our masters we of the 'free' are slaves of the Patriarchy who have not yet been assigned individual owners. We are squeezed, tighter and tighter; eventually. there will be nothing but the households of clan nobles. My association could perhaps survive such a situation, and indeed we are making preparations.' He shrugged. 'We have survived much over the centuries. But perhaps this time it will not be. Better by fitr to restore a functioning human system; our assets would be less in the short term, more secure in the longer.'
'And by helping us, you'll have a foot in both camps and come up smelling of roses whoever wins.'
Hirose spread his hands. 'It is true, the kzin have occasionally found themselves using our services.' His smile became more genuine, and sharklike. 'Nor are all, ah, Heroes, so incorruptible, so immune to the temptations of vice and profit, as they would like to believe.
'Enough.' He produced two sealed packets and slid them across the table to them. 'This one contains the names of criminals in Munchen who have worked with us and have not betrayed us. You will understand that this is no great endorsement. I cannot guarantee they will not sell you out to the authorities merely to win good will with them. However, these are the only names I have.
'This one is more important. The documentation and credit accounts are perfectly genuine. They win stand even against kzin scrutiny; our influence reaches far. I have no knowledge of what identities you have been given, nor do I wish to. You in turn have learned nothing from me that possible opponents do not already know, and know that I know, and I know that they know… but please, even if I cannot join you, do stay and enjoy this excellent restaurant's cuisine.'
'Well. Jonah palmed the folder. 'it might be out of character, rockjacks in a fancy live-service place like this.'
Shigehero Hirose halted, part-way through the privacy screen. 'You would do well to study local conditions a little more carefully, man-from-far-away. It has been a long time since autochefs and dispensers were cheaper than humans.'
'The inefficiency of you leaf-eaters is becoming intolerable,' the kzin said.
Claude Montferrat-Palme bowed his head. Don't stare. Never, never stare at a ratca-at a kzin. 'We do our best, Ktriir-Supervisor-of-Animals,' he said.
The kzin superintendent of Munchen stopped its restless striding and stood close, smiling, its tail held stiffly past one column-thick leg. Two and a half meters tall, a thickly padded cartoon-figure cat that might have looked funny in a holo. It grinned down at him, the direct gaze that was as much a threat display as the barred fangs.
'You play your monkey games of position and money while the enemies of the Patriarchy scurry and bite in the underbrush.' Its head swiveled toward the police chiefs desk. 'Scroll!'
Data began to move across the suddenly transparent surface, accompanied by a moving schematic of the Serpent Swarm; colors and symbols indicated feral-human attacks. Ships lost, outposts raided, automatic cargo containers hijacked…
'Comparative!' the kzin snapped. Graphs replaced the schematic. 'Distribution!”
'See,' he continued. 'Raids of every description have sprouted like fungus since the sthondat-spawned Sol- monkeys made their coward's passage through this system. With no discernible pattern. And even the lurkers in the mountains are slipping out to trouble the estates again.'
'With respect, Ktriir-Supervisor-of-Animals, my sphere of responsibility is the human population of this city. There has been little increase in feral activity here.'
Claws rested centimeters from his eyes. 'Because this city is the locus where feral-human packs dispose of their loot, exchange information and goods, meet and coordinate. Paying their percentage to you! Yes, yes, we have heard your arguments that it is better for this activity to take place where our minions may monitor it, and they are logical enough. While we lack the number of Heroes necessary to reduce this system to true order, and we are preoccupied with the renewed offensive against Sol.'
He mumbled under his breath, and Montferrat caught an uncomplimentary reference to Chuut-Riit.
The human bowed again. 'Ktriir-Supervisor-of-Animals, most of the groups operating against the righteous rule of the Patriarchy are motivated by material gain; this is a characteristic of my species. They cooperate with the genuine rebels, but it is an alliance plagued by mistrust and mutual contempt; furthermore, the rebels themselves are as much a grouping of bands as a unified whole.' And were slowly dying out, until the UN demonstrated its reach so spectacularly. Now they'll have recruits in plenty again, and the bandits will want to draw the cloak of respectable Resistance over themselves.
His mind cautiously edged toward a consideration of whether it was time to begin hedging his bets, and he forced it back. The kzin used telepaths periodically to check the basic loyalties of their senior servants. That was one reason he had never tried to reach the upper policy levels of the collaborationist government, that and… A wash of non-thought buried the speculation.
'Accordingly, if their activity increases, our sources of information increase likewise. Once the confusion Of the, ah, passing raid dies down, we will be in a position to make further gains. Perhaps to trap some of the greater leaders, Markham or Hirose.'
'And you will take your percentage of all these transactions,' Ktriir-Supervisor-of-Animals said with heavy irony. 'Remember that a trained monkey that loses other values may always serve as monkeymeat. Remember where your loyalties ultimately lie, in this insect-web of betrayals you fashion, slave.'
Yes, thought Montferrat, dabbing at his forehead as the kzin left. I must remember that carefully.
'Collation,' he said to his desk. 'Attack activity.' The schematic returned. 'Eliminate all post-Yhaamato raids that correlate to within 75% of the modus operandi of pre-Yamamoto attacks.'
A scattering, mostly directed toward borderline targets that had been too heavily protected for the makeshift boats of the Free Wunderland space guerrillas. Disconcertingly many of them on weapons fabrication plants, with nearly as many seizing communications, stealthing, command-and-control components. Once those were passed along to the other asteroid lurkers all hell was going to break loose. And gravity polarization technology was becoming more and more widespread as well. The kzin had tried to keep it strictly for their own ships and for manufacturing use, but the principles were not too difficult and the methods the Patriarchy introduced were heavily dependent on it.
'Now, correlate filtered attacks with past ten year pattern for bandits Markham, McAllistaire, Finbogesson, Cheung, Latimer, Wu. Sequencing.'
'Scheisse,' he whispered. Markham, without a doubt, the man did everything by the book and you could rewrite the manuscript by watching him. Now equipped with something whose general capacities were equivalent to a kzin Stalker, and proceeding in a methodical amplification of the sort of thing he had been doing before… Markham was the sort for the Protracted Struggle, all right. He'd read his Mao and Styrikawsi and Laugidis, even if he gave Clausewitz all the credit.
'Code, The Eulenspiegel. Lock previous analysis, non-redo, simulate other pattern if requested. Stop.'
'Stop and locked,' the desk said.
Montserrat relaxed. The Eulenspiegel file was supposedly secure. Certainly none of his subordinates had it, or they would have gone to the ratcats with it long ago; there had been more than enough in there to make him prime monkeymeat. He swallowed convulsively; as Police Chief of Munchen, he was obliged to screen the kzin hunts far too frequently. Straightening, he adjusted the lapels of his uniform and walked to the picture window that formed one wall of the office. Behind him stretched the sleek expanse of feathery downdropper-pelt rugs over marble tile, the settees and loungers of pebbled but butter-soft okkaran hide. A Matisse and two Vorenagles on the walls, and a priceless Pierneef… He stopped at the long oak bar and poured himself the single glass of Maivin that was permissible.
Interviews with the kzin Supervisor-of-Animals were always rather stressful. Montferrat sipped, looking down over the low-pitched tile roofs of Old Munchen. None of the sprawling shanty-suburbs and shoddy gimcrack factories of recent years, this ten-story view was almost as he had known it as a student: The curving tree-lined streets that curled through the hills beside the broad blue waters of the Donau, banked flowers beside the pedestrian ways, cafes, the honeygold quadrangles of the University, courtyarded homes built around expanses of greenery and fountains. Softly blooming frangipani and palms and gumblossom in the parks along the river; the Gothic flamboyance of the Ritterhaus, where the Landholders had met in council before the kzin came. And the bronze grouping in the great square before it; the Nineteen Founders.
Memory rose before him, turning the hard daylight of afternoon to a soft summer's night; he was young again,
