“G’day, stranger. Where you from?”
“Ah, I come from Munchen,” the stranger told him.
The judge looked at him hard. “Seems to me I’ve seen you before, stranger. Long time ago. And more recently in one of they noospapies we been getting’ since we got enough hard money t’ pay for them. Frivolity I call it, but some o’ the folk around here like it, an’ it’s a free world these days. Thank the Lord.”
The stranger looked at him carefully.
The judge looked hard right back at him.
“Seems t’me you might just be on the lam from what some folks call justice,” the judge told him.
“And you too, Herr Jorg von Thoma,” the stranger said.
The judge laughed. “That one won’t fly, Senator von Höhenheim. Sure, that was my name once. And sure, I came out here and lived alone in the valley for years. And one day another man came, and then another with his wife, and we lived reasonably close, for help if we needed it, mostly against the lesslocks.”
“Some sort of species related to the Morlocks?” von Höhenheim hazarded.
“Yep. Shorter, more like chimps or baboons, and not too afraid of the light. And varying from being a damn nuisance to a lot worse, until recently when we done taught them a lesson not to mess with man. Or kzin. But now I’m sort of in charge here. Working in the government meant I was good at organizin’ and arguin’, and these people needed a lot of that. So now, hereabouts, I am the government. And the Law. These are my people; I stand by them, and they’ll stand by me. They understand loyalty. So do the kzin we have here. Anyone calls for me to come back to Munchen and face the music is wasting his time. I won’t go, and even if I wanted to, nobody here would let me.”
Von Höhenheim digested this. “You were a better man than me,” he admitted. “You cooperated with the kzin, but you didn’t shame yourself. I adored them. I worshipped power, and they seemed to have all of it. It didn’t work of course, I understand them better now. They could work with you, thinking of you as a servant. I claimed to be a servant of the kzin, one of the KzinDiener, but they knew better. I admired them, hell, I worshipped them for their power, their strength; I saw them as living gods, I wanted to abase myself before them, to adore them. Me they despised. Perhaps the ancient gods of man always despised those who would abase themselves. Those who respect power and do not respect themselves.”
There was a silence.
“And how do you feel about it now?” the judge asked, shaking the ash off his cigar.
Von Höhenheim thought. “I do not know. I am running from an attempted kidnapping and also a murder charge, but the man I killed was slime. Worse than me. But I was slime too. I have nothing to be proud of. I have sought power all my life, and now I see that it was nothing. Once I met a kzin telepath who had been living in a sunken wreck with skeletons. He was grateful for life, and when the moment came, he did his duty. He was nobody important, he will be forgotten, but he did his duty. And because of that, some of the evil I had planned was undone.
“I had a long time to think while I was walking here, it has taken me months, and on the way I stayed at the abbey and talked to Abbot Boniface. He showed me what I was, all in gentle words, most of them questions about why I’d done what I did. I told him everything, it just poured out of me. Ashes in the mouth. There was nothing of value in any of it, and it leaves nothing in the end but contempt for the self. The little triumphs seem so empty, the setbacks devoid of meaning. I thought it was all about me, but it wasn’t. I am nothing. Plaited reeds, blown through by the wind.”
“Yeah. That’s all any of us are in the end. It’s good ya found it out. Most don’t.”
There was another long silence.
“I will go further east. Maybe one day I shall find somewhere I can stay, somewhere where they won’t know me. Then I shall have only to live with myself. That will be hard enough.”
“Better stay here, stranger. Now you figured out what you are, ya can do some work and earn a place here. I’m gettin’ old. These folk here are the usual sort. You know, mainly stupid and silly, but also mainly decent and kind. They need the help o’ someone with more sense, someone who is prepared to take care o’ them and stop them doin’ dumb things…yes, and to love them. I could do with a rest. We may need a new judge East o’ the Ranges before too long.”
There was another long silence. “You would appoint a murderer, a cheat, a liar, someone who has abased himself before the kzin?”
“That’s politics, ain’t it? And maybe want of courage and self-respect, which can be learned. You’re here because they caught ya out. Don’t get caught out again. An’ the best way is t’ be middlin’ honest. Ya know, the most successful cultures on old Earth were those that engaged with the rest of the world and learned all the other culture’s best ideas. Now we got the kzin t’ learn from. And they tell the truth. And hey, it works better than you’d think. Your big nemesis was a kzin. Vaemar-Riit. Seen it in the noospapies. Learn off him. That’s the smart way.”
“If I could start again…” there was dreadful pain in von Höhenheim’s voice, and a kind of yearning.
“It’s a big, big country, stranger. An entire planet. Room for people who see they screwed up and wish they’d done things differently.”
“I spent my entire life screwing up,” von Höhenheim said bitterly. “I worshipped power. It took a lot of walking and thinking and talking to the abbot to see it, but What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”
“Then now would be a good time to change strategies, don’t ya think?” the judge asked cheerfully. “I had time t’ think too. Long ago. And I got a gift of mercy I never deserved. From a kzin warrior, a sergeant, with a sense of honor as deep as a well. And kindness from Vaemar-Riit, no less. So I owe those guys, I owe them big time. And ya know what they say? They say, pass it down the line.”
“You are a great man, judge. I could never fill your shoes. But I will do all that I can. If you will give me mercy, then I will try to earn it.”
“Right, then ya can find Ruat, our sheriff, an’ ya can tell him I have appointed ya his clerk, so ya can learn the ropes. Have to get ya one o’ them starry things made up for ya to wear. Ya might have t’ explain what a clerk is. He’s a kzin, an’ still learnin’ stuff.”
The former senator swallowed. Well, the kzin could only eat him, he thought. He squared his shoulders. This was a new life, a promise, something shiny and wonderful had this moment opened up before him. He had been forced to look into his own soul, and seen the wretched smallness of it. He was more than lucky to have a second chance, and he wasn’t going to mess this one up. If a kzin sergeant could have a sense of honor as deep as a well, then a man could at least try to equal that.
HERITAGE
by Matthew Joseph Harrington
The UNSN carrier Yorktown had been an experiment which might not be repeated.
A colony ramship, started by Skyhook Enterprises and completed just before the end of the First War, had been fitted with hyperdrive and gravity compensators at the beginning of the Second, making it the largest warship humans had ever constructed. Much of its interior was hangar space for singleships sheathed in superconductor, which allowed them to go through a ramfield without scrambling the pilot’s nerve impulses. The carrier’s mission had been to: a) accelerate to relativistic speed, b) reach the kzin home system in hyperdrive, c) reenter normal space, d) wreak multiple kinds of havoc with the Yorktown’s drive and field as they decelerated through the system, e) drop off its singleships to destroy targets of opportunity, f) take a close turn around the star with the field stirring up flares, g) pick up the singleships, h) accelerate out of the system, and i) go into hyperdrive as soon as they were out of the singularity.