won't let him in. It's unlucky for the groom to see the bride before the wedding.'
'If Vaemar,' said Karan, 'I'll not see him till finished here.' She applied a little nontoxic gold paint to the tips of her fangs and surveyed the result thoughtfully.
'And Tabitha?'
'News will keep,' Karan told her. 'Want to break not all at once. Better still, perhaps, let him find out for self. Proud quicker if his discovery, I think. He's got lot to adjust to.'
'He's a genius,' said Leonie. 'He'll adjust.' Her voice trailed off. The word 'genius' was haunted for her. She thought of another genius trying to adjust. Then, a moment later: 'It's not Vaemar. It's Nils.'
'Is he all right?' asked Gale. 'None of them were due yet.'
'Why didn't you tell Arthur about Morlocks?' Vaemar asked. It was night and Rykermann, bringing Leonie back to Munchen, had summoned him. Rykermann had told him in private code that there were secret matters to discuss.
'I was about to,' Rykermann told him. 'Then I remembered Early. And Arthur reports to Early, wherever he may be now. I'm not sure that I wanted Early nipping trouble in the bud by sending a comet or asteroid into the Hohe Kalkstein. Or worse. Never forget what a totally ruthless swine Early is. I believe there's more unevolved Pak in him than in most of us…
'I'd like to be able to go back to Arthur and report the stuff is safe or destroyed before I give either of them the happy news that we spent so much toil and blood to deposit tree-of-life with a colony of Pak breeders who are really unevolved. Let's destroy the stuff first. Or make sure it is destroyed.'
'Unevolved? Or evolved differently?' asked Vaemar.
'Leonie and I were discussing that a very long time ago. When she was a student, before the first reports of the kzinti began coming in. The Angel's Pencil warnings, the disappearing ships… It seems like another age. But plainly the Morlocks have remained far closer to the original Pak breeders than humans have… And it was another age. It was a good post-graduate class I had. She's the only survivor of it.'
'I raised the question then,' said Leonie. 'Why, after coming so far from the direction of the Core, hadn't the Pak gone one small and logical step further and planted a second colony a mere four light-years away on Wunderland? And we found the answer: they did. I remember spooning a fossil out of the cave floor, cleaning it with sonics, inch by inch, day by day, finding the analogues of human bones and organs that no alien life-form had any right to possess. DNA from live specimens confirmed it. It was going to be my doctoral thesis. I even began wondering about plans to somehow… rehabilitate… them when my work had made me famous. Then, er… no offence… our studies were rudely interrupted… Nils set me and the other post-grads to work analyzing an orange hair he'd found…'
'In any case, it seemed interesting and even exciting before the invasion, but not important, the way our priorities were after that,' said Rykermann. 'If there was any reason to worry about potential Pak Protectors, there were several million around in the form of humans anyway, even if we hadn't suddenly found ourselves with other things on our minds.'
'I'd asked Earth to send us everything known about the Pak, although the university had the basic texts here. Not much more had arrived before the invasion. Partly caution at the Earth end, I suppose. The Pak story was like the knowledge in the early Middle Ages of the Earth being a spheroid. Scientists knew about it and it wasn't exactly secret, but people didn't talk about it much. Partly, there simply wasn't much known. Besides, the university had a limited budget for buying interstellar maser time…
'Presumably tree-of-life failed here for the same reason it failed on Earth and the Protectors eventually died. As on Earth, some breeders survived.'
'But there were differences,' Leonie told Vaemar. 'You know because of Wunderland's lighter gravity the caves are much bigger here than on Earth or Kzinhome. Big enough to be inhabited by large life-forms on a permanent basis. There are fewer roof-collapses and the slower flow of water means larger volumes of limestone are dissolved in ballroom chambers and honeycombs rather than along the narrow lines of stream-courses. With the mynocks and other flying things there is a lot more protein being brought into the caves than is usually the case on Earth. The breeders moved into the caves-possibly to escape tigripards or other predators-and found themselves on top of the food chains there.
'Without many predators or competitors in the caves and without weather or any need to devise shelter or protection from it-without rain or heat or ice-ages-they were under far less evolutionary pressure than were the breeders on Earth. Those grew up fighting leopards on the savannah.'
'Leopards?' asked Vaemar. 'I remember, they are…'
'Big cats. Fighting such creatures is a good way to sort out the cleverest as survivors.'
'I see.'
'The caves were like a great womb they never had to leave, and in which they had almost no need to develop. Possibly the radiation from the Pak ships and engines on Earth also caused mutations that didn't occur here. Anyway, these breeders on Wunderland didn't need many brains. They also escaped the worst of the meteor impacts that have obviously affected evolution on the surface here. In fact the meteor-impacts would probably have helped them by changing water-levels and giving the caves more suspended tables and more habitable layers of chambers.
'In this gravity they were well-muscled and already well suited for leaping and clinging to stalactites and so forth. Once their eyes and other senses adapted to the dark, their evolution must have almost ceased, as it has with many life-forms in Earth caves. On Earth there is a species of crustacean found in caves in Australia whose close relatives live in caves in the Canary Islands and the Carribean. They hardly changed in the time continental drift separated them so far.'
Rykermann nodded.
'Earth scientists think Homo sapiens is not all Pak in its inheritance,' he said. 'The theory is that the original Pak Protectors probably modified the breeder population to better fit the Earth ecosystem and biochemistry. Sewed in the genetic material of Earth primates. That is why humans seem to fit well into the Earth animal kingdom… It also raises the possibility that the breeders on Wunderland were not so modified, or modified differently. It's patently obvious that they have never developed anything resembling a civilization. We three know that all too well. Predatory bands, with rudimentary stone weapons, almost entirely carnivorous…'
Rykermann went to a collecting pannier.
'And there is your latest specimen, Vaemar.' He produced a translucent container and handed it to his pupil. 'It is dry and withered, but…'
Vaemar turned the thing over. 'A Morlock infant or late-term fetus. A mummy.'
'Or a human infant or fetus, perhaps?'
'It could be, I suppose,' said Leonie. 'There were children who took refuge in the caves during the war. Maybe this was a stillbirth. Or an abortion by some poor child. They had no birth control.'
'Damaged as it is,' said Rykermann, 'it has sufficient characteristics of both species to puzzle us as to its identification, does it not? I think it may be a hybrid. A human-Morlock hybrid, not carried to term. And humans and Morlocks are meant to have evolved under different stars. It should be as impossible as… as a human-Kzin hybrid. Add that to the DNA profiles. Anyway, Vaemar, just let me know if the stuff's still there, and sealed. Obviously, take all precautions for dealing with dangerous material. And don't forget there's radioactive material there as well.'
'What you say about Early-' said Vaemar. 'Are the Protectors so dangerous? I would have thought we had the power to conquer them.'
'Yes,' said Rykermann. 'They are so dangerous. Arthur's told me quite a lot, apart from what Earth sent us. The one human Protector we know of, Brennan, was a Sol Belter, an evolved, modern man, the product of many generations of civilization and science and imbued with the values of benevolence and cooperation that are part of all the great human religious and ethical systems. Also, fortunately, he was a good man.
'When he became a Protector he adopted the entire human race and his interventions in human affairs were benevolent as well as secret. He probably saved Earth from perishing in war, over-population and pollution, even if he then nearly killed us with kindness by making us almost too gentle and pacifist to resist when your lot came
