crouched to lap up a drink; instinctively, their muzzles rose every second or two to scan the surroundings.
“We contributed less than a quarter of the capital, yet we are to have equal shares,” Spots replied. “You would complain if a monkey brought you a zianya with its muzzle already taped.”
Bigs yawned enormously and licked his lips. “Zianya
– ah, the first mouthful, full of fear-juices! With dipping sauce and grashti on the side.” He paused. “Yet I would complain if a monkey brought one. It is disgraceful to be dependent upon them.”
“Silence, fool. You did not complain when they were our slaves-and we were even more dependent on them then! Ready-strike.”
This rush carried them to the line of supports, where the next hole waited.
“You are a whisker-splitter,” Bigs said, unlimbering his cutting bar They had dropped the thigh-thick end of the log across a boulder, leaving it at comfortable chest height. With four swift strokes he trimmed the hard wood to a point.
“Besides,” Spots continued, raising his voice slightly from the other end of the log, where he belayed a loop of cable to a hole punched through the wood. “There are probably no zianyas closer than Hssin.”
They whined; zianyas were a homeworld beast, and they had never flourished in the ecology of Wunderland, unlike many other kzinti animals. Before the human hyperdrive armada arrived some kzin estates had specialized in rearing them, coaxing them to reproduce and investing in expensive gravity-polarizer sheds to rear them under homeworld gravity, 1.55 of Earth’s. Most of those had been smashed in the fighting, or confiscated in the aftermath of liberation, and the markets were vanished now that kzinti were few and poor in a human-ruled Wunderland.
“Reason enough to shake the dust of this world from our paws,” Bigs went on. “Push-slowly, slowly.”
Spots heaved with a steady pressure on the smaller end of the log, as his brother guided the point to the lip of the hole. As he did, his ears waggled ostentatiously.
“Yes-I can see us prostrating ourselves before the Patriarch’s Cushion. ‘Admittedly we did surrender to the omnivores and obey them; nevertheless we long to have Full Names and be permitted to maintain the noble-sized households we, the penniless refugees, have brought.’ Aha! The Patriarch’s liver overflows with kin-feeling for us! His pelt stands on end with joy at our scent! With his own hands, he serves us tuna ice cream. He awards us Names; he allows us possession of every one of our kzinretti; he grants us vast estates on the extremely expensive savannahs of Homeworld…”
His lips flapped derisively against his teeth in imitation of a kzinti snore; you dreamer, it implied. “We could not even afford passage to kzinti space without human help.”
“That may change,” Bigs said, grimly sliding out his claws. Long silvery needles against the black leather of his hands. “That may change…”
“Not without gold,” Spots replied. He took the end of the cable in his mouth and climbed the wall of the canyon with a bounding four-footed rush; kzinti had evolved hands to help them climb rocks.
“Next one ready!” he called, dropping back into Wunderlander. Jonah and Hans straightened; the older man groaned, kneading his hands into the small of his back. “Reave this to the block line.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Gracious lord God, but these are primitive! Tyra Nordbo thought.
Friendly enough, but so backward. The village was hidden, with dwellings of straw and bamboo tucked deep under an overhang of rock. There was a waterfall at one end of the little valley, and channels irrigated gardens of banana, citrus and vegetables. There were goats and sheep, a few horses… and that was all. There was plenty to eat here, but not a book, not a powered tool, not a single comp or receiver. The only metal or synthetic was what their ancestors had brought in, fleeing as refugees from the first wave of kzinti conquest There were things here that had been only names to her before: opthamalia, cataracts, club-foot, harelip. She shuddered at the thought, even as she made herself smile and accept an opened coconut from a smiling woman. At least the settlement was fairly clean. And the people walked with pride.
I thought we were badly off in Skognara during the occupation, she mused, Machinery wearing out, more and more hand labor, the kzin tribute abating not one whit. It was paradise compared to this. The thought of the labor and loneliness these people had endured was chilling. Only by cutting themselves off completely from the money economy had they been able to stay out of the kzinti sight, but that meant no machinery, no medicine, no help in the disasters of everyday life… They were touchingly awed at having one of the Nineteen Families here, as well. There was no mistaking what she was, of course; everything from her accent to the mobile ears that twitched forward at a sound betrayed it. It u humbling.
“Why did you stay here?” she asked the leathery old headman of the… village seemed inappropriate. Compared to this, Neu Friborg was like downtown Munchen. And the headman was probably only fifty or so, not even middle-aged by civilized standards.
His grandfather had been a orbital shuttle pilot.
“We are free, Fra Nordbo,” the man said proudly. “Here, we pay no tribute to the enemy. None of them has ever came here-except one on a hunting trip.”
He nodded proudly to a ledge above the plaited-cane doorway. The skull that grinned with yellowed fangs looked much like a cat’s, or a tigripard’s, until you saw the long braincase that swept back from the heavy brows. A creature that thought, and made tools, and hunted Man. Until some Men hunted it…
“We had the pelt,” the villager went on regretfully, “but it rotted in my father’s time.”
“The kzinti are gone,” Tyra said gently. “Gone from all this world. None remain except those who accept human rule. You have no need to hide anymore.”
The man’s face fell slightly. “I know,” he said. “A fur hunter told us the news ten months ago.” More slowly:
“You are of the Herrenfolk, Fra Nordbo,” he said. “Since the war is over, folk have come from the Great City. They speak of taxes, of land titles-of taking our children for schools.”
“You understand,” he went on, leaning closer earnestly. “We do not want to be isolated any more… not really. We know we have forgotten much. But we are free. Some say the folk of Munchen wish to grind us down, that they think of us as ignorant savages.”
You are, poor creatures. No fault of yours, Tyra thought sadly.
“What shall we do?” he said. “We know nothing of these matters-only what the officials of the new government tell us. Some say we should move again, as our ancestors did-move back even further into the mountains, and live free. There are others like us in the Jotuns, they might help.”
“Even the Jotuns are not large enough to shield you from Time and Fate,” Tyra said gently. “You need a friend who can intervene for you in Munchen. I know a good man, a Herrenmann, who would be your protector. But even so, change will come. It must; your children deserve to have the world opened up to them once more. Wunderland is once more a planet of Man, and there is no reason to deny them the stars.”
“Thank you,” the headman said, wiping at his eyes one palm; the calluses scraped against the blond-gray stubble on his cheeks. “We will try it.”
The headman’s daughter came in, with a tray: slices of roast wild boar and gagrumpher, steamed plantain, sauces, the rough homemade wine. Tyra’s mouth filled at the smell; her own camp-cooking had grown tiresome.
“his good of one of the Freunchen clan to take time for our troubles,” the headman went on.
“Duty,” Tyra mumbled. Embarrassing. Perhaps only in a place as out-of-the-way as this, as completely isolated from the past century, could you find that sort of faith in the Nineteen Families and their tradition of stewardship.
“We must do what we can for you, who helped those who were strangers,” he said.
“Murphmmhg?” she replied, then swallowed. “You’ve already helped me,” she said. Quite sincerely; a month in the wilderness with nobody but her horse and Garm to talk to had been a chastening experience.
“There are… bad people in the mountains,” he said. “Some of them have been here for a long time-they fought the ratcats a little, stole from us more. The real fighters, to them we gave without asking, but they went
