'While there is one tall shrine to shake Or one live man to rend;
For the wrath of the gods behind the gods Who are weary to make an end.
'There lives one moment for a man When the door at his shoulder shakes, When the taut rope parts under the pull, And the barest branch is beautiful One moment, while it breaks.
'So rides my soul upon the sea That drinks the howling ships, Though in black jest it bows and nods Under the moon with silver rods, I know it is roaring at the gods, Waiting the last eclipse…
' 'Think on, of those who write so,' he said. But there is other:
'The world is so full of a number of things, I am sure we should all be as happy as kings.
'I think, if I may say so to you, that Gay thinks like that latter. But I know the darknesses in which kzin can live, too. I know it well. Charrgh-Captain…'
To a knowledgeable observer, his body language said more than his words.
'Does he distress you so much?'
'Yes. Like many kzintosh of his generation, he has no religious faith. Why believe in the Fanged God who gave kzinti the Universe and domination of all life when humans keep winning the wars? But that does not modify his loathing of me. On the contrary, it increases it. When you have lost anything to worship, it is a comfort to find something to despise. Thank the God I am good at shielding. I work at it.'
And how do you feel about the Fanged God, Peter?' It was one of those questions spacers on watch could ask one another.
'We high Wunderkzin are not low Kdaptists. Some of us believe Fanged God and Bearded God have their own kingdoms. Others have conceptions more subtle: that the Fanged God is the heroic aspect of the Bearded God, who being omnipotent has no need for heroism.'
'In Christianity the Incarnation is meant to solve that problem: God had to know by experience everything human, including courage and even despair: 'My God! my God! Why have You forsaken me?' '
'We never despair. In any case, I do not necessarily speak for myself. And there are other things. For the relatively few of us on Wunderland there are many sects. Be assured we do not dress in human skins for our services or make chalices and candlesticks of human bones, as the low Kdaptists do. But Charrgh-Captain believes in nothing beyond the material. Or so he thinks. Yet he also thinks his values are those of the old Kzin culture. Like so many adult kzintosh of the Patriarchy today, there is great confusion in him. Once there was a haunting fear, never, never admitted, that the fabled Free Jotok Fleet would return with vengeance. More lately humans have been seen by a few as avatars of the Free Jotok-who probably do not exist. My own fears are different, perhaps a little more human: to have some great task, some great test, and fail-that fear comes to me sometimes at a late hour. Fear of being proven to be a Nothing, a creature of neither world. Charrgh-Captain would never think of failure. He would conquer or die.'
'Is he dangerous, do you think?'
Peter Robinson extended one set of black-tipped claws whose curvature shone like steel, claws that could have torn a man apart with a single leisurely pass, and a tiger with a couple more. 'He is a kzin.' He paused and added: 'As I am not.'
'I don't know whether you say that as boast or complaint, my friend.'
'I don't know either. But as I have paced the silent corridors of this ship, while I have enjoyed the silence, I have been glad my friends were sleeping near me. Is that foolish?'
'No.'
'The founder of our line was raised by humans when he was a war-orphaned kitten, found blind and starving for his mother's milk. But when he was old enough he made a conscious choice. 'And you gave us a chance to rise… more than we would have given you. Great-Grandsire was proud, proud, when he became the first Wunderland Kzin elected to an office by humans. The old fellow still talks about that day. When he made a speech to the Wunderland Assembly-'Let us grow together: not an imitation cat but a better human,' he said, thinking of Markham and what had happened to him, 'not an imitation human but a better cat'-and they applauded, he recorded the applause and laid down the recording in the new family shrine. He said we had found our own Honor.'
'He knew about Markham? I only learned of that when I gained the security clearance for this work.'
One of many secrets we had.'
'The first of my family to set foot on Wunderland,' said Richard, 'was a staff officer with the Liberation forces. On one leave after the cease-fire he was hunting in Gerning and came across a cottage in the forest.
'It was occupied by an old lady, a proud, impoverished aristocrat, pure Nineteen Families blood, long since come down in the world, living alone with a couple of animals and with a little charity from the nearby farmers. Post-Liberation Wunderland had a lot of rather queer fish, of course. I suppose it still does…
'The place was dilapidated, and he did a few chores and repairs for her. She gave him tea in an ornate old service of genuine Neue Dresden china, apologizing for the lack of servants. Not unexpectedly, she came to talk of the 'Good Old Days,' and how much better things were then. She missed her lost boys. Arthur was always interested in history-he'd worked in a museum before the war-and he took notes. 'It took him quite a long time- plus a reference by her to 'those nice big pussycats'-to realize that she was actually talking about the Occupation, and her 'boys' were a couple of kzin officers of the local garrison who for some reason had made a pet of her-if they were in the vicinity and wanted to sharpen their claws, they might do it by tearing a pile of wood into kindling for her. If they were hunting in the forest and had made a kill, they might throw her a haunch of meat as they passed. I suppose that meant non-monkey meat. She gave them bowls of cream. I doubt they realized how she thought of them… She was quite mad, of course. But that, coming on top of a couple of things that had happened to him on Wunderland earlier and later, influenced old Arthur's thinking. His story, 'Three at a Table,' has become a family legend. He'd been an Exterminationist, but he ended up patron of the first official mixed chess club.'
'Quite mad, as you say… And Wunderland still does have a lot of queer fish… like me.'
We like Wunderland,' said Richard. 'Partly because of the queer fish. We've been thinking of settling there.'
'May I say… I hope you do.'
'Only five hundred and forty million years ago, billions of years after the time when the thing we seek was built,' said Richard, 'our ancestors on Earth lived in a placid sea. They were parading the vicinity of the Burgess Shale on multiple jelly legs. Your ancestors and ours cannot have looked much different.'
We know thrint and tnuctipun planted common life-forms throughout the galaxy,' Peter Robinson replied. 'You and I are alike enough to indicate common primordial ancestors.'
'Alike enough to eat each other. I do not mean that observation to be cruel or offensive, but it emphasizes our common biology.'
'Also, there have been speculations that the telepaths' power is somehow-I know not how-related to the Slaver Power-some inherited vestige of tnuctipun biological engineering, perhaps? Something in our nucleonic acid? A laboratory experiment that was thrown away and survived?'
'It's hard to see how that could be. Thrint and kzin are not contemporaries by billions of years.'
I find much hard to see. You will have another bourbon? You face quite a long watch.'
I'm used to it. It goes with the job.'
'A lot goes with my job.' The Wunderkzin said, 'Thank you for being my… friend, Richard. It will be good to go to sleep with that emotion in my mind.'
'The human race as it is today evolved out of a lot of different breeds,' said Richard awkwardly. 'You've seen that on Wunderland. A lot of humans must have asked at times: 'What am I?' But in the end we shook down fairly well.'
'I wonder if they ever asked as emphatically as I do,' said Peter Robinson, 'and who they asked.'
Richard was still on watch when the mass-detector dropped the Wallaby out of hyperspace. The nearest stars were distant but the singularity that was a stasis field was sharp and bright in the center of the radar screen. By the time the awakened crew assembled on the bridge it had grown.
Behind it was a deep-radar ghost. The artifact was in wide orbit around a flattened sphere-a free-floater planet, dark and cold, a gas giant too small to glow. How had the Puppeteers found this thing? 'Big,' said Melody. 'Bigger than we thought.'
'It certainly is,' said Richard. 'As a matter of fact it is in visual range now.'
'It's too far away!'
