“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 civiliz
ation 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 full-time 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 kzinrret collar. Her perfume had the smallest hint of kzinrret-derived pheromones. There was a carefully chosen hint of kzinrret 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 unab
le 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.
I GO WITH VAEMAR.
SEEK RYKERMANN ADVICE.
RYKERMANN DOMINANT HUMAN.
I KNOW. SAVE IN WAR. HELP VAEMAR.
He hoped that was clear. He added:
HAVE LUCKY HUNTING GOOD CHESS
COMPANION
OLD RAARGH
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 Munchen 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.