nomenclature on his second visit to the monastery. A grazing pony caught the odor of the kzin and fled.
'I feel a little foolish telling you to be careful,' said the abbot, looking up at Vaemar who stood beside him like a tower of teeth, claws and muscle. 'And I hope I'm not insulting. But nonetheless, I will tell you. Again. We've never known everything that's in the swamp, but we've always known a lot of the life there is highly dangerous, certainly to humans. Overly inquisitive or incautious people have long had a habit of disappearing there. Of course, if you go in a small canoe alone up a waterway inhabited by big crocodilians that's perhaps not overly surprising, but… Marshy can tell you more.'
'Our canoe should be bite-proof,' said Vaemar. 'And it's a good deal harder to upset than a one-man job.'
'I know. But some of those who have disappeared ought to have known their business. There was a sailors' rhyme on Earth, once:
Take care and beware of the Bight of Benin Where one comes out and forty go in.
I'll not nag further. But I want your expedition to be a success. And no more disappearances.'
They boarded the car for the short flight over the rolling, flower-bright meadowland and down to the creek, last reach of Grossgeister Swamp, where the big canoe and the rest of the expedition waited.
Vaemar checked the loading of the canoe and its outriggers as the abbot chatted with the other five expedition members. It was a primitive and stupid craft compared to those which had been generally available on Wunderland before the invasion and the following decades of occupation and war, but it was the best the university had available for student expeditions now, and in some ways its very low-tech nature could be an advantage. They moved out of the creek under the engine, then took up their paddles.
The canoe travelled almost silently under the thrust of the six paddles, two of them worked by the muscles of kzinti.
Water-dwellers, amphibians, land-dwellers occupying the ecological niches that on Earth would be filled by swamp-deer, peccaries and the like, were plentiful, as were flyers. Creatures of all sizes that would have fled at the sound of the engine presented themselves for the expedition's cameras. But this part of Grossgeister Swamp was never quite silent. Water lapped in the channels between the islands and the stands of trees, insectoids and amphibians sang in ceaseless choirs and choruses, and from time to time there came the splash of some larger creature breaking the surface.
The land varied from rises of mud supporting reed-clumps and a few drowning bushes to substantial sandy islands with game trails and occasional dwellings, some occupied, some plainly abandoned and going back to the swamp. Occasional floats in the channels marked fishermen's nets. The vegetation was almost entirely the red of Wunderland: neither the green plants of Earth nor the orange of Kzin had been able to colonize this place.
After an hour of paddling they reached one of these substantial islands with more obvious signs of long-term occupation. The house on it was a solid structure, with the vegetation before and about it clipped and trimmed like a lush red lawn and hedge. There was a dock and a moored boat spiky with electronics. Marshy, the occupant, a lean old man who reminded Vaemar of a farmer in the backblocks beyond the Hohe Kalkstein, greeted them warily, taking no trouble to disguise the fact that both he and the house were armed, even though ten years after the end of the war on Wunderland a party of four young humans, two of them girls, and two young kzinti, did not look particularly threatening. The human students had a couple of slung strakkakers as well as their collecting guns (unusual strakkakers on Wunderland in that they had large trigger-guards and given the right personalized coding could be operated by kzin as well as human hands) but Vaemar and the other kzin, Swirl-Stripes, carried only their w'tsais here. Vaemar presented the abbot's letter of introduction.
Marshy ushered them in. One large room, lined with shelves on which curious odds and ends were interspersed with old books, had as its dominating feature a great sweep of curved window, once plainly the main viewport of a spaceship's bridge. Its upper part gave a panoramic view of a maze of islands, channels and sloughs, with here and there in the distance open water rippling and sparkling in the sun. Its lower part extended below the water-line, giving a view like a great aquarium. Some of the life-forms they saw would have been recognizable to a terrestrial biologist as examples of parallel evolution. Some, a few, were introduced creatures from Earth. Some were familiar Wunderland creatures. Some were still utterly strange. There were comfortable viewing arrangements, even a kzin-sized indoor fooch as well as human couches in front of the great window. Vaemar wandered over to it as Swirl-Stripes and the human students appropriated the seating. Rosalind MacGowan came to the window beside him. Marshy dialed them refreshments.
'He told me you were coming,' he said. 'Asked me to keep an eye on you. Don't know if I can do much in that direction. And you appear capable of looking after yourselves. What do you know about the Great Ghost? Have you been here before?'
'Only round the edges,' said Rosalind, 'with Professor Rykermann, as Hon… as Vaemar will tell you.'
'Most of us only know it round the edges,' Marshy said. 'Do you know what you're looking for?'
'Life in the center. New life,' said Vaemar. 'And anything else worth studying. New ecological relationships, for example. Urrr.' His ears betrayed the equivalent of a human frown of concentration as he spoke.
'You are… abstractly curious?'
'Yes.'
'Umm… I see.' There was a flicker of a new expression in the man's bleak old face. 'I was there just after the Liberation. Everything dead. The water still covered with floating carrion. It made me sick and I've seldom been back. But I suppose nature's tidied the place up in its own way now.'
'That's what we want to measure,' said Anne von Lufft, her face and voice full of eagerness. 'The extent to which the center is being re-colonized.'
'Can't you do it with satellites?'
'Not in enough detail,' said Hugo Muller. 'Some of the life-forms are small. And satellites are expensive. There's no substitute for being on the ground.'
'That's the right answer,' said Marshy. 'Also, I suppose, there's not much thesis-fodder to be had from satellite readings.'
'We're only third-years,' said Toby Hill. 'They're not big theses.'
'But they might lead to big theses,' said Marshy. 'What do you want an old swamp-hermit to do for you?'
'Tell us about Grossgeister,' said Swirl-Stripes.
'That would take eight minutes or eight lifetimes.' He touched a button and a map was thrown up on one wall. 'You know its center is an ancient meteor crater, like Circle Bay itself. Or in this case, more than one crater. The bigger islands are mainly remnants of ancient ring-walls. It's big. No one knows it all. You can't even map it by satellite because satellites can't tell all that's land and all that's shallow water, or see through overhanging forest. Peat burns under the surface in places and makes smoke and steam. A lot of the boundaries between land and water can't be defined, anyway. Many of the channels and marshlands and smaller islands change. In the wider waters the currents build up sand bars and tear them down.
'There are stretches like a great river of vegetation, miles wide and a couple of inches deep. It's fed by rivers and by the sea and by underground springs. Part of its shallow, part of its fresh, part of its deep, part of its salty from the sea. There are wide stretches of open water. Men who have lived in it longer than I have perished, without modern navigation aids or smart boats, only a short way from home, lost in channels and islands that all look exactly like each other. Nobody's ever known everything that lives-or lived-in it.
'Humans have always fossicked round the edge of Grossgeister, but in the three hundred years we've been on this planet, we've never tamed it. We've hunted in its margins and its creeks ever since the first explorations-but from the first day we've had a feeling it was also hunting us. Your kzin Sires'-he told Vaemar and Swirl- Stripes-'never took much interest apart from the military aspects-of course you like to hunt dry-footed.'
'We can conquer water,' said Swirl-Stripes.
'You know that the heart was cooked out of it. The kzinti used the heat-induction ray when a particularly troublesome gang of Wascal Wabbits took refuge there. Then, during the Liberation, a big kzin cruiser was shot down. It came down slowly, and there were survivors who went on fighting for a while. The hulk's still there, as far as I know. I suggest you leave it alone. I take it you've had basic ROTC training and know better than to
