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Wunderland, East of the Höhe Kalkstein, 2437 AD

“HEY, JUDGE, there’s a kzin outside the stockade!” The man was excited, with some reason. “He’s lying down spread out, on his face, like he’s already been shot.”

The kzin could have jumped the stockade, at least got his claws high enough to fight his way over. It hadn’t been built to keep out kzin. The judge had persuaded them to put it up because the lesslocks had become more than just a thieving nuisance, and their numbers had increased in recent years. What had puzzled everyone who had made it was how much bigger it was than seemed necessary; higher, and leaving a wide space between the village and the wall. But the judge had insisted they think for the future, and he was a persuasive man. So they’d gone along with him, as they usually did.

“I’d better come—and you men, don’t shoot unless he attacks. Which is very unlikely, I’d say. The submission posture isn’t something they take lightly.” The old man struggled to his feet. He walked with a stick these days.

The gate was opened cautiously, and a lot of guns were held ready. They were not likely to be as effective as the owners thought, the judge knew. A kzin took a lot of killing, and a homemade musket firing homemade gunpowder wasn’t even going to slow one down if he went into attack mode.

“Greetings, Hero,” the judge spoke in the Heroes’ Tongue, or at least the slaves’ patois approximation to it. He was rusty, but it came back.

The kzin raised its head and looked at him. “No Hero, I,” he answered bleakly. “I come to beg, human.”

“What for, kzin warrior?” the judge asked. This was unprecedented in his experience.

“Not for myself, human,” the kzin answered. “Medicine, for my kzinrett and my kits. Sooner would I die than humble myself so. I shame myself beyond measure. But if I do not, my kzinrett and her kits will die. My male kit is a good son, and I have a duty . . .”

The judge wondered. “Stand up, kzin warrior. There is no shame in what you do. It takes courage beyond measure to face down shame beyond measure.”

The kzin rose to its feet. Its fur was patchy and matted, but it still looked imposing and dangerous as it looked down at the human. “What must I do, human?” it asked.

“Bring your family here. All of them. We will need to know what medicines we have which might be useful. We have little, but we will share them.”

“It will shame me even more that I have to be given them by you,” the kzin rumbled. “Better to take them by force, but I know not what to take.”

“No, better to trade,” the judge told him. The Heroes’ Tongue—or at least the closest human approximation of the slave’s patois—was coming back to him more easily now. But it was too easy to make an unintentional insult. In the days of the Occupation, any slave who attempted to mangle the Heroes’ Tongue would have lost his own tongue and shortly afterward his life for the defilement. Fortunately, the slave’s patois was relatively easy to speak and tolerated. “We help you and you help us. That way we both gain.”

“Trade?” the kzin asked, mystified by the alien word. “What would you do, enslave me?”

“No, nothing like that. I don’t know what you might have for us, but we can worry about that later. It will be a small debt of honor until then. And when you pay it off, we’ll be even. And who knows? Maybe we can find something else to trade. There is usually employment for a warrior.” There was no word that he knew for profit in the Heroes’ Tongue, in fact few words for any ideas about economics at all. Slave economies didn’t need them. Teaching catallactics to kzin could be a long job. But the prize, oh yes, the prize!

The kzin was baffled, but not given to patience. “I will go and return with my brood. I will be a day.” The huge beast turned and marched off without a word of thanks. There wasn’t a word for that, either. Not between Heroes and food.

“What was all that about, Judge?” one of the men asked.

“The kzin wanted medicine for his mate and children,” the judge explained. “He’ll be bringing them tomorrow, probably in bad shape. I want them in the hospital for a spell.” If there had been a dialectitian listening carefully, he might have picked the judge’s rustic accent as assumed or at least lately acquired, but he would have had to be good.

“You’re gonna let that monster into the stockade?” The man was aghast. Another spoke up: “An’ your goin’ t’ give it our medicine? You’re crazy, Judge.”

“Crazy like a fox, Ben. Think about it. Suppose we can get some trade going with this one. Maybe others later. They’ll have some value to us. That one could sure help take out a whole lot of those damned lesslocks if he figured he owed us something. Would you rather have them fighting for us or against us?”

One of the men scratched his head absently. “I guess if there are ratcats around, we sure don’t want them as enemies.”

“A good point,” said the judge. “However, if anyone uses the term ‘ratcat’ again, they will regret it. I am not talking political correctness now, I am talking survival.”

Another man grumbled. “But, Judge, that damned monster is a natural killer. You’re not gonna let it wander around inside the stockade, for Chrissake?”

“For Christ’s sake, that’s exactly what I’m going to do,” the judge said calmly. “What’s the best way to totally destroy your enemy?”

They didn’t know.

“You turn him into a friend,” the judge told them. “It’s there in the good book. You need to have a closer look, Hans, Ben.”

“That doesn’t sound very easy.”

“Sorry, I don’t recall anyone saying anything about ‘easy.’”

The judge had won the argument. He was good at that. So when the next day, the kzin returned, supporting his kzinrett and with a kitten on each shoulder, he was let into the stockade and taken to the hospital, which was a slightly bigger shack than most there. All four looked at their last gasp. The nurse and doctor, just one woman, took one look at them and demanded that they bathe and all be put to bed, which was a bit impractical, because first, no bed was remotely big enough and second, because kzin didn’t use them anyway. Also the adults wouldn’t fit into any bath. Bathing the kits had been trying, but they, too, were too weak to effectively protest. The adult female was obviously close to dying, and had running sores on bald patches. The judge thought of the hunting technique of the Komodo dragons of Earth, to bite and scratch prey perhaps far larger than itself and then to follow it remorselessly until infection weakened it and brought it down.

When Nurse-Doctor Wendy Cantor had seen the damage, she sent out for the whisky. Partly to drink, but mostly as a disinfectant. There was a lot of whisky around the village. The female winced at the touch of it, and choked and spluttered. The kits howled. The kzin himself affected indifference when he finally got his turn for treatment, simply remarking that he was a Hero when the judge inquired after his feelings. The judge, who had had a lot to do with kzin once, was aware that they expected effective medical treatment to be painful. The judge had had to be summoned to translate the interrogation of Nurse-Doctor Cantor.

“What’s wrong with them, Wendy?”

“Infections from the scratches mostly, I think. And poor diet. They only eat meat, don’t they? Like cats? If they’ve been living off the wabbitohs and a few lesslocks, they won’t be getting much vitamin D, and if their metabolism is much like ours, they need it. Worth pushing some fish-liver juice into them. Don’t have the old pills left, but we have enough fish from the river. If we had some proper antibiotics I could get them healthy in three days, but we don’t. The supply from the monastery was small, and we haven’t had anyone go there for months, and no way of paying for it except whisky. They’ve got lots of that. Soon as we get something to pay with and someone to go, they should go with an order.”

“I knew the abbott once. He was old and I don’t know if he’s still alive, but if the present one is anything like the man I knew, they will help us without payment. Or I could give them a few hours’ work on their machinery. They’ve still got a lot of rebuilding to do. The kzin took most of their equipment.”

“Would they want gunpowder?”

“They can make better than we can. They’ve got dogwood trees there—makes the best charcoal. I’ve heard they are trying to breed Jotok. They’ll need ponds for that.”

“You know a lot of things, Judge.”

“Knowing things was my business.”

“Say, Judge, sometimes, when you forget yourself, you don’t talk like one of us back-country hicks. I’ve noticed it before.”

“I see . . . have you ever talked about that to the others?”

“We’re Wunderlanders, Judge. We’re live Wunderlanders. We didn’t come through the occupation alive by letting our mouths flap. Unless there’s good reason we keep our lips closed . . . but our ears open, maybe. But you never told us what you were . . . before . . .”

“No, I never did, did I. Well, I’m a live Wunderlander, too. But just remember this: we are getting ourselves a kzin with a debt of honor to us.”

Treating the kzin was at least not going to use much of what precious little resources they had, the judge realized. If it worked, he could easily defend the expense.

It worked. It took two weeks, but it worked. And in that time, someone had noticed the kits were playing with some pretty stones, a couple of chunks of gold, an uncut diamond and two sapphires. The kzin also liked gold as an ornament, and on some planets used it as currency, and, of course, it would have had many uses if they had anything left of a technology. The kzin remarked, as mildly as he was able, that the kits might not like to give the shiny nuggets up.

“Not these; wrestling your kits for them could cause some bad feeling, not to mention loss of body parts. But if you could show us where you got them, it will more than pay for the medicine and the treatment,” the judge had explained.

“You want a kit’s toys?” the kzin asked in disbelief.

The judge nearly grinned, but stopped himself in time.

“That’s the way it goes, kzin warrior. What means little to you means a lot to us and the other way around. That’s why trade is a good idea. We both gain. Dumb people think it’s zero-sum, but it ain’t. Not unless the government gets involved, and here, I’m the government, and the law, and a lot of other things besides, and I come pretty cheap, I can tell you.”

“I can get you as much as a man can carry,” with a shrugging motion, the kzin conveyed the impression that it did not believe a man’s carrying abilities were great, which, compared to its own, was true enough. “If you come with me, I will show you. Which sort do you want?”

“We can use all of them, they’ll all fetch something. But the gold is the best bet. That we can trade easily.”

The kzin was bewildered. “You are mad creatures, human,” he said. “What do you do with them?” Then, more thoughtfully, as though answering his own question. “These things are for Nobles’ palaces.”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” the judge told him. “But rich people will pay a lot for pretty stones. The manretti like to wear them, and the men buy them to impress the manretti.”

“Something to do with your mating rituals?” the kzin hazarded.

“Yep, I guess so,” the judge admitted. “There’s other stuff too, but when you come down to the jewelry uses, I guess it amounts to getting a gal by giving her something other gals would like to have too. Pretty dumb when you think about it. But people are.”

“Then we go tomorrow, Judge human,” the kzin said. He had picked up the Judge part by hearing what other people called him. It was not clear if it was a name or a rank. But these human beings gave everyone a name, as if it meant nothing. Truly they were astonishing. Nothing to look at, but they had defeated the might of all the kzin on Ka’ashi. Not merely in space. The kzin remembered the last days of infantry combat on the ground.

“You can leave the kzinrett and the kits here,” the judge said casually.

“But our base is in the cave,” the kzin objected. “I must take them back. And my mate cannot care for the kits yet on her own.”

“And in the cave you will run into trouble with the lesslocks all over again. It was partly those scratches that made you all sick. Why not live in the village? There’s a house here that’s empty. Too small for you, but we’ll show you how to build it up. Our manrett is a skilled healer. Much experienced.”

“I sometimes forget your manretti are sentient,” the kzin admitted, “though I should not. My first sergeant warned me: ‘Those manretti can be trouble,’ he said. Next day one fetched the meat for the sergeant’s mess. There was a bomb inside it. But indeed the lesslock vermin are getting worse. They get worse every year. We have moved to higher caves, but they find a way in. They appear to have an ability to learn from experience. But if I come here, I will have an honor debt to you. The home you speak of. And I do not know if there is much prey around.”

“Any time you want to pay us, a few of those pretty stones, particularly the ones with soft yellow metal in, that will get you plenty. And there are wild deerylopes and boaries in the woods, as well as a herd of gagrumpers. Kill more than you can eat, bring some back and trade them for anything you might want.”

It sounded very, very strange to the kzin. This trade idea was unnatural, surely. There was some trade between Heroes, mainly on long-settled planets, but between Heroes and slaves it was a different matter. Heroes generally took what they wanted, though they sometimes gave token payments to pets or as rewards to old retainers. He had known a trooper, long dead, whose sire on Kzin had sold medicines that the healers prescribed, but he had been honorably crippled. Things were different on Kzin. There were even organizations in which an economic historian might have seen the rudiments of guilds. But these still had as long way to go.

“You mean I give you this gold, you give it to a man far away, he gives it to a man even farther away who makes it into a manrett toy, and in exchange gives some medicine to the man not so far away, who gives it to you. Why does everbody do this?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that; you see, we have the stuff called money, which . . . Oh, never mind, you’ll pick up the idea gradually. And we need a name for you.”

“I have no Name,” the Kzin said, with a doleful stare at the ground.

“Then I shall give you one. From now on, you are Ruat,” the judge told him calmly.

The kzin pondered. Truly this Judge human must be important if he could give names. And was a human-conferred name legitimate? It might as well be.

“Rrhouarrghrrt,” he pronounced it doubtfully.

“Yep. That’ll do fine. And I know you aren’t much inclined to socialize with other kzin, but if you know of others in the same condition as you were, bring them in. We’ll take care of them until they are healthy, and if they want to stay with us, well, we’ll just have to learn to get along.”

The judge and Ruat were making a patrol of the village just inside the perimeter the next evening. The judge felt a little tense. Something in the air, but not just that. Andersen, the community’s chief woodworker and bowyer, had gone searching for some exotic red wood and had been away a long time. The judge had ideas that, now that the hyperdrive was making communication with Sol System a matter of weeks, most of them spent in accelerating and decelerating, rather than a one-way voyage of decades, a market might exist there for some of the more exotic Wunderland timber products, and Anderson had been building up a stock of the beautiful red and orange woods. There might even be a market among the kzin, many of whom were fanatical chess-players and prized ornate sets. The judge knew of Andersen’s enthusiasm for his craft. Still, he should not have lingered out until this hour. Indeed, it was unlike him.

“The kits are growing stronger,” Ruat said. “I shall have to make them new quarters. Male and female cannot grow up together.”

The judge realized he had a point. Female kzinti, as far as he knew, were of very low intelligence. Why this was so, nobody knew, but there were theories that it was the result of some intervention long ago at the dawn of kzinti science. During the years of Occupation the human population of the Alpha Centauri System had had more pressing matters to think about.

“I suppose,” Ruat went on, “I will have to be thinking of a nursery-name at least for my son.”

“Think carefully,” said the judge. “It may be that he will grow into a major historical figure.”

“How so?”

“Who is to stop him?”

The lesslocks attacked with howls and screams. They carried bushes, which they used as scaling ladders. The human watch had grown slack after months of quiet. Had they been silent, a good number might have scrambled over the wall unobserved.

The judge had a double-barreled percussion-cap pistol. Men and women, wielding a variety of weapons, poured from the huts. The rush of the lesslocks overwhelmed the first humans. The judge realized with horror that they were outnumbered several times over. The armory contained most of their precious supply of percussion caps and most of what few modern combat weapons they possessed. Their hunting muskets had limited stopping power against the heavily-muscled anthropoids.

He fired his pistol as Ruat roared the kzin battle-cry, “I lead my Heroes!” the blade of his wtsai flashing, and tore into the thickest press of the lesslocks. The lesslocks clumped round him, allowing the humans to get to the armory. The human shots were telling now. It had been wearisome and time-consuming to beat out percussion caps from sheets of copper, but it paid off now in rapidity of fire and reliability. Someone threw a grenade. It was a homemade contraption, but the blast was effective in scattering the creatures. For a moment, before they closed in again, the judge saw Ruat standing in a heap of bodies, his roars drowning out the lesslocks’ screams.

There was the sizzling roar of a modern strakkaker, its blizzard of glass-and-Teflon needles turning lesslocks into instant anatomist’s diagrams. (The judge thought again with the detached part of his mind how human their structure was. Perhaps one day someone would find out why. Convergent evolution, he guessed. Maybe their remote ancestors had lived in trees.)

The lesslocks were armed with stones and weighted sticks. Whatever they had expected, it had not been that the defense would be led by a kzin. Ruat hurled himself into the thickest press of them. If they had anything like a chief or leader, he would be there. Between the flashes of the muskets, the judge had an impression of body parts flying. Like a streak of orange lightning, Ruat’s male kit shot into the fray. He was already the size of a leopard. Whether he had been taught or whether his warrior instincts were enough, he was effective. He swiped and snapped at the throat of one of the lesslocks, swiped at a second, and was onto another before the first hit the ground. The second blundered past, howling in agony, entrails spilling. There was a third the kit had swiped, staggering blindly, a tier of white ribs showing.

The lesslocks were retreating. Outnumbered though they were, the humans were now keeping up a disciplined fire, one file loading as the other covered it. Fresh ammunition supplies were being brought up and passed out methodically.

The lesslocks found getting out of the stockade considerably more difficult than getting into it. Not many survived to get over the wall and back to the tree cover.

Ruat was bleeding from numerous new bites and scratches, but his eyes were shining. He walked back to the humans with the kit on his shoulder and a positive swagger in his step. He contemplated his ear-ring, imagining how it would look adorned with many new ears. There would be an ear-ring for his son too. The judge would have slapped him on the back, but remembered in time never to touch an adult male kzin without permission. Still, there were plenty of cheers for him. It was hard to estimate exactly how many lesslocks had died, but it seemed unlikely that they would attack again for a long time. Wendy Cantor produced some fish-flavored ice cream that she had been secretly preparing as a treat for the kits. They purred and preened against her, already knowing enough not to press so hard as to knock her down.

“I was an infantry trooper once,” Ruat said. “I never thought it would fall to my lot to be the one to give our battle-cry—and lead.”

“You are truly a Hero now,” the judge told him. “But I think you will have the chance to lead us in battle again. That was a coordinated attack. I do not think it will be the last . . . We must heighten the wall, and make sure there are always sentries posted. The degree of organization behind the attack concerns me.”

“Thinking of those days,” said Ruat, “I remember the Surrender Day.”

“So do I,” said the judge. There was suddenly something very bleak in his voice. Then he laughed to cover it, but the laugh sounded forced and artificial to him.

“Our officer gave me a kzinrett from his own harem and told me I was not permitted to die nobly in battle. He said I was to make for the forest and do what I could to keep our species alive. You say you remember those days? A bad time.”

“My Hero, you do not know how bad. I was once Captain Jorg von Thoma, of the Patriarch’s human auxiliary police,” said the judge. “A kzin saved my life at the risk of his own, that day. That secret puts my life in your hands.”

“Why do you tell me this, then?”

“To seal the trust between us.”

A month later there were four kzin families living in the village and Wendy had treated them successfully with antibiotics, which they now had in large quantities for both human and kzin. One single kzin had come in, had been made healthy as far as his body was concerned, and had subsequently killed a man who had laughed at him. Ruat had broken his neck with contemptuous ease: Darwin was working on the kzinti, too. The judge approved Ruat for maintaining Law and Order, and gave him a job as a policeman—the first the village had ever had. Some of the humans had grumbled at the appointment, but a larger number felt safer. Previously there hadn’t been much by way of crime beyond the odd drunken fight, but afterwards there wasn’t any.

Wunderland, Southern Continent, 2438 AD

“HEY, WHAT’S THAT?” Sarah pointed across the waves, high and roiling in Wunderland’s light gravity.

Greg focused his binoculars on the object. “Looks a bit like a monster fin, doesn’t it?”

Sarah shivered in her parka. The Southland was always cold, and with Wunderland between A and B, the biggest components of the Alpha Centauri triple star system, the planet was as far from A as it ever got. Winter on Wunderland was determined by the orbit, because the planetary axis inclination was small. And B sucked the aphelion out and made it precess. Coming here for a honeymoon was even more eccentric than the orbit.

“It’s rolling a bit. Hold on, it’s coming more upright. There’s some letters on it,” Greg turned his head sideways to read them. “It says ‘UN’ something . . . You look at it, and tell me I haven’t lost my marbles.”

Sarah took the binoculars and adjusted them. “I think you’re right. Can we get closer?”

“If it’s what it might be, we need to take the flyer over it. We can record it for the television studios. Hey, we might get enough to pay for the whole honeymoon! Come on, let’s get back inside. It will be warmer, too.”

They trudged through flurries of snow back to the flyer. Half an hour later, Sarah had gone back to T-shirt and shorts and was poised with the videocamera ready as Greg took them out to sea.

“Low tide, or we wouldn’t have seen anything, but look, there’s a lot of it underwater. It’s a spaceship, or more than half of one. And it doesn’t look like one of ours.”

Wunderland ships had evolved their own design architecture around enclosed globes and spaces. The kzin favored wedge-and-ovoid shapes. Sol ships, however, came in many varieties.

“Must be one of the blockade runners from Sol System, one that nearly made it. Must have been here for at least since the end of the war.”

“Why haven’t the satellites picked it up, then?”

“Not many pass ’round here. The stationary ones look north, and the others look up for kzin warships, not down. Besides, a lot of the kzin satellites as well as nearly all the pre-war ones were destroyed.”

Southland had never had too much interest to anybody. No minerals worth extracting, a lousy climate for crops or humans. There had been some kzin bases, of course, but they got a pasting at Liberation. Greg and Sarah had chosen it as an unusual honeymoon spot because it was practically pristine. Also, it lacked the dangerous life-forms of little Southland—or so they hoped. So far, they had seen nothing that a modern vehicle couldn’t easily keep out.

Wunderland’s biology was by no means fully classified yet. Now that the war was over, on the surface of the planet at least, and scientific research was resuming, professional and amateur scientists and collectors could still hope for major discoveries. Meanwhile, military craft and dedicated satellites guarded the skies, ceaselessly alert for anything that might be the radiation signature of a kzin ship that was unaware of, or disregarded, the still fragile cease-fire on the planet.

“Now, try not to interrupt, I’m starting to record.” Sarah pointed the camera down as Greg obligingly tilted the flyer.

“This is Sarah and Greg Rankin reporting from just half a kilometer into the not particularly great Southern Ocean, off Southland, and less than a hundred meters up from the water,” Sarah narrated.

“We’re looking down at what appears to be a spaceship, sunken and hard to detect. It has quite a lot of marine growth on it. We saw the fin by chance, and came for a closer look. You can see that it has a UNSN insignia, so it must have been here for a couple of years. We think it’s the wreck of a blockade runner.” She looked straight at the camera and blinked.

“It’s a very sad discovery to make on our honeymoon. Brave men and women died in that ship, and to no good purpose. They got so close, but crashed when they’d nearly made it. It would be worth finding out what it was that stopped them from bringing arms and other supplies to us, and perhaps to commemorate their efforts. Bravery should be recognized.” No point in speculating too much. Every spacer knew the phrase “The many deaths of space.” She went on: “Maybe the kzin shot them down. But we don’t know what brought them to Southland.”

She turned off the recorder. “I’ll send a copy to my parents to show them that coming here wasn’t as stupid as they reckoned, and another to the government. And I’ll ask the television news channels if they are willing to pay for the video before I send anything. Once they’ve got it, goodbye to our getting another cent for it. But if we can build up a bidding war, we might just pay for the rent on the flier at least.”

“Go for it, girl. Who is that current affairs guy? Stan Adler? Try him, and tell your parents not to part with their copy. And instead of the government, try the Guthlacs. If it goes straight into the bureaucracy, nobody will ever hear anything more about it.”

“You mean you don’t trust the government?” She pronounced it “gummint” as a term of mockery. “But all those warm, loving politicians and bureaucrats exist only to look after us and protect us.” Sarah grinned at him. Greg would either explode or start a rant. Either would be entertaining, and she had an instant cure for both. All she had to do was lean forward seductively and say: “Ooh, Greg, you are so clever,” and he’d start laughing.

“There is one thing, though,” she said before he could get started. “It was generally kzin tactical doctrine, after they got the measure of us in the early days, to travel in the largest possible fleets. This ship doesn’t look as it it was hit by a fleet.”

“Well, that’s very interesting, but what has it got to do with me?” Vaemar asked the two humans. Their breathing indicated they were nervous, but confronting a predator with more than twice their combined bodyweight would tend to have that effect. Vaemar was used to it, and went out of his way to underplay the fangs. Yawning was definitely out, and watching a videotape of a downed spacecraft isn’t particularly stimulating, so concentration was needed.

“Well, we were all set to sell the video to a news channel. We’d agreed to a huge price, and everything looked grand. But then Sarah thought of something.”

Sarah explained: “You see, I figured it was probably shot down by a kzin warcraft. I mean it’s the easy explanation, isn’t it? And that might stir up old resentments. If you think it would cause interspecies trouble, we wouldn’t go through with it. I mean, we could do with the money, but money isn’t everything, and it was just luck that we saw the fin. So it’s not as if we did anything to earn any. We don’t really deserve it.” She would have smiled, but knew better. The circumstances in which humans showed their teeth to kzin were very restricted.

Vaemar looked at her thoughtfully. A sense of honor in a female human. He’d known it before, of course; he had several manrett friends, but it was not altogether common, and rather refreshing. “But why me?”

“We talked to Abbot Boniface first, and he said you were the one to see. He said you are effectively leader of the kzin, and it was time you got into politics,” Sarah told him innocently.

Vaemar sighed, a kzin noise like treacle going down a drain. He was already getting into politics, and he hated every single politic he’d gotten into. But he liked these people. The male was ginger-haired and had orange spots all over his face. Freckles, he thought they were called. The female was a nice chocolate color, which looked much healthier, and she had crinkly black hair, which looked like spun wire. When he moved, the sun flashed on the metal of his ear-ring. After the adventure in the caves with Rarrgh, he had the beginnings of a respectable collection of human and kzinti ears hanging from his belt. The kzin—yes, call it “surrender”—on Wunderland, while the war went on in space, had been inevitable, and he was overwhelmingly glad of it for many reasons, but it did make life complex sometimes.

“It might, of course, have been downed by a kzin warcraft,” his deep voice half-purred. “But a spacecraft is unlikely. Most of the ships from Earth that tried to run the blockade were detected and intercepted when still in deep space. Getting this close would have been difficult. An approach well out of the ecliptic might have been tried, but there were detecting satellites out there, too. If it had got as far as low orbit of Ka’ashi—I beg your pardon, of Wunderland—there would be little defense except aircraft and a few satellites. If it had run into the fleet or one of its prides, there would have been nothing left of it.

“I shall have records searched to see if there is any mention of the kzin shooting down a craft that got very close. They may not exist—much was destroyed at . . .” He couldn’t quite bring himself to say either “Liberation” or “surrender” easily, and the humans noticed it—“at the signing of the truce with Man, but it would be interesting to see if there is anything left. Hroth, who was staff-officer, is writing an account.”

Not a pleasant job for a kzin to undertake, thought Sarah. Still, it may be an interesting document. And humans will enjoy buying it to read heroic things about themselves.

The young kzin looked at them both. “But that is of historical interest. The question is, should you suppress your finding in the interests of kzin-man relations. The answer is ‘no,’ you must not. Sell it to your television station. Only complete honesty and openness between our species can help us forge the trust we both need. This is history, it is our task to make the future, we must not let the past dictate to us. And now, please join my mate and me for afternoon tea. I hope you like cucumber and tomato sandwiches, Karan is rather proud of her sandwiches. She has even tried eating some of them . . . I must confess my own vices include a taste for cake. My Sire took me when I was a very young kit to his secretary’s children’s party. She gave me cake and a large ball of fiber to leap upon. I sometimes wondered where she got that idea—until I found out.” His ears lifted in the kzin equivalent of a smile.

“I trust you were not offended,” Sarah said nervously.

“On the contrary, I have had some made for my own kits.”

Senator von Hohenheim was busy. He was always busy. So when the little sharp-faced man knocked on his door and came in without being asked, the senator switched on a scowl that would have astonished his electorate. The senator was a bulky man, and on television could have passed for a bald Santa Claus out of uniform, but just at the moment his glare would have smashed mirrors and broken camera lenses. “What the hell do you want, you grubby little runt? I’m busy. I’ve got a committee to chair in ten minutes.”

Alois Grün was apologetic. “I’m sorry, Senator, but it’s important. The evening news will have some footage of a spaceship from Earth that crashed into the Great Southern Ocean some years ago. Nobody knew of it until now, apparently. Well, hardly anybody.” He looked meaningfully at the senator.

“Why should it be of the slightest interest to me, for G—Oh.” There was a pause which, if not in fact pregnant, had definitely been going into overdrive on the chocolate biscuits.

“Oh. You don’t think . . .”

“Well, Senator,” Grün was still deferential, but there was more than a faint hint of something a great deal less gentle. Skinny little Smeagol of a creature the man might be, but, Senator von Höhenheim reminded himself, he had survived the Occupation, where perhaps eight Wunderlanders in every ten had not. Darwin had operated ruthlessly among the humans of Wunderland for more than sixty years. There was cunning there, and even more importantly, ruthless determination. “It is hard to explain otherwise, is it not? I mean, your orders were obeyed instantly. I was there to see the missiles launched in accordance with your instruction. Obviously I didn’t see the actual strike, but there must have been one, must there not? And since the ship was never found, well, this might well be it, don’t you think?”

The senator looked at him and considered. “Is it too late to damp the story down? Can we prevent it going out?”

“I have read Earth history. I was a schoolteacher once, a long time ago, before the invasion.” A not-so-subtle reminder that he had been one of the fortunate or cunning few who had retained access to geriatric drugs. And that he knew a lot. “The Marconi scandals, Watergate, the climate change falsifications. In each case the cover-up was worse than the original wrongdoing. To cover up now would surely cause an even bigger storm than the video itself. It would prove there was something to hide. I cannot recommend that approach, Senator.” The little man rubbed his hands together. It didn’t show in any too obvious way, but he was enjoying this, just as he enjoyed lecturing the senator on subjects he would know nothing about.

“Of course, it goes without saying that should an unfortunate accident befall me, I have left a record that would be published. Killing my attorney, banker, or other obvious trustees would be an inadequate means of suppression. It is not in an obvious or vulnerable place, and indeed, there may be more than one copy.”

The senator looked at him narrowly. “Well, it surely is inconsequential. After all, it’s been eighteen years. The thing has been in the sea and must surely be corroded. There will be nothing to show what brought it down. And one hole must look much like another. Everyone will take it for granted that it was some kzin attack that destroyed it.”

“Forensic science is very advanced, Senator. And some modern materials resist corrosion. Spaceship hull alloys, for instance.”

“Most of the police stations and laboratories were destroyed at Liberation.”

“Only ‘most.’ Some records survived. As did a few of the police—the lucky ones. You know how collaborators were dealt with . . . Except for those smart enough to keep a foot in each camp,” Grün said. “The Kzin got most of those early, with telepath sweeps.” He went on: “Meanwhile, ARM has been bringing in new up-to-date detection equipment. To say nothing of the rumors we hear that they’ve got kzin telepaths working for them on interrogations. Kzin torturers, too, some say.”

“I refuse to believe that, even of ARM. If the population found out . . .”

“I could not be at all sure that there won’t be some that tell the truth,” Grün said. “And if that got out, well, you would be in serious trouble, Senator. Hanged as a traitor, very likely. You’ve seen plenty of hangings, and worse. You know what they entail. Certainly the story of how you only pretended to join the collaborators to spy on them would be . . . difficult . . . to sustain. At best, it would be the end of your career. Even if you escaped the noose or the axe, I doubt you would find eking out a living as a laborer in some back-block farm very appealing. And don’t forget there are still plenty of people who wouldn’t let an acquittal by a court inhibit them.”

“But there cannot be many of the KzinDiener left alive. Who could tell that the order was mine?”

“Well, I was there, of course, and I saw you give the order. Oh, not that I would say anything, of course.” The little man rubbed his hands together again. “But there might well have been other survivors. The abbot at Circle Bay Monastery tried to protect von Thoma, and maybe . . . some others. Naturally, they would not be anxious to draw attention to themselves at this stage of things, but they might seek amnesty in exchange for testifying against you. I don’t say this is inevitable or even likely, but are you prepared to completely rule it out?” He looked with his head tilted to the side, at his master. His master pursed his lips and looked back.

Stan Adler was in fine form. His current affairs program always beat the competition in the audience ratings. He spoke into the camera with his trademark lopsided half-grin. “Tonight, the Appropriations Committee Chairman, Senator von Höhenheim, has again objected to funding a proper investigation of the downing of the spaceship Valiant in the Southern Ocean. Our news investigators, following the initial sighting of the wreck by honeymooners Sarah and Greg Rankin in the Southern Ocean,” the screen cut to a wedding picture of the happy pair, “have gone diving in difficult storm-tossed waters to find the wreck and have positively identified her.

“It is known that she was bringing military and medical supplies, which might have saved many lives had they arrived and been transferred to the Resistance. Perhaps even shortened the final phase. Tell me, Senator, why exactly do you object to a properly equipped government investigation of this tragedy?”

The camera facing the senator showed a green light, and he looked into its lens rather than at his interrogator. “Well, Stan, you know that I am only the chairman, I don’t make these decisions all on my own.” The senator was genial.

Stan the Man smiled in the way that, his admirers had suggested, would make a kzin warrior nervous. He wore a casual shirt with his monogram, a small stylized eagle in black, over the pocket holding his phone. Cell phones had been back in the city for less than six months, so it was something of a status symbol.

“But I hear that your voice was the strongest in opposition to it. In fact, it was taken for granted that it would go through unopposed. It was only at the last moment that your supporters came out against it. And you got the casting vote. That was the first passage. And things aren’t very different now you have it back from the lower house.”

“You have to understand, Stan, that we cannot spend the taxpayers’ money just the way we would like. It is a matter of priorities. Of course we would all like to know exactly what happened, and someday we shall. But it is hardly urgent. The wreck has been there for many years, a few more will hardly make much difference.”

“But you funded the building of a new Arts Complex costing over ten million dollars. Many people could give you long lists of things they would say were needed more urgently. From orphanages to prostheses to pharmaceutical factories. Not many on Wunderland are interested in arts today. Poetry and painting were not really survival skills. Dancing a ballet for a hungry kzin would be like playing a lure for a hungry fish. Not to mention rebuilding our space navy instead of relying on Sol forces. And what about the very controversial plan to drain much of Grossgeister Swamp at a much bigger cost? Even if one accepts that both of these are worthwhile projects, which I don’t, they are hardly more urgent. The longer the wreck is underwater, the less information we shall be able to recover. I can hardly take it that that is what you want, Senator?”

“On the subject of the Arts Complex . . .” von Höhenheim began.

“Perhaps it would be better if we remained with the subject at hand at the moment, Senator. The question was, why do you want to delay getting any information about what downed the Valiant?”

“I want nothing of the kind. After all, what mystery is there? We are certain to discover that a kzin warship crippled it somewhere in space, as happened to countless others,” said von Höhenheim.

“Not according to the kzin leader, Vaemar, who is in the process of getting a couple of doctoral degrees in mathematics and history, and who had a look at the kzin records.”

“A kzin!” The senator’s scorn was virtually palpable.

“A kzin, may I remind you, Senator, who has proved his loyalty to the ideal of kzin-human cooperation on more than one occasion. You will recall that it is only a few years since he saved an entire expedition into Grossgeister Swamp, and was instrumental in obtaining our first live specimens of Jotok. Before that, he helped thwart a plan by former collaborators to kidnap him and use him against humanity. ARM, which is not renowned for being over-trustful, has allowed him to accept a commission in the Reserve Officer Training Corps at Munchen University. He works with Nils and Leonie Rykermann, not only two of the most heroic leaders of the Resistance, but also two of the most respected leaders on Wunderland today. He is a friend of Dimity Carmody.”

“Quite a paragon of felinoid virtue, in fact!” The sneer would play well with a big part of the audience, the senator thought. “Perhaps you’d like to remind your audience of his family connections, also! And the humans his sire sent to the public hunts!”

Stan the Man’s body language projected confidence and relaxation. It was a tool of his trade that he he’d worked on for a long time, and modern fabrics dealt with the sweat. “Yes, it is true that Chuut-Riit was his sire. Personally, I don’t think that that should be held against him in this context. Quite the reverse, if anything: the values of the high kzin nobility may differ from ours in many ways, but their sense of honor is almost physically real. Unless there is a very strong reason for supposing otherwise, I think it likely that he is telling the truth.”

“High nobility . . . Assuming what you say is true, the kzin still fighting us in space—and many of those who have grudgingly accepted a peace with us here on Wunderland—regard him as a quisling.”

“Sometimes it takes courage to accept the name of quisling. Vaemar has mixed with humans—on equal terms—since he was a kit . . . But tell me, Senator, why are you so hostile to Vaemar-Ritt?”

“Apart from the fact that the idea of quislings—of any species—disgusts me, I am hostile to all kzin—I suppose it is no longer politically correct to call them ratcats. It you want a reason, doesn’t my record in the Resistance speak for itself? Of my guerrilla group, only I and one other survived to see the Liberation. I am a lawmaker and a law-abiding citizen, but I don’t mind telling you and the people of Wunderland that I have some sympathy for the exterminationist position. Wipe them out while we still have a chance! Before they get the hyperdrive!” Careful, he thought, don’t go overboard here. “Or so many say.” He caught himself up quickly. “I’m not saying that is exactly how I feel, I appreciate the necessity for peace, but I do understand how the exterminationists feel.”

Stan fired back. “But if we attack the surrendered kzinti here, the war in space will have no chance of a settlement. Surely it would mean a fight to the finish, with one race or the other annihilated—and they might very well be the ones doing the annhilating. The Kzin Empire is big. We don’t even know its full size. There is no guarantee we would win, hyperdrive or not.”

“Exactly, Stan. That is why I have used my influence, when I can, to try to restrain the exterminationists as a movement. We must have peace with the kzin of this planet at least, but let it be a firm and watchful peace. Anyway,” he continued, “although I am opposed to this expedition, if I should be overridden by the lower house, I intend to accompany it personally. I will pay my own expenses, and will be able to ensure that there is no more wastage than necessary.”

“Don’t you have to be invited?” Stan asked quizzically.

“Professor Rykerman and his wife will no doubt be organizing it, and they are old colleagues of mine, both politically since Liberation, albeit on opposing sides, and before that in the Resistance, though we were in different groups. I shall have no trouble arranging it with them.”

Senator von Höhenheim was thinking he had diverted the interview satisfactorily, when Stan the Man returned to the attack like a barracuda.

“And now, we come back to Vaemar-Riit. I talked to him earlier today, and here is what he said.”

Stan the Man turned to a screen, which took up most of a wall, and still showed Vaemar at reduced size. The young kzin was standing in the garden of his palace, and Stan, seen from the back, held up a microphone.

“Lord Vaemar, I gather you have seen the video we showed last week of the wreck of the Valiant?”

“Yes, I saw it nearly two weeks ago.” The kzin was a long way from the microphone, but his voice was unmistakably clear.

“How come you saw it before we broadcast it?” Stan appeared miffed.

“The two humans who took it came to see me and showed it to me.”

“Why did they show it to you?”

To those who knew how to tell, Vaemar looked slightly uncomfortable. “They wanted to know if I thought it should be made public out of fear that it might damage man-kzin relations.”

“And what did you say?” Stan asked.

“I told them that complete openness between us is the only basis for the trust both species need if we are to live together on this world,” Vaemar told him reluctantly. It was true enough, he told himself, but it sounded too good and virtuous. Kzin didn’t like feeling virtuous. It tended to go with self-deception, a very bad habit for a warrior.

“So, you told them to go ahead and give it to the media?” Stan asked.

“I take it that they would want to sell it to the highest bidder, not give it,” Vaemar explained. Stan changed the subject hurriedly.

“It was obviously important for us to know about this tragedy, and the kids deserved some sort of reward for their enterprise. And did you think it was likely that the Valiant was shot down by a kzin warship?”

“It was the simplest explanation, of course, but it was a little puzzling that it had got so close. Most of the Earth ships trying to run the blockade were detected way out in space. There were few kzin resources so close to the planet beyond aircraft and satellite defense. But I now know that it was not a kzin satellite or aircraft. I have had the surviving records checked, and they show no sign of any strike from space defenses at a spacecraft at that time.”

“Then what could it have been that brought it down?”

Vaemar looked thoughtful. “The most likely explanation is that it was wounded but not destroyed out in space. Since we do not know exactly when the Valiant crashed, we cannot say with confidence that this did not happen. A kzin commander might have thought he had destroyed a vessel that he had only injured. However, that particular error seems to have been more common in human than in kzin record-keeping. But there were not many blockade runners at around that time. A close examination of the ship and its log would go some way to resolving the matter. There would be records of when it left Sol System, but they would only give an estimated time of arrival. It might have slowed or been diverted for some reason.

“There were countless minor skirmishes in space of which no records were kept. One of my earliest memories is of my Honored Sire’s rage when the Man’s Bone-Shredder disappeared. There were many such. Our capital ships travelled in squadrons—’prides’—as we called them, or fleets, but there were a variety of smaller ships travelling alone on innumerable tasks. Perhaps one met the Valiant, though I think that is unlikely.”

“Why, sir?”

“Space is too big to make chance encounters likely. Especially with modern detection technology.”

“Indeed. Yet they have happened. Especially near planets. And what other possibilities are there?”

“There is always the possibility of a freak accident. Even a meteor impact, for instance. Although that would seem most improbable given modern meteor-defenses. But the Wunderland System is cluttered with junk, of course. And again, an examination of the wreck might provide evidence on this point.”

“You are a qualified space pilot. Is there any other explanation that you can think of?”

Vaemar thought hard, but he couldn’t see any way to avoid this.

“There is the possibility that the KzinDiener fired missiles at it. There was a group of very enthusiastic collaborators who had some weaponry. They were not under very strict control; they had been passed as loyal by telepaths. Eventually their armaments would have had to be replaced, and the kzin commander would have found out that missiles had been launched. The missiles would have been numbered, of course, but if this happened just before the truce, then it might have been overlooked. It would not have had a high priority by then.”

“You mean it might have been attacked by human beings working for the kzin?” Stan sounded aghast at the thought. Today more or less the entire human population claimed to have been in the Resistance at one level or another. Known collaborators, at least the prominent ones, were either dead or hunted outlaws. Officially there was a general amnesty and reconciliation, but a number of people had commited suicide in some very strange ways, sometimes stabbing themselves in the back on dark nights, or shooting themselves in the head several times. Stan, who had been a genuine member of the Resistance, although not at any high level, had congratulated (on prime time television) the corpses who had recognized the error of their ways and atoned for their treachery to humanity with such remarkable dedication and persistence. Sniffing out collaborators and naming them was good television. Unlike kzin, most human beings enjoy feeling virtuous.

“It is not something I can rule out,” Vaemar told him politely. Although he felt more comfortable with humans than many kzin did, he did not enjoy television interviews. However, some kzin was going to have to do it, and anybody else might make an even worse mess of it than he would. Besides, actually answering the questions, and doing so truthfully, seemed to cause the interviewers such consternation and surprise that it had its entertaining side. Perhaps the custom would spread to human ‘politicians.’ There were some kzin on Wunderland who would lose no opportunity in their considerable repertoire of psychological tricks to discomfort humans. Vaemar, who genuinely desired peace between the two species and got on well with his human friends, was not like that, but even he found it impossible to pass up the temptation to tweak the monkeys’ tails at times.

“Thank you, Lord Vaemar, I’m very grateful for the kzin perspective.” Stan had finished. He had cut the bit where Vaemar had explained that he wasn’t a Lord exactly, and that as far as kzin were concerned, they weren’t so extensively equipped with herd genes as human beings, so there would always be in any group of kzin at least as many opinions as there were kzinti. Sometimes more than twice as many.

The screen blanked out and Stan turned back to the Senator who was projecting a slightly bored indifference. Over the years von Höhenheim had worked as hard on his mannerisms as Stan had on his.

“Comments, Senator?”

“I don’t see anything much there. You would expect the kzin to try to shift the blame onto humans. Oh, he was subtle, I’ll give Vaemar that. He didn’t offer it as his first guess, it was his third, but he left the inference there for your viewers.”

“Crap, Senator. I had to drag it out of him. And if he’d wanted to exonerate the kzin, why did he tell the kids to publish and be damned?”

“Because he knew it would get out sooner or later. Better to try to establish that he was in favor of it being made public than that he had tried to suppress it.” The senator looked smug.

“Then why were you trying to suppress it? Not the video, that’s out there, but the examination to see what did down the Valiant?”

The senator sighed. “Nothing of the kind. I have said that we need to know the truth and we will find it. I give you my word on that. I think, though, that this is ancient history. The government is always anxious to pursue the truth. But what difference could it make these days? The old bad days of private revenge are over anyway, even if, to take the most implausible case, human deviants were involved. And I simply cannot believe that many human beings would have aided the enemy in this fashion. Oh, some did, no doubt, some malcontents, traitors. And any who still live must surely be ashamed of themselves.” Von Höhenheim put on his stateman’s face.

“The utter shame and disgrace of collaborating is now obvious to everyone. I am sure your viewers feel that as strongly as you or I do,” he went on smoothly. “But we need to move on, to strive for reconciliation with all. Some may well have collaborated to protect their families. Some may have believed, in a twisted way, that they were doing humanity a service—that they or their children might eventually rise to positions of authority or influence within the Patriarchy.”

“But they would have seen what happened to the Jotok—a once proud and civilized species, reduced to the kzins’ slaves and food animals,” Stan objected.

“I did not say that I agreed with such an attitude, or that it was plausible, only that it may have existed. We are reconciled with our quondam conquerors, as you have shown by interviewing a kzin tonight. We have forgiven them. We are striving to extend the hand of friendship even to these ferocious aliens. And we should extend it also to those lost souls who strayed under the occupation and gave aid to the enemy.”

“It’s not the hand of friendship I’ll be extending if I find a human traitor who shot down a human ship to cozy up to the kzin rulers,” Stan told him. “It would be a quite different hand, believe me. That wasn’t just shameful or disgraceful, though it was that too. Not exactly on the order of some wretch in the Ordungspolitzei issuing a traffic violation notice on behalf of the collabo Government! Treason to humanity is a bit closer, don’t you think?”

Without waiting for an answer, Stan turned to the camera and started his closing spiel. “This is Stan the Man, Stan Adler here, on the topic of who shot down the Valiant. Was it a legitimate kzin strike, a part of the war, or something much worse? Was it an act of treachery by human collaborators trying to ingratiate themselves with their overlords? Tonight you’ve seen one of the kzin, a student, not an overlord, and only born towards the end of the war, who has shown himself friendly to man. We of Wunderland also know that, however cruel and merciless they may be, the kzin despise liars and seldom if ever lie themselves. And you’ve seen Senator von Höhenheim, who doesn’t want us to find the truth any time soon. You make up your own minds as to which of them you’d rather have on your side in a fight, which one you’d trust. Good night.”

“That bastard knows something. He’d not have dared speak to me that way if he didn’t.” The senator was white with rage. Alois Grün sat down without permission. They were alone in the senator’s office, a suitably large room with a rich carpet and wood panelling enriched by gold and crimson swirls, in a suite of rooms high above the streets of Munchen, spread out like a plan below. Low gravity encouraged high building, but the war had flattened much. Lights moved at the park near the spaceport, where acres of hulked kzin warships were gradually being demolished. It was night, but the sky was lit by the vast jewel of Alpha Centauri B, and the sliding points of light that were natural and artificial satellites.

“He can hardly know anything,” Grün said carefully. “I agree he seems to have some definite suspicions. His closing remarks were tantamount to an accusation, but he was not as explicit as he would surely have been did he have any hard evidence. Oh, I don’t blame you,” said Grün. “I remember what we were promised: estates and slaves of our own on Earth or Wunderland if we cooperated, dinner in the officers’ mess if we didn’t. It wasn’t a difficult choice. Oh yes, we should have been good scouts and defied Ktrodni-Stkaa! Ktrodni-Stkaa, whom even other kzin were terrified of!”

Von Höhenheim glared. His mind was working hard.

Abbot Boniface walked in the abbey grounds with Vaemar. It was night, and the stars glittered above them in eternal silence. The orange exhaust flame of a chemical rocket vanished skyward. Somewhere, far beyond the range of visual sight, human and kzin fleets might be locked in battle. Splashes from the fenced-off Jotok ponds suggested the young amphibians were busy.

“Yes, I did tell that nice couple that you should go into politics. I don’t for a moment suppose you want to. Anybody who does want to go into politics shouldn’t be allowed to. But you are needed. It’s your duty, in my view.”

Vaemar made a noise in the back of his throat that could almost have been a growl. Kzin have a clear grasp of the concept of duty; in Vaemar’s view, this was a dirty card to play.

“You will have to convince me of that. I have a duty to put my mind to use in mathematics also. That is ultimately much more important than politics.”

“More important, yes, I grant you that. Mathematics is one of the bases for our civilization and has been since Euclid, and making a contribution to it is certainly important. But not as urgent as making a contribution to good government. Ignore the political environment and you will find that your mathematical work is unfinished because of the meddling of the ignorant. Things like that have happened in the history of both our species, as you know. Didn’t the kzin equivalent of universities start because kzin with a bent for mathematical thought were forced to flee into the wilderness to escape the incessant challenges to death-duels? As our Archimedes was killed by a conquering soldier at the fall of his city. Wernher von Braun nearly died at the bombing of Peenemunde. If that had happened, we would hardly be talking together today.”

“No. My Sire would have had vast estates on Earth.”

“And you would have had eights of ambitious elder brothers between you and the throne, as you yourself have observed. You are an eccentric, Vaemar, a misfit like your friend Dimity. Like Karan, for that matter. And you know what happens to misfits in the Patriarchy.”

Vaemar knew very well. He would have had difficulty surviving, even with his illustrious family to protect him.

The abbot pressed his point. “Your work might even be destroyed, labelled as kzin mathematics and consequently not real, proper human mathematics at all, since your arithmetic is on base eight or for some other rationalization.” The abbot put his hand up. “No, you don’t have to tell me that the idea is insane, I know that, but there are some insane people about. And there have been such arguments before. Einstein’s theories were banned in Nazi Germany as Jewish physics. In fact, you could say that the whole idea of government is to keep fools, knaves and lunatics from disturbing their neighbors. And if no intelligent being will contribute to government because other things are more fun, and, in the long run we may never have, more important, then those who do take power will be all fools, knaves or lunatics. It has happened in the past.”

“But I shouldn’t be any good at it,” Vaemar protested. “I know what is required, I have seen enough human politicians to know. Compromise and lies. Those are the foundations of politics. And I cannot lie. My honor does not permit me.” Vaemar made that noise in his throat that the abbot correctly translated as intense distaste. “I speak not only of human politics. I was too young to be aware of the intrigues that filled my Sire’s palace, but I have learned much since—our Heroes sent out on wars of conquest for glory, yes, and for land and slaves, and to expand our Empire up the spiral arm, but also simply to keep them out of the way. A warrior doctrine whose purpose was to have rival claimants to the throne kill each other off! The mass-production of dead Heroes who are so much less inconvenient than live ones. And even that was more honorable than what a politician has to do in a democracy.”

Abbot Boniface smiled to himself. A human who spoke of his honor would have rung alarm bells, but for a kzin it was perfectly natural. “But you can compromise. You can accept the good without rejecting it in favor of unattainable perfection. You, perhaps you alone, have enough insight into both kzin and man to see another point of view. And the fact that you cannot lie is a great strength. Oh yes,” Boniface said wryly, “I know that the main method of politicians has usually been to let everyone think that you are on their side. Shading the truth at best, downright misleading lies at worst. Trying vainly to be all things to all men. But both man and kzin have a respect for those who tell the truth as they believe it to be. Our best statesmen in the past have usually been like that. They have told the truth and argued honestly for what they believed to be right, and the power of honest belief can accomplish much. I know. In my own small way I am a politician, you see.

“Sometimes. I have to guide and advise, I seldom command. And when I do, it is after much earnest reflection and prayer. It needs a good deal of faith in my own judgment, and I have a great talent for doubt.”

“Look out! Get behind me!” Vaemar had dropped into a fighting crouch. His claws were extended and his wtsai had appeared like magic in his paw.

“Tigrepard!” The abbot could see nothing but a hint of something yellowish-red in the long grass of the garth. Vaemar screamed and leapt. In an instant the two great felinoids were locked in battle, flattening the plants. The abbot groped for his own weapon, but he could not use it for fear of hitting Vaemar.

It was over in an instant. The tigrepard was a big one, but Vaemar was bigger and quicker. He stood back, panting a little, as it died, then removed the ears.

“Your defenses are not all they should be, father,” he remarked. “I noticed a patch of the west wall looked rather tumble-down.”

“And you have reminded me what the price may be for relaxing eternal vigilance,” said the abbot, holding his voice steady with an effort. “I would not have lasted long on my own. I shall have a repair party to the west wall tomorrow.”

“No, father, not tomorrow, tonight. At this time of year tigrepards travel in prides. But sweep the grounds first of all.”

“I am in no position to disregard your advice. You seem to know a lot about them.”

“Of course. We are cats, too.”

Vaemar watched the sweeping of the monastery grounds by parties of well-armed novices under the eyes of the monastery’s hunters, and then turned back to the abbot. What had he been saying? Ah, yes, he’d talked of doubt.

“But how can you maintain your faith in the Bearded God if you are troubled by doubts? Don’t you doubt His very existence?”

“Oh, lots of times. I think He wants me to. So I am not troubled by doubts; if God didn’t want me to doubt, I wouldn’t be able to. He wants me to pursue truth, and that inevitably requires doubt about everything. There was a time once when I suddenly realized that I was in danger of becoming an atheist for religious reasons. When I saw it in those terms, I laughed for a week, and felt the inner warmth that told me God was pleased that I had seen the joke. But we are getting off the subject, and although I would be very proud if I managed to convert you, I don’t expect to do so any time soon. So we shall leave the theology for another time and return to the politics, if you will.

“We live in very interesting times, as the old Chinese curse had it. And hence very dangerous times. We need the very best brains to see the possibilities and to guide the people wisely. We need a kzin in our political system very badly, and no other is as well suited as you. That is why I think it is your duty.”

Vaemar pondered. The abbot was a wise man, Vaemar could sense it. He was also a good man, a man of integrity and honor. A strange sort of honor; turning the other cheek when struck was something hard to even think about. Vaemar sensed that there was something deep about this, something even few human beings could fully grasp. To not fight back when you could, that was paradoxical, but maybe it was a very clever strategy. Perhaps it was something to do with destroying your enemy by turning him into a friend. He would think about this some time.

But was the abbot right? Was it truly urgent that he play a role in the political turmoil? His instincts were violently opposed to the very thought. And yet . . . Sometimes the instincts were wrong and had to be bridled. Human beings were good at doing that, often too good. Kzin didn’t get a lot of practice. Maybe they weren’t good enough. And it would certainly be needed if he were in politics. And he, Vaemar, was much better than any other kzin he knew at holding off the gut reaction and taking time for reflection. The cortico-thalamic pause, as an ancient Earth writer had called it. Vaemar’s sire had seen this as one of the strengths of man, and one he wanted his people to acquire. Perhaps, Vaemar thought, he was the right kzin for the job.

“How is this done, this becoming a politician?” Vaemar asked cautiously.

“The local member of the bundestag, a conservative, died last week. Old age officially, exacerbated by the time under Occupation. We shall be having a by-election within a month. I would strongly support your candidature for the conservative party. There is a natural platform already made. The liberals are planning to drain part of Grossgeister Swamp, and we are mounting opposition. I take it that you are not in favor of draining the swamp?”

“It would be madness. We have a rich and wonderful ecology here, which would be devastated. What are they thinking of?”

“Building housing for the poor, who are more likely to vote for them, so as to change this electorate to give a majority who would support them. They know the locals oppose the idea, and are playing it as being kind to those who have to live in tumbledown slums in Munchen.”

“Well, why not improve the housing in Munchen?”

“Needed for commercial purposes. So they say. I think it’s because they have a huge majority in the city and want to take some of it away from where it is wasted and gain another electorate. This one is big in area but sparsely populated.”

Vaemar thought hard. The abbot was a clever man. He knew what Vaemar would think about draining the swamp, and was putting his case for Vaemar fighting it officially. There might be good arguments in favor of draining the swamp, but if it was a political gambit then he, Vaemar, would fight it tooth and claw. Metaphorically only, of course. More prosaically, he’d be using words. But words, he knew, could be as powerful as teeth or claws or much heavier weapons. A kzin warrior training, at his level, required an understanding of how to motivate troops, of how to get the best out of them using words and body language.

These things had been neglected the first time the kzin found themselves in a serious war. Too many of their aristocrats and young officers desperate for Names had been unable to propose a plan in such a way that their staff dared to point out potential weaknesses. Rarrgh had told him: “I have seen many die from that mistake.” This was, perhaps, not altogether different. Thinking of it as combat, using ideas and words as weapons, somehow made him feel a lot better about it. He would vanquish his opponents! Not as satisfying as physical combat, but more real and with more serious consequences than chess.

“Very well, my friend and adviser. If you truly believe it is my duty and that I am needed, then I will do it, though it will sadden me greatly to take time from mathematics and history. And I rather think that if I go down this path, I shall have little time for anything else. What exactly must I do?”

Boniface smiled, as much as anyone ever does when facing a kzin. His mouth turned up at the corners and his eyes crinkled. “Thank you, my friend and one-time student. I believe it is the best thing for all of us on Wunderland that you do this. I shall put your name forward to the committee. They will have several candidates, I daresay, and the selection committee will interview all of them. I shall have to explain rather a lot of things to you.”

“So there is hope for me. The selection committee may reject me,” Vaemar reflected out loud.

“They might be that stupid. I don’t think so, but it is possible. It depends on the alternatives. You will, of course, do your best to get selected.”

“Yes, of course,” Vaemar said without any enthusiasm. And he would indeed have to do his best, any less would be dishonorable. Whatever doing his best might mean.

“What is it that makes this urgent?” Vaemar asked.

The abbot looked up at the silent stars. “Many small things. And just possibly one big thing. You know I have many sources of information, some not perhaps as reliable as others. And urgent is a word with many nuances.”

“I do not understand you,” Vaemar told him.

The abbot sighed. “There are some hints, some fragments which I have pieced together. I may be wrong. I hope I am.”

“Go on.”

“I have some reason to think there may be something out there. Further along the spiral arm. Something coming this way. You know, of the few sentient species in the galaxy that we have ever recorded, the thing I notice is how much we share. We can understand in some limited way what sort of things drive us. All men are brothers. Well, cousins at least, and we know this from genetics. But it goes deeper than that. You and I are very different in our genetics, but the universe has shaped us, and we have responded in ways which although different show striking similarities. We are both made up of star-stuff, both evolved in the Goldilocks Zone through similar sets of fantastic improbabilities. We both understand what truth and honor and justice mean, and they are important to both of us. You have your Fanged God, and we our Bearded God, but they might almost be two faces of the same entity. Both of them demand truth, honor and justice of us.”

“But your Bearded God also demands that you love your enemy,” the kzin rumbled softly. “And the Fanged God does not.”

“True,” Boniface admitted.

“Perhaps the Fanged God feared such a dreadful weapon being loosed in the universe.”

The abbot’s eyes lit. “Ah. You have seen that. Good. All the same, our response to the demands made upon us makes us almost brothers. And brothers, of course, fight and squabble with each other. But there may be something outside which is very different from all the species we know. Something terrible, something which threatens us all. And something which neither man nor kzin separately could face. It has been hinted to me that there is some sort of plan to forge a deeper alliance between our species, and perhaps others. Perhaps both our gods want that, and something acts for both of them. Perhaps because one day, perhaps a thousand years from now, we shall have to meet something so terrible that only a melding of the traditions of our people can hope to overcome it. The odds against our ships first encountering each other in the way they did were long indeed.”

“How stupid our telepaths were then, to discover you had no weapons but kitchen knives, and to miss entirely that your chief religious symbol was an instrument of torture!”

The abbot nodded to concede the point and then went back to his own. “Who knows what lies in wait for us, further up the spiral arm? You know how we got the hyperdrive: a race that lives in deep space—a race we knew nothing of—contacted our colony at Jinx and sold the colonists a manual. You know the size of space. Beyond your ability to imagine, or mine. Can that have been blind chance? I have heard a theory—no, less than a theory, a fingertip feeling—that our wars have been made by others, in order to forge in that flame some power that may be needed one day to defend truth and honor and justice and perhaps, yes, even love, and save them from something which would smash them as meaningless baubles and scatter the dust into endless night.”

There was a pause as man and kzin regarded each other calmly.

“One cannot make a life decision on mere speculation,” Vaemar rumbled.

“Of course not. But we have played enough chess, you and I, for you to know that it is foolish to make a move for only one reason. Strategy and tactics both are involved in making a move. The tactical issues are much easier to think about. But in the end, the strategy may be what makes a move into a winning game. And I sense that Wunderland may be the world on which man and kzin achieve something jointly which neither could hope for alone. Let that be no more than a dream, still it is a dream worth dreaming, don’t you think?

“There is another thing. Given that you are a reserve officer in our armed forces, and given that I have no hard facts to tell, I may tell you something else about this theory of mine: the telepaths have told us much that they never told you, their masters. Their range is short, but when one links to another, it is not so short. They cannot always correlate well, but when they do, the product is powerful. The telepaths have stores of secret knowledge. They do not, I think, know, but they have guessed—how, I know not—that something cataclysmic is happening in space.

“You know we offered Kzin a temporary truce so the kzinretti and kits on Wunderland left without . . . Heroes to care for them might be repatriated. It was . . . is . . . hoped that there might be more talks, leading to a permanent truce, though that may be but a dream. Still, our chief negotiator, McDonald, found out much—for the Patriarchy to talk to us at all is a huge step. It would never have happened if we had not gotten the hyperdrive and won the Liberation of this planet, along with Down and some other worlds. But we have discovered something you may find uncomfortable. The Patriarchy has found out about you, Vaemar.”

“I suppose they were bound to find out about me sooner or later,” Vaemar admitted.

“It was expected that their attitude would be berserk rage. But—forgive me if I use a monkey expression, for I do not mean to be insulting—it appears the Patriarch is no fool. In fact, his attitude appears to be something like ‘Lurk in the long grass. Wait and see.’ That must be our attitude too.”

“You so often give me things to think about. And so seldom anything easy.” Vaemar looked down at the little man who looked back at him with the hint of a smile on his lips. “You spoke of chess. Do I need to tell you, an Aspirant System Master, that you improve only by playing against better players?”

Dimity Carmody could see that Vaemar was unhappy with his decision. “I do understand, Vaemar,” she told him. “You are not the only mathematician to get mugged by reality. Remember, Gauss was a senior bureaucrat, and Evariste Galois died in a duel for political reasons. I guess mathematics and science are what are called ‘market failures’; most people are too dumb to see how important they are and don’t value them as much as pursuing power. At least you don’t fall into that set.”

“Thank you for seeing my dilemma and for being so understanding, Dimity. I had thought you would be angry with me.”

Dimity shook her head sadly. “Angry, yes, but not with you. With the dreadful fools we have to live among. And who can stay angry with them for long? After a short time it turns to pity, then a determination to have as little to do with them as possible. The trouble with politics started with Plato, who thought that our leaders should be selected from the best and brightest of the human race. Were he a bit more of a thinker and less of a literary man, he’d have realized that the best and brightest don’t want the job. They pursue insight, not power. Power is an empty piece of nonsense no intelligent person would waste time on. But that leads to power going to fools who want it, and they can make our lives a misery. So every so often, the intelligent must take control, however little they like the idea. And now is one of those times, I suspect. If the abbot thinks so, he is likely right. He has a lovely, simple mind, does Boniface. In a better world, he’d have been a mathematician. He has that hunger for the transcendent which is the mark of the best scientists and mathematicians.”

“Will I ever be able to go back to it, do you think?”

“Given that we can stop getting old in these times, I am sure you will, one day. As long as you stay playful, Vaemar. All the best work is play. And you may find enough in politics to stop you getting stodgy.

“The times constrain us, Vaemar, my love. How you put your mind to work is not a matter of personal preference. No man is an island, nor a kzin either. Mathematicians are ultimately the most practical of people; once you see things clearly there are no choices.”

Vaemar considered. He recalled that she had once pulled his tail playfully. Very few other beings could have done that and lived. But she saw everything with a terrible clarity and she saw his mind. She saw him as a mind; the outer form was not important to Dimity, just something to be played with. What Dimity said was right. There were no choices.

“Thank you, Dimity. You have opened doors for me into strange and wonderful worlds. And now the abbot has opened another, and I must pass through. But I will not forget the other worlds. Nor the joy of exploring them.”

“Come and see me when the need arises, Vaemar. When the squalor of engaging with mental and moral pygmies becomes too much to bear; when the pain of not being able to say what you think becomes intolerable, for fear of its effect on fools, I shall be here for you.”

“Where does it all come from?”

“There’s this little village, out in the boondocks. East of the range. Started off just after the kzin surrender, lots of people realized they’d starve to death without a government to organize bringing stuff into the city, and we hanged or shot most of the collabos. So some smart folk went out to do some farming and keep themselves in food. And some were already out there. Seems to have worked, there’s a whole collection of villages out there now, and the land around gets farmed and hunted.”

“But gold? And other stones?”

The trader shrugged. “There’s other stuff besides farming land. There’s a whole lot of country out there, some people just upped and grabbed their share of it. Like the Wild West in some of those old movies. Someone found the gold. There’s big seams of the stuff in quartz sometimes. And there are things pushed up from the deeps by volcanoes, plenty of those around. The abbey’s built on one.”

“And this comes from the other side of the abbey?”

“So they tell me.”

“Don’t you want to go off and get yourself some of that there gold?” The man was hungry. You could see it in his eyes.

“Nope. There’s other things out there besides gold. Like kzin hunters, who went out too, wanting to stay away from the conquerors, and with a mighty big grudge against humans, some of them. And other things, some of them as murderous as a kzin. The tigrepards and the lesslocks are bad enough, and the Morlocks, when they come out onto the surface at night, are worse. Me, I’m a city boy. Don’t fancy getting ate.”

“Still, if a bunch of guys, say a dozen of us with guns, was to go and find this place, we could get us our hands on some of the gold, maybe?”

“Maybe. And then again, maybe not. One of they kzin could take out a dozen men with his bare claws ’n’ fangs afore they could work out where to point the guns. Believe me, I’ve seen it. Thirty of us jumped a kzin during the war. I got away.”

“Can’t be much kind of law out there, yet,” the man argued. The trader could read him like a picture book, one with really dirty pictures. Yes, and a dozen armed men could find that village and take all that gold without having to do much digging at all, at all. Some people couldn’t abide work. He shrugged. No point in telling them the village was well armed. He remembered a psychopath in the early days of the Occupation, maddened by everything, a really nasty piece of work, who had enjoyed killing orphaned children. A kzin had decided the children were the Patriarch’s property. What had happened to the man had not been pleasant. This man, and his accomplices too, were the sort of people Wunderland would be better off without.

“I wouldn’t know. Like I said, I don’t want to get ate.”

This wasn’t quite true. The trader had spent some time yarning and exchanging gossip with the men and women and the odd kzin who had come in from the village. And he had heard of the judge. Judge Tom, the Law East of the Ranges. He sounded a tough cookie.

“Dimity Carmody says that you have a lovely, simple mind,” Vaemar told the abbot. He nodded.

“Yes, I do have a simple mind,” he admitted. “But it has taken me many years to get it that way. I think she was born with one, lucky girl.”

“She said that in a better world, you might yourself have been a mathematician. She said you have the hunger for transcendence which is the mark.”

“She would know. I have never seen myself that way. I feel myself to be too muddled, too confused. Still, it could be worse. I could be like so many people, who are so muddled and confused they haven’t even noticed they are muddled and confused. I give thanks to God that He has shown me something of the extent of my muddle and confusion. Just enough to see it and not so much as to make me despair. And now you have some questions about politics, I think.”

“Yes, some quite basic ones. For a start, why are there two political parties? What is special about two?” Vaemar was puzzled. He was stretched out before a roaring fire, polishing his ear-ring, while the abbot was sitting in a chair close by.

“I believe there was some mathematics developed about a century ago to consider that question, but it has puzzled others before you,” the abbot told him. He went on and started to sing in an artificial deep voice:

“I often think it’s comical, Fa la la, Fa la la,

“That every boy and every girl that’s born into this world alive,

“Is either a little liberal, or else a little conservative.

“Fa, la, la.”

The abbot looked quizically at Vaemar, who was astonished by what seemed to be unusual frivolity, even by human standards, and explained:

“That was written in the last part of the nineteenth century, so you are hardly the first person to find it puzzling. Gilbert’s guardsman did too. It has something to do with stability. You see, human beings have a good share of herd genes. Ninety-eight percent of our genes we have in common with chimpanzees, and about seventy percent we share with cows. And rather more with wolves. We have an impulse towards the collective. We also have an impulse towards hierarchical power structures, as do you kzin. We also have some who are individuals with a strong wish for freedom. These things are written inside us, and we all have something of them. In our various cultures, some of those impulses are expressed more freely than others, and get buttressed by memes.

“A political party is a coalition of memes, and these can change. For example, in Gilbert’s time, conservatives were generally much more collectivist and hierarchical, and the liberals much more individualist. In our day it is nearly the other way around, the conservatives are more inclined to individualism, the liberals are more collectivist. Of course, a coalition of individualists can be formed, but they tend to argue with each other rather a lot, so they are underrepresented in the political system. The individualists in the present conservative party are perhaps less individual and more hierarchical than those who vote for them.

“Of course, the general population has all these dispositions to different degrees. In any society, individuals learn that they have to cooperate to stay alive, and collectivists learn they have to be able to be independent sometimes. But the collectivist impulse ensures that people gather together with those who think alike, that’s the nature of collectivism. And those who need freedom stay away from them, disliking the mutual coercion the collectivists habitually use on each other. But the individualists, too, need the support of a collective. They tend to feel ‘There is no such thing as society,’ because they make relatively few concessions for the approval of their partners. They expect to have to fight for what they want. The collectivist impulse means that an individual who has it strongly virtually lives for the approval of other members of the collective. Both are survival strategies, and are seldom met in their pure forms, but the genes are there, and the memes to express them in any culture.

“In stable times, the collectivist impulse can lead to mass hysteria, with the preference for believing things not because they are true but because you want to, or because your friends all do. These are not stable times, and believing things just because you want to can easily get you killed in a hostile environment, so there has been a strong selection pressure to be realistic. So the liberal party is not yet as dominated by ideology as it has been in the past, or as it will be again. It’s much more complicated than that, but it contains the essentials. So, there are two groups because human beings drift away from weaker collectives to more powerful ones. Not that two is always the necessary count of parties. Highly individualist cultures often have more, but then the groups themselves form coalitions. And fracture when the conflicting memes become too painfully apparent. People tend to vote as their parents do, sometimes seeing it as a matter of tribal loyalties rather than self-interest. There are other dimensions than the collectivism-individualism one of course, but that axis is important.

“Generally, in our culture, conservatives want justice and liberals want mercy. Conservatives expect to live with risk, liberals want security. Conservatives see the society as a delicate organism, to be altered with care. Liberals see it as a machine to be rejigged at will. Conservatives seek to minimize the size of the State, yet, because they are inclined to a more realistic view of life, they are more likely than liberals to see threats, so they are more inclined to large military expenditure and all the State intrusiveness that goes with it. These are, broadly, the things liberals and conservatives want. Obviously, everybody wants all of them, but when they conflict as they usually do, this is the way people tend to split. I don’t pretend to understand it in any detail, it is a specialist subject. But parties can change, and do. I suppose I can tell you that during the war on Earth, before Dimity arrived with the hyperdrive, there were conservatives who seriously wanted to make peace—not in spite of the fact we were losing, mind you, but because of it. Every defeat and disaster led, as time went on, to more and more cries, growing louder and louder, to stop the space-war. They even had a slogan, ‘Come home, Earth,’ until Vrissriv-Admiral’s raid broke through the planetary defenses, levelled cities and spaceports and seized a couple of thousand slaves. Templemount had just taken over then. A pacifist delegation went to see him after that. He evidently decided that it was necessary to show he meant business and publically executed the lot of them. Of course, the fact that there was a kzin radio transceiver found in their party headquarters didn’t exactly help their case.”

“That sounds very odd thinking,” Vaemar objected. “Defeat is no reason to surrender. Not before all is plainly lost. And not even then, unless it is necessary to preserve the species. We surrendered only because the alternative was annihilation, and Hroth, who was the senior surviving officer, ordered us to. It seems utterly perverted otherwise. Had these people not read even your own ‘Battle of Maldon’?”

“No, not then. Senechel was out of his depth. He did his best, and we owe him for what preparation there was, but he couldn’t think in the appropriate way after centuries of ARM-enforced pacifism. Considering the conditioning he labored under, he did heroically. Finally Templemount took over. That fat old man, who had been in every party and who none of the political class trusted. He roused Earth and the Belt to fight to the bitter end. He sent out counterattacks to catch the kzin fleets while they were still outfitting. He even sent an expedition to find your homeworld. It was armed with The Sabbath Goat.”

“What was that? I don’t know of it.”

“Believe me, it is better you don’t. Anyway, they were never heard of again. Perhaps one of your patrols got them.

“Anyway, without Templemount we would have surrendered before the hyperdrive arrived. And those were conservatives who wanted it, more than the liberals, which tells you that parties can change, sometimes very quickly if there is a leader of principle like Templemount.”

“Kzin politics seems much simpler,” Vaemar remarked. “It’s largely a matter of fighting to get to be in charge of the whole system. We don’t have anything like political parties. I suppose we have clan loyalties, but there are lots of clans. They form alliances, but break them whenever it is convenient. Formal notice should be given in such cases. Perhaps in the Patriarch’s palace things are a little different.”

Vaemar tried to find common patterns between kzin and human culture, and decided he needed to study kzin history as well as human history. “Alright, shelve that for the present, as you human beings say. What exactly is a policy? Parties seem to have lots of them.”

“If you are going to keep a party together, everyone has to agree on some things that are important and need doing. Once they’ve agreed, it gets written down and is called a ‘policy.’”

“What if you don’t agree?”

“Well, you have to vote in the approved way in the house, or the party may expel you. But you get a chance to determine what the collective policy will be when it’s being debated in the party room. At least, that’s how the conservatives do it.”

“What do the liberals do?”

“They have a smaller group called a ‘caucus’, which decides what the policies will be. They used to have it open to every member of the party, not just politicians, but it was too unwieldy. Or maybe sometimes the party voted for things the leaders didn’t want. There are all sorts of ways of getting your ideas imposed on other people. It’s much easier to do this in a party of collectivists, where social disapproval is a serious threat. In a party of individualists you need compelling arguments. Sometimes, historically, both parties are very collectivist or hierarchical or both, and the individualists in the world at large get practically no say in what is decided. It’s not quite that bad at present, but it could get that way.”

“I don’t think I’m a very collectivist being,” Vaemar said slowly.

“Well, at least you’ll be in the right party. You wouldn’t last long in the liberal party,” the abbot pointed out.

“This business of having to vote for something I might disagree with. What if someone asks me if I agree with a policy that I didn’t vote for, and thought was wrong but was outvoted on? I shall just have to say that the rules are that I have to, and I follow the rules. And then they would ask why do I follow such stupid rules, and I can’t think of any good answer,” Vaemar complained.

“Happens all the time. The good answer is that if you want to get anything right done, you have to have a party, and that means you will sometimes have to put up with something stupid being done. I must admit that when politicians are asked a question like that, they usually answer a totally different question and hope nobody will notice.”

“Does it work?”

“Not very often, except with the stupid.”

“I’m glad, because I don’t think I could do that. I should just answer the question truthfully.”

The abbot’s shoulders heaved as he manfully suppressed a laugh. “That would surprise everyone. And a good thing it would be, too.”

“This interview committee I am seeing tomorrow. Are there right answers and wrong answers to the questions they will ask me? Is it like a mathematics viva voce? Or is it quite different? What are they trying to find out?”

“Different committee members will have different concerns. Some will want to be reassured that you aren’t going to rip apart any member of the government who you happen to disagree with. Not that they’d mind if you did for themselves, but it would look bad. Others will want to be confident that you will toe the party line and not argue back. You won’t keep those people happy whatever you say, so don’t bother about them. Just be yourself and tell the truth as you always do; let them work out the probable consequences. I shall be on the committee, and they know you are my preferred candidate. I shan’t be able to vote, of course, but I can present some arguments. I’m quite looking forward to it. I don’t say you’ll get the approval of a majority, but at least you won’t be dull. Some of them will prefer dull, but there are some sensible people there who will see you as an opportunity.”

Vaemar looked doleful. He had never much enjoyed examinations, but at least in mathematics, you knew where you were. And even in history, which was a bit trickier, if your facts were right and your arguments solid, you survived.

The villagers now had horses, and ploughing was a lot easier. Ruat watched them ride about in disbelief. The horses no longer panicked when he was upwind of them. He wondered if somewhere there was an animal he could ride. It would have to be a lot bigger than a horse, and he had never seen anything that might do, but the country was big, and who knew? He had never seen horses before the villagers had bought some with his gold. Not that it was his gold any longer, of course; he had traded it for other things. Medicine, and help in building . . . a . . . home. That was the word. Owning things was not an unfamiliar concept in principle, kzin nobles and officers owned things. Names, and slaves, and homes. But for a low-grade kzin, it hardly ever made sense to own anything. But, Ruat reflected, now he did own things. Maybe that made him some sort of noble. It was a strange idea, but not without attraction.

Ruat paced along outside the stockade. He was on patrol. A silver five-pointed star hung from a silver chain around his neck. He even knew what the words embossed on the star meant. Sheriff. He could pronounce that word now, quite clearly. The judge was the Law East of the Ranges, and Ruat enforced the judge’s law. That’s what sheriffs did. Because his honor required it, he was going to do it well.

Of course, it was pretty easy.

“Tell me, Lord Vaemar, why exactly do you want to join the conservative party, and why in particular do you want to stand for the Grossgeister District?” The questioner was the chairman, actually a woman, with a thin, worried look and wispy hair, wearing a hat that looked like roadkill. She looked up at Vaemar nervously.

Vaemar responded promptly: “I want to join the conservative party because I want to conserve something, the Grossgeister Swamp. And I have long associations with the area, I know some of the people here, humans and kzin. They are fine people and I like nearly all of them. One of them, the old man known as Marshy, saved my life and my mate’s life, as well as that of my . . . colleague . . . Swirl-Stripes and other humans. I have helped explore the swamp, and am well aware of the vast variety of life-forms there, many rare and . . .” it was a strange, difficult word to pronounce . . . “beautiful. Never will I forget watching the creatures of the swamp passing through the water by Marshy’s window—the procession of bright creatures passing was one of the wonders of this world—or the bioluminescent life-forms at night. Further, there are the dolphins, your allies. And our sentient brothers, at least. For them it is hunting ground and nursery. There are land-dwelling animals on the bigger islands, and stretches of blue water. Future generations will thank us for preserving it.”

“Didn’t the kzin burn the heart out of it during the war?” someone asked.

“Assessing the damage was one of the purposes of my expedition,” Vaemar replied. “Although other events overtook us, I am happy to report that it appears to be recovering rapidly. I believe in a few years no trace of damage will remain, if it is simply left untouched. And the expedition team I went on was good training for me in leading a mixed human-kzin team successfully.”

“And you brought out specimens of value,” piped up one old fellow, evidently trying to be helpful.

“Yes. Among other things, the only surviving specimens we know of unattached Jotok on this planet. They are being reared at the monastery.” He had also brought out Karan, but she was not the business of these men.

“There are many other swamps,” said someone. It was true. Frequent meteor strikes had left much of Wunderland’s coast riddled with circular holes like a Swiss cheese. Nonetheless, Vaemar’s words seemed to have moved the meeting. Further, they had forgotten the dolphins, and many felt guilty of their forgetfulness at Vaemar’s reminder.

Vaemar could feel a current running against the interjector. It was not merely a subjective impression. Like all male kzin, he had a rudimentary ability to detect emotions, which with the telepaths was developed into a complete sense. Like most kzin he had felt rather embarrassed by this, precisely because of its connection with the despised telepath caste. Suddenly he realized what a useful political asset it might be.

“We kzin,” he continued, “have at times destroyed species in our wars, but never willingly or wantonly. Even when the Chunquen fired missiles at us from their submerged sea-ships, we only boiled part of their seas.”

“Very nice of you,” someone muttered. Vaemar looked at the interjector, who seemed to suddenly shrink under his gaze. Vaemar was big, even for a kzin.

“But why should a kzin want to go into politics at all?” a heavily built man with a ginger beard sat next to the woman and scowled as he asked his question. The panel were seated around a table, and Vaemar stood before it, looming over them. When he had come into the room, the chairman had invited him to sit in the solitary chair facing the table, and then stopped in embarrassment. Kzin didn’t normally use chairs, and few human chairs would have survived, this one clearly would not. Then he had been asked if he would care to lie down on the carpet, and had politely declined. Nobody argued the point.

“My species is sharing this world with yours. We have the vote, although I do not know of a kzin who has used it. So far we have been somewhat dismissive of the political process, but that must change in time. I am the first to consider standing for public office, but I will not be the last. When the kzin see that they have some measure of control over their own future by reasoned debate, they will start taking an interest. It is not in our traditions, this democracy. But not all human beings have been used to it either. Perhaps it is similar to the way in which Japan on your homeworld came to accept and even embrace what must have seemed a very alien way of doing things.”

There was a stunned silence. Vaemar knew a lot more about human history than the committee did, and this was a little embarrassing. He recognized Nils and Leonie Rykermann, sitting towards the back of the room. That meant some support for him, at least. The sight of them brought back old memories.

“Hmmph. Well, be that as it may, what do you do in the Bundestag when a liberal front bencher smiles at you? Are you going to go into attack mode and rip his throat out?”

“Liberal members are not going to do much smiling at me. But in general, I agree that there is a problem. I am actually quite used to people smiling at me, and at each other in my presence. Nils and Leonie Rykermann tried not to, but they gradually forgot, and Dimity Carmody does it all the time these days. Yes, it triggers a reflex, but if you or any other human sees someone of the opposite sex who attracts you, you do not automatically commit rape. You have been socialized. It is harder for kzin, who do not socialize so readily, we are more impulsive, and it is harder for the older ones. I do not encourage human beings to show their teeth, but not because I cannot contain my reaction. It would go hard with them if they were to forget that not all kzin were socialized with human beings as much as I have been. This will gradually change as more kzin get used to the strange way you show an emotion which we express quite differently, and which we can misinterpret rather easily. But no. I shall not tear out any throats from the opposite side. Not unless they really irritate me.”

That last was Vaemar’s idea of a joke. It fell very flat. Nobody was quite sure what to do about it. He realized he had to tell them.

“That was a joke. Not a very funny one, perhaps. We kzin do not have the same sense of humor as you do, although we also react to the incongruous.”

“I would advise against humor in general.” The man with the beard looked as if it was a long time since he’d tried any.

There was a pause. The majority of the committee were obviously making up their minds that Vaemar was going to be more of a liability than an asset. As a filler question and an attempt to see if there was any prospect at all of anything positive coming out of the interview, a solidly built woman at the end asked her only question:“Do you think that kzin will more likely vote for one of their own?”

“The kzin will have no interest in the species of their representative. But once they decide to engage, almost all will vote conservative,” Vaemar assured them calmly.

The panel brightened considerably. “Why is that?” the lady chairman enquired, looking almost lively.

Vaemar thought for some seconds. What was the best way to put this so it didn’t sound terrifying? “The liberal party is very collectivist. Kzin are more individualistic. They can obey orders under a military rule, of course. But in a democracy where they are not so constrained, they will have little sympathy for a collectivist belief system.” That sounded a lot better than telling them that from a kzin perspective, herd species looked like prey and the individualists more like predators, and the kzin weren’t ever going to even consider joining the side of the prey. Besides, apart from those die-hards who regarded him as a quisling, the idea of voting against the son of Chuut-Riit and a grand-nephew of the Patriarch was literally unthinkable. Vaemar decided that this business of choosing words carefully so as to put things in a good light without telling lies was quite interesting.

“So once the kzin see that we are for genuine freedom, they will vote for us preferentially?” The man with the beard was incredulous. He hadn’t expected the kzin to show such good sense.

“Only a few deranged kzin would consider voting for the liberal party as it is at present. The old parties—the Herrenmanner and the Progressive Democrats—are shadows of their former selves, and I think will take a long time to rebuild, if they do so at all. Too many humans blame them, perhaps unfairly, for the lackadaisical pace of the original rearmament effort. There is no reason for any kzin to be interested in them. Perhaps the odd telepath. Once they can see the merit of voting at all, kzinti will overwhelmingly vote for conservatives, just as I would not consider joining the liberals.”

“And the kzinretti?”

“Those of low intelligence will either not vote or will vote as their masters direct them. The intelligent ones, the ones we call ‘the secret others’—of whom my own mate is one—will vote as they please, and any attempt to influence them would be met with defensive hostility. But there are too few of those to make a great difference. Much less than one in an eight-cubed.

“It is not just that the liberals do not conserve,” Vaemar continued. “It is not even that they are willing to destroy the ecology of the swamp as a foolish ploy to change the electorate so as to favor themselves. It is that they favor the herd against the individual. Self-respect is central to the kzin ethos. It is built into our genes. To speak candidly, all normal kzin would see liberals as perverted and disgusting and less than, well, human.” And natural prey, but he didn’t have to say that.

The bearded man brightened even more. That was pretty much how he felt about liberals.

Vaemar went on. “And if the conservative party shows the way to allowing the kzin to engage in the political life of the world, then they will change the balance here drastically.” Vaemar sounded confident. He was. The knowledge that kzin did not lie was something the committee knew and were busily factoring into their calculations. There was an excited buzz as the panel discussed these interesting points with each other in an undertone. Vaemar thought that it wasn’t necessary to point out that one of the longer-term effects would be to drive more human beings towards the liberals, and to make the liberals more individualistic and less collectivist, until one day some kzin would vote for them. That they could work out for themselves. Or not.

The rest of the questions were formal and nobody was very interested in the answers. The prospect of getting a fair number of new voters on the right side, their side, was absolutely irresistible.

“Thank you, Lord Vaemar, I think we have enough information to be able to come to a decision quite soon. You will be hearing from us within a day or two,” the chairman told him. She even smiled at him until she remembered, but Vaemar didn’t smile back. Nobody had bothered about the effect on human beings of a kzin smile, because when a kzin bared his teeth, it wasn’t because he was amused by something, but because he was preparing to spring. But he didn’t tear her throat out either, he just bowed politely and left.

After Vaemar had gone there were still some worried voices.

“It’s all very well to say that we’ll win even in Munchen if we get the kzin vote. What if every human being votes against any kzin? ‘Dirty ratcat-lovers.’ They could hang that label on us.”

“Who cares? Vaemar’s exploits are well-known. Including the fact that he fought beside the Rykermanns, two of our most respected leaders”—he paused and bowed to them—“and is a friend of Dimity Carmody, or Lilly the Pink, as the old song calls her—‘The savior of the ’uman race.’ Anyway, it will be a long time before we have many more kzin candidates. Just one to show we want to engage with the kzin is all we need. If he does well, it will prove our foresight and wisdom. Also, the Jotok will get the vote when they grow to sentience. It was his expedition that found and saved them—as we will emphasize to them, if he is one of our party.”

“If . . .”

“Hell, it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t even make it, and I can’t see that happening. Not many folk around here will be voting for the liberals.”

“He speaks quite well, don’t you think? Sounds educated, of course. Might go down well in the Bundestag, those bloody libs posture around as if we’re all a load of hicks. And he’s a lord or something.”

“Yeah, but can you see him on the hustings getting through to some of the old-timers who hate the kzin worse than poison? And for Pete’s sake, can you see him kissing babies?”

There was a long silence as this picture went through their minds.

“I can’t imagine many mothers offering their babies to be kissed,” someone said. “They might be unsure of getting the whole baby back.”

“Vaemar’s teacher, Rarrgh who was Rarrgh-Sergeant, saved my life when I nearly drowned in a cave in the Hohe Kalkstein,” said Leonie Rykermann. “He gave me artificial respiration, and, as you can see, he kept his claws sheathed.”

The Rykermanns’ words mattered. Almost the only figures to have fought in the Resistance from the first day to nearly the last, they were Heroes of virtually legendary stature in Wunderland’s mythology.

Opinion was divided. “Perhaps we should ask Nils Rykermann’s opinion?” the abbot suggested quietly. This looked to be an excellent idea, and the committee brightened again.

“Professor Rykermann, do you have any views on the candidacy of Lord Vaemar?” the bearded man asked.

“To reject Vaemar’s candidacy will hardly improve man-kzin relations on this planet,” Nils Rykermann told them. “There are kzin on Wunderland, on Tiamat, and in the asteroids of the Serpent Swarm, who would like to be good, constructive citizens. Some, I am told, worked to rescue humans in the devastation after the UNSN Ramscoop Raid. Already many of them work on human projects, and not a few in positions of trust.”

Leonie interjected. “Rarrgh, Vaemar’s . . .” Leonie could not think of the correct word—major domo seemed faintly ridiculous and few here would know what verderer meant—“chief servant, twice saved my life. The first time he stopped me from drowning, the second time he ran through fire and helped Dimity Carmody give me resuscitation when the traitor Henrietta wounded me.” She had also saved the life of the kitten, its legs broken by the Morlocks and kept for live meat, who grew to be Karan, but modesty prevented her mentioning it.

A murmur ran through the gathering. The name of Dimity Carmody, the genius who deciphered the alien theory behind the first hyperdrive shunt, was a potent one here.

“Where is Dimity now?” someone asked.

“She is Vaemar’s guest, and also his Ph.D. supervisor,” said Leonie. “He has placed a guest-house in his palace at her disposal. She has the use of the laboratory and instruments. I believe ARM is aware of the situation.” And has probably planted something the size of a grain of rice under the skin between her shoulderblades, thought Nils, to track her movements and to detonate if she looks like leaving the planet without permission. Neater than a Zrrow. But it would be tactless to mention that now.

The testimony of the Rykermanns, and the name of Dimity Carmody, had done much to swing the meeting.

“He may need a bit of coaching,” the bearded man said eventually. “But there are quite a few kzin around here, and a helluva lot more spread around the planet. I say we should go for him. And just think of the look on the chancellor’s face when our boy gets up to speak.”

Vaemar and the abbot got out of the air-car and looked at the stockade. “You are sure this is in my electorate?” Vaemar asked. “It’s a long way to the abbey and Grossgeister Swamp.”

“Your electorate is pretty open-ended. I don’t think officialdom knows about this place yet, it’s too far away. But the villagers have been trading gold and precious stones for some months now, and buying all manner of things from horses to newspapers.”

“Will they still hate all kzin, do you think? They must have come here to escape the Occupation in the first place,” Vaemar wanted to know.

“There’s your answer.” The abbot pointed to a tall, bulky figure coming down to the stockade from the hills. It walked lithely and confidently. It saw them and headed straight for them. Vaemar moved in front of the abbot and patted his holster.

“Ho, kzin warrior, what do you here? The kzin is a mighty hunter!” Vaemar asked in the formal tense. The kzin’s eye caught the red fur on Vaemar’s chest, and his ear-tattoos. He began to go down in the prostration until Vaemar stayed him with a gesture. “Dominant One . . .” he began in the old style.

“That is not necessary,” Vaemar reassured him. “We live in modern times now.”

“Greetings, then, Great One and Human. I am Rrhougharrrt, the sheriff of this town. I keep the Judge’s Law.” Ruat showed them his badge with pride.

“I am standing for election for this district,” Vaemar explained. “I would like to talk to the town, if that can be done without alarming the people here.”

Ruat gave a very human shrug, although on rather a large scale. “I know nothing of elections and districts, Great One. I will take you to the judge, who will decide. Follow me.”

They followed him to the gate, which was opened to allow them in by a gatekeeper who addressed Ruat in familiar tones. “Hi, Ruat, got some more visitors to join us?”

“I know not, Hans, but the Hero is of royalty. I take them to the judge.”

Boniface and Vaemar were admitted with a polite nod, and the gate closed behind them. They looked around. It was somewhere halfway between a shantytown and a well-designed minor city. The houses were a bit rough but were in the process of being spruced up. Children and kzin kits played together in the streets, the kits with buttons on their claws and Vaemar had seldom seen anything like it: man and kzin living together and a kzin sheriff who seemed to be on good terms with everbody. The kids showed not the slightest fear of him; they seemed to see him as a protector. They waved at him and smiled. And the kzin waved back and flipped an ear at them. Unbelievable.

“Judge, I have found some strangers. They came by aircar, it is outside the wall. The Hero wants to talk to the town, for reasons I know nothing of. You must explain it to me later.” The judge looked up at them. He was sitting on a rocking chair on the porch of his house and smoking a pungent cigar.

“Lord Vaemar-Riit, as I live and breathe! And of course you are the abbot. I have never met you, but I have heard a lot about you. I knew your predecessor. I owed him a debt.”

“But you have met Vaemar before?” the abbot inquired.

“Indeed I have, although under embarrassing circumstances, and with luck he does not recall me.” The Judge was grave, so Vaemar decided not to recognize him formally, although it was not hard to recall the circumstances. Vaemar had been a mere kit at the time, but the events had been, ah, memorable.

“I have been selected as the conservative candidate for the Grossgeister electorate,” Vaemar explained. “I would like to tell your people why it is important to vote for me. It seems a very vulgar thing to do, but I am assured that it is proper.”

“Hey, you’re going into politics? That’s wonderful! Some of the men are out hunting or farming, but they’ll all be back later. Can you wait two hours? We can have the whole town lined up for you by then. Not a whole lot of folk, of course, less than two hundred all up, but we are growing at the expense of some of the other villages further out. We can thank Ruat for that. He found gold and precious stones near here, which means we’re rich now, and the word gets out.”

“You have prospered,” said Vaemar, as the villagers assembled.

“Indeed.” It was obvious to the judge that Vaemar recognized him, despite the years that had passed. “And the sergeant . . . Rarrgh?”

“He heads my household . . . my palace staff.

“You have a palace? Times have indeed changed, O’ Vaemar-Ritt!”

“Only a small one. But I find it is big enough. It is not on the scale of my Honored Sire’s, but I find it is big enough for contentment.”

“Then you are fortunate, as I have been.”

Vaemar didn’t need a soap box to stand on, had such a thing been available and strong enough to bear his weight. He checked with the abbot, who nodded.

“People, Heroes and humans, I am Vaemar-Riit. If you will vote for me next week, then I will represent you. My duty is to do what I can to help you help yourselves. I will do this if I am elected, whether you vote for me or not.

“I will have a say in the making of the laws. I will try to pass laws which I think are good for all this world. I shall exercise my best judgement.”

There were six, no, seven kzin standing at the back, with men and women among them.

“If you want to ask me questions, I will try to answer them. Thank you.”

It was probably the shortest campaign speech on record. It seemed to work. A kzin called out: “What is this voting? I have heard of it, but it meant nothing to me.”

“You will be given a piece of paper with some names on it. There are little spaces after the names. To vote for me, you make a mark with a stylus after my name. If enough of you do this, I will become your representative.”

“And if we have some trouble, we may come and ask your help?” a kzinrett asked.

“Yes.” Vaemar was firm. “It will be my duty to give you help if I can.”

The crowd digested this. “Will you favor the kzin? They are your kind,” a human voice pointed out.

“No, I will do justice. I will be representing all of you, not just the kzin.”

The crowd started discussing this with each other. Vaemar looked at the abbot, who nodded.

“Did I do that properly?” Vaemar asked the abbot on the way back.

“Looked pretty good to me,” Boniface told him comfortably. “Think of it as practice for the rest of the speeches. Some may be a little longer when you’re closer to Grossgeister. Tell them about the swamp.”

“That will be good,” Vaemar agreed. “I thought perhaps I could have spoken more, but could think of nothing to say.”

“Doesn’t stop most politicians,” the abbot said drily. “I found it very refreshing.”

“Ain’t for me t’ tell you how t’ vote, Bill.” The judge yawned.

“But you are gonna vote fer a kzin? I don’t know I want to stay in this town, we got kzin all over the place, and I hate them. I hate them all.”

“That’s your right as a free man an’ a fool, Bill Braun. How you can have strong feelins about a whole bunch of people you never even met is beyond me; I can only hate people I know pretty well, m’self.”

“There you go, callin’ them people. They ain’t people, they’s kzin.”

“Way I see it, if you can have a talk to it, it’s people. Don’t much care about the shape or size or color,” the judge told him. “Ruat is definitely people. He went into the river to fish out that kid was drowning last week, and he don’t like water much at all. Would you still hate him if it had been one of your kids?”

Bill Braun glared at the judge. “We should have a human sheriff, not some goddam ratcat.”

“No human sheriff could have heard the kid from that distance and moved so quickly. A human sheriff, and the kid would have drowned. ’Course, it’s so much better to be fished out dead by a human than alive by a kzin, ain’t it?”

Bill Braun couldn’t think of an answer to that. He wanted to move out. He would have moved out. But his wife had told him that if he went, he went on his own. Damned women were more trouble than the kzin. And you couldn’t beat them these days, even when they were sassy. Last time he’d threatened her, she’d screamed and that damned Ruat had been at his door in two seconds flat. Hadn’t done anything. Just looked and asked if everything was alright. Had then explained that violence was against the Judge’s Law. Except when it was required, as part of the law, of course. That, Ruat had explained, was his job.

The election day came. Vaemar and his mate Karan went around to every public place they could. They took Orlando and Tabitha, who were now nearly four years old, and were zooming around, mostly on all fours but occasionally toddling, and well behaved, all things considered; They also took their brand new kits, Orion and Arwen, who had opened their blue eyes but were still dazed by the world. Children came up to stroke them, because they looked so adorable.

After the count, the abbot could barely contain himself.

“Those two cute little fluff-bundles helped win you the election, Vaemar. You got fifty percent better numbers than your predecessor. The liberal was nowhere. And ten kzinti voted, which is a first. Next stop, the Bundestag.”

Fifteen horses galloped east. The twelve riders carried rifles and side guns and were all in serious need of a shave. It was the better part of a day’s journey to the village, and they had started late in the morning, so it would be nightfall when they got there. The three pack animals were roped to the horse of the last rider, who would have been recognized by the trader as a man who’d do anything to get money except work for it.

“The member for Grossgeister,” intoned the speaker. Vaemar rose. This was his maiden speech, and he hoped it was going to work. The government looked up at him from the front benches, most of them with their mouths open.

“Madam Speaker, ladies and gentlemen. I stand before you as the first kzin member of this house, and as a sign that our two peoples can share this world under the rule of Law.” There were a few “Hear, hear” sounds from behind him. The public gallery was packed, with several massive kzin standing among them. Journalists filled the press gallery.

“It would be possible for me to disburse platitudes about the fact that I, a kzin, should accept the role of this house, and that in doing so I might encourage other kzinti to engage with the political process, but to do so would be stating the obvious.”

The chancellor turned to the man on his left. “We’re going to have to get one of those damned ratcats in on our side of the house, or we’re buggered,” he whispered savagely. “If all kzinti decide to vote conservative because this one is, we’ll lose everywhere. See to it, fast as you can. I don’t care who he is, or what his politics are. We need a ratcat.” The man nodded and scurried away. This was urgent. Vaemar had won a bye-election, but a general election was not too far off.

“Instead, I want to turn to the last finding of the finance committee. It is chaired by Senator von Höhenheim, who is, of course, of the upper house, and not answerable directly to this house. It is, however, this house which must ultimately determine proper priorities. And there is something which I find most unsatisfactory in this latest report. I hope to persuade both sides of this house that two grievous errors have occurred and that we must put them right.”

Vaemar remembered to take a sip from a glass of water. Timing, proper pauses and the right buildup. Rhetoric was a weapon.

“First, there is the plan to drain Grossgeister Swamp. It is hard to understand how the government side of the house could possibly support this. The region is a complex wetland with a delicate ecology comprised of a huge number of species. That was where we found the Jotok, intelligent beings when developed, and there may yet be many others in their early stages. The dolphins breed there. To drain the swamp would be murder.” That caused a buzz among some who remembered the Occupation. “I could enlarge on the damage which can be done when ecologies are disturbed, damage extending far beyond the immediate locality. If anyone doubts this, then listen to any competent ecologist. I have here some relevant papers which I shall table, and which demonstrate forcefully the serious risk of unexpected and malign consequences following meddling with a system as complex as an ecology.”

Vaemar paused again after brandishing more documents than a human being could carry, and slapping them down on the table. (The thud made the government front bench jump.) The kzin sounded civilized; his soft, mellow voice carried not a hint of violence, but the sheer size of the creature was intimidating. The public gallery was absorbed, the press gallery appreciative and safely distant from the big animal. The front bench was not. Somewhere in their hindbrains, ancient terrors were triggered.

“And yet many millions of thalers were to be spent on this project, and no committee has been set up to consider the consequences. That surely cannot be allowed to go through. It would be irresponsible in the extreme; this house would be derelict in its duty if it did not set up a committee to review the plan to drain the swamp, and I am confident that any such committee would reject the plan as monstrous.” Vaemar took another sip of water. So far, so good.

“Yet the examination of the Valiant has been stopped in its tracks. It might be thought that I would be the one opposed to an investigation which would likely bring opprobrium on the kzin. After all, by far the most likely explanation is that a kzin warship hit it and thought it destroyed. But truth must be faced down, no matter how fearful.” Vaemar’s voice rose in power and pitch: “We must learn to live together, and to trust each other. It is perhaps the most important thing for the future of our world that we do this. And trust must be based on plain speaking and on knowing the truth. Therefore I call upon this house to set up the investigation of the downing of the Valiant as most exigent business affecting our common future. My own most trusted servant, Rarrgh, has volunteered to go to provide security at no cost to the public treasury.

“I therefore move that the matter of draining the swamp be referred to a committee of all parties and that the house authorize an investigation of the Valiant.” Vaemar bowed politely and returned to his seat, which had been greatly enlarged, strengthened and modified, but was still damnably uncomfortable. He must see about getting a footch installed. Several, in fact. That would be symbolically important, too. The house clapped for him, with wild enthusiasm from the conservative opposition, and more restrained graciousness from the government benches. The vestigial representation of the old Herrenmanner and the Progressive Democrats were pleased they had not been omitted. The public gallery mostly clapped, except for the kzinti, who made noises of approval. As maiden speeches went, it had the merit of brevity and the serious flaw of actually saying something. The chancellor would have scowled, but the press gallery had him in their camera sights. So he gave a benevolent smile instead.

The men arrived at the village in darkness. Lights showed through the palings of the palisade that encircled the village; generators had been purchased and put to interesting uses. Eleven of the men dismounted, and some broke their breach-loading rifled muskets, loading them from bandoliers, while eyes watched them from the dark. The eleven crept up to the gate. The last man at the back sat and watched them, the three pack horses behind him sniffing the air nervously. His gun was already loaded.

There was a young man at the gate. Hearing the bandits, he opened the gate cautiously and peered out, shining a torch at them. Had they been marauding lesslocks, he’d have slammed the gate shut and given the alarm by blowing on the whistle he kept on a chain around his neck. Seeing humans, he called out to them:

“Hi, guys, who are you, then?” The lead bandit shot him, but did not kill him. The sound split the night more than the whistle would have done. The young man fell back, raised his own gun and shot the bandit stone dead, but it was too late. Inside the gate, the bandits shouted in triumph and fired into the air.

Outside the stockade, the horses were beginning to panic. One of the pack animals screamed, reared, broke the lead which tied him to the last man’s horse and turned to run. There was a chorus of howls and the horse was submerged under a horde of lesslocks. The man caught the red eyes of the brutes and fired at them.

Lesslocks were so called because the species was clearly related to the Morlocks, but were smaller and squatter. They were less intelligent than the baboons they somewhat resembled, but were stronger and much more aggressive; they hunted in big packs of several hundred. They surged towards the man, who reloaded quickly and fired again before he went under a snarling mob.

Inside the stockade, deaf to the sounds outside because of their own firing, the bandits felt that things were going their way. The villagers were looking at them with horror, the women screaming. That was when Ruat and his deputies arrived. One of the bandits looked at a charging kzin, and tried to get off a shot. That settled things as far as Ruat was concerned. None of the other bandits even managed to aim; having five kzin warriors coming at you numbed the mind. The gates were dragged shut, leaving most of the lesslocks surging futilely about outside.The eleven bodies were torn apart. It made a bit of a mess, but, apart from the lead bandit’s head, caught in the branches of a high tree where it had been flung, it could be tidied up easily enough come morning.

“Are we allowed to eat them?” one of the deputies asked.

Ruat pondered. He wasn’t sure; he’d have to ask the judge for a definitive ruling, but he suspected not.

“No, we do not eat intelligent beings. Not unless they taste really good, and these won’t,” he explained. This seemed reasonable to the rest of the kzinti.

Outside the stockade, one of the lesslocks had picked up a musket. He found out how to break it, and copied what he had seen the man doing, taking a bullet from the bandolier and poking it into the breach. Then he closed the gun and pulled the trigger. It exploded and blew apart the head of another lesslock. Some dim sense of power came to the one holding the gun. It led the way back into the darkness, taking the gun and the bandolier with it.

The cross-benchers had taken the side of moral virtue and supported Vaemar’s proposals when they had been made into a formal bill. This had allowed it to pass by a very respectable majority, to the discomfort of the government, which had opposed it on the principle that the opposition must always be wrong about everything. Vaemar had declined to be on the committee investigating the swamp-draining proposal, explaining that his presence might detract from the necessity of demonstrating complete objectivity. This was thought to be rather an eccentric perspective, but had, as it turned out, the effect of the committee feeling obliged to investigate the matter carefully and relatively honestly. The argument in favor of investigating the Valiant had some support from the anti-kzin faction, who hoped that it would show once again that the kzinti were murderous scum. The conservatives, joining with a minority who saw the force of Vaemar’s argument that truth had to be confronted no matter how uncongenial, and another, larger minority, which had some serious suspicions about von Höhenheim and were worried about being seen to support him, again had the numbers, and the item passed. And so it was agreed that an expedition was to be sent out to do something about the sunken spacecraft. Rarrgh and the Rykermanns, Greg and Sarah, and Stan Adler, as well as a sizeable crew, and two other teams of Stan’s news competitors were to go with it. This was going to be a very public event.

The motion-detector at the Rykermanns’ door rang. Leonie awoke instantly, still with the reflexes of a guerrilla leader. The console by her bed identified the visitor as a large male specimen of Pseudofelis sapiens ferox. The lock identified the paw-print as Vaemar’s.

The Rykermanns’ ground-floor sitting room was equipped with a footch, the couchlike furnishing on which a Kzin warrior might recline. After shaking hands with Nils Rykermann, Vaemar presented Leonie with a small gold music box, mounted on what he said was Morlock bone, intricately sculpted. Rykermann felt his eyes narrowing very slightly as he looked at this. A valuable, if small, gift from a kzin of high rank was often the prelude to a request. He also knew, however, that this request would not come at once. A trouble with such requests was that, should danger be involved, the kzin would fail to mention it, politely assuming that all had as much contempt for danger as itself.

The robot butler brought appropriate food, and they chatted about the matters of Vaemar’s estate, such as the doings of Rarrgh’s increasing brood of kittens, and the work being done by Dimity Carmody, which Vaemar was sponsoring, on the further applications of Carmody’s Transform. Finally, as if by chance, the talk drifted to the doings of Orlando and Tabitha.

“I would be grateful,” said Vaemar, “if you would allow them to accompany you on the Valiant expedition. Rarrgh will go with you, of course, to keep them out of mischief, and Nurse. They should not be a burden.”

It was not the favor Nils Rykermann had been expecting.

“My friend, may I ask why?”

“Because I am too tied up with politics to go myself, and I want them to start mingling with humans at the earliest possible age. An expedition into the wild will be an excellent introduction for them.”

“They are very young,” said Leonie.

“Not much younger than I was when Rarrgh, who was then Rarrgh-Sergeant, defended me at the last siege,” said Vaemar. “There is an important matter at issue. You know only a small handful of female kzin have retained high intelligence. Karan is one. It will be a good chance to test Tabitha’s intelligence under stimulating conditions.”

“I do not think that is all you have in mind, friend,” said Nils Rykermann.

“No, not quite all. My Honored Sire came to the belief, as a result of his experiences not only on this world, but on others earlier, that one of our species’ greatest defects was the low place we gave to abstract knowledge. He had been on Chunquen, when many Heroes died because we kzin had no interest in Chunquen’s seas, or the locals’ submarine boats. When the Heroes saw their deaths coming upon them on the tips of nuclear missiles, it was too late to start learning. So he set out to study humans,” (A trifle of awkwardness here: a lot of the preliminary part of that study had taken the form of dissection, but there was no point in reviving that fact now.) “But I know as a result of my own studies how many other areas there are that we have neglected. Seas take up about sixty percent of Wunderland’s surface. I would like my son to have some knowledge of marine biology. The swamp taught me something of its fascination.

“Certainly, I do not want him to fall into the trap I have seen in the history of both our species—to grow up overly aware that he is a noble’s son, living a life of ease and privilege, a Caligula, a Commodus, a Virritov-Riit. The abbot has mentioned this to me as a risk more than once. I want to start him on adventure while he is young. Something more that mere hunting for sport. Remember the Sage’s Chant:

Knowledge, Oh Heroes, stands alone,

Knowledge that comes with kittens’ playing,

Knowledge that comes with rampant slaying.

A mighty weapon on its own . . .

“Certainly I plan to get even more sons. But Karan has so far disapproved of other possible candidates for my harem. She says we must be modern.” Leonie turned away to hide a smile. She could guess what form Karan’s disapproval would take. “And, of course, one must be careful with the Riit bloodline.

“I was not much bigger than Orlando is now when I killed my first Morlock. We had come in wild country after Rarrgh put down Jorg von Thoma. I had slipped away from Rarrgh and entered the caves alone. I was no bigger than one of those Earth leopards at the time. Rarrgh disciplined me severely afterwards, but I believe he was secretly pleased with me. When he had finished he groomed me and fed me with some zinyah meat as a treat. I don’t know how he had got hold of it.”

“I must say I am looking forward to seeing the old Teufel again,” said Nils thoughtfully, “and I guess he would not object to a field trip. But, my friend, I must be very clear about this. If Orlando and Tabitha are to accompany the expedition, they must be his responsibility, solely and entirely. You know how poor us monkeys’ senses are. I cannot run an expedition and be watching those mischievous little balls of devilment at the same time. You know, my friend—and we have been through enough together for me to be able to take politeness beyond its limits by stating this—there may be danger.”

“You speak frankly, but I forgive you. Much rides upon Orlando. But Rarrgh will be with them.”

The mess inside the stockade had been cleared up, graves dug outside the palisade and the bodies buried. The mess outside the stockade was harder to deal with: fifteen dead and partly eaten horses and one dead man scattered about the place. Bits of the man had been eaten as well, but the body had been torn apart. Nobody could have recognized what was left without DNA analysis, and the thinking was simpler and more direct around the village. He’d got what he deserved. Likewise the other eleven bandits. The kzin deputies and Ruat had been given a sort of triumph for saving the villagers, a parade around the village on the outside and then once around again on the inside. Slowly, roles were evolving and beaten into habits. The judge was meticulous about the discussions that went around, joining in every one and letting his opinion be known.

Even the most obstinate of kzin-haters were coming around to the view that although kzinti in the abstract were murderous monsters, our kzinti were natural protectors. To the kzinti, something similar was happening. Although human beings in the abstract were natural slaves and food, our humans were basically, well, like kzin kits, essentially weak and helpless and to be protected. And the kits and children went to school together. It wasn’t much of a school; there were only two classes, those who could read and do sums, and those who couldn’t. They taught each other most of what they learned. They squabbled and fought indiscriminately and had to be punished when it got out of hand. Having buttons put on your claws was a dreadful disgrace to the older kits. The idea that the bigger kits should look after the little ones of both species, once planted, found good soil. The judge looked on his village with approval. If the folk in the big city could see how it was working out, here in the boondocks, maybe they’d have some hope for the future, he thought.

Further out, things were not nearly as nice. The kzin seldom attacked villages or even homesteads. They knew they had lost a war. They believed that if they did not observe the truce, they would die, and would deserve to die. The human beings were less tolerant and would have been happy to hunt the kzin down, but with the weapons to hand, this was impractical. Some had discovered this the hard way: Darwin strikes again. In the main, the species stayed separate and distrustful.

“Judge, there’s a man here from out east. Some small village. He says they got attacked by lesslocks, and there’s no survivors.”

“Ask some of the men to ride out, armed. Oh, and take a couple of the kzin deputies with you. With you on horse and them on foot, you should be able to stay together. That’s important.” The judge was getting worried by the lesslocks. The numbers were getting unbelievable. Thousands of them in the neighborhood, and they were damned aggressive. They mainly hunted by night, and were cleaning up all the wildlife that moved except for fish. And they vanished for days or even weeks on end, suggesting a fair amount of travelling. Marauding lesslocks would overrun any homestead. Only a fair-sized village with a stockade and armed men stood a chance.

When the posse got back, it was to tell a terrible story. There had indeed been no survivors. The village had been small, had no stockade and had been swarmed. There were marks of the lesslocks fangs on the gruesome half-consumed bodies of nearly fifty people. But there were no guns. The guns and the ammunition had been taken. And one of the bodies had been shot.

The judge was worried. The village had defenses and could survive any ordinary attack, but the outlying villages, of which they had only partial and fragmentary knowledge, were another matter. And what if the lesslocks started attacking in daylight? The village could not sustain itself against a siege; their food was outside the stockade and already hunting was getting much harder.

“We’re going to have to get help from the government,” he told the men and kzin. “I hate to do it, I really do. Anytime a government gets its nose into anything they make a mess of it. But this time I don’t see an alternative. So Hans, Ben, take some fast horses and get to Vaemar’s palace. Get one of the deputies to run with you. Let Vaemar know the situation. He said he was here to help us help ourselves. Well, this is when we take him at his word. We need serious weaponry at the very least. Ride by daylight, come back by daylight. No night riding anywhere near here. Got it?”

“Got it, Judge, we’ll be back as soon as we can.”

Karan stood with her two younger kits held close, both squirming to free themselves. She was not as big as Vaemar or the deputy, but she was big for a kzinrett and had the sort of presence that made up for any lack of inches or kilograms.

“Vaemar is not here at present, he is in the Bundestag and will be in committee meetings after that. I am his voice. Tell me your troubles and it will be as if you told him.”

Hans explained about the massacre and the threat the lesslocks posed. The fact that they had obtained guns and seemingly knew how to use them caused Karan to think hard.

“I must come and see for myself. I need to talk with your judge and to see the massacre. It is not that I doubt you, at least, not more than I doubt anyone, but I need hard facts, not second- or third-hand reports. If you return tomorrow, I shall be there before you. I shall fly to the village. I will bring some military people to give their assessment. Be sure that I take this very seriously and that Vaemar’s promise to you will be kept.”

The aircar held Karan, her new kits, two military men and one military woman. It landed outside the village after overflying it, and the judge, two men, Ruat and two kzin deputies came out to meet her. The combination of human and kzin in amity struck Karan as it had Vaemar. She had plenty of human friends, but this grouping had arisen quite independently. She saw something that nobody except perhaps the judge was capable of seeing: that the lesslocks were not entirely a curse. The dynamics which had made a man-kzin cooperation inevitable were intensified by the threat of the lesslocks. Intelligence was coming together to defend itself against a blind rage that had the numbers. Villages that had a mixed population were stronger than those which did not, and would survive. A sort of social Darwinism.

“Welcome to our village, my lady Karan,” the judge said, hobbling forward on his stick. “I take it that Lord Vaemar is busy and you are his deputy?”

“Vaemar is busy in the Bundestag, but he knows of this matter, and although we had a slight difference of opinion on whether I should come in his place, and whether I should bring Orion and Arwen here, we are in complete agreement that this is urgent and needs to be handled immediately. I have come to observe for myself the massacre and confirm that the lesslocks have guns.” Karan bowed politely, and let the squirming kits down, where they went racing around. It must be safe, it was mid-morning and the lesslocks were creatures of the dark. And nearly every species was kind to infants. The kits’ big eyes triggered something protective across different species. No doubt there was a genetic recognition that the kits were too small to make a good meal, and it was better to let them grow bigger before eating them.

“Please come into the village, my lady. I suggest sending the aircar into hover mode just in case, but if you will follow me, you—” That was when the lesslocks attacked.

There were only a handful of them, but one jumped up out of the ground almost at the judge’s feet, with a gun raised. The aircar had nearly landed on it. It was close, and much, much too close to Arwen, who gazed at it with astonishment. The judge threw himself in front of the kit and lunged. It had been a long time since he had acquired skill in fencing, and his stick was no schläger, but the tip went into the lesslock’s eye, and the creature fell back and dropped the musket. Another lesslock stood and pointed its musket. The gun waved about uncertainly, the animal having only a vague idea of aiming. The barrel fell until it pointed at Arwen. The roar from Karan, the deeper roar from Ruat, the sound of a shot and the judge throwing himself in front of the kit happened too quickly to be distinguished, but Karan snatched Arwen back only a second before Ruat hit the lesslock and ripped its head off. The other lesslocks fled, and Ruat and the two deputies took them down within seconds. Karan looked down at Arwen. The bullet had emerged from the judge with the momentum of a thoroughly slugged baseball, and the kit had caught it in one paw, and was inspecting it to decide if it was edible. “No, dear, it’s yukky,” Karan pronounced, and took it from her and threw it in the long grass.

“You been hurt, Judge,” one of the men said, unnecessarily. The bullet had caught him in the gut, and blood was pouring out from entry and exit wounds. Karan stooped and reached into the aircar for a first-aid kit. She bound the damage as well as she knew how, quickly and expertly. Then she placed the unconscious judge gently in the aircar. “Fly him straight to the hospital in Munchen. Fast as you can go,” she told the pilot.

“I must go with him,” Ruat rumbled.

“Good. And you,” Karan addressed the female aide, “make absolutely sure he gets the top priority treatment as a matter of urgency. Send another aircar back to us as soon as you are airborne. Now, go!”

Ruat climbed in, and the aircar shot off. He didn’t know what was going to happen, but without the judge, they would all be lost.

Karan stalked into the village. She was in a towering rage with herself. She had underestimated the enemy. So had the judge, and he might pay the ultimate price for that. But he had taken a bullet to save her kit, and that made a blood debt that would last forever. She was shown to the judge’s house, which was also where he dispensed justice. The population, alerted by the gunshot and only partially informed, gathered and looked at her with some apprehension.

“I have sent your judge to the hospital. He has been seriously wounded by one of those sthondat-excreted lesslocks. Until he comes back, or you appoint a new judge, I am the Law East of the Ranges. I will do my best to give justice, even though I have not his wisdom.” Her green eyes flashed, and nobody doubted her for a moment.

Vaemar needs to know, Karan thought. There was no necessity for visiting the scene of the massacre now; the basic fact of armed lesslocks was established beyond all possibility of doubt. Karan shivered with rage. The lesslocks now had an implacable enemy who would destroy every last one of them, whatever their inadvertent capacity to bring man and kzin together.

The judge opened his eyes to see Ruat’s face framed by blue sky and the transparent upper shell of the aircar.

“Looks like I’ve taken early retirement,” he wheezed. “I’m a goner, I guess. But it’s been good having you as a friend, Ruat. You’ve done a good job.”

“You must live, Judge, you must. We need you more than ever now.” Later, Ruat was to treasure that friend word. Just now he had no time for thinking about it.

“We in an aircar?” The judge’s eyes roamed.

“Getting you to be mended, as fast as we can go,” Ruat told him. “Hang in there, judge,” he implored. The judge tried to nod, but closed his eyes.

Ruat felt very out of place in the hospital. It was full of humans, and they were running around very fast, pushing a trolley with the frail, shrunken judge on it. They wouldn’t let him follow them, nor the female military aide, who had handled all the negotiations and filled in forms. He looked around. A small man with a camcorder came up to him.

“ ’Scuse me, but who was that guy you just brought in?” the little man asked.

Ruat looked at him. He seemed harmless. “That was the judge. He is a great and important man. He is the Law East of the Ranges, and I am his sheriff.” He showed the man his badge.

“Really? A human judge and a kzin sheriff? That sounds kinda interesting. Tell me more,” the little man said.

Ruat told him pretty nearly everything. It took some time and involved some food in a kzin restaurant, where the meat was really, really rare. In fact, still running. Although they were prepared to cook it, a little bit, for the occasional human customers.

Karan, through Vaemar, had ordered six drones equipped with anti-personnel weaponry. They were rare, and the military had been very nervous about releasing them, and had sent as many officers along with the controlling equipment. They stood in the village, not far from where the pig farm had been before it had been decided to temporarily shift it. It was already dark.

“We need to hunt the horde. Possibly several hordes. Can you get these things airborne without burning down the palisade?”

“Certainly, ah, ma’am. They should have no difficulty picking up a large number of bodies, even in the dark. Infrared capacity was noted in your specification.”

“Then get them up there and quarter the district. Circle around the village and then look east. The beasts travel in large packs.”

The officers looked at each other, and one of them shrugged. They had been trained to kill kzin, not take orders from one, but these were new and different times. Mental flexibility was definitely part of the modern job description.

“Very well, ah, my lady. We have six large monitors, one for each drone, and you will see what the drone sees. But please keep the newsmen well back.”

The drones were released and went up on thin rocket flames. Karan watched the pictures they sent back. The village looked ridiculously small, but for a while she could see herself and the group inside the walls as green flickers against the darker ground. Those walls might have to be rebuilt from stone if this didn’t work. The officers worked with keyboards and controllers, and the drones carefully avoided each other and surveyed the region. There were occasional flashes of bright green as small bodies roamed the woods and hills. But nothing like a horde.

“Further east,” Karan ordered. The officers obeyed, and the six drones drifted off silently. “Deputy, do you recognize the area?” Karan asked one of the native kzin.

“Yes, my lady. That one is about a quarter of the way to the site of the massacre. And that one is flying over territory where we have seen solitary kzin who do not wish to join us.”

It was perhaps too early for the lesslocks; the sun, Alpha A, had set only an hour earlier.

“Where would you expect the lesslocks to be at this time?” Karan asked.

“It is impossible to say with confidence. They seem to be moving far afield, which means starting early if they are to be back before sunrise, so it would not surprise me if they were further east and perhaps more southerly, since they have already devastated the region where the massacre took place. They are probably smart enough not to revisit the site. Although they will eat carrion, and may remember where their visit produced so many bodies. Of course, we buried them, but maybe they will dig them up again.”

“What’s that?” one of the newsmen asked, He had been taking pictures straight off the monitors. Others had been getting background shots of Karan and the officers, not to mention the villagers and particularly the kzinti.

“Ahh,” one of the officers made an approving noise. “Hundreds of them. Each as big as an ape, moving on all fours in the main. I’ll take us in closer.”

“I’ve got another group,” another officer remarked. “I should say at least a thousand of them. Going down to check up.”

The two monitors dived towards the hordes. The bodies glowed bright green against the black background. They seemed oblivious to the vehicles above them.

“They must be lesslocks, but I need to be sure. Any way we can be certain?” Karan asked.

“Fiat Lux. Let there be light,” an officer ordered, and a searchlight in the drone illuminated some of the horde.

“Lesslocks,” Karan said with satisfaction. The beasts squinted up into the light, pausing. Some of them carried guns and had bandoliers slung around their squat bodies.

The drones rose quickly. Whether the beasts had the sense to use muskets against the drones was not at all clear, but a lucky hit could lose some very expensive equipment. A very lucky hit could do worse. Several of these present remembered the grossly asymmetrical war between the kzin Occupation forces and the Resistance that had flickered and smouldered in these red-jungle-clad hills. Human casualties in the end had been something like eighty percent of their original strength, but overconfident, unwary or unlucky kzin had suffered too.

“Destroy them. Every one of them,” Karan ordered. The last part of the order was probably unnecessary, but Karan was taking no chances. With humans you could never be quite sure. Should lesslocks with guns escape into the great cave systems . . . and there was a question of vengeance. Another thought struck her even as she gave the order: many of the caves were still littered with the debris of decades of war. Not homemade muskets, but strakakkers and plasma-cannon, lasers and beam rifles. There were even stories of nukes . . . Let the lesslocks, now they knew of the principles of modern weapons, get hold of those, and . . .

This was what the officers had come for. The drones banked and tilted. A missile left the drone with deceptive slowness; it turned into the center of the horde and suddenly accelerated earthwards. Just before impact, it exploded into a vicious hail of slivers of steel and glass, and then detonated again into a ferocious flame of petroleum jelly. There was no microphone on the drone, but Karan had no difficulty imagining the screams of napalmed and razored bodies. She found it immensely satisfying. Something she had read once came to mind. For the female of the species is more deadly than the male. Kipling had got that right, she thought.

Both of the hordes were wiped out and reduced to roiling black smoke. No others could be found. A few individuals vanished like giant black insects into cracks in the ground, but they were very few. You did not choose your enemies wisely, Karan thought. The drones returned to land outside the stockade after inspecting the ground to make sure it was clear of lesslocks. The villagers cheered the officers and Karan with jubilation. The judge had been avenged.

Stan the Man had a lot of competition. One of his opposite numbers on a different television station had sneaked away from the southern continent with a less-than-convincing explanation involving a deceased relative. As if any newsman would put a relative, deceased or not, before the job. Unless the relative had been garrotted or hanged, drawn and quartered in a really grisly fashion, of course, when it would become a story, and one with a human interest angle.

The story of the village where kzin and humans lived happily together broke like a tidal wave. There were, it was true, a few other joint settlements, but in these they kept apart, in a state of watchful, suspicious truce. The fact that a human had taken a bullet for a kzin kit (pictures of Arwen blowing bubbles, and a slightly jealous Orion) showed what brave and noble people human beings were, which the human beings really liked, and pictures of Karan delivering justice cheered the kzin. Of course, there wasn’t much justice to deliver, since asking the lady Karan to adjudicate on just which party had owned the pig and which the piglet seemed a bit, well, trivial really. So some issues had to be, if not manufactured, at least helped along a bit by kindly newsmen and newswomen. The justice Karan had delivered to the lesslocks went down well with both kzin and humans. Pictures of children and kits playing went around the planet. Pictures of dead lesslocks and of the massacre which had caused the retribution followed. People were proud of the brave pioneers who had gone out to face such things, and glad that they had kzin to help them. After the story hit, human beings went out of their way to be decent to kzin, a sort of acknowledgement that the surrender meant genuine peace. Kzin accepted that the truce was something more than a cessation of active fighting and looked as if it was going to last indefinitely. Some of the underlying tension that had outlasted the war began to dissipate. It was a slow process, but a man-kzin alliance was starting to look like something that could happen on Wunderland.

In due time, the Patriarchy also looked and wondered. So did other things.

The judge had also looked. Seeing his village on television had surprised him, and the enthusiasm with which telejournalists had pointed out children and kzin kits playing together and going to school together had helped his recovery. But it made him surprised when his visitor was announced.

“My lady, I thought you were holding down my job back at the village,” he greeted Karan.

“It is not too demanding at the moment. Problems that they troubled you with, they fear to bring to me, lest my patience be shorter than yours. As it likely is,” Karan confessed. “Mostly it is getting people to own up to being in the wrong when they are. They know inside themselves, they just don’t want to admit it. Both our species suffer from pride, but yours is better at self-deception.”

“Yes, we’re really good at that,” admitted the judge. “And can I stroke the kits? I think I’m entitled to.”

“Indeed you are,” Karan agreed, letting the two squirming bundles loose. “It remains a blood debt for all my family.”

“Don’t really know why I did it. I guess they just look so cute, and that damned lesslock so damnably ugly, my instincts kicked in before I had time to think. I’m not often noble when I have time to think, I promise you.” He stroked Arwen who purred and rolled over on the bed to have her tummy tickled. Orion scratched his way up to join her.

“At least you have survived. We got you here in time, and they say you will make a complete recovery. You got the best treatment on Ka . . .Wunderland. My mate will meet all costs; it is the very least we could do to show our gratitude. I had to put up with a severe reprimand for exposing them to danger, and I did put up with it. Vaemar said I must feel very guilty indeed to be so meek, it was disturbing him. And when he gets a moment’s free time, he wants to come and thank you himself.”

“I look forward to renewing our acquaintance.” The judge separated the two kits, which were practicing fighting with each other. “I get tired rather quickly still, and these kits are cute as buttons, but they are wearing an old man out. I hope to meet them again when I have a little more bounce to the ounce myself. Although I’ll never have as much as they do.”

Karan took them back and held them firmly. “I must go back to holding down your job. And I am very glad I do not have to hold it down indefinitely. You can be sure that my hopes for your early recovery are very sincere. The matron has promised me, however, that she will hide your clothes until she is satisfied that you can be safely discharged, so don’t even think of leaving early. Know that I and my mate are forever in your debt. As are these little furballs.” Karan bowed to the judge as he lay back. Karan looked back at him as he lay there. His eyes were closed with exhaustion, but there was a trace of a smile on his lips.

“It’s coming in from the senator’s own phone,” the technician told Stan Adler. Stan was leaving for the Southland soon, and having a final check on one of his sources. “It’s crazy. He can’t be blackmailing himself.” They looked at the string of e-mails. “Calls himself Deep Throat on the e-mails, and they come from a made-up email address, but I’ve traced them and they originate on the senator’s own phone, like I said.”

“Deep Throat. Rings a faint bell. Must check on what it means,” Stan said, half to himself. “I guess it could be that the source is very close to the bastard and has access to von Höhenheim’s phone. A girlfriend maybe. But it’s a chancy business if von Höhenheim gets into the phone and finds out he’s got an account he didn’t know about. Particularly when he reads a few e-mails.”

“You don’t think he’s trying some smart bit of misdirection? Accusing himself of something so bad that when the truth comes out it doesn’t look anything much by comparison? Some charge he can easily prove false?”

“I wouldn’t put it past the bastard,” Stan admitted grudgingly. “And so far there’s been no proof. Just some insinuations that could get the writer hanged anyway. Claims to have been in the KzinDiener. That mob of scum were passed by kzin telepaths, so there’s no question they were traitors as far as humanity is concerned. They just loved the kzin, they’d do anything to show what adoring scum they were. I mean, you could make out a case for some of the collabos, they did at the trials. You know, they were doing their best to help the human race survive in the face of conquest. That sort of stuff. There may have been some truth in it in a few cases.” This was a big admission coming from Stan; he took the view that sliming up to the cats was beneath any self-respecting human. But self-respect had been one of the early casualties of the war, which was why there was so much hatred of the kzin still around. It came not from the people who had fought to the end but from the people who hadn’t. Stan could admire a formidable enemy, but he’d never doubted that they were the enemy. Now the enemy tended to be the scum who had temporized, particularly those who had found themselves on the losing side after the surrender. Oh, they had signed up mentally with the kzin, and now they felt betrayed. Those were the ones who really hated the kzin now. Those who had tried to side with the powerful and been let down.

They’d figured out that the kzin despised them and most of humanity despised them too. Well, that was what happened when you sold your soul. It was never a good deal. On the other hand, he had to admit, being eaten wasn’t a good idea either.

He remembered too, the aged, haggard survivors of some of the Resistance groups from the early days. The kzin tortures, which everyone knew of only too well, since viewing them had been compulsory. The Public Hunts. Those who had not had access, or enough access, to the suddenly rare, precious geriatric drugs. The slow deaths of the diabetics (scores of thousands of them unsuspected in the days of autodocs) for whom treatment was denied until a makeshift, primitive plant to make the crude, long-forgotten treatments was set up. The cancer patients. Those of every age who died slave-laboring on the kzinti fleet’s new spaceport. It was not simple.

“I figure he’s someone close to the senator, and he’s angling for immunity if he drops the senator into it right up to the neck. And all we know about him is that he hasn’t got a phone, or not one he’s prepared to use, but he has ready access to the senator’s. Shouldn’t be too hard, I’ll get one of the researchers onto checking out the senator’s staff. And his girlfriends, if any.”

“We can’t give him immunity, that’s a legal thing,” the technician objected.

Stan grinned wolfishly. “He may think I’ve got some sort of hold over a few judges or politicians. I’m not saying he’s altogether wrong about that. He must also think I’d use it to save him in exchange for solid information. That’s where he’s badly wrong. This guy has been a treacherous shit to everyone in sight, and he is going down. But I’m happy to let him think he’s in there with a chance; slime like this always feel they can con you into doing them some good. They’ll believe they can manipulate their way out of any mess. Let’s set him up to give us the real dope and then take them both down. So saith Stan the Man.”

“Why do you have it in for this von Höhenheim, Stan? He may have been a bastard once, but he’s not corrupt like so many of them.”

“Not so far as we know. And nailing ex-bastards is good television. Besides, I hate those kzin-worshipping creeps. Now, I gotta run. ”

The car was large and well-outfitted, strongly armored and armed like the fighter-bomber it had once been, with dorsal and ventral gun-turrets as well as forward-firing guns. Only its bomb-load was missing, replaced by a variety of salvage gear, and the seats which had once held attack marines had been partly removed to provide some kzin-sized accommodation. Orlando and Tabitha, however, were kept in a suitably strengthened playpen under the eyes of Rarrgh and a well-armored human nurse. They would not be welcome tearing about the car in flight and did not take kindly to being strapped in. They were, however, contented enough, standing on their hind legs to peer out through a port at the terrain passing below.

Nils Rykermann had not been particularly happy about bringing them, but Vaemar had been insistent. He had given detailed instructions to watch for signs of intelligence on the female kit’s part. If she had inherited Karan’s intelligence, the implications could be significant. Anyway, Rarrgh came with the kits, and he would be an asset in the event of any trouble.

Just now Rarrgh was flying the car. He was remembering another flight, the day kzin resistance on the planet had ceased, and he had escaped with Vaemar and Jorg von Thoma from the remnants of the kzin garrison at Circle Bay Monastery.

“So what happened to Captain von Thoma?” Nils Rykermann asked him. “I was still recovering from having the Zrrow removed from my shoulder. Removing it killed the surgeon and nearly killed me. We still didn’t have proper autodocs deployed then. I missed all those months.”

“I swore to protect him on the last day,” said Rarrgh. “One of the last servants of the Patriarchy who remained loyal . . . I could not hand him over to the vengeance of your people. You shouldn’t have been able to remove the Zrrow at all. We only accepted your parole because you were wearing it,” he added.

“And because you put in a good word for me, I think,” said Nils.

“We had fought side by side against the Morlocks. You and Leonie had saved my life when I was helpless. As least Leonie did—she dug me out of the rockfall instead of blasting me. And I think I know how else you used your fighter’s privileges . . .”

“I swore to kill von Thoma many times during the war,” said Nils. “But later I grew sick of killing and vengeance. Leonie showed me other things. The abbot released me from my vows. He said they were not good vows anyway. Mind you, if I actually did see him again . . . I had relatives, and students, who went to the Public Hunts, thanks to his police . . .”

“I am still sworn to protect him, but I suppose after this time it can hardly hurt to tell you what happened. And I trust you,” said Rarrgh. “When we were a good way away from any human forces, I set him down, as I had promised him. He had basic survival equipment from the car. A food-and-water maker, a shelter-tent. I did not search him for weapons, but I imagine he had some concealed. He would have needed them in that country. When I checked it out later I found it was thick with tigrepards. They had multiplied without check during the Occupation, and the lesslocks were leaving their burrows. The fighting had destroyed many of their old food sources.”

“I feel sorry for them,” said Nils. “Like the Morlocks. They are unpleasant creatures, but they did us no harm till we attacked them.”

Rarrgh still had trouble understanding certain human emotions.

“It was war,” he said.

“Not their war.”

Rarrgh gestured through the window to a ruined homestead on the ground below. “That might well have been their work,” he said. “Of course, there might be other explanations . . .”

There was only the deep thrumming of the engines for a while.

“And there were other things,” said Rarrgh. “Beam’s Beasts, Advokats, Zeitungers . . . I thought he might not have survived. The Zeitungers were the worst.”

“I know. I had one brush with them. One brush was enough.”

“When I had established a secure and defensible bivouac for Vaemar and myself I went back to check on him, but he was gone. Whether he lived or died I know not. Later, when I was doing some work on the human farms, I tried to probe with a few questions. Some said they had seen a lone male human heading north, but there were many such wanderers then. There still are. Do you have a god that watches over travellers?”

“We have a saint. Saint Christopher.”

“Ah. For us, the brave traveller, who dares the unknown, comes under the attention of Amara, third male kit of the Fanged God. But he lives on the Traveller’s Moon, which orbits Kzin with the Hunters’ Moon. I am not sure how much attention he pays to the goings-on of this world.”

Senator von Höhenheim grunted. He had said relatively little so far, and had kept one wary eye on Rarrgh and the other on Stan and his two assistants. Below them the sea was shallowing and changing color.

“We must be getting close,” Sarah said.

A gong sounded. A light blinked on the control panel.

“There it is. A nuclear engine, leaking but not badly. Let’s get suited up.” Now the radar was focused on the shape of the ship. The warcraft’s sweeping lines, designed for high speed in atmosphere, were marred by obvious damage about two-thirds of the way down the hull. The after part had broken off and lay some distance away.

“That looks like a missile hit, all right.”

They landed the car on a shelving beach about half a kilometer from the rolling hulk.

The Rykermanns and the Rankins headed out to the wreck in a tender-boat. It had a translucent bottom, and diving was carried out through a central airlock. The high seas of Wunderland made this essential.

Had they been on a pleasure cruise there would have been plenty to watch. The seas of Wunderland teemed with life. Boisterous as the surface waves were, the sea a short distance down was tranquil.

The great curve of the Valiant’s tail-part rose before them, somehow menacing in its sheer size. Nils steered the tender to the stern of the wreck.

“Look!” he said, rather unnecessarily, pointing. A circular hole had been punched in the banks of exhaust ports. Stan’s people and an automatic camera on the tender were busily filming. Stan’s competitors were trying to get better shots.

“Heat-seeking missile, I’d guess,” Nils continued. “It must have got some way in before it detonated. Well, I guess there’s not much to tell who fired it. The missile itself would have been completely destroyed.”

“I would think,” said Stan, “that such a missile would not have been very effective in space, where there would have been no point in running a chemical motor anyway. It has locked onto its target too neatly. As far as I know, these blockade-runners had ramscoops, which they detached and left in orbit to pick up on return. For flight in atmosphere they had chemical rockets—and hot exhaust ports. Especially in a system as dusty as this one, there would have been too much danger of a ramscoop picking up particles, not to mention enemy tactics like dropping compressed radon into it. I’d say it was flying on chemicals. ”

“Meaning it was shot down in atmosphere.”

“And look there!” said Sarah. Towards the nose of the great wreck, lights were burning behind several ports.

“The foward part is still air-tight.” With strong modern alloys, designed for years in space, that was not particularly surprising.

“Could there be . . . anyone alive in there, do you think?” asked Sarah.

“It’s not impossible. Those ships had mighty rugged life-support systems. It’s been a long time, but the old design was expecting to be in space for decades.”

“Try calling them up.”

The results were ambiguous. No answer came, but a finely tuned motion-detector reported movement. Something was in there, about the size of a man.

“If he’s been down there all these years he’s not likely to be keeping a watch on the instruments,” Leonie said. “He’s not likely to be very sane, for that matter.”

“We can’t just leave things like this,” said Nils. “We’ll have to go in now, and find out. But we’d better go armed.”

“We’ll need cutting torches to clear the growth off the airlock controls anyway,” said Leonie. “And to cut away any evidence we find.”

“I think we should take a couple of beam rifles as well.”

Their suits were designed for space but worked equally effectively under water. Von Höhenheim, who was too bulky for athletics, remained in the tender. A quick pass of the torch was enough to clear the growth off one of the derelict’s forward airlocks. They stepped into the airlock and the water cycled away. The first thing that caught their eyes on the bridge was a translucent tank attached to an instrument console. It was nearly empty and the skeleton of a dolphin fitted with artificial hands lay on the floor. They removed their helmets.

“Kzin! I smell kzin!” Nils brought his beam-rifle to the ready. Almost without thinking, he and Leonie had gone into a back-to-back crouch, the muzzles of their weapons sweeping each exit from the lock. Leonie, still clumsy on her new legs, moved too fast and fell sideways. Sarah picked her up.

“That thing we saw on the motion detector,” she said, “I’m sure that wasn’t a kzin. It was too small.”

“I don’t care. Can’t you smell them? Maybe it was a small kzin.”

Violent headaches hit them. The Rykermanns recognized them at once.

“Telepath probing! That explains it! There is a telepath here!” Leonie screwed up her face and pressed her hands to her head.

“For God’s sake! Rarrgh! Tell it we mean no harm! Tell it the war is over on this planet!” and then: “Tell it we have come to rescue it!”

The humans had expected no results. Nils and Leonie had to consciously override their training in such a situation and not think about eating vegetables (or—one of their teachers had been a Hindu—the capering monkeys of Hanuman), a drill designed to overwhelm a kzin telepath with nausea.

To their surprise, the humans felt their headaches subsiding. From one of the corridors a kzin emerged: small, bedraggled, a typical specimen of the kzin telepaths taken under the Patriarchial regime at birth and forcibly addicted to the sthondat-lymph drug, though perhaps looking somewhat better than the typical telepath that kzin commanders tended to use to destruction. Like all telepaths, language was no trouble for it. Its Wunderlander was fluent and colloquial and it spoke as close an approximation of human speech as its vocal arrangements would allow it.

“Don’t hurt me!” it cried, falling face-downward in the posture of total submission.

“You have nothing to fear from us. Who are you and what are you doing here?” asked Nils, keeping the creature covered. This telepath was indeed small for a kzin, and plainly no fighter, but even so unwarlike an example of the kzin species would be able to dismantle a tiger—or a human—faster than the eye could follow. And their ability to inflict instant, paralyzing pain on the brain’s receptor centers gave them an additional weapon.

“I was telepath aboard the cruiser Man’s Bone-Shredder,” the telepath told them, rising slowly. “Dominant One, there was a battle and I was taken prisoner. I was put aboard this ship.”

That made sense, Nils thought. Telepaths were too useful to waste. They could be a mighty asset and it had been found that many had no cause to be loyal to the Patriarchy.

“Approaching Ka’ashi, we were pursued by ships of the Patriarchy, but evaded them. Then this ship was hit by a missile fired from the ground, and crashed. I had been placed in a restraining web so I was the only survivor of the impact.”

“How did you know the missile came from the ground?”

“I read the captain’s mind.”

“Where are the bodies of the captain and crew?”

“I ate them. The bones are in there.” He gestured to a closed door. I arranged them according to rank and dressed them in their uniforms. Do you wish to see them?”

The humans shuddered.

“It was all I could do to show my respect and gratitude,” the telepath went on. “Apart from that there is a supply of rations. But I am glad that I have been found. I knew I was under water, but not how deep.”

“Have any records survived?”

“I did not touch the computer’s records. I am not familiar with human mechanisms and there were no survivors to teach me. I feared to touch the wrong controls. I read from your minds that the war is over on this planet, and the Patriarchy has been defeated. I am glad. My kind warred in secret against the Patriarchy as we might. I hope you will take me to be with others of my kind.”

“It’s a wonder you survived all that time, and a greater wonder you are still sane,” Leonie told him.

“My caste has had long experience of living on the edge of sanity,” the telepath told her drily. “And I have less than six months’ food left. I should have had to take a chance on surviving the airlock naked before long. I have found comfort in isolation, but I should have been obliged to forsake this place soon.”

The ship must have been retrofitted with the hyperdrive, Nils realized, and prudence would have made them provide food for a full crew for several years in case it failed. And two years of food for a full crew would have enabled a single individual to survive this time. And yes, solitude would have been better than company for a telepath. The pain of other minds would have been far worse.

“We will need to get a kzin-sized suit down to you,” Leonie said.

The telepath nodded. Kzin did not easily show emotion in front of humans.

“Tell us,” said Stan. “You read the captain’s thoughts at the end?” Leonie was prying out the bridge recorder.

“Only in flashes. I dared not distract him or the other humans. For the ship to lose all control and crash, I thought I would be lost too. I huddled in the restraining web. We ran long and far before the missile caught us, with many evasions. The captain was clever, but not clever enough.”

“But you picked up something.”

“Of course.”

“Say on. Tell us all you know.”

“The missile’s signature identified it as a Hero’s Slashing Claw.”

A short-range ground-to-air missile, barely capable of reaching the fringes of space. Though they could not be sure, Nils and Leonie thought they had been issued by the Patriarchy to KzinDiener forces. To prevent their misuse by humans, the later models had had identifiable radiation signatures, though whether the keys identifying these still existed was another matter.

Greg and Sarah returned to the surface and brought down a kzin spacesuit from the car. It was far too big to fit the telepath well, but it was adequate for a short, one-way trip.

“I don’t trust von Höhenheim,” said Nils. “If he is not entirely kosher, the recorder might be proof of that. I think I’ll keep it out of his way until we’re all snugged down and ready to leave. And don’t let him know this kzin is a telepath.”

“He looks like a telepath.”

“If von Höhenheim asks, tell him the kzin has been eating badly lately. Also, he looks too well-grooomed for a telepath. I suppose because he hasn’t had to use the telepath sense for a while.”

Feeling there was nothing to be gained by alienating the telepath, they asked him if there were any possessions he wished to take with him, but there were none. Nils and Leonie had by this time made a watertight bundle of all the bridge recorders, and they returned to the surface. Rarrgh, who was trying to follow Vaemar in being a modern Wunderkzin, tried not to treat the telepath too contemptuously.

“You had better collect the kits,” Nils told Rarrgh. Orlando and Tabitha, under Nurse’s anxious eyes, had been playing in the sandhills above the beach.

“We must come back when we have time and examine this place,” said Leonie. Storms had piled the margin of the sea with all manner of flotsam and jetsam, including the carapace of some large crustacean.

Nils also walked down to the tidal zone. It was hard to remember that he had been a professor of biology once. No one paid attention to Senator von Höhenheim. He quietly reentered the car. A shot from its dorsal gun-turret fused the sand to glass, barely in front of the human party’s feet.

Nils wasted no time in demanding to know what was the meaning of this. He brought Leonie down with a flying tackle and rolled with her down the side of the dune. The others did the same.

“Bring out the kittens,” von Höhenheim ordered through the loud-hailer as the car rose and hovered above them.

“What do you want with them?” asked Nils into his com-link.

“Hostages. They are two of the most valuable beings on this planet. Can you imagine the consequences if their Sire were presented with their fried carcasses?”

“I can imagine what the kzin would do to you. And the human government wouldn’t stop them.”

“I saw you bury something when you came ashore. It may have been the bridge-recorder. I will trade it for the kits’ lives.”

“And what about our lives?”

“Killing you would not be useful to me.”

“I’m glad you have enough sense to see that.”

“I have a private island with a laboratory and autodocs. It is equipped with memory-editing facilities. Agree to have your memories of what has happened here wiped, and you will be returned to Munchen unharmed.”

Nils did not believe him for a second. But his head was buzzing. It was not the full tiger-headache of a telepath’s probe against resistance, but he recognized it. He thought at the telepath, “Do you understand what has happened? Make a circle in the sand if you do.”

The telepath made a circle.

“Help us, and Chuut-Riit’s son will be under a life-debt to you. Use the Telepath’s Weapon.”

The telepath injected himself with a spray he had concealed in a pocket of the vest-like garment he wore.

“What are you doing?” boomed von Höhenheim.

The telepath went limp. His eyes rolled up. He struck at the human’s pain centers with all his force.

The car jerked sideways in the air, suddenly out of control. Rarrgh made a mighty leap up onto the wing, his prosthetic arm smashing through one of the skin-fittings—a refuelling port, The car slewed further and came down hard. Rarrgh had pulled himself onto the wing or he would have been crushed beneath it. They dragged von Höhenheim out unconscious after closing down the engines. Stan’s people had video-recorded the entire episode. This included Tabitha racing to Rarrgh and pulling bits of wreckage off him and licking his face while mewing frantically; Orlando had been a poor second. When the footage was shown in Munchen, Karan and Vaemar watched it with enormous satisfaction: it certainly looked as if the female kit had bred true. With any reasonable luck, so would Arwen, although it would be years before they could be sure. And all the kits were safe.

“What do we do with the bastard?” Stan raged. “That business of trying to take a hostage and promising us a memory-wipe is as good as a confession! It’s gone out on television, and most of our audience want to know why he’s still alive.”

“Due process,” Nils answered phlegmatically. “He’s under house arrest, but the legal guys are still trying to formulate a charge. Threatening a couple of kzin kits doesn’t look enough, we have to get to motive. And he’s had the sense to say absolutely nothing. Or his lawyers have told him to stay silent.”

Stan pondered. “I think I know how to nail him,” he said at last. “There’s the emails from his sidekick, Deep Throat. It has to be Grün. He’s been hinting at enough to send them both down. It’s time he came good. Or bad, in this case.”

Von Höhenheim faced Grün. He had been allowed to return to his old office while wearing an anklet that told police where he was, and he had found Grün there waiting for him, and sitting in his chair.

“Good to see you, Senator,” Grün had said cockily. He stood and made way for von Höhenheim, with a little bob that was loaded with irony.

“And may I say how disappointed I am that you are under house arrest for trying to steal the records of the warship you were responsible for shooting down.”

“Bah. They have nothing on me that cannot be explained,” von Höhenheim snorted. “So I was planning to kidnap two kzin kittens. That was on the television, I saw it. The question is why? Do you doubt that a good lawyer will have a dozen explanations which redound to my credit? Oh, an illegality perhaps, but one a great many humans will have sympathy for when my lawyer explains my motives. And they don’t have any kzin on jury duty, so I expect to get a good deal of sympathy. And my lawyers have already ensured that I shall not have to go before a telepath; the argument advanced was that my well-known hostility to kzin would lead to not being able to trust the telepath’s findings. And the court bought it.”

“As long, of course, as there is no other evidence in your complicity in shooting a missile at the Valiant?” Grün rubbed his hands together.

“Who could possibly provide it?” von Höhenheim asked. He looked narrowly at Grün.

“I could, Senator. And I would be willing to go before a telepath and have it confirm my honesty on the point. Unless, of course, I were to get some consideration, financial consideration. Rather a lot of it. You are a wealthy man, Senator. You did well out of the Occupation as a leader of the KzinDiener. Better than I by far. I would think that if you were to give me half of that wealth, it would certainly buy my silence.”

“So you think you can blackmail a von Höhenheim, you slimy runt? That is a mistake.” The senator drew his pistol and aimed it at the suddenly terrified Grün. “Say your prayers to whatever gods you bow before.”

Grün started to babble. “You must not threaten me, Senator, this is being re—”

The senator shot him between the eyes. The body was hurled backwards, arms and legs flung wide. Von Höhenheim considered. Getting rid of the body should not be impossible. The sound had not been loud, and the building was empty at this time. What was it the disgusting creature had said. “This is being . . .” Being what? Being recorded? No, it was not possible. He looked around frantically. He saw it. A camera stuck on the wall above the door. He aimed carefully, fired, and saw it explode into flame and a shower of sparks. He smiled grimly and looked around for a chair to stand on, so he could rip the thing down. He reached out for one sturdy enough to take his weight and started rolling Grün’s body out of the way with his foot.

That was when the phone made a ding sound. He hardly ever used the thing, where was it? The sound came from the corpse, and von Höhenheim found it in the top pocket, and looked at it. He had mail. With a heavy feeling in his stomach, he checked. There were six messages, all from different television news channels. He opened the first and read it with mounting horror.

“Thank you for your video. It will be checked out by an editor for possible use within the hour.”

Removing the anklet had been difficult, but he had been able to aim the gun carefully. However, the blast had burned his ankle. At least now he could walk without being traced by satellite, and he had some hours until it was light. Money. He must have money, as much as he could carry. The safe held more than that. He filled his pockets with gold coins and looked around. He had little time. Getting the anklet off would notify the police that it was no longer being worn, and at some point a computer-generated message would be sent to a human being, but with luck, not until the morning.

Von Höhenheim limped to the door, glanced once at the corpse with contempt, and went out. So, he was ruined. A video of him shooting a blackmailer was the end. But he would not give in without a fight. The world was big, and there were always opportunities for a man of resource. He would go east. There were towns out there now, he knew.

“My word, come in out of the rain; it’s a terrible night, not fit for man or beast.” The kindly old abbot held the door wide, and von Höhenheim dragged himself in. He was beyond exhausted. He’d been running on empty for a day now and his foot was burning in constant pain.

“Come in here. At least I have a good fire burning—we’ll soon have you warm and dry.”

It was like being a child, and being comforted by this old man. Von Höhenheim shivered uncontrollably and accepted the support that the old man gave. This abbot looked to be a hundred, but he was tough and wiry enough to support von Höhenheim all the same.

The fire was in a grate that was big enough to burn a log as big as a man, and the abbot led him to a chair that was directly in front of it, and added logs to the blaze. Again, the old man was stronger and more energetic than one would have expected, von Höhenheim thought.

The abbot bustled about and brought blankets back with him and wrapped them around von Höhenheim as if he were indeed a child.

“You are limping, show me the cause. We all had to have some degree of medical skills when I was younger, it was a survival skill,” the abbot said gently. Then he looked over the damaged leg, tutted to himself and went outside the room. Von Höhenheim listened to the storm outside, the wind howling as though in torment, and the gusts of rain on the windowpane battering against the glass.

When the abbot came back, it was with some sort of salve. He knelt by von Höhenheim, took the exhausted man’s boots off, then his socks, and applied a handful of the salve to the wound. Von Höhenheim gasped as the stuff stung.

“Antibiotic, not a powerful one, and with some herbs to help. I see from your boots and feet that you have come a long way,” the old man said. He went back to another chair, which he placed close to von Höhenheim’s, and then seated himself. He looked intently at von Höhenheim. There was only kindness in his eyes, but kindness was no use to von Höhenheim. They sat and looked at each other.

“Yes. I walked from Munchen. It has not been easy.”

“My word, that does go some way to explain the state of your boots. Well, you are most welcome to rest and eat. Today is my birthday, you know, and you are welcome on that account too.” The old man smiled happily.

“Thank you, I would be most grateful. I can pay, I have some gold.” Von Höhenheim was stiff. The last thing he needed was pity. Pity might break him.

“Oh, no, we cannot take money,” the abbot sounded almost shocked at the idea. “It can be my birthday present, you see.”

“It is usual for the visitor to give the present, not the person whose birthday it is,” von Höhenheim pointed out.

“Oh, but of course; but you see, you only get food and shelter, and to keep your money, I suppose. But I get the blessing of doing a fellow human being a kindness. Worth so much more, don’t you think?”

Von Höhenheim didn’t. In his view the old man was a fool, but it would have been undiplomatic to say so. He watched as the old man shuffled off to return with bread, cheese and meat, and a jug of ale. He gave von Höhenheim two plates and a carving knife, placing them on a little table he drew up next to von Höhenheim’s chair.

“We have made a very nice liqueur here for many years,” the old man said with a beaming smile, sitting down again. “When you have finished, I shall get you some.”

“Thank you,” von Höhenheim mumbled through a mouthful of cheese-and-beef sandwich. He was ravenous. He needed the ale too, his throat was dry. He wolfed the meal down and drank the ale.

“If you are still hungry in an hour or two, perhaps some fruit, but it would be unwise to eat too much too quickly,” the abbot said. “Let me get you that liqueur. I am sure you will find it soothing.”

He did. Von Höhenheim leaned back in his chair and sipped the liqueur. It sent a warm glow right down his digestive tract. Combined with the warmth of the fire, he was able to feel the aches in his bones start to ease.

“Rather pleasant being inside, with the storm held at bay, don’t you feel?” the abbot said chattily. “You must stay for at least tonight, of course. The beds are rather hard, we would hardly pass for a hotel. You can have one of the cells the brothers used to use.”

“Are there many people here at the abbey?” von Höhenheim asked.

“Oh dear, no. We used to be a thriving little community at one time, although we suffered badly during the occupation. But it is so hard to find people with a vocation these days. We had a deluge of vocations during the war and occupation, but the death rate was high. At present our few remaining monks and brothers are away on an agricultural course. I am holding the fort. I have some novices and helpers who come to help with the Jotok pools, but they do not live at the abbey.” He sighed regretfully. “No, I am virtually alone these days, save for a woman who comes in once a week to do odd jobs. I think she enjoys looking after me, so I let her do my washing for me. Not that there’s a lot of that.” He laughed.

The fire roared and crackled, and outside the storm raged and spat at the windowpanes. There was a long silence, and von Höhenheim felt sleep stealing over him. He felt almost safe. He wasn’t, of course, he never would be again. But then, safety was an illusion—he’d always known that.

“Let me take you to your cell,” the abbot said comfortably. “I have made up the cot for you, and you should be quite warm. I hope you sleep well.”

In the morning, von Höhenheim raised himself out of the bed with some reluctance. The storm had passed in the night, but his aches and pains had not. He dressed hurriedly and left the small room, almost a cell, but with no lock on the door either inside or out.

He explored briefly. A kitchen garden was visible through a window, and he could see a blue sky with some straggly white clouds. Then he picked up the smell of frying bacon and found the abbot up and cooking breakfast.

“Oh good. You are awake. Isn’t it a beautiful day? Go to my study and wait by the fire, I shall bring both our meals in together.”

The study was the room he had been taken to last night, and there was a new fire roaring away. The walls of the room were lined with old-fashioned books; he had not noticed them last night. He went and looked at the titles; mostly theology, but with some popular and not-so-poular science books. Von Höhenheim sniffed contemptuously. The abbot was one of those intellectual people he despised. A soft man, this abbot, interested in ideas. What use were ideas? A man had to be hard, to be practical. It was a miracle the abbot had survived the Occupation.

The abbot came in carrying two large plates with bacon, eggs and mushrooms. Von Höhenheim helped him place them on small tables, and the abbot vanished to return in a moment with knives and forks, none of which matched.

“Here you are, now eat. I’ve given you three eggs. Very nutritious eggs.”

The abbot gave thanks, very quietly, then they ate in silence. The abbot had given himself about half of what he had given von Höhenheim, so he finished first. He waited politely for von Höhenheim to finish, then took out the plates and cutlery. Von Höhenheim waited for him to come back. He didn’t like the thought of what he had to do next. He could hear the running water as the abbot washed everything.

The abbot bustled back and sat down. “Now we can talk. I have a feeling you’ve a lot to tell me.”

“No. I have to leave now. And I fear I must tie you up and gag you. Nobody must know I have been here.”

The abbot looked into von Höhenheim’s eyes. “On the whole, I’d prefer it if you shot me,” he said with infinite patience. “Oh yes, I detected the gun in your pocket while I was wrapping blankets around you last night. You see, if you were to tie me up, I should certainly starve before I was found, and I have an aversion to rats. Silly, I know, but there you are.”

Von Höhenheim drew his gun.

“It has already killed one man. He deserved it and you do not, but I am desperate.” He levelled the gun at the abbot.

The abbot ignored the gun and looked into von Höhenheim’s eyes. He showed no fear whatever, but he looked a little sad.

Von Höhenheim looked back, and his finger tightened on the trigger. He closed his eyes.

“I think you ought to look,” the abbot said patiently. “You might botch the job if you have your eyes closed.”

Von Höhenheim opened his eyes, and the abbot looked into them sadly.

Von Höhenheim took a deep breath and tried again. Why was it so hard?

His finger tightened, then he slumped and put the gun back in his pocket.

“I can’t do it,” he said savagely.

“That’s good,” the abbot said in relief.

“Good for you, you mean,” von Höhenheim snarled at him.

“Oh, who can tell? I meant good for you. It would be dreadful to have to kill someone. You would find it very difficult to live with, don’t you think? Your conscience would give you terrible pain. It already has, you know. I can feel it. But I wouldn’t feel anything, I’d be dead. Or perhaps if the stories are true, I would be somewhere else.”

Von Höhenheim glared at him.

“Some people don’t seem to have a conscience,” the abbot explained, “but I think we all do really. It’s just that if you keep telling it to shut up, it sort of loses specificity. You know there is something wrong, something badly wrong, but you don’t know exactly what, so it just becomes a general wretchedness. And some poor souls live their lives that way. I think that is what hell is. And they never find out.” He shuddered, as a man glimpsing horror beyond words.

“Conscience! You babble of nothingness,” von Höhenheim snarled.

“That’s just silly,” the abbot told him calmly. “It’s one of the most important things in this wide and amazing universe. What was it stopped you killing me? Such a small thing, so easy to do, but you couldn’t do it.”

“I still could, and if you annoy me with this prattle, maybe I will,” von Höhenheim shouted at him.

“Perhaps,” the abbot answered prosaically, as if it hardly mattered. “I think though that you should ask yourself why this so-called prattle is making you angry. Do you think it could be because it’s about a great truth you have been trying to deny for a long time?”

“Nonsense,” von Höhenheim replied.

“Would you like another glass of our liqueur, do you think?” the abbot asked him. “It’s good for the nerves, and I think you could do with some.”

Von Höhenheim made a noise of intense frustration, and the abbot took this as agreement and bustled out. In a moment he returned with an ancient bottle and a single glass. He glugged a healthy quantity into the glass and gave it to von Höhenheim, who was feeling bemused.

“Try that. But don’t drink it too fast, you need to savor it. We went to a lot of trouble to get it right.”

Von Höhenheim sipped the drink and looked at anything but the abbot. The fire was burning nicely. Outside, birds were singing.

“Tell me about it,” the abbot said softly. “It often helps, you know.”

“Since I cannot leave you alive, I suppose I might as well,” von Höhenheim said savagely.

And he told the abbot, “I was a leader of the KzinDiener during the Occupation.

“Servants of the kzin?” the abbot asked.

“Yes. We all but worshipped them. And they betrayed us in the end.”

“Well, false gods do that, you know. It’s one of their distinguishing characteristics,” the abbot pointed out reasonably. “How did they betray you?”

“They lost the war. They were so strong and so beautiful. But they lost.”

“I see,” the abbot said thoughtfully. “Yes, I can see that might look like betrayal. But I daresay they did their best, you know. The mistake was to worship them; they are only animals, after all. Intelligent, of course, and with souls, no doubt. Much like us, really. I suppose the trouble is that some people need to see their gods in a very human form. A failure of imagination or perhaps perception, don’t you think?”

“What do you mean?” von Höhenheim asked suspiciously.

“Well, the trouble is, God is everywhere you look. So some people don’t see Him at all. I find that amazing, but it’s true. I suppose it’s a bit like an ant not seeing a human being, they’re just too big. The world is so full of wonders, and some poor folk just don’t notice. And we all have a hunger for the transcendent, and if we don’t notice it because it’s everywhere, then when you see a kzin prowling, and you’ve never seen a kzin before, I suppose for those poor people, it must look as if it’s what they’ve been searching for all their lives. A tragic mistake, of course, but one can see how it could be made.”

“I don’t understand you,” von Höhenheim said angrily.

“I think you do, you know. I think you saw the power and the glory and fell for what is really only a poor copy of the real thing. Of course, we are all made in the image of God, all of us, man and kzin alike. But it’s only an image, not the real thing.”

Von Höhenheim’s mind was in turmoil. Yes, he did understand, at least in part.

“Where are all those wonders you speak of?” he asked.

“Oh, my. Haven’t you ever seen a green shoot coming out of the bare brown soil? Isn’t that a miracle? Aren’t you a miracle? That anything should live among this vast whirligig of suns is a miracle, as is the whirligig of suns itself. Just think of the galaxy turning in endless patience, for time beyond comprehension. We can talk glibly of billions of years, but the mind cannot grasp the wonder and the majesty of it. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork. And if that were all it would be enough; but it is only a tiny part. There is life, there is intelligence. And you and I are a tiny part of that, and we can see something of the wonder. Well, I can. Maybe you can’t.”

Von Höhenheim was silent. Something inside him was crying. The abbot was right, there was wonder in the universe, as well as atoms and galaxies. And he had never really seen it. Not until he had been shown.

“There was a man named Saul,” the abbot said, looking at him in sympathy. “Very like you, I should guess. Full of certainty. Very competent, very clear in his thinking, but perhaps lacking in humor. And he took the road to Damascus in pursuit of what he thought was important work: making life difficult for people he hated, actually. And on the way, God spoke to him. That sort of conjures up a deep voice speaking out of heaven, but I find that hard to believe. God speaks to me quite often, but he doesn’t do it with sound waves, you know. It’s more commonly a sort of internal niggle, a sort of spiritual itch that you just have to scratch. And sometimes it’s a great warmth that spreads right through me. So I’m inclined to think it was likely that Saul had something similar. He had a sudden insight into what he was doing, and it shocked him so much he went blind for a while. Or so the story goes. It’s a very easy story to believe, for me.”

“What happened to him?” von Höhenheim asked.

“He became someone else. He changed his name because of that. All of a sudden he figured out how to be happy. God asked him why he kept trying to turn against the road, to do the wrong thing, and he suddenly realized he didn’t have to. What had looked the easy road became very hard, and what had looked impossibly hard was suddenly inevitable. So, he became another man. A man who could be happy.”

“I wish I could become another man,” von Höhenheim said, and the abbot heard the yearning in his voice.

“Well, I daresay getting to the point where you want to and see that it’s possible is the hard bit,” the abbot said cheerfully.

Two days later von Höhenheim waved goodbye to the abbot and set out to the east, walking steadily. In his last words, he had asked humbly if the abbot would report his presence.

“No. I am not answerable to man, but to my God and my conscience,” the abbot had replied firmly.

Having waved back, the abbot went into his study and thought. “My goodness, I think I’ve performed a miracle,” he said aloud. “Well, You did it, of course, but You let me be the one it was done through.”

He fell to his knees and looked up to a heaven he saw quite clearly.

“Oh, thank you so much, God,” he said happily. “That was such a wonderful birthday present.”

A long time later . . .

A solitary figure came slowly through the dark. He was obviously footsore, the gatekeeper thought. Come a long way, and lucky to make it without bumping into a tigrepard.

“Can I rest here the night,” the stranger asked. “I can pay. I have gold.”

“We got more o’ the stuff than we know what t’ do with, but yes, you can stay the night. If you want to stay longer, you’ll have to talk to the judge an’ see if he agrees.”

“You have a judge?”

“Sure we got a judge, an’ a damn good one, too. We even got us a sheriff an’ a couple o’ deputies. An’ you sure better not piss them off, I’m telling ya.”

The stranger was passed inside and directed to Ma Jones, who had a spare room and was prepared to serve food to people who looked reasonably clean. With the traffic they were getting these days, she might find she was running a hotel before long, the gatekeeper thought.

In the morning, the stranger appeared before the judge. No, the Judge, the stranger told himself. The judge was sitting at ease in a chair, smoking something that could pass for a cigar most places. He looked up.

“G’day, stranger. Where you from?”

“Ah, I come from Munchen,” the stranger told him.

The judge looked at him hard. “Seems to me I’ve seen you before, stranger. Long time ago. And more recently in one of they noospapies we been getting’ since we got enough hard money t’ pay for them. Frivolity I call it, but some o’ the folk around here like it, an’ it’s a free world these days. Thank the Lord.”

The stranger looked at him carefully.

The judge looked hard right back at him.

“Seems t’me you might just be on the lam from what some folks call justice,” the judge told him.

“And you too, Herr Jorg von Thoma,” the stranger said.

The judge laughed. “That one won’t fly, Senator von Höhenheim. Sure, that was my name once. And sure, I came out here and lived alone in the valley for years. And one day another man came, and then another with his wife, and we lived reasonably close, for help if we needed it, mostly against the lesslocks.”

“Some sort of species related to the Morlocks?” von Höhenheim hazarded.

“Yep. Shorter, more like chimps or baboons, and not too afraid of the light. And varying from being a damn nuisance to a lot worse, until recently when we done taught them a lesson not to mess with man. Or kzin. But now I’m sort of in charge here. Working in the government meant I was good at organizin’ and arguin’, and these people needed a lot of that. So now, hereabouts, I am the government. And the Law. These are my people; I stand by them, and they’ll stand by me. They understand loyalty. So do the kzin we have here. Anyone calls for me to come back to Munchen and face the music is wasting his time. I won’t go, and even if I wanted to, nobody here would let me.”

Von Höhenheim digested this. “You were a better man than me,” he admitted. “You cooperated with the kzin, but you didn’t shame yourself. I adored them. I worshipped power, and they seemed to have all of it. It didn’t work of course, I understand them better now. They could work with you, thinking of you as a servant. I claimed to be a servant of the kzin, one of the KzinDiener, but they knew better. I admired them, hell, I worshipped them for their power, their strength; I saw them as living gods, I wanted to abase myself before them, to adore them. Me they despised. Perhaps the ancient gods of man always despised those who would abase themselves. Those who respect power and do not respect themselves.”

There was a silence.

“And how do you feel about it now?” the judge asked, shaking the ash off his cigar.

Von Höhenheim thought. “I do not know. I am running from an attempted kidnapping and also a murder charge, but the man I killed was slime. Worse than me. But I was slime too. I have nothing to be proud of. I have sought power all my life, and now I see that it was nothing. Once I met a kzin telepath who had been living in a sunken wreck with skeletons. He was grateful for life, and when the moment came, he did his duty. He was nobody important, he will be forgotten, but he did his duty. And because of that, some of the evil I had planned was undone.

“I had a long time to think while I was walking here, it has taken me months, and on the way I stayed at the abbey and talked to Abbot Boniface. He showed me what I was, all in gentle words, most of them questions about why I’d done what I did. I told him everything, it just poured out of me. Ashes in the mouth. There was nothing of value in any of it, and it leaves nothing in the end but contempt for the self. The little triumphs seem so empty, the setbacks devoid of meaning. I thought it was all about me, but it wasn’t. I am nothing. Plaited reeds, blown through by the wind.”

“Yeah. That’s all any of us are in the end. It’s good ya found it out. Most don’t.”

There was another long silence.

“I will go further east. Maybe one day I shall find somewhere I can stay, somewhere where they won’t know me. Then I shall have only to live with myself. That will be hard enough.”

“Better stay here, stranger. Now you figured out what you are, ya can do some work and earn a place here. I’m gettin’ old. These folk here are the usual sort. You know, mainly stupid and silly, but also mainly decent and kind. They need the help o’ someone with more sense, someone who is prepared to take care o’ them and stop them doin’ dumb things . . . yes, and to love them. I could do with a rest. We may need a new judge East o’ the Ranges before too long.”

There was another long silence. “You would appoint a murderer, a cheat, a liar, someone who has abased himself before the kzin?”

“That’s politics, ain’t it? And maybe want of courage and self-respect, which can be learned. You’re here because they caught ya out. Don’t get caught out again. An’ the best way is t’ be middlin’ honest. Ya know, the most successful cultures on old Earth were those that engaged with the rest of the world and learned all the other culture’s best ideas. Now we got the kzin t’ learn from. And they tell the truth. And hey, it works better than you’d think. Your big nemesis was a kzin. Vaemar-Riit. Seen it in the noospapies. Learn off him. That’s the smart way.”

“If I could start again . . .” there was dreadful pain in von Höhenheim’s voice, and a kind of yearning.

“It’s a big, big country, stranger. An entire planet. Room for people who see they screwed up and wish they’d done things differently.”

“I spent my entire life screwing up,” von Höhenheim said bitterly. “I worshipped power. It took a lot of walking and thinking and talking to the abbot to see it, but What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”

“Then now would be a good time to change strategies, don’t ya think?” the judge asked cheerfully. “I had time t’ think too. Long ago. And I got a gift of mercy I never deserved. From a kzin warrior, a sergeant, with a sense of honor as deep as a well. And kindness from Vaemar-Riit, no less. So I owe those guys, I owe them big time. And ya know what they say? They say, pass it down the line.”

“You are a great man, judge. I could never fill your shoes. But I will do all that I can. If you will give me mercy, then I will try to earn it.”

“Right, then ya can find Ruat, our sheriff, an’ ya can tell him I have appointed ya his clerk, so ya can learn the ropes. Have to get ya one o’ them starry things made up for ya to wear. Ya might have t’ explain what a clerk is. He’s a kzin, an’ still learnin’ stuff.”

The former senator swallowed. Well, the kzin could only eat him, he thought. He squared his shoulders. This was a new life, a promise, something shiny and wonderful had this moment opened up before him. He had been forced to look into his own soul, and seen the wretched smallness of it. He was more than lucky to have a second chance, and he wasn’t going to mess this one up. If a kzin sergeant could have a sense of honor as deep as a well, then a man could at least try to equal that.

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Framed