a friend of an astronomical curiosity, leaving a wife who had no choice but to yield more than he had, as conditions grew worse. Condemned for a traitor in absentia, by a court that thought it was merciful… and Mutti was all alone now in the big silent house on the headland at Korness, looking out over the waves. Few friends had been willing to visit, much less speak in her defense.
“Dada-mann,” Tyra whispered, laying her head on her knees and weeping aloud, because there was nobody to heat That was what she had cried out when he left. There had been no words he could say to a child of eight… Presently Garm came, creeping on his stomach and whining at her distress, sticking his anxious cold nose against her face; she clutched him and sobbed until there was no more.
When she was functional again she took the coffee pot off the heater coil-the fire was for comfort, and predators-and poured herself a cup. The other letter was still sealed; she had nearly discarded it, until the return address caught her eye. Claude Montferrat Palme, a Herrenmann of ambiguous reputation. Frowning, she pressed her thumb to the seal to deactivate the privacy lock and then opened it.
“Dear Fra Nordbo,” she read. “A possible juncture of interests-”
“Yes, there are workings in the mountains,” the old villager said.
At least, that was what Tyra thought he had said. These backwoodsmen had been up in the high country for the better part of two centuries, pioneers before the kzinti came and isolated by choice and necessity since. Their dialect was so archaic it was almost Pletterdeutz, without the simplified grammar and many of the loan-words from the Baltic and Scandinavian languages that characterized modern Wunderlander. Back further in the Jotuns were tiny enclaves even more cut off, remnants of the ethnic separatists who had come with the third through seventh slowship fleets from Sol System.
“What sort of workings?” she said, slowly. Her own accent was Skognaran, more influenced by Swedish and Norse than the central dialect of Munchen; modified by a Herrenmann-class education, of course.
The Nordbos were formerly of the Freunchen clan, one of the Nineteen Families. Formerly. Lucidly, these primitives were out of touch with the news; they barely comprehended that the alien conquerors were gone.
“Ja, many sorts, Fra Nordbo,” the old man said deferentially.
The von Gelitz family had owned these lands-still did, pending the Reform Commission’s findings-but that ownership had always been purely theoretical, except for a hunting lodge or two. Nobody but the Ecological Service ever paid much official attention to this area, and they had gotten careless during the occupation. There was an old manor house outside Neu Friborg’s common fields, but it had been ruins for the better part of a century. He had called them the “old herr’s place.”
Old, she thought with a shiver, looking at the man. They were getting by on home remedies here, and what knowledge their healer could drag out of an ancient first-aid program. The wrinkles, wispy white hair, liver spots… this man might be no more than seventy or eighty, barely middle-aged with decent medicine. Markham should spend less on his precious fleet-the UN Navy is fighting the war now-and more on people and places like this!
Apart from premature aging and the odd cripple, it was not too bad as backcountry towns in the Jotuns went. Built of white-plastered fieldstone and homemade tile, around a central square with the mayor’s office, the national polezi station-long disused-and the Reformed Catholic church. There was a central fountain, and plenty of shade from eucalyptus and pepper and featherfrond trees. They were sitting under an awning outside the little gasthaus, watching the sleepy traffic of midafternoon: bullock-carts and burros bringing in firewood or vegetables, a girl switching along a milch cow, tow-haired children in shorts tumbling through the dust in some running, shouting game. A rattletrap hovertruck went by in a cloud of grit, and a waitress went about watering the flowers that hung from the arches behind them in earthenware pots.
That was all there was to see: the town and its four-hundred-odd inhabitants, the cluster of orchards and fields around it in the little pocket of arable land, and wilderness beyond-mostly scrubby, in the immediate vicinity, but you could find anything from native jungle to forest to desert in a few days’ journey. All about the peaks of the Jotuns reared in scree and talus and glacier; half a continent of mountains, taller than Earth’s Himalayas and much wider. Wunderland had intermittent plate tectonics, but when they were active they were active, and the light gravity reduced the power of erosive forces. These were the oldest mountains on the planet, and not the highest by any means.
The old man finished fanning himself with his straw hat and continued:
“Jade, of course. No mines, but from the high mountain rivers; that is how we paid our tribute to the kzin. We are not ignorant knuzen here, Fra Nordbo!”
There was a pathetic pride to that; a hovertruck had come once a month from the lowlands, until the final disruption at liberation. Tyra felt a slight stinging in her eyes. Once even the most isolated settlement had been linked to Munchen, with virtual-schools and instant emergency services…
“Then, sometimes hunters come through; hunting for tigripard bides, quetzbird feathers. Or prospectors. There is gold, hafnium… when I was a small boy, scholars also from the Scholarium in Munchen.”
“Scholars?” she said, pricking up her ears.
“Yes; they said little-this was just after the War you understand, people were suspicious then-but there were rumors of formations that could not be accounted for. But they found nothing, and had to return to Munchen when so much of the Scholarium was closed by the government.” The collaborationist authorities had other priorities than education; their own profits, primarily. “And -but your supplies, they have arrived!” He rose and left, bowing and murmuring good wishes.
Another hovertruck pulled into the square; big and gleaming by contrast with the single ancient relic the village of Neu Friborg owned, although shabby enough by Munchen standards, much less Earth’s. The man who stepped down from it was tall, 190 centimeters at least; his black hair was worn in a shag cut, although she knew he had kept it in a military-style crop while he was Police Chief of Munchen. Chief for the collaborationists, and notoriously corrupt even by the gang’s standards. Claude Montferrat-Palme, of the Sydow clan. He wore expensive outbacker clothes, leather boots and grey usthcloth jacket and breeches, with a holstered strakkaker, and a beret. A small, neatly clipped black mustache lay on his upper lip, and his mouth quirked in a slight smile,
“Fra Nordbo,” he said, bowing formally over her hand with a click of heels.
“Fro Palme,” she replied, inclining her head with equal formality. A server bustled up with stems of the local beer.
“Prosit,” he said.
“Skaal,” she replied. “Now that the amenities are over, could you tell me exactly what you had in mind?”
Her voice held a chilly correctness; he seemed to recognize the tone, and smiled wryly.
“Fra Nordbo, I’m very strongly reminded of your father.”
“You knew him?” she said, with a raised eyebrow. “Perhaps you will claim to have been his friend, next?”
He surprised her by letting the smile grow into a deep laugh. “Quite the contrary” he said, shaking his head. “He treated me with the most frigid politesse, as befitted an honorable Landholder forced to deal with noxious collaborationist scum.”
She relaxed slightly. “He couldn’t have known you were involved with the Resistance,” she said.
“Ach, at the time I wasn’t,” he replied frankly. “I was a collaborationist at that point. My conversion came later; people do change. As some claim your father did, later.”
“That is a lie!” she said. More calmly: “My father was an astrophysicist, it was his… hobby, since he had to govern Skognara from a sense of duty. How was he to know the enemy would think a mere energy-anomaly a thing of potential military importance? The kzin-Yiao-Captain-forced him to accompany them on the expedition.”
“From which he has never returned, and hence cannot defend himself. And the Commission has been in no charitable mood.”
Tyra’s blond head drooped slightly. “I know,” she said quietly. “Tb,.. my brother and I, we have discussed resigning the Nordbos from the Freunchen clan.”
“Advisable, but it may make little difference. Unless I’ve lost my political feelers-and I haven’t-the Reformers are going to strip the Nineteen Families of everything but ceremonial power. And from all but their strictly private property, as well.”
Tyra nodded jerkily, feeling the hair stir on her neck as her ears laid back. That mutation was a mark of her heritage, of the old breed that had won this planet for humankind.
“it is unjust! Men like my father did everything they could to shield -“ She shrugged and fell silent again, taking a mouthful of the beer.
