The Man-Kzin Wars 12

by Larry Niven

  The glowing red ball fell off the end and rolled away. The Thrint stared after it. Then he looked up.

  The Protector shot his eye out with a plain old slug pistol. "Apparently a knife doesn't always work," it said as Gnix fell backward.

  Then it blew the three Tnuctipun's brains out too.

  It turned to the fourth, Darfoor, who screeched desperately, "Fa la be me en lu ki da so mu nu e ti fa di om sa ti po ka et ri fu..." and more of that general nature.

  The Protector said, "Glossolalia?...Machine code?...Hard... wire...ta...lo..."

  Shleer pulled out one of the Peer's anemones, leapt into the room, and thrust its disk against the Tnuctip's side. As designed, the disk stayed put against the target's skin, while the ultrafine hullmetal wires it bound together passed through it, resuming their original shapes: curves, varying from slight to semicircular. In combination they made up a rather fluffy blossom: an anemone.

  They had to pass through the Tnuctip to do it. It fell into two pieces and a good deal of goo.

  The Protector shook its immense head in relief and said, "Kid, I owe you a big one."

  "You don't either," said Shleer.

  "I do. The Tnuctipun created my ancestors, and they clearly hardwired our brains to respond to a programming language this one knew. I was about to become his adoring slave. I owe you big."

  "You gave me my father back."

  "I wanted him healthy anyway. Give me a minute here." It went to the control panel and looked it over. "Wow, good traps you guys make. Got it." It shut down the acceleration field. Then it opened a belt pouch and got out a disk about the size of a decent snack, pulled a switch, and set it down to inflate into a globe.

  "How did you do that with the variable knife?" Shleer said.

  "One time-alteration field won't work inside another. The wire was too thin to support the weight of the ball when it wasn't in stasis. Sorry, I'm being rude. I'm Judy Greenberg."

  "Who?" said Shleer, utterly surprised.

  When he'd come out of it, Larry had abruptly sat up in his rinse tank and said, "Why the hell do kzinti dislike eye contact?"

  They were felines, after all. "Good question," said Peace. "That's Judy there. She insisted. She'll be out tomorrow."

  "What about the girls?" They had four daughters, Gail, Leslie, Joy, and Carolyn. Carolyn was four. (All had blond hair the young Peace Corben would have given up three fingers for.)

  "Old Granny Corben explained everything, and they're all proud of you two." The colonists' children, at least, trusted her, not least because kids usually know a pushover when they see one. (It is a protector's duty to spoil children absolutely rotten.)

  Larry had then said, "Oh god damn. Telepath in orbit to be sure the situation is resolved." So Judy had to be the one going in with the amplifier.

  "At least she's a precog." So she'd duck before being shot at.

  "Thanks." That had helped. Larry picked up a pack of cigarettes, left thoughtfully nearby, and lit one. "Gaahhh!" he bellowed, and threw it into the rinse tank he'd just left. "What did you put in that?"

  "Tobacco," Peace said.

  He looked her over. "They've always smelled like that to you?"

  "Yes, but you seemed to enjoy them."

  He spent almost a full second thinking this over. Then he said, "Thanks."

  When the globe had inflated, it split open, and another Protector came out. Shleer goggled for a moment, then realized the globe had been a portable transfer booth.

  The new Protector looked at the red ball, then at Judy Greenberg, and said, "Aristocrat." Judy snorted.

  "What?" said Shleer.

  "Sorry, ancient Earth joke," said the new one. "At a gunfight, how do you recognize an aristocrat—that is, a noble who inherited his rank? He's the one with the sword."

  Shleer began laughing and found it hard to stop. He'd been through a lot lately. The new arrival got out a brush and did Shleer's back a little, which calmed him down. "Thanks," he said.

  "You would have done this yourself if we hadn't shown up, wouldn't you?"

  "Not as fast."

  "Details. I'm Peace Corben."

  "Felix Buckminster told me about you."

  "Felix? Hm! He did love gadgets. What's your Name?"

  Shleer got self-conscious. "It's a milkname. I'm only four. Shleer." He took a deep breath, and said, "Can you help the harem?"

  It was interesting to see that Protectors had claws that came out when they were upset too. Peace looked at Judy and said, "Doc."

  "Larry's on it," said Judy, who had begun inflating a bigger receiver.

  Peace was shaking her head. "The thing that gets me," she said, "is why the hell someone who can do this didn't just tailor a disease to exterminate the Thrintun?"

  "Against their religion," Shleer said.

  Peace looked at him. "You're a telepath."

  "Uh—"

  "You have to have gotten that from a Tnuctip, because no kzin who ever lived could possibly have come up with a reason that stupid."

  They were making eye contact. Shleer gave it a try.

  Peace shook her head. "I realize you're distressed," she said, "but if you ever give me another headache this bad, the slap you get is gonna give you an ear like a grapefruit. You're looking at it from the wrong end. This doesn't discredit you; it makes telepaths respectable. Are you aware that you've single-handedly saved civilization? Everybody's civilization? I intend to make damn sure everyone else is."

  Judy was loading kzinretti into the autodoc that had arrived, and Peace joined in.

  Notwithstanding their removal of the Thrintun—and Tnuctipun—embryos, and restoration of the kzinretti to health, the Patriarch had clearly been glad to see the Protectors go. While the Greenbergs had been tailoring plagues for kzinti ships to spread, to kill off any Thrint or Tnuctip that got loose in Known Space thereafter, Peace had spent some time interviewing survivors about the chain of events, and it had evidently upset her. Nobody really welcomes a cranky Protector.

  She piloted Cordelia out to the local Oort cloud, then got on the hyperwave and said, "We need to talk."

  Such was the seriousness in which she was held that the Outsider came via hyperdrive, which they normally didn't use. "It is good to see you were successful."

  "Yeah, you don't have to blow up their sun or whatever. You're in contact with the puppeteer migration."

  "That information is not available for sale."

  "It wasn't a question. I have a message for you to relay to them, to be paid for out of my credit balance."

  "Proceed."

  "Keep going."

  There was a pause. "Is that all?"

  "If they don't seem to respond appropriately, add this:

  "The kzinti found a stasis box you had neither opened nor destroyed, in the debris you abandoned in your system when you left Known Space. It held a Slaver and several Tnuctipun genetic engineers. They were found by the kzinti. The Slaver had the Tnuctipun growing Slaver females by the time they were stopped, and had the kzinti fleet preparing antimatter weapons. All you had to do was drop the thing into a quantum black hole. Your interference is offensive, but your irresponsibility is toxic. In the event that you inflict either upon humans, or their associates, ever again, you will be rendered extinct. Message ends."

  "Peace Corben, you should be aware that we have contractual agreements with the puppeteers for their well-being. Whatever you have planned, we would have to stop it."

  "Planned? What am I, Ming the Merciless?" she exclaimed. "I'm not going to warn someone about something I haven't done yet! I set up my arrangements over three hundred years ago."

  "What arrangements?"

  "It's the bald head, isn't it? I don't know. I expected to have this conversation someday, and I knew you could do a brain readout, so I erased it from my memory. If you're bound by an obligation to look out for their safety, the best help you can give is to have them get out of our lives and stay out.

  "And as regards debts
and contracts, diffidently I point out that I have just taken action to clean up the leftover results of your big mistake. Nobody will hear about that but Protectors, by the way."

  "Thank you." And the Outsider was gone.

  "Damn, I didn't mean to humiliate them," she said.

  "Hm?" said Larry.

  She glanced at him. "They—What are you doing?"

  He took the tennis ball he'd been chewing out of his beak. "I just ate. Flossing."

  The true tragedy of the Pak had been their utter lack of humor. Conversely, every human Protector was an Olympic-class smartass.

  "Hm!" she said, and shook her head. "We got the name 'starseed' from the Outsiders, and nobody ever questioned it in spite of the fact that the damn things never sprout. The Outsiders made them. Starseeds go around sowing planets with microorganisms that are meant to evolve into customers. Outsiders keep track of what worlds are seeded and monitor development to make sure nothing really horrible happens. Three billion years ago they were lax in this, and two billion years ago a species they'd missed exterminated all organic intelligence in the Galaxy. They charge high for questions about starseeds because they're ashamed. So what's the verdict?"

  "The kids all wanted to name whatever planet we settle everybody on Peace. I persuaded them it was against your religion."

  "Thank you."

  "Everybody else wants to call it For a Breath I Tarry. Including Judy and me."

  Pleased, she said, "What about Tinchamank?"

  "We thought we'd clone him some mates and find them their own planet. After that it's up to them. Can we go look at Altair One?"

  "The Altairians didn't have time travel," she said.

  He didn't read her mind. (He'd tried it once after the change. She was still a lot smarter than he was, so it had been much like peeking through a keyhole and seeing a really big eye looking back.) After a second he said, "You already looked." At her self-conscious nod he said, "So how did they vanish?"

  "Kind of an immaterial stasis field is the best I can describe it. The math's on record if you care. They'll reappear in a couple of thousand years, probably shooting. I left the kzinti a note."

  He nodded. "I'm still a little sore about our kids smelling wrong. Judy's not."

  "I did the same with my own."

  "I didn't say I didn't understand it. We won't restart the Pak wars, fine. They just seem like strangers."

  She nodded. "Yah."

  Rrao-Chrun-Riit signed the edict. Anyone using slaves would henceforth have no trade or tax advantages over anyone using paid free employees, and would face a choice of slowly going broke or changing over to workers who had a motive to do their work well. He had recently acquired some strong views on the subject of slavery.

  He turned to his son, who had saved everything that mattered to anyone. Before the assembled clan of Riit he declared, "Felix Buckminster taught you as well as I had hoped. Yes, I assigned him to you," he said, amused at Shleer's astonishment. "I'd have arranged for you to be brought out of the harem if he hadn't been sterile! You really thought I wouldn't know that a kzinrett came from a lineage of telepaths? My own mother did! But it's recessive. My son, you are not merely a telepath, you are a full telepath, with the ability humans call Plateau eyes. You can vanish, yes—but you can also charm disputants out of fighting.

  "And you make plans.

  "Good plans.

  "You followed an enemy to gain information, you acted on what you learned to gain more, you built a mechanism to enable you to fight an unbeatable enemy, and when that enemy was dead you acted instantly and correctly to destroy another that proved even worse.

  "My son of all sons:

  "Choose your Name."

  "Harvey," said the next Patriarch of Kzin.

  Independent

  Paul Chafe

  I woke up disoriented in milky grey light. I got my eyes open and saw digits floating in front of my face, 1201. I was in a cube, a sleep cube, on a shelf of a bed barely big enough for the thin, firm mattress pressed gently against my back. The cube itself held the bed, a small desk/table and chair, room to stand up and get dressed, and no more. I pushed the stiff and cheap spinfiber blanket down around my waist. I was awake because the lights were on, the lights were on because I must have set them to come on at twelve. The digits blinked to 1202 and I tried to remember how I had gotten here, but there was just a big blank where last night should have been. Why wasn't I on Elektra?

  "News," I said. The numerals vanished, replaced by a program list. Ceres local was one of the news options. That squared with the barely perceptible gravity that held me against the mattress. I was on Ceres. So far so good. I pointed that channel up and was rewarded with a holo of some net flak on the business beat talking about the current crisis. The rockjacks were still striking against the Consortium, and the Belt economy was spiraling downhill fast. I didn't care about that, what drew my eye was the market ticker running at the bottom. It featured the time and date, twelve oh two, April fifteenth.

  April. It was suppose to be March. What was going on? I stumbled to my feet and through the door. I found myself in a nondescript cube dorm in my underwear. Most of the other cubes were marked vacant. Everyone else had already got up and left, and it was too early for the incoming crowd. I felt bleary; however long I had slept it hadn't been enough. I went back in and hauled the blanket off the mattress and dumped it into the recycler by the door of the cube. The drawers beneath the narrow bed opened to my thumb and I hauled out my clothes. I went through the pockets for a clue as to what I had done last night, but there was nothing. I thumbed my beltcomp alive and checked it. It agreed the date was April 15th, but the entries since March 20th were blank. It wasn't just last night missing, it was better than three weeks. What was going on?

  Nothing came to mind, the anonymous, identical cube doors looked back at me blankly. It was accomplishing nothing, and I could ponder the question in the shower. I resealed the drawers and padded down the hall, grabbing a towel on my way past the dispenser. My body knew where the shower was, so I'd been here before. I had a vague memory of checking in the previous night, but it was strangely hazy. I've gone on a few benders in my life, maybe a few more than normal recently, with little else to do but down cheap whiskey and skim for contracts at a booth in the Constellation. But three weeks?

  The shower room wasn't overly clean, but the water was steaming hot and I let it stream over me, cascading off my body in lazy parabolas to slide down the walls to the pump-assisted drain. The dispenser spilled depilatory in my hand and I noticed words scrawled on my palm—opal stone in big red block letters. I looked at them for long moment through the translucent depilatory gel. The writing looked like mine, and I have a habit of jotting things down on my palm when I want to remember them. This time the trick wasn't helpful. I couldn't imagine what they referred to, I'm not into jewelry, and opals come from Mars, not something I'd likely be carrying, even as a smuggled cargo. What did that have to do with me? I smeared the gel over my face. The hairs that came away were four or five days' growth. What on earth had I been doing?

  I came out of the shower and dried off, feeling better if not less confused. The letters were washed off my palm, but the words were burned into my brain. opal stone. I'd go back to Elektra and ask her what was going on. Elektra is my ship, a singleship officially, although that's more due to me bribing the registrar than any virtue of her design; her class is built for a crew of three. I'd put in a lot of modifications to make her manageable on my own. We've come to know each other well, and she looks after me. I remembered docking at Ceres, some three months ago now. I hadn't had a contract in that long. Docking fees were eating my savings alive, while the rockjacks and the Consortium fought their dirty little war over the concession split. I'm an independent, like all singleship pilots, and sometimes that has its downsides. I went back to my tube to dress, then went out the front desk and thumbed out, nodding to the attendant. There was a Goldskin cop by the door, and he came up t
o me.

  "Dylan Thurmond?" He had his official voice on.

  I nodded, not wanting to admit I was me, but if I denied it his next step would be to demand my thumbprint. No point in making him work for it. What had I done? My record isn't exactly spotless. I'm a singleship pilot, and it's a tribute to my skill that I have far fewer than the average number of smuggling convictions. Unfortunately that isn't the same as zero.

  "I'd like you to come with me." His voice brooked no argument.

  "What's this about?"

  "They'll tell you at headquarters." He led me down to the tube station and invited me to share a tube car with him. He sat in stoic silence while I sweated out the twenty minute tube ride, trying to rack my brain for details, any details, but what I remembered wasn't going to help my case any. At headquarters he spoke briefly to the desk cop, and I heard a word that made my blood run cold. Murder. I told myself I had to be a witness, killing isn't in my nature, but my persistent amnesia wasn't reassuring. He took me into a small, unadorned room and turned me over to a tough-looking officer, Lieutenant Neels. Neels' voice was calm, inviting cooperation, but his manner was rock hard beneath the soft exterior. He didn't need to emphasize what would happen if I chose to be difficult.

  "I'm not trying to be evasive, Lieutenant," I told him. "I woke up this morning with no idea where I was."

  He nodded. "Just think back, and go over what you do remember."

  Police stations look the same on any world. I looked up at the grey ceiling and worn sprayfoam walls and as I cast my mind back I suddenly understood where my memory had gone. It all started in the Constellation, I remembered that much. I told him what I knew.

  It was an average night, March 20th, though if you'd asked me on the day I would have had to guess at the date. On the vid wall Reston Jameson was being interviewed about the violence between the Consortium and the rockjacks, and the economic disaster the strike was for the whole Belt. The sound was down, but I knew what he was talking about because it was all anyone was talking about. To an underemployed singleship pilot the resulting slump had a very personal impact. Maybe I should have sold out and gone to fly for Canexco or Nakamura Lines, but I'm an independent and flying for someone else would be one step above life in a cage for me. Jameson ran the Consortium, though you'd find other names over his on the directorship list, everyone knew the difference between the figureheads and the controlling mind. He had been quoted as saying he'd break the rockjacks and the Belt with them if that's what it took to keep the Consortium in control of metal mining, and of course he'd denied ever saying it. I was interested in hearing what he was saying, and was about to ask Joe to private me the audio when they came in.