“Machinery?” Harold moved up beside her. She leaned into his side with slow care. He winced at the thought of kzin claws raking down her leg. . . .
Maybe I’ve been a bit uncharitable about Jonah, he thought. The two of them came through the kzin hunt alive, until Claude and I could pull her . . . them out. That took some doing. “They’re not using machinery, Ingie. Bare hands and hand-tools.”
Her mouth made a small gesture of distaste. “Slave labor? Not what I’d have thought of Claude, however he’s gone downhill.”
Harold laughed. “Flighters, sweetheart. Refugees. Kzin’ve been taking up more and more land, they’re settling in, not just a garrison anymore. It was this or the labor camps; those are slave labor, literally. Claude grubstaked these people, as well as he could. It’s where a lot of that graft he’s been getting as Police Chief of Munchen went.”
And the head of the capital city’s human security force was in a very good position to rake it in. “I was surprised too. Claude’s been giving a pretty good impression of having Helium II for blood, these past few years.”
A step behind them. “Slandering me in my absence, old friend?”
The servants set out brandy and fruits and withdrew. They were all middle-aged and singularly close-mouthed. Ingrid thought she had seen four parallel scars under the vest of one dark slant-eyed man who looked like he came from the Sulineasan Islands.
“There are Some Things We Were Not Meant to Know,” she said. Claude Montferrat-Palme was leaning forward to light a cheroot at a candle. He glanced up at her words, then looked aside at the door through which the servant had left the room; then caught her slight grimace of distaste and laid down the cheroot. He had been here a week, off and on, but that was scarcely time to drop a habit he must have been cultivating half his life.
“Correct on all counts, my dear,” he said.
Claude always was perceptive.
“It’s been wonderful talking over old times,” she said. With sincerity, and a slight malice aforethought. They were considerably older times for the two men than for her. “And it’s . . . extremely flattering that you two are still so fond of me.”
But a bit troubling, now that I think about it. Even if you can expect to live two centuries, carrying the torch for four decades is a bit much.
Claude smiled again. His classic Herrenmann features combined with untypical dark hair and eyes to give an indefinable air of elegance, even in the lounging outfit he had thrown on when he shed the Munchen Polezi uniform.
“Youth,” he said. And continued at her inquiring sound. “My dear, you were our youth. Hari and I were best friends; you were the . . . girl . . . young woman for which we conceived the first grand passion and bittersweet rivalry.” He shrugged. “Ordinarily, a man either marries her—a ghastly fate involving children and facing each other over the morning papaya—or loses her. In any case, life goes on.” His brooding gaze went to the high mullioned windows, out onto a world that had spent two generations under kzinti rule.
“You . . .” he said softly. “You vanished, and took the good times with you. Doesn’t every man remember his twenties as the golden age? In our case, that was literally true. Since then, we’ve spent four decades fighting a rear-guard action and losing, watching everything we cared for slowly decay . . . including each other.”
“Why, Claude, I didn’t know you cared,” Harold said mockingly. Ingrid saw their eyes meet.
Surpassing the love of women, she thought dryly. And there was a certain glow about them both, now that they were committed to action again. Few humans enjoy living a life that makes them feel defeated, and these were proud men.
“Don’t tell me we wasted forty years of what might have been a beautiful friendship.”
“Chronicles of Wasted Time is a title I’ve often considered for my autobiography, if I ever write it,” Claude said. “Egotism wars with sloth.”
Harold snorted. “Claude, if you were only a little less intelligent, you’d make a great neoromantic Byronic hero.”
“Childe Claude? At this rate she’ll have nothing of either of us, Hari.”
The other man turned to Ingrid. “I’m a little surprised you didn’t take Jonah,” he said.
Ingrid looked over to Claude, who stood by the huge rustic fireplace with a brandy snifter in his hand. The Herrenmann raised a brow, and a slight, well-bred smile curved his asymmetric beard.
“Why?” she said. “Because he’s younger, healthier, better educated, because he’s a war hero, intelligent, dashing and good looking and a fellow Belter?”
Harold blinked, and she felt a rush of affection.
“Something like that,” he said.
Claude laughed. “Women are a lot more sensible than men, ald kamerat. Also they mature faster. Correct?”
“Some of us do,” Ingrid said. “On the other hand, a lot of us actually prefer a man with a little of the boyish romantic in him. You know, the type of idealism that looks like it turns into cynicism, but cherishes it secretly?” Claude’s face fell. “On the other hand, your genuinely mature male is a different kettle of fish. Far too likely to be completely without illusions, and then how do you control him?”
She grinned and patted him on the cheek as she passed on the way to pour herself a glass of verguuz. “Don’t worry, Claude, you aren’t that way yourself, you just act like it.” She sipped, and continued: “Actually, it’s ethnic.”
Harold made an inquiring grunt, and Claude pursed his lips.
“He’s a Belter. Sol-Belter at that.”
“My dear, you are a Belter,” Claude said, genuine surprise overriding his habitual air of bored knowingness.
Harold lit a cigarette, ignoring her glare. “Let me guess . . . He’s too prissy?”
Ingrid sipped again at the minty liqueur. “Nooo, not really. I’m a Belter, but I’m . . . a bit of a throwback.” The other two nodded. Genetically, as well. Ingrid could have passed for a pure Caucasoid, even. Common enough on Wunderland, but rare anywhere else in human space.
“Look,” she went on: “What happens to somebody in space who’s not ultra-careful about everything? Someone who isn’t a detail man, someone who doesn’t think checking the gear the seventh time is more important than the big picture? Someone who isn’t a low-affect in-control type every day of his life?”
“They die,” Harold said flatly. Claude nodded agreement.
“What happens when you put a group through four hundred years of that type of selection? Plus the more adventurous types have been leaving the Sol-Belt for other systems, whenever they could, so Serpent Swarm Belters are more like the past of Sol-Belters.”
“Oh.” Claude nodded in time with Harold’s grunt. “What about flatlanders?”
Ingrid shuddered and tossed back the rest of her drink. “Oh, they’re like . . . like . . . They just have no sense of survival at all. Barely human. Wunderlanders strike a happy medium”—she glanced at them roguishly out of the corners of her eyes—”after which it comes down to individual merits.”
“So.” She shook herself, and felt the lieutenant’s persona settling down over her like a spacesuit, the tight skin-hugging permeable-membrane kind. “This has been a very pleasant holiday, but what do we do now?”
Claude poked at the burning logs with a fire iron and chuckled. For a moment the smile on his face made her distinctly uneasy, and she remembered that he had survived and climbed to high office in the vicious politics of the collaborationist government. For his own purposes, not all of which were unworthy; but the means . . .
“Well,” he said smoothly, turning back towards them. “As you can imagine, the raid and Chuut-Riit’s . . . elegant demise put the . . . pigeon among the cats with a vengeance. The factionalism among the kzin has come to the surface again. One group wants to make minimal repairs and launch the Fifth Fleet against Earth immediately—”
“Insane,” Ingrid said, shaking her head. It was the threat of a delay in the attack, until the kzin were truly ready, which had prompted the UN into the desperation measure of the Yamamoto raid.
“No, just ratcat,” Harold said, pouring himself another brandy. Ingrid frowned, and he halted the bottle in mid-pour.
“Exactly,” Claude nodded happily. “The other is loyal to Chuut-Riit’s memory. More complicated than that; there are cross-splits. Local-born kzin against the immigrants who came with the late lamented kitty governor, generational conflicts, eine gros teufeleshrek. For example, my esteemed former superior—”
He spoke a phrase in the Hero’s Tongue, and Ingrid translated mentally: Ktiir-Supervisor-of-Animals. A minor noble with a partial name. From what she had picked up on Wunderland, the name itself was significant as well: Ktiir was common on the frontier planet of the kzinti empire that had launched the conquest fleets against Wunderland, but archaic on the inner planets near the kzin homeworld.