The swamp changed. Channels grew wider and deeper, but the life about them grew less abundant. They were approaching the dead heart of Grossgeister. When the kzinti had concentrated the heat-induction ray on it, most of the vegetation had been too wet to burn quickly, but the waters had boiled, including the liquid that made up a good part of the internal volumes of the typical Wunderland swamp-plants. Tides and currents since then had washed away most of the masses of dead animal and vegetable organic matter, and some life-forms had begun to re-colonize the area.
With the channels generally wider here, the water was clear and empty down to a pale sandy bottom, though processions of large fish could now at times be seen swimming in from other areas. The stands of vegetation on the islands were mostly dead and crumbling. Among the grey of the dead plants on the islands some new red shoots were now beginning to appear. Crocodilians and other large animal life-forms which had scrambled or somehow flung themselves ashore in an attempt to avoid the boiling water were skeletons lining the island banks. There were human skeletons among them, too. It had, after all, been humans the kzinti had been after. Once they saw sunlight gleaming on metal among the bones: a pair of dolphin hands. Apart from the sound of the waters this part of the swamp was still very silent. The flying things stayed where there was more food.
They picked an island with relatively few bones and dead vegetation for their camp that night, where a sparse fringe of reeds was beginning to grow back in the clear shallows, and had their electronic defenses set up well before Alpha Centauri A began to sink. The boat was too stupid to defend itself but they hoped that would not be necessary. It was agreed one kzin and one human would be on watch at all times. Vaemar telephoned Marshy, the abbot and the University giving the basic details of the disappearances and saying that they required no assistance as yet. The long war had made the humans of Wunderland, as well as the kzinti, a fiercely independent and self- reliant culture. They would get no help unless they asked for it. Vaemar tried to open the bricks he had taken, using the boat's computer, but they made no sense and appeared to have been deliberately scrambled.
As the night deepened, so did the sadness of the scene: apart from a few swimmers there were almost none of the spectacular bioluminescent displays of the outer marches. Instead of the swamp growing noisier as it took up the business of the night, it grew even quieter.
'It feels as if Zeitungers were around,' said Anne. Zeitungers were shuffling, gluttonous vermin related to Advokats, carrion-eaters who outdid Advokats by possessing a limited psi ability to broadcast mental depression and nausea. Humans and kzinti alike hated them even worse than they did Advokats or the fluffy white, blue-eyed, poisoned-fanged Beam's Beasts. They were, however, not known as swamp creatures.
'I don't think they are necessary here,' said Vaemar. 'This scenery is sad.'
'You feel it too?'
'Of course.' Then he added: 'You were sorry when we found the dead kitten.'
'Of course. We all were.'
'I thought so. Our kinds are still killing one another in space, you know, and on other planets.'
'But not here.'
'So it seems. I hope you are right… You do not hate kzinti?'
'The abbot says we should be grateful to you for a number of things. He said it was thanks to you that we rediscovered the whole moral universe that we had been in danger of forgetting-courage, sacrifice, faith… And you know I do not hate you, Vaemar.'
'Fear us, then?'
'Why do you ask? Are you trying to understand us?'
'Yes. I think I make some progress.'
'Should I help you understand humans? I think of a human politician I once heard of: 'He worked tirelessly to promote greater understanding between nations that understood one another only too well already.''
'That seems to me a very human thought… And you can think a little like one of my kind… But I am your fellow-student accepted into the university. I am also your superior officer in the ROTC. Further, I am younger than you. Is it not seemly to instruct the young?'
She might laugh, but she did not smile at him. Not smiling at kzinti, not showing the teeth in the kzin challenge for battle, was still, ten years after Liberation, a conditioned reflex for humans.
'I was ten years old at Liberation. By then my family farmed in the high country northeast of the Hohe Kalkstein. We seldom saw kzinti. I, for myself, as a child, did not really understand hate. Kzinti were above and beyond my hate. But fear, yes, and yes. A lucky human family was one with but a few dead to mourn. My family were unusually lucky, I know now, or rather my grandfather was foresighted to get us away. Near the towns, even in Gerning, things were very different. We paid our taxes, and the local Herrenmann had the task of representing us to the kzinti. We had strong rules for survival by then. I knew no different life.
'One thing I remember. Kzin words were starting to creep into our language from the slaves' patois. Once, my parents caught me using some new kzin word, or a word derived from the Heroes' Tongue. My mother wanted to punish me, but my father said: 'No, she must learn it. That is the future.' That day I ran away. I was in the forest for a day and a night until a search party found me. My father's words were echoing in my mind. 'That is the future.''
'There are plenty of human words invading the kzin tongues on Wunderland now,' Vaemar said.
'Our little farm was not much,' Anne went on. 'There were few of our old possessions left-a few pieces of china and crystal from old Neue Dresden, a few old paper books. Things like that. An old woman taught us children in a one-roomed school, and her work was increasing, for there was no way to repair our computers. Our robots had begun to fail and some of the farms near us were ploughing again with animals. Our culture was little enough, but I knew fear then, for somehow I was old enough to understand what my father meant. To see it all going, soon all gone. All, all, all…'
'I see,' said Vaemar. 'Like the Jotok. Like most conquered races… I would have said like all conquered races, if I had not begun studying Earth history, and… if I had not certain thoughts…'
'I know little of the Jotok but the name. A name that was an omen of fear for some among us, as I discovered later when I began higher studies. An indication of what we would become. Once your allies?'
'Once our… employers. How could a culture like ours have developed a science of spaceflight? When we reached the stars we found we were the only culture of warrior carnivores that leapt and hunted there. We did find a few other sapient carnivores, some of which had got up to knives and spears, and they gave us good sport on their own planets. We found alien spacefaring races, but they were scientific and civilized and cooperative, and when we met them and enslaved them as the Fanged God had decreed they could hardly put up the ghost of a fight… All but the last one, of course…
'The Jotok had hired us as mercenaries and security guards for their trade empire… I do not know how many powers of eights of years ago. On the worlds of the Kzin Patriarchy they are our slaves and prey, and hardly a trace of their civilization remains except in our naval equipment-and words like 'navy,' I suppose. You must have noticed that for cats our spacefaring has an incongruously nautical vocabulary: we had little to do with the sea on our Homeworld. I guess the Jotok began as seafarers. They live in water when they are young. There is a legend that a few of them escaped at the end of that war when our long-sires turned on them and removed their flesh, a legend of a Free Jotok Fleet, waiting and vengeful somewhere in space, but I do not believe it feasible. Too much time has passed and we have seen no sign of it. It may be one of those… urrr… necessary legends, like the old prophecies of Kdarka-Riit. You know of them?'
'A little.'
'There is one he composed when relaxing replete with the rest of his pride after a successful kz'eerkti-hunt on Homeworld.' Vaemar quoted:
'Oh, Race of Heroes, have a care. Tree-swinging monkeys are not all That wait. Pride may precede a fall When under distant stars you fare. 'Your claws pull down each alien race. Each is your prey, and our God's laws Deliver them into your jaws. So thought the Jotok in your place…
'But of course you know how hard it is to preserve the nuances when translating rhyme into rhyme… some think there is a hint of an emotion in that stanza which we have no word for, but which has a human name…' His voice trailed off. The priesthood, then as now, had not liked prophets outside their own prides, and a prophet whose Full Name had included any suffix other than Riit would not have got away with it. Unspoken, another verse from the sage's ancient chant, recently resurrected by a few Conservors of the Ancestral Past, ran through his mind:
Death then for many. For some few Another, stranger fate will be: Tree-swingers who have left the tree Will
