'Now to find our missing pair.'
Guthlac wiped his forehead. 'They're alive,' he said at last.
He pointed to the screen before him. A ship could be stealthed, but, at least for a time, its passage through atmosphere could not. 'That could be the trace of the ship.'
'It could be.' The instrumentation showed a faint trail of atmospheric disturbance, dissipating as they watched.
'If that's a ship, it's got the best cloaking I've ever seen. Beyond the atmosphere there will be no way to follow it.'
'We are looking for Protectors. Rykermann thinks the Hollow Moon was the original Protector ship. Could they be heading for it?'
Guthlac punched numbers. 'It gives us somewhere to start looking,' he said.
'I've got them,' he said at last. 'Extreme range, and there's interference, but that's where they are.' He turned to Albert Manteufel, his pilot. 'Take her up!'
'Gnosticism…' said Vaemar thoughtfully. 'You said it is the idea of man becoming a god through his own inner efforts, or having a secret piece of god-ness inside him…' The Protector had gone, leaving them together in what they were coming to think of as 'their' room.
'I think that's what it means,' said Dimity. 'Salvation by knowledge. Gnostics were 'people who knew,' and therefore spiritually superior beings. Perhaps a sort of race-memory of the Breeder-Protector cycle. But as I said, I'm not a theologian. The abbot once told me that almost all serious heresies are forms of gnosticism. He also said that, given that the universe had been created, it didn't matter much in religious terms where Man came from biologically, what mattered was where we were going spiritually.'
'That Protector would seem to justify this gnosticism,' said Vaemar. 'A being turning into a god.'
'I don't think so,' said Dimity. 'The kzinti wouldn't say that, would they?'
'No. Our souls go to the Fanged God, and are devoured by Him after a good hunt.'
'And that's the end? It sounds rather bleak to a human.'
'No. The souls of cowards are regurgitated into… well, the human word is Hell. The souls of Heroes go on somehow, but as it said we have only hints about that. It is a Mystery. But the hints are enough for us to have fought wars over them.'
'And I don't think the abbot would say this is a case of beings turning into gods,' said Dimity. 'That thing is not a god, it is just a fast calculating machine… less human than a human, almost incapable of choice, almost without the advantages of limitation and imperfection. Mentally like me, only more so. As impaired as I am.'
'No, Dimity, not like you.'
'You are a chess master, Vaemar. Is it not true for you as for me that you come to some point in chess where you no longer seem to be moving the pieces, but rather watching them move.'
'Yes, the moves become inevitable.'
'Choice disappears. My life has been like that-watching equations become inevitable. As I think a Protector sees the world. I do not think this Protector sees it in such terms yet. But it will soon.'
'Was it like that even when you were a cub… a child?'
'I got a lot of my memories back with being on Wunderland and with the treatments… I can say: especially when I was a cub. I did not speak for the first few years of my life, because there seemed nothing worth saying. Why state the obvious?'
'Humans often do. And I think it is another habit we are catching from them. I have noticed we Wunderkzin tend to talk more even when we do not need to.'
'Yes, humans often do. I didn't. I watched it all happen. The tests, the brain scans. I recorded my parents weeping over me as I looked up at them without expression because there was nothing to express, their whispers about 'abnormal alpha waves,' 'Asperger's Syndrome,' 'moron…' 'there are special schools…' 'Love and cherish her…' It was the fritinancy of insects.
'I sat in a playpen in my father's study while he worked, watching him at his keyboard, the equations crawling across his computer screen. They put in swings, and made little tunnels for me to explore and there were all sorts of books and toys that lay on the floor. I sat there and heard Father talk with his colleagues. One of them had a son, a very bright little boy to whom Father gave lessons in calculus. Postgraduate students, too-he took some tutorials with the cleverest of them in his house. I listened in my playpen, and later, sitting on my chair. I didn't do much. I did not speak much but I was puzzled, and eventually angry-why were they so slow? Why did they use such clumsy and incomplete symbols? Why did they not bring down their quarry-tidily, simply, beautifully? At length I decided to find out. That curiousity I had about humanity was the little, vestigial thread I had connecting me to it.
'One day, when I was seven, Father came in and found me at the keyboard. I remember how his face lit up. That was the first time a human's emotions had touched me. 'Who's a clever little girl then?' he cried. Then he shouted to Mother: 'Moira! Moira! Come and look! She's playing!' Then I saw him lift his eyes. He saw what was on the screen, and I saw his face change. His mouth began to twist, his hands went up to his mouth, and I knew he was fighting back a scream. By the time Mother arrived, he had stopped shaking.
''We do have a clever little… girl,' he said, taking Mother's arm, and pointing. And already I heard him stumble over that word 'girl.' Girls are human, you see. They both stared at it for a long time.
''Can it be what I think it is?' But Mother was no longer looking at the screen when she said that. She was looking at me. It must be hard to have the realization hit you in a second that you have given birth to a monster, a freak. Father printed everything off and looked at it for a long time.
''I think I understand the implications of the simpler equations,' he said. 'I think it shatters a principal paradigm of our knowledge of paraphysical forces… One of the paradigms… At least one…' Then he began to laugh, a strange laugh such as I had never heard before.
'I was getting bored again by that time, so I gave them a lecture. Rebuked Father for his slowness and stupidity. Told him I was angry at the limitations of the symbols he used. It was hard on my vocal chords because I'd used them so little before and that made me angry, too. Wondered at their tears. Thus began the career of Dimity Carmody. More tests, more brain-scans. The special schools-I told you I'd heard them speak of special schools-and everything else. Lessons in how to choose good clothes, for example. How to do my hair. Looking normal is a big part of being normal. Efforts to socialize the machine, the monster, with chess and music, to teach it to relate to human beings. They strengthened the little, little thread that connected me to normal humanity.'
'You laugh. You weep, Dimity,' said Vaemar. 'I have seen your eyes when you behold a sunrise. I saw you toiling in the cave to keep Leonie alive as shots and flame flew about you. Never say you are a machine. As for a monster… do I look like a monster to you?'
'No. You are splendidly evolved to be what you are.'
'A killing machine?'
'Of course not! Or that is the start. You are a carnivore, a great carnivore, a mighty hunter, top of your food chain. But you, Vaemar, are so much else as well.'
'Yes. I am, thanks to the successful human reconquest of Wunderland, one of the few surviving examples under any star of an introspective kzin. Monstrous to normal members of my own kind, like Chorth-Captain. But we must not be sorry for ourselves. Would you, Dimity, really be different if you had the choice?'
'It is difficult to say. But I think not.'
'Nor I.'
'The only kzinti I know well are you and your Honored Step-Sire Raargh Hero,' said Dimity. 'And I know that Raargh, too, in his gruff old way, is not merely valiant. He can be thoughtful, and chivalrous, as well. I do not forget that I owe him my life, or the pain he got saving me. We are both of species that have a great potential, and a paltry expression of it. But sometimes something shines through.'
'I know you and I are not machines, merely because we can think, or because we are different to the norm of our respective kinds,' said Vaemar.
'You have all the abilities of a young male kzin, and something else,' said Dimity. 'You are more than kzin. But
