Man-Kzin Wars XIV

by Larry Niven

  He made a noise in his throat, and she turned to get him another bulb. While she was getting it he opened his desk, only to find several more pieces of paper that said COLD. “Hey, where’s my cigar lighter?” he demanded.

  “Obviously I took it.”

  “Well, dammit, give it back! It’s a priceless heirloom, maintained and handed down from agent to agent for over six hundred years.”

  “I should just think it has been. I found eighty-two different ways it can be used to ruin somebody else’s day. Eighty-three if they don’t smoke. You’ll get it back later, I don’t want you wasting time. You had enough to eat?”

  “I want a cigar,” he grumbled.

  Her rigid face was as capable of expression as a Noh mask— exactly so: when she turned it to change the shading, she displayed a new mood. She detested tobacco smoke.

  “You mind if I smoke?” he said, prepared to see if Protector hide would blister.

  “Hell, I don’t mind if you catch fire and burn to the ground like Miss Havisham. You’ve spent almost three hundred years making my job harder to do.” She opened his cigar box—he saw another slip of paper—got one out, snipped the end, handed it over, and lit it for him.

  “Is that a wooden match?” he said after the first drag.

  “They’re supposed to preserve the flavor.”

  “I just—mm, it does, thanks—I just think that’s a little extravagant.”

  “Marshall, this planet has ten million square miles of forest. That’s about a trillion trees. Cut down one percent a year and that’s five tons of lumber per flatlander, with another five tons of foliage and slash for reductive petroleum synthesis. That resource is the principal factor that keeps the dolphins from taking over the plastics industry with their corner on the algae market. You’ve started to believe ARM press releases.”

  Early took a gloomy puff to avoid answering. She was right. Then he said, “Who’s Miss Havisham?”

  “Early selective-breeding reformer, precursor of the Fertility Board. Marshall, I need to find the other Freezer Banks.”

  “Other?”

  “The only one I can find in ARM records is under this building.”

  “They were combined right after the start of the First War,” Early said. “What was left. They were just about emptied out.”

  The mask turned again, to become forbidding and cold. “Transplants?”

  “Sergeants.”

  The Protector blinked six times. Then she got her pad back out and scribbled on it again. She had damn long fingers, from the extra joint that gave a Protector retractable claws. The effect was exceedingly creepy. Without looking up from the screen, she said, “A lot of things that frighten people are hardwired into the brain from Pak days.”

  “How did you do that without seeing my face?” he said.

  “Your body language changed.” Ursula lifted her gaze again, and he paid attention to her eyes for the first time. They were pretty. It was a jarring contrast with the rest of her looks. Also, the pupils were different colors—one red, one blue. “That was your idea too.”

  “Yes.”

  “That was brilliant, and this is me saying it. Well done.”

  “What kind of frightening things?” he said, embarrassed.

  “It’s a long list. For example, revulsion at the idea of old people having sex comes from the fact that the Pak were accustomed to anyone past menopause becoming physically asexual. Bald people are intimidating. And before boosterspice, children used to be afraid of kissing Grandma.”

  “I remember.”

  “So you would,” she said, nodding.

  “I don’t get why, though.”

  The mask shifted, and she was about to tell him something unpleasant. “Protectors recognize their descendants by smell, and can detect the mutation of a single codon. Any creature not under protection is a threat to descendants. And Protectors make maximum use of resources. When someone big and wrinkly leans over close enough to smell you, there’s a chance you’re about to be eaten.”

  He didn’t want to believe that, but he had quite a good memory—and that was exactly the way he’d felt about his grandmother the first time he’d been shown to her.

  It would have shown on his face to someone not nearly as smart as she was. “You’re safe,” she said.

  Badly wanting to change the subject, he said, “What do you want with the Freezer Banks?”

  “We need generals.”

  “There’s not an intact head in the lot,” he said.

  “Not a problem. I plan to use sections of at least three brains each and splice them together, rectify the DNA, and use the combined experience to make encyclopedic geniuses. I’ll grow them new bodies.”

  The thought was ghastly. “Three sets of memories? They’ll be insane!”

  She shrugged. “Insanity in a breeder is about as serious as warts on a leper. I have a Sinclair accelerator, so I can provide enough therapy to get the personality fragments to establish a working relationship. They’ll have the advantage of being genetic supermen—superwomen, rather, since the rectifying process would treat a Y chromosome as a defect.”

  “Are you talking about nanomachines?”

  “Right.”

  He snorted. “Good luck with that. We’ve had people working on that since before I was born. They always break down.”

  “I know. Brennan saw it happening, made nanotech that attacks all other nanotech, and turned it loose. I have to do all my work in a chamber that’s been cleared of the hunters.”

  “What in hell did he do that for?”

  “Marshall, consider what may be defined as nanomachinery. When photosynthetic life began releasing free oxygen as a byproduct, it exterminated almost everything on the planet and replaced it with its own kind. The plants you live with and eat aren’t nearly as efficient at using light as what I’ve made. And that’s just an intentional feature. Can you imagine what someone might make if he screwed up? Brennan may have been a quintessential Belter, but even his imagination was good enough for that.”

  Early reeled. “That’s a hell of a note for Weeks,” he said.

  He evidently didn’t have to explain who Weeks was. “When I looked in on him he was moving in that direction. Would have made a ’bot that hunted the hunters. Fortunately I stopped him before he could do any damage.”

  He closed his eyes. “He’s dead?”

  “Humph,” she said. She didn’t grunt, she pronounced it. “Thanks to Phssthpok and the Morlocks, people think of Protectors as casual murderers. It’s most unfair. I’m not casual at all. Besides, as soon as I saw him I realized he was a Cellar Christian.”

  Early hated that term. “Religion has never been prohibited.”

  “No, just heavily edited. And a good thing, too. Weeks was raised on source material, and he’s peculiar even for a breeder. I altered my cloaking system, appeared in his room, and offered to teach him all the secrets of nanomachinery in return for his soul. I expect he’s still at church.”

  Early stared, gaped, and said, “You’re a fiend.”

  “You know, that’s just what he said. Slightly different emphasis, though.”

  Early got up, breathing heavily, and went into the bathroom. Here and there, where his weapons of opportunity had been, he found a few more notes that read COLD. It was getting annoying.

  It became more annoying when he realized he didn’t need a shower. He got out casual clothing, dressed, and said, “I like taking showers.”

  “You can switch off the ’doc’s body cleaner if you’re just going to sleep. It wasn’t very good, so I redesigned it while I was undoing the Puppeteer hacks.”

  Something that had been bothering him—besides Ursula—came to a point: “I was wounded before humans had encountered Puppeteers,” he said.

  “As one of the great philosophers of the Fission Age often said, ‘That turns out not to be the case.’ The Puppeteers were interfering with human society, and erasing the memories of any witnesses, w
ell before the First War.” After a flash of annoyance so brief he wasn’t sure it was something she intended as a message, she added, “You’ll recall they got their name because there was a Time For Beany revival. ‘Puppeteer’ is a cute, harmless name. One of them chose it. They arranged the revival and the timing of the first contact.”

  “You got that from the one you questioned?”

  “Didn’t need to. I had an extensive entertainment database that predated the editing of ARM records. Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent had two eyes.” She began scribbling again, and muttered, “Give me a bit, that’s the fake one.”

  Appalled, he said, “Why didn’t anyone notice that in the secure data?”

  “They got to that too—I keep meaning to get around to doing that holographic indexing system.”

  “But nobody can get into that.”

  “Nonsense, I did. And they’ve had computers for millions of years.”

  “How did you manage that?”

  “I could tell you, but the shock would be so great you’d revert to infancy and I’d have to erase your memory back to before we met.”

  “Come off it, I’m not that fragile.”

  “You always say that.”

  “What?”

  She looked up, all innocence. “Oh, nothing.”

  A few moments after the transition from horror to severe exasperation, Early recalled that Jack Brennan was suspected of having undertaken a number of elaborate and disturbing jokes. One had been the extermination of the Martians. He was getting off lightly.

  He looked at the screen she held up to show him and saw three grayscale images side by side, the first two grainy. One was the Cecil he remembered from the cube. The second was similar, but with two eyes and some more details to the features of the head. The third was a Puppeteer’s head, which looked almost exactly like the first image. “The middle’s the original?”

  “Correct.”

  Early frowned. “How long?”

  “Long enough to sic the kzinti on us in the first place. Locating a slowboat in interstellar space requires a technology well in advance of kzin capabilities. Brennan had made us too nice to be good cannon fodder, and the kzinti were too feral to take the job, so they decided to use both races to do selective breeding of each other. Calm down, I planted some surprises in the Puppeteer when I put him back. Have to erase my own memories of them before I talk to any Outsiders, of course, but I can promise you if they’re still in contact with us in five hundred years they’ll be much too busy to manipulate human lives.”

  Early made certain his face and body didn’t shift and reveal his feelings.

  So she noticed the stillness instead. “Relax, I won’t either,” she said. “I’ll make some generals, they’ll win the war, and kzin culture will be altered to the point where they won’t feel compelled to start another. The only thing I’ve done to alter Earth’s culture is rig autodocs to remove Puppeteer bugs and arrange for water from Lake Mead to reach Death Valley.”

  “You did that? It looks like seepage.”

  “Thank you.”

  Early snorted. “And it’s not enough to make it habitable.”

  “No, but it’s enough to make it more bearable for borax mining. True, the spaceports at Perth and Nairobi will get a little less business, but the important thing is that the price of boron will go down.”

  “I wasn’t aware that was a vital resource.”

  “It’s used in linac-fusion plants. They’re small, but they don’t need a fusion shield, so they don’t need an ARM presence to guard them from Gangreens. The ARM personnel budget will have to be cut, and with fewer ARMs around, nations will be able to show more independence. This will lead to petty quarrels in the UN. You need more practice not getting along.”

  Early didn’t like that, but the part of his brain he thought of as a Roman judge had to admit she had a point. “How did you do it without disturbing anything else? Nanobots?”

  “Oh, no, I wouldn’t turn something like that loose unsupervised. It . . . hm. It’s too hard to describe without a few months of teaching, you don’t have any words for some of the forces involved. You don’t even have terms to use in a plausible lie, like the one about how a disintegrator works.”

  That confused him. “I thought it reduced the charge on electrons.”

  She shook her head. “And a slug pistol causes little pieces of metal to appear inside things. Another great Fission Age philosopher likened a man surrounded by forces beyond his comprehension to a mouse on a battlefield. A little difficult to explain what’s going on. The standard explanation of a disintegrator is like telling that mouse that humans are throwing things at one another. It leaves stuff out—like why the disintegrator doesn’t turn to dust.”

  “So give me the mouse version,” Early said, annoyed again.

  She shook her head again. “That’s the disintegrator example. Explaining the porosity trick would be more like trying to make the mouse understand that all this stuff on the battlefield is going on because a teenage French girl was prettier than her mother, who resented her and made her finish up some rye bread that had gone bad and should have been thrown away. The concepts just aren’t there.”

  He recognized the example; he was a military historian. “Is that a serious explanation of Joan of Arc?”

  She shrugged again. (In a properly run world, with her Protector’s shoulders, that would have made some kind of dramatic noise.) “It explains the visions, and some of her work displays the behaviors of an abuse survivor. It’ll do.”

  “How come you don’t sound like Brennan?” he said.

  “I’m not in a hurry,” she said. Before he could tell her that was hardly an answer, she said, “Sorry. This may come as a shock to a respectable ARM, but sometimes people with an agenda have been known to say and do things that are misleading.”

  “If sarcasm was a physical substance, I’d be getting a rash.”

  “Ooh, good one—Brennan could have sounded any way he wanted, but he was planning to steal a starship. He presented limitations he didn’t possess, to create a sense of security.”

  “Like not letting Garner smoke, because he ‘couldn’t help himself’?”

  She stood as straight as she could, which wasn’t very, and said, “Very good! And the story he told about how he killed Phssthpok. Claimed he stunned him with a blow to the head and crushed his throat. Sheer fantasy; Protectors don’t stun. The injuries on the corpse in the Smithsonian suggest he broke the Pak’s elbows with a Martian’s spear, cut the nerves—glass is sharp enough, if you have a Protector’s strength behind it—then strangled him before Phssthpok could heal enough to use his hands again.”

  “I thought Ph—the Pak was stronger than he was. And a better fighter.”

  “Marshall, the Pak store calcium phosphate in their mitochondria. As a reserve to rebuild broken bone it’s wonderful, but it displaces ATP. It’s as if every cell in the body has water in the petrol tank. The trait has been bred out of their human descendants, largely though suicide. Jack Brennan was at least thirty percent stronger than Phssthpok, and he would have been able to use any fighting move he’d ever seen on the cube. His biggest problem was leaving a presentable corpse.”

  “But that didn’t have anything to do with his getting the Pak ship. Why would he lie?”

  “Same reason everyone does. Saves time.”

  He took a final puff as he tried and failed to think of a counterexample. It did all boil down to saving time. He stubbed out the cigar and said, “Time for what?”

  “Time he’d have to spend later, if breeders knew he was alive, and had traps set for him when he came to make alterations. Ready to go rob some graves with me, Igor?”

  “If you can turn invisible, what do you need me for?”

  “I don’t want the stuff to just disappear, it’ll upset too many people. I prefer to make it look like the appearance of these generals is the result of breeder activities.”

  “And you trust me to kee
p quiet?”

  “A paranoid certainly grasps the concept of self-interest. You’re a breeder, but you’re an awfully smart one.”

  He wasn’t sure whether he felt flattered or patronized. He decided he could do both. “Okay, got your shovel?”

  She patted a pocket by her left knee. “All set.” While he was trying to decide whether she might really have a shovel in there—it could be a foil-covered balloon, and stasis fields were easier to make than the ARM ever wanted anyone to know—she handed him an earplug and said, “This will let you hear me. If I have a question, I’ll stick to yes or no, just nod or shake your head.” A bubble helmet deployed over her own head, and she disappeared again.

  He put it in and said, “What if I have a question?”

  “Oh, like you’d trust my answer,” came her voice, soft but clear. “That’ll evaporate in a couple of hours. If you decide there’s something you’d believe, get out your phone and write it unless you think it’s an emergency. Then I’ll stun people and erase memories afterward.”

  He nodded, then went out the door.

  On the long walk down the hall to the elevator—he’d had an apartment near an elevator back when he was (good God!) in his twenties; never again—he said in a low voice, “Just what’s the plan?”

  “Shipping the materials to a secret lab offworld, where a crazed doctor has a plan.”

  “So we’re sticking to the truth.”

  “Hm! Right.”

  “I surmise you have most of the arrangements in the system already,” he said.

  “Of course.”

  “Enthusiasm is no substitute for experience,” he said, and every part of the corridor was swept with sonic cannon except where he was. He dove for the hatch that opened up in the wall, went five stories down a slide that he’d swear hadn’t been that steep in the drill, came out into another hallway, and rolled against a transfer booth, whose door popped open. He wasn’t even tempted, he knew she could trace him if he used it. His phone was obviously bugged, so he came to his feet and ran to the emergency phone. Hand on the scanner, he said, “Marshall Buford Early crisis priority to Osiris Chen.”

  The screen lit up.

  It said COLD.