I got her into the car, propping her up. Her head was on one side. To my horror her mouth was hanging open like a corpse's and there was no recognition in her eyes. I had no idea what to do. I administered an anesthetic dart. It would stop her moving and doing further damage, at least. If she lost respiratory functions, well, I could do no more. She lolled forward, and I propped cushions about her, at least keeping further pressure from the wound. Skimming low, I headed out of the burning city and northwest. I passed other refugees, columns of humans on foot heading who knew where? Some carried bundles of possessions. There were exhausted old people, sitting or sprawled despairing by the road, pregnant women who would have no midwifery ward, children, some without parents or adults, and hospital patients with surgical appliances and trailing tubes. Some died as I passed. There was nothing I could do for any of them. There was, I felt, nothing I could do for the human species beyond what I was doing. Once, when I had left the great mass of refugees behind, I saw a kzin aircraft. I was flying very low and cut the engine and landed. I think it saw us but to my surprise it took no notice. Like cats, the kzin seemed often unpredictable. It headed toward the great columns of smoke rising from the city and from farther east. I noticed there were no more of our lasers lighting the smoke clouds. Dimity continued to breathe.
I reached the monastery towards nightfall.
I noticed as I approached that the wooden building had been removed from the foot of the metal steeple which we once speculated the alien scout might have taken for a rocket or missile. It stood on bulky strap-on reaction motors and a complex of wide circular craters showed it had already landed and taken off several times. Fueling lines ran to it and it was surrounded by a ring of armed men. The gates were closed. There were more monks with strakkakers on the wall. There was already a crowd outside, begging to be let in. Others of them were cooking one of the monks' zebras on a spit. A single kzin fighting aircraft would have got the lot in one pass.
I brought the car in low. Strakkakers were raised at us, but none fired. The place looked untouched by the direct effects of war, and I suppose the monks were still hesitant about killing humans. I saw Brother Joachim among those on the wall and shouted my identity to him.
We landed in the garth. I had checked my own strakkaker and its loading, folded its stock and barrel again and hidden it under my coat. Dimity was carried to the infirmary. The monks had good, modern medical equipment, and as well as autodocs there were brothers who were trained as human doctors, though much of the equipment and resources were already in use. I did not dare kiss or touch her as her head was shaved. They did not let me go with her further.
A few minutes after she was taken away I was in the abbot's study. He was staring at a bank of television sets that were alive and receiving.
Chapter 15
Comfort, content, delight-
The ages' slow-bought gain-
They shrivelled in a night.
Only ourselves remain
There was a view from space of Munchen and the surrounding territory. Large areas of the suburbs were still in flames. To the east continuing fire and explosions as well as beams suggested a human army was still fighting. To the southwest, Dresden was a firestorm. Other screens showed human refugees, some scattering out to the north and the farms of the northwest and northeast without apparent plan or purpose, others, who seemed to be in a more organized column, heading for the hills. "That looks another futile stand," I said, indicating a knot southwest of the crater at Manstein's Folly. The abbot shook his head. He seemed to take my presence for granted but perhaps that was an effect of extreme weariness.
"Not altogether. They know what they're doing. It's drawing off kzin from the city and the refugees. The humans have done better than I thought. Are still doing better. At this rate it'll take the kzin weeks or months to destroy all the pockets of resistance. It's still buying time, at least."
"Time for what?" I said, thinking of von Diderachs's words. I moved behind him and stepped back to get an overall view.
"At the moment, time is valuable for its own sake. It takes their attention from the slowboats."
They could shoot them down if they wanted to."
"It also gives time to get more people into the hills. And… it seems from intercepted transmissions that the Kzin may actually… respect a bit of resistance, somehow."
However weary he was, he spoke with some calm authority. And guessing what I had guessed, I felt myself blazing with simultaneous hope and fury.
"You know a lot, don't you?"
"As much as I can learn."
"Inside information from military channels?"
"I've been calling in favors lately."
I moved my hand to my belt as unobtrusively as possible. With my next words things might get difficult. "You knew for a long time."
"Yes. More or less."
"Where are these pictures coming from?"
"A satellite, obviously." The abbot's voice implied he didn't know or care which.
"The Kzin have destroyed all satellites."
"They must have overlooked this one, then."
He was too keyed up to feel the tiny prick on the back of his neck from the little collecting-gun's microscopic, instantly dissolving, sliver of tranquillizer. It seemed the first time in a long while that my professional training and equipment had been of use to me.
"Because it's shielded?"
"How should I know?" He put his hand up to his neck and patted it vaguely. His voice was changing. I hoped that a sudden shock now would get the truth out of him.
"How should you know?"
I had the strakkaker out now. I jumped across the desk and grabbed him by the throat, jabbing the muzzle under his nose.
"Don't play games with me! You know exactly what I mean!"
"Brother!… Professor!… Nils?"
"It's disguised, isn't it? And it's not a satellite so much as a spaceship in orbit?"
He didn't try to dissemble.
"How did you know?"
"I remembered what you said, the night it all began: 'We came here independently… It almost bankrupted the Vatican.' Passage in a big slowboat would have been expensive, but not that expensive. I searched some of the old records when we got them up, and found no mention of your people on any of the slowboat passenger lists. My conclusion was: You came to Wunderland on your own ship."
Yes. We left later than the original slowboats but we came faster. The state of the art had advanced by the time it was launched."
"Where did that ship go? Not back to Earth. There would be no justification for sending an empty craft all the way back. So it's still here. Isn't it?"
"Yes."
"In a system as full of rubble as this it would be easy enough to cover with rocks and dust so it looks like another planetoid. With a low albedo and a high orbit it would be more or less unnoticeable from the ground among everything else that's up there. Your ace in the hole in case you really had to run or fight?"
Yes."
"You made sure it was forgotten."
"Yes. Later we did a deal with some of the Families. Records of how we arrived were removed and people forgot. But we argued that in an emergency the ship would be at their disposal or ours-as lifeboat or… or warship. Then time went by and they forgot about it too. Who cared?"
You denied it to the defense effort now, when we needed every ship we had to defend our world against alien invaders."
"But it was deactivated. There are no weapons aboard. It couldn't have helped the defense effort." Weapons could have been fitted, and it might have been used for an ambush. Any spaceship is a weapon, properly used. But I let it pass. It would simply have been destroyed without affecting the eventual outcome of events, and at least it was a ship in being now.