The Man-Kzin Wars 10 - The Wunder War Read online

  One War For Wunderland

  Prologue

  The ship flew in like a drunken bat, an automatic distress beacon shrieking. It did not respond to signals. When they came within visual sight they saw it was grossly damaged, and plainly not under maneuvering control.

  When they boarded the ravaged ship with its crew of crumbling, desiccated, drifting corpses, some in strange costumes, the only survivor they found was a head-injured woman in coldsleep. They slowed it and stopped it just before it entered the deadly embrace of one of the outer gas-giants. The ship had come a long way under its autopilot from the general direction of either Sol or the Alpha Centauri System. The oddly shaven-headed man who must have instructed it as he died still floated with a freeze-dried hand on the controls.

  But they tested the hull metal where they cut their way in and found that, if it had come from Earth, it must have been a very old ship before it started.

  There were many dead. Far more than a normal crew. This was as packed as a colony ship, more packed, indeed, for a large part of a colony ship's complement would have been frozen embryos. Nor did it carry the vast array of stores and supplies a colony ship would have had: almost nothing but people and hibernation cubicles and bare provisions for a skeleton crew of watch-keepers.

  They were tough spacers who boarded the ship, and most had seen death in space before, but still this was especially horrible and upsetting.

  Apart from the strangely costumed and coiffured men, a large number of the dead were women and children. The hibernation facilities could have just accommodated them all and looked as if these had been being prepared for use when disaster struck, but only the one had been activated.

  It was easy to see but difficult to understand what had happened. It had been sudden. Perhaps the ship had accidentally crossed a big com-laser near its point of origin. A laser—a big one—had burned through the rear of the hull and opened one compartment after another to space, punching its way through hull-metal and human tissue indiscriminately. But if that was what had happened, why had the ship or the station that had fired the laser not come to its rescue?

  Anyway, it had stopped short of total destruction, and a few emergency systems were still working, including the beacon that had signaled its arrival.

  The damage had caused short circuits and fires that had raged even in sealed compartments until the last oxygen in the life-system was consumed. The logbook was melted slag. The last minutes of life aboard the crowded ship were better not imagined but must have been mercifully brief.

  The activated coldsleep unit was damaged and operating with a backup of questionable efficiency. They took the woman down to the surface, and tugs with electromagnetic grapnels moved the strange ship into a parking orbit.

  Even if the woman had not been head-injured to start with, brain-death seemed a near certainty. When they checked the brainwaves' readouts with their own equipment they were astonished by their strength. They were careful, and took a long time healing her and bringing her back to consciousness. The people of We Made It were sometimes painfully aware of being a colony, without the vast medical and scientific resources of Earth or even Wunderland, but their science was still good. The robots of twenty-fifth-century nanotechnology—comparable in size to some large molecules—crawled into her brain, and when a net of them had been formed whose neural connectivity made a whole that was far greater than the sum of its microscopic parts, they sought to trigger a memory. Sensors, receptors, cognitive and motor response units more delicate by far even than those used in normal reconstructive nerve surgery linked their impulses.

  It was a new technology and imperfect. The watchers saw some of what little was left of her memory translated into flickering holograms. There was a jumble of images, including, quite clearly, a scene of a sidewalk café and a man with a lopsided yellow beard under an open sky.

  It looked to those who examined it like something from a picture book of old Earth, though it was not a Flatlander's beard. The tiny robots sewed and spliced and healed a little and crawled out of her brain. They would wait before applying nerve-growth factors so new neuronic connections would not interfere further with the grossly damaged, immeasurably delicate and diffuse network of connections that created the hologram of memory.

  The woman's brain continued to puzzle them, even when they had repaired it as much as they might. There were few pictures but many abstract symbols.

  They tested her DNA but that told them nothing save that she was of human stock originally from northern Europe. They brought her back to consciousness.

  She could speak only in broken sentences when they began, gently, to question her in the hospital at We Made It.

  Chapter 1

  2367 a.d.

  Some lead a life of mild content…

  —Saki

  Around me as I flew, the evening sky of Wunderland was full of light. Alpha Centauri B was so brilliant in its time as to cast its own sharp shadows at dusk and to fill the air with color, yet at an average of 25 AUs easily distant enough to be looked at with the naked eye.

  There too was the red jewel of Proxima and the diffuse, braided lines of the Serpent Swarm. There, a routine sight in this system, was the sliding and flash of meteors, plus a couple of fair-sized moons and other smaller satellites, natural and artificial. There were other points of light that were in fact potatoshaped stony worldlets of various sizes, some carrying loads of instruments, the axled wheels of the old spacestation, the squares and rhomboids of advertising signs (hardly used now—they proved unpopular and counterproductive), high aircraft and spacecraft, and, higher still and parked in their plodding orbits, the old slowboats that had brought the original colonists.

  The towns and city too had their high points of light, not because population pressure in a limited space had forced them upward—Wunderland's chief cities were still quite small—but because .61 Earth gravity made for both high but easily conquerable hills and a few relatively inexpensive architectural flights of fancy.

  Wunderland. Humanity's first interstellar colony was well-named, I thought, watching the landscape pass below me, high crests and ridges still lit by the rays of setting Alpha Centauri A, mountainsides glowing. I had seen pictures of Earth, and understood again the delight our ancestors must have felt in their first days and nights on this new world.

  Not a new thought but still a good one. With its towering hills and mountains, sparkling seas and lush life, its forests, parklands and savannahs where the red-gold of the local vegetation now mixed with the green of Earth plants, its brilliant sky, a gravity that gave good health, good looks (if we exercised hard) and long life, it was impossible to imagine a more wonderful place. Someone had once compared it to the valleys of Malacandra in C. S. Lewis's ancient fantasy Out of the Silent Planet, and noted how Lewis, even if his Mars was a billion years or so behind the times, had anticipated the effects of low gravity on waves. The frustrations of my personal life could be seen in their proper perspective as I flew over that glorious landscape, under those stars.

  I have often remembered the details of that night, and the contentment I did not then know I felt. In fact, I was relieved to be getting away for a few hours from my own thoughts and from the political intrigues and pressures that were becoming more and more obvious between Herrenmanner and Prolevolk on the one hand, and Teuties and Tommies on the other, with the déclassé jumping about on the edges. Because of the frequency of meteor impacts, our fathers had been wary of building near the coast, but we had a good meteor guard force now, with sensors and big rock-blasting lasers mounted in spacecraft and also on the ground, and Circle Bay Monastery stood on a headland, high on the rim of
an old crater. To the west a wide swath of open parklike country swept down to merge with the outer marshes of Grossgeister Swamp. There were ponds and limestone caves, some with odd populations descended from sea creatures washed inland by ancient tsunamis. To the south-east were hills and, seeming far away but still just visible from the air, the diffuse glow of München against the sky. As the night deepened the lights of scattered hamlets and farms were spilled beads rolling to the horizon. A sudden bright plume of orange smoke climbing starwards indicated a takeoff from München spaceport. It had, I thought, been unusually busy lately.

  München had been called New München immediately after its settlement, and its river the New Donau, but the prefixes had fallen out of use. The other München and Donau were more than four light-years away, and there was little chance of confusing them.

  There was the outline of the monastery ahead, dark walls and lighted windows, growing larger as the autopilot shifted into descent.

  I brought my car down in the monastery courtyard. The abbot was waiting for me, visible from a distance as a spot of red light. He had taught me at school, and I had used the monastery as a base for collecting expeditions in the past. We knew one another well.

  "That's where it was seen," said the abbot when I alighted and we had exchanged greetings. "It vanished down there." He gestured with his cigar to a grove of red Wunderland trees near the outlying margin of the swamp, dark in the night shadows.

  "Did you watch the area?"

  "Not continuously, I'm afraid. We thought the best thing was to call you. We kept an eye on the trees during the day, but there doesn't seem to be anything there now. Unless it's good at hiding. But it would have to be good. Some of the brothers aren't bad hunters."

  I scanned the grove with my nitesite. There were a few dull red points in the dark of the trees showing the body heat of small animals. Nothing much bigger than a large rat or perhaps a Beam's beast, but some of the Wunderland reptiloids, even the big ones, were cold when resting. So close to the swamp, it was as well to be respectful of what might be out after dark.

  "Well, I'm not going in there now."

  "Of course not. But you'll take a drop of wine?"

  The monks of Circle Bay Headland made their own wine in the old way. It was famous and expensive and part of the reason I had not waited and flown out in the morning. The abbot was a good host, and the guest rooms were comfortable in an old-fashioned style. We crossed the wide lawn of the courtyard to his study.

  "Something like a big cat, you said. Who saw it?"

  "Three of the Brothers. Peter, Joachim, and John. They'd been fishing in the marshes. They wrote down their impressions separately, as you asked. All emphasized cat."

  I knew them quite well. Brother John was a trained reptiloid handler and had come collecting with me; the others were horticulturists with a good bit of botany and a good deal more zoology than most, even by the standards of an educated and intellectually curious community that lived largely by farming on what was still a comparatively new world with two competing and adjusting biosystems. All intelligent and reliable men.

  "And it was how big? Not a tigripard?"

  "No. Not a tigripard. It was big, bigger than a man, bigger than an Earth tiger, as far as I know, and far bulkier, and they said it ran differently. Sometimes on four legs, undulating like an Earth weasel, sometimes—and this is odd—on two legs. Nothing that they recognized as either a local or an Earth creature."

  "And it didn't attack them."

  "No. But it was plainly a carnivore. They didn't get to see it for long, but they said there was no mistaking the teeth and the limbs."

  "And nothing local, you say?"

  Some of the bigger Wunderland animals, like gagrumphers, were—appropriately for Alpha Centauri A's planet—centauroid in form, but they generally went about in herds and with all six legs on the ground. In any case, gagrumphers were herbivores and placid unless threatened. And as far as large animals go, even creatures as evolved as humans can generally tell herbivores from carnivores instinctively at a glance. It's deep in our genes.

  "Definitely not."

  "Everything we know about evolution says such a creature wouldn't evolve in this ecology," I said. "Predators don't grow bigger than they need, and the native prey-animals all around here are quite small. If there was anything big enough to jump on adult gagrumphers, we'd know about it by now... we'd have seen anything really big long ago. On Earth nothing preyed on elephants, at least not healthy ones."

  I know. But you said the native prey-animals. We've introduced equids and cows and sheep and pigs. That might attract visitors from farther afield. What's in the hills and the forests? You haven't got the whole planet classified yet, have you?"

  Wunderland is smaller than Earth but a good deal bigger than Mars. The last I heard, even the surviving vestiges of Martian life had had their mysteries. "I might say: 'Give us a chance!' It is a whole planet!" I told him.

  "And things can grow bigger in water, can't they? We've got both the sea and the swamp not far away... But they're sure this was not a water dweller. I told you I had something odd for you." Something odd. It gave me a sudden queer shiver. Sometimes we remembered that, if Wunderland was wonderful, we were also still alien intruders upon it.

  "The cat aspect is strange, certainly," I said, "Even a tigripard isn't very catlike. But this sounds more like the persistence of an Earthside myth than anything else. Many wild places on Earth had legends of solitary, wild giant cats that had no business being there—there were sightings, even photographs, of the Beast of Bodmin in England for centuries." Cryptozoology was one aspect of Earth history I had to know something about—the habits of a lot of Wunderland's fauna might be described as cryptic. "They were probably actually big wild dogs that had turned sheep-killers, plus sightings of domestic cats that had gone feral and bred a bit bigger than normal, or surviving Felis sylvestris wildcats. Maybe there were one or two big felines that had escaped from captivity. But it would be odd to find the same legend here. And they are sure it wasn't a tigripard? They can be quite dangerous enough!"

  "No. It was the first thing I asked them. They are quite sure. I don't want to overreact, but I thought it could be something special—which can mean specially dangerous."

  "If it's unknown, it could be dangerous. What looks more harmless than a Beam's beast? They caused a lot of casualties before we got the measure of them."

  We passed under an arched doorway, through an enclosed space I had learned was called the Garth, through another arch with a brass-bound wooden door in a lower wall and entered the abbot's book-lined study.

  The Catholic Church, like some of the Protestant denominations, had been supported on Wunderland by a large and wealthy congregation once, including some of the Nineteen Families. The monastery buildings had some extravagant architectural follies from those days, including sections of battlemented wall and a high tower that could have come from Neuschwanstein. The monks' private quarters were austere while eschewing extremes, but the abbot had to be something of a politician now, and entertain. As the church's support declined, paradoxically, he had to show influential visitors more than a modicum of comfort.

  Well, I wasn't sorry for it. The monastery's past generations of abbots or whoever had made these rooms had managed to combine comfort with a rare feeling of stepping into an almost museum-exhibit-like past. But it was part of a still-working institution with a life, a poetry, if you like, that no museum can achieve.

  I was glad there was such a place on Wunderland, where every human structure was relatively new. There was an antique open fire burning in what the abbot had told me was called a "grate," old chairs that one wouldn't want to sit on for long but which reminded one of how our ancestors sat, as well as comfortable modern ones, a really ancient ornate "clockwork" clock, a shelf of antique-looking paper books in red and gold beside the computers, a crystal decanter on a side table. It seemed odd to talk of unknown dangers in such surroundings.


  "You have weapons?"

  "A few." He waved around the room: "You know we like old things. There are a couple of antique shotguns we use as fowling pieces, and the collecting guns." A ginger kitten jumped onto his knee as he sat, kneading the folds of his robe and purring raucously as he stroked it.

  "Also, of course, we need them when we have to kill a badly injured animal or one of our own beasts for meat. We're old-fashioned in just about all ways, you know."

  "I remember the first time you fed me meat from an animal you killed," I said. "It took me a bit of getting used to. A useful accomplishment for a biologist on field trips, though." We both laughed at the memory of my rush to the bathroom the first time I saw—and then realized—what was on my plate. "Sometimes I thought you were toughening me up deliberately."

  "I was." There was something different in his voice for a moment that snagged my attention. Then he resumed his usual slightly pedagogical manner. Perhaps one's old teacher never quite gets beyond teaching, I thought.

  "I've said it is part of the churches' duty not to move with the times, though not all the secular brethren agree with me. Oh yes, and we've got some modern strakkakers in case we encounter dangerous creatures like Beam's beasts or tigripards at the sheep...

  "Or, between you and me," he continued, "in case we are attacked by humans, who could be much more dangerous. We've got a few bits and pieces in the Treasury and round about that might tempt thieves." The clockwork clock, I thought, must be just about beyond price for some rich collector. But who would know how to maintain such a thing?

  "Using strakkakers against thieves sounds pretty draconian!" The strakkaker's blizzard of glass needles would turn a man into an anatomist's instant diagram. Even police only carried them in emergencies.

  "We wouldn't, not in the first instance. But if anyone broke in, we might have to defend ourselves. The Papacy has always taken the long view about weapons technology. It was the Bull Romanus Pontifex that gave the charter to the age of European exploration." He loved to lecture, I knew. When I was a child he had spent a lot of time with me after school and guided me towards my career. "It was a pope who tried to ban the crossbow. And it was a pope who tried to ban the sale of the noisy, inefficient stonethrowers called cannon to Africans in 1481. We knew they wouldn't stay at that state. But the ban didn't stick and the Moorish pirates were using them in galleys to dominate the western Mediterranean not much later..." He took a sip of wine. "We're aware our isolation could make us vulnerable."