“And you go home. Or to another star system, but you get out of Alpha Centauri.”
Early laughed again, more softly, and set the snifter down. “I hope you don’t think I’m the only agent the… ARM has?” he said.
Jonah cut in: “No. But you’re the smartest-or if you’re not, we’re hopeless anyway. It’s a start.”
“It will win me time, which I will use,” Montferrat added. Early sat in silence, puffing occasionally, while the sun set finally; the stars came out, and a quarter moon, undimmed by Beta Centauri. A flash of shooting stars lit up the night, ghostly soft lightning across the hills and the faces of humans and the kzin.
“More time than you might expect,” he said. “Bureaucracies tend to get slower as they age, and mine… “More silence. “Agreed,” he said. “It’s time for me to move on, anyway. I’m getting too well known here. Lack of discretion was always my besetting sin. There’s still the war-we have to organize the ex-kzin slave worlds we’re taking as reparations-and doubtless other work will be found for me. Ich deinst, as they say.” He looked over at Montferrat. “Checkmate-for now,” he said, rising and extending his hand.
“For now,” Montferrat agreed. “Harold here to hold the stakes?” “Agreed; we can settle the details at our leisure.” He bowed to the ladies, an archaic gesture he might have picked up on Wunderland. Or not, if he was what they suspected. “And now, I won’t put a damper on your victory celebrations.”
He strolled like a conqueror out to the waiting aircar, the stub of his cigar a comet against the night as he threw it away and climbed through the gullwing door. The craft lifted and turned north and west, heading for Munchen, an outline covering a moving patch of stars.
“I doubt he’s going to accept defeat gracefully,” Jonah said, sipping moodily at his coffee. Montferrat had winced a bit when the younger man dumped his cognac into it. “Especially when he discovers the interior of the spaceship melted down into slag when the tnuctipun bastard died.”
“The hull alone is a formidable secret; he’ll have the satisfaction of putting that in the archives,” Montferrat said judiciously. “You know, I could almost pity him.”
That brought the heads around, even Spots’s. “Why?” Harold demanded, pulling himself out of reverie.
“Because he’s so able, and so determined-and his cause is doomed to inevitable defeat,” Montferrat said. At their blank looks, he waved his cigarillo at the stars.
“Look at them, my friends. We can count them, but we cannot really know how many. The number is too huge for our minds to grasp! With the outsider’s gift of the hyperdrive, we have access to them all-and the kzinti will too, in their turn, you cannot keep a law of nature secret forever, despite what the ARM thinks.”
His voice deepened. “The universe is too big to understand; vastly too big to control even by the most subtle and powerful means, even this little corner of it we call Known Space. There is an age of exploration corning-as it was in the Renaissance, or the twenty-first century. Nothing can stop it. Nothing can stop what we-all the sentient species-will do, and venture, and become. That is why I pity Buford Early-and why I never despair of our cause, no matter how bleak the situation looks. Tactically we may lose, but strategically, we cannot.”
Jonah looked thoughtful, and Harold grinned across his basset-hound face. Tyra Nordbo laughed, and leaned forward to put a hand on his arm. The jewels in her tiara glistened amid the artfully-arranged piles of blond hair and the shimmering silk of her gown dung.
“Thank you for everything,” she said.
“Nonsense,” he said, watching Jonah’s gaze on her, warm and fond. Bless you, my children, he thought sardonically. And f I wasn’t a middle-aged eighty and didn’t have commitments elsewhere, you wouldn’t have a chance, Jonah the Hero.
“The stars,” she said. “For both of us.”
“Perhaps,” Montferrat said. “Someday.”
“Someday.”
Jonah laughed. “Myself, after the past couple of years, I’m not so sure I’ll ever want to leave the confines of Greater Munchen again.”
Tyra laughed, but Montferrat had a suspicion the Sol Belter might mean what he said; he sounded very tired, at a level below the physical.
“May,” Jonah added, standing and extending his crooked arm, “I show you the gardens, Fra Nordbo?”
“I would be delighted, sir,” she said.
Montferrat watched them go. “A satisfactory conclusion, all things considered,” he said. “Very satisfactory indeed.”
EPILOGUE
:
Harold’s Terran Bar was far too noisy and crowded and smelled of tobacco smoke. Spots-Son of Chotrz-Shaa still felt it was appropriate, in memory of his brother. He had taken the same booth for the evening, and the remains of a grouper lay clean-picked on his plate. Glen Rorksbergen and jersey mingled in yellow and amber delight in a saucer, beside his belt computer.
It will take many years to decode that download, he thought. There had been far more in the tnuctipun spaceship’s system than the mere fifty terabytes his belt model could hold, as well. Piecing together the operating code with nothing but fragmentary hints and sheer logic would be a torment.
Still, he had time.
To you, my brother, he thought silently, dipping his muzzle towards the drink. I dedicate the hunt.
HEY DIDDLE DIDDLE
Thomas T. Thomas
“A kzinti warship!” Daff Gambiel called from the watch-keeping station at the mass pointer in the ship’s waist. “No-a whole fleet of them!” he corrected. “Dead ahead!”
Up near the control yoke Hugh Jook, Callisto’s navigator, spun on. his own axis and dove toward the detector. He braked by grabbing a nearby stanchion and going into partial parabola around it. Once he stabilized, Jook studied the thin blue line that peeked out of the milky globe.
“Relax, Daff.” He sketched the line with his finger. “Is that what you’re excited about? Look at the mass actually showing there. Way too much for hull metal, even in a tight formation. That’s an asteroid.”
“So far out?” Gambiel said doubtfully.
“It’s a rogue. A rock that got perturbed from its orbit.”
“Perturbed enough to reach stellar escape velocity?” Gambiel still sounded unconvinced, but the Hellflare tattoo on the Jinxian’s blunt forehead glowed violently with the flush that was creeping up from his cheekbones. “I’d rather believe the Navy’s conclusions. They say it should be a fleet.”
“Coming through on gravity polarizers? Oh sure!” The navigator’s native Wunderlander superiority leaked out around the edges of his debating style. “And if they were accelerating, pointing away from us, then they would mask the gravity wave so thoroughly our detector wouldn’t budge. Pointed toward us, in braking mode, they’d show the shadow of a couple of solar masses.
“This line’s just right for a small iron or carbonate body.” The Wunderlander pulled his chin. “How it got here, and moving so fast-probably pulled out by the gravity well of a passing star or black hole… No kzinti need apply for that picture, however much you want to believe. Anyway, the Navy is dead wrong. We blasted the Patriarchy back to a collection of cinder worlds and a basketful of kittens in the Third War. They’re harmless.”
Jared Cuiller, commander of the Callisto, listened casually to this conversation. By now, it was going through its seventh or eighth cycle among his tiny four-person crew. They were thirty-six days out of Margrave and twelve light-years beyond the Chord of Contact between Known Space and the Patriarchy. Although his ship’s mission had come up fast, the debate behind it had been years in the making.
Over the decades since the Third Man-Kzin War, various industrial conglomerates had gone in to rebuild the shattered Kzinti homeworld and reconstruct the Patriarchy’s fractured system of colony and tribute planets along more market-oriented lines. The organized religions had sent in missions to introduce concepts of peace and love, equality and reciprocity-as far as they would go. The universities had sent archaeological and sociological study teams. All of these observers insisted that the Kzinti were pacified, if not exactly civilized. And the U.N. Peacekeeping Commission still controlled strictly the production facilities of Kzin and its colonies, as well as the goods they could buy and sell. So conventional wisdom said the Kzinti had neither the war spirit nor war making capability left in them.