Kershner stopped dead, blinked about nine times, and said, “Yes.”
“How big is it?”
Kershner held up his thumb and forefinger a little ways apart.
“The Blacker?” said The Johnson.
An old woman said, “Yes?”
“What’s the stuff for alloys in constant friction, very rare?”
“Rhenium?”
“That’s it, thanks-Why can’t you run the wave at full strength through a cubic foot or so of rhenium? There’s plenty of asteroids.”
What Persoff knew about this subject he had mostly learned from journalists’ work, but it must have been a good idea, because Kershner got all excited. “That could work! People still think of rhenium as too rare to be used for most things, but you’re right, there’s lots of asteroids! How did you think of it?”
“Captain Persoff described hyperdrive, and we spent yesterday discussing possible causes for the Blind Spot effect and working out implications. It seemed to us that in hyperspace, normal matter must be the local equivalent of a massless particle, which accounts for the standard speed.”
“That’s right! Captain, permission to-”
“Denied. It’ll wait until after we’ve attended the ceremony.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We don’t mind,” said The Johnson.
“Yes, we do,” said someone who must have been The Hale. “Captain Persoff, there’s been some discussion, and the general opinion is that the ship’s organics will have to be replaced. Since the trees have to be cut anyway, it’ll be best all around if they’re used for that. And we’d appreciate it if you could use everything from the first row there. Roots and all.”
“Thank you, that’ll help a lot.” They were taking it a lot better than he’d dared hope.
The Blacker stepped forward. In the moment before she spoke, Persoff had a chance to notice and realize a lot of things that he hadn’t fitted together before. To begin with, she was wearing something that actually looked sort of Polynesian: a necklace of long, sharp teeth. Old teeth. Kzinti teeth. He’d been assuming the Galaxias had merely fired, survived, and gotten thrown this way, but that had to be wrong: they knew what the kzinti called themselves, which meant they’d had prisoners, and they’d forced them to learn English, because they didn’t use kzin loan words. Near the Blacker there were other women, in hearing range but not close enough to interrupt, who were dressed in clinging outfits of orange fur, extremely worn in spots.
He was suddenly very glad he hadn’t been able to bring any Wunderkzin. Something had happened back then, and these people made damned sure they remembered it.
“Captain,” said The Blacker, “are you certain you wish to be part of this? It can be a strain even for us, and we grow up with it.”
“You’re helping us, and we couldn’t do without you. It seems to me we have to show our respect.”
“Then you do understand,” she said, and turned and led the other Blackers west, toward the trees.
Eden came to his side and said, “She jumps to conclusions sometimes. Do you have recording devices?”
“Yes, why?”
“Use them. You’ll see.” The Foote walked after the Blackers.
“Recorders on, everyone,” Persoff said.
At the trees, the procession halted, and all the adults moved to let the children through. The only grownups near the front were carrying babies. The Blacker waited until the Yorktown’s officers were near, then said, “Pay attention. We can never do this again. People have come to take us home. You must say goodbye to your family.” She put her hand on the nearest tree.
“This is James Foote, who gave up everything he had to build the Galaxias. It was he who extended the field around the ship after the enemy boat rammed us, so that the drive would destroy its mothership and leave them dependent on us no matter if we won or lost. When he was dying he asked to be frozen, so that he could be buried on the planet he always hoped to reach. This was a tiny island then, but the Pilot crushed rock, buried James Foote, planted this tree over him, making the first true soil in the world, and brought rocks from other islands to protect it from the tide, and so we have done ever since when we bring our dead here.” As she moved to the next tree, all the children came up and touched the first, one by one. Last of all, mothers took their infants to the tree and guided a hand to touch it, so that each baby could be told later that this had been done.
Persoff was in something like clinical shock. This was their cemetery, and their museum.
And to beat the kzinti they were willing to cut it all down and grind it to pulp.
“This is Captain Jonas Hale, who was blinded fighting the officer of the kzin attack boat. He advised the Pilot through as much of the trip as he could, and was the best friend the Pilot could have wished for.” One by one, they all touched the tree.
“This is Olga Blacker, who kept us all from going mad, by listening to everything we needed to say, and reminding us of the good things.” The procession continued.
“This is Russelle Wells, who sneaked aboard to be with her boyfriend, who had lied and wasn’t actually part of the crew. She raised thirty-one infants with adult bodies into people who could raise children of their own, and never once had to hurt any of them.” The Blacker bowed to the tree before moving on.
“This is Lavinia Schafer, who taught kzin prisoners English, and then taught them to answer questions. And outlived them all.” The Blacker clenched a fist and raised it overhead in salute.
“This is Academician Marion Johnson, who made so many ruined things work that we could spend two days and a night naming them all, and who got aboard the Galaxias in a crate because he was judged too ill for space travel. He showed us how to cool the planet we needed, and died while we were waiting.”
The seventh tree was touched with special care. “This is Stuart William Denver, who brought us here in a damaged ship through uncharted wilderness, who gave us all hope when we despaired, and who landed all of us and all we needed to live on this world, and died of his burns after getting the last passengers out of the lander as it sank.” She kissed the tree. One by one, the rest did too. After the children had moved on, the adults moved in to do the same.
As she moved on to introduce the next rank of trees, Persoff, who was blind with tears, heard Kershner say softly, “And the kzinti call themselves Heroes?”
THE MARMALADE PROBLEM
by Hal Colebatch
“I think I’ve solved the Marmalade problem,” General Leonie Rykermann told her husband, Nils Rykermann. “The monastery.”
The Marmalade problem had been preoccupying her thoughts for some time. Had Marmalade been reared on Kzin or on any kzin-ruled world, it is very unlikely that he would have survived childhood. However, he was reared on Wunderland, after Liberation, and had lived to be a problem.
What the circumstances of his birth were, no one knew. After the cease-fire there had been many orphans, kzin and human, wandering the scarred surface of the planet. Some formed savage feral gangs. Marmalade had been found, very near death, not far from Circle Bay Monastery. He had been clutching a locket, engraved with a sigil such as were issued by Conservers of the Ancestral Past.
Instead of killing him the farmers had obeyed the abbot’s instructions and handed him over to the monastery’s care. It appeared he had previously been selected for telepath training-so much he could tell them, and the telepath syndrome generally produced smaller and weaker creatures than the huge fighting kzin-but he remembered very little beyond that. He fetched up at length in the orphanage where Leonie Rykermann was trying, in the face of considerable opposition, to turn parentless kittens into Wunderkzin-kzin who might cooperate with the humans on Wunderland.