Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIV

“All life…” said somebody else.

I have said it was impossible to tell the scale. Now the picture was becoming fuzzy. I noticed tiny things, possibly insects, were moving at the base of the column. As I watched, they moved into or under the low structure near it.

“Well, there’s life, anyway,” I said.

“A complete waste,” said the general. “We could look at this till Doomsday, and it wouldn’t tell us anything useful.”

“Except that Doomsday is coming,” said Gropius. “And this is all that’s left. The last trace of Man. We must have destroyed the Earth big time.”

“It remains top secret, with your permission, sir,” the general said. “No need for people to know what’s coming.”

The shuddering patterns of interference were coming more quickly and frequently to the picture now, and the distortions becoming more gross. Then the picture dwindled to a pinpoint of light and died. Our glimpse into the future had ended. We looked at each other wordlessly. There was nothing to say.

But there had just been time to see the white column, on a soundless beam of light, lift from the ground, turn towards the Pleiades, and vanish in a flash.

by Hal Colebatch

Occupied Wunderland, 2419

“The monkey is telling the truth,” the telepath reported. “It does not know why the other monkeys died.”

I knew enough of the Heroes’ Tongue to follow what it said. I had not tried to resist it or make its task more difficult, so we were both feeling in better shape than would otherwise be the case. And I had told the truth. The telepath was bewildered, and so was I.

Slave Supervisor nodded, a mannerism he must have unconsciously picked up from humans. Anyway, it seemed I was off the hook.

“Resume your duties,” he growled at me.

I made a prostration of obedience-not gratitude, kzin would not appreciate that-and gathered my books and left. The telepath followed me. I gave silent thanks that Krar-Skrei and his pride had not been present. To Krar-Skrei, a dead monkey was a good thing on principle.

An apparently motiveless murder and a suicide. The kzin would not have cared, except we three had been tasked with teaching a class of kzin about human culture, on Chuut-Riit’s orders. I could guess why, after killing von Kleist, Thompson had opened his own veins-the kzin punishment for destroying the Patriarch’s property and spoiling Chuut-Riit’s schemes would have been a great deal worse than a largely painless death in a hot bath. It was an end that befitted a classical scholar devoted to Petronius, who had died similarly on Nero’s orders. But why had he killed von Kleist in the first place?

We still had wills, or some of us did, part of the fast-vanishing remnants of legality. Thompson, we discovered, had left everything to his wife, to whom, for all his faults, I knew him to be devoted. Had there been a love triangle there?

Another document had been left by Thompson, apparently meant to be attached to his will like a codicil, and made apparently just before he committed suicide. In it he claimed von Kleist had been a member of the Resistance. This stopped kzin reprisals against Thompson’s family-he was written off as a monkey who, by killing a feral monkey, had tried to do his duty to the Patriarchy, even if in a typically monkey-daffy way. Yet as far as I could tell, it was untrue. To a human it made no sense. Anyway, we lived and worked too closely together to have secrets of that magnitude from one another. More, it would have been impossible. The Resistance in Neu Munchen had finished long ago. The humans still carrying on were holed up in the wild country, apart from occasional furtive trips to the city to pick up what supplies they could.

Well, I was too busy staying alive myself to worry overmuch. Suicides, and, for that matter, murders, on occupied Wunderland were by no means uncommon. As I returned to my quarters that night, it seemed to me, not for the first time, that suicide made a good deal of sense for us all. Even if I had had two good arms, I would not have dared even think about escaping to join the Resistance: my mind might easily be swept by a telepath again, perhaps a more thorough and more viciously hostile one.

There had not been much left of the Munchen University. The kzin had forbidden human research into any branches of science that might have military application, and as for the fine arts-well, what was the point of a BA now? The University had some endowment lands, and the collaborationist government allowed it to collect a little, diminishing, rent from these, I presumed to help prop up an appearance of normality, though some of the collabos might have their own games and rationalizations. That kept some of us alive, until the tenants died or walked off, or the kzin took over rent-collecting for themselves. Some of us, yes. There were few humans more helpless on Wunderland-on Ka’ashi , rather, than an academic whose department fell apart. Most of the University’s remaining productive farmland was worked by robots who didn’t care who their masters were.

We had almost nothing to do, apart from competing with the hedge-teachers who gained a pittance from teaching children the basics of reading and writing. We spent our days in the common room, drinking foul ersatz coffee, and wondering how long our lucky position as unassigned slaves would endure. To venture out of doors meant the risk of being robbed as the last of law and order gradually broke down, or worse, being conscripted by the kzin for slave-labor. The braver members of the faculty who had joined the Resistance were gone and mostly dead.

We all knew what might happen. Shortly after the cease-fire we had been summoned to watch the University’s vice-chancellor and his family die in one of the Public Hunts, the first we had seen. Captain von Rathenau of the collabo police force had set it up. The vice-chancellor and his family had not made good sport, however-they had been too old, too young, too out of shape, or too paralyzed with fear to run, let alone fight. So as not to disappoint the kzin youngsters who had turned up for the hunt, von Rathenau, under Krar-Skrei’s orders, had then drafted a number of the human spectators to replace them.

The vice-chancellor had not even died for a great cause, just for misdirecting the collabo government, possibly unintentionally, in the hunt for Nils and Leonie Rykermann. The collabos had learned of the Rykermanns’ work in organizing the Resistance, and Krar-Skrei, the area governor, had put a price on their heads. The Rykermanns, when they heard about this, had insolently retaliated by putting a price on Krar-Skrei’s head-a supply of the geriatric drugs which had suddenly become worth far more than gold, and double that for von Rathenau, who was a more possible target. Krar-Skrei was a terrifying piece of work, even as kzin nobles went.

Our position was similar to that of the purveyors of luxuries in any depression in Earth’s history, only immeasurably worse than most. We offered classes to children of the officials of the collabo Government, with an almost total lack of success. Apart from the basics of reading, writing and counting, what was the point of learning anything? And how could we discipline or examine them? If the child of a collabo official wanted a degree, he or she got one without more ado.

This more-or-less wretched existence had been interrupted by a visit from the collabo security forces. They rounded us up and began checking off our specialties against lists they carried.

Finally they selected three of us: von Kleist, Thompson and me. I did not like either of the others much. Too cowardly or insufficiently patriotic to join the Resistance themselves, I had the feeling that they despised those quaint enough to do so (at least I had an excuse). But when our names were first called, there was little room to think of anything save to not let oneself be overmastered by terror. Something told me to put on a good front.