by Larry Niven
“I am capable of functioning in a laboratory,” he said.
Peace glanced at him. Slippers, hardhat, diaper. “Hm!” she said, blinking—Buckminster had obviously been having some fun. “Since you know what a Protector is, you know what happened to Jack Brennan. Do you know what happened to Einar Nilsson?”
“Smelled the roots and ate until his stomach burst,” Corky said.
“He smelled one root, freeze-dried by vacuum, and gnawed one bite off before he could be subdued, and aged to death in an hour. Nilsson was a good deal younger than you. Boosterspice doesn’t correct genetic age; it just overrides it. He cooked his brain; you could conceivably catch fire and burn to the ground. Don’t touch anything. Don’t open anything. What do you want?”
In what would normally have been a good imitation of firmness, he said, “What are your intentions?”
“I’m not going to tell you.”
“Why not?” he said in reasonable tones.
“That either.”
“I’m entitled to know something,” he insisted.
“Why? What have you done with your knowledge since you killed the last collaborator? It was easy to look them up, and the last died two years ago. Lose your nerve?”
As expected, that cracked him right down the middle. He staggered, righted himself, then looked around helplessly. “I—” he said, then ran out of the room.
He was coming along. Peace adjusted the proportions of what she was mixing, based on new information.
Buckminster smelled him on the way into the observatory: very upset. It wasn’t an ambush, though, because Corky promptly said, “I can leave.”
“No need. Need any help with the controls? Peace does tend to build for her own level of precision.”
“I worked that out. I was just looking at Pleasance. What do you want to look at?”
“The fourth Pak fleet,” Buckminster said. “The human Protectors are just getting to it. Judging from the debris of the first three, the battle shouldn’t be all that interesting, but the Pak may have worked out something they can do.”
“Fourth? How censored many are there?”
Buckminster cocked an ear at this archaism, but said, “Nineteen. Sixteen, now. The six furthest off show some design innovations, like carbon-catalyst fusion—pure helium exhaust, thin and very fast—which Peace says suggests the Pak have allowed the breeders to evolve a little more brainpower. They must have been dismantling planets by then.” He made a series of adjustments and displayed a view that was between Orion’s hypothetical feet. There were hundreds of dim red specks, no longer quite in hexagonal array. “That’s the second fleet. Passed us about thirty years ago. That glow is friction with interstellar gas. Peace says the Homers must have sprayed boron vapor into its path and blown up the ram engines. That would have been sometime during the Second War. Otherwise somebody around here would have wondered about it.” He switched the view toward Sagittarius—Peace would just have rotated it, but humans had appallingly little trouble with wildly swooping views—and said, “The wreckage of the third fleet’s almost invisible in front of a nebula, and further from us anyway. Here’s the fourth.” Hundreds of white specks, in nothing like hexagonal array. “They saw the first three go and tried to scatter, but the lateral vector component is still tiny. Loosened up the fusion constriction—they should be blue—but they don’t know about the boron. Peace says the change won’t save them. The rams won’t all blow up, but the gamma rays will roast the pilots. The fifth wave will have to be hunted. Is being hunted by now, and may be gone—this view is about a hundred and twenty years old. Here, look!” he said, making Corky jump. “Sorry,” he said. “But look here. See that red dot? That’s a human Protector’s ship. They’re redshifted, so they don’t show up well, but this one’s right in front of a dark region. Not many of those out that way.”
“Am I a coward?” Corky asked abruptly.
It occurred to Buckminster, after he’d been staring for about half a minute, that if that had been a ruse, it would have been a good one—Corky could have gotten in a couple of pretty solid licks with an ax before he could have responded. “No, of course not.” Though you may be the silliest person I’ve ever met, he reflected.
“It’s been a couple of years since I did anything. Toward justice.”
Buckminster was certain he was expected to say something at this point, but couldn’t think of anything relevant. He attempted, “One of the things that used to confuse officials in treaty discussions is how some of your terms have multiple and contradictory meanings. ‘Justice’ is a good example. What you’ve been doing isn’t what humans usually call justice—that tends to be more like Patriarchal arbitration. Killing the humans who got your family killed is more like kzinti justice—though we’d want it to be publicly known. Part of it is the idea that anyone else who considers duplicating the offense should feel very reluctant.”
“Deterrence,” Corky said. He was looking very intently at Buckminster.
“I think so. I’ve mostly encountered the human term in a political context, but it sounds appropriate.”
Corky spoke slowly. “You claim I can’t kill the Patriarch—”
“I’m not making any special claims. It just so happens.”
“Right…You’re a kzin.”
Buckminster didn’t see any reason to deny it. He’d watched transmissions of human gatherings, and noticed that most of the attendees didn’t look comfortable until someone had stood up and told them things they already knew. It was a habit he suspected was related to why they kept defeating better warriors. It made sure everybody did know. It was awfully tedious, though. He waited for Corky to go on, then realized Corky was also waiting for something. He nodded. That seemed to do.
“What would you do to someone that killed your family?”
“I don’t have a family.”
“Supposing you did.”
“I wouldn’t let him.”
Corky was getting angry, though he kept his face and voice from showing it. “Suppose you couldn’t be there when he attacked.”
“I’d have no business starting a family if I was going away,” Buckminster said. Abruptly he realized that Corky was taking his hypothetical reasoning as personal criticism, and said, “Kzinti females are nearly helpless outside of childrearing.”
That worked: Corky calmed down at once. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Bad example. Suppose—”
“Are you trying to ask me what you should do to the Patriarch?” Buckminster interrupted.
“…I guess I am.”
“Nothing. You can’t even get near the palace if he’s in residence. And you can’t get near him on visits of state, either—his security force is much tougher than the fleet that invaded Pleasance.”
That fleet had crushed the planetary defenses in a couple of hours. “I see,” said Corky, who seemed to lose track of his surroundings after that.
Buckminster waited a little, then started zooming the view for the more distant fleets.
Peace found Corky sleeping under a table in the kitchen, on top of seventy hand towels. She got herself corn muffins and a crock of stew, brought up a seat, and began eating. Presently Corky said, “Why don’t you wear clothes?” irritably.
“Why don’t you wear chain mail?” she replied.
“Chain mail isn’t about keeping your organs of excretion out of sight,” he said.
“No, it’s about keeping the rest of your organs from coming into sight,” she said.
Evidently he understood the implicit comment: That’s usually irrelevant, too. After a moment he said, “Are those muffins?”
“Yes.”
“They smell unusual.”
“It’s maize. Didn’t get sent out with any first-wave colony ships—lacks some amino acids. So it’s sort of an Earth specialty. Try one.”
She was handing it under the table when Buckminster came in. The kzin’s tail lashed once, his ears curled tight, and he blinked rapidly a few times and fl
ed the room.
“What just happened?” Corky said indistinctly, around a muffin.
Peace waited until he swallowed the first bite. “He’s been kidding me about keeping pets,” she replied.
After a few seconds Corky burst out laughing.
The laughter went on too long, and when she moved the table and saw him weeping hysterically it was no surprise—he was long overdue. When it started to exhaust him she got him a mirror and some more muffins, these with honey.
His reflection calmed him in seconds, and he wiped his face and bit into a muffin. Once he’d swallowed he said, “That’s good. What’s on it?”
Honey was unknown on Pleasance—bees steer by the sun. “Bug vomit,” she said.
He made a brief scowl and went on eating. Presently he got up and tossed the towels out, then worked the dispenser. “How do I get a chair?” he said. She brought one up, and he said, “Why not just tell me?” as he sat.
“I don’t want the place filled up with brooms,” she said. It went right by him, as he hadn’t gotten acquainted with the entire seven centuries of recorded visual entertainment history. “You’re not a coward, you know,” she added.
He stopped chewing. Then he resumed, swallowed, and said, “I didn’t expect him to tell you.”
Another expression Peace had on tap was rolling her eyes. “Because it was between guys? I’d give a lot to learn how to inhibit the human tendency to Identify With Everything. You’re an alien. It wasn’t important enough for him to tell me. This place is fully monitored. What else would you expect?”
“…I hadn’t thought about it.”
Peace refrained from saying, Miraculously I conceal my astonishment. “What’s happened is, you’ve worked very hard, and you’re tired enough that you’re not completely crazy any more. So now you care if you live or die.”
“We don’t like the word crazy,” Corky said.
Peace paused, then leaned right, then left, to look carefully past him on either side. Then she sat straight and laced her fingers. “Do your friends have any messages for me?” she said interestedly. “Or do they only talk to you?”
Corky looked annoyed, which was a more participatory expression than the usual scowl. “Psychists,” he grumbled.
“Yes, I know that,” she said patiently. “And I do like the word. It’s to the point. You’re not as crazy as you were twenty-two years ago.”
“I’m forgetting them,” he whispered, haunted.
Peace shot him.
The dart hit the thick pad of his left pectoral muscle, hard, and he screamed and went over backwards out the right side of the chair, which of course didn’t go with him. He came to his feet with dart in hand, face bright red, and screamed, “What the hell was that for?”
“Memory,” she replied.
He stood glaring and panting for a long moment, then looked down at the dart. Then he threw it on the floor. “Why didn’t you just tell me and give me the shot?”
“Seeing as how you’re so cooperative and such a good listener, you mean?”
Corky scowled. “So what happens now?” he said eventually.
“Now you eat,” she said, and got up to toss out her dishes.
“I want some answers!” he roared.
“Emulating Richard Sakakida,” she said, and left.
He was too baffled to follow her at once, and naturally after that there was no catching her.
“Buckminster, is there—what are you doing?”
“Cleaning your ship.”
Corky clearly had a lot of thoughts about that, most of them disagreeable. Finally he said, more or less humbly, “Thank you.”
“It’ll all be on the bill,” Buckminster said.
“Bill?” Corky said blankly.
“Joke. What were you asking?”
Corky shook his head a little. He seemed easily confused. “Can I get into the databank here?”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Just to look something up.”
“Oh. Certainly. Let me shut this down.” The cleaning robot was in an air duct at the moment, which meant it could just be shut off—it wouldn’t drift. “What did you need?” Buckminster said, fingers poised over the screen.
“Richard Sakakida,” Corky said.
Buckminster thought about it. Then he sent some commands, and handed Corky the screen. “You’d better do it. Too many ways to spell ‘Richard’ in Hero.”
Richard Sakakida was the name of an intelligence academy-ship in the Third War, and a singleship-infiltration carrier in the Second—the same vessel. The name had been held by various people over previous years, but the search for relevance went all the way back to the 20th century, to the war that had established the UN’s existence.
Richard Sakakida, an American of Japanese ancestry, had washed ashore in Japanese-held territory during the war and explained that he was a defector. After some torture to make certain that he wasn’t lying, he was accepted as a civilian servant. His work as a servant was exemplary, and he was soon taken into the service of the local commanding officer. He was a fine valet, though not much of an aide—when told to clean the CO’s sidearm, he displayed a thorough ignorance of military matters by polishing the exterior to a high shine, without taking it apart.
In the course of his duties as a servant, he also acquired, and delivered to US Army Intelligence, the entire Imperial Japanese order of battle: name and function of every division, where the men in each were from, who their officers were, organization of the chain of command, and the overall war plan. That is, what places would be attacked, what size and type of force would be used to do it, what contingencies had been anticipated, and how they would be responded to. Once this was in American hands, the Japanese never won another battle.
In the Fourth War, the kzinti had won exactly one battle: the surprise attack on Pleasance. After that, every attack force they sent anywhere had been ambushed by human fleets, usually within minutes of entering a region where they couldn’t use hyperdrive to escape. The forces guarding Kzin itself had ultimately been drawn off by diversions, allowing individual stasis capsules of Hellflare troops to hit the planet at hundreds of miles per second, unmolested. The Fourth War had lasted less than six years, from the invasion of Pleasance to acceptance of the terms of surrender. The Patriarch had called for armistice about a week after the arrival of the human commandos, who displayed an understanding of kzinti anatomy rather better than that of most kzinti field surgeons. Peace Corben must have gone to Kzin at the start of the War, gotten into their toughest security areas, and walked out with the entire military database.
A childless Protector could adopt the entire species; Peace Corben had done a fine job indeed of caring for her wards. Decidedly better than a certain psychist.
Buckminster flinched as Corky burst—almost exploded, really—into tears. He said, “You want me to take that?” and reached for the screen.
Corky looked at him.
Buckminster carefully drew back his hand. Corky was taut as a bowstring, and his face bore an expression of kzinlike wrath. “I’ll just go get a drink,” Buckminster said, and kept his movements slow as he got up and left.
Buckminster called Peace as soon as he was clear. “Corky’s in death-seek,” he said.
“That was quick.”
“Oh. What did you do?”
“Injected him with one of my witch’s brews. He thought he was forgetting his family, so I put together some stuff that’ll let him call up old memories without swamping them with irrelevant associations.”
“How did you manage that?”
“I synthesized the things that let me do it,” she said. “Do you want details, or did you have plans for the next month?”
“I was thinking of eating and sleeping, which I’m sure would slow things down. What do we do now?”
“Have you gotten the Silver Bullets out of his ship?”
“Oh yes.” He’d done that before starting the cleanup.
&nb
sp; “Then you keep out of sight, and we wait for him to come see me.”
Corky was waiting for her in the kitchen when she went in for a scheduled meal. (As a breeder she’d suffered from depression and hypothyroidism, so she was accustomed to eating whether she felt hungry or not—yet another lucky break for humanity, since there was no tree-of-life growing where she made the change to Protector.) He said, “I need to leave.” Then he actually looked at her.
Peace was wearing a knee-length singlet, in white, with the usual array of pockets down both sides to the knees. There were black letters on the chest:
BECAUSE I’M THE
PROTECTOR,
THAT’S WHY!
His fierce expression went blank with surprise, then developed into amusement and dismay—the latter largely at the amusement. He cleared his throat superfluously, then said, “I need a pressure suit and a schedule of the Patriarch’s movements—I want to know when he’ll be away from his palace.”
“You’ve given up on assassination.”
“Yes,” he confirmed unnecessarily. “I still don’t think it’s a bad idea, but his successor wouldn’t understand. The trouble with kzinti is they’re still too much in shock over losing. They don’t take it personally.”
“True,” she realized, suddenly admiring his plan. “He won’t be traveling for a few months yet.”
“I have to get back in condition anyway, and practice with my lift belt, so the pressure suit first, I think.”
“First we eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Don’t make me cut up your meat for you.”
That look of dismayed amusement returned. Corky shut up.
Less than a day later he was gone. Peace had gotten a tissue sample in the course of fitting the suit, and was telomerizing some cells when Buckminster found her. “You let him go,” the kzin said.
“Had to.”
“Are those his cells? Are you cloning him?”
“Yes and no.”
“What does that mean?”
“Yes, they are, and no, I’m not. I’d been planning to provide infertile women of good character with viable ova containing my original gene pattern, suitably modified to meet local fertility laws, and large trust funds. I had enough for one or two Peace Corbens per human world. Now, though, I’m adding his genes to the recipe. The paranoia can be retained as a recessive, and there’ll be more variety in their appearance.”