us.'
'It wasn't like that on Wunderland,' said Rykermann. 'We didn't censor old history so much as lose interest in it. Earth history was Earth business. Irrelevant to us. We had a whole world to shape… A brave new world it still was… I remember, after we got the warnings, those months of scrabbling through old, chance preserved, fragments of Earth books and records trying to reinvent the wheel.'
We did something the same,' said Guthlac.
'We were just getting a military production base together here when the Kzin arrived.'
You look as if you had your share of it.'
'After Dimity was killed, I got away into the hills,' Rykermann said. 'I was a biologist and I knew some low- tech organic chemistry-nearly all our people were helpless without modern laboratories and industrial plants. I also knew as much as anyone about the great caves, full of bones and phosphates. I was the Resistance's biochemical production manager, overseeing the secret factories where nitrates and phosphates were made into explosives and war-gases.
'I was also one of the few leaders deemed indispensable enough to get-when possible-geriatric drugs and other sophisticated medical treatment from the Resistance's stolen supplies. Leonie was another.'
She was fortunate to be your wife.'
'We didn't marry until we'd been in the hills for some time… and, I'll say… after the memory of Dimity had receded for me, a little. After I'd stopped hoping quite so hard that every attack we launched would turn out to be a suicide mission. In any case, we hardly had room for such sentimentalism as giving geriatric drugs to a spouse. The few we had went where they were needed most and she got them on her own merits. Not even my decision.
'She'd been one of my postgraduate biology students, and in addition she had natural gifts with low-tech medical care. That made her important. We'd forgotten we were aliens on this world. Exotic diseases, which our parents and grandparents had controlled so easily with modern medicine and autodocs that we'd forgotten they existed, came raging out, along with a lot of the old human diseases we'd also forgotten and which we'd lost resistance against.
'We did still have quite a lot of more-or-less old-fashioned farmers, thank God!-that's why we're not all dead-but most of us were twenty-fourth-century, machine-dependent people. Robots did a lot of the farming and other dirty jobs. Hell, apart from never seeing a dead animal, a lot of us ex-city dwellers had never seen recognizable meat! At first people starved from ignorance as much as shortages. Like the caveman, shivering with cold on a ledge of coal, fleeing weaponless from the cave-bear over outcrops of iron ore, lapping water muddy with clay… More of us perished from general softness… humaneness, lack of ruthless decisiveness, not knowing what mattered for immediate survival and what didn't. 'Then they got the country and the old estates organized, and there was a supply of food back to the cities again. Some sort of government was got together under kzinti supervision and factories started turning over. Someone persuaded the Kzin that we couldn't pay taxes or slave for them if we were dead of starvation.
'I was in the wild country by that time and didn't see it. Disease was what we were concerned about in the hills. Some of the old bacteria and viruses had been eliminated in our ancestors before they left Sol system-that's another reason why some of us lived-but it turned out that there were still plenty left. Common colds alone-to which we'd lost quite a lot of resistance-killed far more people than the Kzin killed directly. That's before we start counting the score of the big-league diseases and Wunderland's own contributions. Things were bad enough in the cities, but at least they kept some modern medical facilities functioning. Even there they suddenly had to find puppy dogs and sheep to make something called insulin. Do cataract operations by hand-yes, you may well look queasy. And that was high-tech compared to what we had in the hills. There was no proper birth control once the contraceptive implants' lives ran out, and yet for women pregnancy became a deadly danger again. Leonie-and it was not only her scientific training but also a matter of intuition with her-turned out to be a priceless asset. 'She was a good fighter, too. A natural tactician and strategist and handy with a beam rifle. We've both outlived most of our contemporaries. It's not nice, watching your friends die of black rot or old age. Still, we've been happy together. She's an extraordinary woman. Kind to me, kind to all the world. The liberation, when it came, was a savage time, as savage as the invasion in its way, and a lot of people were in a sort of drunkenness of joy and vengeance. But even before the fighting stopped, before the relief operations were set up, she was taking care of stray kittens along with the pups and the orphans.'
Some people do. We had cats at home.'
'I mean kzin kittens! She's always believed in some kind of eventual… reconciliation.'
And you don't?'
'No! First, it's impossible and suicidal, and second… I cannot forgive.'
'Nor I. And yet… '
'Yes?'
'I have heard that you had dealings with the kzinti and survived.'
'That was in the caves. A kzin and I found ourselves in a sort of temporary alliance against the morlocks-the big carnivores that live at the top of the food chain there. We thought we were going to die together. Then, when the other kzinti came, this one got them to sew me up, and they let me go with a branding and another implant in my skin-kzin-sized and a good deal less comfortable than human ones-and my word not to fight against Heroes again.'
'And did you?'
'Is one's word to a ratcat binding? But there were other ways of helping the human cause by then. I think I kept to the letter of my promise, shall we say, though I exploited some loopholes in it.'
Scrupulous of you.'
'Partly pride. Whatever you say about the ratcats, they keep their word, and I wanted to show that a human could do so, too. Partly Leonie made me. The kzin in question had saved her life, too. Though I think she would have had me keep my word anyway. Partly fear. Break your word to the Kzin and you fare much worse than an ordinary monkey if you fall into their claws subsequently… I was still valuable to the human cause. There was plenty of work to be done in backwoods biochemistry that didn't require one to be a direct fighter.
'Anyway, my motives were mixed. I'm human, aren't I? Mixed motives are our nature. I think my nerve was starting to go then and I'd had enough of tangling with kzinti. I thought of their tortures.' He paused again, steepling his fingers in thought.
'The Masonic orders kept some of Kipling's poetry alive on Wunderland when it had been banned on Earth for militarism,' he said. 'We used to recite it in our camps before battle sometimes:
'Our world is passed away In wantonness o'erthrown. There is nothing left to-day But steel and fire and stone.
'Though all we knew depart The old commandments stand: 'In courage keep your heart, In strength lift up your hand!'
'But I recall another poem of his I found that is not particularly militaristic. It went something like this:
'What with noise, and fear of death, Waking, and wounds and cold,
They filled the cup for My Mother's Son Fuller than it could hold.
'That was the point that my mother's son had reached, too.'
Jocelyn van der Stratt nodded. 'We understood that,' she said. 'Few could have done more than you.'
In any case again,' Rykermann went on, 'The kzinti weren't fools. They could track me with the implant, and any attempt to remove it would have killed me and anyone helping. Thing called a zzrou in their charming language. Full of poison and explosive. Still, I made myself useful enough to find, rather to my surprise, that I had a political base after the liberation. So here I am.'
'Markham has talked of a just settlement with them,' Guthlac said. Jocelyn made a feral noise in her throat. Rykermann shook his head.
'Justice isn't possible! Recently I've looked at the history of war crimes trials on Earth in ancient times. But war crimes trials for kzinti make no sense. How can you try members of an alien species whose concepts are so different from our own and who thought of us as slaves and prey animals? There was some rough and ready approximation of justice after the liberation, of course: a lot of the most brutal kzin individuals who survived were hunted down and killed-taking a lot of humans with them, often enough. The followers of Ktrodni-Stkaa, who had been especially savage and saw humans as nothing but monkey-meat, in particular. Those who'd treated humans
