Man-Kzin Wars X: The Wunder War, Page 3

  “And a-hunting we will go!”

  “Aren’t all these weapons rather…” I knew there was an antique word, and it came back to me from some history course. “Overkill?”

  “No.”

  Normally the monks would be in thoroughly good spirits at the prospect of helping me on a collecting expedition. That part of my work was most people’s idea of a holiday. But there was something serious in their faces that morning. I knew them as friends, and behind their politeness and what I thought of as their professional serenity I sensed tension. They didn’t argue about the strakkakers but kept them.

  There was no point in taking the car. The place where they had made the sighting was only a few hundred meters from the main gate.

  Inside the walls were fish ponds and gardens with many Earth as well as Wunderland plants: a lot of these (netted over, as were the ponds, against various large and small flying pirates) were grown for their fruit, but some were purely decorative: casurina trees, cape lilacs, the scarlet of bougainvilleas and nodding palm fronds. Along with the flutterbys, Earth bees were loud. Near the gate the kitten was sunning itself in a patch of marigolds. A couple of bright flags flew on the higher towers.

  We walked through the parkland-like meadow of red and green grasses star-spangled with flowers. The monks had a small business making perfumes from nectar, and perhaps that encouraged the flutterbys. They rose about us out of the grasses in glorious multicolored clouds.

  But there was an undercurrent of something else. The usually tame animals in the meadows seemed nervous. Apart from the more usual domestic animals, the monks had raised a small herd of zebras for decorative purposes, and their black-and-white variations and heraldic profiles as they grazed usually provided a pleasing contrast with the riot of colors. Today, I saw, the zebras were clumped together, standing in a circle as far away from the swamp and the grove as they might get, the stallions facing outwards.

  “This thing we saw,” Brother Joachim told me again, “it’s big. Bigger than a tigripard.”

  “So the abbot said. But three strakkakers? I hope you’re not leaving your house defenseless.”

  Brother John, I knew, laughed a good deal. He wasn’t laughing now.

  “It’s not only big. It’s dangerous.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Just because I wear this robe doesn’t mean I’m not a hunter.”

  “Hunter’s instinct, you mean?”

  “More than that. Instinct usually whispers. This was screaming: ‘Run! Run for your life!’ That was even before we saw it…The creature was nightmarish. If we’d told the Father how terrifying it really was, I don’t think he would have believed us.”

  “I hear what you’re saying, and I respect it. You’re a hunter, but you’re a scientist, too. What was so terrifying about it?”

  “It’s not easy to put into words. But part of it was that it shouldn’t have been there. Look, Professor, a tigripard makes sense ecologically. But this didn’t. It was too big.”

  “Odd, I told the abbot that last night. But size can be hard to judge at dusk.”

  “Not this size. There are the bushes where we first saw it.”

  “Yes?”

  “It stood twice the height of them.”

  “We all agree on that,” Brother Peter added.

  “That’s more than the height of a man.”

  “Much more.”

  “It looked like…like a cross between an oversized tiger and a gorilla. There’s something else. Something hard to explain. It was…monstrous. It loped away a few moments after it saw us, but—and we’re all sure of this—in those moments it was weighing up whether to attack us or not. And it had us at its mercy. If it had decided to attack, we were dead. We knew.” The others nodded.

  I thought I understood what he meant. Not from experience but professional observation. A hunted animal knows when it has been marked out as prey. There is a sort of subtelepathic thing, an ability to terrify prey by projecting intent, that is part of a certain type of predator’s stock in trade.

  And yet…the serious settlement of Wunderland had begun with the arrival of the first slowboat carrying the Families and the core of settlers three centuries before. It had been surveyed before the colonists unpacked, and the most obvious types of big fierce animals, in the immediate area at least, had been found and either eliminated or moved to islands. Since then there had always been natural scientists at work classifying, dissecting, ecologizing…

  But relatively few of them, and much of their work was directed to practical matters—agriculture, husbandry, mariculture, genetics, conservation, toxology, biological physics—rather than the fairly self-indulgent pleasures of pure zoological research.

  I was only the second to occupy my chair. As the abbot and I had said, we were a long way yet from knowing even all the larger animals on the principal continent of Wunderland—it would be a sad day for me if we ever did!—but this was Circle Bay, only a short flight from Munchen. The Abbott had complained to me that light pollution from the city would soon be affecting the monastery’s little visual observatory (a telescope in orbit was beyond the monastery’s modern budget and not its style anyway).

  The monastery’s nearest neighbors were small niche farms, worked by vigilant, reliable robots under minimal human supervision. Grossgeister Swamp was large, not fully explored, known and rumored to be the abode of odd things as well as odd people. But as a scientist I thought it highly unlikely that it contained some kind of giant tiger.

  Or was it? Tigers, I remembered, had lived in swamps as well as jungles on Earth. The Sundabands at the mouth of the Ganges had been so infested with them that towers were built for stranded sailors to shelter in. At the southern end of the Malay Peninsula, as late as the mid-nineteenth century, they had regularly swum the Johore Strait to the new city of Singapore to eat workmen. Water would support a big body, too—but the swamp had its own large assortment of strictly water-dwelling predators, including some analogous to Earth crocodilians. I doubted anything like a tiger could compete with them in a watery or muddy environment.

  Apart from aerial and satellite surveys, and the expeditions of scientists and fishermen, there was a small population of humans, marshmen and swampmen—“characters,” some fairly dubious—who seemed to like living in the swamp and often made some income as hunting and fishing guides. The swamp was undoubtedly dangerous for the ignorant, and these “characters” would have to be well-acquainted with it. Hard to imagine that a big land-dwelling predator had managed to live so near a populated zone for so long quite undetected.

  But was it impossible?

  Sometimes, when we were not taking it for granted and speaking of it as our home, even we, the Wunderland-born, tried to make ourselves realize how alien we were. It was good, I thought suddenly, that the first colonists had come in large numbers and, though we were thinly scattered on the planet still, our population was now in tens of millions.

  I was glad that when I was born there had been a good scattering of settlements. A small, single colony, like some of the later ones on more distant planets, might well be a terrifying place to be. What was it like for a settler to look up at the night sky from the single settlement on one of the new colony worlds—assuming they had a night sky—and feel himself so utterly alone beyond that single pool of light?

  We, and the tough loner humans of the Serpent Swarm, descendants of the tough loners who had first colonized Sol’s asteroid belt, were, if we thought about it, quite alone enough.

  Reduce the Sol system to a scale model on a large field: Sol is a ball nine feet in diameter. Walk away from it for about five minutes, a fifth of a mile, and you come to the orbit of Earth, a little ball about an inch in diameter. Earth’s moon, the size of a small pea, is about two and a half feet from it.

  Wunderland, on this scale, circling the nearest of all major stars, is 50,000 miles away.

  No good. Draw what picture you like. Know that our ancestors made
the journey. The mind still can’t really take it in. But we should not be surprised by strangeness here.

  Brother Joachim dropped on his knees and pointed to a patch of bare ground.

  The tracks were of four-toed, clawed feet. The claws of a carnivore, I was sure. And they were big. Bigger than a human foot, and sunk farther into the ground than a human footprint would have been. Something very solid indeed appeared to have made those tracks. Unless this was some sort of hoax—and I could not imagine why these monks might be hoaxers—it was a creature that was still very heavy in Wunderland’s gravity.

  Now I saw it had left an obvious trail. A wide swath of vegetation, including small trees, was broken and beaten flat. Its tracks pointed straight for the swamp. I cocked the collecting gun with its tranquillizer darts, meant to be good for both Earth and Wunderland animal physiologies. The monks unslung and cocked the strakkakers. Brother Joachim moved in front of me.

  Following the trail could hardly have been easier. As we descended into the marshy ground the prints grew deeper. Clawed-up divots of dirt confirmed the creature had been moving at speed, and here and there were the marks of forepaws…very curious forepaws.

  Near the borders of the swamp proper the trail turned aside, towards the grove of Wunderland trees. It entered the grove.

  And ended. There was a wide circle of disturbed ground, nothing more. I wondered if the creature had somehow buried itself or tunneled out of the grove. That seemed contrary to everything we knew. And those prints were not from the claws of a digging animal. But Wunderland was not Earth…

  I got the car then and we examined the site from the air. The car’s ground effect obliterated the trail as it went but we filmed it first. The track from the grove to the spot where the monks had seen the creature became obvious, as did the track back to the grove, and the wide circular disturbance of the ground and bushes there. It appeared plain that the creature had left the grove and proceeded to higher ground near the monastery as if to observe the buildings.

  There was no indication of how it had entered the grove in the first place or where it had gone. There was no disturbance to indicate a tunnel or burrow. This was not the cave country of the limestone ranges, there were no cracks or sinkholes, and radar had charted the location of all the shallow local caves long ago. We flew over the swamp’s margins, and saw nothing new. Even the normally teeming flying and swimming creatures of the swamp seemed unusually silent and scarce.

  The monks and the abbot seemed almost apologetic, but any biologist learns to bear with frustration and delay in fieldwork. I asked them to keep their eyes open and not to hesitate to call me if they saw the odd creature, or any other odd creature, again, and then I flew back to Munchen. But if I was reasonably philosophical about it, some disappointment remained. To have captured an unknown species of large animal, carnivore or otherwise, would have been a very big thing.

  And the monks had been good witnesses that there had been something there. Something big and catlike. I was sure they were telling the truth to the best of their ability. Before leaving I had examined them separately and their accounts remained consistent. I wondered if I would ever see one.

  The voicemail on the instrument panel lit as I approached the city. I thought it might be the Monastery calling to say they had seen anything new, but it was something that struck me as a good deal odder: the mayor’s office. They wanted me right away.

  Chapter 3

  The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

  —H. L. Mencken

  “I’m frankly somewhat embarrassed to have called you like this, Professor,” Deputy-Mayor Hubertstein said. “I understand you’ve been on a field trip today.”

  “Not much of a trip. But I can’t think what this is about.”

  “We’re setting up rather a rushed conference to put a number of experts in the picture, including a biologist.

  “A bit of a possible problem has come up. I’ve got to tell you straight away, though: this meeting and its…subject matter…are, well, potentially embarrassing at the moment. I know you are a responsible man. You’ll keep secret about this?”

  “I still don’t know what ‘this’ is, but yes, I suppose so.”

  “All right. Come this way, please.”

  There was Police Chief Grotius, Captain von Thetoff and another, more senior, officer of the Meteor Guard, with both spacer and Herrenmann written all over him. Others joined us in the capsule that took us up to the Lesser Hall. Most of the seats there were already filled.

  A string of my colleagues from different departments of the university. There was Herrenmann Kristin von Diderachs, spokesman (dictator, some said) to the City Council for the Nineteen Families, smooth, confident, plump and complacent, radiating pride and authority, who I had been presented to but who would hardly have deigned to acknowledge me. There was van Roberts, his opposite number for the Progressive Democrats. Some other politicians had cross-party friendships but I knew these two hated each other and were said to be barely on speaking terms even in the Council.

  Others I recognized as political figures and industrialists. And in a majority of them the dress, features, and unmistakable body language of the Nineteen Families.

  There was The Markham, there was Freuchen, there was Thor Mannstein, there was a representative of the Feynman clan, and there were others: Montferrat-Palme, of an old family coming down in the world, Talbot with his defiantly symmetrical beard, The Dunkley of Dunkley, Schleisser, The Argyl, Mannteufel, Franke, Johnston, Buxton, von Kenaelly, Lufft. Golden or flaxen hair and those mobile ears. A more than usual number of asymmetrical beards with their own subtle identifications and codings of status. But there were other people too: as well as professionals of nebulous status like me (our beards asymmetrical but not blatantly so), there were a couple of obviously wealthy and successful prolevolk and a good number of the new déclassé. Also a man who I knew slightly as one of the town librarians.

  I had been vaguely annoyed at having my evening interfered with, and further by being sworn to secrecy by someone like Hubertstein. I hadn’t had anything like that done to me before.

  As we entered the hall annoyance gave way to curiosity. Not just because of the caliber of those present. With modern communications, any sort of large face-to-face meeting like this was rare. And there was something in the body language of some of those already gathered: Grotius, who called us to order, and Mayor Larsen, who took the podium.

  I had met the mayor socially a few times. I had even heard her speak formally before. But never like this. She opened new buildings and presided at civic banquets. She was another mouthpiece for the Nineteen Families. Her speeches were as a rule long on sonorous bromides and short on content. She normally began by working through the titles of the more or less distinguished ones present. This time she did not.

  “We have had a warning from Sol system about hostile aliens in space. They have been attacking Sol ships.”

  There was a long moment of echoing silence.

  “It seems the aliens have no interest in negotiation or communication. They have some kind of gravity control that gives them acceleration and maneuverability which no conventional ship can match. They have matched velocities with ships travelling at .8 lightspeed.”

  There was a brief hubbub of exclamations. She waited for it to subside before continuing to state the obvious.

  “Of course, this message is more than four years old.”

  The hall was on a column, high above nearly all of the city lights, and had a plexidome for a roof. The designers wanted to make the most of Wunderland’s sky. Sol was there, easy to pick out as part of a constellation in the new Wunderland zodiac, the Tigripard, made principally from the great “W” of Cassiopeia.

  Both Alpha Centauri B and Wunderland’s prime moon had set, so that the sky above us was as dark as it ever go
t. There was the white point I knew was Sol, and Earth was somewhere hanging in that blackness. A blackness that was suddenly strange. Somebody spoke.

  “What are these aliens like?”

  “Something like big cats. We have pictures.”

  The mayor clicked a switch and a holo appeared.

  “This was sent back by a colony ship called the Angel’s Pencil. It encountered one of them—one of their smaller scout ships, Earth now thinks, and got lucky with a drive mounted in tandem with a big com-laser. It escaped and destroyed the alien ship.” She clicked through other holos. “These pictures have come a long way. They’ve deteriorated a bit, but you get the general idea. This is the wreckage of the alien.”

  She paused. There was a thick, heavy silence as the pictures stood there. Not shock, not horror, I think, not then. We were simply finding ourselves, too suddenly, in the presence of something too large and strange to understand.

  “What does a whole ship look like?” That was von Thetoff.

  Grotius answered. “We’ve got that.” The holo changed and flowed into a red near-ovoid thing. “But I guess that if you see something coming at you at .8 light and making inertialess turns, you won’t have to ask.”

  There was another dead silence in the hall. Whatever we had been expecting, it was nothing like this. Then a score of voices began to rise. The mayor held up her hand.

  Another figure stood. I didn’t know him, but he looked like a Herrenmann gone physically somewhat to seed and certainly to low-gravity fat. (That was one thing about Wunderland that irked us then: with workouts we could be the handsomest people in the universe but in later life without frequent sessions at the gym most of us tended to become either elongated stick figures or balloons. No world was perfect, some of us thought.)