Like Raargh's, his neck and shoulders bore a complex of scars, including, strangely, the rough-and-ready suturing of a kzin field-medic, and an identifying kzin brand which he had not had removed. But he had regrown his beard, a moderately asymmetrical spike identifying him as important-what had once been called "quality"-without being quite Families, and there was little gray in its gold yet. One of his visitors was an obvious Earthman, shorter and heavier, wearing the crisp uniform of a Staff Brigadier of UNSN Intelligence. He was of about the same apparent age as Rykermann, or perhaps younger. In his case the geriatric drugs had never been interrupted.
The other was Jocelyn van der Stratt. She was in the uniform of the Wunderland Police, with badges of high rank. Like certain other Wunderlanders she had adopted the kzinti custom of wearing a belt-ring, with a collection of dried Kzin and human ears.
"The lady you lost, who you spoke of earlier, Dimity Carmody," said Guthlac. "If I may ask, what happened to her?" His voice was careful, delicate. "I do not mean to cause distress, but in this case I need to know. I know Jocelyn's story, and I know why she is committed to our cause."
Not the usual," said Rykermann. "On this planet," he went on, " 'the usual' was disease, hunger or kzinti teeth. I suppose Dimity was lucky, or so I've told myself often enough. She was a scientist, and I thought she had something valuable, a theory about FTL. At my insistence there was an attempt to get her away in a slowboat, but by that time the Kzin had got tired of their cat-and-mouse game with the slowboats and destroyed it in space.
"I had the privilege of watching, via a camera on her ship… until the screen went blank. At least I know she died quickly. In fact she can't have known anything about it. She'd been injured already and was in a doc. They were trying to reach We Made It."
He strode across the room and opened a paneled cupboard with a key. He reached in and produced a small music box. "That's what I've got left of Dimity," he said. "A kzin kindly returned it to me… another story… I've kept it for fifty-eight years… All I have!" He struck his fist on the table. "Selina was probably long dead by then," said Arthur Guthlac. "The Happy Gatherer just disappeared. One of the first ships to go. I imagine them approaching some kzinti vessel… innocent, excited at the prospect of contact… I imagine it often…"
"Your wife?… Your lover?"
"My sister. We were very close. It had always been the two of us against the world. Two square pegs in round holes. She went into space: the brilliant one. I'd become a museum guard and out of sheer bloody-mindedness I got involved in illegal studies."
"Illegal?"
"Military history. Totally forbidden. You could get your memory wiped and draw a few years' rehabilitation digging for water ice in the canyons on Mars for that in those days. And there were times before that when it would have been the organ banks. ARM had a long-term project to breed aggression out of the human race, and part of it was banning and systematically destroying military history. My chief at the museum was ARM, of course-all we museum staff were.
"My forbidden studies were inevitably discovered, but I was lucky with the timing of that… I remember standing in front of my chief waiting to be formally charged and arrested, and wondering how much worse my case would be because I was a junior ARM officer myself. Anyway, he'd found I wasn't the only one in the place involved: 'I don't seem to have a very law-abiding general staff, Guthlac,' he said, 'but at this moment it's about all the General Staff that Earth's got.' Strange the difference a couple of capital letters can make. ARM had just concluded that the Angel's Pencil's messages were genuine… that the Kzin were real and they were coming to get us."
"It wasn't like that on Wunderland," said Rykermann. "We didn't censor old history so much as lose interest in it. Earth history was Earth business. Irrelevant to us. We had a whole world to shape… A brave new world it still was… I remember, after we got the warnings, those months of scrabbling through old, chance preserved, fragments of Earth books and records trying to reinvent the wheel."
We did something the same," said Guthlac.
"We were just getting a military production base together here when the Kzin arrived."
You look as if you had your share of it."
"After Dimity was killed, I got away into the hills," Rykermann said. "I was a biologist and I knew some low-tech organic chemistry-nearly all our people were helpless without modern laboratories and industrial plants. I also knew as much as anyone about the great caves, full of bones and phosphates. I was the Resistance's biochemical production manager, overseeing the secret factories where nitrates and phosphates were made into explosives and war-gases.
"I was also one of the few leaders deemed indispensable enough to get-when possible-geriatric drugs and other sophisticated medical treatment from the Resistance's stolen supplies. Leonie was another."
She was fortunate to be your wife."
"We didn't marry until we'd been in the hills for some time… and, I'll say… after the memory of Dimity had receded for me, a little. After I'd stopped hoping quite so hard that every attack we launched would turn out to be a suicide mission. In any case, we hardly had room for such sentimentalism as giving geriatric drugs to a spouse. The few we had went where they were needed most and she got them on her own merits. Not even my decision.
"She'd been one of my postgraduate biology students, and in addition she had natural gifts with low-tech medical care. That made her important. We'd forgotten we were aliens on this world. Exotic diseases, which our parents and grandparents had controlled so easily with modern medicine and autodocs that we'd forgotten they existed, came raging out, along with a lot of the old human diseases we'd also forgotten and which we'd lost resistance against.
"We did still have quite a lot of more-or-less old-fashioned farmers, thank God!-that's why we're not all dead-but most of us were twenty-fourth-century, machine-dependent people. Robots did a lot of the farming and other dirty jobs. Hell, apart from never seeing a dead animal, a lot of us ex-city dwellers had never seen recognizable meat! At first people starved from ignorance as much as shortages. Like the caveman, shivering with cold on a ledge of coal, fleeing weaponless from the cave-bear over outcrops of iron ore, lapping water muddy with clay… More of us perished from general softness… humaneness, lack of ruthless decisiveness, not knowing what mattered for immediate survival and what didn't. "Then they got the country and the old estates organized, and there was a supply of food back to the cities again. Some sort of government was got together under kzinti supervision and factories started turning over. Someone persuaded the Kzin that we couldn't pay taxes or slave for them if we were dead of starvation.
"I was in the wild country by that time and didn't see it. Disease was what we were concerned about in the hills. Some of the old bacteria and viruses had been eliminated in our ancestors before they left Sol system-that's another reason why some of us lived-but it turned out that there were still plenty left. Common colds alone-to which we'd lost quite a lot of resistance-killed far more people than the Kzin killed directly. That's before we start counting the score of the big-league diseases and Wunderland's own contributions. Things were bad enough in the cities, but at least they kept some modern medical facilities functioning. Even there they suddenly had to find puppy dogs and sheep to make something called insulin. Do cataract operations by hand-yes, you may well look queasy. And that was high-tech compared to what we had in the hills. There was no proper birth control once the contraceptive implants' lives ran out, and yet for women pregnancy became a deadly danger again. Leonie-and it was not only her scientific training but also a matter of intuition with her-turned out to be a priceless asset. "She was a good fighter, too. A natural tactician and strategist and handy with a beam rifle. We've both outlived most of our contemporaries. It's not nice, watching your friends die of black rot or old age. Still, we've been happy together. She's an extraordinary woman. Kind to me, kind to all the world. The liberation, when it came, was a savage time, as savage as the invasion in its way, and a lot of people were in a sort of drunkenness of joy and vengeance. But even before the fighting stopped, before the relief operations were set up, she was taking care of stray kittens along with the pups and the orphans."