Larry Niven - The Man-Kzin Wars 05

His voice followed her as she cantered out into the falling night.

And so the Commission leaves us only the home farm, the Teufelberg forest, and the Kraki, of the properties, Tyra Nordbo read, tilting the paper towards the firelight. The letter took on the tones of her mother’s voice, deliberately cheerful and utterly sad, as it had been ever since Dada left. Was taken away on that crazy astrophysical expedition by the kzin, Yiao-Captain. But this is more than enough to keep all of us here busy. It is a relief not to have the management of so much else, and we must remember how many others are wanting even for bread.

She started to crumple the printout in one hand, then carefully smoothed it out and folded it, tucking it back into the saddlebags and leaning back against the saddle. In the clearing on the other side of the fire her horse reached down and took another mouthful of grass, the rich kerush sound followed by wet munching and the slight jingle of the hobble chain. Her new dog Garm looked up and thumped his tail on the grass, the firelight ruddy on the Irish Setter-mostly Setter-hairs of his coat. Elsewhere the flicker caught at grass, trees, bushes, the overhanging rock of the cliff behind her and the gnarled trunk and branches of an oak that grew out of the sandstone ten meters above her head. Overhead the stars were many and very bright; in the far distance a tigripard squalled, and the horse threw up its head for a moment in alarm. Nowhere in the wilderness about her was there a hint of Man-save that the tree and the grass, woman and horse and dog were all of the soil and blood and bone of Sol.

“So,” she whispered to herself “It is not enough that we are stripped of our honor, they must make us paupers as well.”

Not quite paupers, she admitted.

That had been among the first things her father taught her; not to lie, first and foremost not to lie to herself. They would be quite comfortably off; the home farm was several thousand hectares, the timber concession would be profitable enough now that the economy was recovering, and the pelagic-harvester Hrolf Kraki was a sturdy old craft. The household staff were all old retainers, loyal to Mutti, and very competent. It’s not the money, she knew; it was a matter of pride. The Nordbos had been the first humans to settle Skognara District, back when the Nineteen Families arrived. They had been pioneers, ecological engineers adapting Terran life to a biosphere not meant for it and a planet not much like Earth; then guides, helpers, kindly landfathers to the ones who came after and settled in as tenants-in-chief, subtenants, workers.

It was not the loss of the lands and factories and mines; in practice the family bad merely levied a small percentage in return for governing, a thankless privilege these past two generations. But Gerning and Skognara belonged to the Nordbos, they had made them with blood and sweat and the bones of their dead. For the Commission to take the rights away was to spit on the memories. Of Friedreich Nordbo, who had sponsored a tenth-share of the First Fleet, of Uirike Nordbo, who discovered how to put Terran nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria in fruitful symbiosis with the native equivalents, of Sigurd Nordbo, who lost his life fighting to save a stranded schoolbus during the Great Flood, Of her aunt Siglide Nordbo, who had piloted her singleship right up to the moment it rammed a kzinti assault transport during the invasion.

And of Peter Nordbo, who had stood like a rock between the folk of Skognara and the conquerors’ demands, every day that he was able. Who was ten years gone, shanghaied into space because he told a kzin who was half a friend of an astronomical curiosity, leaving a wife who had no choice but to yield more than he had, as conditions grew worse. Condemned for a traitor in absentia, by a court that thought it was merciful… and Mutti was all alone now in the big silent house on the headland at Korness, looking out over the waves. Few friends had been willing to visit, much less speak in her defense.

“Dada-mann,” Tyra whispered, laying her head on her knees and weeping aloud, because there was nobody to heat That was what she had cried out when he left. There had been no words he could say to a child of eight… Presently Garm came, creeping on his stomach and whining at her distress, sticking his anxious cold nose against her face; she clutched him and sobbed until there was no more.

When she was functional again she took the coffee pot off the heater coil-the fire was for comfort, and predators-and poured herself a cup. The other letter was still sealed; she had nearly discarded it, until the return address caught her eye. Claude Montferrat Palme, a Herrenmann of ambiguous reputation. Frowning, she pressed her thumb to the seal to deactivate the privacy lock and then opened it.

“Dear Fra Nordbo,” she read. “A possible juncture of interests-”

“Yes, there are workings in the mountains,” the old villager said.

At least, that was what Tyra thought he had said. These backwoodsmen had been up in the high country for the better part of two centuries, pioneers before the kzinti came and isolated by choice and necessity since. Their dialect was so archaic it was almost Pletterdeutz, without the simplified grammar and many of the loan-words from the Baltic and Scandinavian languages that characterized modern Wunderlander. Back further in the Jotuns were tiny enclaves even more cut off, remnants of the ethnic separatists who had come with the third through seventh slowship fleets from Sol System.

“What sort of workings?” she said, slowly. Her own accent was Skognaran, more influenced by Swedish and Norse than the central dialect of Munchen; modified by a Herrenmann-class education, of course.

The Nordbos were formerly of the Freunchen clan, one of the Nineteen Families. Formerly. Lucidly, these primitives were out of touch with the news; they barely comprehended that the alien conquerors were gone.

“Ja, many sorts, Fra Nordbo,” the old man said deferentially.

The von Gelitz family had owned these lands-still did, pending the Reform Commission’s findings-but that ownership had always been purely theoretical, except for a hunting lodge or two. Nobody but the Ecological Service ever paid much official attention to this area, and they had gotten careless during the occupation. There was an old manor house outside Neu Friborg’s common fields, but it had been ruins for the better part of a century. He had called them the “old herr’s place.”

Old, she thought with a shiver, looking at the man. They were getting by on home remedies here, and what knowledge their healer could drag out of an ancient first-aid program. The wrinkles, wispy white hair, liver spots… this man might be no more than seventy or eighty, barely middle-aged with decent medicine. Markham should spend less on his precious fleet-the UN Navy is fighting the war now-and more on people and places like this!

Apart from premature aging and the odd cripple, it was not too bad as backcountry towns in the Jotuns went. Built of white-plastered fieldstone and homemade tile, around a central square with the mayor’s office, the national polezi station-long disused-and the Reformed Catholic church. There was a central fountain, and plenty of shade from eucalyptus and pepper and featherfrond trees. They were sitting under an awning outside the little gasthaus, watching the sleepy traffic of midafternoon: bullock-carts and burros bringing in firewood or vegetables, a girl switching along a milch cow, tow-haired children in shorts tumbling through the dust in some running, shouting game. A rattletrap hovertruck went by in a cloud of grit, and a waitress went about watering the flowers that hung from the arches behind them in earthenware pots.

That was all there was to see: the town and its four-hundred-odd inhabitants, the cluster of orchards and fields around it in the little pocket of arable land, and wilderness beyond-mostly scrubby, in the immediate vicinity, but you could find anything from native jungle to forest to desert in a few days’ journey. All about the peaks of the Jotuns reared in scree and talus and glacier; half a continent of mountains, taller than Earth’s Himalayas and much wider. Wunderland had intermittent plate tectonics, but when they were active they were active, and the light gravity reduced the power of erosive forces. These were the oldest mountains on the planet, and not the highest by any means.