kzin. 'In feet, this split can be used.' He rose, raked claws through air from face to waist. 'My thanks, Conservor. You have given me a scent through fresh dew to follow.'
Chapter III
This section of the Jotun range had been a Montferrat-Palme preserve since the settlement of Wonderland, more than three centuries before; when a few thousand immigrants have an entire planet to share out, there is no sense in being niggardly. The first of that line had built the high eyrie for his own; later population and wealth moved elsewhere, and in the end it became a hunting lodge. At the time of the kzin conquest it had been the only landed possession left to the Montferrat-Palme line, which had shown an unfortunate liking for risky speculative investments and even riskier horses.
'Old Claude does himself proud,' Harold Yarthkin-Schotmann said, as he and Lieutenant Ingrid Raines walked out onto the verandah that ran along the outer side of the house.
The building behind them was old weathered granite, sparkling slightly with flecks of mica; two stories, and another of half-timbering, under a strake roof. A big rambling structure, set into an artificial terrace on the steep side of the mountain; below the slope turn-bled down to a thread-thin stream in the valley below, then rose in gashed cliffs and dark-green forest ten kilometers away. The gardens were extensive and cunningly landscaped, an improvement of nature rather than an imposition on it. Native featherleaf, trembling iridescent lavender shapes ten meters tall, gumblossom and sheenbark and lapisvine. Oaks and pines and fran-gipani from Earth, they had grown into these hills as well… The air was warm and fragrant-dusty with summer flowers.
'It's certainly been spruced up since we… since I saw it last,' she said, with a catch in her voice.
Harold looked aside at her and shivered slightly. Ingrid Raines had been born two years before him, but he was a greying fifty-odd, while she… she was exactly as he remembered her. Belter-tall and fair-skinned, slimly muscular and green-eyed, with black hair worn in spaceborn fashion that shaved all the scalp save for a strip from forehead to neck.
She had spent most of the intervening decades in coldsleep, at a high fraction of lightspeed; he had lived every minute of them here on Wunderland, lived hard and without the best anti-senescent treatments. While she went to Sol with the last shipload of refugees, joined the UN forces that fought off the kzinti Fourth Fleet. Came back with a smooth-mannered systems engineer and trained killer named Jonah Matthieson and knocked off the Big Tabby, Chief Ratcat Chuut-Riit himself, with the nastiest piece of combined software sabotage and kzinti psychology he could imagine.
Matthieson. Now there was a case. Genius class programmer. Humorless, like a Swarmer, but not like a Swarmer. A Belter. Earth's asteroid civilization was like Wunderland's, but different. Matthieson was about thirty, biological. Chronological would be older, of course, given he'd come across four light-years. Anyway, not old enough for anti-senescence to make much difference. Smoothly handsome, in an angular Belter way; also tough and smart. A calm angry man, the dangerous type. Dreadfully attractive while you were no prize even as a young man, he told himself. Ears like jugs, eyes like a basset hound and a build like a brick outhouse. Nearly middle-aged at only sixty, for Finagles sake. Spent five years as an unsuccessful guerilla and the rest as a glorified barkeep.
A little more than that. Harold's Terran Bar was well known in its way. Had been well known. Had been his…
'A lot more populous, too,' she was saying. 'Why on earth would anyone want to farm here? You'd have to modify the machinery.'
There had always been a small settlement in the narrow sliver of valley floor, but it had been expanded. Terraces of vines and fruit trees wound up the slopes, and they could hear the distant tinkle of bells from the sheep and goats that grazed the rocky hills. A waterfall tumbled a thousand meters down the head of the valley, its distant toning humming through rock and air. Men and men's doings were small in that landscape of tumbled rock and crag. A church-bell rang far below, somewhere a dog was barking, and faint and far came the hiss-scream of a downdropper, surprising this close to human habitation. The air was cool and thin, though not uncomfortably so to someone born on Wunderland;. 61 gravity meant that the drop-off in air pressure was much less steep than it would have been on Earth.
'Machinery?' Harold moved up beside her. She leaned into him with slow care. He winced at the thought of kzin claws raking down her side… maybe I've been a bit uncharitable about Jonah, he thought. The two of them came through the kzinti hunt alive, until Claude and I could pull her… them out. That took some doing. 'They're not using machinery, Ingi. Bare hands and hand-tools.'
Her mouth made a small gesture of distaste. 'Slave labor? Not what I'd have thought of Claude, however he's gone downhill.'
Harold laughed. 'Flighters, sweetheart. Refugees. Kzinti've been taking up more and more land; they're settling in, not just a garrison anymore. It was this or the labor camps; those are slave labor, literally. And Claude grubstaked these people, as well as he could. It's where a lot of that graft he's been getting as Police Chief of Munchen went.' And the head of the capital city's human security force was in a very good position to rake it in. 'I was surprised too. Claude's been giving a pretty good impression of having Helium II for blood, these past few years.'
A step behind them. 'Slandering me in my absence, old friend?'
The servants set out brandy and fruits and withdrew. They were all middle-aged and singularly close- mouthed. Ingrid thought she had seen four parallel scars under the vest of one dark slant-eyed man who looked like he came from the Sulinesian Islands.
'There are Some Things We Were Not Meant to Know,' she said. Claude Montferrat-Palme was leaning forward to light a cheroot at a candle. He glanced up at her words and caught her slight grimace of distaste, and laid down the cheroot. He had been here a week, off and on, but that was scarcely time to drop a habit he must have been cultivating half his life.
'Correct on all accounts, my dear,' he said. Claude always was perceptive.
'It's been wonderful talking over old times,' she said. With sincerity, and a slight malice aforethought. They were considerably older times for the two men than for her. 'And it's… extremely nattering that you two are still so fond of me.' But a bit troubling, now that I think about it. Even if you can expect to live two centuries, carrying the torch for four decades is a bit much.
Claude smiled again. He had classic Herrenmann features, long and bony; in his case, combined with dark hair and eyes and an indefinable air of elegance, even in the lounging outfit he had thrown on when he shed the Munchen Polizei uniform.
'Youth,' he said. And continued at her enquiring sound, 'My dear, you were our youth. Hari and I were best friends; you were the… girl… young woman for which we conceived the first grand passion and bittersweet rivalry.' He shrugged. 'Ordinarily, a man either marries hera ghastly fete involving children and facing each other over the morning papaya-or loses her. In any case, life goes on.' His brooding gaze went to the high mullioned windows, out onto a world that had spent two generations under kzinti rule.
'You…' he said softly. 'You vanished, and took the good times with you. Doesn't every man remember his twenties as the golden age? In our case, that was literally true. Since then, we've spent four decades fighting a rear-guard action and losing, watching everything we cared for slowly decay… including each other.'
'Why Claude, I didn't know you cared,' Harold said mockingly. Ingrid saw their eyes meet. Surpassing the love of women, she thought dryly. And there was a certain glow about them both, now that they were committed to action again. Few humans enjoy living a life that makes them feel defeated, and these were proud men. 'Don't tell me we wasted forty years of what might have been a beautiful friendship.'
'Chronicles of Wasted Time is a title I've often considered for my autobiography, if I ever write it,' Claude said. 'Egotism wars with sloth.'
Harold snorted. 'Claude, if you were only a little less intelligent, you'd make a great neo-romantic Byronic Hero.'
'Childe Claude? At this rate she'll have nothing to do with either of us, Hari.'
The other man turned to Ingrid. 'I'm a little surprised you didn't take Jonah,' he said.
Ingrid looked over to Claude, who stood by the huge rustic fireplace with a brandy snifter in his hand. The
