The men arrived at the village in darkness. Lights showed through the palings of the palisade that encircled the village; generators had been purchased and put to interesting uses. Eleven of the men dismounted, and some broke their breach-loading rifled muskets, loading them from bandoliers, while eyes watched them from the dark. The eleven crept up to the gate. The last man at the back sat and watched them, the three pack horses behind him sniffing the air nervously. His gun was already loaded.
There was a young man at the gate. Hearing the bandits, he opened the gate cautiously and peered out, shining a torch at them. Had they been marauding lesslocks, he’d have slammed the gate shut and given the alarm by blowing on the whistle he kept on a chain around his neck. Seeing humans, he called out to them:
“Hi, guys, who are you, then?” The lead bandit shot him, but did not kill him. The sound split the night more than the whistle would have done. The young man fell back, raised his own gun and shot the bandit stone dead, but it was too late. Inside the gate, the bandits shouted in triumph and fired into the air.
Outside the stockade, the horses were beginning to panic. One of the pack animals screamed, reared, broke the lead which tied him to the last man’s horse and turned to run. There was a chorus of howls and the horse was submerged under a horde of lesslocks. The man caught the red eyes of the brutes and fired at them.
Lesslocks were so called because the species was clearly related to the Morlocks, but were smaller and squatter. They were less intelligent than the baboons they somewhat resembled, but were stronger and much more aggressive; they hunted in big packs of several hundred. They surged towards the man, who reloaded quickly and fired again before he went under a snarling mob.
Inside the stockade, deaf to the sounds outside because of their own firing, the bandits felt that things were going their way. The villagers were looking at them with horror, the women screaming. That was when Ruat and his deputies arrived. One of the bandits looked at a charging kzin, and tried to get off a shot. That settled things as far as Ruat was concerned. None of the other bandits even managed to aim; having five kzin warriors coming at you numbed the mind. The gates were dragged shut, leaving most of the lesslocks surging futilely about outside. The eleven bodies were torn apart. It made a bit of a mess, but, apart from the lead bandit’s head, caught in the branches of a high tree where it had been flung, it could be tidied up easily enough come morning.
“Are we allowed to eat them?” one of the deputies asked.
Ruat pondered. He wasn’t sure; he’d have to ask the judge for a definitive ruling, but he suspected not.
“No, we do not eat intelligent beings. Not unless they taste really good, and these won’t,” he explained. This seemed reasonable to the rest of the kzinti.
Outside the stockade, one of the lesslocks had picked up a musket. He found out how to break it, and copied what he had seen the man doing, taking a bullet from the bandolier and poking it into the breach. Then he closed the gun and pulled the trigger. It exploded and blew apart the head of another lesslock. Some dim sense of power came to the one holding the gun. It led the way back into the darkness, taking the gun and the bandolier with it.
The cross-benchers had taken the side of moral virtue and supported Vaemar’s proposals when they had been made into a formal bill. This had allowed it to pass by a very respectable majority, to the discomfort of the government, which had opposed it on the principle that the opposition must always be wrong about everything. Vaemar had declined to be on the committee investigating the swamp-draining proposal, explaining that his presence might detract from the necessity of demonstrating complete objectivity. This was thought to be rather an eccentric perspective, but had, as it turned out, the effect of the committee feeling obliged to investigate the matter carefully and relatively honestly. The argument in favor of investigating the Valiant had some support from the anti-kzin faction, who hoped that it would show once again that the kzinti were murderous scum. The conservatives, joining with a minority who saw the force of Vaemar’s argument that truth had to be confronted no matter how uncongenial, and another, larger minority, which had some serious suspicions about von Höhenheim and were worried about being seen to support him, again had the numbers, and the item passed. And so it was agreed that an expedition was to be sent out to do something about the sunken spacecraft. Rarrgh and the Rykermanns, Greg and Sarah, and Stan Adler, as well as a sizeable crew, and two other teams of Stan’s news competitors were to go with it. This was going to be a very public event.
The motion-detector at the Rykermanns’ door rang. Leonie awoke instantly, still with the reflexes of a guerrilla leader. The console by her bed identified the visitor as a large male specimen of Pseudofelis sapiens ferox. The lock identified the paw-print as Vaemar’s.
The Rykermanns’ ground-floor sitting room was equipped with a footch, the couchlike furnishing on which a Kzin warrior might recline. After shaking hands with Nils Rykermann, Vaemar presented Leonie with a small gold music box, mounted on what he said was Morlock bone, intricately sculpted. Rykermann felt his eyes narrowing very slightly as he looked at this. A valuable, if small, gift from a kzin of high rank was often the prelude to a request. He also knew, however, that this request would not come at once. A trouble with such requests was that, should danger be involved, the kzin would fail to mention it, politely assuming that all had as much contempt for danger as itself.
The robot butler brought appropriate food, and they chatted about the matters of Vaemar’s estate, such as the doings of Rarrgh’s increasing brood of kittens, and the work being done by Dimity Carmody, which Vaemar was sponsoring, on the further applications of Carmody’s Transform. Finally, as if by chance, the talk drifted to the doings of Orlando and Tabitha.
“I would be grateful,” said Vaemar, “if you would allow them to accompany you on the Valiant expedition. Rarrgh will go with you, of course, to keep them out of mischief, and Nurse. They should not be a burden.”
It was not the favor Nils Rykermann had been expecting.
“My friend, may I ask why?”
“Because I am too tied up with politics to go myself, and I want them to start mingling with humans at the earliest possible age. An expedition into the wild will be an excellent introduction for them.”
“They are very young,” said Leonie.
“Not much younger than I was when Rarrgh, who was then Rarrgh-Sergeant, defended me at the last siege,” said Vaemar. “There is an important matter at issue. You know only a small handful of female kzin have retained high intelligence. Karan is one. It will be a good chance to test Tabitha’s intelligence under stimulating conditions.”
“I do not think that is all you have in mind, friend,” said Nils Rykermann.
“No, not quite all. My Honored Sire came to the belief, as a result of his experiences not only on this world, but on others earlier, that one of our species’ greatest defects was the low place we gave to abstract knowledge. He had been on Chunquen, when many Heroes died because we kzin had no interest in Chunquen’s seas, or the locals’ submarine boats. When the Heroes saw their deaths coming upon them on the tips of nuclear missiles, it was too late to start learning. So he set out to study humans,” (A trifle of awkwardness here: a lot of the preliminary part of that study had taken the form of dissection, but there was no point in reviving that fact now.) “But I know as a result of my own studies how many other areas there are that we have neglected. Seas take up about sixty percent of Wunderland’s surface. I would like my son to have some knowledge of marine biology. The swamp taught me something of its fascination.