'How do you feel, General?' Cumpston asked. 'About the wedding, I mean.'
'As I should feel, I guess,' Guthlac told him. 'Scared. Happy. I've never been married before. I want to be with Gale for the rest of my life. I want lots of children and I want them to live here on Wunderland. I'd like to get her farm back into proper production. Big John can help now he's been patched up. Earth's been too crowded and conformist for a long time. I don't particularly care if I never see it again. I'd like my children here. And none of those damned birth restrictions!'
'We had to have them. It's the only reason we've been able to keep the crowding down a bit.'
'Yes, but Earth hasn't kept the blandness down. Or the conformity and police control, more than a little of which I had a hand in making. As somebody said: 'I've seen some terrible things and a lot of them I caused.' But I see what I've been missing now. Wunderland is full of surprises still. Gale was the best of them.'
The red telephone on Guthlac's desk called him, then went into battle-secret mode, vibrations keyed to his personal implant. He listened to it, then stared at it with curious expression.
'That was Defense Headquarters,' he said at length. 'A message has just come in on the hyperwave.'
'I gather it's something important. Are you going to tell me?' There was something like consternation behind Cumpston's voice as he stared at Guthlac. The brigadier had raised a hand and was wiping away tears.
'Oh, yes, it's important. And I'm going to tell you. Everybody will know soon enough anyway. McDonald and the Patriarch's negotiator have signed a treaty. Humanity and the Kzin Empire are at peace. Sixty-six years after first contact. It's a funny feeling.' He looked at the wetness of the tears on his hand with surprise.
'Peace. It's a funny word, Arthur.'
'It's going to take some getting used to… For the kzinti, too. I doubt they've ever been at peace with anyone before.'
'Some geneticists have speculated,' said Cumpston, 'that the war has changed the kzinti. Killed off their most aggressive individuals, made the species less dangerous.'
'And some,' said Guthlac, 'have speculated that the war has changed them by killing off their most stupid and reckless individuals, and made the species more cunning and more dangerous.'
'I know. What do we believe?'
'After sixty-six years of war, there must still be a place for optimism, for hope… for ideals. Otherwise we are indeed no better than animals.'
'Yes.' Cumpstom raised his eyes to the window. 'Does the sky look different to you.'
They both stared at it for a long time. 'Yes. Or I think it will soon. Do you believe death is not going to fall out of it again?'
'I'm trying to…' Cumpston said. 'I hope our kzin friends here will be pleased… I mean our real kzin friends… Vaemar, Raargh, Karan… Big John.'
'You think of them first? You're a funny bird, Michael.'
'Vaemar's always been vulnerable to a certain stain: quisling, collaborator. Maybe that's gone now.'
'Vaemar was only a kitten when the kzin forces on Wunderland surrendered. A lost, orphaned kitten, when Rarrgh took him in. Should he have fought to the death against us with his milk-teeth? Anyway, even if there's now a cease-fire in space, I doubt it means the likes of Vaemar can come and go between here and the Patriarchy just like that.'
'Perhaps he can one day. Another thing I'm realizing: we don't have to use Baphomet.'
'No.' Baphomet was something very new, which the two officers had been briefed on shortly before. It was an update of the old idea of a disrupter bomb. A complex carrier designed to penetrate deep into the crust of a suitable planet, and set off explosions which, it was calculated, could turn over a tectonic plate. It had been tried on a lifeless world orbiting Proxima Centauri and had worked. Had the target's geology been a little different, Proxima would have become a twin star sub-system.
'Sorry, Arthur, I'm still trying to get my mind around it all. There's a lot to think about. It's going to take a while to digest. But your children, and Gale's, can maybe grow up in a better time.'
'Give me a chance to get some first!'
'Me too, perhaps.'
They both laughed, and Guthlac poured celebratory drinks.
There had been a resumption of brief and cryptic messages from Chorth-Captain. He had established himself on Ka'ashi. He had discovered an arms depot, and a mighty ally. It was time to leap.
Kzaargh-Commodore had broken his rule of maximum possible silence. He sent back interrogatories. The replies remained cryptic. Things were going better than expected. The ally was unexpected but potent. Attack!
The kzinti had no allies. Other races were enemies, prey or slaves. It was inconceivable that the kzinti needed allies. Or rather, Kzaargh-commodore thought, struggling like so many kzinti to fathom an utterly new situation, it had been inconceivable that the kzinti needed allies. His crew trod softly for he was puzzled and angry. He had sent more interrogatories, but Chorth-Captain had fallen silent again.
Fury, puzzlement, impatience… and hope. He had become capable of waiting no longer.
There was a comet which he had marked out, a large and highly volatile one, plainly destined to a short life. Hiding as he might in its tail, he turned his ship and plunged back towards Ka'ashi.
A pod of dolphins broke surface in the car's flying shadow as the Ocean rolled away below. Dimity called them. The communicator was programmed to translate into Dolphin, and Dimity had picked up some of their concepts long ago.
They exchanged pleasantries, but with difficulty. During the decades of war many dolphins had come to maturity in the oceans of Wunderland with little knowledge of the human partners who had brought them as fellow enthusiastic colonists across interstellar space. Cooperation was being rebuilt slowly, and though the humans of Earth had employed some dolphins in their war-fleets as strategists it was hard to know how much these Wunderland dolphins knew-or cared-of the kzinti or current events. Still, they were friendly to the human walkers, and asked if, like their fathers, they might trade for hands. Dimity recorded their identities.
Little Southland was not very little. It was a detachment of Wunderland's southern continent, a knife-shaped triangle of land stabbing towards the South Pole, with a total area of 17,000 square miles, much of it cool to cold desert like Patagonia. With the temperate areas of Wunderland still empty or only sparsely settled, there was no need to cultivate it. There were some military installations and a few scientific ones.
Its population of avianoids was its main macrobiological interest. Varieties of creatures with vast striking beaks resembling the diatrymas of Earth's Eocene roamed it, and there were some introduced Earth birds, too: The 'banana belt' of the northern coastal regions had a climate not unlike the south of New Zealand and there were a few ranches for reconstituted and slightly modified moas, strongly fenced in and over to protect them from the savage and powerful locals.
The car climbed. Vaemar and Dimity approached the land at about ten miles' height, searching with instruments.
'There!' A fuzzy radiation signature, but one that matched the record in the brick. Dimity tracked an optical telescope in.
'Nothing that shows on the surface,' said Vaemar. 'It would be hidden, of course.'
'Granite everywhere. Hot granite. That won't make following a radiation trail easier.'
They deployed a deep-radar scanner. A faint but unnatural grid of lines became visible. Vaemar grinned and his claws slid from their sheaths. 'Prey,' he said, and then: 'We must give no cause for suspicion. Dimity, take over flying. If anyone contacts us, better that they see your face than mine.'
There were interrogatory signals coming in from the scientific and military stations on the ground, but the car answered them automatically with the University's code and signature. They descended. Vaemar and then Dimity could make out the movement of life-forms on the surface. They changed into lightweight combat/utility suits, Vaemar's leaving his claws free, and Dimity adding a helmet with breathing mask, and landed.
