There are times when I regret accepting this post, he thought, sipping the tea and returning the cup with a ritual gesture of thanks. It was hard, not seeing green things except ones that grew in a tank. . . .
Of course, this was the post of honor and profit. Humans would remain half-free longer in the Serpent Swarm than on the surface of Wunderland, and so the Association was preparing its bolt-holes. Nothing must endanger that.
Enough, he told himself. Put aside care.
Much later, his wife sighed herself. “Worthless though my advice is, yet all possible precautions must be taken,” she said, hands folded in her lap and eyes downcast.
Traditional to a fault, he thought; perhaps a bit excessive, seeing that she had a degree in biomechanics. Still . . .
“It would be inadvisable to endanger their mission excessively,” he pointed out.
“Ah, very true. But maintaining our connections with the human government is still essential.”
Essential and more difficult all the time. The kzinti pressed on their collaborationist tools more and more each year; they grew more desperate in turn. Originally many had been idealists of a sort, trying to protect the general populace as much as they could. Few of that sort were left, and the rest were beginning to eat each other like crabs in a bucket.
“Still . . . a vague rumor would be best, I think. We will use the fat man as our go-between; we can claim we were playing them along for more information if they are taken.”
“My husband is wise,” she said, bowing.
“And if the collaborationists grow desperate enough, they might offer rewards sufficient to justify sacrificing those two.”
“Who are, after all, only gaijin. And on a mission which will do us little good even if it succeeds.”
“Indeed, there are limits to altruism.” They turned their faces to the garden and fell silent once more.
* * *
“The inefficiency of you leaf-eaters is becoming intolerable,” the kzin said.
Claude Montferrat-Palme bowed his head. Don’t stare. Never, never stare at a ratca—at a kzin. “We do our best, Ktiir-Supervisor-of-Animals,” he said.
The kzin superintendent of Munchen stopped its restless striding and stood close, smiling, its tail held stiffly beside one column-thick leg. Two and a half meters tall, a thickly padded cartoon-figure cat that might have looked funny in a holo, it grinned down at him with the direct gaze that was as much a threat display as the bared fangs.
“You play your monkey games of position and money, while the enemies of the Patriarchy scurry and bite in the underbrush.” Its head swiveled toward the police chief’s desk. “Scroll!”
Data began to move across the suddenly transparent surface, with a moving schematic of the Serpent Swarm; colors and symbols indicated feral-human attacks. Ships lost, outposts raided, automatic cargo containers hijacked . . .
“Comparative!” the kzin snapped. Graphs replaced the schematic. “Distribution!
“See,” he continued. “Raids of every description have sprouted like fungus since the sthondat-spawned Sol-monkeys made their coward’s passage through this system. With no discernible pattern. And even the lurkers in the mountains are slipping out to trouble the estates again.”
“With respect, Ktiir-Supervisor-of-Animals, my sphere of responsibility is the human population of this city. There has been little increase in feral activity here.”
Claws rested centimeters from his eyes. “Because this city is the locus where feral-human packs dispose of their loot, exchange information and goods, meet and coordinate—paying their percentage to you! Yes, yes, we have heard your arguments that it is better for this activity to take place where our minions may monitor it, and they are logical enough—while we lack the number of Heroes necessary to reduce this system to true order and are preoccupied with the renewed offensive against Sol.”
He mumbled under his breath, and Montferrat caught an uncomplimentary reference to Chuut-Riit.
The human bowed again. “Ktiir-Supervisor-of-Animals, most of the groups operating against the righteous rule of the Patriarchy are motivated by material gain; this is a characteristic of my species. They cooperate with the genuine rebels, but it is an alliance plagued by mistrust and mutual contempt; furthermore, the rebels themselves are as much a grouping of bands as a unified whole.” And were slowly dying out, until the UN demonstrated its reach so spectacularly. Now they’ll have recruits in plenty again, and the bandits will want to draw the cloak of respectable Resistance over themselves.
His mind cautiously edged toward a consideration of whether it was time to begin hedging his bets, and he forced it back. The kzin used telepaths periodically to check the basic loyalties of their senior servants. That was one reason he had never tried to reach the upper policy levels of the collaborationist government, that and . . . a wash of non-thought buried the speculation.
“Accordingly, if their activity increases, our sources of information increase likewise. Once the confusion of the, ah, passing raid dies down, we will be in a position to make further gains. Perhaps to trap some of the greater leaders, Markham or Hirose.”
“And you will take your percentage of all these transactions,” Ktiir-Supervisor-of-Animals said with heavy irony. “Remember that a trained monkey that loses its value may always serve as monkeymeat. Remember where your loyalties ultimately lie, in this insect-web of betrayals you fashion, slave.”
Yes, thought Montferrat, dabbing at his forehead as the kzin left. I must remember that carefully.
“Collation,” he said to his desk. “Attack activity.” The schematic returned. “Eliminate all post-Yamamoto raids that correlate with seventy-five percent MO mapping to pre-Yamamoto attacks.”
A scattering, mostly directed toward borderline targets that had been too heavily protected for the makeshift boats of the Free Wunderland space-guerrillas, disconcertingly many of them on weapons-fabrication plants, with nearly as many seizing communications, stealthing, command-and-control components. Once those were passed along to the other asteroid lurkers, all hell was going to break lose. And gravity-polarization technology was becoming more and more widespread as well. The kzin had tried to keep it strictly for their own ships and for manufacturing use, but the principles were not too difficult, and the methods the Patriarchy introduced were heavily dependent on it.
“Now, correlate filtered attacks with past ten-year pattern for bandits Markham, McAllistaire, Finbogesson, Cheung, Latimer, Wu. Sequencing.
“Scheisse,” he whispered. Markham, without a doubt: the man did everything by the book, and you could rewrite the manuscript by watching him. Now equipped with something whose general capacities were equivalent to a kzin Stalker, and proceeding in a methodical amplification of the sort of thing he had been doing before . . . Markham was the right sort for the Protracted Struggle, all right. He’d read his Mao and Styrikawsi and Laugidis, even if he gave Clausewitz all the credit.
“Code, Till Eulenspiegel. Lock previous analysis, non-redo, simulate other pattern if requested. Stop.”
“Stop and locked,” the desk said.
Montferrat relaxed. At least partly, the Eulenspiegel file was supposedly secure. Certainly none of his subordinates had it, or they would have gone to the ratcats with it long ago; there was more than enough in there to make him prime monkeymeat. He swallowed convulsively; as Police Chief of Munchen, he was obliged to screen the kzin hunts far too frequently. Straightening, he adjusted the lapels of his uniform and walked to the picture window that formed one wall of the office. Behind him stretched the sleek expanse of feathery down-dropper-pelt rugs over marble tile, the settees and loungers of pebbled but butter-soft okkaran hide. A Matisse and two Vorenagles on the walls, and a priceless Pierneef . . . he stopped at the long oak bar and poured himself a single glass of Maivin; that was permissible.
Interviews with the kzin Supervisor-of-Animals were always rather stressful. Montferrat sipped, looking down on the low-pitched tile roofs of Old Munchen: carefully restored since the fighting, whatever else went short. The sprawling shanty-suburbs and shoddy gimcrack factories of recent years were elsewhere. This ten-story view might almost be as he had known it as a student, the curving tree-lined streets that curled through the hills beside the broad blue waters of the Donau. Banked flowers beside the pedestrian ways, cafés, the honeygold quadrangles of the University, courtyarded homes built around expanses of greenery and fountains. Softly blooming frangipani and palms and gumblossom in the parks along the river; the gothic flamboyance of the Ritterhaus, where the Landholders had met in council before the kzin came. And the bronze grouping in the great square before it, the Nineteen Founders.
Memory rose before him, turning the hard daylight of afternoon to a soft summer’s night; he was young again, arm in arm with Ingrid and Harold and a dozen of their friends, the new students’ caps on their heads. They had come from the beercellar and hours of swaying song, the traditional graduation-night feast, and they were all a little merry. Not drunk, but happy and in love with all the world, a universe and a lifetime opening out before them. The three of them had led the scrambling mob up the granite steps of the plinth, to put their white-and-gold caps on the three highest sculpted heads, and they had ridden the bronze shoulders and waved to the sea of dancing, laughing young faces below. Fireworks had burst overhead, yellow and green . . . Shut up, he told himself. The present was what mattered. The UN raid had not been the simple smash-on-the wing affair it seemed, not at all.