by Larry Niven
He gasped and held it, coughing—and got over his fear, and the resulting intelligence, almost immediately. "Her real name was Charlotte," he said, attempting dominance again.
"Charlotte Chambers," Peace said, nodding.
He hadn't known the last name. "Oh, she told you."
"No," she said. "All it took was logic and persistence and a ten-pound brain."
* * *
Charlotte Chambers' name hadn't been in the historical database of Jan Corben's ship, Cockroach, but had been included in the classified UN ARM records Peace had gotten on Earth—for a shockingly cheap bribe, considering it was wartime. Peace had simply compared the two and found the only very rich person her mother had chosen to delete.
There was corroborative evidence, too.
Charlotte Chambers had been a latent paranoid with a generous trust fund, which was drained for ransom when she was kidnapped. The kidnapper had been an organlegger, strapped for cash when the Freezer Bill of 2118 filled the public organ banks to capacity. He had brainwashed her to keep her from testifying against him, but had been caught when a highly original money-laundering scheme was exposed. Once the means of brainwashing had been revealed, Charlotte had responded to treatment and begun to function—and sued the organlegger. An outraged and horrified jury had awarded her a staggering sum, which she invested with all the care her now-manifesting paranoia could provide.
She'd gotten around the Fertility Laws of the time by emigrating to Luna and bearing her own clone.
The records had it that she died when her daughter was just short of voting age, in an accident that required her body to be identified by its DNA. Her daughter had taken over her investments like she'd been doing it for years, and presently moved to the Belt to raise her own clone. The fifth in this sequence had bought a ramship and gone to live on Mount Lookitthat after her mother's tragic demise, and as mountaineers had by then developed a society that tolerated very little government intrusion the trail was lost.
In the course of four and a half centuries, she'd have borne, and murdered, anywhere from twelve to twenty daughters. Cockroach had had facilities for restoring a cell to a youthful state, and prepared eggs in stasis.
A curious corollary was that Peace Corben owed her existence—and the human race thereby owed many millions, possibly billions, of lives—to some nameless twenty-second-century organlegger, who'd provided money, idea, and madness to the woman who'd finally been known as Jan Corben. Human history was filled with flukes like that: like the discovery of beer, so people would grow grain instead of starving, once overgrazing had turned the forests of Southwest Asia and North Africa to desert; or the introduction of fossil fuels and electricity right as the latest Ice Age was reaching its peak, keeping the planet insulated with carbon dioxide just long enough for fusion and superconductors to take up the slack. If there was some outside influence arranging these breaks, it was beyond Peace's power to locate—beer had assuredly been discovered when stale bread was left in water too long, a bizarre error when people were hungry, and steam engines and generators were made possible by the work of a couple of young men who tinkered because they were too socially inept to find dates, in a culture and era where women were prepared to marry anybody. There were plenty of other examples, equally counterintuitive.
* * *
"You'd make a fascinating monograph," Corky tried again.
"You wouldn't make a decent pair of knee boots. Too leaky. You had enough pimples to supply a middle school."
"I was too busy to bother washing."
"How about half a minute to tell the computer run the pressure down to two hundred millibars of pure oxygen? Decompression breaks the pimples and cleans them out, and pure oxygen kills the bacteria. Sol Belter trick, close to six centuries old. Of course, their singleships just lacked bathing facilities—they did want to be clean. Speaking of which—" Peace hauled him along by the arm again, this time to the shower. "Scrub all over."
"Why should I?" he demanded.
"Buckminster and I will both know if you don't," she replied.
"So what?"
"Ever seen the body cleaner in an autodoc at work? It uses an elegant feedback system, doesn't miss a speck, beat everything else off the market. There's thirty-one companies that make autodocs, but only one subcontractor for the body cleaner: Snark Limited. I own it. I invented the cleaner. I can whip one together in about ten minutes. It won't have a sleep inducer attached. Scrub all over."
* * *
Buckminster was almost done eating when Corky got back to the kitchen, and watched him curiously as Corky puzzled over the dispenser settings. Finally, with enormous reluctance and a veneer of condescension, Corky turned and said, "How is clothing acquired?"
The kzin thought for a moment. "My sire used to skin and cure a ftheer for a new ammo belt every year, but of course most people just go to an arms shop. Why?" he asked innocently.
"I mean, how is it acquired here?"
"It isn't. What would we do with it?"
"I want to get something to wear!" Corky said, façade cracking.
"Ah. You should have said. I can understand that; that thing must get caught in stuff all the time." He got up and punched for a few hand towels. "These should be easy to tie together."
Corky was now standing in a peculiar, slightly-hunched posture. "Aren't there settings for garments?" he said.
"I can turn up the heat. Peace won't mind."
"It's warm enough. Something to protect skin."
Buckminster also got him some ship's slippers and a hardhat. "You want knee or elbow pads?" he said, but Corky didn't say anything. After some thought, Buckminster found a setting for a sewing needle and some thread. Corky took these, nodded, and left.
Buckminster looked after him, blinking. Presently his ears waggled a bit.
Peace was in the second biochemistry lab when Corky found her. She'd spent what added up to a couple of thousand hours there since it was built, investigating her own body chemistry and duplicating the useful compounds. "Don't touch anything, and especially don't open anything," she told him without looking his way.
"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 Prot
ectors are just getting to it. Judging from the debrís 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 fled 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 participat
ory 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."