better often got a better shake-often, that is, not always. The human collaborators… that was another matter. They'd done what they'd done knowingly.
'The fighting didn't all stop at once, but when it did stop, there was very little in the way of an organized resistance-largely because so much of the kzin military had fought to the death before the cease-fire, also because they just don't think as we do. Some of the survivors went berserk, but there was no equivalent to the human Resistance after the kzinti invasion, no organized sabotage or uprisings. Also, of course, they'd destroyed all of their military assets that they could.
'And it wasn't long before we put the kzinti to work: doing a lot of dirty, dangerous jobs like disarming explosive devices where there was no point in risking human lives. Advising on dismantling the hulked kzin warships. Telepaths were useful from Day One, and many telepaths were not particularly loyal to the Patriarchy anyway. But soon others were showing they could be useful too.
'So much of Wunderland's infrastructure was wrecked that there were real fears of chaos. We had generations of lawless feral humans, including children-ever heard of the Wascal Wabbits? Kzin security guards made a difference there… With so much machinery destroyed, muscles were needed, too. Any muscles. They still are.'
'That's the peril!' Jocelyn exclaimed. 'We are accommodating them! Giving them a place in our hierarchy! Getting used to them there. There are even some sick-'
'I have heard some humans refer to Chuut-Riit and some of his pride, like Traat-Admiral, or Hroth, as relatively enlightened, at least compared to a Ktrodni-Stkaa,' said Rykermann. Jocelyn gave another, louder snarl that had something feline and feral in it.
'So have I,' said Guthlac. 'Mainly humans from Earth of the post-war generation. On behalf of us Flatlanders I apologize for them. They never had to endure the horror here.'
'Exactly. In a few years, if things go on as they are, we will have a generation growing up who see kzin in the streets and think they know them, but who never experienced the war or kzinti rule,' said Rykermann. 'What are ruined and exterminated generations to them? Perhaps torn photographs of people they never met. Our stories and histories will become the boring-perhaps to them even comic-tales of grandparents: 'Oh, yes, the Public Hunts and all that.' The photographs of our dead will be rubbish to be burned in the general house-cleaning by our heirs when we die. Until the Kzin return! 'I can honor a kzin,' Rykermann went on. 'I can respect individual kzinti, but never, never, will I forget watching the kzin laser burn into Dimity's ship. I understand ARM's plan for the Wunderkzin-to create a kzin caste who can be partners with humans on a human world, perhaps even allies one day, not to mention hostages. I understand it, but I will destroy it.'
'Does this come between you and your wife?' asked Guthlac. 'That you seek vengeance so for the death of another woman?'
'The answer for me is: 'Why burden Leonie with it?' I don't.'
'You put a lot of time into building a memorial to her. Doesn't Leonie think it's a bit… ' Guthlac made an eloquent gesture.
'Jocelyn and every Wunderlander knows the answer to that,' said Rykermann. 'Dimity Carmody would have been worth a memorial if she had been as sexless as a bumblebee. She was a child when she discovered Carmody's Transform which gave our technology the greatest independent boost its ever had. Given a few more years and we might have… Just before the Kzin arrived she'd been working on what she called a 'shunt' that she thought could break the light barrier. If anyone could have done it, it would have been she. She showed me some of her calculations, but they meant nothing to me. The famous Professor Rykermann couldn't even understand the symbols she used. But isn't 'shunt' how the scientists on We Made It describe the principle of the Outsiders' hyperdrive? My guess, my belief rather, is that she was working on the right lines.
'But in any case Leonie never guessed how I felt about Dimity, how all-consuming my love for her had been. I'm not even sure if she knew her. She was a biology student and Dimity had her own department.' He gave a lopsided laugh. 'It was an unconsummated love, by the way. The professor of biology was too much in awe of the supergenius to actually do anything in that direction until too late. The only times we got to sleep together we slept. Holding one another, exhausted and terrified and with the Kzin after us.' There was a sudden shake in Rykermann's voice. Guthlac turned his eyes away from him with a peculiar expression of embarrassment. 'There was no reason to tell Leonie,' said Rykermann, after an awkward pause. 'There was no deceit involved. You can hardly be unfaithful with the dead. Why burden her with something that is in the past forever and that can't be changed?
'There are plenty of good objective reasons for wanting every kzin in the universe dead,' he went on. 'Their incidental interference in my private life is an inconvenience, shall I say, and an additional motivation for me. Perhaps that last vision of the laser burning into the ship carrying Dimity before the screen went blank'-his voice struggled again momentarily-'simply helps me to see the state of things more clearly. Let that species continue to maraud through the universe and more Dimitys will die. More Leonies, more millions to join the millions of Wunderlanders who lie in unmarked graves, whose bodies drift eyeless and freeze-dried between the worlds, those who have no grave where any heart may mourn. More dead like your sister, like Jocelyn's people. Other races too… countless… '
'We cannot share a universe with the Kzin,' said Jocelyn. She spoke quietly but her eyes burned. 'And your Dimity?'
'What would Dimity have said, had she lived? I don't know. I only know that she must be avenged. She and all the other dead innocents. I can't be an open Exterminationist. That would bring me into conflict with Markham. He seems to have become some sort of kzin-lover.'
'I thought he was the greatest leader of the Resistance! Carried the fight on in space,' said Guthlac. 'Yes, and now he's the greatest obstacle in our path. He's not much good as a democratic politician-far too much the Herrenmann still-but, as you say, he's the Resistance's greatest hero. He fought in space, while we grubbed around in caves and skulked in swamps and alleyways with dung bombs.'
What's his problem, then?'
'I think he admires the Kzin,' Rykermann said. 'So, in a sense, do I, though I want them dead. I can admire certain qualities in them, anyway. They have the toughness and courage of any successful barbarians. But I think he sees them as fellow aristocrats. He himself is only Families on his mother's side, and that makes him more extreme than the twenty-two-carat article.
'If I wished to slander him I'd say he prefers the Kzin to the impudent prolevolk who no longer give him and the Nineteen Families the deference which he must convince himself every hour to be his due, and who have had the great estates broken up. I don't mean that seriously, of course, but… maybe there's a little grain of subconscious truth in it.'
'Prefers the Kzin?' asked Guthlac. He frowned as if peering through a bad light. 'Wasn't he their most daring and ruthless enemy?'
'I'd be the last to question his bravery and leadership,' said Rykermann, 'but there's a difference between fighting in space and fighting a guerrilla war on the ground. People relatively seldom get wounded in space battles, for example. Markham didn't have to see so many messy wounds-wounds there was often no way to treat. He could regard the Kzin more… abstractly. The enemy in battle was an image on a radar screen for him, not a tower of fangs and claws suddenly looming over you in a cave or chasing you through a swamp to tear you apart for monkey meat. Or simply taking over a district's last farmland for a hunting preserve so hundreds of humans died slowly of starvation. Or leveling a last makeshift human hospital because it was a handy site for an ammunition dump. For Markham, the Kzin was not even the horrible Thing waiting for you at the end of the process that might begin with the collabo police's 3 a.m. door knock.
'Space battles can, I imagine, be fun if you're young and have no hostages to fate and are in the right frame of mind-provoke a Kzinti Vengeful Slasher-class into chasing you and then drop a cloud of ball bearings in your wake for it to hit at. 8 of lightspeed. Things like that.
'Jocelyn'-he gestured to her deferentially-'had the worst part: She worked for the collaborationist police while helping the Resistance. She carried a suicide pill for years in case it was casually announced one day that there would be a telepath check… Markham had what you might call a relatively clean war. Also, the Kzin control of the asteroids was always less total than it was planetside. They liked Wunderland and its elbow room, and they left a lot of the work of squeezing taxes out of the asteroid settlements-the Serpent Swarm-to human collaborationists. In a lot of the Swarm it was still fairly easy for humans to come and go and forget the terror and ghastliness that
