by Larry Niven
It was too dim and slippery to run, and we were too tired, but we set off at the best pace we could. I still had my night glasses with a built-in compass, and Dimity had a sense of direction which she had proved in the caves and which I trusted rather more. There was a roar, and the slick walls and the liquid around our feet glowed orange in reflected light. We looked back and behind us we saw flame boiling down the manhole, but we had already made some distance. I was alert for Beam's beasts but we saw none. I knew poison had been put into the drains regularly to keep them down.
We covered several miles, heading north, then took some stairs to the surface. The streets in this part were deserted. We reached my house about dawn. It was running on its own auxiliary power, and the door recognized my retinal patterns. It didn't matter much since someone else had gained entry earlier by driving a vehicle through the front wall. There was an almost unbearable smell of decay inside, but all we found of the source were a couple of severed human fingers. The kitchen and the autodoc had been used.
We slept for a few hours, huddled in the basement in a nest of blankets. Dimity's head wound was still bleeding. I cleaned it as well as I could but thought that after our race through the drain the best thing to do would be to let it bleed and hope any infection might be carried away. Before modern autodocs I would, I thought, have had a medicine-chest with a bottle of disinfectant for injuries such as this. As it was I was worried about the shaking-up that nearby explosions had given my own autodoc, apart from possible tampering, and dared not use it. A lot of people would be having to learn to get by without docs soon, I thought.
I did find some acid in my laboratory, weakened it greatly with water, and cleaned the wound cautiously with that. Later I also rinsed some fabric in it and made a clumsy bandage, cursing the fact that modern fabric was almost impossible to cut without proper tools. There was still food in the kitchen and I dialed us a meal late in the morning. The windows were opaque and I left them that way apart from a few small spy holes. We had a view of deserted streets and smoke, with plenty of background noise. Television and Internet were all dead.
"How are we?" Dimity asked.
"Worse off than before we started. We've lost the transport, the kzin are here, and the slowboats are gone. We've achieved precisely nothing." There was something else wrong: Dimity's question, though basically meaningless, would have been a natural thing for a normal person to say. But the Dimity I knew would not have bothered asking it.
"The slowboats are gone." Nor did Dimity normally repeat things pointlessly. I felt something cold inside me that had nothing to do with the mere ordinary fear I felt for us both and for our dying world. "Look in the sky. You'll not see them in orbit anymore. The big space stations are gone too."
We did for a few kzin."
"Not exactly enough for victory."
"Perhaps those are the biggest victories we can hope for now."
"It's still going on."
So we could hear. Explosions, the roaring of out-of-control fires. Distant shouts, screams. There was also the noise of kzin engines, unmistakable and terrifying. As we watched through one hole a kzin warmachine appeared at the end of the street, a huge red armored thing, floating a few feet above the pavement. We could do nothing but back away from the hole and crouch in the darkest corner we could find. Eventually the sound diminished and when we crept back to the window it was gone. A couple of times we saw humans running from one building to another, and then kzin on foot. Neither came our way.
"It's no good here."
"No." There was not much I could do but hold her.
"It doesn't look good, does it?" she said.
"No."
"We'll find a way out. Even this shall pass away."
"I'm sure it will."
"No, I mean things might get better."
"I suppose so. They seem to have got worse for a while."
"In some ways it wasn't all that good before..."
"It seemed to be," I said.
"One thing, Nils. It was hard, I know, for you to be in love with a freak. Know, at least, that the freak loves you."
Then I remembered something. Or rather two things. Things the abbot had said to me in what seemed another life. I went back to my laboratory and retrieved a collecting gun and a small selection of darts. I also found the stock of portable food and strakkaker ammunition I had laid up and hidden weeks before was still untouched.
It all seemed to be quieter when we ventured out. I wanted to wait till dusk, but Dimity said the felinoids could certainly see in dim light better than we could: In fact the streets were deserted save for the dead and a few Beam's beasts already creeping upon them. There was fighting still going on but it seemed to be on the other side of the Donau.
I thought it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, for us to find transport. Actually there were abandoned vehicles all round. The streets leading to major arteries were jammed with them, some burned and wrecked, some apparently undamaged. The dead bodies were mostly but not all human. People had tried to shelter in the pools in the nearby fountains and they were full of floating, parboiled corpses. Perhaps a kzin had used a plasma weapon, because the whole square was burned. Between two burning buildings we found a flyable ground-effect car with keys still in its dead owner's fingers. I turned on the engine and the car lifted as a crowd of humans came pouring around the corner. It looked like a gagrumpher stampede. There was no time for me to get my strakkaker clear of its buttoned pouch. They mobbed the car, fighting to get in. It tilted and Dimity was dragged out.
I still had the controls and used the car to smash a couple of them against a wall. Then there was another firefight: a group of kzin and armed humans exchanging shots. That scattered the mob. Half a dozen of them ran right into a strakkaker blast and were cut down. A rampaging kzin swatted others to left and right, apparently hardly noticing them. Another kzin and a human rolled together under a stream of molten metal pouring from the guttering of a burning building. Then the fighters disappeared down another alley.
One human staggered back a moment later, face gone, hands clasped to his stomach where a kzin's claws had partially disemboweled him. He tripped over his spilling guts and fell. I can hear his screaming now. A kzin leaped on him and then the beam of a laser passed through the pair of them, ending it. Suddenly the fight had broken up, and but for the dead the street was deserted again.
Dimity had fallen hard and had been kicked and trampled. She was unconscious. In the ruddy light the new blood pouring out of her head, ears, and mouth looked black. Amid the mess I saw what looked like bone fragments. A much worse head wound on top of the previous one.
I got her into the car, propping her up. Her head was on one side. To my horror her mouth was hanging open like a corpse's and there was no recognition in her eyes. I had no idea what to do. I administered an anesthetic dart. It would stop her moving and doing further damage, at least. If she lost respiratory functions, well, I could do no more. She lolled forward, and I propped cushions about her, at least keeping further pressure from the wound. Skimming low, I headed out of the burning city and northwest. I passed other refugees, columns of humans on foot heading who knew where? Some carried bundles of possessions. There were exhausted old people, sitting or sprawled despairing by the road, pregnant women who would have no midwifery ward, children, some without parents or adults, and hospital patients with surgical appliances and trailing tubes. Some died as I passed. There was nothing I could do for any of them. There was, I felt, nothing I could do for the human species beyond what I was doing. Once, when I had left the great mass of refugees behind, I saw a kzin aircraft. I was flying very low and cut the engine and landed. I think it saw us but to my surprise it took no notice. Like cats, the kzin seemed often unpredictable. It headed toward the great columns of smoke rising from the city and from farther east. I noticed there were no more of our lasers lighting the smoke clouds. Dimity continued to breathe.
I reached the monastery towards nig
htfall.
I noticed as I approached that the wooden building had been removed from the foot of the metal steeple which we once speculated the alien scout might have taken for a rocket or missile. It stood on bulky strap-on reaction motors and a complex of wide circular craters showed it had already landed and taken off several times. Fueling lines ran to it and it was surrounded by a ring of armed men. The gates were closed. There were more monks with strakkakers on the wall. There was already a crowd outside, begging to be let in. Others of them were cooking one of the monks' zebras on a spit. A single kzin fighting aircraft would have got the lot in one pass.
I brought the car in low. Strakkakers were raised at us, but none fired. The place looked untouched by the direct effects of war, and I suppose the monks were still hesitant about killing humans. I saw Brother Joachim among those on the wall and shouted my identity to him.
We landed in the garth. I had checked my own strakkaker and its loading, folded its stock and barrel again and hidden it under my coat. Dimity was carried to the infirmary. The monks had good, modern medical equipment, and as well as autodocs there were brothers who were trained as human doctors, though much of the equipment and resources were already in use. I did not dare kiss or touch her as her head was shaved. They did not let me go with her further.
A few minutes after she was taken away I was in the abbot's study. He was staring at a bank of television sets that were alive and receiving.
Chapter 15
Comfort, content, delight—
The ages' slow-bought gain—
They shrivelled in a night.
Only ourselves remain
—Rudyard Kipling
There was a view from space of München and the surrounding territory. Large areas of the suburbs were still in flames. To the east continuing fire and explosions as well as beams suggested a human army was still fighting. To the southwest, Dresden was a firestorm. Other screens showed human refugees, some scattering out to the north and the farms of the northwest and northeast without apparent plan or purpose, others, who seemed to be in a more organized column, heading for the hills. "That looks another futile stand," I said, indicating a knot southwest of the crater at Manstein's Folly. The abbot shook his head. He seemed to take my presence for granted but perhaps that was an effect of extreme weariness.
"Not altogether. They know what they're doing. It's drawing off kzin from the city and the refugees. The humans have done better than I thought. Are still doing better. At this rate it'll take the kzin weeks or months to destroy all the pockets of resistance. It's still buying time, at least."
"Time for what?" I said, thinking of von Diderachs's words. I moved behind him and stepped back to get an overall view.
"At the moment, time is valuable for its own sake. It takes their attention from the slowboats."
They could shoot them down if they wanted to."
"It also gives time to get more people into the hills. And... it seems from intercepted transmissions that the Kzin may actually... respect a bit of resistance, somehow."
However weary he was, he spoke with some calm authority. And guessing what I had guessed, I felt myself blazing with simultaneous hope and fury.
"You know a lot, don't you?"
"As much as I can learn."
"Inside information from military channels?"
"I've been calling in favors lately."
I moved my hand to my belt as unobtrusively as possible. With my next words things might get difficult. "You knew for a long time."
"Yes. More or less."
"Where are these pictures coming from?"
"A satellite, obviously." The abbot's voice implied he didn't know or care which.
"The Kzin have destroyed all satellites."
"They must have overlooked this one, then."
He was too keyed up to feel the tiny prick on the back of his neck from the little collecting-gun's microscopic, instantly dissolving, sliver of tranquillizer. It seemed the first time in a long while that my professional training and equipment had been of use to me.
"Because it's shielded?"
"How should I know?" He put his hand up to his neck and patted it vaguely. His voice was changing. I hoped that a sudden shock now would get the truth out of him.
"How should you know?"
I had the strakkaker out now. I jumped across the desk and grabbed him by the throat, jabbing the muzzle under his nose.
"Don't play games with me! You know exactly what I mean!"
"Brother!... Professor!... Nils?"
"It's disguised, isn't it? And it's not a satellite so much as a spaceship in orbit?"
He didn't try to dissemble.
"How did you know?"
"I remembered what you said, the night it all began: 'We came here independently... It almost bankrupted the Vatican.' Passage in a big slowboat would have been expensive, but not that expensive. I searched some of the old records when we got them up, and found no mention of your people on any of the slowboat passenger lists. My conclusion was: You came to Wunderland on your own ship."
Yes. We left later than the original slowboats but we came faster. The state of the art had advanced by the time it was launched."
"Where did that ship go? Not back to Earth. There would be no justification for sending an empty craft all the way back. So it's still here. Isn't it?"
"Yes."
"In a system as full of rubble as this it would be easy enough to cover with rocks and dust so it looks like another planetoid. With a low albedo and a high orbit it would be more or less unnoticeable from the ground among everything else that's up there. Your ace in the hole in case you really had to run or fight?"
Yes."
"You made sure it was forgotten."
"Yes. Later we did a deal with some of the Families. Records of how we arrived were removed and people forgot. But we argued that in an emergency the ship would be at their disposal or ours—as lifeboat or... or warship. Then time went by and they forgot about it too. Who cared?"
You denied it to the defense effort now, when we needed every ship we had to defend our world against alien invaders."
"But it was deactivated. There are no weapons aboard. It couldn't have helped the defense effort." Weapons could have been fitted, and it might have been used for an ambush. Any spaceship is a weapon, properly used. But I let it pass. It would simply have been destroyed without affecting the eventual outcome of events, and at least it was a ship in being now.
"And now it's been activated again. These transmissions prove it."
"Yes. One of the families helped us, and we have a shuttlecraft.
"You can put that gun down," he said, "I'm not going to fight you. We have enough problems already."
What are you going to do with it?"
"Get some of our people away, and some refugees. But it's a small ship. We can't take many."
To Earth?"
"No. Earth is plainly under attack as well. What would be the point? I'm thinking of sending it to We Made It."
"Why?"
"First, to give them warning. Second, because it's taking some of our eggs out of two threatened baskets. These kzin may not know of We Made It."
"No. You must send it to Earth. With Dimity Carmody aboard."
"Why? She is a shapely and clever young lady, and I know that you are in love with her. But your subjective feelings are not important now, Nils. As God is my witness I'm sorry, but to send her would be at the cost of not sending somebody else. It seems to me she is better equipped to survive here than some. If any are to survive the kzin."
"At this moment she is in your infirmary, badly injured. Head injured. Isn't regrowing brain and central nervous tissue the hardest surgical procedure of all?"
It stopped him for a moment. But he replied:
"You must see that that makes no better case for her. To take her in that condition with a lot of medical equipment—equipment that's needed here—would mean leaving even more of the others be
hind... You cannot think I enjoy making decisions like this?
"I, of course will not go," he went on. "These are my flock and I will not abandon them. In any case, I have already told you that it will not go to Earth. Earth warned us, remember. They already know of the kzin attack even if they are not directly experiencing it. And I can tell you we have had no laser messages from Sol System for some time. That strongly suggests their big lasers are busy." The drug might be making him tell the truth but I could see it was not affecting his willpower. "I will stay here if I must, but send her to Earth!" I shouted. "She thinks she has... she knows she has made a mathematical discovery that may have military applications."
"Can you believe that?" He was nodding in his chair now. I hoped he was not going to lose consciousness.
"Do you know of her work?"
"I've heard of it. Who hasn't?"
"Given her own chair and research unit at the age of sixteen. Discoverer of Carmody's Transform. Can't you take what I say on trust? And if the Kzin get her... "
"If the Kzin get her she dies. Or perhaps not. Again, as a man, I'm more sorry than I can say, but I believe my duty is clear. I've thought of you as a friend and I've no wish to hurt you or any man or woman. But a lot of people are going to die. Having more neuronic connections in her brain than average doesn't morally entitle her to special treatment."
"She has a military value. This is not for me or for her. The survival of the human race may depend on it."
"Perhaps I should ask her."
There was a soft phut, a pneumatic sound. I saw a dart appear in the back of my right hand. I reached to pull it out but it worked quicker and more heavily than the one I had used. The room began to go black. As I fell I saw Brother Peter advancing, with his own collecting gun.
I came around on a couch in the same room. The daylight slanting through the window told me a night and more had passed. And it was a smoky light, pulsating with distant fire. I felt, stupidly, for my strakkaker. It was gone, of course.