“What you say about Early—” said Vaemar. “Are the Protectors so dangerous? I would have thought we had the power to conquer them.”
“Yes,” said Rykermann. “They are so dangerous. Arthur’s told me quite a lot, apart from what Earth sent us. The one human Protector we know of, Brennan, was a Sol Belter, an evolved, modern man, the product of many generations of civilization and science and imbued with the values of benevolence and cooperation that are part of all the great human religious and ethical systems. Also, fortunately, he was a good man.
“When he became a Protector he adopted the entire human race and his interventions in human affairs were benevolent as well as secret. He probably saved Earth from perishing in war, over-population and pollution, even if he then nearly killed us with kindness by making us almost too gentle and pacifist to resist when your lot came calling. Morlock Protectors, it’s safe to bet, wouldn’t be like that.”
Leonie gave a sort of jerk, and nearly fell. Her legs were not what they had been and sudden emotion now made her even more clumsy. Both Rykermann and Vaemar reached out to help her.
“What is it, Lion-cub?”
“Protectors with hyperdrive!”
Rykermann thought. Leonie saw his face grow pale in turn. Vaemar made a questioning sound.
“The kzinti didn’t want to destroy the human worlds,” Leonie said. “They wanted them intact for themselves, and they wanted to keep the human race like the Jotok. However merciless they are in battle kzinti have a kind of conservationist sense towards other species—according to traditional kzinti’s cosmology, other intelligent species have a place in the great hierarchy ordained by the Fanged God. It just happens to be a very long way below their own. Isn’t that right, Vaemar?”
“The Fanged God gave us other species to serve us and for us to prey upon, not to exterminate except when we had no other choice,” said Vaemar. “At least that is the traditional teaching. Remember the kzinti offered the humans of Ka’ashi—excuse me, I mean of Wunderland—a cease-fire as soon as the Conquest Landing was complete.”
Rykermann took up the thought. “But the Protectors would have only one aim: Destroy all possible competitors. First to exterminate the human species, and if necessary destroy the human worlds and all other life on them—they’d use anything: relativity weapons, anti-matter weapons, the dirtiest possible thermo-nukes and ramscoops in atmospheres, killer hypersonics, geological disrupters. They’d make missiles of comets and asteroids, trigger solar flares. No possibility of treaty or negotiation. All other species, especially all other sapient species, regarded as vermin-to-be-exterminated by definition. Not only would they be more totally focused on destruction than would kzinti, they are far more intelligent than nearly all individuals of either of our species, and far tougher…
“There’s a theory, you know, that Venus’s tectonic plates were somehow turned over a couple of million years ago. It makes no physical sense. We can’t see how such a thing could have happened, except by artificial disruptors greater than any we’ve even conceived of. But what if, when the original Protectors reached Earth, they found some sort of life on Venus, some sort of potential threat or competitor? Well, I suppose we’ll never know…”
“Impossible, surely!”
“I hope so…I suppose we would still make more human Protectors in response, if we had tree-of-life and they gave us time. But it’s far harder to defend against an enemy that wants to do nothing but kill you than against one that merely wants to conquer you.”
“They’d like to take Earth and Wunderland as breeding-space, of course, but an empty Earth and Wunderland,” Leonie said. “Taking them would be secondary to getting totally rid of the human race, a dangerous rival and a mutated deviation from the Pak form.
“Perhaps they wouldn’t even care much about preserving Earth or Wunderland or the Asteroids if they had Mars and Venus to terraform, not to mention the colonies we’ve established in other systems and all the various moons and planetoids available. Given what we know of Protector toughness and engineering intelligence, they might consider several possible worlds that are too tough for us as ripe for transforming and could write Earth and Wunderland off.
“Of course, once they’d removed the human race, they’d take on the kzinti without pausing to draw breath. Then they’d wipe out any and every other sapient or potentially sapient race they found. According to what Brennan learnt, there weren’t even other animals on the Pak homeworld. As well as human hyperdrive technology, they’d get kzin gravity technology—giving them even more worlds and weapons.”
Vaemar’s eyes gleamed and more of his fangs showed.
“You think they could beat Heroes? The Patriarch’s Navy?” he asked.
“Vaemar, my friend,” Rykermann said, “humans are, in fighting ability, a crude, feeble, slow, stupid, fragile, soft, merciful, pacifist and rudimentary version of Protectors. I do not mean to insult, but need I say more?”
“No,” said Vaemar. “I see.”
“And even Brennan, evolved and benevolent as he was, was utterly ruthless,” Rykermann went on. “One reason it took a long time to establish a proper human presence on Mars was that creatures there attacked the early bases. I don’t know much about them, but apparently Brennan just wiped them out. No interest in preserving them, not even any curiosity about them—Protectors seem to have very little abstract curiosity.
“Look back to the Slaver War for a precedent for a Pak Space-War, perhaps. Or worse: even at the end the Slavers didn’t kill the nonsapient life-forms. Look to a war of extermination throughout the galaxy. A war against all life. The war of humans and kzinti would seem a quaint, friendly affair by comparison, a skirmish or two, a sort of neighborly disagreement. Pak without the hyperdrive would be more than bad enough. Pak with the hyperdrive…well, my imagination’s limited, I suppose, but I think they would just go on destroying intelligence or potential intelligence wherever they found it, on and on up the spiral arm, out to the other arms, back towards the Core, until they had all the galaxy or until they came up against something worse than themselves. If there is such a thing.”
Rykermann paused and collected his thoughts.
“This is very scary,” he said. “Or rather, it could be. But consider: These Morlock Protectors, if they did exist, wouldn’t know anything. However clever they may be potentially, they have no teachers. Knowledge must have a source.”
“I’ve thought of that,” said Leonie. “They could get teachers. I’ve tried just now to put myself inside the skull of a newly-awakened Morlock Protector from the great caves. Such a Protector would, I guess, have memories of the Breeder stage. That could mean memories of the existence of humans and kzinti—probably of fighting against humans and kzinti in the caves—memories of aliens, of weapons, of war. And a knowledge of its own ignorance. If I were such a Protector, now suddenly a super-genius—the first thing I would set out to do would be to acquire knowledge.
“There could be several ways to begin that. We’ve cleared a lot of the old human and kzinti weapons and equipment from the war out of the great caves but there are probably still a lot left. Who knows what remote chambers and tunnels some of our people ended up fighting to the death in? Our Protector could take them apart and find out how they worked. But more importantly, if I were such a Protector, before I showed my hand more obviously, I’d capture humans and kzinti and find out everything they knew.”
“How?”
“Raids on the surface. They’d talk under torture.”
“Kzinti? Heroes?”
“Yes, Vaemar. As far as I know any sapient will talk under torture eventually. Isn’t one of your—the kzinti’s—own instruments of torture called ‘Hot Needle of Inquiry?’ They wouldn’t have developed it if it didn’t work…
“But Pak Protectors would use anything, and unlike either of our species, would feel no particle of distaste at having to do so. Normal kzinti, I know, regard torture as something not admirable or heroic, to
be resorted to only from necessity, though that doesn’t stop them once the necessity has been established. Those of both our kinds who enjoy torture for its own sake are abnormal individuals, shunned and despised by the normal. For a Pak Protector such scruples would be without meaning.
“As the Protectors’ knowledge grew, interrogation would get easier. They could alter prisoners’ brain or body chemistry, for example, so even the bravest could not but tell everything they knew at once. They’d find out about computers quickly and hack into them. They might capture kzinti telepaths and use them. Can you imagine a Pak Protector with access to the internet? There are certain to be computers with internet linkage lying in the caves among the bones and weapons.
“There is another thing. You know, Vaemar, that the great weakness of the kzinti is that they are impatient. They attack before they are ready. Time and again, that was the only reason we won, both strategically and tactically.”
“So Raargh-Hero drilled into me in our earliest hunts. And so wrote my Honored Sire Chuut-Riit.”
“Pak, as far as we know, are enormously patient. After all, they are very long-lived. That is probably one reason why, though they had spaceflight for a long time, they never, as far as we know, bothered with any space-drives beyond fairly simple interstellar ramjets. Also, of course, after a certain level, perpetual war may militate against technological progress. The original Pak colonization project took tens of thousands of years just to get to these systems. They didn’t mind. They don’t have the weakness of impatience…
“Perhaps Morlock Protectors would not be as smart as either Pak or human Protectors. They are starting from a much lower pre-change base-level of intelligence than human Protectors, certainly. Living in a largely risk-free, challenge-free environment in the caves for tens of thousands of years they might have devolved. They might. But that they’ve devolved enough is not the way to bet.
“But they might get the hyperdrive.”
“You’re trusting him with a lot,” Leonie said, as Vaemar’s car dwindled in the northeastern sky.
“He’d have worked out the Morlock-Pak relationship for himself. In fact, I mentioned it to him a long time ago, when it didn’t seem important in the way it does now. Don’t forget, he’d also done work on the Hollow Moon as part of his space-engineering units.” The Hollow Moon was one of Wunderland’s many small moons, further away than most. About four miles across, with a space at its core, so deep radar said, apparently about a mile in diameter, it orbited Wunderland at a distance of about 60,000 miles. Apart from being hollow, its other oddities included a near-spherical shape, usually only associated with objects of far more mass and gravity. Humans had begun to study it before the kzin invasion, but that study had been dropped during the war and the Occupation. What human spacecraft the kzinti had permitted to fly then were needed to keep the shattered economy turning over, not for abstract research or flights into areas that the kzinti might disapprove of. There were what appeared to be ancient tunnels leading, presumably, to its core, but they were blocked. Its metal content was quite high, but that of many other moons and asteroids was higher and these were more worth mining. There were entrances to its tunnels of some depth, but during the war neither side had used these much as hiding-places, simply because they were too obvious.
After Liberation abstract and academic scientific projects had resumed slowly, the cheaper ones first. There was plenty to do on the surface of the planet and on the inhabited asteroids and little money for space exploration. Policy had been to leave the anomalous moon alone until there were again resources available for a proper, long-term expedition. It had been thought at one time that it was an ancient artifact of the Slaver Empire, but its orbit was receding gradually from Wunderland (one reason it had not been demolished as a danger by the first colonists), and if it had dated from the Slavers’ time it would have disappeared into space long ago.
“I stick to my old idea. What could it be but the original spaceship the Pak used for the journey from Sol?” Rykermann said. “In any case if I can’t trust Vaemar after what we’ve been through, who can I trust? Yes, laugh if you like.”
“You know, don’t you,” Leonie said, “that seeing you and Vaemar together—like the fulfilment of everything I’d been working for—was important in helping me live. I think I’m entitled to laugh. Sometimes it seemed it was your hand I was holding, and sometimes a kzin’s.”
Rykermann nodded. No need to ask what she referred to. After she had partially come out of the tank, Vaemar and Raargh had spelled him, sitting at her side while he slept. The hospital staff hadn’t liked it at first, but the kzinti had been very insistent, and he had cooperated with them.
“I wish…I wish Brennan had been right, and we could have kept the gentle society we had,” said Leonie. “There is nothing good about becoming warlike.”
“We had no choice,” said Rykermann. “But you know I’m a convert now. I’ll work for peace and reconciliation. Work with Vaemar and the Wunderkzin.”
“I know. It’s stupid of me, perhaps, but I feel I must say it. We have been at war for sixty-six Earth years. The war goes on in space. One gets weary. Gorillas settled their quarrels with gestures and rituals.”
“But kzinti didn’t. Or Pak…”
“I suppose so,” said Leonie, shedding her clothes. “Let’s go to bed.” But her eyes were full of apprehension.
Rykermann still found it disturbing to look at his wife as she stood there naked. There were no scars marring her body, but when she was seen from a few feet away certain things became more apparent: below the waist that smooth skin was a little darker than it had been, the hair was a different color, and there was a difference in the vase of her hips and thighs. The pubis was more prominent, and the buttocks a little flatter above and fuller below.
Those were among the external differences. Her body was beautiful, as were the bodies of most men and women on a light-gravity world where modern medicine and cosmetic techniques were again available, but much of the lower half of that body had once been someone else. That and much more had left them both emotionally bruised and vulnerable. Leonie had lost consciousness as they were carrying her out of the cave, and had not known until a long time after the operation what had been done to her—Rykermann did not know if she would knowingly have accepted such a transplant even to save her life—and telling her had taken some time. Now they lived with it, and other things.
When she looked at him now he saw again the expression that had been on her face the first time he had seen her conscious after the operations and the long regeneration processes.
He also remembered her as she had been carried out of the cave, apparently dead or dying from the laser-wound, and his entreaties to her to live, shouted until they sedated him. But she lives, he thought. Thanks to Dimity and to a couple of kzinti, she lives…And thanks to a donor, too, whoever she may once have been. Collaborator? War criminal? Accident victim? Best not to think. What does she fear? The idea of yet more monsters unleashed on our world…our worlds!…or the stranger’s body sewn onto her? Or that I am still desperately in love with a beautiful super-genius who saved her life and about whom we can never speak? Oh my poor, dear wife! He stepped forward and took her in his arms. He began to run his fingers down the familiar curve of her spine, then stopped. Once his hands would have known by instinct how to caress her. The first times they had made love when she returned from hospital had been bizarre, and in a real sense frightening, for them both. It had more of comfort and release now, but still…Her breasts were still the same firm-tipped softness against him that he knew so perfectly. He felt the body that was not entirely her body respond to him, and the sudden wetness of her tears on the skin of his chest. There was the saltiness of them in his nostrils, more a taste than a smell, the fluttering of her eyelashes’ attempt to brush them away. When he bent to kiss her, the part of her skin that touched his lips tasted as it had always done. Much of the rest, he knew, would not.
My dear, dear wife, he thought. Life has not exactly been kind to you. You deserved better. We are casualties of war, we in our way as much as the millions whose bones lie bleaching about this planet. Nothing to do but press on. Kipling had the words for it: “Be thankful you’re living, and trust to your luck, and march to your front like a soldier.” And you are the bravest soldier I know. But what would I not give to make the world kinder for you?
Chapter 5
Vaemar landed his car in the High Limestone country, the Hohe Kalkstein, in an overgrown glade formed by an ancient cave roof collapse, near the twisted wreckage of an old kzin military sledge, partly covered with reddish vegetation and sunk into the soil. There was also a scattering of bones, gnawed by large and small teeth, bleached and fading into the ground. The Wunderland War Graves Authority had much to do and few people to do it with.
Kzinti loved exploring caves, but unless charging in the heat of battle, no kzin was capable of entering one recklessly. Vaemar had lights and a handgun as well as his w’tsai, and a tough helmet which now had the addition of a lobster-tail neck-guard at the back and epaulettes covering his shoulders—the favorite initial tactic of Morlocks was to drop both rocks and themselves onto the heads of intruders. He checked his radiation detector, very much standard procedure for all who ventured into the great caves of Wunderland, littered with the debris of more than five decades of war. As he crossed the threshold, there was a sharp jump in the gauge and a whirring from its miniaturized descendent of a Geiger counter. Vaemar leapt back. The radiation was not huge, but he saw no reason to expose himself to it. He climbed into a tough, lightweight suit, also standard equipment, and resumed his exploration, keeping a wary eye on the detector.
He moved further into the cave, lights and his own superb eyes sweeping the darkness for any signs of activity. There was nothing on the cave floor, not even the normally ubiquitous vermiform scavengers.