, sir. Will this do?” asked the other politely. He pulled out a small folding gun. The first man began to back away, hands raised to his face. Then he turned to run. The man with the gun took deliberate aim and blew him to pieces with a single exploding bullet. Then he returned the weapon to his belt and began loading containers methodically onto a dolly.

How long has it taken us to go from the twenty-fourth century to the fourteenth? I thought as the strakkakers whirred and the screams of the wounded diminished. How long ago had I been dining with the abbot and had we been reflecting together over his wine upon the too complacent state of our world? I couldn't remember.

“We beat them! We beat an infantry attack!”

“One. Look at our casualties! We won't beat the next. They'll be forming up for the final attack now.”

But I remembered something else the abbot had said.

“We still have the aircraft!” Dimity seemed to be giving von Diderachs orders now. “An attack from the air could do them a lot of damage. Create a diversion! Fire everything you've got at them while we attack. They won't be counting on air support.”

“One pass,” said von Diderachs. “One pass and then get out of this. That is a direct order and I give you no discretion in the matter. You'll do no good by throwing your lives away, and there's little more time to be bought here.”

“I can't leave you like this,” I said. Something primitive, atavistic. I had no idea what the emotion I was experiencing might be called—it was counter-productive to my survival and Dimity's, whatever it was—but it went against the grain to leave them.

“Then let me make it easier for you,” said von Diderachs. “Wunderland needs you both. But if you try to return to this doomed battle I'll shoot you down myself. There! I said you had no discretion. Wunderland will need you, Rykermann. Will need you both.”

I looked at his haggard glaring face and shrugged. I had no discretion.

“Cheer, you bastards!” I heard him shout into the communicator as we mounted the sledge, and scattered cheering came from up and down the line.

Our drum was beating again. From the kzin lines we heard answering drums—a deep booming. I realized the drums were more than signaling devices: they must also be to encourage one side and terrify the other.

I flew, firing the big beam-gun as we swooped low over the kzin lines, Dimity firing the sidearms as she could at the infantry. The humans were throwing everything they had at the kzin, suppressing their fire while our beam tore into them. And our beam was hot. We saw ground tearing up and vehicles and aliens mixed in it, burning kzin flying through the air like comets. We heard alien screams of rage and agony. I thought I also still heard distant cheers from the human lines.

The humans had established some guns on an outcrop behind their main line: These too poured fire into the kzin lines, but as a stationary position they had a short life. We saw them hit by a heavy missile, possibly summoned from space.

One pass and we climbed hard away. A squat cylinder flew in an arc through the air, slow enough to be visible, and exploded in another soundless disk of blue-white light, another following—someone on the human side was still firing molecular-distortion batteries at kzin as missiles. Our sledge rocked as something hit it from below.

I banked, and we came in again, north of the end of the kzin line. We fired a few more bursts into the end of the line, setting off a chain of secondary explosions. No kzin seemed to have a thought of taking cover, and the beam-gun on continuous fire knocked them down in flames until it overheated and shut off. The whole kzin line was burning and the human cheers were unmistakable. There was still a pack of kzin vehicles, and we fired our remaining weapons into that.

Some Kzin had survived. They weren't firing much but what fire they had left was concentrated on us. Beams were coming back at us now, fast and very close. Something hit a corner of the sledge in a spray of fragments, throwing it about wildly and nearly overturning it. The beams—as I should have realized with our own gun—seemed to use so much energy that they could only be used for very short bursts, but I saw one swinging like a scythe. We avoided it narrowly but plainly a couple like that would finish us. There was nothing more we could do.

Had we bought the human army a respite? For what it was worth, I thought we had. The last I saw, every human gun was firing into the kzin lines without answering fire. But I also saw lights descending from the sky farther south. It looked like a kzin landing that would take the human forces from behind.

Our heavy ammunition was finished. I kept us low, following the contours of the ground. Behind us were more explosions.

“They'll get sick of that sooner rather than later,” Dimity said. “Then they'll detonate a fission or fusion device.”

“More to the point,” I said, “why don't we use them? The Meteor Guard have them—and used them against the kzin in space, Kleist said. We could break up their landings and concentrations.”

“I guess if we did they would retaliate massively. They control space. München and the other cities would be obvious targets then. There's lots more both sides could do: use plasma gas, run a ramscoop in atmosphere, fire a spaceship's reaction drive downward into the infantry and melt them in one pass. If I can think of that, why can't they? Things like that have been happening in space.”

“They're holding back for the same reason hunters don't go after game with strakkakers,” I said. “Where would be the sport in it for the kzin?”

“It's interesting,” she went on, as though discussing a problem in astrometaphysics. “Both sides are holding back from using their ultimate punches. I wonder if there is any hope in that? My head hurts. I hope Diderachs or whoever is in charge has got the sense to scatter before the kzin bring the nuclear devices in. They might get a few away into the hills. They might. I think the kzin will have to pull back before a strike.” There was something wrong with her voice.

München was a sparkling patchwork of fires, lasers still lighting up the dense rolling clouds of smoke. Here and there shellfire from heavy guns climbed in strangely slow and graceful arcs into the sky, evidently following kzin aircraft. But the devastation seemed less than I had expected. There were still large patches untouched. In some of them the lights of streets and houses were still burning, and other lights showed traffic movement. It was a weird reminder of a remote and vanished world, until we got closer.

Chapter 14

As we approached, I saw in amazement the reaction flames of ships taking off from the spaceport, apparently unmolested.

Dimity saw it too. We skimmed between the high buildings, setting down a few blocks from the university. “There seems to be some areas still under human control,” she said. “We'd better not fly a kzin craft here.”

I had been thinking the same thing.

“But I don't understand this,” I said. “What are the kzin doing? They could have walked all over any resistance.”

“They don't want to smash the place up too much,” said Dimity. “They can see it's an industrial center.”

“Wouldn't that make it a prime target?”

“It would if the issue was in doubt. But they're sure of winning.”

“And why are they letting those ships take off? They must control everything in space by now?”

“We'll find out, I guess.”

We landed at the outskirts of the city. I still had a strakkaker and, wanting my hands and arms free and not psychologically prepared to expect trouble from fellow humans, hung it in a pouch on my belt, which I buttoned closed. It was secure even if I could not reach it quickly. Never have I done anything I was to regret so bitterly forever after.

There were people in the street now. Few and furtive at first, but as we approached the spaceport they became thicker. There seemed to be some sort of order. We even began to see police directing them. There were vehicles, ground-cars moving in their regular traffic-lanes, an oddly normal sight against the multicolored fire and smoke filling the sky. But there were dead bodies lying in the street, and groups of humans in strange clothes running crouched over weapons. The streets grew more crowded as we went on. And everyone was moving the same way. I found blood smeared on my hands and saw it clotting the back of Dimity's hair. She had had some sort of small head-wound, presumably when the vehicle had been hit by kzin fire. Neither of us had noticed it and in that light I could see nothing more.

Ahead of us at the approach to the spaceport was some sort of bottleneck. Police—“soldiers” perhaps—were manning heavy weapons mounted on vehicles, pointed down into the screaming crowd that had now congested and slowed. All order seemed to have broken down. I had no choice but to use my body as a battering ram to try to get Dimity through.

A kzin craft tore up the street, a few yards over the head of the mob. It didn't fire and seemed to be simply toying with them or herding them. The crowd parted somehow, many people fleeing into side streets, but leaving bodies still on the road and pavement. Dimity and I huddled in a doorway as we saw the bulky shapes of kzin leap from the vehicle and pursue the fleeing mob up one alley with deep-throated, leonine roars that carried above the screams.

The soldiers cowered down, not touching their weapons as the kzin disappeared down the street. But as I got Dimity to the checkpoint they returned to them. The frenzied mob were pouring back into the street again. The soldiers fired two bursts, the first in front of them, the second directly into them. That cleared them again. We reached one of the vehicles and a soldier swung a weapon onto us. I shouted up at him.

“This is Dimity Carmody! The discoverer of Carmody's Transform! You've got to let her through!”

It didn't matter if he believed me or not, or if he had heard of her.

“No one beyond this point without a pass.”

“But…”

He raised his weapon.

“There are a lot of people who want to get on the slowboats. I've no time to argue.”

I could have tackled him. It would have been hopeless but I could have tried. But the other police were taking notice of us now. There were other people behind us with passes. One chance:

“Help us, then, for your mother's sake as well as mine.”

He stared at me blankly, then shook his head. The crowd behind pushed us to one side. Dimity stumbled and I grabbed at her. To fall here under the feet of this mob would be death for her, after all we had been through. Pushed and stumbling myself, my feet off the ground, I feared we would fall and be trampled together, but somehow I fetched up against a barrier. It was giving way and I was going down, Dimity with me. And another man stepped deliberately out of the crowd to us.

“I heard you,” he said, gripping my hand. “For my mother's sake as well as yours, I will…” He pulled us back onto our feet. Another swirl of the crowd took us into an alcove, entrance to an office block. There was a passage and he helped us down it, though it only led to another street.

“Don't think too badly of them,” the man said. “The first evacuations were better. I've seen some real nobility in the refugee queues. But this is the end.” I was no longer surprised that in the midst of Ragnarok a human being should try to morally defend his fellow creatures.

The sky to the east turned white, then orange and red. Some time later the shock-wave reached us. I guessed that, as Dimity had predicted, the Kzin had tired of the human resistance at Manstein's Folly. All I could hope was that it was a clean bomb and the wind would be from the sea. We were clear of the crowd now. I shook the man's hand, and we parted. There were plenty of trampled dead to show how we could have been if he had not helped.

Another kzin craft appeared. This time the troops fired at it. It was a mistake. Four more appeared, following it, and dived on the gun vehicles.

We ran, pelting down the approach-way. The checkpoint was no longer relevant. Ahead of us was the landing field and a single craft, ringed with weapons. There was more order here, it seemed, and a line of people were running aboard with some sort of organization.

A kzin aircraft, a vast red wedge-and-ovoid, hurtled low over us, fire spitting from weapons. It was heading straight for the shuttle. We threw ourselves to the ground with the explosion reflex that was becoming instinctive. Wreckage and debris fell about us. The kzin aircraft soared away.

“They've had enough, evidently. No more shuttles.”

A little less luck and we might have been on that shuttle now burning on the field. A crash wagon with some brave people aboard was heading out to it, siren wailing. I felt I had had enough. I was unable to think. I took told of Dimity's hands as we sat there.

“Now what?”

“No slowboats now for us,” she said. “Someone may tell them to get away while the going's good. I'd say it's all over here.”

“We've got to get out of this crowd. This is too much of a prime target.”

The front of the crowd had seen the shuttle destroyed. They were spilling around the now purposeless police block. But the crowd behind was pressing on. We saw more people going down underfoot. Then we heard the ripping-cloth sound of more kzin vehicles, and this time they were shooting as they came. We heard the whirr of strakkakers briefly between the roar of the kzin weapons. On one of the roofs a Bofors gun was still putting on a fireworks display.

There was a manhole in the pavement, its cover knocked loose. Someone had tripped and was kicking and scrambling free. Dimity pointed and we dropped in. We fell a couple of meters, nothing in our gravity, and splashed into a stormwater drain. Above us were screams and gunfire. Others fell or threw themselves through the manhole into the drain behind us. There were a few permanent tracer-lamps glowing dimly on the walls, and by the light of these we saw steps and a narrow path running above the water.

“Underground again,” said Dimity.

“At least it's not crowded, and somehow I don't think it's the sort of place cats would enjoy poking their noses into.”

“Let's get away from this part, all the same. They might think it too easy to pour something nasty down here.”

It was too dim and slippery to run, and we were too tired, but we set off at the best pace we could. I still had my night glasses with a built-in compass, and Dimity had a sense of direction which she had proved in the caves and which I trusted rather more. There was a roar, and the slick walls and the liquid around our feet glowed orange in reflected light. We looked back and behind us we saw flame boiling down the manhole, but we had already made some distance. I was alert for Beam's beasts but we saw none. I knew poison had been put into the drains regularly to keep them down.

We covered several miles, heading north, then took some stairs to the surface. The streets in this part were deserted. We reached my house about dawn. It was running on its own auxiliary power, and the door recognized my retinal patterns. It didn't matter much since someone else had gained entry earlier by driving a vehicle through the front wall. There was an almost unbearable smell of decay inside, but all we found of the source were a couple of severed human fingers. The kitchen and the autodoc had been used.

We slept for a few hours, huddled in the basement in a nest of blankets. Dimity's head wound was still bleeding. I cleaned it as well as I could but thought that after our race through the drain the best thing to do would be to let it bleed and hope any infection might be carried away. Before modern autodocs I would, I thought, have had a medicine-chest with a bottle of disinfectant for injuries such as this. As it was I was worried about the shaking-up that nearby explosions had given my own autodoc, apart from possible tampering, and dared not use it. A lot of people would be having to learn to get by without docs soon, I thought.

I did find some acid in my laboratory, weakened it greatly with water, and cleaned the wound cautiously with that. Later I also rinsed some fabric in it and made a clumsy bandage, cursing the fact that modern fabric was almost impossible to cut without proper tools. There was still food in the kitchen and I dialed us a meal late in the morning. The windows were opaque and I left them that way apart from a few small spy holes. We had a view of deserted streets and smoke, with plenty of background noise. Television and Internet were all dead.

“How are we?” Dimity asked.

“Worse off than before we started. We've lost the transport, the kzin are here, and the slowboats are gone. We've achieved precisely nothing.” There was something else wrong: Dimity's question, though basically meaningless, would have been a natural thing for a normal person to say. But the Dimity I knew would not have bothered asking it.

“The slowboats are gone.” Nor did Dimity normally repeat things pointlessly. I felt something cold inside me that had nothing to do with the mere ordinary fear I felt for us both and for our dying world.

“Look in the sky. You'll not see them in orbit anymore. The big space stations are gone too.”

“We did for a few kzin.”

“Not exactly enough for victory.”

“Perhaps those are the biggest victories we can hope for now.”

“It's still going on.”

So we could hear. Explosions, the roaring of out-of-control fires. Distant shouts, screams. There was also the noise of kzin engines, unmistakable and terrifying. As we watched through one hole a kzin war-machine appeared at the end of the street, a huge red armored thing, floating a few feet above the pavement. We could do nothing but back away from the hole and crouch in the darkest corner we could find. Eventually the sound diminished and when we crept back to the window it was gone. A couple of times we saw humans running from one building to another, and then kzin on foot. Neither came our way.

“It's no good here.”

“No.” There was not much I could do but hold her.

“It doesn't look good, does it?” she said.

“No.”

“We'll find a way out. Even this shall pass away.”

“I'm sure it will.”

“No, I mean things might get better.”

“I suppose so. They seem to have got worse for a while.”

“In some ways it wasn't all that good before…”

“It seemed to be,” I said.

“One thing, Nils. It was hard, I know, for you to be in love with a freak. Know, at least, that the freak loves you.”

Then I remembered something. Or rather two things. Things the abbot had said to me in what seemed another life. I went back to my laboratory and retrieved a collecting gun and a small selection of darts. I also found the stock of portable food and strakkaker ammunition I had laid up and hidden weeks before was still untouched.

It all seemed to be quieter when we ventured out. I wanted to wait till dusk, but Dimity said the felinoids could certainly see in dim light better than we could: In fact the streets were deserted save for the dead and a few Beam's beasts already creeping upon them. There was fighting still going on but it seemed to be on the other side of the Donau.

I thought it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, for us to find transport. Actually there were abandoned vehicles all round. The streets leading to major arteries were jammed with them, some burned and wrecked, some apparently undamaged. The dead bodies were mostly but not all human. People had tried to shelter in the pools in the nearby fountains and they were full of floating, parboiled corpses. Perhaps a kzin had used a plasma weapon, because the whole square was burned. Between two burning buildings we found a flyable ground-effect car with keys still in its dead owner's fingers.

I turned on the engine and the car lifted as a crowd of humans came pouring around the corner. It looked like a gagrumpher stampede. There was no time for me to get my strakkaker clear of its buttoned pouch. They mobbed the car, fighting to get in. It tilted and Dimity was dragged out.

I still had the controls and used the car to smash a couple of them against a wall. Then there was another firefight: a group of kzin and armed humans exchanging shots. That scattered the mob. Half a dozen of them ran right into a strakkaker blast and were cut down. A rampaging kzin swatted others to left and right, apparently hardly noticing them. Another kzin and a human rolled together under a stream of molten metal pouring from the guttering of a burning building. Then the fighters disappeared down another alley.

One human staggered back a moment later, face gone, hands clasped to his stomach where a kzin's claws had partially disemboweled him. He tripped over his spilling guts and fell. I can hear his screaming now. A kzin leaped on him and then the beam of a laser passed through the pair of them, ending it. Suddenly the fight had broken up, and but for the dead the street was deserted again.

Dimity had fallen hard and had been kicked and trampled. She was unconscious. In the ruddy light the new blood pouring out of her head, ears, and mouth looked black. Amid the mess I saw what looked like bone fragments. A much worse head wound on top of the previous one.

I got her into the car, propping her up. Her head was on one side. To my horror her mouth was hanging open like a corpse's and there was no recognition in her eyes. I had no idea what to do. I administered an anesthetic dart. It would stop her moving and doing further damage, at least. If she lost respiratory functions, well, I could do no more. She lolled forward, and I propped cushions about her, at least keeping further pressure from the wound. Skimming low, I headed out of the burning city and northwest.

I passed other refugees, columns of humans on foot heading who knew where? Some carried bundles of possessions. There were exhausted old people, sitting or sprawled despairing by the road, pregnant women who would have no midwifery ward, children, some without parents or adults, and hospital patients with surgical appliances and trailing tubes. Some died as I passed. There was nothing I could do for any of them. There was, I felt, nothing I could do for the human species beyond what I was doing.

Once, when I had left the great mass of refugees behind, I saw a kzin aircraft. I was flying very low and cut the engine and landed. I think it saw us but to my surprise it took no notice. Like cats, the kzin seemed often unpredictable. It headed toward the great columns of smoke rising from the city and from farther east. I noticed there were no more of our lasers lighting the smoke clouds. Dimity continued to breathe.

I reached the monastery towards nightfall.

I noticed as I approached that the wooden building had been removed from the foot of the metal steeple which we once speculated the alien scout might have taken for a rocket or missile. It stood on bulky strap-on reaction motors and a complex of wide circular craters showed it had already landed and taken off several times. Fueling lines ran to it and it was surrounded by a ring of armed men.

The gates were closed. There were more monks with strakkakers on the wall. There was already a crowd outside, begging to be let in. Others of them were cooking one of the monks' zebras on a spit. A single kzin fighting aircraft would have got the lot in one pass.

I brought the car in low. Strakkakers were raised at us, but none fired. The place looked untouched by the direct effects of war, and I suppose the monks were still hesitant about killing humans. I saw Brother Joachim among those on the wall and shouted my identity to him.

We landed in the garth. I had checked my own strakkaker and its loading, folded its stock and barrel again and hidden it under my coat. Dimity was carried to the infirmary. The monks had good, modern medical equipment, and as well as autodocs there were brothers who were trained as human doctors, though much of the equipment and resources were already in use. I did not dare kiss or touch her as her head was shaved. They did not let me go with her further.

A few minutes after she was taken away I was in the abbot's study. He was staring at a bank of television sets that were alive and receiving.

Chapter 15

There was a view from space of München and the surrounding territory. Large areas of the suburbs were still in flames. To the east continuing fire and explosions as well as beams suggested a human army was still fighting. To the southwest, Dresden was a firestorm. Other screens showed human refugees, some scattering out to the north and the farms of the northwest and northeast without apparent plan or purpose, others, who seemed to be in a more organized column, heading for the hills.

“That looks another futile stand,” I said, indicating a knot southwest of the crater at Manstein's Folly. The abbot shook his head. He seemed to take my presence for granted but perhaps that was an effect of extreme weariness.

“Not altogether. They know what they're doing. It's drawing off kzin from the city and the refugees. The humans have done better than I thought. Are still doing better. At this rate it'll take the kzin weeks or months to destroy all the pockets of resistance. It's still buying time, at least.”

“Time for what?” I said, thinking of von Diderachs's words. I moved behind him and stepped back to get an overall view.

“At the moment, time is valuable for its own sake. It takes their attention from the slowboats.”

“They could shoot them down if they wanted to.”

“It also gives time to get more people into the hills. And… it seems from intercepted transmissions that the Kzin may actually… respect a bit of resistance, somehow.”

However weary he was, he spoke with some calm authority. And guessing what I had guessed, I felt myself blazing with simultaneous hope and fury.

“You know a lot, don't you?”

“As much as I can learn.”

“Inside information from military channels?”

“I've been calling in favors lately.”

I moved my hand to my belt as unobtrusively as possible. With my next words things might get difficult.

“You knew for a long time.”

“Yes. More or less.”

“Where are these pictures coming from?”

“A satellite, obviously.” The abbot's voice implied he didn't know or care which.

“The Kzin have destroyed all satellites.”

“They must have overlooked this one, then.”

He was too keyed up to feel the tiny prick on the back of his neck from the little collecting-gun's microscopic, instantly dissolving, sliver of tranquillizer. It seemed the first time in a long while that my professional training and equipment had been of use to me.

“Because it's shielded?”

“How should I know?” He put his hand up to his neck and patted it vaguely. His voice was changing. I hoped that a sudden shock now would get the truth out of him.

“How should you know?”

I had the strakkaker out now. I jumped across the desk and grabbed him by the throat, jabbing the muzzle under his nose.

“Don't play games with me! You know exactly what I mean!”

“Brother!… Professor!… Nils?”

“It's disguised, isn't it? And it's not a satellite so much as a spaceship in orbit?”

He didn't try to dissemble.

“How did you know?”

“I remembered what you said, the night it all began: 'We came here independently… It almost bankrupted the Vatican.' Passage in a big slowboat would have been expensive, but not that expensive. I searched some of the old records when we got them up, and found no mention of your people on any of the slowboat passenger lists. My conclusion was: You came to Wunderland on your own ship.”

“Yes. We left later than the original slowboats but we came faster. The state of the art had advanced by the time it was launched.”

“Where did that ship go? Not back to Earth. There would be no justification for sending an empty craft all the way back. So it's still here. Isn't it?”

“Yes.”

“In a system as full of rubble as this it would be easy enough to cover with rocks and dust so it looks like another planetoid. With a low albedo and a high orbit it would be more or less unnoticeable from the ground among everything else that's up there. Your ace in the hole in case you really had to run or fight?”

“Yes.”

“You made sure it was forgotten.”

“Yes. Later we did a deal with some of the Families. Records of how we arrived were removed and people forgot. But we argued that in an emergency the ship would be at their disposal or ours—as lifeboat or… or warship. Then time went by and they forgot about it too. Who cared?”

“You denied it to the defense effort now, when we needed every ship we had to defend our world against alien invaders.”

“But it was deactivated. There are no weapons aboard. It couldn't have helped the defense effort.”

Weapons could have been fitted, and it might have been used for an ambush. Any spaceship is a weapon, properly used. But I let it pass. It would simply have been destroyed without affecting the eventual outcome of events, and at least it was a ship in being now.

“And now it's been activated again. These transmissions prove it.”

“Yes. One of the families helped us, and we have a shuttlecraft.

“You can put that gun down,” he said, “I'm not going to fight you. We have enough problems already.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Get some of our people away, and some refugees. But it's a small ship. We can't take many.”

“To Earth?”

“No. Earth is plainly under attack as well. What would be the point? I'm thinking of sending it to We Made It.”

“Why?”

“First, to give them warning. Second, because it's taking some of our eggs out of two threatened baskets. These kzin may not know of We Made It.”

“No. You must send it to Earth. With Dimity Carmody aboard.”

“Why? She is a shapely and clever young lady, and I know that you are in love with her. But your subjective feelings are not important now, Nils. As God is my witness I'm sorry, but to send her would be at the cost of not sending somebody else. It seems to me she is better equipped to survive here than some. If any are to survive the kzin.”

“At this moment she is in your infirmary, badly injured. Head injured. Isn't regrowing brain and central nervous tissue the hardest surgical procedure of all?”

It stopped him for a moment. But he replied:

“You must see that that makes no better case for her. To take her in that condition with a lot of medical equipment—equipment that's needed here—would mean leaving even more of the others behind… You cannot think I enjoy making decisions like this?

“I, of course will not go,” he went on. “These are my flock and I will not abandon them. In any case, I have already told you that it will not go to Earth. Earth warned us, remember. They already know of the kzin attack even if they are not directly experiencing it. And I can tell you we have had no laser messages from Sol System for some time. That strongly suggests their big lasers are busy.” The drug might be making him tell the truth but I could see it was not affecting his willpower.

“I will stay here if I must, but send her to Earth!” I shouted. “She thinks she has… she knows she has made a mathematical discovery that may have military applications.”

“Can you believe that?” He was nodding in his chair now. I hoped he was not going to lose consciousness.

“Do you know of her work?”

“I've heard of it. Who hasn't?”

“Given her own chair and research unit at the age of sixteen. Discoverer of Carmody's Transform. Can't you take what I say on trust? And if the Kzin get her…”

“If the Kzin get her she dies. Or perhaps not. Again, as a man, I'm more sorry than I can say, but I believe my duty is clear. I've thought of you as a friend and I've no wish to hurt you or any man or woman. But a lot of people are going to die. Having more neuronic connections in her brain than average doesn't morally entitle her to special treatment.”

“She has a military value. This is not for me or for her. The survival of the human race may depend on it.”

“Perhaps I should ask her.”

There was a soft phut, a pneumatic sound. I saw a dart appear in the back of my right hand. I reached to pull it out but it worked quicker and more heavily than the one I had used. The room began to go black. As I fell I saw Brother Peter advancing, with his own collecting gun.

I came around on a couch in the same room. The daylight slanting through the window told me a night and more had passed. And it was a smoky light, pulsating with distant fire. I felt, stupidly, for my strakkaker. It was gone, of course.

“How do you feel?” the abbot asked.

“Rotten.” There were pains everywhere. The locator implant in my arm was doing something. I thought in a disorganized way that it was probably triggered by my generally disordered metabolism.

“Well, you can be thankful. She's gone. You convinced me. You and rereading the effects and importance of Carmody's Transform and her other published work.”

“To Earth?”

“To We Made It.”

“That was a mistake.”

“Think about it. The Kzin have let the slowboats go so far. They may change their minds and pursue them. If so, they'll be likely to go after the big ones, which are all going the same way, only a few days apart. A smaller and faster ship on its own may have more chance. Anyway, she's safely away.

“The Kzin have been landing heavier warcraft in the last few hours and using heavier weapons,” he went on. “Apparently they've had enough play.”

“I could have gone with her.”

“I have watched you since you were a child. You have always been one of our human insurance policies, and now you are one of the few of them left alive. That last night you came here to the monastery, after the first feline was seen, I knew a storm was coming. The real reports from the Meteor Guard had been passed on to us for some time. Our culture was soft, complacent, faction-ridden, our people had lost much of their pioneering heritage very quickly, and few had survival skills. You have no faction and you know something of survival. You are even a public figure. You are needed here… as a leader, now.

“There is another thing,” he went on, meeting my gaze. “The shuttle was full. I had to have twelve people dragged off as it was to accommodate her and her medical equipment. God help me! The rest were families. Should I have broken them up to make room for one more?”

“Yes, God help you!” Then, loath as I was to ask him anything further, “Can I… see the ship?”

“Are you sure you want to?”

“I'm sure.”

“You can't see her,” he said, “Even if you should. She's in coldsleep. But you can see she's out of this horror. She's as safe as any can hope to be. And so is whatever's in her brain. There's a camera on the ship. You can see she's getting away.”

He touched the desk. There was a framed view of Wunderland from space, already shrinking. At one corner of the screen I could see some of the stony plating that had disguised the ship, now shed and tumbling rapidly away. Then we saw something else. I think we both cried out together. The abbot had fallen on his knees and was praying loudly. Something about a cup passing.

Two points of light on the screen: A red ovoid ship, moving fast, and behind it (or I guessed behind it—such things are almost impossible to judge in space except by comparing relative sizes) a black dot with a yellow halo: a reaction-drive ship, pursuing.

I saw the hull metal around the camera port beginning to change color, volatilize. The kzin ship was holding a laser on the fleeing vessel. It seems so intent on its attack as not to see the reaction-drive ship closing. Then I saw the reaction-drive ship firing at the Kzin. There was the beginning of an explosion, and the screen went blank.

“So the Kzin did pursue them. Why did you think they would not?”

“I hoped.”

I could have killed him as he knelt there. Bare-handed, I nearly tried, but an overwhelming sense of futility prevented me. Besides, it was not his fault. He had more or less done for Dimity what I had wanted him to do.

The only ones to blame were the Kzin. And she would have died in sleep without the least knowledge. A better death than many would have on this planet… or on Earth, perhaps. I realized that perhaps taking the chance to send her to We Made It had been the right one: the Kzin would not spare Sol System, and the refugees cramming the big slowboats had probably bought themselves no more than a temporary lease of life that would be spent in coldsleep. Besides, I thought more savagely, killing him in these circumstances was too kind. The little ginger cat jumped suddenly onto his shoulder and looked at me with bright button eyes. It patted at something glittering on his fat cheek which I realized was a tear. He lifted the cat down, stroking it.

I don't know how much he read in my face. His voice was calm now.

“And now I have something else to do. Come with me.”

I followed him. He climbed a spiral staircase to a room I had not seen before, lined with old books. He threw open a window.

“You get a better view from here,” he said: “Look!”

There were the armed monks on the walls. A small door within the large main gates was open and people were entering the garth through it. Outside was a great crowd, more streaming to join it all the time.

“You can't take them all,” I said, stating the obvious.

“That's hardly the most pressing concern.” He handed me some high-magnification binoculars and gestured to the southwest. “Look toward München.”

More refugees. The line seemed to reach to the horizon. The fueling depot for the shuttle rocket had been demolished and was a smoking crater. But there was something else. I edited out the drifting smoke and haze. Above the straggling humans was the red ovoid of a kzin war-machine.

“They're coming.” I felt some malicious satisfaction. “The refugees are drawing them to you.”

“Yes, but they aren't attacking the refugees.”

“I suppose they want to keep their meat fresh.” I saw him flinch.

“What will you do?” I pressed him. It was sheer viciousness on my part, since there was so obviously nothing to be done. “You can't flee into the mountains or the swamp. And doesn't your church disapprove of suicide?”

“It is a great sin,” he said, but his voice seemed abstracted and far away. “Condemned by solemn anathema from the days of the earliest councils.”

“So what will you do?”

His momentary composure was gone again. If he was no longer weeping, there were beads of sweat running down his pasty brows to his face, and his voice shook. “What Pope Leo did.”

I had no idea what Pope Leo did. I stood silent, staring with loathing at this fat, frightened little man who I had once thought of as a teacher and friend. There was an old paper-knife by one of the books. I reminded myself that was pointless for me to kill him when I doubted I could give him a worse death than the Kzin would, but I hoped that I might live long enough to see him die. He beckoned me back to his study.

He opened a standing closet and began to pull things from it. I smelled a musty whiff of aged fabric preservative and noted it somewhere even at that moment.

He pulled the colored fabrics over his head and around his shoulders, dressing himself in stranger clothes than I had seen him wear before, flowing multicolored robes with a vaguely horned-like hat. He groped in the closet again and brought forth a peculiar carved rod with an ornate, curved handle.

“I told you I am also a bishop,” he said, as though that explained everything.

“Do you expect God to intervene? He's hardly been noticeable by his presence so far.”

“He did when Pope Leo stopped Attila the Hun from sacking Rome.”

“How did he do that?”

“He asked him not to.”

“You intend to ask them?”

“We have made some progress in understanding the kzin language,” he said. “It cost my friends in the government nothing to send me the reports of its work in that direction, and several of the brothers are scholars.

“I could not try to speak the Kzin's language, but I have some words of their script.” He showed me a cloth on which strange marks had been made in bright colours. “I have tried to keep it short and simple,” he went on. “I was going to write: 'Spare this place!' However, if there is a word for 'spare' in that sense we haven't found it. 'We ask for mercy' has the same problem—no word for 'mercy.' I hope that what this says is: 'This place is sacred.' ”

“They do have a word for 'sacred'?” I said it trying to wound.

“Yes. I think so. There are some hopes riding on our translation being correct.”

“You think that will deter them?”

“Can you think of anything better?”

I said nothing.

“Come with me.”

“Why?”

“I don't think Pope Leo faced Attila alone. I've seen old pictures of that confrontation. They seem to respect courage. You have obviously been injured recently and if you are seen standing with me it may have some small effect.”

I followed him. The monks cleared the way at the gate for us and we stepped out to meet the advancing kzin.

“Are you afraid?” I asked him.

“Yes. I have never been so afraid… Rykermann, please, don't leave me to face them alone.”

I hated him more than any living creature, but I stayed. I no longer cared what happened to me, and I know part of me wanted to see him die. But there was something else, too. I couldn't leave him, white-faced, blue lips moving in prayer, as he stood there shaking and did not run.

The kzin warcraft drew nearer, and details became plainer. It was a huge thing, now plainly the familiar combinations of wedge and ovoid, with the bulges and turrets of weapons. None of the makeshift weapons-systems that Wunderland had put together in the preceding months was even remotely comparable in size or power. How helpless and pitiful it made the fleeing humans look! It could have destroyed them, and us, like ants. But the kzin were still not firing.

It seemed to swell in size as it drew closer yet. There was no spitting of dust and gravel beneath it as there would have been with a human ground-effect car. The machine even had a certain majesty in its power and size. The ripping-cloth sound grew. We could see armoured aliens behind translucent ports.

It stopped. Like a scene from old fictions of alien first contact, a ramp was lowered. A kzin in ornate clothing and with an injured arm descended, followed by others less ornately dressed. The abbot held up his sign. I recognized the kzin: It was the only living one I had ever seen closely in the light.

Did it recognize me? Its huge violet eyes held mine. It thrust its sidearm into its belt and raised two objects: one was the modem from the cave-habitat that linked to the locator implant in my arm.

So that was how it had found me among the scattering hordes of human ants. Had I drawn it here? The other object was something smaller that I could not make out.

It ground out a distorted human word I recognized as “cave.” Then it touched the belt it wore, the one that we had dropped to it. It placed the objects it held on the ground.

If the abbot could stand so could I. And some instinct told me it was better to stand and face this creature than either fall on my knees in supplication or turn to flee. Remembering the old game of “Tiger, Man, Gun,” I folded my arms and puffed out my chest. In the game that had indicated I was a man, and proud of it, though in the game the tiger ate the man. Also, it gave me something to do with my arms. I felt that however the kzin interpreted the gesture, it could not be seen as too subservient, but could not be taken as a threat. We were plainly weaponless.

“Cave,” I replied.

The kzin raised its huge sidearm and fired. But the bolt smashed into a derelict, abandoned ground-car that it evidently considered was an asset humans should not possess. Its gaze passed from me to the abbot and his sign. It opened its jaws and licked its black lips with a huge tongue.

I remembered a line from The War of the Worlds: “I was on the verge of screaming; I bit my hand.” It seemed a good idea.

Then it turned and reentered the vehicle, the others following.

There was a long pause as we stood there, then the ramp retracted and the great warcraft rose and turned away, back toward the city. Its guns fired two or three times, picking off vehicles and bits of machinery. We heard a confused clamoring of voices from the monastery and the crowd of refugees.

“We must give thanks,” said the abbot. “We have been granted a miracle.” There was puzzlement more than anything else in his expression and voice. He seemed to be trying to come to terms with a completely new and strange problem. His hand fluttered to his chest. “I have been allowed to live to see a miracle.”

I was not so sure. It seemed to me likely that, with the war plainly all but won, the kzin must be thinking of preserving the human population for their own purposes. I did not even think then that the kzin had sought me out specially: It had merely wanted to know where all the humans were heading for, and the monastery was the last place before the swamp and sea and mountains where they could gather. But all the same, things might have gone very differently.

“Come with me to the chapel,” said the abbot. “I must call the brothers to prayer and thanksgiving.” He clasped his chest harder and gave a sudden cry. He staggered in a circle, then fell, writhing. I bent over him.

“Heart,” he whispered. “A fat old man's heart…” His voice and his respiration were rising and falling in an odd way. “Yes, listen… Do you recognize it, scientist? Cheyne-Stokes breathing. Something few heard on this world when everyone had a doc. But I've attended the dying… You will hear a lot more of it as the docs fail, I fear… I'm not good at fear… This… this is another miracle. It will save me much fear.” His voice rallied for a moment.

“Rykermann, you may hate me, and God knows I am a sinner. But let me give you my blessing.”

I shrugged. Hatred seemed unimportant now.

“My personal unworthiness does not affect the quality of it, you know,” he whispered with a shadow of his old manner. “As for Masonry, I doubt you can teach the Kzin the handclasp. They haven't the fingers for it. But be careful of the—”

His writhing stopped. He mumbled feebly, then his voice grew a little stronger and he muttered something in a language I did not understand and raised his hand from his chest, waving it at me as though trying to give me something invisible. I bent closer to catch his words but as I did so he died.

I heard something else then, where the kzin had stood. Along with the locator modem it had left me Dimity's music box. It must have found it in the module, and it must just now have wound the tiny handle with the huge claws of its undamaged arm.

I walked slowly back to the monastery. The infirmary was still stocked, I knew. I had plenty of means of killing myself. Dimity was gone. She had, at least, I kept telling myself, died quickly and cleanly in space, and her knowledge was lost to the Kzin and their mind-readers. But she was lost to me forever. Forever? I remembered my profession of belief in a Supreme Being and turned it over in my mind to see if it helped. To opt out of this horror would be to do nothing, not even to mourn.

I also had, I now realized, a duty to survive. I was a professor of biology and a sort of chemist, and I would be needed. If not for my degrees and papers, then for the fact that my expeditions had made me, as I thought naïvely then, one of the few modern urban Wunderlanders who had any experience of camping and surviving in genuinely primitive conditions.

And there was another matter. Cats did not like fire. Bones and nitric acid made phosphorus. Caves with deep drifts of morlock and mynock bones would be a source of phosphorus. Guano, rich in nitrates, would be a prime source of low-tech explosives, a precious strategic resource if there was someone to build a factory to process them. That someone would have to know organic chemistry, and know at least a little of survival in the wild. Ceramics and armor to withstand laser-blasts, fabricated in hidden factories with improvised plant, would also need someone with chemical knowledge. There were probably no living humans, now, whose knowledge of the great caves of the Hohe Kalkstein came close to mine. Those caves would be a huge strategic resource.

From the makeshift and growing refugee camp I could already hear the sounds of babies crying from hunger. A live Nils Rykermann might be able to help there as well.

The abbot had shown me the reality of duty. As for that odd thing called honor, I thought I had seen a shape of that somewhere between van Roberts and von Diderachs, between the abbot and the kzin.

The first person I recognized in the refugee camp was Leonie Hansen. She had brought away as much equipment from the laboratory as she could carry and with a couple of others had set up a sort of clinic. A lot of it was very simple stuff—test tubes, optical microscopes, filtration paper I saw, all now beyond price. She, or somebody, had seen that the ultrasophisticated equipment of modern laboratories, like autodocs, would be useless without power sources and maintenance. I thought then that many things would go on, and that she would also be needed.

Epilogue

First, of course they asked her name.

“My name is Dimity Carmody.”

That was not a We Made It name. But it was not a We Made It ship. The design, the specifications and part numbers showed it had been built on Earth, a long time before.

“What is your position?”

“Special… Special… Special Professor of Mathematics and Astrometaphysics.”

“That's not a crew mustering. And you look too young.”

They said “look too young,” not “are too young.” She had been in Coldsleep a long time. She tried to cooperate.

“No… I… I don't know what it is.”

“Were you crew?”

“I don't know.”

“What happened?”

“I don't remember.”

They let her rest, and though it obliterated some memory potential they applied stronger nerve-growth factors and other regeneration therapy to the brain and where the central nervous tissue had been destroyed. They showed her pictures of the ship as it had been when they had boarded it.

“What do you remember?” The healers on We Made It were gentle and patient.

“I am Dimity Carmody.”

“You came in an Earth ship. Did you come from Earth?”

“No.”

“Where do you come from?”

“München. I grew up in München. My father let me play with his computer.”

“München?” They looked up an old Earth atlas and found pictures of it. But when they showed her the pictures they meant nothing to her. They found New München in the records and showed her that: the last pictures they had were of a small town of a few thousand people. She did not recognize the old buildings but she recognized the star patterns.

“That's Wunderland.” That solved part of the puzzle. And the memory pictures could be Wunderland. Someone showed her flash cards of Wunderland and general human scenes. They showed her a copy of her own memory of the man with the yellow Wunderland beard, and that brought an almost overwhelming response of love and loss and grief so that they feared for her, but she could not put a name to the man and eventually it passed. At a picture of a cat she laid her ears back. Then they examined her ears again and found the characteristic musculature of some of the aristocratic Wunderland families. They found another picture of what looked like a cat, very distorted, in her own memory and showed it to her but it meant nothing though she flinched from it.

“Yes, Wunderland.”

“This isn't Wunderland.”

“Oh.”

“What year is it, Dimity?” They meant, of course, what year did she remember it as being.

“I don't know.”

She never on that world remembered the Kzin or what had happened on Wunderland, though she remembered her theoretical work at length, when the Outsiders sold We Made It a manual for a faster-than-light shunt whose first operating principles she alone could recognize and understand.