The Wunder War

Chapter 1

2425 a.d.

The kzin screamed and leaped.

The gagrumpher was a young one, lagging a little behind the herd, half-asleep on its feet in the warm forenoon. The kzin landed on its back, above its middle pair of legs. The centauroid reared up, shrieking. The gagrumpher herd wheeled, the males charging back.

But the gagrumpher's rearing had brought its throat in range of the feline's razor fangs. The kzin swung its jaws, slashing. There was time for one crushing bite at the neck bones, and it was down, racing for the trees like an orange shadow a second before the gagrumpher bull-males arrived.

The wounded gagrumpher stood for a moment, blood jetting, then it collapsed, its oxygen-starved brain already dying, though its rear legs kicked for some time under the instinctual commands of the dorsal ganglial knot.

The males could not pursue the predator into the trees, and as they stood in a bellowing group, the snarl of another kzin tore the air on the opposite side of the clearing, between them and the rest of the herd. They could not leave the females and the other juveniles unguarded. They hastened back, and the herd moved on.

The body of the adolescent became still in its pool of blood as the dorsal ganglia died. A colony of leather-flappers that had risen shrieking into the sky returned to their trees, and the forest settled down again to its own affairs.

Warily, two kzin approached the kill. The killer, like its prey, was a youngster, showing a mixture of kitten spots and adolescent stripes against its bright orange fur. The other was older—much older. There was gray at its muzzle, one eye and one arm were artificial, its ears were torn shreds and the fur at its neck and shoulders grew raggedly over a complex of scar tissue. The youngster kept watch as the elder kzin lowered its great head and lapped the blood, then crouched and lapped in turn.

The forest was quiet again. They ate undisturbed.

“That was a good kill, Vaemar,” the elder kzin said. He gave the youngster a grooming lick.

“Thank you, Raargh-Hero. But I doubt I could handle an adult yet. And it was a stupid one to lag behind the herd in this close country.”

“Then you have seen the fate of the stupid. You feel nothing in the ground?”

“Feet. Distant enough.”

“Gagrumpher feet?”

“Yes. I think so.” The pattern of the gagrumpher's centauroid footfalls could never be mistaken for those of a quadruped, but many of Wunderland's native life-forms were centauroid.

“Are they approaching or receding?

“I think… I think they are still receding.”

“Be sure, be very sure. The males could be returning quietly through the cover.”

“They do not sound heavy.”

“Nor would they, to your senses yet, if they put their feet down slowly. They are very different things, leaping on the back of a dreaming youngster, and looking up to see a dozen charging adult males. You do not want to be under those forelegs when they rear up. I have heard some humans made the skins of our kind into what they call rrrugz. Adult gagrumphers can do the same more quickly.”

“They are moving away, Raargh-Hero, I am sure of it now.”

“Indeed. Do you know why they move away?”

“No.”

“The males know we are here. Their usual response would be—I will not say of such clumsy and noisy herbivores to 'stalk' us—but to attempt to take us by surprise. If they are moving away, it is for a reason. Perhaps some other enemy approaches.

“Never feel shame like the foolish ones at using ziirgah. It is a gift of the Fanged God,” the old kzin went on. Ziirgah was the rudimentary ability of all kzinti to detect emotions of other hunters or prey. Most used it quite unthinkingly, but because it was developed in a few into the despised talent of the telepaths, many felt unease at using it consciously. It had saved Raargh's life on more than one occasion.

“Always danger, Raargh-Hero.”

“Vaemar, when you look at me, see always two things: I am old, and I am alive. I notice danger. Not all who were kits with me, or recruits, or fighting soldiers, did so… Listen now!”

“There…!” The young kzin's ears and tail shot up.

“Yes, mechanism! You know the enemy now.”

“We must get under cover!”

“Finish your meat. It is your kill, and we have enough time. We will take the haunches to salt before the Beam's beasts and the snufflers get them.”

The sound of the vehicle grew. The kzinti slashed what remained of the gagrumpher carcass to pieces, bagging it in tough fabric. They were in deep cover, invisible, when the human car, flying low, entered the clearing.

It landed beside what was left of the gagrumpher, and the driver got out. The human examined the scattered, bloody bones, the imprints of clawed feet and of Raargh's prosthetic hand on the ground about, sniffing with a feeble, almost useless nose, then crossed the clearing toward the shade of the red Wunderland trees where the kzinti lurked. His eye lighted on some of the bagged meat.

“Anyone for chess?” he called.

The young kzin leaped from the undergrowth. His hands with sheathed claws struck the human in the chest, knocking him down. Though far less than fully grown, he already overtopped and easily outweighed the man.

“Be careful, Vaemar,” the elder admonished him in what, five years previously, would have been called the slaves' patois. “He has not the strength of a Hero!” He made a swipe at Vaemar with his prosthetic arm. The youngster ducked and rolled away.

“There is no offense, Raargh,” the human said in the same dialect, those words in the Heroes' Tongue being couched in the Tense of Equals. He climbed to his feet and reached to scratch the top of the youngster's head. “Young will be young.”

“Urrr. To live with you monkeys, young need be cautious. You have a board?”

“Yes.”

“Old weakling! To let youngster leap you so!”

“Many of us are old, Companion, but some of us have a trick or two yet.”

“Come to our cave.” He spoke now with the grammar of the Heroes' Tongue to this human who understood it, rather than the simplified patois. “We have got it well set up now. Even a chair for any monkey brave enough to stick its nose in. Vaemar will cover your eyes while I make safe the defenses.”

The human held his captured chessman up to the light. “These are nice pieces.”

“Vaemar made them. He is good with a sculpting tool.”

“From what you tell me he is good at many things. But he is fortunate to have you.”

“So what you will tell the Arrum?”

“There is no point in lying, to them or to you. So far they have asked little of me. He has the right to live as he wishes, as do you… but I think…”

“Yesss? Go on.” A hint of the Menacing Tense.

“Someday he will need more than this.”

“It is good to stalk the gagrumphers and fight the tigripards, good to look out at night upon the Fanged God's stars, or sleep under them when we range far, to scent the game in the forests under the hunters' moons or lie in the deep grass glades at noontide,” said Raargh. “Few high nobles live so well. And unlike high nobles we have no palace intrigues to poison our livers.”

The man nodded, pinching his lower lip between thumb and index finger in a characteristic gesture of thought. “And yet… for him it cannot be like this forever. You know as well as I he is exceptional. Your kind on this planet need leaders now, and they will need them tomorrow.”

“To lead them to what?”

“Hardly for me to say.”

“To become imitation monkeys? Apes of apes?”

“Do you really think the seed of Heroes would accept such a destiny? I think not.”

“What then? Check! Urrr.”

“You know your kind have some deadly enemies among the humans on this world. Jocelyn van der Stratt is far from the only one of her party. I think, as you do, I know, that Vaemar may be a great treasure for this planet, a natural leader for the Kzin but one who can deal with humans, too. What might we not do combined? I think even Chuut-Riit may have felt that, or something like it. It will be very slow, but perhaps on Wunderland both our kinds have been given a strange chance.

“But there are many humans who do not want kzinti leaders to emerge, who do not want the Kzin to be. Vaemar has a duty, companion mine. And so, I think, do you. Perhaps, if I may speak as soldier to soldier, a harder one than any you faced in battle.”

“You think the monkeys will attack us? There will be many more guts spilled then. There are many Heroes left on Ka'ashi!”

“I hope not. And I think I have grounds for hope. Each day that passes is a day in which humans and Kzin share the planet, a day for some memory of the war and the Occupation to be forgotten. But it is slow.”

“It does not matter if the days here pass fast or slowly,” said Raargh. “We hunt, we watch the stars. Vaemar grows. I will not be able to play chesss with him much longer—too many easy victories for him on this little board, and my authority is undermined.”

“If he can beat you easily, Raargh, he must be a player indeed. But most kzinti who bother with the game become masters… Once when we talked, you too said the Kzin of Wunderland would have need of him.”

“He still does not get the best out of his rooks. He does not use them to smash through the front… And I am not good enough a player to be the best teacher for him—I announce checkmate in three moves, by the way. They do not have need of him yet.”

“We hold things together, I grant you, but there are a lot of hopes on that youngster.”

“He comes. Let him try his rook work on you. He has been waiting for his game.”

“If you can beat me so easily, what hope have I against him?”

“I, who am old, am schooling myself to perceive things like a human. He, who is young, has only me to learn from, me, and one or other two oddities about in these unpeopled parts… You are right, he will have to go soon, though it shaves my mane and twists my liver to say it… But I warn you, he learns quickly.”

The sound of the human car died away. Raargh gazed after it for a long time. Night was falling on Wunderland, Alpha Centauri B magnificent in the purplish sky, the sky that humans now ruled.

“Finish salting and dressing the meat, Vaemar,” he said. “I must pace and think.”

The forest made way for the kzin, though he was hardly hunting. He made a single, small kill, enough for relaxation and a clear mind.

I lost my own kit and my mate in the ramscoop raid, he thought. Must I lose Vaemar too?

Perhaps not. As things had once been, a Hero did not worry over his kits, who should make their own fortune, provided only that they did not dishonor him. But ever since the human acquisition of the hyperdrive had turned the tide of battle in space, for Raargh and Vaemar ever since the day the Patriarchy's forces on Wunderland had surrendered to the victorious humans and Raargh had fled with the Royal Governor Chuut-Riit's last kit to the open country beyond the great scarp of the Hohe Kalkstein, things had been different.

They had lived wild and free, but not entirely so. Wunderland was a sparsely settled world, and during the Kzin occupation and the decades-long war its human population had been further reduced, through heavy casualties, through the poverty and chaos that spread with a destroyed infrastructure, and as a result of suddenly being denied many modern drugs and medical procedures. Birth rates had collapsed as death rates had soared. Now, with rebuilding and the UNSN present in force, and with automated farming and food-production methods being restored, the cities were draining off the human rural population from many areas.

The remaining kzin, considerably to their own surprise, had, after the chaos and fighting that followed the Liberation, been allowed a fair degree of freedom, though they had been stripped of most of the land and estates which they had taken and, except in part of the asteroid Tiamat, where they had their own community, and recently in part in the settlement at Arhus, were subject to human government and laws in major matters. But there was still much wild country. Kzin like Raargh who settled in the backwoods were largely left alone (the little matter of the stolen air-car in which he had escaped after the Kzin surrender seemed to have been forgotten, and the car was still with them). But, he knew, they were under a degree of discreet, and even frank, surveillance. It would not, he suspected, be a good idea to test the limits of their freedom. Cumpston had taken it upon himself to call upon them. There were other humans who crossed their paths from time to time as well, such as the female called Emma, who apparently lived in the forest somewhere to the southeast.

Sometimes he sold meat to the scattered human vegetation-cultivators in the area, rounded up or killed beasts for them, guarded their farms in their absence, or used his great strength to do other work. He had thus acquired goods and a small store of money. “You can trust old Raargh to do a job,” he had heard one say. “He's not so bad for a ratcat.” Here, in the open country beyond the Hohe Kalkstein, the claws of the occupying kzinti had rested relatively lightly, and his prosthetic arm and eye, though actually more effective than natural ones for many purposes, made him look less dangerous. It had been strange and distasteful at first to have to deal with former slaves and prey animals on such terms, but with the passage of time he was becoming used to it. The cultivator's words, when he thought them over, had actually not displeased him.

There were also, Raargh knew, many humans who wished to kill every kzin on Wunderland. This provoked a fighting reflex, but it was hardly unexpected. He had installed defensive measures at their cave. The advice of other humans, including his chess partner Colonel Cumpston, had been to lie low and let, as he put it, “time heal some wounds.”

Those that were not fatal to start with, thought Raargh. Too many dead Heroes, too many dead monkeys, for all to be forgotten. I sometimes forget how favored by the Fanged God I am. How few who joined the Patriarch's Forces with me now live! Hroarh-Captain travels with a cart replacing his legs. He remembered Hroarh-Captain as a young officer, bursting through with his troops to rescue him, sole survivor of his platoon, at the First Battle of the Great Caves.

And that led to another thought. The human Rykermann, who had fought beside him in the caves when they had been surrounded by morlocks. They had believed they would die together and had exchanged certain confidences. He had helped Rykermann's mate, Leonie, to escape the morlocks, and had asked Hroarh-Captain for Rykermann to be given fighter's privileges and for his life to be spared. And Rykermann in return had asked something for him, something which Hroarh-Captain had agreed to… partly for politics and because it was convenient, it was true, but… There were a few humans he could talk to. This is a human world now and I need human advice and contact. I do not like it, but if Vaemar is to live here and lead, he will need it too. He cannot stay in the forest forever.

Cumpston was a good chess partner and had intervened to save his life from the female Jocelyn van der Stratt in the burning ruins of the refugee camp outside Circle Bay Monastery, the day the last Kzin forces on Wunderland surrendered. The abbot of the monastery, too, another old chess partner… But Cumpston, he knew, was an ARM agent still, and Raargh suspected his interest in Vaemar was more than avuncular. Raargh was prepared to admit that the stocky human might somehow presume to “like” them, but chess was not his only agenda. And the abbot was old and feeble. Raargh did know how he continued to impose his will on the… monks? monkeys? whatever they were called… who he had been set to dominate.

It is Rykermann among the humans who owes me most, he thought. His life and his mate's life. He is high in their dominance structure, too. The television in the car had shown him Rykermann speaking in the monkey-assembly, when troops of them got together to chatter about laws. He had had Vaemar watch it too, as part of his education for this new world. I will go to Rykermann, he thought.

Chapter 2

Nils Rykermann looked out at the night over München. Rebuilding after the Liberation had been quick. The craters and the vast chaos of rubble and ruins were gone, as were many of the Kzin's architectural contributions. The last of the refugee camps and shantytowns on the outskirts were being cleared away. There in the light of Alpha Centauri B was the glittering steel spire of St. Joachim's as it had always been.

But even, or especially, under the night sky, it was not the prewar city. The suburbs stretched farther, the spaceport was far bigger. Beyond the spaceport was a vast scrapyard where the hulks of Kzinti warcraft were piled. Moving dots of light showed where salvage teams worked on some of them. And now laser and missile batteries, and more experimental and esoteric weapons, visible and hidden, ringed the city and the surrounding hills.

The sky was different too. One moon blown to pieces, and virtually every prewar and preliberation satellite shot down by one side or the other. Where there had once been advertising signs in orbit there were now guard ships and weapons systems. A double improvement, thought Rykermann.

The people had changed more than the city. Most of Rykermann's Wunderlander contemporaries were dead. Born in 2332, he had been 35 at the time of the Kzin landings. His body, tonight in the grey uniform of the Wunderland Armed Forces with its discreet cluster of oak leaves at the collar, was slim, strong and taut. He was 93 now, in what on Earth was counted early middle age, and he looked less than early middle-aged until one saw his eyes.

Like Raargh's, his neck and shoulders bore a complex of scars, including, strangely, the rough-and-ready suturing of a kzin field-medic, and an identifying kzin brand which he had not had removed. But he had regrown his beard, a moderately asymmetrical spike identifying him as important—what had once been called “quality”—without being quite Families, and there was little gray in its gold yet.

One of his visitors was an obvious Earthman, shorter and heavier, wearing the crisp uniform of a Staff Brigadier of UNSN Intelligence. He was of about the same apparent age as Rykermann, or perhaps younger. In his case the geriatric drugs had never been interrupted.

The other was Jocelyn van der Stratt. She was in the uniform of the Wunderland Police, with badges of high rank. Like certain other Wunderlanders she had adopted the kzinti custom of wearing a belt-ring, with a collection of dried Kzin and human ears.

“The lady you lost, who you spoke of earlier, Dimity Carmody,” said Guthlac. “If I may ask, what happened to her?” His voice was careful, delicate. “I do not mean to cause distress, but in this case I need to know. I know Jocelyn's story, and I know why she is committed to our cause.”

“Not the usual,” said Rykermann. “On this planet,” he went on, “ 'the usual' was disease, hunger or kzinti teeth. I suppose Dimity was lucky, or so I've told myself often enough. She was a scientist, and I thought she had something valuable, a theory about FTL. At my insistence there was an attempt to get her away in a slowboat, but by that time the Kzin had got tired of their cat-and-mouse game with the slowboats and destroyed it in space.

“I had the privilege of watching, via a camera on her ship… until the screen went blank. At least I know she died quickly. In fact she can't have known anything about it. She'd been injured already and was in a doc. They were trying to reach We Made It.”

He strode across the room and opened a paneled cupboard with a key. He reached in and produced a small music box. “That's what I've got left of Dimity,” he said. “A kzin kindly returned it to me… another story… I've kept it for fifty-eight years… All I have!” He struck his fist on the table.

“Selina was probably long dead by then,” said Arthur Guthlac. “The Happy Gatherer just disappeared. One of the first ships to go. I imagine them approaching some kzinti vessel… innocent, excited at the prospect of contact… I imagine it often…”

“Your wife?… Your lover?”

“My sister. We were very close. It had always been the two of us against the world. Two square pegs in round holes. She went into space: the brilliant one. I'd become a museum guard and out of sheer bloody-mindedness I got involved in illegal studies.”

“Illegal?”

“Military history. Totally forbidden. You could get your memory wiped and draw a few years' rehabilitation digging for water ice in the canyons on Mars for that in those days. And there were times before that when it would have been the organ banks. ARM had a long-term project to breed aggression out of the human race, and part of it was banning and systematically destroying military history. My chief at the museum was ARM, of course—all we museum staff were.

“My forbidden studies were inevitably discovered, but I was lucky with the timing of that… I remember standing in front of my chief waiting to be formally charged and arrested, and wondering how much worse my case would be because I was a junior ARM officer myself. Anyway, he'd found I wasn't the only one in the place involved: 'I don't seem to have a very law-abiding general staff, Guthlac,' he said, 'but at this moment it's about all the General Staff that Earth's got.' Strange the difference a couple of capital letters can make. ARM had just concluded that the Angel's Pencil's messages were genuine… that the Kzin were real and they were coming to get us.”

“It wasn't like that on Wunderland,” said Rykermann. “We didn't censor old history so much as lose interest in it. Earth history was Earth business. Irrelevant to us. We had a whole world to shape… A brave new world it still was… I remember, after we got the warnings, those months of scrabbling through old, chance preserved, fragments of Earth books and records trying to reinvent the wheel.”

“We did something the same,” said Guthlac.

“We were just getting a military production base together here when the Kzin arrived.”

“You look as if you had your share of it.”

“After Dimity was killed, I got away into the hills,” Rykermann said. “I was a biologist and I knew some low-tech organic chemistry—nearly all our people were helpless without modern laboratories and industrial plants. I also knew as much as anyone about the great caves, full of bones and phosphates. I was the Resistance's biochemical production manager, overseeing the secret factories where nitrates and phosphates were made into explosives and war-gases.

“I was also one of the few leaders deemed indispensable enough to get—when possible—geriatric drugs and other sophisticated medical treatment from the Resistance's stolen supplies. Leonie was another.”

“She was fortunate to be your wife.”

“We didn't marry until we'd been in the hills for some time… and, I'll say… after the memory of Dimity had receded for me, a little. After I'd stopped hoping quite so hard that every attack we launched would turn out to be a suicide mission. In any case, we hardly had room for such sentimentalism as giving geriatric drugs to a spouse. The few we had went where they were needed most and she got them on her own merits. Not even my decision.

“She'd been one of my postgraduate biology students, and in addition she had natural gifts with low-tech medical care. That made her important. We'd forgotten we were aliens on this world. Exotic diseases, which our parents and grandparents had controlled so easily with modern medicine and autodocs that we'd forgotten they existed, came raging out, along with a lot of the old human diseases we'd also forgotten and which we'd lost resistance against.

“We did still have quite a lot of more-or-less old-fashioned farmers, thank God!—that's why we're not all dead—but most of us were twenty-fourth-century, machine-dependent people. Robots did a lot of the farming and other dirty jobs. Hell, apart from never seeing a dead animal, a lot of us ex-city dwellers had never seen recognizable meat! At first people starved from ignorance as much as shortages. Like the caveman, shivering with cold on a ledge of coal, fleeing weaponless from the cave-bear over outcrops of iron ore, lapping water muddy with clay… More of us perished from general softness… humaneness, lack of ruthless decisiveness, not knowing what mattered for immediate survival and what didn't.

“Then they got the country and the old estates organized, and there was a supply of food back to the cities again. Some sort of government was got together under kzinti supervision and factories started turning over. Someone persuaded the Kzin that we couldn't pay taxes or slave for them if we were dead of starvation.

“I was in the wild country by that time and didn't see it. Disease was what we were concerned about in the hills. Some of the old bacteria and viruses had been eliminated in our ancestors before they left Sol system—that's another reason why some of us lived—but it turned out that there were still plenty left. Common colds alone—to which we'd lost quite a lot of resistance—killed far more people than the Kzin killed directly. That's before we start counting the score of the big-league diseases and Wunderland's own contributions. Things were bad enough in the cities, but at least they kept some modern medical facilities functioning. Even there they suddenly had to find puppy dogs and sheep to make something called insulin. Do cataract operations by hand—yes, you may well look queasy. And that was high-tech compared to what we had in the hills. There was no proper birth control once the contraceptive implants' lives ran out, and yet for women pregnancy became a deadly danger again. Leonie—and it was not only her scientific training but also a matter of intuition with her—turned out to be a priceless asset.

“She was a good fighter, too. A natural tactician and strategist and handy with a beam rifle. We've both outlived most of our contemporaries. It's not nice, watching your friends die of black rot or old age. Still, we've been happy together. She's an extraordinary woman. Kind to me, kind to all the world. The liberation, when it came, was a savage time, as savage as the invasion in its way, and a lot of people were in a sort of drunkenness of joy and vengeance. But even before the fighting stopped, before the relief operations were set up, she was taking care of stray kittens along with the pups and the orphans.”

“Some people do. We had cats at home.”

“I mean kzin kittens! She's always believed in some kind of eventual… reconciliation.”

“And you don't?”

“No! First, it's impossible and suicidal, and second… I cannot forgive.”

“Nor I. And yet…”

“Yes?”

“I have heard that you had dealings with the kzinti and survived.”

“That was in the caves. A kzin and I found ourselves in a sort of temporary alliance against the morlocks—the big carnivores that live at the top of the food chain there. We thought we were going to die together. Then, when the other kzinti came, this one got them to sew me up, and they let me go with a branding and another implant in my skin—kzin-sized and a good deal less comfortable than human ones—and my word not to fight against Heroes again.”

“And did you?”

“Is one's word to a ratcat binding? But there were other ways of helping the human cause by then. I think I kept to the letter of my promise, shall we say, though I exploited some loopholes in it.”

“Scrupulous of you.”

“Partly pride. Whatever you say about the ratcats, they keep their word, and I wanted to show that a human could do so, too. Partly Leonie made me. The kzin in question had saved her life, too. Though I think she would have had me keep my word anyway. Partly fear. Break your word to the Kzin and you fare much worse than an ordinary monkey if you fall into their claws subsequently… I was still valuable to the human cause. There was plenty of work to be done in backwoods biochemistry that didn't require one to be a direct fighter.

“Anyway, my motives were mixed. I'm human, aren't I? Mixed motives are our nature. I think my nerve was starting to go then and I'd had enough of tangling with kzinti. I thought of their tortures.” He paused again, steepling his fingers in thought.

“The Masonic orders kept some of Kipling's poetry alive on Wunderland when it had been banned on Earth for militarism,” he said. “We used to recite it in our camps before battle sometimes:

“But I recall another poem of his I found that is not particularly militaristic. It went something like this:

“That was the point that my mother's son had reached, too.”

Jocelyn van der Stratt nodded. “We understood that,” she said. “Few could have done more than you.”

“In any case again,” Rykermann went on, “The kzinti weren't fools. They could track me with the implant, and any attempt to remove it would have killed me and anyone helping. Thing called a zzrou in their charming language. Full of poison and explosive. Still, I made myself useful enough to find, rather to my surprise, that I had a political base after the liberation. So here I am.”

“Markham has talked of a just settlement with them,” Guthlac said. Jocelyn made a feral noise in her throat. Rykermann shook his head.

“Justice isn't possible! Recently I've looked at the history of war crimes trials on Earth in ancient times. But war crimes trials for kzinti make no sense. How can you try members of an alien species whose concepts are so different from our own and who thought of us as slaves and prey animals? There was some rough and ready approximation of justice after the liberation, of course: a lot of the most brutal kzin individuals who survived were hunted down and killed—taking a lot of humans with them, often enough. The followers of Ktrodni-Stkaa, who had been especially savage and saw humans as nothing but monkey-meat, in particular. Those who'd treated humans better often got a better shake—often, that is, not always. The human collaborators… that was another matter. They'd done what they'd done knowingly.

“The fighting didn't all stop at once, but when it did stop, there was very little in the way of an organized resistance—largely because so much of the kzin military had fought to the death before the cease-fire, also because they just don't think as we do. Some of the survivors went berserk, but there was no equivalent to the human Resistance after the kzinti invasion, no organized sabotage or uprisings. Also, of course, they'd destroyed all of their military assets that they could.

“And it wasn't long before we put the kzinti to work: doing a lot of dirty, dangerous jobs like disarming explosive devices where there was no point in risking human lives. Advising on dismantling the hulked kzin warships. Telepaths were useful from Day One, and many telepaths were not particularly loyal to the Patriarchy anyway. But soon others were showing they could be useful too.

“So much of Wunderland's infrastructure was wrecked that there were real fears of chaos. We had generations of lawless feral humans, including children—ever heard of the Wascal Wabbits? Kzin security guards made a difference there… With so much machinery destroyed, muscles were needed, too. Any muscles. They still are.”

“That's the peril!” Jocelyn exclaimed. “We are accommodating them! Giving them a place in our hierarchy! Getting used to them there. There are even some sick—”

“I have heard some humans refer to Chuut-Riit and some of his pride, like Tratt-Admiral, or Hroth, as relatively enlightened, at least compared to a Ktrodni-Stkaa,” said Rykermann. Jocelyn gave another, louder snarl that had something feline and feral in it.

“So have I,” said Guthlac. “Mainly humans from Earth of the post-war generation. On behalf of us Flatlanders I apologize for them. They never had to endure the horror here.”

“Exactly. In a few years, if things go on as they are, we will have a generation growing up who see kzin in the streets and think they know them, but who never experienced the war or kzinti rule,” said Rykermann. “What are ruined and exterminated generations to them? Perhaps torn photographs of people they never met. Our stories and histories will become the boring—perhaps to them even comic—tales of grandparents: 'Oh, yes, the Public Hunts and all that.' The photographs of our dead will be rubbish to be burned in the general house-cleaning by our heirs when we die. Until the Kzin return!

“I can honor a kzin,” Rykermann went on. “I can respect individual kzinti, but never, never, will I forget watching the kzin laser burn into Dimity's ship. I understand ARM's plan for the Wunderkzin—to create a kzin caste who can be partners with humans on a human world, perhaps even allies one day, not to mention hostages. I understand it, but I will destroy it.”

“Does this come between you and your wife?” asked Guthlac. “That you seek vengeance so for the death of another woman?”

“The answer for me is: 'Why burden Leonie with it?' I don't.”

“You put a lot of time into building a memorial to her. Doesn't Leonie think it's a bit…” Guthlac made an eloquent gesture.

“Jocelyn and every Wunderlander knows the answer to that,” said Rykermann. “Dimity Carmody would have been worth a memorial if she had been as sexless as a bumblebee. She was a child when she discovered Carmody's Transform which gave our technology the greatest independent boost it's ever had. Given a few more years and we might have… Just before the Kzin arrived she'd been working on what she called a 'shunt' that she thought could break the light barrier. If anyone could have done it, it would have been she. She showed me some of her calculations, but they meant nothing to me. The famous Professor Rykermann couldn't even understand the symbols she used. But isn't 'shunt' how the scientists on We Made It describe the principle of the Outsiders' hyperdrive? My guess, my belief rather, is that she was working on the right lines.

“But in any case Leonie never guessed how I felt about Dimity, how all-consuming my love for her had been. I'm not even sure if she knew her. She was a biology student and Dimity had her own department.” He gave a lopsided laugh. “It was an unconsummated love, by the way. The professor of biology was too much in awe of the supergenius to actually do anything in that direction until too late. The only times we got to sleep together we slept. Holding one another, exhausted and terrified and with the Kzin after us.” There was a sudden shake in Rykermann's voice. Guthlac turned his eyes away from him with a peculiar expression of embarrassment. “There was no reason to tell Leonie,” said Rykermann, after an awkward pause. “There was no deceit involved. You can hardly be unfaithful with the dead. Why burden her with something that is in the past forever and that can't be changed?

“There are plenty of good objective reasons for wanting every kzin in the universe dead,” he went on. “Their incidental interference in my private life is an inconvenience, shall I say, and an additional motivation for me. Perhaps that last vision of the laser burning into the ship carrying Dimity before the screen went blank”—his voice struggled again momentarily—“simply helps me to see the state of things more clearly. Let that species continue to maraud through the universe and more Dimitys will die. More Leonies, more millions to join the millions of Wunderlanders who lie in unmarked graves, whose bodies drift eyeless and freeze-dried between the worlds, those who have no grave where any heart may mourn. More dead like your sister, like Jocelyn's people. Other races too… countless…”

“We cannot share a universe with the Kzin,” said Jocelyn. She spoke quietly but her eyes burned. “And your Dimity?”

“What would Dimity have said, had she lived? I don't know. I only know that she must be avenged. She and all the other dead innocents. I can't be an open Exterminationist. That would bring me into conflict with Markham. He seems to have become some sort of kzin-lover.”

“I thought he was the greatest leader of the Resistance! Carried the fight on in space,” said Guthlac.

“Yes, and now he's the greatest obstacle in our path. He's not much good as a democratic politician—far too much the Herrenmann still—but, as you say, he's the Resistance's greatest hero. He fought in space, while we grubbed around in caves and skulked in swamps and alleyways with dung bombs.”

“What's his problem, then?”

“I think he admires the Kzin,” Rykermann said. “So, in a sense, do I, though I want them dead. I can admire certain qualities in them, anyway. They have the toughness and courage of any successful barbarians. But I think he sees them as fellow aristocrats. He himself is only Families on his mother's side, and that makes him more extreme than the twenty-two-carat article.

“If I wished to slander him I'd say he prefers the Kzin to the impudent prolevolk who no longer give him and the Nineteen Families the deference which he must convince himself every hour to be his due, and who have had the great estates broken up. I don't mean that seriously, of course, but… maybe there's a little grain of subconscious truth in it.”

“Prefers the Kzin?” asked Guthlac. He frowned as if peering through a bad light. “Wasn't he their most daring and ruthless enemy?”

“I'd be the last to question his bravery and leadership,” said Rykermann, “but there's a difference between fighting in space and fighting a guerrilla war on the ground. People relatively seldom get wounded in space battles, for example. Markham didn't have to see so many messy wounds—wounds there was often no way to treat. He could regard the Kzin more… abstractly. The enemy in battle was an image on a radar screen for him, not a tower of fangs and claws suddenly looming over you in a cave or chasing you through a swamp to tear you apart for monkey meat. Or simply taking over a district's last farmland for a hunting preserve so hundreds of humans died slowly of starvation. Or leveling a last makeshift human hospital because it was a handy site for an ammunition dump. For Markham, the Kzin was not even the horrible Thing waiting for you at the end of the process that might begin with the collabo police's 3 a.m. door knock.

“Space battles can, I imagine, be fun if you're young and have no hostages to fate and are in the right frame of mind—provoke a Kzinti Vengeful Slasher-class into chasing you and then drop a cloud of ball-bearings in your wake for it to hit at .8 of lightspeed. Things like that.

“Jocelyn”—he gestured to her deferentially—“had the worst part: She worked for the collaborationist police while helping the Resistance. She carried a suicide pill for years in case it was casually announced one day that there would be a telepath check… Markham had what you might call a relatively clean war. Also, the Kzin control of the asteroids was always less total than it was planetside. They liked Wunderland and its elbow room, and they left a lot of the work of squeezing taxes out of the asteroid settlements—the Serpent Swarm—to human collaborationists. In a lot of the Swarm it was still fairly easy for humans to come and go and forget the terror and ghastliness that was always with us here, though as Kzinti numbers increased, human freedom to breathe was gradually being lost everywhere.” Rykermann paused a moment, gathering his thoughts. Then he went on.

“The anti-Exterminationists aren't a monolith, of course. Markham, I think, admires the Kzin for what they are. ARM, as always, has its own secret agendas, which I don't expect even you, Arthur, know much of. Others value them not for what they are, but for what they might become.”

“Like your wife?

“Yes. But I will not be disloyal to her as a wife, and anyone who thinks I am is mistaken. She has a noble and generous vision and dauntless courage. She believes contact with humans is changing the Kzin, that already those born on Wunderland are different—more flexible, more empathic. I think she is mistaken, though I salute her intentions. And in any case a more flexible, more imaginative Kzin would only be more dangerous.”

“And you and I and Jocelyn lost loved ones to them. To love anyone is to make a perpetual hostage of your heart. Markham is a cold, sexless creature, brought up on Nietzsche, mother-fixated. I doubt he's ever loved anyone else, let alone lost them. He married only fairly recently, I think chiefly for the purpose of getting an heir—that's another kzin-like thing about him. But maybe to be a Markham you have to be like that.

“I don't know how much damage he did the Kzin battle-fleets—his whole collection of makeshift warships couldn't have engaged even one of their great dreadnaughts with a hope of survival—but the damage he did their bases and shipyards and the intelligence that his people masered to Sol wasn't negligible. Perhaps he helped buy Earth and Sol System breathing space between the Kzin fleet attacks. That may have been crucial. Gave time for the miracle of the hyperdrive to come from We Made It. I'm told Earth was at its last gasp when the Crashlanders arrived.”

“It was,” said Guthlac. “If they expected a heroes' welcome it was nothing to the one they got!”

“Markham certainly kept flames of hope and defiance alive here when they were desperately needed. I'd be the last to deny we owe him plenty, and perhaps Sol System does too.

“I've tried to understand what makes him tick,” Rykermann went on. “Especially now that we're in Parliament together. He counted those who died with him as warriors fallen in a noble cause, and I'm sure he's been punctilious in seeing their names are spelled correctly on the memorials. I think his feelings for them would have stopped there. Remember Frederick the Great's words to encourage his troops when they hesitated in battle: 'Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben?' When I read that, I thought: 'That's Markham!' But I see the laser burning into Dimity's ship almost every night of my life. We didn't see the end, as I told you, but I imagine it passing through her body as she lay in that medical coffin…”

“Jocelyn? Do you feel the same?” Guthlac asked.

“I'm a civil servant. And like all senior police officers on this planet I've plenty of enemies from the past. I was exonerated after the Liberation and decorated and promoted for my role in helping the Resistance, but I did wear the collabo uniform. It would be easy for some enemies to take what I did—what I had to do—out of context. 'Who is the genuine friend of humanity? Ulf Reichstein-Markham, who fought the Kzin in the Serpent Swarm in improvised warships; Markham whose name even Chuut-Riit knew; or the former so-called Captain Jocelyn van der Stratt who supervised… supervised…' No, I can't say it, even here. You can work out the rest of it. But that's what they'd say.”

“One thing I've learned in politics,” said Rykermann, “is the softly, softly approach. Nils Rykermann fighting Ulf Reichstein Markham—and the UNSN—on Exterminationism wouldn't get me far. It might get me the personal attentions of ARM… You understand.”

“I was about to say: 'They wouldn't dare!' But of course they would,” said Guthlac. “I was part of ARM's planning staff and I know them better than most. War does things to people, but even before the war ARM's ethos was that it couldn't afford scruples. Buford Early had no scruples about killing tens of thousands of humans—maybe more, we still don't know how many exactly—in the ramscoop raid. I did certain things on Earth when it looked as if the pacifist movement was getting too powerful—and I'd do them again if I had to without a backward glance. ARM as a whole had no scruples about holding back on all sorts of technology that would have helped us in the war, until it was almost too late, for fear it might get into the wrong hands—as if that would have been worse than a Kzin victory destroying human civilization forever! You're right to be distrustful of it.”

“Nils Rykermann as Exterminationist leader would be quietly stymied, I think,” Rykermann told him. “But Nils Rykermann the mainstream politician reluctantly forced into supporting Exterminationism might be a different matter.”

“So we're agreed.”

“Yes. Softly, softly,” Arthur Guthlac nodded. “By the way, Jocelyn's people and I are among those meeting a delegation from We Made It in a few days to discuss expanding hyperdrive factories here. Her section is in charge of security for the project.”

“I know. And more hyperdrive factories here are the best news I've heard for a long time. We're going to need them,” Rykermann said. “If we do exterminate the Wunderkzin, I think it rules out the chance of a peace with the Kzin anywhere, ever. The others will hardly be inclined to surrender. We're in for a long war.”

“That's exactly what we must have. Like it or not, they're too dangerous to be in the universe, Nils.”

“We know,” said Jocelyn.

“Come with me, if you like,” said Guthlac. “I'm sure they'll want to meet you.”

“Thanks, but I'm back to the caves tomorrow,” said Rykermann. “Thank God, politics still isn't a fulltime job. I remain a biologist, remember. Even a celebrity biologist! Leonie's there, with some students. We're trying to rehabilitate the ecosystem. It got messed up pretty thoroughly in the war. Odd, I suppose, that we should be trying to preserve the morlocks as a species now.”

“They can hardly be much of a threat.”

“No, they're barely sapient and they stay in the dark. Still, that's the human race for you: trying to preserve its enemies.”

“Not all its enemies, I trust.”

“So do I.”

Chapter 3

Jocelyn van der Stratt, like many of Wunderland's top administration, had a spacious apartment, once the property of a wealthy collaborationist, located, like Rykermann's Parliamentary office, in a tower high over the city.

Its decorations included the body of Peter Brennan, a fighter in the early days of the Invasion who even the Kzinti had referred to by full name, enclosed in a translucent block. Jocelyn had liberated it on the day of the Kzin surrender. The Kzin had let him keep his trophy-belt of kzinti ears, and this could still be seen on him, along with, on the remains of his jacket, the small cogged wheel of the Rotary Club badge he had worn in memory of peaceful days. There were also, about the walls, the earless heads of various kzinti and of human collaborators, weapons, photographs and holos of certain other dead humans, china from old Neue Dresden, and, in a niche, an inlaid jar of kzinti workmanship which had once held Planetary Governor Chuut-Riit's urine, kzinti symbol of Conquest and once gift to a sergeants' mess of Heroes.

Jocelyn reclined at ease on a couch covered in kzin fur. She was smoking a cigarette of mildly narcotic Wunderland chew-bacca and she had chosen the details of her dress with great care. Ulf Reichstein-Markham sat upright on a chair with the same material. He smoked nothing.

“Privately,” she was saying, “I'm on your side. The Kzin were honorable enemies. Many like Traat-Admiral and Hroth could acknowledge and respect human courage. And could be reasoned with. 'Enlightenment' is no empty word. Chuut-Riit wished to understand us. Perhaps the passage of a little time was necessary for us to see their more positive qualities. Thanks to the hyperdrive we are secure militarily and can afford to be more active in exploring avenues to a lasting peace.”

“It is time to become friends,” said Markham. His English was still careful, and Wunderland sentence structure came and went awkwardly in it. “I do not pretend it will be easy. Sacrifices we may have to make. They must be convinced of our good intentions. But infinitely worthwhile the effort. At the end of the journey ennobled may both races be. I did not, however, think that you shared my views.”

“I must tread warily,” said Jocelyn. “You should know, for example, that Rykermann is a secret Exterminationist. I cannot break openly with him yet.”

“He was a brave fighter,” said Markham. “He has much-deserved prestige. It would be a good thing if he could be shown the longer view.”

And you have chivalrous instincts, thought Jocelyn. I could love you very easily if fate had not made me love Rykermann. But Rykermann has your courage and leadership combined with a wound, a vulnerability, that together make women love him easily. He is not of your hollow-ground steel. Still, you are physically attractive and I will, I think, have no problems about seducing you. Rykermann may have called you a cold, sexless creature, but I know men better than any man does. You are not sexless, you are just frightened of losing control, and of an instinct that makes you lose control.

“A pity about his wife,” she said.

“What do you mean? Leonie I know quite well. We have worked together.”

“Then you know what I mean. She shares our feelings that it is—or soon will be—time to be friends. But married to an influential man like Rykermann… And she a Resistance hero in her own right as important as he—if not as great as you…”

“No,” said Markham. “We all served as we might. I was fortunate to have wealth and connection, and the valiant spirit of my mother to inspire me. I got into space, where many born planetside had no such opportunity. You are flattering, but I cannot rank myself ahead of those whose part it was to fight here in such difficulty and danger.”

“I have the honor to know, humbly and afar, of your mother's greatness,” she told him. “Humanity's greatest heroine in this war, whose name, with your own, will never be forgotten. But you speak of danger? You, whose name even Chuut-Riit took cognizance of? But it would be good if she could be detached from him somehow. Good for her, I mean. She is a great and good woman.”

“To interfere between man and wife is unscrupulous, surely?”

“Unscrupulous? Did we not all learn to dispense with scruples? What had Nietzsche to say of scruples?”

“You know Nietzsche? He kept my spirit aflame for Men during the darkest days!”

“Another bond between us!” Of course, the little facts that I have studied your profile in every detail, or that you called your so-called flagship Nietzsche are not relevant to the spontaneous nature of this happy coincidence, she thought.

“Nietzsche knew scruples—all scruples—as weakness, as unworthy of the Overman,” she went on. “And you, I know, have no weakness.” That may help fix the ratcat-loving bitch's wagon. Detached from Nils Rykermann, Leonie could be picked off. The details of how would present themselves in due course. Kzin-lovers might, with a little discreet prodding, shed their ideas on one another, each find justification with the other, each push the other into a more extreme position. Give him the ego gratification she knew he needed desperately, and Markham could be made into an instrument as pliable as it was useful.

She had been moving toward him as she spoke. Now she sank on her knees and kissed him, projecting humility, adoration, worship. The band of kzin-leather about her neck she had chosen for associations with a dog or kzinrett collar. Her perfume had the smallest hint of kzinrett-derived pheromones. There was a carefully chosen hint of kzinrett too, in the watered-silk pattern of her skin-tight trousers (there were costumes available with hints of tails, but that, she had decided, would have been definitely over-egging the pudding). Even for a mother-fixated man she did not think her breasts needed enhancement, but she made sure her posture, as she had previously made sure her costume, presented the best view of them. The circles of non-toxic luminous paint round her nipples did no harm as she dimmed the lights.

“Hero,” she whispered, feeling him respond.

Colonel Cumpston, Raargh thought, should be told what he was doing. For him to return and find both Raargh and Vaemar gone without notice would certainly cause him to alert the human authorities prematurely, and perhaps drastically diminish Raargh's freedom of action.

He called him on the car's Internet but was unable to reach him. The car's IT facilities were fairly basic, lacking access to a translator, and he was not sure if a human mailbox would store his voice message understandably. To back it up he typed a message with Vaemar's and the spellcheck's help in the odd human script.

He hoped that was clear. He added:

Raargh closed the cave. He had invested in modern door-seals, and he thought they should be secure.

He left the aircar inside. Flying it to München would have been quicker than trekking but would have attracted far too much attention, including that of the UNSN, who were still its legal owners. He had stealthed it during his escape with Vaemar in the confused conditions of the Kzin surrender, but any flight in a stealthed car now, with Wunderland's defenses fully in place and with sleepless machines on hair-trigger alert for Kzin raids from space, would be short and fatal.

In any event, he had no objection to going on foot. The old wounds in his legs pained him sometimes, but no kzintosh would deign to notice such things. Besides, he was in no hurry to receive counsel that he thought he was not going to like. If Rykermann agreed with Cumpston that Vaemar must begin specialized training, then perhaps this would be one of the last hunts Vaemar and he enjoyed together. Though I hope they will give him some furloughs with me still, he thought. My liver cannot part with him forever.

They carried their w'tsais, meat and salt with a few delicacies, flasks of water and bourbon, Raargh's military belt with its utility pouches, small bows and arrows, and an antique bullet-projecting rifle, plainly hunting weapons only. On liberated Wunderland kzinti with a cache of modern beam rifles did not advertise the fact. They had sun hats and ponchos. They had evolved on a colder world than Wunderland, and what clothes they took were for coolness rather than warmth. Vaemar packed a folding chessboard.

München lay southwest, in a direct line beyond the scarp of the Hohe Kalkstein, and then with many miles of dry plains and mesas, supporting little life, before one came to farming territory again. The crater of Manstein's Folly, where a human force had made a stand and engaged the Kzinti in a set-piece battle early in the war, was still radioactive, and the farms closer to München had suffered a great deal from war, neglect and dispossession.

There, near the city, things had been intense. Though there had been a strained, fraught, peace of a sort during the Occupation, no human venturing abroad had had a moment's security for his or her life who encountered a bored, angry or simply hungry kzin. Sheltering a single Resistance fighter had meant not merely farmsteads and hamlets but whole districts wiped out in reprisal. A child herding animals with the aid of a pointed stick might, with its animals, suddenly be the object of a lethal hunt by high-spirited kzin youngsters or sportive adult kzinti who decided the stick counted as a weapon. Ktrodni-Stkaa had had some of his vast estates in that area… Now there was little game there, and the farmers rehabilitating some of the land would probably take less kindly to kzinti visitors than did those in these relatively untouched backwoods. It was decorous and sensible to take an indirect route, heading at first south, cutting across to the west later. There would be more game and fewer humans. That it would take longer was also, for Raargh, good. It would, he told himself with what he knew was a rather thin rationalization, help Vaemar's education to see more territory.

They loped along with the mile-eating kzinti stride, leaping and scrambling over rocky outcrops and other obstacles with the reflex that, long ago under Father Sun, which humans called 61 Ursa Majoris, had helped develop their ancestors' claws into hands. Game ran from them, but, when they wished to hunt, did not run fast enough.

They ate well the first night. They had killed again as it was fitting for kzintosh to kill, with fangs and claws. They had also built a small fire. They did not need it for cooking, warmth or light, but Raargh knew there were humans in the forest also and he wished to advertise their presence: A fire would not be made by stalking Kzin and was, he hoped, a sign of innocent intent.

They heard the human's footfalls long before it came in sight. Raargh had Vaemar take the rifle and his bow and hide from the night-blind creature beyond the circle of firelight in tall grass. He himself sat by the fire, w'tsai to hand but not obviously so, until the human appeared.

He relaxed when it did so. It was Emma, the human female whom he and Vaemar had encountered on hunts before. She appeared to live alone somewhere in the vicinity, presumably in one of the forest glades that dotted this rolling, largely open country. She was dressed warmly against the night air, even her hands covered in bulky gloves.

“Friend!” she called. Raargh took no particular notice of the fact that she called it in the Female Tongue of the Kzin (the Heroes' Tongue used the term “friend” very sparingly and with complex connotations) and pronounced it as correctly as a human throat might.

Raargh watched her unspeaking, save for an ambiguous “Urrr” in his throat as she approached. As she strode into the firelight before him she went down in the prostration of a human slave before its master. It was not something he had seen for five years.

“What do you want?” Raargh was certainly on speaking terms with some humans, and for Vaemar's sake as well as for the jobs he picked up he made an effort to be more outgoing in that direction than most, but very few Kzinti admitted humans to conversation easily. Since she had spoken in the Female Tongue he replied in the Heroes' Tongue. Naturally and without thought he employed the Dominant Tense. She switched to Wunderlander—the Female Tongue was not good for complicated conversation, but her posture, and, as he could now tell, her voice, remained humble.

“Noble Hero, please call your companion out.”

“Companion?”

She raised a nitesite.

“Noble Hero, I am aware from this device that there is another Hero ensconced in the tall grass not far away. I think it is Vaemar. I mean you no harm. And what harm could a single manrret do to two Heroes?”

She had a point there. And she seemed truly alone. Raargh had heard no other footsteps or mechanisms. He called and Vaemar bounded back towards the light.

“What do you want?” he said again.

“You!” She opened her gloved hands and fired the guns they concealed, spinning on her heel from Raargh to Vaemar. Kzin are inhumanly fast in battle, and it was a very near thing, but with the guns already in her hands she was fractionally faster. When they fell and had ceased to move she called an eight of Kzinti out of hiding and loaded them onto a sled.

Leonie emerged from the great mouth of the Drachenholen as Nils Rykermann landed. She was smeared with mud and had a strakkaker slung over her shoulder. They embraced.

“Another dirty day for you.” Nils Rykermann was wearing a modern fabric jacket. The wet soil fell from it.

“We've penetrated the old 19-K tunnel complex,” she answered. “Plenty of mess to clean up.”

They walked together under the scarred and blasted cliffs through the cave entrance and into the great ballroom of the Drachenholen's twilight zone. Rykermann cast an odd look for a moment at an old habitat module, stripped and plundered long ago by the desperate scavengers of the Resistance, now refitted. He seldom passed it without making a small gesture which Leonie never commented on. The limestone formations, once an incredible fantasy of flowering stone, were blackened and broken above them. The cave floors had been cleared down to bedrock. Bright lights had been strung here and there. There seemed to be no crepuscular life left to disturb.

“Remember our first trips here?” asked Leonie.

“Yes. And the others.”

“We thought the caves would be here forever, unchanged. A great biological treasure house. I remember the weeks I took to excavate my first fossil… then we chucked fossils aside as we shoveled out the guano.”

“Guano meant bombs,” said Rykermann. “Bombs meant dead kzin. Water under the bridge. We'll restore it. What have you done with the students?”

She gestured to lights emerging from one of the tunnels beyond. Several young men and women, wearing masks and breathing apparatus, were trooping out of the cave carrying litters. They bore loads of bones and rags and a few partly mummified bodies and body-parts, human and kzin.

“Decent burial,” she said. “I've wanted to give it to them for a long time.”

“One might say they had decent burial already,” said Rykermann.

“They were our comrades. I think some would have wanted their bodies to go home. I found Argyle von Saar. He loved the caves, of course. I left him where he was. He'd be happy his body went into the Drachenholen's food-chain. But some of the others… they'd like prayers and headstones, I think, and grass and sun and the flutterbys.”

“You speak as if they were still alive.”

“Of course. This ugly rubbish isn't the people we knew. What about these?” She gestured. Another group of students was emerging around a small sledge, purring loudly as it was lifted by a Kzin-derived gravity-motor. It was piled with weapons: kzinti beam rifles and plasma guns, heavier tripod-mounted squad weapons, gas canisters, old human Lewis guns and smart guns, all manner of detritus. Someone had set another mummified kzin on top of the pile, in parody of a conqueror's triumph.

“Some of those may still be charged. Get them into one of the outside modules and lock it. I'll keep the key. We'll have to take them to the city as soon as possible. I don't want to lose any more students… Come to think of it,” Rykermann went on, “I was talking to a fellow yesterday who began as a museum guard on Earth. UNSN Brigadier now. There should be a museum of the Resistance. He might be able to give us advice in setting it up. Let future generations look at those Lewis guns and wonder at what we were forced to fight with.”

“I don't like all these mummies,” Leonie said.

“They're hardly very aesthetically pleasant. But they're not the people we knew. Just organic matter going back to nature a bit more slowly. As you say, ugly rubbish.”

“I mean, if the skin and tissues haven't been eaten, it shows how little life is left in the caves, where they once crawled with scavengers.”

“I knew those scavengers well.” They leaned together and he slipped his arm around her.

“So did I. So much of the biosystems have been destroyed.”

“It was to be expected,” said Rykermann. “Plasma guns, gas, biologicals… There are other caves. We'll find the lost species and reintroduce them here.”

“No sign of live morlocks yet. I think we and the kzinti may have killed them all between us.”

“Then be sure to get all the dead material you can. It might make a good graduate student project to clone them.”

“I feel guilty about them,” said Leonie.

“You killed a good few yourself, my dear. You and me and our furry friend together at one stage.”

“I know. But we invaded their habitat. And… we have no right to wipe out species.”

“Not even near-brainless predators of atrocious habits?”

She was silent a moment before replying. Then she answered:

“Not even them… Not even, I think, predators of atrocious habits whose brains are comparable to our own.”

“I don't know any creatures whose brains are comparable to our own,” he said.

There was a slight stiffening of her body, imperceptible to a casual observer.

“Not even one who saved our lives?”

An edge of iron entered his voice. “I paid that debt in a currency that was understood.”

Leonie had known terror in these caves during the wars. The Resistance had decorated her and the Free Wunderland government had rewarded her for heroism. She had fought monsters and horrors in the hills of Wunderland and in this stone jungle and beaten them. But now she looked at her husband with a new kind of fear in her eyes.

Raargh recovered consciousness in a police web. Turning his head cautiously, he saw Vaemar similarly restrained a few feet away. There was no sky above them. Their packs had been laid on a small stand in front of them.

The light was reddish, and somehow familiar, as were the high sandstone walls. He remembered: Some outstanding NCO's, himself among them, had been lectured by senior officers of the General Staff. It was like the palace of a kzinti noble, a replica of the noble architecture of Old Kzin.

Once, rage would have exploded in him and if he could not have torn the web apart he would have torn himself apart in his efforts to do so. But his years as an NCO, and even more the five years since the Liberation, had taught Raargh self-control. He did not even scream. He remained still and watched Vaemar slowly open his eyes and raise his head.

Footsteps. Human and kzin. A door opening. The human female Emma entered, accompanied by another female he did not know, a male human and a young adult kzin, all armed with nerve-disrupters. The humans were wearing bizarre costumes of orange with variegated stripes. It was almost as if they were trying to imitate the markings of a kzin pelt. The human male bore on the pale skin of its forehead the tattoo of Chuut-Riit's house service. Since tattoos could be removed, Raargh knew it must have retained this voluntarily. Its pallor, and that of the second female, suggested to him that they had long lived away from the sun. The humans went down in the prostration before them, and the second female began to speak in the Slaves' Patois.

“Noble Hero, this slave craves your indulgence to hear her. My daughter and I have done great discourtesy, to you and to He whose blood is the most glorious on this planet. I beg you, stay your wrath while I speak. It is for the sake of the Patriarchy that I have acted so.

“I was Henrietta, once executive secretary, chief and proudest human slave of Chuut-Riit. I now act to fulfill his legacy. This is my daughter Emma; Andre, who was house-slave also; and Ensign, who helps us. Behold!” She held up a sign that every Kzin knew as the Sigril of the Patriarchy, emblazoned with the cadet claw of Chuut-Riit.

“You do not remember, perhaps,” she told Vaemar, “but you were once a guest at my house in the happy times. Your Honored Sire Chuut-Riit honored my home by attending my children's naming-days. Once he brought you… You enjoyed playing, I remember, with a ball of fiber…” Her voice shook for a moment, and she made a sound of grief.

“I know Heroes do not lie,” she went on. “I ask you to give me your Names as your Words, upon this Sigil, that you will not harm me or any human of mine this day if I release you, that you will allow me to show you certain things that the Heroes of this planet, and this Hero above all”—she gestured at Vaemar—“need to know. It may be that the survival of the Heroic Race is at stake, and not on Ka'ashi only, but under Father Sun himself.”

Raargh glared. He hardly trusted himself to speak to this monkey who had dared lay hands on him—and on Vaemar, who was his charge, given by the Fanged God to replace his own dead son, and a Prince of the Blood. Yet the male's tattoo compelled attention.

The manrret was abasing herself before Vaemar now. Most young male kzin had even less self-control than their elders, but Vaemar, as Raargh had long known, was different. Chuut-Riit, his blood-sire, had been a genius and a thinker, and on the day they met, Vaemar, still a kitten, had shown he was his Sire's true son, possibly saving Raargh's life and a clawful of other Kzin lives in the process. Vaemar was still very young—he was not even adolescent, but remained brilliant beyond his years, with the insight and control of a superior adult.

Further, Raargh had taught him to enhance that control and patience day by day, instead of dwelling on the screaming attack which a conventional combat-master would have drilled into him, and which play with siblings—always potentially ready to turn in a lethal pack upon any individual suspected of weakness or oddity—would have made into a virtually unbreakable imprint. Vaemar had said nothing yet. He was watching and waiting. He turned his eyes toward Raargh, ears lifted in question.

The old kzin's ears were so torn and scarred as to be virtually useless for signaling anything but the most basic emotions. He growled out an assent, Vaemar following suit. Henrietta killed the web and they stepped onto the floor of the fortress. Looking about him, Raargh saw tunnels running off into dimness. The roof was very high, and there was machinery and scaffolding. His nose brought him a complex mixture of hydrocarbons, plastics, chemicals, foodstuffs and living rock.

Colonel Cumpston read the kzin's message: SEEK RYKERMANN ADVICE. The kzintis' dwelling was closed and sealed. Their tracks showed they had left on foot, not long before. He checked with the telltale of his car's locator and confirmed that they had already made some way south.

Chasing after them would be pointless. It would be easy to catch up with them but it would probably only anger the old kzin, who, if he had wanted another companion, would have said so. “Never force your company on a kzin” was a pretty basic maxim for any human. And if two male kzinti could not look after themselves, who on Wunderland could?

Well, Cumpston knew, Raargh and Nils and Leonie Rykermann had a curious bond between them. Raargh had told him of how they had saved each other in the caves when surrounded by morlocks and when all hope seemed lost. But… his training had been to rule out assumptions. He settled himself in the car, closed the canopy to avoid the attentions of the flutterbys, and clicked the computer. The map with its two blinking smears of red light disappeared. Rykermann, like all Wunderland politicians and other prominent citizens, was the subject of an ARM dossier.

Before the invasion he had had some celebrity as a biologist and explorer but had steered clear of politics outside the University, apart from being appointed to one of the defense committees set up in haste shortly before the Invasion. He had married Leonie Hansen, his former student, in the hills. Their Resistance records were heroic, and after the Liberation he had been elected to the Parliament's lower house. Since then his politics had been fairly mainstream. He had a place on several committees now.

Wunderland electors, having weakened the grip of the Herrenmanner of the Families, did not want a caste of professional politicians developing to replace them, and, like most Wunderland politicians, Rykermann had kept up his day job: professor of biology at the München University. That, Cumpston thought, would also give him more television exposure than an ordinary Deputy.

There was a list of his community activities and clubs. He was president and organizer of a foundation to commemorate the university's Special Professor of Mathematics and Astrometaphysics, the discoverer of Carmody's Transform, who had died in the Invasion, and apparently he worked hard for it, raising funds for commemorative projects and scholarships. In his own field he and Leonie had made the rehabilitation of the caves one of their major professional projects.

There was also a list of his associates and meetings, always a high priority for profiling with ARM dossiers.

He didn't have a lot to do with Ulf Reichstein-Markham, a Resistance hero of the first rank, and now a major spokesman for tolerance and rehabilitation of the remaining Kzin on Wunderland. Cumpston had met Markham several times. Leonie Rykermann seemed to have had more to do with him on professional bodies than did her husband. She, Cumpston noticed, had even tried to set up a small nonprofit employment agency to use kzin talents with Markham on the board of governors. There was a record of a speech at the opening in which she referred to the kzin soldier who had saved her from the morlocks. As with her husband, the cave project took up a lot of her time.

There were also meetings between Rykermann and Jocelyn van der Stratt. Rather a lot of them. That name was flagged in hypertext on the dossier. He jumped to it. She was, as he knew, a very senior police officer. Former member of the Collaborationist police, exonerated and decorated for her secret services to the Resistance. And flagged notices: She had a number of associates in the Exterminationist Party.

Certainly, it seemed, she did not like kzinti. There had been several reports, and she had been reprimanded for “excessive zeal” in dealing with them since the Liberation. Cumpston thought to himself that any officer who, on Wunderland, got into trouble for excessive zeal in dealing with kzinti must be excessive indeed.

The dates of the meetings scrolled up. There was a pattern, but it took time to see: the meetings between Nils Rykermann and Jocelyn van der Stratt has nearly all occurred when Leonie Rykermann was working at the caves.

That might, of course, mean nothing. But… a clandestine love affair? That didn't fit the psychological profiling of Rykermann anyway, but such profiling wasn't infallible, and Cumpston knew well enough that there was, to use a very old phrase, nowt [1] so queer as folk. And the profiling of Jocelyn van der Stratt indicated more ambiguity. Which added up to no more than guesswork. Circumstantial hints of sexual liaisons were a field rich in misdirection. By the Black Swan, he thought, I hope I guess right! He remembered one of the old books ARM had resurrected for its hastily-contrived course of military psychology: Slide Rule, by an early designer of flying machines named Nevil Shute:

The war and Occupation on Wunderland had gone on for not four years, but more than fifty, growing bleaker and grimmer in every one of them. Could I have lived fifty years under the Kzin and stayed sane? he wondered. Under a sometimes desperately maintained veneer of normality, madness was rife in many circles. Not that Earth and Sol were free of such problems. Few people knew how close collapse had been when the Crashlanders had arrived from We Made It with the hyperdrive.

He looked back at Leonie's mention of the incident in the caves battle, then put in a couple of keywords and searched Rykermann's speeches inside and outside the Parliament. There was nothing comparable, no mention of the time, however brief and however secondary to the main campaigns, when the two humans and the kzin had fought as allies. No mention of Leonie's experience. There were, however, several references to the deceased Professor Carmody, “murdered by the Kzin.”

Colonel Cumpston activated a higher security clearance. Buford Early's square dark face appeared on the screen. Cumpston wondered for a second if the general ever went off duty. Early turned toward him and removed a cigar from his mouth. It was an invitation to speak. Early expressed no surprise at Cumpston's request. He just nodded, heavy, impassive, a little frightening even to those who thought they knew him well.

Raargh and Vaemar were still heading south. Cumpston took off and headed southwest, toward München.

Chapter 4

The Glory Bee had dropped out of hyperdrive beyond Alpha Centauri's vast singularity and commenced its slow fall through the double star's gravity well several days previously.

Now Wunderland's surface filled most of the bridge's view-ports. Dawn was approaching München but the city's lights could be made out at the edge of the retreating crescent of night. They were cleared to land in a few hours.

“Well, does any of it come back?” Patrick Quickenden's voice was tender.

She gazed down with wide eyes. “The sky… some of the sky is familiar, I think. I remember the constellations.”

“That's good.”

“I hope so. I've read enough to be apprehensive.”

“There's been a lot of rehabilitation and rebuilding in the last five years.”

“There must have been. That looks like a big city.”

“We'll know the details of it soon enough.”

“It's a strange feeling, Paddy. I can't tell you… It's frightening.”

“I think I can guess something of it. But there's no need for fear.”

“Nightmares of great tiger-cats, for years.” She gave a little off-key laugh. “Death, flames. Comforting myself when I woke up with the thought that they were only nightmares. And then finding they were all real… I have one flash often, of a horrible scene in a burning street. And… seeing a flash that I know is a deliberate nuclear explosion. I'm frightened of the tigers, still. Silly of me. But they were with me in that coldsleep coffin. They've got deep into what's left of my brain.”

“There's no need for fear now,” he told her gently. “Remember, the Kzin are beaten on Wunderland and humans are pushing them back across space. Thanks to you. We'll push them farther yet, again thanks to you.”

“I'm afraid that I shouldn't have come back, though I was the one who insisted on it.” She gripped his hand tightly, her free hand brushing at her head with a nervous gesture. Her fingertips touched scars, invisible under plastic surgery and under the gold of her hair.

“We've got a job to do,” he said. “I know you'll do it.”

“Brain… my brain's still pretty good, isn't it?”

“Well, if you don't strain it too much, it can handle little jobs like building the engine that shatters the light barrier from nothing but an alien manual. I'd say that's at least a reasonable performance. About average for someone of your IQ, perhaps—if there was another human being to take an average from.”

“I always hated being… abnormal… But now it's the absence… that chunk of memory that's gone… What was I?”

“When they pulled you out of the coldsleep tank on that derelict, your alpha-wave was still off the scale. No one, no one, else could have done what you did! Don't you know why they sometimes called you Lydia Pink?”

“I did hear that name a couple of times when we were on Earth. I didn't know they were referring to me. I remember somebody said it and you shut him up pretty quickly. I wondered about that at the time.”

“I suppose I'm overprotective. There are security considerations, and… other things. But if you've any doubts about your mind…”

“What's it mean? I suppose compared to a Jinxian I'm pink. I don't live under Sirius.”

“It's from a very old song someone rediscovered. Under Templemount, the Pychwar people on Earth went through all the ancient army and navy songs they could find when keeping morale up was a tough business. It wasn't one of the useful ones then, but somebody kept it in mind. Only the first three lines are relevant:

“Dimity, don't cry, please!” He kissed her forehead. “Anyway, there are good reasons why your identity, and certainly your precise role in the scheme of things, shouldn't be publicized too widely. Call me paranoid, but I'd rather the Kzin—and some humans, for that matter—didn't know the interpreter of the Outsiders' manual,—the chief builder of the hyperdrive, was in space, even now.

“Don't worry,” he went on, “songs round a piano don't carry over four light-years, and both the hyperwave and the ship traffic is monitored. No one here knows who you are who shouldn't…”

“It's not that sort of fear. Do I go to Wunderland under a false name?”

“A good idea if we can keep it up. There are still kzin on Wunderland. It's well-named, by all accounts. A beautiful, glorious world: open skies—I hope I can get used to that—low gravity. Can you sleep for a while? I'll make you something?”

“I'm still afraid. I don't know why. Please, hold me, Paddy.”

Jocelyn van der Stratt read the details of the We Made It party with considerable interest. She called up some verifying information, and then confirmed to her deputy that she would join Arthur Guthlac and the Wunderland Science and Industry Authorities' delegations in meeting them personally. She also called Ulf Reichstein Markham and canceled their meeting that evening. She had not changed her mind about his usefulness as a tool, but he could be put into reserve. It looked as if another and possibly neater solution to the problem of Leonie Rykermann might be in the offing.

Arthur Guthlac should be brought more firmly on side. That could be accomplished. You'll be harder to seduce than Markham, I guess, she thought, but I've had bigger challenges before. You're not bad-looking either. I don't think the kzinrett-suit for you. Not the first time, anyway. I've never had a Flatlander, or a Brigadier, or, unless I miss my guess, a virgin. But you might find you get lucky on Wunderland tonight. She dressed, again with some thought, and put a call to Guthlac on her vidphone. Postwar Wunderland lacked such luxuries as transfer booths but, she was sure, he would come quickly enough.

Colonel Cumpston landed his car near Grossdrache, the cave mouth that was the main entrance to the great complex of the Drachenholen. He had changed into UNSN field dress with the badges of his rank discreetly visible. Students were still shrouding the human mummies. One armed with a strakkaker disposed of a small pack of snuffling advokats and a couple of the even more detested zeitungers, also poisonous little carrion eaters and disease reservoirs but with, in addition, a limited psychic power of broadcasting depression to humans and other sophonts.

The kzin fragments had been stacked in one of the many blast craters nearby and burned, without deliberate insult if without particular reverence or ceremony. In any event, cremation was common among kzinti.

Nils Rykermann had had the caves gazetted as a wildlife sanctuary and restricted area long before the war, but now, when they still contained many dead bodies and many live munitions, that restriction was taken more seriously. None of the students had the authority to question Cumpston's ARM credentials, but they insisted he take mask, lamp, compass, helmet and utility pack and provided him with a guide.

The Rykermanns were at the site of one of the old morlock “towns.” Long-dead bodies lay around still: dead morlocks, dead humans, dead kzinti. Lights shone off grinning skulls with peeling crusts of blackened skin, on corpses cuddled over sheaves of bare ribs, on long, naked limb bones.

“A lot of old friends,” said Rykermann, when the guide had left. “We keep rediscovering unknown or forgotten chambers. It was a long war.”

“Well,” said Cumpston, “it's over now.”

“Is it?”

“It is for this planet. And against the hyperdrive the kzinti don't have much chance in space.”

“You think so? We're going to drop out of hyperspace and say to them: 'Nice planet you've got here. Just hand it over, if you wouldn't mind?' And they'll say: 'Oh indeed, Noble Monkey! Anything to oblige!' It's going to be like that, is it? Do you know how many we lost taking Hssin? Not even a proper planetary base, just a collection of bubble habitats? Have you heard any reports on the fighting on Down?”

Cumpston said nothing to Rykermann's sarcasm. He had, he told himself, sometimes regretted opening his mouth, but had never regretted not opening it. His first remark had been to test Rykermann's reaction, in any event. “I can tell you about Down,” he said. “My information's fairly up to date.”

“It's not over,” said Rykermann. “And as for this planet, it won't be over while kzin are on it.”

“Nils!” Leonie Rykermann's voice could have been conveying a number of things, but her body language betrayed distress.

“I'm sorry…” said Nils Rykermann. “I get a bit emotional sometimes…” And then, as he saw a couple of the small decorations Cumpston had made a point of wearing for this visit: “You were there on Hssin, weren't you?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know how ferocious they are. And what fighters. Every male trained in high-tech warfare, and practically every male who lives to adulthood, even the telepaths or computer nerds, who are considered feeble and ridiculous by kzinti standards, capable of dismantling a tiger in claw-to-claw combat.”

“I think I've known that for quite a while. Hssin wasn't the first fight I've been in.”

“These morlocks tend to be more complete than a lot of the other remains,” said Rykermann. “But we'll have to find out more about their life cycle before we can try to re-create the species.”

“How interesting a species are they? Are they worth re-creating?”

“I was interested, before the Invasion, in seeing how intelligent they were. They gave us a surprise in the fighting by using stone weapons. I also noticed a great variety of noises they made. There's a strong possibility they had language. And the fact that they broke the legs of prisoners to stop them escaping while they kept them alive and fresh to eat shows a certain capacity to plan and anticipate behavior. They're a species, however unattractive, with minds, however dim, and no threat to us now. Given that, perhaps we have some sort of duty to re-create them.”

“I see. How effective were their weapons?”

“You see these scars?” Rykermann touched his neck and shoulders. “Most of them are from morlock blows. The kzin who was with us got a similar collection, even prettier.”

“Do you happen to know that Kzin's Name?”

“Just a minute!” Rykermann suddenly drew himself up and stared at Cumpston as if seeing him for the first time. The tall Wunderlander easily overtopped the stocky Earthman. “What's this about? Who are you? What are you doing here? This is a restricted project!”

Cumpston produced a card and shone his light on it. Nils Rykermann inspected the card in silence, showed it to Leonie and handed it back.

Rykermann drew a deep breath. “All right,” he said more calmly. “I'll ask again. What do you want?”

“This was quite a long hike for me,” said Cumpston, “and breathing the dust on the way is thirsty work. You wouldn't have anything like a cup of tea, would you?”

Leonie looked at him gratefully. Nils Rykermann breathed heavily for a moment, then he seemed calmer. Cumpston remembered that Rykermann was now also a politician.

“All right,” he said. There were a couple of camp stools set up in one corner with a small utility module. Cumpston sat himself on a thick section of broken stalagmite column. Leonie poured the tea, which, from his dossier, he knew she was fond of. With the skulls and the mummies staring at them under the harsh lights, it was, Cumpston thought, a strange place for a picnic.

Rykermann seemed to welcome the chance to talk now. Cumpston drew him out on the battles that had been fought in the caves. After some time he brought the talk back to the kzin soldier who had fought with them against the morlocks.

“Was that Raargh?”

“Yes…”

“He seems to have been a reasonable ratcat. Didn't you save each other's lives?”

“How did you know that?”

“I know things. Records are my business. Who knows, I might write a history of the war someday.”

“He was on an operation to wipe us out in the caves.”

“You don't look wiped out from where I'm standing.”

“I repaid him… I suppose there was one other thing I owe him for, though. He saw me when I was being treated and told me his Name. Orderly who sewed me up wanted to castrate me to make me more docile if I was to be allowed to live, but Raargh told him it was incompatible with Fighters' Privileges and didn't seem to work with monkeys anyway. As well as being Sergeant, Raargh had just got his Name, and Orderly took notice. I was grateful for that.” Rykermann laughed sardonically. “Apart from anything else, we had no transplant facilities for any subsequent… rectification.”

“If I may ask in turn, how did you know what they were saying?”

“I'd been studying the Heroes' Tongue as well as the slave language ever since the Invasion. It had been a long war even then.”

“I remember. Did you have dealings with Raargh again?”

“I kept out of all kzinti's way. We both did.”

“You never thought about him?”

“Why should I?”

“I think I would have, in the circumstances… wondered what made up such a creature, and so on.”

“I knew all I wanted to know about the kzinti. I'd been involved in ground fighting from the first. We… someone else and I… got away from Manstein's Folly just before they nuked it. As for Raargh… Kzin NCOs tend to be… something like human NCOs. Tough. Capable. It's rarer for them to become full officers, because of the immobilist nature of Kzin society. I had to study them once. I don't have to now. I've got enough to think about here.”

“Raargh—I only discovered his new Name later—saved us both,” said Leonie. “I'd given no word not to fight, and I'm not sure the Kzinti would have taken the word of a female Man anyway, but… I didn't want to fight him.”

“Have you seen him since?”

“No. Is that why you're here?”

“Yes. I gather he may be looking for you—not as an enemy, I might say. He's lived with humans successfully since the end of the fighting. Actually, I think he wants to ask your advice.”

Rykermann shrugged. “If you're what your credentials say you are, you know our interests. Apart from my Parliamentary duties I'm interested in these caves and in my students.” He watched Leonie move away to take recordings from some instruments, then continued: “I've no time for or interest in ratcats. I've seen enough of them to last me the rest of my life. When we get the ecosystems of these caves functioning again I've plenty of other projects. One of my first dreams as a young naturalist was to explore and classify Grossgeister Swamp properly. But it's a little below the caves in my list of priorities now—and it breaks my heart to see it. Our furry friends boiled the center out of Grossgeister with their heat-induction ray when some Wabbits took refuge in it. A great biological paradise, a Golconda of new species, only a short flight from München, and more than half of it sterilized by them! Rehabilitating Grossgeister will be my next project, though there's no way I can bring back the lost species there—we don't even know what most of them were! Classifying Grossgeister was going to be my greatest project, but they've destroyed its heart as they've destroyed so much of our lives. And once a thing is lost… it's lost.”

“Don't you know what he wants to ask you about? Or want to know?”

“Not particularly. I'm not in the business of advising ratcats.” He laughed abruptly. “If one bizarre day they got the vote and they were in my Parliamentary constituency I suppose I'd have to talk to them. I can't see that happening, somehow.”

“Well, I seem to have come on a fool's errand,” said Cumpston. “Still, seeing your work has been fascinating.”

“Come back in another five years,” said Rykermann. “We might have a clean planet by then. Leonie will show you the way back to the crepuscular zone.”

Cumpston fed the tapes of the conversation and the films of Rykermann and Leonie into the car's computer. Buford Early was back to him before he had traveled far.

“According to the speech and body language analyses, coupled with the analyses of their earlier speeches and their contact profiles several things emerge plainly,” he said. “Rykermann is an Exterminationist. His wife isn't. She half-knows he is and she's trying to convince herself he doesn't mean it.”

“That's bad.”

“But it's not quite that simple. He wants all kzin dead but he feels under a debt to Raargh. For Leonie's life at least as much as for his own. I don't think he values his own life very highly. There's a lot of death wish in that boy.”

“Do we know why?”

“Do I have to draw you a diagram? Little thing you might have noticed called the war. It screwed up a lot of Wunderlanders pretty badly. And not only Wunderlanders. People did things they can't live with now, lost people they can't live without, sometimes. The euphoria of Liberation is wearing off and survivors' guilt is coming back. People are blaming themselves for things they did to stay alive. Certainly he has a major hang-up about this girl professor, for whose death he blames the Kzin and himself about equally, depending on the weather and what he last ate. Who knows all the details? But after fifty-three years of Kzinti occupation there aren't too many on Wunderland who are a picture of glowing mental health. And Rykermann had a tougher war than most. Why do you think he's working a lot harder than he needs to now?”

“Because he's politically ambitious?”

“In that case he'd be concentrating on the one thing: politics. Instead of which he's scattering himself all over the shop—politics, cave antics, television features, the memorial to this professor—all displacement activity. He's trying to stop himself thinking, and I think he's going to snap soon, but he could do a lot of harm before he does.”

“So what do we do?”

“Give me time to think, boy. I can't come up with an optimum plan in a second.”

“Raargh is seeking him out.”

“What for? Still wanting his head for a wall decoration? Wouldn't be popular now, not with Rykermann a celebrity. That's how he found him, I suppose. The old devil must watch monkey television.”

“For his advice. I gather he trusts him because of their old alliance.”

“Advice? Advice on what?”

“What to do about Vaemar's future. I think Vaemar is with him.”

“Cumpston, Vaemar is valuable!”

“Raargh thinks so too. For what it's worth, so do I. That's why I disturbed your esteemed labors.”

“There are hopes riding on that cub for… for… Where are they now?”

“Close by. I've got them on the tracker.”

“Get in closer. In fact check them now.”

“They're not far away. But… Buford, the signal is odd. Muzzy. But it's there. They may be resting up in a cave. They're cats. They love exploring holes.”

“Find them! Go in now! Close enough to help them if need be. If they must see you, so be it. Keep them away from Rykermann. If you need help I'll send the cavalry.”

“They called the spaceport the Himmelfährte,” said Jocelyn. “The way to Heaven. Not for the reason you might think obvious, but because so many humans died slaving here when the Kzin wanted to expand it in a hurry. This place is built on human bones.”

“I see,” said Arthur Guthlac.

“There are the memorials.”

“Pretty realistic. Are those children?”

“Yes,” she said. “We commissioned the best sculptors on Wunderland. Something never to be forgotten. There are going to be a lot of memorials on this planet. We're going to make sure nothing's forgotten, ever.”

A section of one of the kzinti warcraft hulks, cut free, fell to the ground in a metallic crash and a cloud of dust. A clutch of dead kzin, freeze-dried in space years before, stared out eyelessly at them from the new cavity in the hull. Jocelyn banked the car away and headed for the main spaceport building.

“I suppose the ratcat-lovers are very pleased it's all kzin-sized,” she remarked as they flew between the huge doors into the parking bays. “Convenient for them when they come back.” In fact human-sized facilities were replacing the giant and brutally utilitarian kzinti military buildings and installations. Black paint was smeared over a wall that had once been adorned with a heroic kzin mural. “That'll be them now.” She gestured to the tube extending from a recently-landed shuttle. Professor Meinertzhagen, the head of the Wunderland Science Authority, and other gray-uniformed Wunderland officials who Arthur Guthlac had met previously, joined them.

“She's turning a few heads!” he remarked, as the We Made It party approached.

“Not my image of a hyperdrive expert,” Jocelyn told him. There was no need to specify who they meant. “That's odd,” she added.

“What?”

“I'd say she's a Wunderlander. That's not a Crashlander's musculature. Look at the rest of them. Far more solidly built. Blondie's muscles were formed in Wunderland gravity with a lot of exercise, although I'd say she's lived in Crashlander gravity for a while since. Also, she's walking scared.”

“Agoraphobia? The original Crashlander party that returned to Earth tended to suffer from it under an open sky.”

“There are treatments for that now. And those ears. Those are Herrenmann ears.”

“I wouldn't know.”

“You're a flatlander. And I'm a cop, remember?” She gave him an enigmatic smile as she said it. Her swinging hand brushed his and for a moment she squeezed his fingers.

“We notice things like that,” she went on. “Look at her eyes. She's as jumpy as a Kzin on a hot osmium roof. Watch.” She made a peculiar and difficult noise with her lips. The ears of the blonde woman and of several passersby twitched noticeably. The blonde woman looked bewildered. Jocelyn's face was composed as if nothing had happened.

“Once I looked for UNSN infiltrators.”

Her words had taken them into uncomfortable territory. The head of the Crashlander delegation shook hands, carefully restraining his grip.

“Patrick Quickenden,” he introduced himself. “Helen Moffet, Roger Selene, Sam Kim…”

“We've got a couple of cars waiting,” said Jocelyn when the introductions were completed. “We're lunching at the university. You'll be able to see the city on the way.”

The Crashlander party had seen Earth, but as the belt carried them toward the cars, they gazed in astonishment at Wunderland's open skies, mild weather, tall hills and buildings and blazes of multicolored plants. We need not spend our lives under a single star again, thought Arthur Guthlac. Once I saved money in the hope of a cheap holiday on the Moon before I died. The hyperdrive has liberated us from more than the Kzin. Let this war finish—let the threat be destroyed, and Starman will come into his own! And then, Why, I could be a Wunderlander!

“There's more dust in the air,” said the blond woman suddenly. She had been watching a flutterby that rested on the tip of her finger, fanning its delicate wings.

“More dust than what?” Arthur asked.

“Than I expected, I suppose. The light is different.”

“There was a war,” said Jocelyn. “A big war. There were nukes used during the Invasion, during the intra-kzinti war, during the Liberation, and worse than nukes during the UNSN's ramscoop raid before that. It hasn't all settled yet. But it will. We're going to build a better planet here. A cleaner planet!”

“I see… of course.” Her face contorted suddenly and she clutched at Arthur Guthlac's arm. Whatever gravity she came from, her grip was so painfully tight he thought for a moment she was attacking him. Her blue eyes were wide with terror. He saw her fight down a scream.

Three of the scrapyard workers across the way were loading a sled. One of them was a kzin.

“There are quite a few of them around,” Jocelyn said, following her gaze. Her voice was cold and expressionless. Either she disliked the sight or she despised the woman's obvious stab of terror. “You needn't worry about it.” She rustled the dried objects that hung from her belt-ring. “Kzinti ears,” she said, then added, “and human collabos. A custom we copied from them.”

The blond woman stared at the things for a moment. Her hand brushed her hair in a gesture Jocelyn had already noted. The sledge was loaded now. The workers killed the engines of their lifts and one of the humans opened a flask. He tossed a can of beer to the other human and one to the kzin. The delegation and the reception committee boarded their cars and headed toward the university, flying by a scenic route. But more than one head turned to look back at the trio.

Chapter 5

“This redoubt,” Henrietta said, “was begun by Chuut-Riit shortly before the ramscoop raid. Initially he feared a coup against him by an alliance of other kzin, particularly followers of Kfrashaka-Admiral and Ktrodni-Stkaa, much more than he feared humans.

“He kept it secret from all but a few of his own pride, and me, Executive Secretary and most senior and trusted of his slaves. Very shortly before his murder he began to have other thoughts, which he entrusted, posthumously, to me alone.

“Traat-Admiral was of course one who knew of the original project, though not his very deepest thoughts, and after Chuut-Riit's murder Traat-Admiral carried it on. He and nearly all his pride perished in space. By the time of the human landings it was unfinished, much as you see this section now. But enough had been done to enable it to support a few of us. As well that more Heroes did not know of it, or they would have raided its stockpiles of weapons for the last battles.”

“Who built it, if it was secret?” asked Vaemar. His Wunderlander was correct, much better than Raargh's, though with a nonhuman accent. Raargh had procured sleep tapes for him to learn from.

“Slaves, Noble Prince. They were killed before the surrender. Then the Heroes who had supervised them went out to die heroically.”

“I was at my post at the Governor's Palace in München when the end came. On the day of the cease-fire the mob stormed the palace. Zroght-Guard-Captain and some of the others made a last stand there. I escaped with Andre and a few other loyal humans of Chuut-Riit's household. And with Emma, my eldest daughter. Save for her I could not get my family away. Many humans who had obeyed and served the Heroes, who had interceded with them for humans and kept order and production on this world, were lynched by people who owed their lives to them. The mob seized my man and fed him alive to kzinretti in the zoo cages. I think a priest intervened to save the children. Or perhaps not. I do not remember those days well.

“In the chaos we made our way here, mingling as need be with the hordes of refugees,” she went on. “Ensign here and other Heroes who had been informed in time got here as well. Chuut-Riit had given me this shortly before his murder, warning me that he had a premonition of doom, and that this was his last ktzirrarourght in case doom fell.” She fished at a chain around her neck and drew forth an antique gold and silver locket, a human thing, perhaps made in Neue Dresden. “It contained four things: a map and the keys to this fortress, a tuft of his fur, and a hologram recording.

“While you slept, Noble One, I already tested your nucleonic acid against his. I know the reports that you are his son are true.”

“This was built, all in a few weeks?” asked Vaemar, looking about him again.

“Indeed, Noble One. You come of the greatest race in the Universe.”

“Truly, I come of a great people… Great works.”

“Yes, there is nothing the kzinti cannot accomplish, though all the fates turn against them. But I have no secrets from your blood. We had an advantage. ARM suppressed the knowledge of Sinclair fields on Earth, but they had been used to enhance the reaction-drives of the first interstellar slowboats. There were still plans of them in the old archives here.”

“Sinclair fields?”

“Time precesses faster inside them. They would have had major military and weapons applications for both sides—war-winning weapons if we had got them in time—but we only rediscovered the plans late in the day, and used them here to speed up production. Inside the fields, much could be built while little time passed outside. We used them also, to grow and age the trees we planted above to conceal the work, even, with high-pressure pumps, to grow stalactites to conceal disturbances at cave entrances. And to grow some stray kzin kittens quickly to adulthood, increasing our strength. We have young Heroes here, thoroughly trained, who know only this place and its discipline.

“As for the major rooms and excavations, the God had done much of that already. These chambers link to the great caves of the Hohe Kalkstein, are indeed an extension of them. But still, it was a mighty feat… Come with me now. Noble Prince, do you remember your Honored Sire Chuut-Riit?”

“A little,” said Vaemar. “Images.”

“You will see your Honored Sire once more.”

Henrietta, accompanied by Andre, Emma and Ensign, led them to another chamber. Human chairs and Kzin-sized stone fooches surrounded what looked like an auditorium. There was an instrument console and racks of sidearms on the walls as well as a few stuffed humans, a battle-drum, and other trophies that emphasized its kzinti, and in particular its military kzinti, appearance. There was even a gonfalon of Old Kzin, and some of the artificial lights shone from cressets of antique appearance.

At a gesture from Henrietta, Raargh and Vaemar reclined on two of the fooches. Emma at the console touched a keypad. There was a faint hissing as concealed ducts pumped out odors. A hologram of a mighty kzin appeared. It spoke in the Heroes' Tongue, in the Ultimate Imperative Tense of Royalty:

“This is the Testament of Chuut-Riit, Planetary Governor of Ka'ashi, of the blood of the Patriarch, to my slave and friend Henrietta-human.

“Henrietta, if you are watching this I shall be dead. One attempt by the human Arrum to assassinate me has been thwarted. There will be others, and by kzinti as well as humans.

“This I have always accepted. We Kzinti have long had proverbs like your human 'Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,' and I chose to wear the crown and accept what goes with it. Yet it was a surprise for me to discover that the humans of Sol System knew so much of us as to know to strike at me personally.

“How did this happen? I thought on it. The humans who fled from Ka'ashi to Sol System left long before I arrived. There must have been secret comings and goings between the two systems since. Light-messages, perhaps.

“We had, I suppose, known this was possible, yet had had no interest in it. If the Sol Humans knew the terror of our Names, so much the worse for them! And in that lack of interest I detect a deep-seated military weakness in our kind. I long ago realized, Henrietta, that your kind have talents we lack. We are curious if mysteries are presented to us, we enjoy showing our talents for solving puzzles and conundrums, and we are always eager to stick our noses into caves that may hide secrets or prey, but we lack your degree of curiosity for its own sake. Sometimes I think the deadliest blow the Jotok ever struck against us was to give us knowledge so that we never came to love the hunt for it.

“I summoned the telepaths who have examined human prisoners, and forced myself to interrogate them. That was perhaps prodigal of me—by then all telepaths were urgently needed for war security. But I uncovered many things which I had not suspected, not least about the telepaths themselves.

“However my main discovery was this: When we first met humans and our telepaths reported a race given over wholly to peace and as weaponless as the Kdatlyno and others we have encountered, even as the human laser-cannon slashed at our fleets, some speculated that monkey pacifism was not natural but had been conditioned in them by another race. Perhaps some race had sought to use them as the Jotok sought to use us when they recruited us as mercenaries and gave us technology.

“Some even speculated that those conditioners of monkeys were the Jotok—the fabled free Jotok fleet that had escaped us. We searched for those conditioners, whoever they might be, without result.

“So I discovered, putting together one piece and another, that humans had indeed been conditioned: first by the Arrum. But second by something behind the Arrum that has no name. I am a kzintosh of the Blood Royal, brought up in palaces, now a Planetary Governor with enemies and rivals. I am used to dominance-ploys and Konspirrissy. Most Konspirrissies have inbuilt limitations to their growth and fall apart, are betrayed or fission after they pass a certain size. But this was Konspirrissy beyond Konspirrissy.

“By human standards very old, very large. So old and large that the normal fission of Konspirrissy, even exposure, would not be fatal to it. It had grown and changed through many human lifetimes. We Kzin nobles have studied Konspirrissy, yes, we have made a science of it—I shall say we of the Riit clan most of all. We did not come to rule the kzinti by the speed of our fangs and claws alone. We know that Konspirrissy may grow in such a way that the Konspirritors hardly need to conceal their aims. They need only manipulate a few appearances and emphases. Humans are so inconstant that even one who tells the truth about his plans is not believed: Look at your Hitler, your Lenin, your Sunday. But we kzinti have had some equivalents.

“And I discovered that even some Heroes were being drawn into it: some unknowingly, some merely unknowingly at first. Yes, Arrum and what is behind Arrum has its plans for the human species—and now I find it has plans for the kzinti species too!

“Sol humans have defeated our fleets. I intend to overwhelm them, with the Fifth Fleet or if need be the Sixth. I regret that much of Earth may have to be destroyed. I will try to keep Africa, Yucatán where the Jaguar-gods dwell, the Rocky Mountains and the Russian steppes for the hunting. An easy victory would have been better for both humans and kzinti, though I cannot blame humans for their stubbornness. After many easy conquests we wanted to find enemies in space who would test our fighting skills and courage, and then the Fanged God in His great bounty granted our wish.

“And yet, I think the Konspirrissy may strike back at me, yes, even here in the Governor's Palace on Ka'ashi. Humans adapt with great speed. That is both their strength and their weakness. You have a legend, The Jungle Book, of a human cub raised by pack-raiding beasts who yet became a leader of a whole ecosystem, enemy of one of the great kattz I look to meet on Earth, friend to another of the dark pelt! How amazed I was, each time I reread that legend, that such a thing could have happened! On Kzin it would have been not possible. Kzinti are hard as iron and stone, and do not change or adapt. That is our strength and our weakness. If the pride of that great kat Bagheera still live, I will speak with them when I conquer Earth.”

Something changed in the great face. Its regal impassivity wavered.

“I say that if you see this message I shall be dead. I believed that, with culling, over a few generations humans would become the most useful species the Patriarchy has ever acquired. Now I wonder if the Konspirritorrs do not see the Kzin in the same light! Or if they see Kzin and Human together as but malleable material for some other end.

“Henrietta, I have a foreboding that these Konspirritorrs may destroy me. I think they are a greater threat than Ktrodni-Stkaa and his pride. These Konspirritorrs threaten both our kinds.

“If I am dead, Traat-Admiral is my chosen successor. I think he will assert his dominance successfully, though he is but the Son of Third Gunner. I think he will see my youngest kits through the nursery. The elder will find their own way. I have told him you are decorous and he will listen to your advice as I have. I sometimes almost envy your kind their intelligent females, for I have no one but Conserver and you to whom I may open my mind.

“You, my most trusted slave, must guide Traat-Admiral in his dealings with humans as I know you have guided me. Prepare the path so that Traat also discovers what I have discovered. He is the cleverest of my pride, but he must make discoveries for himself and learn to think as I do, but without me.

“Do not mourn for me overmuch. I shall be with the Fanged God. Traat is brave and loyal, but he may fail. If he does, the task may devolve upon you. Destroy the Konspirritorrs that threaten both our kinds.

“My sons are clever. Do not forget them. Guide them too if you can. You have served me well and faithfully. Your presence has brought me pleasure, and because of you I was able to be a better master to the humans of Ka'ashi.

“I hope that you may prosper and have many cubs.”

The holo vanished. Henrietta bowed her head to the place where it had been.

“That, Noble Prince, was your Sire. That, Noble Hero, was the Kin of the Patriarch.”

Raargh growled in his throat. He had seen the living Chuut-Riit, had been lectured by him as an NCO, and indeed had been presented to him and marked by a few drops of his honored urine after he had received his Name. The holo brought back many memories. As the odors were also meant to, he thought.

He said nothing yet. He and Vaemar had given their Words not to attack their human captors that day. Those Words held them. Even if they did not, he had seen the snouts of automatic guns in various corners. Henrietta had spoken of “Ensign and other Heroes.” He had seen a few in these chambers, more near the entrances when, paralyzed and half-unconscious, he and Vaemar had been brought here. He had disciplined his mind to try to count them and take note of the defensive works, but there must be others he had not seen. At one point he had smelled Kzinretti. Anyway, there were too many to fight.

His ziirgah sense made it plain that they were being watched, though it also hinted—it could hardly do more than that and he was using it to its limit—that the gestalt of interest in him was fluctuating, and tending to drop as he continued to remain calm and made no furious or rampant movements. The kzinti here were presumably used to regarding all kzin as allies, and the field-grown ones would know nothing different. Who knows how many this place holds? He thought. And I must find out more. Then: I must think very carefully. A ghostly hologram could lay no charge on him; he knew it was but a collection of electronic impulses, perhaps even faked. Yet the testament of Chuut-Riit was not something to be set aside lightly.

Raargh and Vaemar had passed this way. On Earth the orange fur of a kzin would have blazed out, but on this part of Wunderland the vegetation was still largely native, reddish, and better camouflage for them. Infrared surveys, difficult enough in daylight, showed body-heat patterns of what could be several large animals, but not, disturbingly, the almost unmistakable signatures of kzinti.

Still, it was limestone country. The great caves of the Hohe Kalkstein were only a couple of score miles to the south. Raargh and Vaemar might well have found some deep hole to rest in or explore. He climbed to two thousand meters, then higher, and surveyed the country visually. A pattern of southward flowing streams, appearing and disappearing, the sudden sharp hollows of roof collapses, and other indications of cave country became obvious. There was also another pattern—a regularity of disturbance in the ground that did not look natural. He tried deep radar. His car's set was not powerful but it showed a jumble underground of passages, streams, hollows, and again, sharp-edged regularities. The UNSN had learned that the Kzin, when they condescended to put their minds to it, could be masters of camouflage, and some of this had a kzinti military look to it, though it was on a far larger scale than the ambushes the UNSN had experienced. But if large-scale excavations had been going on here, where was the spoil? The forest and woodland were old Wunderland growth.

The telltale indicated Raargh and Vaemar were in the vicinity but not close. Cumpston landed the car. He was in a shallow gully, filled with vegetation. Brown and pale-gray limestone outcrops rose about, and even sitting in the car's cockpit he could see the dark apertures of three or four caves, partly screened by tall trees.

He tasted the air as he could, trying for a gestalt feeling of the place. A native Wunderlander would be better at this, he thought. The clouds of flutterbys created an impression of tranquility that was not necessarily reliable. But there was a small stream flowing with a good population of amphibians, froggolinas and the even odder kermitoids that were looking at him curiously and making no effort to hide. There were other animals in the vegetation. If anything violent had happened recently, or if the kzin were hunting, the local wildlife would, he was sure, be silent and invisible. A small mechanical sniffer confirmed his own suspicion of kzin pheromones, but in the breezy glade they were much dispersed.

A more sophisticated sniffer would have been useful, he thought, pinching his lip. Or a dog. Dogs' reaction to the faintest smell of kzin was unmistakable, but there were few dogs on Wunderland now. Kzinti had not liked them. Well, Early had mechanical sniffers and a great many other things. Was it time to call Early? Cumpston had lights and weapons, not all of the latter obvious. He decided to check the nearest caves first.

The first he looked at was plainly undisturbed. Not far within, delicate straw stalactites hung unbroken from the roof almost to the ground. Another time he would have enjoyed exploring this cave for its own sake, but it was obvious that nothing the bulk of a Kzin had passed this way. The next cave showed some disturbances in the mud at its entrance. Looking closely, he was not surprised to make out the print of a kzin foot, though even in Wunderland gravity it seemed curiously light for such heavy creatures. In the still air a molecular analysis confirmed the presence of kzin breath-particles as well as pheromones. He identified the signatures of Raargh and Vaemar, but also others. There were human breath-particles, too. He started into the cave, then hesitated.

Dangerous? Going alone into a cave on an alien world seeking a pair of large carnivores, evidently with unknown companions, was not an entirely safe thing to do, even if the carnivores in question were his chess partners. But in the event of trouble his failure to report would trigger an alarm at Early's headquarters. Normally, the failsafe would trigger every five days, and at present it had four days to run. That was much too long an interval for safety in these circumstances, he thought. He would readjust the car's brain to send a signal after two hours. That was, he thought, the best compromise he could make between recklessness and an excessive caution that would accomplish nothing. A movement caught his attention and there was a peculiar droning sound as he turned back to the car. He never reached it.

“We'll have some lunch here and then have a look around the science department and laboratories,” Professor Meinertzhagen said. The party had left their cars and were walking through one of the pleasanter parts of the campus. The steel spire of St. Joachim's glittered in the distance.

“This is the Café Lindenbaum, quite a historic place. One of the first sidewalk cafés in München. Some say the day it opened we stopped being a village. Mark you, it's famous among the more cynical on the staff as the 'Failure Factory.' Students drinking coffee, chattering and flirting on sunny days when they should be bent over their screens.”

“I suppose students are students everywhere,” said one of the Crashlanders.

“The Chess Club's always met here, too. You know we're organizing an Interstellar Tournament—the ICF has approved a new title of Interstellar Master, now that we don't have to wait years between reports of each move! The restaurant section we're eating in is too expensive for most students, though. It's always had human service. It was a gimmick before the Invasion. Later,” he went on, “human service in restaurants—or anywhere else—was no novelty. As the economy collapsed machines broke down. More significantly, humans would work for less—do things for a crust or a pittance that machines had always done—do anything not to starve. Now, I'm pleased to say, human service is becoming a rare and fancy gimmick again. We might have a look at Harold's Terran Bar this evening. There's a lot of history there, too.”

“But there's still human service here, I see,” said Patrick, as they settled themselves around a couple of sidewalk tables. Several of the Crashlanders were fascinated by the flutterbys.

“Oh yes, Old Stanley. But he's the proprietor nowadays. Very grand!” Professor Meinertzhagen waved to the aproned old man.

He shuffled over, clutching an antique paper notepad and tray. The tray fell from his hands, clattered and rolled away.

“Professor Carmody!” he cried.

“No!” Paddy Quickenden jumped to his feet.

“I think it's too late,” she said. “How do you know me?”

“But… you used to come here with Professor Rykermann in the old days… before the Invasion.”

“That's a long time ago.”

“How could I forget? The last time I saw you there was rioting over the new defense taxes and conscription orders. There had been reports of trouble in space. Old Otto had told me to pile sandbags round the walls, and that's what I was doing. You and Professor Rykermann left together. Then, a few nights later, the bombardment started… But… you look the same!”

“That's all right!” Meinertzhagen said sharply and loudly. To look far younger than one's years on Wunderland implied access to geriatric treatments during the Occupation. With relatively few exceptions, that implied a Government position or at least a prosperous and politically acceptable life during the Occupation. It was not a passport to approval on post-Liberation Wunderland. “This lady came from We Made It today in one of the new hyperdrive ships. You must be mistaken. Now we are attempting to offer her and her distinguished colleagues some hospitality!”

“Oh! No, no of course, it couldn't be, could it?… but… well, everything is on the House for any Crashlander! We haven't forgotten what we owe them. I'm sorry, I'm getting old… I'm getting very old. I survived, you know… So many didn't.”

“This is an official party. Gratuitous service won't be necessary,” Patrick Quickenden interjected. “We would simply like to give our orders now!”

“Yes, sir, of course.”

“Well,” said Dimity, as the old man shuffled off mumbling, “It seems the secret's out, such as it is. We can't silence him… But this is all so… I've been feeling strange ever since I came here.”

“We can silence him, actually!” Patrick Quickenden said. She shook her head. “I appear to be remembered. Well, it was partly to find my past that I wanted to come back. Paddy… look!”

“That's the annex to the new physics block,” said Meinertzhagen, following her pointing finger to the building across the street.

With .61 Earth gravity Wunderland buildings tend to be tall. Many, of course, had been leveled in the war. This one was large and new. High on its portico was the legend:

“I knew I'd been a professor,” said Dimity. “That is one thing I did remember. I even remembered the title of the chair. They said I looked too young, but somehow I was sure of it.”

“Too young!” Patrick was still gazing at the dates on the inscription. “This explains the strength of your alpha-wave when we found you. It also explains… begins to explain, rather, how you did what you did.”

He crossed the street to read the inscription more closely. In smaller letters below the main wording was a rhymed couplet. It was an adaptation from a limerick once quoted to Nils Rykermann in the Café Lindenbaum.

“Does the expression “can of worms” mean anything to you?” asked Patrick as he returned to the group. “I think we may have just opened one.”

“I think,” said Meinertzhagen, “we had better enjoy our meal. I hope you like Wunderland cuisine. It's got a strong North European background, of course, but many of the dishes are local. There are some intriguing blends.”

“Like the vegetation,” said Patrick. “Look at those colors! Where else, on any world, could you see a blend like that! And under such a sky!” He had conquered his agoraphobia and was feeling rather pleased with the fact.

The university gardens were well tended and a thing of pride and prestige. There were a variety of green, red and orange plants, blended and landscaped into a contrast of hot and cold colors. For the Crashlanders it was a Wonderland indeed.

“Yes, they make quite a pleasing mixture, don't they?” said Meinertzhagen. “The green plants are from Earth, of course, and the red are native. Poems have been written about how well they go together. There's a lot of symbolism there.”

“The orange plants too,” said Dimity. “It's almost like a spectrum. I seem to know the others, but I don't remember them. Are they Wunderland too?”

“I think,” said Meinertzhagen, not knowing fully what she meant, “that the orange plants may have come originally from the sixth planet of 61 Ursa Majoris… also known as Kzin. It's had a lot of effects here.”

Chapter 6

Andre brought Colonel Cumpston into the chamber at the point of a nerve disrupter and secured him with a police web. He had, he explained, found him at one of the disguised entrances to the fortress. He had evidently been following the kzinti. Raargh affected complete indifference and signaled to Vaemar to do the same. Cumpston had been searched and X-rayed and had a number of small weapons removed.

“I'll leave you,” said Andre, “with these two. Perhaps you had better hope they don't get hungry.”

Obviously there would be listening devices and spy cameras in the room where they were kept. In any case, humans and Kzin were coming and going. Still, it was impossible not to talk. They had no writing materials.

“How find us?” Raargh asked.

“I put a tracking device in Vaemar's chessboard. I knew he seldom traveled without it. Forgive me for this discourtesy. It was useful in the event.” Cumpston replied in his careful human approximation of the Heroes' Tongue. He did not think it tactful to tell the kzin that some of the game they had eaten had contained both chemicals and micro-robots that had made tracking them a great deal more certain than that.

“There is much discourtesy,” growled Raargh. “And it does not seem very useful.” Still, the bond between them held. Raargh had not forgotten how Cumpston had helped him—and Vaemar—to life and freedom on the terrible God-forsaken day of Surrrendir, and the three of them had shared things since.

I can't tell him help will be on the way, thought Cumpston. Though friend and foe both should be able to work that out. Help will take a long time to get here, though. If I'd had a few more minutes it would have been a different story. The entrance to the subterranean fortress—if it was the main entrance he had been brought through—as well disguised. Obviously, if it's not been picked up by satellites over the last five years. It had taken him a long time to be brought this far, past guarded doors and weapons positions. He had seen only a few kzin, but they were well dug in and protected, and there were heavy weapons. The place was like a maze on several levels, a labyrinth. Any attacking force would face heavy fighting and innumerable delays.

Cumpston and the kzinti exchanged stories, speaking fairly freely. There was no point in hiding from their captors what they knew already.

This chamber, like the one containing the hologram projector, and like others Cumpston had been led through, was electronically smart. It contained a control console and stacks of weapons and ammunition. None of these presented him with any opportunity, since he was restrained in the web and in any case the weapons were securely locked. The two kzinti had more freedom of movement, but he could see they were being closely tracked. The snouts of cameras and guns followed their movements from several corners.

He had expected the kzinti, confined, to be in a killing frenzy, but Raargh was moving slowly, deliberately. Cumpston had undergone an intensive course in Kzinti body-language, and what he read from the big kzin was relaxation, laziness, a sort of lofty contempt for events. Even his tail, usually the giveaway with a kzin trying to conceal his emotions, was relaxed. So, as far as Cumpston could tell, were the pheromones of his body. He could detect little of the gingery smell that, when intensified, signaled kzin anger. Vaemar, he saw, was copying Raargh's example. Maybe they've drugged him, Cumpston thought. Or maybe he's the greatest actor on this planet.

Raargh had tried to free him when the guards left, but when he approached the web an alarm had sounded and a quick, stabbing red laser beam spat into the ground at his feet. Raargh adjusted his artificial eye and told them the web, as well as the weapons cabinets, was guarded by infrared rays, too closely meshed for him to get through.

Food for the kzinti was provided through an automatic feeder system. Officers' field rations of bloody meat, better than Raargh had been used to as a Trooper or a Sergeant, and some small live animals. There was even that prized Kzinti delicacy, a zianya, tipped into a trough and bound with cords to heighten its flavor-enhancing terror and prevent its struggling and shrieking. There were a couple of indoor fooches and even some entertainment tapes, though neither kzin used them. It was plain great efforts were being made to keep them comfortable. Raargh recognized soothing pheromones in the air. The small animals provided for them were kzin natives, presumably bred from stock imported during the occupation. Contemplating them, and particularly the futilely kicking zianya, gave Raargh the beginnings of an idea. Though he was not yet very hungry, he killed them all, and as he ate them spilled what was in total a good deal of blood, blood whose smell was very similar to that of kzin blood. No alarms responded, and the kzinti who appeared to be on maintenance work in different parts of the large room, but who were presumably doubling as guards, did not seem to notice. Most enclosed chambers frequented by kzinti or used by them as living space had a smell of blood about them, not to mention a complex of other smells. It was bracing and taken for granted.

Henrietta, Andre and Emma returned after a few hours, with a guard of several young Kzinti and humans.

“Noble Heroes,” said Henrietta, “you have seen the words of Chuut-Riit. You know his spirit lives on in this fortress, as you know the fighting spirit of the Heroes of Ka'ashi is not dead. Now, in his name, I ask you: Do you acknowledge obedience to the word of Chuut-Riit?”

“Chuut-Riit was Planetary Governor and of the blood of the Patriarch,” said Raargh. Was, not is, was his unspoken thought. I have my own hunt now—to preserve Vaemar and to rear him to be a leader of the kzin of this world. Once I thought the Patriarch's Navy would return with swift vengeance, but five years have passed and now I do not think that they will be returning soon. I play for time and for Vaemar. “Why do you need to ask of a kzintosh who won Name in battle?”

“Where were you going when Emma brought you here?”

Cumpston thought quickly. The less accurate information these maniacs had the better.

“Arhus,” he said. Arhus was the site of the biggest planetside kzin settlement. Arrangements had recently been made to grant the kzinti there a limited degree of self-government.

“I did not ask you to speak!” said Henrietta.

“But you insult Heroes. You interrogate them as if they were prisoners or slaves.”

Oddly, his words seemed to give her pause.

“These Heroes I know,” he said. “Do you think you are the only human who knows the Kzin? This young kzintosh has learned fieldcraft in the wild. Now he goes to his own kind to learn other things.”

“With your tuition, ARM agent?”

“I will not go with him to stay with kzinti at Arhus. How could I? But do you think you are the only human on this planet who wishes peace between Man and Kzin? If there can be peace, I do not wish the Kzinti ill. There is much about them I admire, and these two I have known long.” I hope there's enough truth in that to confuse her, he thought. Also I hope that there's no telepath among the kzinti here. I hope that all the telepaths on Wunderland have got nice cushy jobs with the human security forces and have been given Names and kzinretti of their very own and the nice gentle new telepathic drugs I heard our laboratories were working on and have no wish to help this crazy business.

Henrietta looked at him with somewhat lessened hostility. Plainly, he did have some relationship with these two kzinti. There was an expression of doubt or conflict on her face.

“Release him,” said Vaemar. He spoke in the Ultimate Imperative Tense, which Cumpston had never heard him use before. Henrietta moved to obey, but a celfone on Andre's wrist bleeped. He turned to Henrietta and spoke to her urgently.

“We've got your car under cover and we're taking it apart,” Henrietta told Cumpston. “I'll need you shortly to send a signal from its brain to say all is well. I'd advise you not to be smart and not try to do anything like sending or omitting key code-words. We have a telepath.”

But if you put a telepath on me I'd feel it, he thought. What do they want with me? he wondered. Why have they kept me alive? I'm nothing but a threat to them, not potentially useful and venerated like Vaemar or respected like Raargh. They might be able to get a telepath, of course. Bring one from Arhus or somewhere and peel my brain. I wouldn't like that. Or maybe they've got some idea of brainwashing and reprogramming me. With modern drugs that was not difficult. A fully suborned ARM officer might be very useful indeed. Cumpston had been trained to resist brain washing, and it would, he thought, be interesting in that event to see whether his training or Henrietta's chemicals were the more effective. That a battle between them might leave him an organic waldo was something better not thought about. He had seen the results of such conflicts in others and tried to blank his memory and imagination.

Henrietta interrogated him somewhat further, then she and Andre left, accompanied by a party of the humans and kzinti. Her questions, he thought, seemed somewhat unfocused. Both the humans and kzinti in general seemed, however, to come and go at will. One kzin was doing what looked like maintenance work under the control console, a couple of others were patrolling the upper gantries. A couple were staring at screens. One appeared to be curled up in a corner asleep. In the dim light at the corners of the large chamber it was hard to see exactly how many there were. It reminded him a little of the bridge of a warship at cruising stations. There were even, he noticed, small screened sanitary compartments. Well, that was not surprising. Cumpston, one of comparatively few humans to have been in a kzin's lair as a guest, knew that Raargh had a similar arrangement at his cave. Kzinti, like most felines, liked their toilets private, apart from their use of urine as a marker and in social rituals. Raargh himself, who seemed to be moving about with a good deal of freedom, had previously been inspecting the sleeping kzin and had gone to use one of these compartments without question.

Emma, some of the men, and some of the kzinti remained. Cumpston noticed an immediate change in the atmosphere with Henrietta's departure. The men, he saw, including some manretti, wore slightly different costumes to the ones who had departed.

“Different prides,” remarked Vaemar. So he saw it as well. One of the men, plainly an officer or in a command position, walked over and released Cumpston from the web. He had, Cumpston saw, the name “McGlue” on his jacket. As Cumpston stepped down, McGlue made a quick gesture, unnoticeable except to trained eyes. It was the recognition signal of a fellow ARM agent. Cumpston felt relief flooding though him. It appeared they were not without allies. McGlue also made a queer, twisted smile that seemed to run off one side of his face. Then Emma strode over. Yes, without Henrietta, the atmosphere was definitely different. Cumpston's gestalt sense, though acquired with difficult training, was hardly even a poor imitation of kzinti ziirgah, but its signals were unmistakable. Vaemar too was wrinkling his nose and ears, and his tail was lashing now.

“My mother has no proper plans,” Emma told them. “Her brains went loose after the events of the human invasion, after those things that happened when the disgraced coward once called Hroth-Staff-Officer surrendered. She has never fully recovered. For a long time she lost her memory of who she was. I did not lose mine.

“What she wishes now is to make this place into a refuge for Kzinti where they can be taught to understand human ways so they—Heroes and Conquerors—may eventually creep into some lowly place in the monkey hierarchy. She seeks to teach them the slaves' dream of proving indispensable to their masters, so they may one day rise to some kind of junior partnership, by monkey grace and favor—the mirror image of the very dream that some humans of Ka'ashi cuddled to their monkey breasts! She expects them to gradually penetrate human society, to at last take part in human plans and strategy, perhaps at last to take revenge on those who killed Chuut-Riit or their remote descendants.

“The reality is different! Never will the Heroic Race be the slaves or the copies of apes! The Fanged God will not allow such an obscenity! I have forced the issue, as my Destiny decrees.

“There are heavy weapons here for an army,” she went on. “Not just infantry and armor, but aircraft, small spacecraft. Most of the human fleet is at the warfront, light-years away.

“With Chuut-Riit's son, we will rouse and rally the kzin of Ka'ashi and Tiamat. They have had five years of subjugation and persecution by monkeys and are ready to scream and leap. We can take the humans of Ka'ashi and the Serpent Swarm by surprise.”

“And when the Hyperdrive Armada returns?”

“Their return will suit me perfectly. Returning, they will have to abandon their present front. The Kzin fleets and bases they engage now will have time to recover. Time also to ingest the latest lessons of the war, perhaps to rip secrets of the hyperdrive from the entrails of captured humans and human ships. And before the hyperdrive ships return we can smash the human ships and bases here.

“And do not overestimate the Hyperdrive Armada. Do not forget: With a double star the gravitational singularity is such that there is a vast volume of space in which the hyperdrive cannot operate—the whole of the combined Alpha Centauri A and B systems, stretching far beyond their outer cometary halos. The hyperdrive would not have been enough for the successful human landings here but for other simultaneous misfortunes and the fangs of treachery ripping at loyal throats. This time the kzin will not be fighting among themselves when the humans arrive. They will be roused, united, and waiting! With Sinclair fields, which we alone possess, we can boost bomb explosions until they are as destructive as anti-matter!

“More! There are hyperdrive ships at the spaceports and under repair and maintenance here and on Tiamat! We can seize them! Link again with the Patriarchy. We can strike Earth itself, and avenge the ramscoop raid with the one claw, present the hyperdrive to the Patriarchy with the other! We will achieve victory!”

“What you will achieve at most,” said Cumpston, “is the deaths of many humans and the extermination of the kzinti in this system down to the last kzinrett and the last kitten, whether many of them joined you or not. As for Sinclair fields, how long do you think it would be before the other side used them? They were invented during the long peace on Earth but they must be in the ARM files.” Don't tell her she's insane, he thought; it will only make her worse. He hoped that phrase “long peace on Earth” might have some sort of subconsciously soothing effect, though it was badly positioned next to the phrase “ARM files.” Best he could do at present.

“You will also turn a terrible war—the war now being fought out in space—into a war of annihilation without any possibility of eventual peace or truce. Without the option of life after surrender one species will perish utterly and quite possibly both will. We know such things have happened before in this galaxy.” He felt as he said it that to arouse such images in her mind would probably only egg her on. But he could think of nothing else to say. Was it a good idea to provoke her? Such questions had often been asked when fighting kzin, and the general answer had been that it couldn't do any harm. If they screamed and leaped prematurely, so much the better. But this was different. “Did not Sun Tzu say: 'Do not make an enemy fight with the courage of despair'?” he asked her. “That is what you will make both sides do. Think on what we know of the Slaver war.”

“You cannot seduce me with words. The conspirators you worked for—the conspirators responsible for the ramscoop raid—will be brought to justice,” she replied. “It will be interesting to see how much ground they can cover when they are turned loose on a kzinti hunting preserve with ten minutes' start!” She was shouting now, and paused to wipe traces of foam from her lips. I don't think you had a good Liberation, Cumpston thought. I wanted vengeance as much as anyone at the time, but this is what it leads to.

There is another thing, he thought. There are outlying parts of Wunderland and much of the Serpent Swarm where the Kzin had still not grown too oppressive. That would have changed as their numbers increased, but there are some humans who hate Sol System for the ramscoop raid worse than they hate the Kzin. Not many—most don't expect an interstellar, interspecies war of survival to be fought with kid gloves—but some. And if my dearest had been killed by humans, how might I have jumped…? Perhaps the Kzin would have human allies. Not many, but enough to do damage. On the other hand, conflicts of loyalty could work both ways. No harm in pointing that out, perhaps.

“Another thing you overlook,” he said: “Many kzin on Wunderland have found they may have better lives as partners with humans than as regimented cannon fodder for the Patriarchy. And for their descendants, the future may be brighter still. Many have been persecuted and humiliated. Many individual kzin died after the surrender. But they have not been murdered wholesale or enslaved, and they know it. A nonconformist kzin will not be dueled to death. There are kzin on this planet who have discovered freedom.” Futile, he knew. There was no rational argument that would reach someone so deeply insane.

“On Wunderland we have been granted a miraculous chance.” He had to say it. He strove to put in into terms that might get through. “Perhaps some would say not merely species but Bearded God and Fanged God have made truce here. With the hyperdrive there are stars and worlds enough for all. We have a chance to show that humans and kzinti can share a planet. If they can do that, perhaps they can share a universe. Destroy that experiment here and all hope of that dies with it.” Tired and dry-mouthed, he argued back and forth with her hopelessly, and he knew, pointlessly, for some time, bringing it back to the fact that postwar Wunderland was proving some human-kzin cooperation was possible.

“There may be a few who have been turned into imitation monkeys by the priests and the secret police, or been bought with monkey gold,” she replied. “The Kzin race can purge itself of such perversions. It is the strongest and noblest culture in the galaxy!” She turned her attention to the console and keyed up some holos of the redoubt and its weapons stores, others of rampant Heroes and Kzin space-dreadnaughts in triumphant battle.

“As for you,” she told Cumpston, “you may be useful as a hostage in the early stages. That is just. The humans you work for intended to hold the kzinti of Wunderland hostage… Noble Hero Raargh!”

But there was no answer. After a few seconds it became obvious to all that Raargh was gone. Emma stared about wildly. Then she ran to the sleeping kzin. She stared down at it, then called another kzin to waken it. It seemed to have a problem doing so, and while telepaths, computer nirrds, or other lowly ones could be kicked awake by their betters, fighting kzinti were generally wary of touching another such when it was asleep. Finally the other kzin took its shoulders and lifted it. Its head flopped backwards, revealing a broken neck. As its body rolled over, long, raw, gleaming bones arced and clattered on the floor. The skin and flesh of one of its arms was missing. There was not much blood. Cord—the cord that had bound a zianya—had been wound tightly at the shoulder to prevent bleeding.

“My Noble Mentor and Stepfather, Raargh who was Sergeant, gave his Word not to harm you humans this day,” said Vaemar. “He did not give his Word to remain here. And when his claws are sheathed his feet fall silently and swiftly.

“It's possible he may go to Arhus.” Vaemar added.

And even now you win a few seconds for him, thought Cumpston. Vaemar was again speaking in the Ultimate Imperative Tense of the Heroes' Tongue, the tense that might be used only by Royalty or, rarely, in a situation where the honor of the Kzin species was at stake, and which, when not employed for the giving of direct orders, lent itself to poetic, circumlocutious constructions. Also, he noticed, Vaemar had caught up the idea of Arhus but he did not tell a direct lie. It took Emma some time to work out what he was saying. Then her fingers stabbed at a control console. There was a sound of doors slamming shut.

Raargh threw away the remains of the Kzinti arm he had carried to hide his own prosthetic one. The passage which promised to lead toward the surface was blocked by a hemisphere, glowing bluishly with some form of radiation. Raargh did not know it for a Sinclair field but he guessed it was not something to venture into. It would not have been put there to stop the passage if it was impotent. He turned and ran into the dimmest tunnel he could find. At first the ruddy light, replicating a winter's day on the Homeworld he had never seen, was easy enough for silent running and leaping. After a short time, however, the light sources became fewer, and then stopped.

Raargh ran on. This part of the secret redoubt was unfinished, he saw. Walls were unlined, roughly hewn living rock. Now there were no lights or other installations. Even the natural eyes of the Kzin, superbly adapted to night hunting, could not see in total darkness, and he was grateful now for having lost an eye in combat years before.

Thanks to his partial Name, his artificial eye was the best available, able to see beyond the spectrum of visible light. It was not perfect, but it was enough to keep him running on. He ran nearly on all fours, both because it was the naturally speediest position for kzin and for fear of beams, Sinclair monomolecular wires and other booby traps. His w'tsai had been taken but he held his prosthetic arm up before him, hoping it would protect his head and chest from Sinclair wire. “These chambers link to the great caves of the Hohe Kalkstein,” the human had said. He was possibly headed in the right direction. He thought he was going south, and the surface rivers, he recalled, had flowed on a roughly north-south axis. Air currents at the sensitive tips of his whiskers gave him some ability to differentiate between long passages and blind alleys. His ziirgah sense picked up nothing.

Something gleamed very dimly in the darkness ahead. In any lesser darkness its ghostly radiance would have been quite invisible. A pile of human bones, presumably those of the slaves who had built this place. They were in fragments, and had plainly been stripped and gnawed by Kzinti fangs. After five years no tissue remained. A few lingering vermiforms wriggled away. There were a few pieces of clothing and oddments but nothing useful. Kzin do not eat carrion, but he was beginning to feel hungry and he turned some of the bare, dry bones over hopefully before he realized what he was doing. The few joints still articulated fell apart. He took a few bones simply to give his jaws something to crunch on.

This spot was evidently as far as the builders of the redoubt had reached. Beyond were natural cave formations. He wondered if morlocks or other creatures survived here. Well, if they did, he would find out in due course. He leaped up a muddy slope, ignoring the pains beginning to speak in the old wounds in his legs, and ran on. There was a stream to follow now. Since he could drink and need no longer fear becoming dehydrated at least, he began to mark his passage with urine. At one point he saw a wandering line of footprints in the mud, but they might have been there for millennia.

He estimated that it was about three hours later (time was becoming difficult to judge) that he found the bones of a kzin. With it was a w'tsai, still as sharp as a w'tsai should be, and a belt containing a couple of sealed infantry emergency ration capsules. Other personal equipment lay about scattered and broken, including the wrappings of ordinary pack rations. That hinted strongly at Morlocks, as did the fact that the skull was fractured as by a blow from above. In any case, he could smell them. The smell of morlocks was unmistakable—even humans with their pathetic mockeries of noses had commented on it—and it had been in his nostrils for some time, along with smells of old fire, old death, and a few tentative smells of new life. It was, he thought—his mind was beginning to run a little strangely now—significant that humans and kzinti smelled odd to each other rather than repulsive. The war might have been even more savage otherwise.

He made himself wait and listen for a time, arranging the bones more decorously as he did so, but the caves were silent apart from the faintest rustling of insects and the distant sound of water. There had been more life in the great caves of the Hohe Kalkstein when he had campaigned in them. The ration capsules were—just—better than nothing for his hunger, and the w'tsai in his hand felt good. His ziirgah sense picked up something now—hunger and hunting, but not yet very near. He pressed on, the sense gradually growing stronger.

He heard a well-remembered rustling over his head some time later, the morlock stench signaling their presence as unmistakably as a burning flare. His artificial eye could just distinguish movement in the darkness there. He bounded away from the downward-jutting stalactites back to a large patch where the roof above was relatively clear. He was lucky it was there, but he had been marking the occurrence of such patches for some time. The morlocks, clinging to the formations, could drop rocks and themselves onto those below, but found it harder to throw rocks or jump accurately a great distance. Like good old days! he thought momentarily. War is the best medicine! before remembering that the good old days often seemed better in memory than when actually being relived, particularly now when he was old, and partly crippled, and with slowed reflexes and tired and alone.

The first morlock to land before him he impaled on the w'tsai, in a conscious tribute and gesture of thanks to the dead Hero who had just bequeathed it to him.

Then he leaped into them with fangs, w'tsai, and the claws of both his natural and artificial hands, his battle-scream shaking the air of the chamber.

Had the morlocks attacked in the numbers that he was used to, they would have overwhelmed him. But they were less than a score, and they seemed less strong than they had been in the old days. Grabbing one with his natural hand and crushing its neck in a single squeeze, it came to him faster than thought that the creature was emaciated. His ziirgah sense picked up primitive emotions of terror and desperation. And HUNGER! He remembered how few living things there seemed to be in the caves compared to the old days. The morlocks, at the top of the food chain, might well be starving. Good! At these odds a warrior need not crave strong foes.

He kept his natural eye tightly shut to protect it as much as possible. His artificial eye and arm were both invulnerable to bites, and his artificial arm smashed aside the morlocks' puny weapons of rocks. His fangs and claws were still those of Raargh-Sergeant, once Senior Regimental Sergeant. Fourteen he counted, the last falling victim to a disemboweling kick he was sure old Sergeant and the w'tsai's late donor would have approved of. His own wounds, as far as he could tell, were fairly minor. There was so much scar tissue around his neck and shoulders, he thought, that the morlocks would have had a tough time chewing though it.

He forced himself to eat his fill of the dead morlocks—they were not pleasant eating, but, he told himself, they were carnivores and even warriors of a sort—carved some flesh from the remainder for future needs and pressed on, marking the passage as he went. Some time later—much later, it seemed—he came upon a part of the wall scarred by flame. There were shattered crystal formations littering the cave floor here, and remains of humans, kzinti and morlocks, some scattered and broken bones, some whole skeletons, some mummies, some of the bones once again very faintly phosphorescent. There were no more live morlocks.

He fell down a long slope and lost much time finding his way back. In the confusion of stone and with his perception being affected by the dark and silence, he blundered up several blind alleys, each time backtracking with difficulty. He slept for a time, woke, and went on. He began to think his quest was hopeless and that he would soon die in these caves. There was no reason to assume these particular tunnels had any exit. He had lost all sense of time, but with all the back tracking he guessed that several days had passed.

He began, however, to feel another was traveling with him. Might it be old Sergeant, who had passed his rank to him with his actions and words as he died in the caves somewhere not far from here? He hoped Sergeant felt his old Corporal had not disgraced his judgment or his spirit. Might it be Chuut-Riit, whose last seed was now in his care?

He began to feel lightheaded. Perhaps the morlock flesh was poisonous. Perhaps it was the combined effects of darkness, silence, battle, and loss of blood. Several times he stumbled, and more than once he banged his head painfully against rock, once nearly breaking his fangs. The feeling of an unseen companion became stronger, but it was an uncertain companion.

After a time its head appeared to him, floating and swooping out of the darkness, appearing first as a tiny claw-point of light that grew larger until it seemed to engulf his vision and then passed on to dwindle and return. It looked like the hologram of Chuut-Riit. Then it looked like the Fanged God Himself, or was it the Human Bearded God? A kzinrett appeared. His mother? Or Murrur, the kzinrett he had bought after he had received his Name, the mother of his dead son, buried with him under burning debris in the ramscoop raid? It had been the last birthing she could give—fertile young kzinretti like Veena had been for the harems of higher kzintosh than he. She had not had a large vocabulary, but even when she was not in season he had enjoyed her company.

He was in the glades beyond the Hohe Kalkstein with Vaemar, stalking the gagrumphers. There were flutterbys and the brilliant sun of Ka'ashi's day, with its differently brilliant night, the wheeling Serpent Swarm, the great jewel of Alpha Centauri B, and Proxima like a hunter's red eye. The floating figures became chessmen. Hard stone struck against him, crystal broke and fell tinkling. Gods sowing stars. He began to feel something he had felt a few times before, once in these very caves. He knew now that its name was Fear. Fear of endless darkness and silence, fear of waiting nonexistence, fear of total loss. He tried working out chess problems in his mind, but he knew hunger was growing and that before long it would be an agony driving out all other feeling. Well, he would die decorously.

He seemed to climb a high path, a great stairway, though the real floor under his feet was broken and uneven. He plunged into a cold stream that nearly covered his head before realization made him struggle clear, choking and spitting. A few more steps and he might have drowned, basely abandoning Vaemar and everything else. The realization and the cold helped bring him back to reality. He groomed his matted wet fur as well as he could, and forced himself to rest for a time, lying still, shivering. The small noises of the stream had a dangerously hypnotic sound to them, and he sang the cadences of Lord Chmeee's Last Battle-Hymn to keep them at bay.

Later he came to an area from which, it appeared, dead bodies and other remains had recently been removed. The pain in his legs was acute now, and he allowed himself to stop and rest a short time and ate the last of the morlock flesh that he carried, making himself ignore the smell. He knew he was back in the great caverns of the Hohe Kalkstein where he had won rank and Name. He knew also that it would do no good were pain, hunger and exhaustion to rob him of his reason.

Far ahead both his natural and his artificial eye detected a modification of the darkness. Nose and whiskers also detected changes in the air. There, at the top of a long slope, was a lamp, turned down and dully glowing. When he reached it he found himself back in familiar territory. There were the old mined-out guano beds, stripped by the monkeys to make dung bombs during the war. There was what the humans called the dancing room, the borrlruhm cavern where he had inspected his squad for the last time as Corporal. He moved on into the crepuscular zone, glowing now with the purple of Alpha Centauri B, at this season with the true dawn pursuing close behind it. There was the old habitat module. Its door was closed but there was a key in it, and he sensed it was occupied by humans. He salivated at the thought of the meat within.

His artificial eye showed him it was surrounded by a fairly thin web of infrared rays and automatic alarms. If he set them off it might not matter, but he avoided them from habit anyway.

Leonie Rykermann stirred uneasily in their sleeping bag. Five years of peace had not dulled her reflexes that had been honed in decades of guerrilla war. She woke and sat up with a startled cry, Nils Rykermann jerking awake beside her. Bending over them in the dim light was the hunched, crouching bulk of a great kzin, smelling of blood, one eye reflecting violet light, the other a glaring red point, jaws agape, fangs gleaming and dripping.

“Be not undecorous and calm liver,” said Raargh in his best Wunderlander, adding considerately, “No need for manrret to cover teats. Raargh has seen before.”

Chapter 7

“Raargh!”

“Yes. Raargh and humans have met here in caves before. Leonie-Manrret dug Raargh out of trap. Raargh push water out of Leonie-Manrret lungs. Kill many morlocks together. Raargh kill more now.”

“Du Alte Teufel!” She added quickly: “No insult. We greet old companion.”

Nils Rykermann had been slower to waken fully. At the first sight of the kzin he tried to thrash wildly out of the sleeping bag, then with a fierce effort became still.

“Raargh!” Leonie shook him, “It's Raargh!”

Rykermann became calmer. Then he looked the old kzin up and down.

“You're changed,” he said. “You look terrible.”

“Kzin is terrible,” Raargh replied. “Will show enemies how terrible soon.” He went on: “Came seek Rykermann-human. God benevolent and Rykermann here. Rykermann dress in costume quickly. Leonie-Manrett dress too. Is trouble!”

“How did you get here?” asked Leonie.

“Through caves, from north.”

“And why?” asked Rykermann.

“You are tired,” said Leonie, “and in pain.”

“I am Hero!” said Raargh indignantly. Then he added: “You know?”

“Yes. I know. Would bourbon help?”

“Bourbon always help. Or brandy,” He added.

“There's something there called liqueur brandy,” said Rykermann quickly, “You wouldn't like that.”

“Rest a moment,” said Leonie, as Raargh drank noisily (deciding privately that Rykermann was wrong about the liqueur brandy). “Have some food, then tell us why you have come here.”

They found food for him, not ideal but better than morlock meat. It took some time for Raargh to explain to the humans what had happened to the north and then tell the story of his journey as a Hero should tell it. Alpha Centauri B filled the great mouth of the cave with light, and the true dawn followed it, well before he had finished. He did not know what they knew of Vaemar's lineage and said nothing about it, rather letting them believe by suggestion that Vaemar was his own son. Cumpston, he pointed out, was also a prisoner of the mad manretti and others who planned a kzin uprising.

“You say there are Heroes there too?” said Leonie.

“Few, not many, I think. The Heroes I saw young. Hot livers. Maybe brains loose like Henrietta-human and other.”

“Brains loose?”

“Kzin attack humans on Ka'ashi… on Wunderland, all kzin die. All kzinretti, all kittens. All. Vaemar die. Many humans die, too, I think. Then kzin and humans fight in space till all dead.

“Raargh young and Raargh say: 'Attack!' All dead is good if die on attack! But Raargh is old. Raargh think of dead kzinretti, dead kittens, Raargh remember ramscoop raid, think of Sire's tales, think of nukes. and relativity weapons on Homeworld. Raargh teach Vaemar to think. Raargh must think too. And there are monkeys who… who Raargh does want not should die.” He tried to cover this embarrassing admission. “Dishonorable to kill chesss partners.”

“What can we do?” asked Leonie.

“How many humans here?”

“Just us, and a few students tidying up outside. Most went back to München yesterday. We stayed because we thought if things were quieter some of the cryptic life-forms might come out.”

“Morlocks came out. Raargh ate! Have you weapons?”

“Not many. We cleared a lot of old weapons out of the caves in the last few days, but the students took most of them back to the city. We found a few more yesterday after they'd gone and we have a few for personal security.”

“Need weapons. Need force. Go back through caves and eat crazy monkeys.”

“We'll have to call for help,” Leonie told him. “This is too big for our claws. They must know you're gone by now, and they'll be waiting for an attack.”

“They not know Raargh go to humans,” Raargh replied. “Not know about old battles with morlocks. Vaemar and Colonel-human let them think Raargh go to Arhus, return with Heroes.”

“Nevertheless,” said Nils Rykermann, “we must think carefully. Leonie is right. We cannot succeed in attacking them on our own. We have only ourselves here now and four young students,” he told Raargh. “They're in the ROTC, of course, but I don't know if they're fully combat trained or experienced apart from young von Bibra, and I have no right to risk their lives. I am going to call Jocelyn van der Stratt.” He looked more closely at the old kzin. There were purple and orange bloodstains on his legs at the old wounds and round his neck and shoulders. There was blood on his head as well. Certain apparently fairly moderate head wounds could be fatal to kzinti. “I have known Heroes before who were more badly hurt than they would admit,” he said. “Lie down and let Leonie tend you.”

“I am a Hero,” said Raargh indignantly, “And time is scarce.”

“Even if we summon help immediately, it cannot get here for some hours,” Rykermann said. “I advise you to rest. We cannot charge back through the caves as we are.”

Raargh remembered his delusions in the caves. Certainly, it would be better if such things did not happen again. He knew there was not much the three of them could do by themselves, though had he been younger that might not have dissuaded him. “Think before you leap!” Chuut-Riit had told them. And the pain in his wounds was extreme. He growled a reluctant “Urrr” of assent.

The module's equipment included a large and versatile medical kit. He let Leonie apply a kzin-specific tranquilizer, pain killer and disinfectant and in a few moments—before he could ask Leonie for talcum powder—he was asleep on the floor of the module.

“We must start work early today,” Patrick Quickenden said. “We've put in a good effort over the last few days, but this hospitality, not to mention seeing a beautiful new world… It could lull us into forgetting there's still a war on!”

“Something has developed,” said Jocelyn, “that may be important. We'd like to take… er… Miss Moffet… to see something.”

“She's a key member of this group,” said Patrick. “I don't want her put at any risk. In fact I insist!”

Jocelyn looked at Arthur Guthlac. She sent him a silent directive.

“There's no danger,” Arthur told him. “Come yourself. It's a fairly short flight in a fast car.”

“I don't like it. There are still kzin on this planet. I've seen several already.”

“I take your point,” said Arthur, “but I'm still a Brigadier. I'll lay on an armed escort.”

“I suppose you know what you're doing. But the rest of us will stay here and get started.”

“Poor old ratcat!” said Leonie. “He's been through the mill. And even partial sensory deprivation is tougher on them than on us. It drives them crazy quicker.” The old kzin with his prostheses looked curiously vulnerable asleep, curled something like a house cat in a basket, but with his artificial arm jutting out at an awkward angle. “It would have been more difficult for him than he'll ever admit to have gone so far through the dark and silence of the caves alone.”

“They never admit weakness,” said Nils Rykermann. “Perhaps they're afraid it would make them seem too… human.” He paused and added suddenly: “You've never hated them as I have.”

“There's no danger of forgetting they're not human. And I tried to stop hating them after the cease-fire. It wasn't easy. If we'd had to live through the Occupation in the cities I don't think I could have even attempted it. And he helped, old Raargh. He had me at his mercy once, and here I am.”

“Mercy is not a concept they understand,” he said.

“Maybe… and yet, here I am.”

“Anyway, I wanted him out for the count. That's why I encouraged him to let you treat him. And all my best brandy from the monastery! Do you think he's telling the truth?”

“I've never known one to tell an absolutely outright lie. But what's he got to lie about? Why else should he be running about in the caves alone and without equipment? And those injuries are certainly real enough.”

“But it's such an incredible story!”

“I'm not only your wife, I'm your chief research assistant, remember,” said Leonie. “I've kept files. We know Henrietta was—is—probably the most hated of all the collaborators. It was an open secret among the Resistance that she was able to influence Chuut-Riit. There were even some Kzin who accused him of… of, well, you can guess. Perhaps she influenced him for good sometimes, but that wouldn't count. She was born and brought up under the Occupation and knew no life but that uniquely privileged one in a household of prominent collaborators, to whose headship she acceded. You know that after the Liberation there was a special price on her head. As for the atrocities committed against collaborators, we were lucky. We were in the hills and missed it all.”

“It didn't seem lucky at the time. We were at our last gasp. And I wanted vengeance on collabos and on the Kzin… I still do!” he burst out.

“That won't bring her back,” said Leonie quietly.

“It's the next best thing!” Nils Rykermann ground out. Then he bit the air and spun round to face her. He looked as if he had been struck a blow. “You… you knew!” he whispered.

“I always knew. Wasn't it always obvious? I knew when I was your student that you were in love with her… and since then that you always have been.” She took his hand in both hers and kissed him. “Don't you remember my hair? How I wore it in those days… with a pink headband?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you think I did that?”

“I never thought.”

“Because that was how she wore hers. Stupid of me, to try to compete with Dimity Carmody!”

“I didn't know.”

“It didn't suit me, really. My hair's darker blond than hers was. My father always called me his little lion cub… I remember, I'd only been enrolled a few days, and I was sitting at one of the Lindenbaum's tables, with some of the other freshers. We were just getting to know each other and find our way around the class-rooms and time-tables, and suddenly we girls realized that all the boys were staring at this blonde two tables away… I'm sorry, I shouldn't go on.”

“Yes… yes. Please. Go on.”

“Who's she? I wondered. A Tridee-star? A fashion model a long way off her turf? Something dumb, anyway, I took for granted, with all my eighteen-year-old sophistication and judgment. The universe couldn't be so unfair as to give somebody looks like that and brains as well! I wasn't surprised when she ordered coffee in… in that funny little voice she had… Then somebody told me: 'Mathematics and astrometaphysics,' they said. I was taken aback and saw that the universe was that unfair. But…” She gave an uneven laugh. “They didn't let me have it all at once. Even then, in my teenage jealousy, I thought she was just a particularly bright student. You can't blame me: She was no older than I. She must be brilliant to be studying Carmody's Transform, I thought. And then I found out… What we put ourselves through as students!

“Then, of course,” she went on, “we found out what an unfair universe was really like.”

“Yes, love, we certainly found that out.”

“After the kzin destroyed her ship, I saw what happened to you… You told me something about it as we set up the first clinic at the refugee camp… Remember?”

“I remember,” he said. “I thought at the time that only you would have thought in all that death and terror and chaos to bring low-tech medical supplies away, would have realized our autodocs would be useless without our civilization. But I was a walking dead man then.”

“I saw the music box, that the kzin left for you. I knew it was hers. I'd seen her playing it at the Lindenbaum when you and she had coffee there together. I'd… I'd even thought of collecting music boxes, too, so you might notice me. I joined the chess club, too, for an excuse to hang around there, hoping you might one day come alone and notice me. But you never played chess.”

“Because she didn't. It showed up her abnormality too much. She wanted to be normal. Do you know the last thing she said to me?”

“I'd like you to tell me.”

“She said—sh-she'd already been injured then: 'It was hard, I know, for you to be in love with a freak. Know, at least, that the freak loves you.' ”

“You've got a good memory.”

“Too good.”

“I love you, Nils. I loved you at the university and in the refugee camp and in the hills. That night in the hills when I told you I'd always loved you, I was telling the truth. It wasn't a student with a crush on her teacher. I'd been there and I knew the difference. And I saw you were falling apart. Don't forget, either, that I've been in bed beside you through a lot of nightmares. Or rather the same one. Oh, my darling, of course I've always known… I had to accept that she'd always be with you. What choice did I have? You can't fight the dead, you can only live with them.

“There's something else,” she went on, and her voice was stronger, almost exultant. “I was there, remember, when the kzin came to the refugee camp. Very few of us had actually seen them then, and I saw you face a creature that made the brave man beside you fall dead of sheer terror. I was there in the days that followed, when it seemed the whole weight of the Resistance, the whole war, rested on your shoulders alone. Not for a day, a week, or a month, but year after year, and the years became decades and there was no hope and you never faltered. You are not only the man I love, you are my hero!”

“I couldn't have done it, Leonie, without you. Not for a year, or a month or a week. Truly, you were beside me… love.”

“I'm afraid I opened a bit of a flood-gate there,” Leonie said after a pause. “For us both. I've been damming that up for a long time too, you know.”

“I'm glad you did open it, my love. So glad!… But Raargh's story? And Henrietta?”

“She escaped. You know. Disappeared.”

“I know,” Nils Rykermann said. “Jocelyn has a particular hatred of her. Her business. I have other fish to fry.”

“Until now I thought she was probably dead.”

“So did I. But it's a whole planet she's got to hide in. A whole system for that matter. And there are plastic surgeons and organleggers. She might look quite different. New handprints. New lungs to confuse breath analysis. New eyes and new retinas.”

“But the main reason I think Raargh's story is true,” said Leonie, “is obvious: A kzin both wouldn't and couldn't make it up. A mad monkey devoted to Chuut-Riit's memory trying to lead a kzin revolt! It's so crazy it has to be true!”

“I'm inclined to agree with you.”

“And he said he was making his way here to see you anyway, as Cumpston said.”

“Yes. But why me?”

“Isn't it obvious? He trusts you.”

“Why should he? I hate ratcats!”

“Obviously, he doesn't think you hate him,” said Leonie. “Fighting together in the caves may have something to do with that… perhaps even the fact that he saved my life. And you left the key in the module door.”

“I forgot it! And… and there was no danger around. Morlocks—if there are any left—don't understand keys.”

“But kzin do.” She quoted, “How brilliantly lit the chambers of the subconscious would be if we could see into them!”

“Who said that?”

“She did. I went to one of her public lectures—on the inspiration of scientific discovery. I knew you'd be there.”

“I've tried, you know, I've tried very hard, never to let her memory come between us.”

“I know.”

“I'll call Jocelyn,” Rykermann said after an uncomfortable moment. He keyed a number on the desk and spoke rapidly. “Well,” he said a few moments later, “talk about serendipity. She's on her way here already. She's about to leave München with Arthur Guthlac and a party they think I might be interested to meet.”

“What's that mean?”

Nils Rykermann shrugged. “No doubt we'll find out. She says Early's had some sort of alarm too.” He shrugged out of his robe and stepped into the shower cabinet. “Freshen up, anyway,” he remarked, turning on the water.

She dropped her own robe and followed him. “Make love to me,” she breathed, winding her arms round him. “I need you.”

Their faces were nearly on a level. He did not need to bend to kiss her.

“I need you too. I always need you.”

Chapter 8

“Patrick's too flattering,” said Dimity, as the outlying farmlands flashed away below the car. “I'm not a key member of our group. I'm largely a theoretician and the original work I did on the hyperdrive has been done. I got myself on this party because I wanted to see Wunderland again.”

“Again?” Arthur Guthlac raised his eyebrows. It was on the face of it such an obviously bizarre thing to say. Before the hyperdrive, interstellar travel had involved decades-long flights in hibernation, had been extremely costly and invariably one-way.

“To find out what had happened. I was born here, grew up here… You think that's impossible?”

“You're saying you are the Dimity Carmody? Go on. Possibly I know what may have happened.”

“The Crashlanders pulled me out of a ship that reached Procyon flying on automatic pilot, its life systems destroyed by a laser blast and everyone else on board dead. I was in a tank. But I couldn't remember much of my life. Not who I was apart from my name or what had happened to us. A title that I didn't understand. I only remembered that something terrible had happened. Images of great ravening cat-beasts, and a man with a yellow beard… and later, when I started reading again, of mathematical symbols… You don't look too surprised.”

“I'm not. Not after something I heard a couple of nights ago, added to what I've seen of you… but now, I wonder.”

“About me?”

“No, whether this trip today was an entirely good idea,” he glanced rather guiltily at Jocelyn, sitting in a blister in the forward part of the car and out of hearing. “Still, we're on our way now.”

Below them the farmlands were giving way to barren, unsettled country. Flat-topped mesas, several now adorned with sensors or batteries of weapons, told of ancient erosion. Here and there was uncleared wreckage of war.

“It looks familiar,” said Dimity. The great escarpment of the Hohe Kalkstein loomed blue-gray to the northeast.

“This part can't have changed much in a long while. Not like München and the university. It's never been settled,” said Jocelyn, returning to the main cabin. She dialed them drinks. Dimity toyed with hers nervously. As it approached the cliffs the car banked slightly and flew up a long canyon. There was a laden vehicle parked on the ground.

The car had a new, kzinti-derived gravity motor and settled with a quiet purring in front of the Drachenholen's mouth. There was none of the noise and stone-spitting of an old ground-effect vehicle. As they cut the engine several humans emerged from the great cave. “Poor security,” remarked Jocelyn. “This place isn't so pacified as not to need a lookout.”

Arthur Guthlac surveyed the scene with the car's security sensors.

“There is a lookout,” he told her. “At least I very much hope that's what it is. Just inside the cave, partially concealed. I read the signature of a large specimen of what the monitor rather quaintly identifies as Pseudofelis sapiens ferox.”

The München party descended from the car, three of Guthlac's four guards triangulating the position with professional alertness.

Nils and Leonie Rykermann and their remaining students hurried to greet the party, Raargh emerging after a moment to join them. He carried one of the salvaged kzinti weapons, a thing the size of a small human artillery piece and too heavy for any human in the group to port. Rykermann was carrying a strakkaker he had been cleaning, and Leonie had another slung over her shoulder. The students were also armed.

“Jocelyn! Arthur! I'm glad to see you!” he called, “We've got a problem here!” With the air of one springing a surprise that might not be agreeable, he turned to Jocelyn, “I hope you can stand a bit of a shock. As you can see, Raargh, formerly Raargh-Sergeant, is here.

“I know you are old sparring partners,” he went on, awkwardly trying to make light of the situation, “but he has done us a service and brought us valuable information.” He counted the München party. “But we may… need… more…”

His voice died away. There was a metallic rattle as he dropped the strakkaker on the ground. He stood staring, his mouth working.

Jocelyn turned from her affectionate greeting of Leonie. “Hullo, Nils,” she said. “I believe you've met Dimity Carmody before. Recently arrived from We Made It.”

Dimity Carmody too was staring as if she could hardly credit her senses. In mirror-image gestures each raised a hand. Their fingertips, trembling, touched. Their fluttering fingers raised, slowly, to touch each other's faces.

Neither had eyes for Jocelyn van der Stratt as she turned abruptly away from them, her face contorted. Only Raargh saw it. He was not an expert in interpreting simian expressions, but his ziirgah sense picked up a hatred like a physical blow. For a second he gave renewed thanks he was not a telepath. He thought this sudden wave of volcanic hatred that flowed from her was directed entirely at him. But he was a Hero practiced in self-control, and the situation demanded discipline. Seeing, at long last, what sort of monkeymeat Jocelyn made would not help Vaemar. His tail lashed the ground, but he remained otherwise impassive.

“I'm sorry,” said Dimity. She was still staring at Nils Rykermann but speaking apparently to everyone. “There is a lot I don't remember. I was hurt, you know.”

They made their way to the main camp. Dimity stared about her, touching the back of her head with a characteristic nervous gesture, keeping well away from Raargh. She seemed to recognize the module. Jocelyn and Raargh glared at one another, Jocelyn's body language almost kzinlike, with barely pent attack reflex, Raargh using his lips and tongue to cover his teeth with a conscious effort, the tips of the glistening black claws of his natural hand peeping from between the pads. Nils Rykermann walked like a man in a daze.

Leonie, blank-faced as a soldier under inspection, explained what had happened, Raargh elucidating at various points.

“Can we be sure it's Henrietta?” Jocelyn ground out. Her teeth were clenched and her eyes shining now. Her fingers ran through the ears on her belt-ring, as if counting them over and over.

“That's how she identified herself. Raargh never saw her before. But why should any impostor wish to boast falsely of being the most hated human on the planet? And she has a recording of Chuut-Riit. Raargh thinks it's probably genuine, not a VR mock-up. He saw Chuut-Riit alive.”

“I have seen Chuut-Riit alive, and I have seen her before!” said Jocelyn. “The last time was when she accompanied Chuut-Riit to the start of a public hunt. Among the game turned loose for the kzin were some convicted humans in whom I had a… very personal interest. And I was in police uniform. I remained impassive and betrayed nothing, like a well-trained monkey. To have betrayed anything would only have achieved a place for me in the hunt as well. It was as I stood there that I vowed to kill her with my own hands. I will get her. If necessarily alone.”

Raargh raised the torn remnants of his ears in the equivalent of a human nod of understanding. Actually he was thinking of what dead Trader-Gunner had said to him the day of the cease-fire when he met Jocelyn: “Those manretti can be trouble.” I have always wanted that tree-swinger dead, but for Vaemar's sake as well as the word I gave I must be calm, he thought again. He had schooled himself for the company of one or two humans, preferably on his own ground or in the open. Being confined in the living-module with thirteen of them was a strain, especially with several of them giving out emotions that battered at his ziirgah sense. Leonie, who, after the battle with the Morlocks he thought he knew, was throwing out an emotional shield such as he had never encountered before. He wondered why. A short time before she had seemed relaxed and calm. That had been after mating, he knew, but even allowing for what monkeys were like, what had been a radiant, almost tangible happiness seemed to have worn off very quickly.

As for the mad manrret Henrietta and her even madder get, her presumption of some kind of partnership with Chuut-Riit would have been an intolerable insult even if she had not dared to lay forcible hands on Vaemar and himself.

He noticed the Jocelyn manrret looking at his ears. Torn as they were, it seemed, she could read that simple gesture. Her body language altered and his ziirgah sense recorded the waves of hatred that flowed from her mind being modified by something like brief fellow-feeling. We both understand vengeance. And then he thought: One of us two is not going to see another sunrise.

“They must suspect Raargh has given the alarm. They will be pulling out now,” said Leonie. “I suggest we send a blocking force back up the route Raargh took getting here, and another to watch for the main exits. It would be easier if we knew what the main exits looked like, but there you are.”

“I don't like dividing our force,” said Arthur Guthlac. “There are too few of us as it is. And we don't know how many there are.”

“We're not challenging battle. Only watching them till substantial forces arrive. They may not think Raargh went to humans. Perhaps they think he's headed to the kzin community at Arhus to bring them into the revolt. But we've got to move fast.”

“I've called for reinforcements,” said Guthlac. “Anyway, if Cumpston failed to report to Early after a certain time, emergency procedures would be triggered automatically.”

“How much do you know of Early's schemes?”

“Not a lot nowadays. And frankly I don't want to. His work was always secretive, and it's become more so lately. Don't forget, he got to where he is not only by being a brilliant military strategist, but by being the most ferocious carnivore in ARM's internal politics. That means manipulating ARM factions against one another, never letting the right hand know what the left hand is doing. Hunting kzin with a pocketknife in a dark room is child's play compared to the games Early plays.”

“No more monkey-chatter!” said Raargh. “Vaemar is captive. Must rescue now!”

“If Raargh says Vaemar is important, he is,” said Leonie.

“All right,” said Arthur Guthlac after a moment. “Can you guide us back through the caves?”

“Yes, trail is marked.”

“And we don't know the other entrance or entrances. It or they are presumably well hidden. Very well. This is my plan. It you don't like it, say so very quickly.” He turned to two of the soldiers. “Dunkerton and Collins, you will take our car and the university car and fly north. Commence a box search of the area using deep radar. Remember they may have both a human and a kzin prisoner, both important. Don't fire on them under any circumstances. Track them till reinforcements arrive. Take both cars in case they split up. The rest of us will head back through the caves. That's the only way I can think of that gives us a chance to block both ends of the burrow at once.”

No one disagreed.

“Right, Nils and Leonie, I'll get you and your students to organize weapons, equipment, food, lamps for us all. You know best what we'll need. We may be underground a long time.”

The module emptied quickly under Leonie's direction. Arthur Guthlac turned to the desk and spoke to it urgently. Jocelyn alone remained with him, drawing him aside.

“Early says reinforcements are on the way,” he told her. “Markham's coming too.”

“Why not just let this revolt go ahead? It would do the Exterminationists' work for them.” Her voice had a seductive burr in it. Her fingers brushed his thigh. She bent slowly towards him and kissed his mouth, then drew away, gazing up at him catlike from under her long lashes. Her breasts heaved slightly but noticeably.

Arthur Guthlac looked at her with troubled eyes.

“Don't think the idea doesn't tempt me,” he said. “But… I began my military career—poring over fragments of old forbidden books in a museum—because I cared about the fact that honor seemed to have departed from our world… from Earth's society, anyway. We were sheeplike masses almost without volition, directed and controlled by the ARM bureaucracy, of which I myself was a tiny part. Without realizing it, we were undergoing a sort of death. I wanted to keep some threatened values alive. If it's true that humans can only have a civilization as long as less civilized humans guard it, and I am one of the guardians, then I will still try to be as civilized as possible. Otherwise the whole thing ends up kind of pointless.

“During the war I did plenty of ruthless things, including acting as an agent provocateur to discredit the pacifist movement when the situation on Earth required it. I've slept well with many deaths on my conscience—and I'm not talking about kzin deaths. But to just let these lunatics go ahead with their attempted mayhem seems wrong—perhaps because that old kzin trusts Rykermann, perhaps because we're all getting old and less hot-livered—I mean hot-tempered! Even seeing that kzin and those humans working together at the spaceport. Perhaps I'm wobbling a bit about Exterminationism. Also, who knows how much damage the revolt might do before we crushed it? I need to think the whole thing over.”

“I don't! But there's one reason for me against just sitting back, my love: If Henrietta is there I'm going after her! Alone if need be! But I suppose it would be silly to resent reinforcements.”

As Cumpston had a habit of pinching his lower lip when thinking, Arthur Guthlac had a habit of sticking his out. Jocelyn leaned closer to him, bit it gently between her teeth, then licked his face. She thought of how Markham had enjoyed that.

“Leonie liver not happy,” said Raargh in his blend of Wunderlander and the former slaves' patois. It was a statement, not a question, the vocabulary somewhat broken down. Leonie was not as fluent as the colonel.

“No,” she said, “Leonie liver not happy.”

“We go into battle,” said Raargh. Even though Leonie was a female, it—she—was a fighter, and surely the prospect of action should rouse any fighter's spirits. “Good for soldier to go into battle with high liver. Fight best… Memory Raargh and Leonie fight morlocks?… Why Leonie not happy? Leonie just mate. Mating make females happy.”

“How did you know that?”

“Ziirgah sense,” he told her. “Not telepath,” he emphasized. “Not tell thoughts. But tell feelings. Leonie happy when Raargh wake. Now…”

She laughed.

“Why Leonie discharge from eyes? That also show humans not happy, Raargh know… Once, Leonie dig Raargh out of trap. Once, Raargh help Leonie breathe. Leonie female, but still Leonie and old Raargh companions, Raargh thinks.”

“Yes, Leonie and Raargh companions,” she replied. “Life was simple then. But Leonie is stupid manrret.”

“Some manretti not stupid,” he told her. “Some manretti clever. Leonie clever… Some mans,” he went on, “like clever manretti.”

“Yes, Raargh,” said Leonie. “That is problem. Some mans like clever manretti. Hard to explain to Hero.” She put out a hand and scratched the great scarred head under the lower jaw. Raargh resisted an undignified temptation to purr.

“Raargh companion,” he said.

“Yes, Raargh companion.”

“Leonie have enemies, Raargh have enemies. Raargh eat! Raargh have long fangs, sharp claws.” He demonstrated. “Raargh old, but Raargh quick!… Is Jocelyn manrret Leonie enemy?” he asked hopefully.

“You would, too, wouldn't you? No, companion, it's not that simple. Leonie has no enemies. Not here.”

“Leonie not want to kill kzinti… kill ratcats. Raargh knows.”

“No. But I will fight if I must today… Otherwise… maybe disaster.”

“Yes. Raargh knows.”

Very carefully, imitating a gesture he had seen among humans, Raargh laid his great clawed hand on Leonie's shoulder. Surprised, she turned her tear-streaked face to him. Arthur Guthlac entered. His own eyes widened for a moment at the scene.

“We're ready!” he barked. “We're all going!”

“Shouldn't we leave someone here?” Leonie asked.

“We're too thin on the ground to divide our forces any further. Professor Carmody is our guest on this planet, and I'm charged with keeping her out of danger. But leaving her here with or without a guard is hardly a practical option. In any case, she has said she doesn't want to be left here and she'll come. But I want no lives lost. Remember, we're not going to fight, but to blockade them till Early's troops arrive.

“Raargh,” he went on, “I am declaring this a military situation. Will you take orders from me?”

“Yes.” Five years had accustomed Raargh to humans' notions of discipline. The old kzin did not even growl. And that, thought Arthur Guthlac, weakens me as an Exterminationist a little more. I am a soldier, and that old ratcat becomes one of my troops. Honor is a tanjed awkward thing. And what was the old ratcat doing just now? It looked for a moment as if he was comforting her… But why?… Of course! As the song goes: 'What kind of fool am I?'… and it took a kzin to see it!

“Let's move out!” he snarled.

“What now?” Vaemar asked Colonel Cumpston.

“Waiting is very difficult. At the moment it is all we can do.”

“I think they are listening to us.”

“Yes.”

“It does not matter,” said Vaemar. “Seizing me by a trick and insulting my Honored Step-Sire Raargh—even insulting you, my chess-partner—is not the way to gain my cooperation…”

“If she and Emma have you, they can use your Name to the other kzinti.”

“And what you said… that Emma's plans would destroy every kzin on Wunderland… Do you believe that?”

“Yes, Vaemar. Worse, it would mean no peace between our kinds would ever be possible. That will be difficult enough as things are.”

“It surprises me, that she should behave so.”

“Not me, so much, perhaps, but I have read more of human history. And lived longer.”

“Do you think Henrietta is truly loyal to my Honored Sire?”

“She probably thinks she is. Whether he would approve of what she says in his name is another matter… Suppose, Vaemar, suppose against all odds Emma's plans succeeded—that the Kzin revolted and captured the hyperdrive. How would you feel?”

“I am a kzin. I am Chuut-Riit's son. But I am also a kzin of Ka'ashi—of Wunderland. I know you and other humans… difficult.”

“According to the holo, your honored Sire Chuut-Riit knew Henrietta had influenced him. And he wanted her, if he died, to influence his own sons and Traat-Admiral. He was looking—as far as being what he was allowed him to look—as some sort of eventual partnership—or at least I know of no other notion that described it more closely. His ideas were perhaps not so far removed from those we now hear from Markham and a few others—save, of course, that he saw the Kzin as the utterly dominant ones and the humans existing on sufferance—slaves perhaps at best one day a little above the Jotok.” And monkey-meat if they were fractious, he thought. But if we ever get out of this, I want this young ratcat thinking about a human-kzin relationship on more positive lines. Civilize them for a few—perhaps more than a few—generations, and who knows?

“Yes,” said Henrietta, stepping into the room, Emma beside her. “Chuut-Riit knew I influenced his policies, knew I helped him understand humans. He accepted it. But listening to you has told me a good deal. I seek to stop the secret manipulation of the human race as well as the Kzin. It appears my daughter has an altogether different agenda.”

“There is no point in hiding it any longer,” said Emma. “It is I who am truly loyal to the Patriarchy, and the memory of the Riit.”

“This ARM officer is right! Your plans are insane!” Henrietta cried out. “To guide and instruct Vaemar to help destroy the ARM conspiracy when he leads the kzinti of Wunderland is my charge and my sacred goal. You would destroy everything in a mad adventure!”

“Mad! You call me mad! Have you looked at your own brain lately?”

“Andre sides with me. We have planned this for years.”

Emma raised one hand and made a gesture. “Go and make ch'rowl with your pet monkey, then! Behold!” A dozen male kzin entered the room, standing about her. They were all, Cumpston saw, young. Older than Vaemar, taller and bulkier, but several still with the last traces of juvenile and adolescent spotting on their coats. There were also several more humans with them.

“The loyal humans and the loyal Heroes side with me!” Emma snarled. One or two of the kzin growled. Emma addressed them in the hiss-spit of the Heroes' Tongue. Cumpston was astonished that a human could pronounce it so well. She turned back to Henrietta. “You forget! Half these Heroes' Sires were of Ktrodni-Stkaa's pride! They follow me!”

“I have given them refuge.” Henrietta's hand went to the weapon on her belt. “I have tried to help the kzin of Wunderland, of every pride, but not for this! And you have here the blood of Chuut-Riit, who you would risk! Chuut-Riit, who was my good Master! Yes, and who called me friend as well as slave!”

“Chuut-Riit! You cannot impress us with that name! My loyalty is to the Riit! The true Riit, whose traditions were borne by Ktrodni-Stkaa! Chuut-Riit was a compromiser, if nothing worse! If Riit he truly was! Chuut-Riit's reward was foul death at the hands of a human assassination team. Ktrodni-Stkaa saw Chuut-Riit and Traat-Admiral for what they were! Monkey-lovers! Much good it did them!”

Cumpston looked at Vaemar with alarm. To insult a kzin—for a human to insult a kzin!—was more than bad enough. To insult a kzin's Sire was far worse. And for a human to insult a kzin's Sire of Riit blood was… unreal. But Vaemar betrayed no emotion save an unnatural stillness.

Two more humans rushed in, wearing the odd pseudo-kzin costume that seemed to be the uniform of these people.

“We've picked up activity in the south passages! Large life-forms. About a dozen of them. They appear to be human but at least one kzin.”

The human identified as Andre strode forward. “We have a common enemy!” he shouted. “We must destroy these invaders. Defense stations!” He stepped to the control console.

Vaemar screamed and leaped. One slash sent the human behind Andre who blocked his way spinning across the room, blood splattering. Then Vaemar ripped at the control console. The lights went out, save for the illuminated numbers of a couple of clocks and other pinpoints. The air was a confusion of kzin and human shrieks. There was the gingery smell of kzinti battle-reflexes. Cumpston felt the weight and sharpness of a clawed Kzinti hand on him.

“It is I, Vaemar,” a voice hissed in his ear. “Follow. Hold my tail. We must find a hiding place!”

Emergency lights were coming on as they left. Henrietta and Emma seemed to be working together at the console. The kzinti and humans were seizing weapons from the racks.

Chapter 9

The journey back the way Raargh had come, with lights and a marked trail, was much quicker. With lights and company, too, even if the company was only human, he did not suffer from the delusions of sensory deprivation. Any surviving morlocks kept out of their way—and the Rykermanns had lights whose radiations morlocks were meant to find especially painful. Raargh again went in the lead, again hoping his prosthetic arm would catch any Sinclair wire before it sliced into living flesh and bone. Arthur Guthlac kept close behind him.

The Rykermann party had automatic compasses, GPS indicators, microminiaturized deep radar and other directional aids, and there was little risk this time of getting lost. Leonie made a selection of emergency medical equipment developed in years of guerrilla war, and Dimity, the most lightly armed of the party, carried it. They went fast, but, to Raargh's impatience, at less than maximum speed. They had only their feet and were hung with gear, and Arthur Guthlac insisted on no more than a walking pace with rest stops. At his insistence they were kitted up in skin-coveralls and each third of the party took it in turns to wear gas masks and helmets. They passed the bone-heap and entered the lined tunnels. Ahead was a dim glow. There seemed little point in dousing their own lights.

“Should we spread out?” asked Jocelyn.

“I don't think there's much point in spreading far. If they've got deep radar or motion detectors they'll see us coming. If they have plasma guns or nerve gas it isn't spreading out that will save us. But it might be a good idea if they try to take us on hand-to-hand.”

“Fighting kzin hand-to-hand isn't a good idea. Anyway, the point isn't to fight. It's to stop them getting away, with or without their prisoners.”

“How do you know this is the only way out?” asked Dimity.

“I don't,” said Guthlac after a moment. “I suppose I took it for granted. In fact, knowing how paranoid the kzin can be when they put their minds to it, it's unlikely they'd have restricted themselves to a single—”

“There!” Raargh stabbed with a massive finger at Guthlac's motion detector. “Movement ahead of us and on our right flank.”

“How many?” asked Leonie.

“They are not many yet. An eight, two eights. But we are not many also.”

The lights showed nothing. Only the single tunnel ahead of them, and what they knew were a complication of dark holes behind.

“These caves have never been fully mapped,” said Leonie. “We've been finding new ones all the time.”

An explosion shattered the panel above them. Raargh, faster than any human could have moved, spun, firing the heavy kzin weapon. Guthlac's two troopers also fired back with quick, short professional bursts.

“Behind us as well, now!” Raargh snarled.

One of the students was down, hit by a chunk of flying metal behind the left ear. Arthur Guthlac saw instantly he was dead. Keeping low, he gathered the strakkaker and spare charges, as well as the food pack the boy had been carrying.

“Did you see anything?”

“No, too quick. Too dark.”

“No point in staying here, then,” said Arthur Guthlac. “Plans are changed. We move on. And we stay together. We're too few to split. Forward!”

A blue glow lit the tunnel ahead of them. Hemispherical, it blocked the way. Raargh recognized it as something to be avoided. Dimity recognized it as a Sinclair field, and Arthur Guthlac knew it from old ARM texts. It was possible to live in the time-compressed zone inside it, given adequate supplies of food, water and air, but only if one was in place before it was generated: The process of entering the zone once it was activated would probably be fatal.

A beam, or the projectiles of a strakkaker, fired through the field would receive enormous acceleration. What would happen to such a beam on leaving the field on the other side no one was sure, but as a rule attempts to get around the Special Theory of Relativity in the Einsteinian universe had either no results or cataclysmic ones. Strakkaker needles, or other projectiles emerging from the field with a kinetic energy giving them far more destructive power than artillery shells, would also not be a good thing in this confined space.

“We'll have to go over it,” Dimity said.

“How?”

She pointed. The roof above them was a complex of machinery—pipes, ducting, ladders, and gangways.

“It's too obvious. They will have booby trapped it.”

Dimity turned to Raargh.

“This field was not on when you came this way?” she asked, speaking carefully in Wunderlander.

“No.”

“I think it's been set up here in a hurry. They may not have had time to do more. If it's enough to delay us, from their point of view that's better than nothing.”

“All right. How do we get over it?”

“We have ropes in the caving gear,” said Leonie. “If that would help.”

“It might. If we could get up there and attach them.”

“Can the kzin do it?” asked Dimity.

“Can you, Raargh?”

“Raargh can try,” he answered. “But Raargh cannot jump like kitten. Raargh is old and has wounds in legs.”

“You are still quick,” said Leonie. “Still have strength of Hero.”

He screamed and leaped, straight upwards, claws scrabbling. The claws of his natural hand cut grooves in the paneling, deep but not deep enough to hold him. The claws of his prosthetic hand smashed through it, found a hold. His hind claws dug in. He pulled himself vertically upright, seized at the overhead ducting and struggled onto it.

“Useful to have a kzin along,” said Leonie.

The glowing domes of the Sinclair fields below them reminded Cumpston a little of giant jellyfish stranded on an Earth beach. But they would, he knew, be considerably more deadly to touch than the worst jellyfish. They were crawling along a high gantry, and he felt hopelessly exposed to any hunter with modern tracking or sensory devices.

The red dot of a laser-site appeared on his chest. Fight or flight, he knew, would be useless. He raised his hands in surrender, signaling to Vaemar to do the same. A group of the armed humans from the fortress appeared at the end of the gantry, McGlue in their lead.

“You had better come out quietly,” said McGlue. There were six of them, with strakkakers and nerve disrupters. Vaemar and Cumpston obeyed.

“Put your hands on top of your heads. Do not make any sudden moves. Dead, neither of you are any use. But we will shoot if we have to. You cannot beat six of us. But I do not want to treat you as prisoners. We are on the same side.”

“And whose pride are you?” asked Cumpston. “The mad one or the even madder one?”

“Ostensibly, we side with Emma,” said the man. “Actually, we have our own agenda. One which you, Colonel, are obliged to support.”

“I suppose you'll explain?”

“I need to. We seem to be alone at present. All other kzinti and humans are off wiping out your little rescue party in the caves. Does this mean anything to you?” He held up a small plastic cube, projecting a holo.

“An ARM ident.”

“Genuine, as you well know. Specifically coded to my DNA and impossible to counterfeit. We have the same employer, Colonel. Or ultimately the same employer.”

“Go on.”

“Your job has been to watch this young kzin. To adjust him to living on a human world. To become his friend.”

“I am his friend! And I have never concealed my ARM status from him.”

“I congratulate you. You have carried out your instructions cleverly. But it has been my part to play a more covert role. ARM is, as you have perhaps guessed, the instrument of a higher power.”

“So even Chuut-Riit guessed. Not a very effective secret if it can be worked out by an alien being four and a half light-years from Earth.”

“Suppose Emma's plans—though I will be frank with you and say our plans, for you know the way we must operate—for a revolt of the Wunderland kzin go ahead. As any practical military man such as yourself understands, it will almost certainly fail. The kzin are relatively few, disorganized and disarmed. On the other hand, given the heavy weapons stockpiled here, and kzin courage and fighting ability, and given a few lucky breaks, an uprising could do great damage and cause considerable loss of human life. As you have eloquently put it, the kzin on Wunderland and Tiamat would then probably be wiped out to the last kzinrett and the last kitten—if events followed an undirected course.”

“But they will not follow an undirected course, and in any case you are wrong is thinking that the kzin of the Patriarchy would care particularly in a moral sense. We would be doing no more than they expect of monkeys. Kzin culture does not have much of the human concept of hostages. The kzinti of the Alpha Centauri system have surrendered. They are disgraced anyway. Their lives mean nothing. That they tried to fight back when the situation was hopeless meant they did no more than Heroes are expected to do. Perhaps it would make their dishonor a little less. Certainly, it will mean other kzin worlds and other individual kzinti will be even less willing to surrender when all their hope is gone than they are now. Certainly, the war will be prolonged, not forever, but enough to give us time.”

“I still don't understand,” said Cumpston. “At the very least, a lot more humans will die, directly and indirectly. And we know the kzinti have other slave races. Some would say, even setting everything else aside, we have a moral duty to help them. Prolonging the war will not do that. A peace has been possible here so far. It may be possible with whole planets.”

“I suggest you look at the long view,” McGlue replied. “The hyperdrive is the greatest threat to the stability of the human species—indeed to all species. Given the absence of war and easy interstellar travel, sooner or later our control is gone. Not this year, not this decade, perhaps not this century. But eventually.

“In the three centuries between the first settlement of Wunderland, followed by the other interstellar colonies, and the development of the hyperdrive we—ARM—lost a great deal of control.

“That was inevitable. Interstellar travel was rare and one-way, with many years spent in hibernation. Even message communication was restricted to the speed of light. Now the hyperdrive threatens chaos for the human race in the long term. Why do you think ARM discouraged research into FTL for so long? But FTL is a two-edged sword, and one edge fights for us: for it also gives us the chance to reassert order and communication throughout the human worlds if we act quickly, and reestablish a controlling presence throughout the human species before the inevitable human diaspora. Prolonging the war with the Kzin will give us time for that, both for the colonies in general and for Wunderland in particular. It will unite the human worlds under ordinary military discipline and organization long enough for us to establish ourselves once again in place on every one of them.

“Can you, an ARM officer of your rank, seriously doubt the worth of our cause? You, a war veteran who has seen so much chaos and destruction? Before the war ARM was a technological police. That is what it remains. Those who fretted under the stability we imposed could not imagine the consequences of destability, or the immeasurably worse consequences we face if we falter now! Would you see wars between human worlds? Perhaps at last a whole galaxy filled with wars? You are more humane than that, Colonel!

“As for the kzin of Wunderland, certain selected individuals will be saved. You, I think, hope for the Kzin to be civilized in the course of time. That is among our goals also.

“We helped that old kzin to escape—or rather turned a blind eye to it—expecting him to die in the caves. Alive here, he was a constant potential nuisance to our plans and a reminder to Vaemar and perhaps some of the other kzin and humans of a false complexity of loyalties. We wanted him permanently out of the way without risking the wrath of Henrietta, Emma, and indeed Vaemar by killing him. We underestimated him—or perhaps kzin military prostheses are better than we thought. Anyway, we did not know there was a human expedition within reach. Well, Vaemar, if he survives this battle we will see he is safe for you now. You will not lose your friend. There are kzinti on Wunderland we shall need. You, Vaemar, will have the highest of places among them, the place to which your royal blood entitles you.

“Vaemar, what we do is for the Heroic race as well. You know chaos would be at least as destructive for your kind as for ours. Sooner or later your kind will have the hyperdrive too. Your role may be to help hold chaos at bay. You are correct, Colonel, that Chuut-Riit's blood may be especially important.

“Already before the Liberation our people here—the trained heirs of those who came with the original colonists—had made contact with certain kzin—kzin who we made sure as well as we could survived the Liberation. We will contact the slave races, in good time. Already we seek among the kzin for a jotok-trainer. Our ultimate masters—and I say 'our' because they are yours as well as mine—do not think in the short term or on a small scale. We do what we do for the longest-term good of all. And I mean all, kzinti included.”

“All right,” said Cumpston. “I accept who you are. What do you want me to do?”

“For the moment, nothing. Things are developing satisfactorily. The best thing we can do now is keep out of the way and not intervene unless we need to.”

Colonel Cumpston nodded, raising his hand to pinch his lower lip thoughtfully. The narrow gangway meant they were standing in a line. The laser in his ring had a single charge only, but given their position it was enough.

“Now,” he said to Vaemar as they stepped over the bodies, “we should move cautiously to find our friends.”

“What about these?”

“I would not suggest you eat them. The meat of such would be distasteful. Drop them into the Sinclair field and it will take care of them in good time. It is useful to have weapons again.”

As they pushed the bodies off the catwalk into the field glowing below, Cumpston took from one of his pockets a small black emblem in the shape of a swan and dropped it after them. They heard, along the passages ahead, explosions and the screech of a strakkaker. Human shouts and kzin snarls and screams. Mechanical voices shouting orders.

“Where now?” asked Vaemar.

“To the sound of the guns, my young Hero!”

The young Kzin's snarl of joy shook the air. Laden with weapons, they ran.

A bolt from Raargh's heavy weapon smashed into the gallery. A human and two kzin fell. Another kzin, leaping down, was hit by the needles of a strakkaker and disintegrated.

But Guthlac's party was taking casualties too: two more of the students and one of the troopers were down, and they were outnumbered, with no obvious way either forward or back, with the enemy in possession of the high ground. I've blundered, thought Guthlac. Terminally, maybe. Should have remembered Sun Tzu. I made the mistake of attacking without knowing the enemy or the terrain. Let them get up a plasma gun and we're done. Had he let Jocelyn—where was she?—distract his fighting brain? Nonsense! He looked at his watch. They had bought some time, anyway. But above them was the labyrinth of ladders, ducting, and machinery which the enemy knew and he did not. Raargh spun and fired, too quickly for him to follow, hitting someone or something—the explosion was fierce enough to leave the species in doubt—that had been crawling on top of some piping behind them. We'd be dead already but for that ratcat, he thought. Still, we've put up a good fight so far. Rykermann also seemed to have rediscovered fighter's reflexes and was getting off fast and accurate snapshots. Leonie too. Well, those three are an old team. Jocelyn was good too, very good, and Professor Carmody, if not so quick, had evidently used a gun before.

Moving shapes above some distance away, hard to make out. He gestured to Raargh, whose artificial eye was proving as useful as his enormous strength. The old kzin fired twice. The explosion brought down a massive overhead gantry and attached ducting in roiling fire. The way ahead seemed clear, at least, since their suits could withstand the heat of ordinary flame.

“Forward!” he shouted, then to Raargh, remembering kzinti combat psychology, “Lead, Hero!”

They sprang up. More shots from behind! The frontal attack, he realized, had been a diversion. The oldest trick in the book, and I fell for it! Well done, Brigadier! The remaining trooper was down, the rest of them bunched together.

Falling wreckage hit Guthlac. He had had broken bones before and now he felt knee and shin snap. Something in his chest, too. The pain was monstrous, but he knew, or hoped, that if he lived he could be quickly repaired. Not like the Resistance fighters who fought here without docs, he thought. Everything went black for a moment, and then he struggled back to consciousness.

Jocelyn spun and fired, holding her laser low. Leonie was right behind her. The laser sliced through her suit and into her lower body. Dimity kicked, knocking the laser out of Jocelyn's hands before it could finish bisecting Leonie.

Raargh saw. With a roar he leaped back at Jocelyn, claws flashing.

Firing as they came, at least twenty kzin and humans charged up the tunnel. Dimity, feet braced apart and steadied against the tunnel wall, fired a laser with one hand and a strakkaker with the other, hitting several, stopping the mass of them for a moment.

Two more shapes, one kzin, one human, leaped down from a gantry into the attackers. At the sound of Vaemar's battle-scream, Raargh abandoned Jocelyn and charged into the fight, firing the heavy kzin weapon even as he leaped. Rykermann was just behind the kzin.

Guthlac tried to follow and fell. Instinct overriding reason, he tried to spring back to his feet, and his right leg collapsed in an agony that seemed to turn the passage white about him. His right knee appeared to have reversed its joint. Splintered bone visible. Gritting his teeth and trying not to scream, he dragged himself toward the others. If a broken rib pierced his lung… well, war was war. Dimity was crouched over Leonie, apparently applying some sort of makeshift tourniquet or bandage. The last of Rykermann's students, who he had forgotten, was giving them some covering fire, advancing in short rushes toward their position, firing quick, accurate bursts. You're either a natural or you've done this before, Guthlac thought. I guess a lot of Wunderlanders have. I should have used you better. Then the student was hit, by three converging lasers fired by the kzinti above, and went down in a gruesome welter. The detail that suddenly sickened Guthlac was that he was another one dead whose name he had never known. And once I was fascinated by bits of stories that mentioned war! I didn't know the half of it!

Command your troops, Brigadier! Remember Ceres! Remember Europa! Remember Hssin! His first concern must be with the battle. Agonizingly, he pulled himself up and half over a heavy section of fallen ducting. Who was friend and who foe in the battle of humans and kzinti? More damage killed the remaining lights, leaving the scene lit only by flames from burning wreckage and the lurid glare of lasers through smoke.

You'll do no good here, he told himself. Get closer. Distance the pain. You're trained to do it. You can get another leg.

He inched onward, keeping to the side of the tunnel. The firing seemed to be more scattered.

Once or twice he heard Vaemar's voice, distinguishable from the other kzin screams by its juvenile note, and a deep roar he thought was Raargh. Flame blazed up brightly at his back as it reached a container of some combustible liquid. He was, he realized, silhouetted by it, and rolled into shadow. He heard another human scream as he rolled and recognized it as his own. Then, concealed from unaided human eyes at least, he lay still.

He tried after a few moments to crawl forward, but collapsed. For the moment the best he could do was hold his gun. He tried to tell himself that Leonie needed any available medical attention more than he did, though his nervous system screamed otherwise.

Chapter 10

Raargh swung and slashed. Even in darkness he had little difficulty in telling friend from foe. In this kind of battle smell mattered at least as much as sight. He screamed and leaped, giving himself up, as in the fight with the morlocks, to the joy of roaring, claw-to-claw slaughter he had long suppressed.

After a time he found himself alone again. The humans called this sort of battle a “dogfight,” and Raargh had known them to end this way before, as pursued and pursuers scattered in individual combats. Yet the suddenness with which the fight broke up always surprised him.

He checked his weapon. A light on the stock indicated it was still charged, but the light itself could be a dangerous giveaway and he covered it with blood from his last enemy. He also checked himself. No serious wounds.

Kzin footfalls behind him. He tensed himself to spring again, then recognized the smell of Vaemar. The two groomed each other quickly, each relieved to find the blood his tongue tasted matting the other's fur was that of enemies.

“Back to the battle, Raargh-Hero?” asked Vaemar. The anxiety in his voice was nothing to do with fear, apart from fear that he might miss something. Vaemar is a genius, Raargh thought to himself, but he is also a young warrior kzin. He proves this day he has the courage to bring down more than gagrumphers.

“Yes, but quietly and cautiously,” he told the youngster. “Remember the lessons of your Honored Sire. We do not expose ourselves to the enemy until we know the strategic situation.”

There was a little reflected light from distant fires, enough to be caught by the felinoids' eyes, and together, slinging their weapons, they climbed a ladder to the upper gangways. Damaged though some of these were, they seemed to offer a quicker and less exposed passage than the tunnels. Though kzinti were descended from plains cats, they were quick and confident high among any structures strong enough to bear their weight. Below them was the bluish glare of the Sinclair field that had blocked their passage. More footfalls told Raargh others were climbing too. Well, if they were enemies, he would deal with them.

More footsteps closer in the near-darkness, echoing hollowly on the metal. Lighter, clumsier. Human. Not the smell of any of the humans he had just journeyed with. Henrietta! He saw she was unarmed. No need, then, to unsling his heavy weapon. The Kzin's natural armament of fangs and claws would be more than enough and far more satisfactory. The monkey who had kidnapped them both, insulting him and the blood of the Riit! His claws extended, jaws gaped, and he braced himself to leap.

And then he stopped. In her rattle-brained monkey way she had tried to be loyal.

“Come forward,” he said slowly. Even if she could not see or smell, she would know the kzin voice. “Monkey play false, monkey die.”

“Kill me now if you wish,” she said. “All is surely lost.”

“You are loyal slave of Chuut-Riit,” said Raargh. “Go. Hide.”

“Emma will destroy everything,” she said. “I do not want that… nor… nor did he.”

“Then go! Many kzinti on Ka'ashi. Many need advice to live with humans. No more rebellion in hopeless conditions!”

“That was never what I wanted…”

“Swear to it! Name as Word!”

“Would you trust the Name of a monkey? A slave? A female?”

“Swear on the name of Chuut-Riit!”

“Very well. No hopeless rebellion, on the Name of Chuut-Riit, I swear.”

“Stop!” It was the voice of another human female, one Raargh remembered well. Jocelyn stepped onto the gangway. She carried a strakkaker in one hand and a nerve-disrupter in the other. Raargh knew he and Vaemar were quicker than any human, but she was a trained fighter, and her fingers were already on the triggers. The nerve-disrupter, a short-range pistol-sized device both agonizingly and lethally effective on human and kzinti nervous systems, broadcast impulses in a cone and did not even need to be aimed.

“So,” she said, “the arch ratcat-lover and the ratcats arranging things together. How appropriate!” She waved the disrupter at Raargh and Vaemar. “You will each, one by one, take the other's weapon,” she told them, “and, without placing your claws near the stock or trigger, or in any way moving quickly, drop them from the gangway. Do it now, and do it very slowly.”

“Jocelyn van der Stratt,” Henrietta's voice dripped contempt. “Last time I saw you was with Chuut-Riit, helping control the crowd at one of the public hunts—hunts that one day I might have had reduced! I had heard you were quick to change your pelt.”

“Then you were wrong. I always worked for the Resistance. I have Kzin and collabo heads and ears to prove it in plenty, but not enough yet.”

“What will you do?” That was Vaemar. His voice, Raargh thought, sounded under perfect control. As far as he could duplicate a human tone he suggested mild curiosity.

“You all have one more part to play,” she told them. “Come with me.”

She marched them in single file back along several galleries, compelling them to hold out their arms at different angles so all could be seen. A discharge from either weapon would have got the lot of them.

There was more wreckage below them here, burning with flickering, smoky flames, and there were some regular lights. They could see bodies—human and kzin—on the ground. There were also voices. Raargh guessed the survivors on both sides could be re-forming. How many were left? Not many of his own human party, which had been too small to start with, against a much bigger formation of well-equipped kzinti as well as the other humans he had seen. At a word from Jocelyn they halted. Below them was the bluish bulge of another Sinclair field.

“Look there!” Below them and up the passage to the left, behind a small barricade of wreckage, were two humans. Raargh recognized them as Leonie and the Dimity female. Leonie was lying in an attitude that told Raargh that she was wounded near death. The Dimity female was doing something to the lower part of her body—first aid, he guessed, from the pumping movements she was making. He could not tell much more. His ziirgah sense was useful for stalking, but in battle the emotions of all around overwhelmed it.

“Leonie Rykermann, a leader of the Resistance, and Dimity Carmody, a hyperdrive scientist. In fact credited by her profile from We Made It as the hyperdrive scientist, the interpreter of the Outsider manual. Either a ratcat or a ratcat-lover would have plenty of motive to kill both of them.”

“You kill Leonie!”

“Carmody stopped me finishing the job. It's better this way… Actually, Henrietta, Leonie Rykermann has turned into something of a ratcat-lover herself, but living the retired life you do in this place you wouldn't have heard that. Their deaths will be blamed on you, or on the Kzin. That alone, that they killed those two heroines, will be all the Exterminationists need. And for me, it kills more than, almost literally, two birds with one stone. It also eliminates both my—”

Raargh leaped. It was a difficult leap from where he stood on the gangway behind Henrietta, and he felt his hind claws slash damagingly down on her as he cleared her body. Jocelyn swung up her weapons, but as she did so her upper body flashed into flame. The blast knocked Raargh sideways and he nearly fell off the gangway. Not perhaps a killing fall for a feline in Wunderland gravity, but there was the Sinclair field directly below. With his prosthetic arm he seized the catwalk and scrabbled back.

Jocelyn was still standing, her upper body burning. Then she slowly toppled from the catwalk.

“Back!” shouted a human voice. Then, in something like Heroes' Battle Imperative: “Blast alert!”

Raargh's explosion reflex took him back, pushing Vaemar before him. As Jocelyn's burning body hit and passed into the field, the flames, in time-compression, flashed out like a bomb. Light scorched the walls around them. In another instant the heat would have cremated the kzinti where they stood. But the hellish glare was only a flash. The flames vanished, the fuel and oxygen in the field exhausted in an instant. Raargh's artificial eye adjusted before his natural one. He waited for Vaemar's sight to readjust, then ventured back toward the catwalk, gingerly, for his whiskers were scorched and shriveled and he felt unbalanced without them. The field was still glowing beneath them, with something black crumbing to fragments in it as he watched. The metal of the catwalk was fortunately a poor conductor.

Nils Rykermann, carrying a laser pistol, stepped onto the catwalk.

“We are too exposed up here,” he said. “And they need us down there. Hurry!”

“Help me!” cried Henrietta. She was sprawling, trying to rise. Raargh remembered the bones he had felt breaking as he kicked down at her. Rykermann raised the laser pistol to her, then lowered it.

“Your people are here somewhere,” he said. “I'll leave you to them.”

“Over here!” It was Arthur Guthlac. Raargh, Vaemar, and Rykermann dragged him back behind the makeshift barricade.

“Leg gone, and a few ribs, I think,” he told them. “I can shoot, but I can't walk.”

“All right. We hold here.”

Arthur Guthlac found little comfort in the situation. With Dimity fully occupied keeping Leonie alive after the terrible accident with Jocelyn's laser, and Jocelyn herself separated from them in the fighting (Let her be safe! he prayed) Rykermann, Raargh, and Vaemar were the only fighters left. Raargh's strength and endurance were colossal but not limitless—already he could see signs of pain and gathering exhaustion in the old kzin—and Vaemar was half-grown and inexperienced. They had gathered up the weapons about but beyond that had no way of replenishing charges or other ammunition. Enemies who certainly outnumbered them had the high ground. At this moment things seemed quiet but they could hardly resist another attack for long. Raargh and Vaemar were noisily eating a couple of the dead. Rykermann did not seem to notice. They are alien, after all, Guthlac thought. Not humans in tiger skins. And they need to keep their strength up and their heads clear for all our sakes. No point in trying to stop them. And then: My God! What is happening to me, that I think of kzin in those terms? They would have eaten Selina that way, if they didn't kill her in space.

Well, I've other things to worry about now. If they leave us alone, find some other way out or fall back into the caves, we might get out of this mess more or less alive. If they attack us again we're done for. I'd like to die on my feet, but I suppose that's too much to ask. And thank you, Jocelyn. As you said to me, I did get lucky on Wunderland. If we live, I'll show you how much I love you.

Footsteps, human and kzin, clanging on the gantries and echoing up the tunnels. They were attacking again. One shot hit a pile of containers stacked against the passage wall. Burning liquid fuel poured out.

They were attacking from three places above, at least. Lifting his head momentarily, Arthur Guthlac fired desperate, unaimed shots, hoping for little more than to make them keep their own heads down. Humans and kzin were leaping down, their falls slowed by lift-belts. The leader of the humans in the pseudo-kzin costumes ahead of the group. He was raising a strakkaker at Leonie and Dimity, halting to get a better aim. Guthlac aimed at him and squeezed the trigger. The dot of the laser-sight was on the tattoo on the human's forehead. It was a certain shot at a momentarily stationary target, but his weapon's power was exhausted. Vaemar passed him in an orange flash, smashing into the human, the two rolling like a catherine wheel. Claws flashed. The human's detached head flew straight up and lodged somewhere in the gantries above. Raargh fired into the bunch of kzinti, then, flinging his empty weapon away, charged too, w'tsai out. The kzinti scattered under his charge, apart from two his w'tsai gutted. Another crossed blades with him, to be beaten to the ground with blows of his prosthetic arm. Guthlac dragged himself toward Dimity and Leonie as Raargh and Vaemar returned. Wriggling along the ground with astonishing speed, the two kzinti resembled fat, hairy, orange snakes.

The burning fuel was approaching the makeshift barricade where Dimity and Leonie were huddled. They were, Arthur Guthlac realized, in a dip in the ground that would act as a sump and pour it on them. He shouted for Dimity to leave Leonie and run while she had time, but she remained with her. Then the fire flowed all about her, cutting off her escape. Rykermann rushed toward the two women, then staggered back, beaten by the heat.

Raargh screamed something and leaped across the flames, the fur of his legs on fire. Gathering Leonie in the crook of his natural arm, holding Dimity with his prosthetic one, he leapt again across the flames and carried them away at a dead run, Vaemar following, backing away and firing. A second later an explosion shattered the ground where they had been, splashing the stream of fire as it poured into it. Guthlac saw that some of the enemy had brought a small mortar into action and others were setting up a plasma gun, a small piece of artillery specially designed for clearing out caves and tunnels with flame. A party of kzinti and humans were passing up ammunition and other heavier weapons.

A sudden howling and trembling filled Guthlac's ears and the air trembled. Sonic stunners, he realized. He struggled for consciousness. Just before everything went black he saw a squad of troops in UNSN combat gear, another squad in the gray of the Free Wunderland Forces, charging down the corridor, Cumpston at their head, and another who he recognized as Markham.

Raargh deposited Leonie and Dimity in a sheltered alcove. Another run secured Dimity's medical equipment. He rolled on the ground and beat at the flames on his fur.

“My Honored Step-Sire is in much pain,” Vaemar told Dimity. “Can you ease it?”

“Yes, yes, I think so.” She extracted a needle from the small field-doc. A gauge showed it was much depleted but not yet empty. “It's human specific, but it ought to work.”

“Yes,” said Vaemar. “Human and kzin have similar body chemistry. It leads to interesting speculations as to our common microbe origins. Proteins are not identical but we can eat same food for a long time.”

Dimity injected Raargh, finding the best purple artery with Vaemar's assistance. She also sprayed the area heavily with the white foam of Universal Burn Repair. Raargh hefted his weapon but the sounds of battle were diminishing as the sonics took effect. He and Vaemar picked off several more figures as they slumped into unconsciousness or lay prone on the gantries. Dimity had turned back to Leonie. Vaemar made an interrogative feline sound that covered a number of questions.

“He is no stranger to pain, I think,” she said to Vaemar, without looking up. “It should be diminishing now.”

“He is Hero,” said Vaemar.

“And you,” said Dimity, “are Hero and something else. You speak of 'interesting speculations' in the midst of a battle.”

“Of course. Interesting speculations are always interesting, particularly, I think, this one, and when I spoke no targets presented themselves and the battle was plainly all but won. I calculated I could afford distraction for that measure from fighting, given the state of the tactical situation. I have just hunted and killed and it is perhaps now safe to obey the promptings of my system and relax a little.”

“I thought… I thought I was the only one…”

“Further,” said Vaemar “I wish to think upon my Honored Sire Chuut-Riit's purported testament in the light of certain of my own experiences and auditions here. Is that strange? I would be glad if you would tell me, should it strike you as such. My Honored Step-Sire says I must learn human ways and values.”

“It is not strange to me,” said Dimity, still not looking up from her work. “But then, I believe that I am not a typical human. I have sometimes wondered what I am.”

“I too have wondered what I am,” said Vaemar.

Colonel Cumpston, carrying beam rifle and stunner, walked wearily up the corridor to join them. The fighting seemed to have stopped. The UNSN and Wunderland troops were gathering up the unconscious bodies of the enemy. There were a couple of medics, guiding a larger doc on a gravity sledge.

“Hurry!” Dimity called. “Hurry! Over here!”

“I'm very tired,” she said, as the medics took over.

“Manrret rest,” said Raargh. And then: “Manrret Hero, too.” He and Vaemar caught her as she stumbled with weariness and set her down. She clung for a moment to Raargh's great arm.

Arthur Guthlac recovered consciousness to find himself looking into the face of Ulf Reichstein Markham. “In all, der results positif haf been,” said Markham. In moments of stress the Germanic sentence-structure and pronunciation of Wunderlander became thicker in his accent. Guthlac saw the stock-light on the heavy kzin weapon he carried was glowing with the warning of insufficient charge. It had evidently seen a lot of firing very recently. Markham drew a deep breath and when he spoke again his accent was much diminished.

“If necessary we will get you a new leg. Let it not be said Wunderland is inhospitable to her distinguished visitors. And you have done us a service… Do you know where Jocelyn is?”

“No.” Jocelyn… you said you loved me, you proved you desired me… Have you completed the transformation of my life, wiped away the last of Arthur Guthlac, the misfit museum guard and finished making Arthur Guthlac the Man? Jocelyn, where are you?

Somehow, as he whispered that question, he knew it would never be answered. Jocelyn was gone with Selina.

There was a cover hiding the lower part of Leonie's body, but Nils Rykermann had seen laser wounds before. He could, if he allowed himself, imagine what was there. A medic was attending the tubing that ran under it, and something was pumping fluid.

He knelt beside her head. Her hands were fluttering feebly, plucking at something invisible. He stroked one with his fingertips.

“A lot of fighting,” she whispered.

“It's over now.”

“So the Exterminationists win?”

“No.”

“Tell me. It's all right. I can hear. I can understand.”

“There is no kzin rebellion. And the Exterminationists have had a blow. They've lost Jocelyn. She was their most powerful figure. Guthlac is wavering, I think. And… so am I.” He bent and kissed her cold forehead. “Lion cub,” he whispered.

“Good… good.” She did not speak again.

“Live,” he breathed. “Don't run out on me. Or on old Raargh.”

Her eyes closed slowly. Rykermann could not tell if she was dead or unconscious. He turned away, his face buried in his hands, and he did not see the medics remove her.

Dimity Carmody was sitting on an empty ammunition box. She had taken out one of her small music boxes and was listening to it. Raargh and Vaemar approached her. The white foam, setting hard, covered the burns on Raargh's legs. He was walking, but carefully.

“Hullo,” she said.

“Do not fear ratcats,” said Raargh, remembering the terror he had picked up from her previously. “Raargh and Vaemar and Dimity manrret companions in battle.”

“Yes,” said Dimity. “I've been told a bit about it all. Well, there are some ratcats I don't fear now.”

“Dimity helped Leonie,” said Raargh.

“Yes, of course.”

“Raargh and Leonie old companions.”

“Funny, she is one of the flashes of memory I have. Quite a lot of it is coming back. Seeing her now, I remember, I was jealous of her. I never dared betray that to him… She was Nils's best student, his favorite. And she wasn't a freak like me. I don't suppose this means much to you.”

“Manretti sentient. Always problems,” said Raargh. “Dominant kzintosh have harem, some kzintosh allocated one kzinrett, most have none. Humans untidy.”

“It must have been hard for you to change, to live with humans as you do,” Dimity said.

“Hero do hard things,” said Raargh. “Otherwise not Hero.”

“No,” said Dimity. “Otherwise not Hero.”

“The human Andre, one who tried to kill you and Leonie,” said Raargh. He produced something and tossed it with a moist sound from hand to hand. “I have his maleness here. A gift for you and Leonie.”

“Honored Step-Sire Raargh-Hero,” said Vaemar, “I do not think Dimity human understands kzinti customs. I will take. But here is a gift,” he held out a chess knight, moulded in osmium with sapphire eyes. “Vaemar made.” Dimity accepted the substitute gift with some relief.

“Not fear?” asked Raargh.

“Not so much.” As Leonie had done previously, she reached out with a tentative hand and tickled his chin. Raargh had just killed and eaten to satiety. This time he allowed himself to purr.

“You play chess?” she asked Vaemar.

“Oh, yes!”

“I haven't played more than a couple of times. But a game between us might be interesting.” Raargh reached out and picked up Dimity's music box. Vaemar looked at it curiously. “May I see it?” he asked.

“Wind it,” she said, “It's running down.”

“It is decorous,” said Vaemar, fiddling at the tiny handle with his claws. “Delicate.”

“Keep it, if you like. A gift.”

“Thank you.” A few tiny musical chimes drifted across the chamber.

“If I killed a couple of them, I'm not going to take the credit for it,” Colonel Cumpston said to Arthur Guthlac. The two Earth officers and Markham had drifted together. “The low profile suits me.” He had already removed the memory bricks from the main control console. With Arthur Guthlac then immobilized and Markham commanding the troops hunting down the surviving enemy, he had been the senior military officer on the spot and no one questioned this. Their records should harvest valuable security data, and any untoward scenes that had been recorded could be discreetly removed.

Arthur Guthlac, his chest bound up and leg encased in a flexi-splint, was now walking again. The damage, in the event, had not required amputation and transplant, but even with modern nerve-and-bone growth factors it would be some days before he was fully healed. They had identified the quite simple mechanisms that controlled the Sinclair fields and were turning them off one by one.

“Well, somebody killed this one,” said Arthur Guthlac, as the field before them died. “But a long time ago.”

There was part of a human skeleton. Around the bare shin and ankle-bones were orange-and-black pseudo-Kzin-striped fabric trousers, much discolored. The pelvis was female. There was some dried, crumbling tissue on and in the torso and rib cage. There was no skull. Above the clavicles there was nothing.

“No,” said Cumpston, “not a long time ago. That must be Henrietta, if she fell feet first into the field still alive. The lower part of her body would have passed into time-compression first. It received no blood-supply and her feet and legs were dead and decomposing by the time her heart passed into it. But her heart was still beating. Everything left in the circulatory system went into her head, which was still in normal time, and from which the blood had no way of returning at such speed. Bang! A quick way to die, at least from the brain's point of view, but the results aren't very cosmetic.” It was probably Henrietta, he thought. But she had not been the only one in that costume. He would look at that later. But Henrietta officially dead would help defuse the time bomb of revenge on this planet. He might not look too hard.

The other bodies that concerned Cumpston, those that had gone into a Sinclair field already dead, would be either crumbling mummies or skeletons before long, depending on how much bacteria had been present. The longer it was before that particular field was found and deactivated, the less easy it would be to tell any cause of death. Certainly if laser wounds were still discernible it would be impossible by now to identify the laser that had caused them in the confused fighting. They had had the hallmarks of genuine ARM personnel, which another ARM could recognize, as there was something else some ARMs might also recognize, but despite what he had been told, Cumpston felt credentials and mannerisms could always be faked. Anyway, they might or might not have been Early's men. ARM was no monolith: It was, he felt, a series of interlocking and competing conspiracies like those fiendish things the kzinti called w'kkai puzzles. Well, when this place was cleaned up, all the bones of humans and kzinti would go for proper disposal. Manpower was still scarce on Wunderland, and police resources would hardly be used to investigate all the bones of kzinti victims that lay around.

“Where's Rykermann?”

“Sedated. He's had a rough time. It seemed to hit him all at once.”

“What happened to Jocelyn?” Arthur Guthlac had asked this several times now. Cumpston had seen the phenomenon after battles before. People would keep asking the same question, but the answer would not stay in their heads.

“Nobody seems to know. But she had no motive to run away. That business with the laser… Accidents happen in battle. Everyone accepts that.”

“I think she was in love with Nils Rykermann,” said Markham. “Love can do strange things to people, I am told.” He was speaking good English with a fierce effort and his face was impassive. Betrayal! Stinking betrayal! But what else can one expect from prolevolk scum! And she used my Mother's name! If he saw Arthur Guthlac flinch, he betrayed no notice of the fact.

“Maybe after what happened she just took off. We'll look, of course. Maybe she'd had enough. She was a heroine of the Resistance. Maybe she'd just run out of… of…”

“We all feel that way sometimes… I'm told,” said Cumpston. Markham said nothing, but his clenched hands were trembling minutely.

“I know it,” said Guthlac. He sounded composed and normal, if a little sad. “And the Resistance's price on Henrietta's head?”

“I suppose if he pushed her into the field Raargh has the claim to it, if it's accepted that this is she,” said Cumpston. “I haven't asked him, but he was in the area and she had kidnapped and insulted him and his protégé—dangerous business to kidnap a kzin. I can imagine how much the Resistance veterans who posted the bounty will enjoy handing it over to him! They may not come at it, of course, and he may not want it. She was loyal to Chuut-Riit after all…

“Odd thing to say about the arch-collaborator,” he went on, “but in her way she was loyal to humanity, too.” And was she altogether on the wrong track? he wondered to himself, thinking of the last injunction of Chuut-Riit's testament. “I'm not sure it was Raargh who killed her. There were others with motive. But I'm not going to cross-examine him on the matter…

“Anyway, he won't do too badly. You know there are females here. He acquires most of the property and the harems of all the kzinti he killed!”

“Good,” said Arthur Guthlac.

“You're not getting fond of the old ratcat, are you?”

“No!” A slightly sheepish smile, and a laugh Guthlac cut off as his ribs pained him. “Well, to tell the truth, he did show up pretty well. I'm no kzin-lover yet, but perhaps my attitude's been a bit simplistic. I need to think. I've accumulated quite a lot of leave in the course of this war, and the time might be coming to take it. Probably take a couple of years to get my application through the bureaucracy, though. Leave would be good. Not alone, perhaps… Where's Jocelyn?”

Chapter 11

2428 a.d.

The walls of the dean's interview room were heavy with antique books. A couple of ancient computers were preserved under transparent domes. There were paintings and even some marble busts of previous eminent members of the faculty. In another of its efforts toward reestablishing a milieu of scholastic tranquility after decades of chaos and war, München University had recently introduced gowns and mortarboards for both staff and students to wear for major interviews and other important occasions.

Nils Rykermann, his robe emblazoned with the esoteric colors and heraldry of his position, looked up from the application and assessment form.

“You're taking a big spread of subjects,” he said. “Literature, history, political theory, physics and astrophysics, economics, chemical engineering, space mechanics, pure philosophy… and you want to do a unit of biology too. That's quite a load for a first-year student! We're going to have to bend the rules. Still, that's been done before for certain… exceptional cases.”

“I hope to specialize eventually, Professor, but I feel I should get a good general background first.”

“Joining the chess club, too, I see. Arthur Guthlac's become the patron, you know. When he came back from his leave at Gerning he decided to extend his posting on Wunderland. And the Drama Society! Are you sure you can manage it, Vaemar?”

“Oh yes, Professor!”

“Well, you must tell me if you find it too much. As dean of studies this year I will be responsible for your entire performance beyond my own subject… Your test scores are encouraging… And your… er… Honored Sire Chuut-Riit… was clever enough.”

“Yes, sir. I will not shame you. Nor him. Nor Honored Step-Sire Raargh-Hero.”

“I'm sure you won't. But prove yourself here, Vaemar, and you will win a greater victory than many… We have our first-semester field trip to the caves next month. You have some acquaintance with them already, and I'm sure you'll be an asset to us. We may regrow some of the smashed formations with Sinclair fields… How does your Honored Step-Sire Raargh-Hero fare?”

“He prospers, Professor. But my infant step-siblings can make it difficult to study. It can be noisy at home. Sometimes when I read they leap at my tail and bite it. My Honored Step-Sire Raargh-Hero counsels patience and self-control.”

“Good training, Vaemar, and good counsel. You will need both.”