service here, which was less of an affectation now than it had been when the place opened, twenty years ago. Machinery was dearer than it had been, and human labor much cheaper, particularly since refugees began pouring into Munchen from a countryside increasingly preempted for Kzin estates. Not to mention those displaced by strip-mining…
'Good evening, Claude.'
He started. It was always disconcerting, how quietly Harold moved. There he was at his elbow now, blue eyes expressionless. Face that should have been ugly, big-nosed with a thick lower lip and drooping eyelids. He was… what, sixty-three now? just going grizzled at the temples, which was an affectation, or a sign that his income didn't stretch to really thorough geriatric treatments. Short, barrel-chested… what sort of genetic mismatch had produced that build from a Herrenmann father and a Belter mother?
'Looking me over for signs of impending dissolution, Claude?' Harold said, steering him toward his usual table and snapping his fingers for a waiter. 'It'll be a while yet.'
Perhaps not so long, Montferrat thought, looking at the pouches beneath his eyes. That could be stress… or Harold could be really skimping on the geriatrics. They become more expensive every year, the kzin don't care… There are people dying of old age at seventy, now, and not just Amish. Shut up, Claude, you hypocrite. Nothing you can do about it.
'You will outlast me, old friend.'
'A case of cynical apathy wearing better than cynical corruption?' Harold asked, seating himself across from the police chief.
Montferrat pulled a cigarette case from his jacket's inner pocket and snapped it open with a flick of the wrist. It was plain white gold, from Earth, with a Paris jeweler’s initials inside the frame and a date two centuries old, one of us is few inheritances from his parents… Harold took the proffered cigarette.
'You will join me in a schnapps?' Montferrat said.
'Claude, you've been asking that question for twenty years, and I've been saying no for twenty years. I don't drink with the paying customers.'
Yarthkin leaned back, let smoke trickle through his nostrils. The liquor arrived, and a plateful of grilled things that resembled shrimps about as much as a lemur resembled a man, apart from being dark green and having far too many eyes. 'Now, didn't my bribe arrive on time?' Montferrat winced. 'Harold, Harold, will you never learn to phrase these things politely?' He peeled the translucent shell back from one of the grumblies, snapped off the head between thumb and forefinger and dipped it in the sauce. 'Exquisite…' he breathed, after the first bite, and chased it down with a swallow of schnapps. 'Bribes? Merely a token recompense, when out of the goodness of my heart and in memory of old friendship, I secure licenses, produce permits, contacts with owners of estates and fishing boats-'
'-so you can have a first-rate place to guzzle”
'-I allow this questionable establishment to flourish, risking my position, despite the, shall we say, dubious characters known to frequent it-'
'-because it makes a convenient listening post and you get a lot of, shall vv say, lucrative contacts.'
They looked at each other coolly for a moment, and then Montferrat laughed. 'Harold, perhaps the real reason I allow this den of iniquity to continue is that you're the only person who still has the audacity to deflate my hypocrisies.'
Yarthkin nodded calmly. 'Comes of knowing you when you were an idealistic patriot, Director. Like being in hospital together… Will you be gambling tonight, or did you come to pump me about the rumors?' 'Rumors?' Montferrat said mildly, shelling another grumbly.
'Of another kzin defeat. Two shiploads of our esteemed ratcat masters coming back with their fur singed.'
'For god’s sake!” Montferrat hissed, looking around.
'No bugs,' Yarthkin continued. 'Not even by your ambitious assistants. They offered a hefty sweetener, but I wouldn't want to see them in your office. They don't stay bought.'
Montferrat smoothed his mustache. 'Well, the kzin do seem to have a rather lax attitude toward security at times,' he said. Mostly, they don't realize how strong the hunting desire to get together and chatter is, he mused. 'Then there's the rumor about a flatlander counterstrike,' Yarthkin continued.
Montferrat raised a brow and cocked his mobile Herrenmann ears forward. 'Not becoming a believer in the myth of Liberation, I hope,' he drawled. Yarthkin waved the hand that held the cigarette, leaving a trail of blue smoke. I did my bit for liberation. Got left at the altar, as I recall, and took the amnesty.' His face had become even more blank, merely the slightest hint of a sardonic curve to the lips. 'Now I'm just an innkeeper. What goes on outside these walls is no business of mine.' A pause. 'It is yours, Of course, Director. People know the ratcats got their whiskers pasted back, for the fourth time. They're encouraged… also desperate. The kzin will be stepping up the war effort, which means they'll be putting more pressure on us. Not to mention that they're breeding faster than ever.'
Montferrat nodded with a frown. Battle casualties made little difference to a kzin population; their nonsentient females were held in harems by a small minority of males, in any event. Heavy losses meant the lands and mates of the dead passing to the survivors… and more young males thrown out of the nest, looking for lands and a Name of their own. And kzin took up a lot of space; they weighed in at a quarter-ton each, and they were pure carnivores. Nor would they eat synthesized meat except on board a military spaceship. There were still fewer than a hundred thousand in the Wunderland system, and more than twenty times that many humans; it was getting crowded.
'More fighters crowding into Munchen every day,' Yarthkin continued in that carefully neutral tone.
Refugees. Munchen had been a small town within their own lifetimes; the original settlers of Wunderland had been a close-knit coterie of plutocrats, looking for elbow-room. They had allowed only limited industrialization, even in the Serpent Swarm, and very little indeed on the planetary surface. Huge domains staked out by the Nineteen Families and their descendants; later immigrants had fitted into the cracks of the pattern, as tenants or carving out smallholdings on the fringes of the settled zone, many of them were ethnic or religious separatists anyway. Until the Kzin came. Kzin nobles expected vast territories for their own polygamous households, and naturally seized the best and ready-developed acreages. Some of the human land workers stayed to labor for new masters, but many more were displaced. Or eaten.
One of the first effects of the new ownership had been forced-draft industrialization in Munchen and the other towns; kzin did not live in cities, and cared little for the social consequences. Their planets had always been sparsely settled, and they had developed the gravity polarizer early in their history, hence they mined their asteroid belts but put little industry in space. The refugees flooding in worked in industries that produced war materiel for the kzin fleets, not housing or consumer-goods for human use…
'It must be a bonanza for you, selling exit-permits to the Swarm,' Harold continued. Outside the base asteroid of Tiamat, the Belters were much more loosely controlled than the groundside population. 'And exemptions from military call-up.'
Montferrat smiled and leaned back, following the schnapps with laager. 'There must be regulations, he said reasonably. 'The Swarm cannot absorb all the would-be immigrants. Nor can Wunderland afford to lose the labor of all who would like to leave. The kzin demand technicians, and we cannot refuse, the burden must be allocated.'
'Nor can you afford to pass up the palm-greasing and the, ach, rowntic possibilities,-“ Yarthkin began.
'Alert! Alert! Emergency broadcast!” The mirror behind the long bar flashed from reflective to broadcast, and the smoky gloom of the bar's main hall erupted in shouted questions and screams.
The strobing pattern of light settled into the civil defense blazon, and the unmistakable precision of an artificial voice. 'All civilians are to remain in their residences. Emergency and security personnel to their duty stations, repeat, emergency and security personnel to their-'
A blast of static and white noise loud enough to send hands to ears, before the system's emergency overrides cut in. When reception returned the broadcast was two-dimensional, a space-armored figure reading from a screen prompt over the receiver. The noise in Harold's Terran Bar sank to shocked silence at the sight of the human shape of the combat armor, the blue-and-white UN sigil on its chest.
'-o all citizens of the Alpha Centauri system,' the Terran was saying. In Wunderlander, but with a thick accent that could not handle the gutturals. 'Evacuate areas of military or industrial importance immediately. Repeat,
