The Man-Kzin Wars 05

CHAPTER TWELVE

Gracious lord God, but these are primitive! Tyra Nordbo thought.

Friendly enough, but so backward. The village was hidden, with dwellings of straw and bamboo tucked deep under an overhang of rock. There was a waterfall at one end of the little valley, and channels irrigated gardens of banana, citrus and vegetables. There were goats and sheep, a few horses… and that was all. There was plenty to eat here, but not a book, not a powered tool, not a single comp or receiver. The only metal or synthetic was what their ancestors had brought in, fleeing as refugees from the first wave of kzinti conquest There were things here that had been only names to her before: opthamalia, cataracts, club-foot, harelip. She shuddered at the thought, even as she made herself smile and accept an opened coconut from a smiling woman. At least the settlement was fairly clean. And the people walked with pride.

I thought we were badly off in Skognara during the occupation, she mused, Machinery wearing out, more and more hand labor, the kzin tribute abating not one whit. It was paradise compared to this. The thought of the labor and loneliness these people had endured was chilling. Only by cutting themselves off completely from the money economy had they been able to stay out of the kzinti sight, but that meant no machinery, no medicine, no help in the disasters of everyday life… They were touchingly awed at having one of the Nineteen Families here, as well. There was no mistaking what she was, of course; everything from her accent to the mobile ears that twitched forward at a sound betrayed it. It u humbling.

“Why did you stay here?” she asked the leathery old headman of the… village seemed inappropriate. Compared to this, Neu Friborg was like downtown Munchen. And the headman was probably only fifty or so, not even middle-aged by civilized standards.

His grandfather had been a orbital shuttle pilot.

“We are free, Fra Nordbo,” the man said proudly. “Here, we pay no tribute to the enemy. None of them has ever came here-except one on a hunting trip.”

He nodded proudly to a ledge above the plaited-cane doorway. The skull that grinned with yellowed fangs looked much like a cat’s, or a tigripard’s, until you saw the long braincase that swept back from the heavy brows. A creature that thought, and made tools, and hunted Man. Until some Men hunted it…

“We had the pelt,” the villager went on regretfully, “but it rotted in my father’s time.”

“The kzinti are gone,” Tyra said gently. “Gone from all this world. None remain except those who accept human rule. You have no need to hide anymore.”

The man’s face fell slightly. “I know,” he said. “A fur hunter told us the news ten months ago.” More slowly:

“You are of the Herrenfolk, Fra Nordbo,” he said. “Since the war is over, folk have come from the Great City. They speak of taxes, of land titles-of taking our children for schools.”

“You understand,” he went on, leaning closer earnestly. “We do not want to be isolated any more… not really. We know we have forgotten much. But we are free. Some say the folk of Munchen wish to grind us down, that they think of us as ignorant savages.”

You are, poor creatures. No fault of yours, Tyra thought sadly.

“What shall we do?” he said. “We know nothing of these matters-only what the officials of the new government tell us. Some say we should move again, as our ancestors did-move back even further into the mountains, and live free. There are others like us in the Jotuns, they might help.”

“Even the Jotuns are not large enough to shield you from Time and Fate,” Tyra said gently. “You need a friend who can intervene for you in Munchen. I know a good man, a Herrenmann, who would be your protector. But even so, change will come. It must; your children deserve to have the world opened up to them once more. Wunderland is once more a planet of Man, and there is no reason to deny them the stars.”

“Thank you,” the headman said, wiping at his eyes one palm; the calluses scraped against the blond-gray stubble on his cheeks. “We will try it.”

The headman’s daughter came in, with a tray: slices of roast wild boar and gagrumpher, steamed plantain, sauces, the rough homemade wine. Tyra’s mouth filled at the smell; her own camp-cooking had grown tiresome.

“his good of one of the Freunchen clan to take time for our troubles,” the headman went on.

“Duty,” Tyra mumbled. Embarrassing. Perhaps only in a place as out-of-the-way as this, as completely isolated from the past century, could you find that sort of faith in the Nineteen Families and their tradition of stewardship.

“We must do what we can for you, who helped those who were strangers,” he said.

“Murphmmhg?” she replied, then swallowed. “You’ve already helped me,” she said. Quite sincerely; a month in the wilderness with nobody but her horse and Garm to talk to had been a chastening experience.

“There are… bad people in the mountains,” he said. “Some of them have been here for a long time-they fought the ratcats a little, stole from us more. The real fighters, to them we gave without asking, but they went back to the towns when the liberation came. The others have become worse, and more have joined them since. They do not come this far back into the mountains often-we have little to steal, and we will fight to keep what we have, When the police chase them, then they run deep into the Jotuns. Some of the ones who were here during the war, they know their way around, a little.”

“Do you help the police?”

“Yes.” Flat and decisive. “The outlaws, they are advokats.” That was a small, scruff’, unpleasant-smelling carrion eater common to this part of the continent; it travelled in packs, attacked sick or wounded animals, and would eat anything including dung. Eat until it puked up, then eat the vomit. The beast was almost all mouth and legs, with very little in the way of a brain, an evolutionary holdover. “If we had more guns, we would shoot them ourselves.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll be cautious.”

“And… “he looked down at his feet in their crude leather sandals. “You said, you were looking also for unusual things?”

Tyra felt a sudden prickle of interest. Unusual could mean anything, back in here; jadeite, a meerschaum deposit, abandoned kzinti equipment from a clandestine base… or news of the party she had been told to look out for. Business for herself, or for Herrenmann Montferrat-Palme. It was about time something turned up, it was cheap to live in the outback but not free, and she would be damned if she was going to be a burden on Mum. Doubly damned if she would go asking lb for help.

“Yes, if you please,” she answered.

“Here.”

He pulled out something small but heavy, wrapped in cloth, and placed it on the table between them. The work-gnarled fingers unfolded the homespun cotton with slow care and the young aristocrat leaned over, holding her breath. A dull-shining piece of… not metal, she thought. About the size of her palm, with a curved surface and a ragged edge, as Wit had been torn lose from a larger sheet. Not any material she recognized, but there was a cure for that.

“Excuse me,” she said, and rummaged in the pack-saddle braced against one bamboo wall. The sample scanner Montferrat had gotten for her was late-model. a featureless rectangle with a pistol grip and readout screen. She pressed it against the whatever-it-was and pulled the trigger.

No data, it told her.

“What do you mean, no data?” she muttered. Perhaps the contact wasn’t close enough: she turned the piece over and made sure there was no airspace.

No data.

“Swine of a gadget!” she said, and tried it on the surroundings. No problem with the table, a rock on the floor; the bamboo wall, or her own hand. Tyra pressed it firmly against the artifact.

No data.

“Hmmpfh.” The girl tapped at the back, running the diagnostic. Everything fine.

Her hand stopped in mid-motion. The scanner worked by firing a tiny but very intense burst of laser energy into the sample, then analyzing the result. The material involved was minuscule, too little to even feel if you used it on yourself, unless you pressed it to your eye, of course. But the laser was very energetic.

She tapped out temperature. At ambient, which was no surprise. Then she squeezed the trigger for the sample function-no data-and asked for hotspots. Nothing: still at ambient temperature. Whatever this was, it was absorbing the energy and not ablating; not even warming up.

Odd, she thought: very odd. Back home in Gerning, the manor-house had had a functioning computer system with good educational programs. Tyra Nordbo had received a sound university-entrance level scientific education, and offhand she could not think of anything with those characteristics. A moment’s conference with her belt-comp’s reference functions confirmed her ignorance. It could be a kzin product, or something military that was not in the general databases…

“Do you mind if I test this?” she said to the headman.

He grinned. “We tried shooting at it. Then we dropped large rocks on it. Nothing we could do would so much as scratch it. The smith’s forge didn’t even heat it up.”

She nodded. That did not mean much, since the only thing these outbackers had in the way of weapons was old-fashioned chemical energy rifles. There were plenty of modern materials that would be untouchable to anything they could do, and which would reflect away a lot more thermal energy than charcoal could produce.

A crowd of children gathered as she came out into the sun, blinking for a moment in the brightness; all dressed alike in shorts, bare feet and varying degrees of grime. They clustered bright-eyed as she drew the magrifle from its sheath beside her saddle, on the porch of the hut, and held up the piece.

“Would one of you like to help me?” she said. A sea of hands waved at her amid eager clamor. She picked a girl of nine or so, with strawberry-blond braids and a gap in her teeth. “What’s your name?”

The girl blushed and dug at the packed dirt with a toe. “Helge,” she whispered.

“Well, Helge, why don’t you take this all the way down there-down by that big boulder-and put it in at ground level? Jam it in tight, facing me. The rest of you,” she went on, “get back-back behind me. Yes, that means you, too. One of you take the little one.”

A few adults had come to look as well; some of them with envy at her equipment, more in curiosity Gracious lord Gott but it must be boring here, she thought. The cassette of regular ammunition came out with a clack sound, and she slid in the red-flagged one from the bottom of her war-bag. The normal rounds were single-crystal iron, prefragrnented for antipersonnel or hunting use. These were narrow penetrators of osmium, in a ferroplastic sabot that would peel off at the muzzle. Antiarmor darts, and at a hundred meters they would punch through two hundred millimeters of machinable steel plate. Much less of real armor, and it drained the batteries like the teufel, but she had a solar-charging tarpaulin spread out over a sunny patch of ground. She tapped the velocity control to maximum and set the weapon for semi-auto.

Helge ran like the wind, heels flashing, and used one to pound the piece of material into the angle between ground and rock. Tyra gave her a smile of thanks and waved her back into the crowd as she sat, pushed her hat back and brought the rifle up with her elbows on her knees. A final check to be sure that everyone was behind herDada-mann had taught her about firearms as soon as she could walk; even under the occupation Herrenmann families had been allowed hunting weapons-and she took up the slack on the trigger. The sighting holo sprang up before her eye on x5, and she laid the target blip on the center of the gray material. Squeeze gently- Whack. The recoil was punishing, several times worse than normal; there was not all that much mass in the darts, but they were travelling fast. She let the tremor die out of her arms and shoulders and the sight settle back on the target as the muzzle came down with its own weight. Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack. Five rounds, as much as her shoulder could stand and more than should be necessary.

“Don’t touch it!” she called sharply, as some of the children ran ahead of her.

The older ones pulled their younger siblings back, making a circle around her as she knelt. The impacts had driven the fragment back against the stone; into the stone, in fact, cutting a trough. The surface was shiny, plated with a film of osmium, and splashes had colored the earth and rock. She reached out with a stick, and it sizzled as the end came in contact with the shiny film. The osmium layer peeled away at the touch, falling to the battered earth below.

“Scheisse,” she whispered. Nothing. Gottdamned nothing. The dull gray surface of the material was utterly unmarked, to the naked eye at least. She shifted the rifle to her left hand and pulled out the scanner. Another no data, and the temperature was still at ambient… no, about. 002 of a degree higher. That after being struck with penetrator darts that splashed across its surface in a molten film!

Well, Herr Montferrat-Palme wanted the unusual she thought. And this is certainly unusual enough.

Another thought struck her as she lifted the material and turned it. The edges were torn, twisted as if something had struck a sheet of whatever-it-was and belled this piece out beyond the breaking strain of the material. Considering what the tensile strength must be, that would have to be a fairly drastic event.

“Careful about that,” she said to a curious child who was poking at the film of osmium; the edges would be razor sharp even though it was thinner than tinfoil. She crumpled it with the heel of her boot and stamped it into a harmless lump. Turning to the headman:

“Where did you find this stuff?”

“The Muttiberg, Fra Nordbo. We pan a little gold in the rivers below it, to trade for things we must have. In the wash beneath-“