Tigers in the muddy Sundaband Islands. Swimming tigers. We were standing on a permanent island made by channels less than fifty meters wide. On the other sides of those channels were tall reed beds and other islands with higher vegetation that might hide anything. Part of the wonder of Wunderland was the variety of its animals, descendants of survivors of successive catastrophes caused by major meteor impacts. And the fauna boasted its full share of opportunistic predators.
Could something charge out of that vegetation and across the channel before we could get back to the car? I get the feeling we are babes in the wood here, I thought. I hadn't even a gun. The headland where the monastery stood was only a few kilometers away, but here in the channels of Grossgeister the vegetation hid any other horizon.
The swamp was silent, but, as it were, not quiet when one listened: water rippling and bubbling, the grunts of mudfish, the queer singing of the froggolinas and insectoids. But were these ignorable, day-today swamp sounds covering up any others? The sounds of something approaching? Cats stalked silently. There were peculiar smells in the air, some of them natural odors of swamp vegetation, living and dead. Others that I didn't know.
There were the eyes and nostrils of a couple of small crocodilians in the still water, looking like pairs of floating Bob's Berries or drifting bubbles. In a way the sight was reassuring: the presence of adolescent crocodilians meant the probable absence of big ones. A twin-tailed serpiform thing sailed by with head held high like a periscope. Something very large and white and curved floating just under the surface brought me up short, heart jumping, until I realized it was the marshman's boat. Or part of it. There has been violence and disaster here, I thought. I had occasionally had dangerous moments on field trips, but that had been different. My assistants and I had always been equipped and prepared. Here I felt prepared for nothing. What am I doing bringing Dimity into a place like this? The unknown is always dangerous. Get her out now! And not just because I love her!
"Nils! Look at this."
Something metal glittering in churned-up mud, almost buried. A heavy automatic gun, the sort the marshmen used to kill the big crocodilians whose back armor might deflect even the needles of a strakkaker. Useless for specimen collecting, it would leave little of any specimen.
It was smashed. Twisted into junk.
It had been loaded with high-explosive bullets and set for automatic fire at 300 rounds a minute. Three rounds only had been fired. There were the casings on the ground. And there were stains on the recoil compensator and pistol grip that looked like blood. A predator?
"Nothing that powerful fits the ecology."
"I know."
"And this is the longest-settled part of the planet. If there was a predator like this here before we'd have known it. You would have seen it in all the other animals. Things would be faster, more powerful, better defended."
She was confirming what I had thought. But I had needed her to confirm it. I didn't want to damage the evidence before any investigation, but now that I had handled the gun already I thought I had better take it back. It would be easy enough to separate my DNA from anything else that might be on it. I saw the honker, an electronic fence device to keep crocs and other possible intruders away, including humans if necessary. Honkers were a good deal more potent than their name might suggest, and like most modern electronics they worked perfectly when they were in one piece. This one was in many pieces, strewn in the mud.
Then Dimity pointed again. There was something different in her walk and stance, as though she had changed into something like a hunting predator herself. The cafe coffee-drinker was not there. Her ears were laid flat back. I had forgotten she had that much Families blood in her. There was a dark pool of what I was now sure was blood, surrounded by froggolinas and covered with small insectoids, scraps of cloth, and, gleaming pinkish-white among them, what I recognized at once as a human femur, cracked open at the lower end, part of the pelvic socket still attached at the upper.
I dropped the broken gun as we ran to the car. I saw another bone fragment in the mud as we passed: it looked like part of the zygomatic arch of a human skull, but I didn't stop to examine it. There were other scattered fragments too, I now saw. I wanted to get back to the city fast, but was still unable to recognize the voice of my own survival instincts. We gained a reasonable height and turned a little farther into the swamp.
"The monastery looks like a fort," Dimity said as we approached it. "High walls round the courtyard, no windows, the tower, the edifacium like a castle keep. It looks quite defensible. You've even got that." She pointed to a tall, smooth-lined metal spire that rose out of a small wooden chapel some distance away. "It looks like a rocket or missile ready for launching. And the marshmen's shacks?"
Nothing like that. You saw what was left of them. Just thin walls and the honkers."
"That may be the point: it looked defensible."
The abbot might be a friend and glad to see me on the occasional evening when there was a bottle to be shared. But the monastery was a working organization, and my arrival unannounced in the middle of the working day, and with a woman, might well have been thought inconsiderate. All he said was: "What's wrong?"
"Is it that obvious?"
"You look terrible."
"There's trouble. We've been to six of the marshmen's cabins. They're dead. We've found… evidence. The cabins destroyed. We're on our way to the police. But first I need to ask the Brothers something. About that thing they saw."
I showed them a small copy of one of the holos I had been shown the night before. "This is a dead specimen, and not a very good picture now. But is that the same species?"
"Yes." Three yeses. Three nods.
"Without a doubt?"
"Without a doubt."
"And it ran from you. I wonder why."
"It didn't want to alert the 'fortress,' " said Dimity.
"We had no weapons when we saw it, no guns."
"It's not scared of guns. And it had already eaten. It didn't want to be discovered, and it probably thought there were too many of you in a building of this size…"
"It thought…?"
"I can only tell you what you have probably guessed for yourself," I said. "These creatures are-obviously-highly dangerous, fearless of humans, and, we have reason to believe, intelligent."
How intelligent?"
"Highly."
"Where do they come from?"
"We don't know." That was only too true.
I guessed the abbot must be a clever administrator to maintain an institution like the monastery in the modern world. I had not noticed before how penetrating his eyes could be.
"Let me put it this way," he said. "Are they going to come horizontally or vertically?" The other monks were hanging on the question. Dimity looked as if she already knew. I didn't see the need for secrecy, but it was still a condition I was bound by.
"I'm not at liberty to say what I think," I told them. "I'm sure if there is a continuing problem you'll be put in the picture."
"Thank you. I think that answers my question…
"Before our Order left Earth," he went on, "the Vatican gave us instructions on what to do if we met aliens. What the theological position was. Did they have souls? It's a very old question, predating space travel by centuries. Saint Paul was quite definite: The Resurrection applied to 'everything in the Heavens and everything on Earth.' The early church writers said we need not worry until we actually knew if they existed or not. To insist that 'God could not have made other worlds' was declared a heresy in the thirteenth century-and that covers alternate or parallel universes as well! Good aliens may have already experienced 'baptism by desire.' Still, it's an area of imprecision."