Did it recognize me? Its huge violet eyes held mine. It thrust its sidearm into its belt and raised two objects: one was the modem from the cave-habitat that linked to the locator implant in my arm.
So that was how it had found me among the scattering hordes of human ants. Had I drawn it here? The other object was something smaller that I could not make out.
It ground out a distorted human word I recognized as “cave.” Then it touched the belt it wore, the one that we had dropped to it. It placed the objects it held on the ground.
If the abbot could stand so could I. And some instinct told me it was better to stand and face this creature than either fall on my knees in supplication or turn to flee. Remembering the old game of “Tiger, Man, Gun,” I folded my arms and puffed out my chest. In the game that had indicated I was a man, and proud of it, though in the game the tiger ate the man. Also, it gave me something to do with my arms. I felt that however the kzin interpreted the gesture, it could not be seen as too subservient, but could not be taken as a threat. We were plainly weaponless.
“Cave,” I replied.
The kzin raised its huge sidearm and fired. But the bolt smashed into a derelict, abandoned ground-car that it evidently considered was an asset humans should not possess. Its gaze passed from me to the abbot and his sign. It opened its jaws and licked its black lips with a huge tongue.
I remembered a line from The War of the Worlds: “I was on the verge of screaming; I bit my hand.” It seemed a good idea.
Then it turned and reentered the vehicle, the others following.
There was a long pause as we stood there, then the ramp retracted and the great warcraft rose and turned away, back toward the city. Its guns fired two or three times, picking off vehicles and bits of machinery. We heard a confused clamoring of voices from the monastery and the crowd of refugees.
“We must give thanks,” said the abbot. “We have been granted a miracle.” There was puzzlement more than anything else in his expression and voice. He seemed to be trying to come to terms with a completely new and strange problem. His hand fluttered to his chest. “I have been allowed to live to see a miracle.”
I was not so sure. It seemed to me likely that, with the war plainly all but won, the kzin must be thinking of preserving the human population for their own purposes. I did not even think then that the kzin had sought me out specially: It had merely wanted to know where all the humans were heading for, and the monastery was the last place before the swamp and sea and mountains where they could gather. But all the same, things might have gone very differently.
“Come with me to the chapel,” said the abbot. “I must call the brothers to prayer and thanksgiving.” He clasped his chest harder and gave a sudden cry. He staggered in a circle, then fell, writhing. I bent over him.
“Heart,” he whispered. “A fat old man's heart…” His voice and his respiration were rising and falling in an odd way. “Yes, listen… Do you recognize it, scientist? Cheyne-Stokes breathing. Something few heard on this world when everyone had a doc. But I've attended the dying… You will hear a lot more of it as the docs fail, I fear… I'm not good at fear… This… this is another miracle. It will save me much fear.” His voice rallied for a moment.
“Rykermann, you may hate me, and God knows I am a sinner. But let me give you my blessing.”
I shrugged. Hatred seemed unimportant now.
“My personal unworthiness does not affect the quality of it, you know,” he whispered with a shadow of his old manner. “As for Masonry, I doubt you can teach the Kzin the handclasp. They haven't the fingers for it. But be careful of the—”
His writhing stopped. He mumbled feebly, then his voice grew a little stronger and he muttered something in a language I did not understand and raised his hand from his chest, waving it at me as though trying to give me something invisible. I bent closer to catch his words but as I did so he died.
I heard something else then, where the kzin had stood. Along with the locator modem it had left me Dimity's music box. It must have found it in the module, and it must just now have wound the tiny handle with the huge claws of its undamaged arm.
I walked slowly back to the monastery. The infirmary was still stocked, I knew. I had plenty of means of killing myself. Dimity was gone. She had, at least, I kept telling myself, died quickly and cleanly in space, and her knowledge was lost to the Kzin and their mind-readers. But she was lost to me forever. Forever? I remembered my profession of belief in a Supreme Being and turned it over in my mind to see if it helped. To opt out of this horror would be to do nothing, not even to mourn.
I also had, I now realized, a duty to survive. I was a professor of biology and a sort of chemist, and I would be needed. If not for my degrees and papers, then for the fact that my expeditions had made me, as I thought naïvely then, one of the few modern urban Wunderlanders who had any experience of camping and surviving in genuinely primitive conditions.
And there was another matter. Cats did not like fire. Bones and nitric acid made phosphorus. Caves with deep drifts of morlock and mynock bones would be a source of phosphorus. Guano, rich in nitrates, would be a prime source of low-tech explosives, a precious strategic resource if there was someone to build a factory to process them. That someone would have to know organic chemistry, and know at least a little of survival in the wild. Ceramics and armor to withstand laser-blasts, fabricated in hidden factories with improvised plant, would also need someone with chemical knowledge. There were probably no living humans, now, whose knowledge of the great caves of the Hohe Kalkstein came close to mine. Those caves would be a huge strategic resource.
From the makeshift and growing refugee camp I could already hear the sounds of babies crying from hunger. A live Nils Rykermann might be able to help there as well.
The abbot had shown me the reality of duty. As for that odd thing called honor, I thought I had seen a shape of that somewhere between van Roberts and von Diderachs, between the abbot and the kzin.
The first person I recognized in the refugee camp was Leonie Hansen. She had brought away as much equipment from the laboratory as she could carry and with a couple of others had set up a sort of clinic. A lot of it was very simple stuff—test tubes, optical microscopes, filtration paper I saw, all now beyond price. She, or somebody, had seen that the ultrasophisticated equipment of modern laboratories, like autodocs, would be useless without power sources and maintenance. I thought then that many things would go on, and that she would also be needed.
Epilogue
First, of course they asked her name.
“My name is Dimity Carmody.”
That was not a We Made It name. But it was not a We Made It ship. The design, the specifications and part numbers showed it had been built on Earth, a long time before.
“What is your position?”
“Special… Special… Special Professor of Mathematics and Astrometaphysics.”
“That's not a crew mustering. And you look too young.”
They said “look too young,” not “are too young.” She had been in Coldsleep a long time. She tried to cooperate.
“No… I… I don't know what it is.”
“Were you crew?”
“I don't know.”
“What happened?”
“I don't remember.”
They let her rest, and though it obliterated some memory potential they applied stronger nerve-growth factors and other regeneration therapy to the brain and where the central nervous tissue had been destroyed. They showed her pictures of the ship as it had been when they had boarded it.
“What do you remember?” The healers on We Made It were gentle and patient.