Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIV

“Well, I daresay getting to the point where you want to and see that it’s possible is the hard bit,” the abbot said cheerfully.

Two days later von Höhenheim waved goodbye to the abbot and set out to the east, walking steadily. In his last words, he had asked humbly if the abbot would report his presence.

“No. I am not answerable to man, but to my God and my conscience,” the abbot had replied firmly.

Having waved back, the abbot went into his study and thought. “My goodness, I think I’ve performed a miracle,” he said aloud. “Well, You did it, of course, but You let me be the one it was done through.”

He fell to his knees and looked up to a heaven he saw quite clearly.

“Oh, thank you so much, God,” he said happily. “That was such a wonderful birthday present.”

A long time later…

A solitary figure came slowly through the dark. He was obviously footsore, the gatekeeper thought. Come a long way, and lucky to make it without bumping into a tigrepard.

“Can I rest here the night,” the stranger asked. “I can pay. I have gold.”

“We got more o’ the stuff than we know what t’ do with, but yes, you can stay the night. If you want to stay longer, you’ll have to talk to the judge an’ see if he agrees.”

“You have a judge ?”

“Sure we got a judge, an’ a damn good one, too. We even got us a sheriff an’ a couple o’ deputies. An’ you sure better not piss them off, I’m telling ya.”

The stranger was passed inside and directed to Ma Jones, who had a spare room and was prepared to serve food to people who looked reasonably clean. With the traffic they were getting these days, she might find she was running a hotel before long, the gatekeeper thought.

In the morning, the stranger appeared before the judge. No, the Judge , the stranger told himself. The judge was sitting at ease in a chair, smoking something that could pass for a cigar most places. He looked up.

“G’day, stranger. Where you from?”

“Ah, I come from Munchen,” the stranger told him.

The judge looked at him hard. “Seems to me I’ve seen you before, stranger. Long time ago. And more recently in one of they noospapies we been getting’ since we got enough hard money t’ pay for them. Frivolity I call it, but some o’ the folk around here like it, an’ it’s a free world these days. Thank the Lord.”

The stranger looked at him carefully.

The judge looked hard right back at him.

“Seems t’me you might just be on the lam from what some folks call justice,” the judge told him.

“And you too, Herr Jorg von Thoma,” the stranger said.

The judge laughed. “That one won’t fly, Senator von Höhenheim. Sure, that was my name once. And sure, I came out here and lived alone in the valley for years. And one day another man came, and then another with his wife, and we lived reasonably close, for help if we needed it, mostly against the lesslocks.”

“Some sort of species related to the Morlocks?” von Höhenheim hazarded.

“Yep. Shorter, more like chimps or baboons, and not too afraid of the light. And varying from being a damn nuisance to a lot worse, until recently when we done taught them a lesson not to mess with man. Or kzin. But now I’m sort of in charge here. Working in the government meant I was good at organizin’ and arguin’, and these people needed a lot of that. So now, hereabouts, I am the government. And the Law. These are my people; I stand by them, and they’ll stand by me. They understand loyalty. So do the kzin we have here. Anyone calls for me to come back to Munchen and face the music is wasting his time. I won’t go, and even if I wanted to, nobody here would let me.”

Von Höhenheim digested this. “You were a better man than me,” he admitted. “You cooperated with the kzin, but you didn’t shame yourself. I adored them. I worshipped power, and they seemed to have all of it. It didn’t work of course, I understand them better now. They could work with you, thinking of you as a servant. I claimed to be a servant of the kzin, one of the KzinDiener, but they knew better. I admired them, hell, I worshipped them for their power, their strength; I saw them as living gods, I wanted to abase myself before them, to adore them. Me they despised. Perhaps the ancient gods of man always despised those who would abase themselves. Those who respect power and do not respect themselves.”

There was a silence.

“And how do you feel about it now?” the judge asked, shaking the ash off his cigar.

Von Höhenheim thought. “I do not know. I am running from an attempted kidnapping and also a murder charge, but the man I killed was slime. Worse than me. But I was slime too. I have nothing to be proud of. I have sought power all my life, and now I see that it was nothing. Once I met a kzin telepath who had been living in a sunken wreck with skeletons. He was grateful for life, and when the moment came, he did his duty. He was nobody important, he will be forgotten, but he did his duty. And because of that, some of the evil I had planned was undone.

“I had a long time to think while I was walking here, it has taken me months, and on the way I stayed at the abbey and talked to Abbot Boniface. He showed me what I was, all in gentle words, most of them questions about why I’d done what I did. I told him everything, it just poured out of me. Ashes in the mouth. There was nothing of value in any of it, and it leaves nothing in the end but contempt for the self. The little triumphs seem so empty, the setbacks devoid of meaning. I thought it was all about me, but it wasn’t. I am nothing. Plaited reeds, blown through by the wind.”

“Yeah. That’s all any of us are in the end. It’s good ya found it out. Most don’t.”

There was another long silence.

“I will go further east. Maybe one day I shall find somewhere I can stay, somewhere where they won’t know me. Then I shall have only to live with myself. That will be hard enough.”

“Better stay here, stranger. Now you figured out what you are, ya can do some work and earn a place here. I’m gettin’ old. These folk here are the usual sort. You know, mainly stupid and silly, but also mainly decent and kind. They need the help o’ someone with more sense, someone who is prepared to take care o’ them and stop them doin’ dumb things…yes, and to love them. I could do with a rest. We may need a new judge East o’ the Ranges before too long.”

There was another long silence. “You would appoint a murderer, a cheat, a liar, someone who has abased himself before the kzin?”

“That’s politics, ain’t it? And maybe want of courage and self-respect, which can be learned. You’re here because they caught ya out. Don’t get caught out again. An’ the best way is t’ be middlin’ honest. Ya know, the most successful cultures on old Earth were those that engaged with the rest of the world and learned all the other culture’s best ideas. Now we got the kzin t’ learn from. And they tell the truth. And hey, it works better than you’d think. Your big nemesis was a kzin. Vaemar-Riit. Seen it in the noospapies. Learn off him. That’s the smart way.”

“If I could start again…” there was dreadful pain in von Höhenheim’s voice, and a kind of yearning.

“It’s a big, big country, stranger. An entire planet. Room for people who see they screwed up and wish they’d done things differently.”

“I spent my entire life screwing up,” von Höhenheim said bitterly. “I worshipped power. It took a lot of walking and thinking and talking to the abbot to see it, but What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? ”

“Then now would be a good time to change strategies, don’t ya think?” the judge asked cheerfully. “I had time t’ think too. Long ago. And I got a gift of mercy I never deserved. From a kzin warrior, a sergeant, with a sense of honor as deep as a well. And kindness from Vaemar-Riit, no less. So I owe those guys, I owe them big time. And ya know what they say? They say, pass it down the line.”