"Come with me to the chapel," said the abbot. "I must call the brothers to prayer and thanksgiving." He clasped his chest harder and gave a sudden cry. He staggered in a circle, then fell, writhing. I bent over him.
"Heart," he whispered. "A fat old man's heart… " His voice and his respiration were rising and falling in an odd way. "Yes, listen… Do you recognize it, scientist? Cheyne-Stokes breathing. Something few heard on this world when everyone had a doc. But I've attended the dying… You will hear a lot more of it as the docs fail, I fear… I'm not good at fear… This… this is another miracle. It will save me much fear." His voice rallied for a moment.
"Rykermann, you may hate me, and God knows I am a sinner. But let me give you my blessing." I shrugged. Hatred seemed unimportant now.
"My personal unworthiness does not affect the quality of it, you know," he whispered with a shadow of his old manner. "As for Masonry, I doubt you can teach the Kzin the handclasp. They haven't the fingers for it. But be careful of the-"
His writhing stopped. He mumbled feebly, then his voice grew a little stronger and he muttered something in a language I did not understand and raised his hand from his chest, waving it at me as though trying to give me something invisible. I bent closer to catch his words but as I did so he died. I heard something else then, where the kzin had stood. Along with the locator modem it had left me Dimity's music box. It must have found it in the module, and it must just now have wound the tiny handle with the huge claws of its undamaged arm.
I walked slowly back to the monastery. The infirmary was still stocked, I knew. I had plenty of means of killing myself. Dimity was gone. She had, at least, I kept telling myself, died quickly and cleanly in space, and her knowledge was lost to the Kzin and their mind-readers. But she was lost to me forever. Forever? I remembered my profession of belief in a Supreme Being and turned it over in my mind to see if it helped. To opt out of this horror would be to do nothing, not even to mourn.
I also had, I now realized, a duty to survive. I was a professor of biology and a sort of chemist, and I would be needed. If not for my degrees and papers, then for the fact that my expeditions had made me, as I thought naively then, one of the few modern urban Wunderlanders who had any experience of camping and surviving in genuinely primitive conditions.
And there was another matter. Cats did not like fire. Bones and nitric acid made phosphorus. Caves with deep drifts of morlock and mynock bones would be a source of phosphorus. Guano, rich in nitrates, would be a prime source of low-tech explosives, a precious strategic resource if there was someone to build a factory to process them. That someone would have to know organic chemistry, and know at least a little of survival in the wild. Ceramics and armor to withstand laser-blasts, fabricated in hidden factories with improvised plant, would also need someone with chemical knowledge. There were probably no living humans, now, whose knowledge of the great caves of the Hohe Kalkstein came close to mine. Those caves would be a huge strategic resource.
From the makeshift and growing refugee camp I could already hear the sounds of babies crying from hunger. A live Nils Rykermann might be able to help there as well.
The abbot had shown me the reality of duty. As for that odd thing called honor, I thought I had seen a shape of that somewhere between van Roberts and von Diderachs, between the abbot and the kzin. The first person I recognized in the refugee camp was Leonie Hansen. She had brought away as much equipment from the laboratory as she could carry and with a couple of others had set up a sort of clinic. A lot of it was very simple stuff-test tubes, optical microscopes, filtration paper I saw, all now beyond price. She, or somebody, had seen that the ultrasophisticated equipment of modern laboratories, like autodocs, would be useless without power sources and maintenance. I thought then that many things would go on, and that she would also be needed.
Epilogue
First, of course they asked her name.
"My name is Dimity Carmody."
That was not a We Made It name. But it was not a We Made It ship. The design, the specifications and part numbers showed it had been built on Earth, a long time before.
"What is your position?"
"Special… Special… Special Professor of Mathematics and Astrometaphysics."
"That's not a crew mustering. And you look too young."
They said "look too young," not "are too young." She had been in Coldsleep a long time. She tried to cooperate.
"No… I… I don't know what it is."
"Were you crew?"
"I don't know."
"What happened?"
"I don't remember."
They let her rest, and though it obliterated some memory potential they applied stronger nerve-growth factors and other regeneration therapy to the brain and where the central nervous tissue had been destroyed. They showed her pictures of the ship as it had been when they had boarded it. "What do you remember?" The healers on We Made It were gentle and patient.
"I am Dimity Carmody."
"You came in an Earth ship. Did you come from Earth?"
"No."
"Where do you come from?"
"Munchen. I grew up in Munchen. My father let me play with his computer."
"Munchen?" They looked up an old Earth atlas and found pictures of it. But when they showed her the pictures they meant nothing to her. They found New Munchen in the records and showed her that: the last pictures they had were of a small town of a few thousand people. She did not recognize the old buildings but she recognized the star patterns.
"That's Wunderland." That solved part of the puzzle. And the memory pictures could be Wunderland. Someone showed her flash cards of Wunderland and general human scenes. They showed her a copy of her own memory of the man with the yellow Wunderland beard, and that brought an almost overwhelming response of love and loss and grief so that they feared for her, but she could not put a name to the man and eventually it passed. At a picture of a cat she laid her ears back. Then they examined her ears again and found the characteristic musculature of some of the aristocratic Wunderland families. They found another picture of what looked like a cat, very distorted, in her own memory and showed it to her but it meant nothing though she flinched from it.
"Yes, Wunderland."
"This isn't Wunderland."
"Oh."
"What year is it, Dimity?" They meant, of course, what year did she remember it as being. "I don't know."
She never on that world remembered the Kzin or what had happened on Wunderland, though she remembered her theoretical work at length, when the Outsiders sold We Made It a manual for a faster-than-light shunt whose first operating principles she alone could recognize and understand.
The Corporal in the Caves
Larry Niven
2408 a.d.
Hroarh-Officer's deep radar projected a hologram of the nearer caves. A three-dimensional labyrinth of interconnecting tunnels and cavities of all sizes, it looked much more like a diagram of living organs than like a stone formation.
The resemblance was complete to the detail that there was movement going on in those tunnels and cavities. The radar could give only a blurred impression of the activity in the nearest parts, but like most of Wunderland's caves, with hordes of flying creatures importing protein each day, the great caverns of the Hohe Kalkstein contained a massive amount of life. Some of that life was human and dangerous. Some of it was nonhuman and also dangerous.
The long cliffs that marked the escarpment of the Hohe Kalkstein reared before them, honeycombed, honey-coloured for the most part (the Kzin had discovered honey fairly recently and were still deciding what they thought of it), in places blackened by fumes or gleaming white where explosions had blasted great shards of the outer limestone away. Here and there were the black entrances of the caves, dangerous and fascinating.