"Children of which kind?"
"Both. They won't be children now, though."
"I suppose I was nearly one of them," said Vaemar. "I could have been left to run wild—or die—given that a few things had happened a little differently." They were silent for a moment save for the sand crunching under their feet as they walked.
"A couple of kzinti have set up a fishing business on Widows' Island," said Marshy. "Largely supplying fish products to other kzinti, I'm told, but some human trade too. It's marked on the map I gave you."
"I'll have a look . . . I assume you are suspicious of me?"
"I'm a swamp creature of a sort. I'm suspicious of many things."
"So you've probably recorded our meeting."
"Why do you say that?"
"If there are kzinti revanchists, and I join them, and come back and eat you, ARM would know what had been happening?"
"My dear young fellow! You don't suppose . . ." Marshy threw up his hands as if in indignation. Then he looked straight up into Vaemar's eyes. "You will see the wonder of the place. I've told you of the danger. I know that it is insulting to stress danger to a Hero and that I have trespassed to the limit of acceptable manners in saying as much as I have. But remember, young Hero, the fact you are in charge means you are responsible for young lives besides your own." He paused a moment.
"I've a fair nose, for a monkey. You use toothpaste on your fangs."
"Yes. I spend a lot of time among humans, like my Honored Step-Sire Raargh Hero. It seems a good idea. But we call it fang-paste. I will care for those in my charge."
"Yes," said Marshy, "I think you will." Then in a fair rendering of the Heroes' Tongue, he added:
"Snarr' grarrch."
"Urrr."
* * *
The shadows of Alpha Centauri A were lengthening as they made camp on a large island. Wide stretches of open water gave a clear field of view all round. By the time the defenses and sleeping accommodation were set up it was nearly dark. Alpha Centaruri B rose early at this time of year, in a blaze of purple with a silver core.
The sky, however, was always brilliant with the light of the Serpent Swarm and Wunderland's satellites, natural and artificial, that had survived the war and been supplemented since, hung like multi-tinted glow-globes. Even the dust of war had contributed a legacy of brilliant sunsets and a diffusion of luminescence at night. The high sliding lights that were satellites and spacecraft made a strange contrast to the primordial feeling of the swamp about them. The swamp had lights of its own—will-o'-the-wisps of incandescent marsh-gas, light-dragons—living beings but barely more substantial—and the more solid shapes of luminescent plants and animals, above, on and below the water.
The humans and kzinti ate and slept separately, though Swirl-Stripes and Toby played banjos together briefly. The kzinti, more silent than the humans when they chose though far bulkier, would patrol the perimeter of the camp at irregular intervals during the night. Their own weapons, though far less devastating than most of the military weapons both sides had been employing by the time fighting on Wunderland ended, were judged more than adequate to handle any known swamp-creature. Vaemar made the first patrol. The oscilloscope on the motion-detector, an invaluable tool on biological expeditions like this, was in a constant frenzied dance and small creatures were to be seen in plenty. Vaemar made field-notes of these, and relaxed enough to snap up one or two of them, but there was nothing obviously threatening.
Drifting in the channel with leaves and other small pieces of debris were the paired berry or bubble-shapes that he knew were the eyes and nostrils of crocodilians. Some of these pairs had enough distance between them to indicate formidable size, but the camp's defenses, both physical and electronic, were effective, and the drifting eyes caused him no concern. He settled for a while into a stand of vegetation, still as another piece of wood as his fur rose and fell minutely to compensate for the movement of his breathing. Only the lights reflected in his great eyes or a gleam of the tips of his shearing fangs would have betrayed his presence to the unwary. He made some mental notes for essays he had due on other subjects—Caesar's use of fortifications as defensive anchors in his campaign against the Helveti, the adaptation of gravity-fields as dust-deflectors for spacecraft passing through Trojan positions, possibilities of hyper-connectivity in neuronetic logic-lattices. There was also a long essay on the Normans—their ability to combine Roman and Viking cultures in medieval chivalry, marrying order and achievement to barbarian freedom and vigor. He had selected this as his major psychohistorical topic. He allowed himself a single move in the chess game he had been playing in his mind for some weeks, and settled into reflection.
Given another turn of the wheel, he thought, and these humans would have been my slaves and prey animals, and I might have been a princeling in a Royal Palace. And then he thought, Yes, and with an eight-squared of ambitious elder brothers between me and my Honored Sire or any throne, not to mention Combat Master who trained, by all accounts, a great deal more lethally than does the ROTC. Very likely I would be dead. Certainly, I would not have been given a clean slate on which to write, perhaps, part of the destiny of my species on this planet. A colony of tubes, which might have been plant or animal, springing from the submerged roots of a tree at the water's edge, pulsed with slow rings of light as it siphoned the water for small organisms. There was a fascination in watching it, though such a sessile thing, even if biologically an animal, would be beneath a traditional hunter's notice.
I am free to
