Man-Kzin Wars XI Hal Colbatch (chrome ebook reader .txt) 📖

her eyes lit and her whiskers twitched. She bared her teeth and raised her ears.

"From Nurse and Orlando!" she told the others. "Tabitha looking at pages of picture-book! Not eating it!" Life with Vaemar had improved her Wunderlander grammar and vocabulary.

"That's wonderful!" said Leonie. "Wonderful for us all! Wonderful for history!" They had all been hanging upon evidence that the first daughter of one of the Secret Others—the thin, hidden line of intelligent kzinrretti—had bred true. It didn't always happen. The Secret Others had been few to begin with, and they were very few now. Karan on human-liberated Wunderland was perhaps the first intelligent kzinrret in millennia who did not have to hide her sapience.

"Hurrah for history!" said Gale. "Bring them to the wedding!"

"Yes, now I can. And rate Nurse charges can't leave them alone with him too long." Karan's ears swivelled. "Car coming," she said.

Leonie's ears also twitched slightly—she had a little Families blood. She stepped to the door. "If that's Arthur, I 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