The Man-Kzin Wars 12 mw-12

by Matthew Joseph Harrington

  Then he turned and leapt toward the God of the Jotok as an arm went past.

  The souvenir of conquest of the Jotoki homeworld was immense, but there was no way to see the thing while settled firmly enough to leap the full distance, and as it was silent in its rotation Shleer simply had no choice but to remember the timing after seeing it upside down. If he ever got it wrong, there was going to be considerable puzzlement after they found his body; it was about a two-hundred-foot drop, from nowhere anybody knew about.

  Getting back was always a lot easier, though. He faced his target then.

  He got to the end of the arm just as it passed the floor, and gave himself a light, military-looking brushing once he was down. A front-and-back medallion went over his head, labeling him a Patriarch's Guest—well, he was—and he padded comfortably into the more modern areas of Riit's Past.

  It was a bad habit to get into a routine, but this was something nobody knew about anyway, so the first place he always went was to see the Patriarch's Peer.

  Harvey Mossbauer stood in the exact spot he had been in when the bomb decapitated him. They'd had to pretty much build a new harem anyway, so that was done in a more secure location and the House of the Patriarch's Past was expanded to include this area. Reassembling him must have been awfully difficult, and there had been some dispute about whether to include both arms—one having been lost a couple of floors up. Patriarch Hrocht-Ao-Riit had said all of him, though, and nobody had altered that since.

  He had his gear these days. Some Patriarchs had thought he looked more fierce all by himself, but he looked more right with his weapons. He stood poised to spin and kick, flechette launcher strapped to the extended forearm, anemone in the hand drawn back to thrust. Five empty slots were left in the anemone bandolier, a nice historical touch; he'd left four in Companions who had decided to engage in claw-and-fang combat.

  They were the only kzinti he'd killed before reaching the harem. He'd disabled more than sixty-four—

  The bandolier, Shleer was annoyed to see, was now filled, by the new and unhistoried Tender-of-Legends no doubt. Shleer took four and put a fifth into the Peer's hand.

  He wished the Peer was alive. The Peer had clearly known how to manage his priorities, and wouldn't attack kzinti until the real problem was solved.

  Shleer realized someone was coming, and began moving to remain continuously out of sight. He was extremely annoyed at the interruption, which was the first of its kind.

  A Tnuctip scurried in, through, and out the far side without so much as looking at the Peer. Shleer was doubly offended. They'd never come in here before; the least the little monster could have done was appreciate the display.

  Though it might not have had a choice.

  Come to that, what could it be doing? The only things down that way were still older history (which he doubted was its goal) or the servant quarters, with their laboratories—and the lifeboat they'd come from.

  Shleer considered. What would the Peer have done in this situation?

  Harvey Mossbauer (he deserved three Names, but no other was ever discovered, and it would have been disrespectful to assign him one) had come, after many years, to inflict justice. He had infallibly turned toward the harem wherever there was a choice; he had used ammunition that disabled without being immediately fatal, causing pursuit to be obstructed by autodoc remotes; he had blasted walls to open shortcuts, or to block reinforcements, but the only antipersonnel charge he'd set off was in the harem itself. The Patriarch had killed his family; he killed the Patriarch's family; now they were even.

  The Peer would have gathered information. And he would have made plans.

  Shleer followed the Tnuctip.

  Larry Greenberg stepped into the stasis capsule and the door closed.

  Suddenly the gravity was different—but lighter? This wasn't Jinx!

  The door opened. There was an alien standing there, resembling nothing so much as the mummy of a patient dead of terminal arthritis. With a head like a deformed basketball. It wore a white sleeveless singlet from neck to knees, apparently made out of filled pockets.

  A really smart alien, too. Mind too fast to read. “Speak English?” he said helplessly.

  “Yes, but I still have to point at the menus,” it replied.

  “What?”

  “Come out, will you?”

  He came out, feeling foolish, and stopped. The Lazy Eight III, colony ship to Jinx, was gone. His stasis capsule had been brought inside another, bigger(!) ship—“What the hell happened?”

  “From the damage I'd say the ramscoop field missed a good-sized speck of dust. Opened the crew module without disabling the ram, just as they were preparing for turnover. That was about eight and a half centuries ago. Nobody could afford to rescue you. It's now 2965 CE. Read this, it'll give you a general overview of the basics.” It handed him what seemed to be a sheet of white cardboard—with touchpads on the margin. When he reached, it clasped a cuff on his left wrist and watched it for a moment. “Medical,” it said. “—Hungry? Of course, a meal would have been extra weight. Read while you eat.” She led him to another room, where he had the novel and dubious experience of seeing food dispensed by a machine. It was good, though.

  The first part was just after his time—Lucas Garner was involved again. A Pak Protector—an alien, sort of—had arrived from the Galactic Core, with a supply of roots that would turn hominids of the right age into asexual fighting machines with superhuman intelligence. Larry got as far the description of what happened to Jack Brennan, and looked up and said, “You're a human being?”

  “Yah. I know your name already; mine's Peace Corben.” It was done eating—from a vessel the size of a punchbowl—and added, “It gets worse. I've got stuff to do, keep reading.” It stood.

  “How do you eat that fast with no teeth?” (Teeth fell out during the change, and Peace Corben's lips and gums were fused into a bony beak.)

  “I've got a tongue that could shell oysters.” It ran out. (Fast, too.)

  He kept reading.

  It got worse.

  Brennan had exterminated the Martians, expanded the power of the ARM to the rewriting of history and brainwashing of all of Sol System. His successor/apprentice had released a virus on the colony world Home that killed about 90 percent of the population, turning the rest into an army of childless Protectors. (Protectors who had descendants recognized them by smell, and methodically slaughtered anything that looked like it might interfere with their populating the universe. Protectors whose instincts were not triggered by the smell of descendants either quit caring and starved, or worked to protect their entire species.) The Protectors of Home had killed off some incoming Pak scouts, then headed toward the Core to exterminate the rest of the species.

  They did this because the Pak were all coming out in the direction of Earth. Earth was known to be habitable, and their own world wasn't going to be.

  This was because the Galaxy was exploding.

  Greenberg's head was exploding. He took a smoke break before he read on—

  This was known hereabouts because it had been seen: The puppeteers had developed an improved hyperdrive, from mathematical hints dropped by Peace Corben after she'd become a protector. (The puppeteers had fled the Galaxy as soon as they saw the films.)

  She'd become a Protector when she'd gone to Home fleeing a kzinti invasion of her home planet. (She had subsequently won that war single-handedly by walking into the Patriarchy's Central Command inside an accelerator field, walking out with their entire order of battle, and arranging for every kzinti attack after the first to be met with overwhelming force.)

  The kzinti were now mining antimatter, from a stray solar cloud that was passing through the Galaxy at about point eight C. And that meant that her arrangements to alter kzinti civilization had been changed by someone capable of mental control.

  The protector came back while he was reading her speculations about what was happening on Kzin. He looked up and said, “You did all
this to collect me?”

  “Right. The records don't say where the device was put.”

  Back in 2107, Larry Greenberg had been Earth's top telepath. Greenberg had been put into contact with an alien, Kzanol, who'd been in stasis for, it turned out, two billion years. Kzanol had been a much more powerful telepath—a Slaver of the Slaver Empire, with the Power to control dozens of ordinary minds—and his transferred memories had overwhelmed Greenberg's personality for weeks. There had ensued a hunt for something which would have made Kzanol, essentially, God:

  “You mean the stasis field with the Slaver amplifier in it?”

  “No, Lucas Garner's hoverchair, I always wanted it for my weapon collection.” Given that Garner had then been a 169-year-old paranoid, that was almost reasonable; his travel chair probably violated all kinds of safety laws, and possibly one or two disarmament treaties.

  Greenberg flushed a little and said, “It was dropped into Jupiter.”

  “Good. I was afraid Garner would have talked them into the sun. That'd be difficult.”

  “You can retrieve it?”

  “What do you think I've been working on while you read, a better mousetrap?”

  “Oh… Still mice around, huh?”

  “Yeah, but changed some. All that radiation during the Kzinti Wars. We've signed a treaty, though.”

  “You're kidding.”

  “Yes.”

  “… You are kidding.”

  “Yes.”

  He blinked a few times, shook his head violently, and said, “Where's everybody else?”

  “Still in stasis. I wanted you apprised of the situation before I extended the accelerator field around them. I mean to spend about fifteen subjective years in this ship, in part to get them adapted before I release them, and I need you to look after their sanity.”

  “I thought you had an emergency.”

  “To the rest of the universe it'll be about eleven days. Stasis won't work inside any kind of time-distortion field, so I had to tell you separately.”

  “Wait a minute, what about my wife?”

  “She's here. I got everybody.”

  “I mean, we wanted children.”

  Peace nodded. “This vessel was built to house up to half a million Protectors and their fighter craft. You won't find it crowded in fifteen years, I don't care how enthusiastic you are.”

  * * *

  The Tnuctip walked right past a group of older kzintosh, who were following a Pierin tutor. (Paid regular staff were a recent innovation, but one that seemed to work. All it took was regarding a contract as an oath.) There were six to avoid, not counting the Pierin, who wasn't being paid to notice Shleer. The group fell silent as the Tnuctip scurried by.

  “Here we have the tablets of Great Sire Chof-Yff-Riit, who, in amongst his personal tastes, specified the penalties for willfully ignoring a known gesture of surrender, which act was a great contribution to all kzinti cultures, and may be argued to have led to unification thereof under the Patriarchy. Who knows how humans signal surrender?” the Pierin asked. It would take more than the end of civilization to shut a Pierin up. Shleer crept along the wall behind his siblings—far behind.

  K'nar-Riit, who was likely to be the next Patriarch, said dryly, “Their hearts stop beating. It's not always a sure sign, though.”

  “Wittily phrased, though possibly misleading. Humans do not have a surrender gesture. They are descended from the Pak, a species that knew nothing but war, and are as a consequence the least reasonable or tractable intelligent race presently known. They are never satisfied until things are entirely the way they want them, and genuinely expect everyone else to cooperate.”

  One of his siblings was turning toward Shleer. Shleer froze, turned only his head, and made eye contact as soon as he was seen. The kzintosh flexed his ears a little and turned back to the Pierin. Shleer continued out of the hall, head pounding terribly.

  The Tnuctip was out of his sight, but passed through somebody else's. Shleer took the correct exit from the next chamber, doing military respiration exercises to get the headache under control. It got a little easier each time.

  He evaded the guards who'd seen the thing, which was indeed heading for the Jotoki labs. Shleer shortened the distance between them to get through the (manifestly useless) containment doors on the same activation, then let it get ahead. It went into the lifeboat, out of sight.

  Then it vanished from his perception.

  Shleer immediately took cover. The Tnuctip came out of the lifeboat wearing a cap of metal mesh, then went over to where the Jotoki traditionally worked on weapons they fondly imagined the kzinti didn't know about, entered, and was invisible again.

  The Tnuctip was wearing a shield against telepathy. The sthondat-nuzzling imbeciles had had a mental shield, but hadn't been using it when they went into stasis! Shleer noticed his claws were out, and retracted them with an effort. A phrase he'd picked up from Felix crossed his mind: “unusually stupid.” It certainly seemed to apply.

  What would the Peer do now? Examine his options.

  Shleer could sneak in on just nose and ears.

  He could wait and follow the Tnuctip further.

  He could wait and look inside after the Tnuctip left.

  Or he could leave now—at least in theory; he only listed it to be thorough.

  Shleer waited.

  Eventually the Tnuctip came out—looking directly toward him. Pure chance, but bad. Shleer hoped really hard their brains were arranged like modern ones, and maintained eye contact. The Tnuctip sniffed a few times, then turned and went to put the shield back in the lifeboat.

  After it had scurried away, Shleer moved for the first time in over an hour, stretching slowly. The only place for the Tnuctip to go was the Residence; it could therefore be ignored now. Shleer entered the Jotoki secret weapon shop for a look.

  Nothing was lying out, but compartments had been handled. He sniffed them out, then checked for traps. One had a hair across the opening, another hair hanging from the hinge, and a deadfall of a canister of dry lubricant powder inside. Intended only to reveal Jotoki interference—so kzinti reflexes kept the powder from spilling a grain.

  The Tnuctip had been working on another mental shield. Cruder-looking, but with an active power source. Jamming? Would that work?

  He looked it over carefully, Felix having taught him a great deal. It most certainly would not work. There were conductors that would melt if full power were applied for more than a few seconds. The Tnuctip had been Programmed to waste its time here.

  Shleer almost pitied the evil little creature. Almost. He replaced the deadfall and the hairs, and began trying to remember, as he headed back toward the harem, where he'd last seen a camera.

  The design seemed worth copying—and Shleer hadn't been Told to use flawed components.

  * * *

  The Slaver Gnix watched a movie and sucked a gnal, or at least the best approximation his slaves had produced so far. He had nobody to tell it to—yet—but he was mostly pleased. He'd been lucky beyond belief.

  He'd manifested full Power later than usual for a Thrint. This had led to his being employed at a food developer's, which was where he'd discovered the spy among the Tnuctipun. Darfoor, the spy, had had a generator for one of the new stasis fields, which had been developed in the course of his last spying job. All Tnuctipun innovations turned out to be part of a long-term plan to disrupt Thrintun commerce. Gnix had taken over Darfoor and his contacts, and they had been working on ways for Gnix to profit from the disruptions when a competing food company had attacked the development habitat.

  By then Darfoor had installed the stasis field in the escape boat, and Gnix had Told him to forget to put on his Power shield.

  The stasis had held while the galaxy rotated several times.

  Amusingly, the creatures that had opened the field had been looking for a weapon to use to escape from slavery. They had built Gnix an amplifier, and he had taken over the rest of the creatures here and se
t his Tnuctipun to growing some females from his genetic material. There was some problem, not too clear—Tnuctipun minds wandered so—with getting the chemistry right in the host females, but there were plenty of them. His new chief slave had apparently been collecting females.

  There were plenty of potential slave races, too, but the fighting slaves' records said some of them knew how to shield against the Power, so Gnix had sent some of the fighting slaves to gather antimatter from a source that had passed by a while back. (For some reason they hadn't done so before.) He was the only Thrint alive—stasis didn't count—and ruler of a small interstellar empire, soon to be a large interstellar empire.

  Not bad for a foreman in a food workshop.

  The only thing he really disliked was the slave telepaths. All the fighting slaves had a touch of it—his sire Gelku would have been terribly upset by that, as he'd been deeply religious—but some had so much that they'd developed mental shielding techniques to stop the noise. He'd finally ordered those removed from the palace. Not killed, since they were useful; but he didn't like running into them. It was too startling. The amplifier could get through a shield to detect them, of course, but that tended to paralyze anyone in range who didn't have one, which in this case meant most of the planet.

  TOO MUCH OIL, he Told the slave burnishing his scales.

  The Patriarch of Kzin wiped off the excess.

  * * *

  It was almost two years before Greenberg saw the protector again. Judy was expecting a daughter, according to the autodoc, and he was edgy: “Hey! Where've you been?”

  “Working” was the reply. “What the hell did you think?”

  “How should I know? There're discrepancies in the history you gave us.”

  “This is your idea of news? How are the rest getting along?”

  That diverted him briefly. “They're afraid of you. They doubt the explanation of why they can't look outside the ship.” Cordelia was in hyperdrive. “—And the history doesn't add up!”