He shrugged and passed it to her. 'I don't see why not. But what do you intend to do now?'
Repair the car as soon as I can,' I said.
'You can't show a light or heat source. They're still around up there.'
'Well, we can't trek very far on foot, and we can't stay here. In any case, there are almost certainly a group of aliens in the Hohe Kalkstein caves. We know there's one.'
'Kzin,' he said. He pronounced it differently, a snarling cough it made my vocal chords ache just to hear. 'They are called Kzin. Plural and possessive kzinti, we think.'
'Oh yes, I know.'
Kleist's nervous excitement was running down now. We were all pretty beaten up, and he and I sank into a sort of doze. Dimity had earphones on, and was playing the disk, staring at the screen. More than once I saw dark shapes, too sharp-edged to be cloud, driving high and silent across the luminous bands of the Swarm and the Milky Way, and more sliding lights that might have been meteors.
Chapter 12
'If I am the Scourge of God, you must be truly wicked.'
I woke in daylight. Modern cars have complex machinery and neither Dimity nor I were practical mechanics.
'I guess we're walking out of this one,' said Kleist. He added: 'That's a Spacers' joke. It's got a bit threadbare lately.'
Repairing the car was an even longer job than I thought. I soon saw that without Kleist we would never have done it. We hoped the daylight heat reflected on the rocks of the mesa would mask what we were doing. We spent most of that day and the next working on the fuel line and its feeder controls, freezing when we saw flying things. We kept a watch in the direction of the Hohe Kalkstein, but though we thought we saw some distant activity on the escarpment nothing emerged from it to come our way. We also thought we saw an ordinary air-car flying well to the north close to the ground, but had no safe way of trying to signal it. It never came back. Alpha Centauri A had set by the time we were finished, Alpha Centauri B rising and casting long shadows in the purple twilight. And in the direction of the escarpment our glasses were definitely picking up lights and movement.
Where to go? I had tried to get Dimity away from Munchen partly to protect her from rioting and chaos and also to protect her knowledge. But there seemed no obvious safer haven now. Kleist insisted he must get back to Munchen, which in any case was the planetside center of the defense effort. (Had it been stupid of us to place our defense headquarters in our major city? I wondered, and came to the conclusion that it had been very stupid indeed.) Then Dimity recalled something.
'You said 'mob the slowboats.' What did you mean?'
'The old slowboats are still intact,' Kleist said. 'The Kzin haven't bothered with them for some reason, at least they hadn't a few days ago, and I saw them in the sky last night. Presumably because they are deactivated they don't see them as a threat, or a high-priority target. But they are being reactivated. We're getting people out.'
That they could be reactivated had been firm policy, and every Wunderlander knew it. It was part of our history that when humanity's first interstellar colony was established, the pioneers laid down that the huge spaceships would be kept fully fueled and ready to fly if some unforeseen disaster on the new planet compelled evacuation. They were still there. Closed down and in orbit they required little maintenance, but it had been necessary at first to resist a temptation to cannibalize them. By the time it was obvious that we were here to stay and in any case the population had grown far too big to evacuate, we had factories supplying everything we needed without them. Besides, we might always want to get to Proxima or Alpha Centauri B. Why break up expensive assets unnecessarily?
'Do the Kzin know that?' asked Dimity.
'I think so. Their mind-readers know a lot… During the breathing-space, the happy time after the Swarm reinforcements came, we got crews and fuel into them,' he said. 'It seemed the unforeseen disaster was well and truly upon us, and we could at least get several thousand people away. They're virtually useless as warships, anyway.'
'Where would they go?'
'Back to Sol, I guess. Sol System should have been able to cobble together better defenses than we have. They've had more time and they've more people and factories, and their Belt has good technology, even if flatlanders think like sheep.'
'Wouldn't the… Kzin just destroy the slowboats?'
'They haven't so far. But maybe it's a cat-and-mouse game. We found in one of our own old texts-Sun Tzu's Art of War-that an enemy should always be left with an apparent escape route as a disincentive to fighting with the courage of despair. But they're hard to understand. They fight without any concept of mercy, but they've also pulled their punches a few times. They could have smashed Wunderland's cities from space, or vaporized the major bases in the Swarm, but they've held off. They seem to be trying to do as little damage to infrastructure as possible. We don't know why.'
'What do you know,' asked Dimity, 'about their concept of humans?'
'Very little.'
'You say they have no interest in negotiation. Do they accept surrenders?'
'They have, yes. They have taken human prisoners. We think… It's horrible and bizarre, but we think they eat them unless they've promised otherwise.'
'When do they do that? Promise otherwise, I mean.'
'Perhaps sometimes if the humans have useful skills. Once or twice when humans have been in relatively strong positions they have bargained and seem to have kept their bargains. But that hasn't been often.'
'So they don't look on humans simply as vermin to be exterminated?'
'That's hard to say. We've got a little of their language. Their word for human is kz'eerkt, which seems to mean 'monkey.' There must be monkeys or analogs on their homeworld. They refer to our ships as 'monkeyships.' ' Kleist closed his eyes for a moment and frowned as if remembering something difficult. 'There was one odd incident: One of our ships was cut off and surrounded by a kzin squadron. It had expended its major weapons and the kzin boarded it. It was a big ship, a Swarm passenger liner originally, and they fought from cabin to cabin for days. At the end the surviving humans made a last stand on the bridge deck. Some of the com-links were still working and broadcasting what was happening to the fleet. We saw and heard the last fight when the kzin broke through. 'They killed the humans pretty quickly. In hand-to-hand fighting we don't stand a chance against them. The last surviving human detonated a bomb. Only a small one, but he must have taken a lot of kzin with him.
'That put the picture out, but we still got sound for a while. We think we heard one of the kzin say something we translate like 'brave monkey' or 'worthy monkey.' But I'm not sure.
'As far as we can gather, they honor brave enemies, if not to the extent of sparing their lives. Is that what you mean?'
'Perhaps a little. But if you were about to get control of an industrialized world,' said Dimity, 'would you smash up its factories and industrial plant?'
'No. Of course not.'
'And nor do they. That means they're coming to stay. Their build suggests they come from a world with heavier gravity than Earth, and a lot heavier than Wunderland. This would be pleasant for them. They can breathe the air. Of course they are coming to stay-what price a whole habitable planet with industrial development ripe for the taking, with light gravity and meat on the hoof as bonuses? They landed scouts. They know something about human biology and morphology. They want to keep our planet, and it follows that they also want humans to work it… Do you have any evidence, or any intuition, that they act more or less independently than humans?'
'More independently, definitely. Tactically they sometimes fail to cooperate with each other to a surprising
