Man-Kzin Wars – XIV

HERITAGE

by Matthew Joseph Harrington

The UNSN carrier Yorktown had been an experiment which might not be repeated.

A colony ramship, started by Skyhook Enterprises and completed just before the end of the First War, had been fitted with hyperdrive and gravity compensators at the beginning of the Second, making it the largest warship humans had ever constructed. Much of its interior was hangar space for singleships sheathed in superconductor, which allowed them to go through a ramfield without scrambling the pilot’s nerve impulses. The carrier’s mission had been to: a) accelerate to relativistic speed, b) reach the kzin home system in hyperdrive, c) reenter normal space, d) wreak multiple kinds of havoc with the Yorktown’s drive and field as they decelerated through the system, e) drop off its singleships to destroy targets of opportunity, f) take a close turn around the star with the field stirring up flares, g) pick up the singleships, h) accelerate out of the system, and i) go into hyperdrive as soon as they were out of the singularity.

They had gotten as far as “a.” Then they were spotted by the battleship, which had possibly been scouting ahead for an invasion; the kzinti were a little less reckless than they’d been in the First War.

Captain Persoff had the Yorktown take evasive action as the kzin fired weapons and began matching course, but a ramship is not built to dodge. Over the intercom, Monstro, as the commander of the fighters was known, said, “We can take him out, Captain. Get in close untouched and slice him into chum.”

“Then you’d better,” said Persoff.

They had only been waiting for the order. Forty dolphins locked, loaded, and launched.

The kzinti had sixty-four fighter ships and the best tracking systems in Known Space. Out of forty targets, they got two. They were completely unprepared for an enemy that maneuvered instinctively in three dimensions. They quickly altered their tactics to attempt to ram the Yorktown. The fact that getting within a thousand miles of the carrier would be fatal only meant that they aimed very carefully. The Yorktown’s beam weapons were diversions of the main drive, and none of the kzinti got within fifty miles except as vapor.

The kzinti had learned the Lesson of the Laser in the First War, and the outer layer of their ship was water tanks. It vented steam wherever it was perforated, and this not only kept the damage from penetrating further, it acted to diffuse and disperse later attacks.

On the other hand, water vapor also interfered with the kzin sensors as it cooled and formed ice crystals, and after about an hour of battle, Captain Persoff began moving the Yorktown closer to the kzin ship. At a thousand miles the ramfield would wreck an unprotected nervous system, but the kzin ship was well-shielded from that, judging by the uniformity of the venting. However, at half that range, the ram drive itself could be aimed with precision, and the only effect of the superconductive sheathing would be to make sure the kzinti all roasted at the same time.

The kzinti realized what was happening just before the carrier got into aiming range of the ramship. The enemy’s fusion drive suddenly lit up, but apparently enough damage had been done that this was a bad idea: most of the conical aft segment turned white and evaporated.

Half the universe turned bright blue, and the other half vanished.

You don’t put a man who isn’t a plasma engineer in command of a fighting ramship. You don’t. Not if you want your ship back. Persoff opened the ramfield constriction to minimal power production, just enough for life support and the gravity planer, and began easing the ship over to the singleships one by one.

The dolphins were all dead, killed by synchrotron radiation from the relativistic protons being diverted by the ramfield. When the kzin ship had exploded, something must have happened to its gravity planer, and it and everything else in the ramfield, inside some unknown but significant level of ram flux, had been accelerated in the direction it had been aimed. What was left of the kzin ship was glowing by its own light, which suggested some of its ammo had gone up after the powerplant blew.

Captain Persoff was moving in on the last one when Astrogator Conreid announced, “I’ve worked out our speed and heading, if you want them.”

“Can’t hurt,” Persoff said.

“Speed is approximate, calculated by comparing the wavelength of that glow dead ahead with the microwave background of the universe. We’re operating at a tau factor of about fifty to one, which works out to a velocity of point nine nine nine eight C. At full impulse,” like most math types, he loathed describing the effect of a gravity planer as “thrust,” “we can decelerate to zero in about five hundred and seventy-nine days, give or take one. That’s our time. By then we’ll be about forty lightyears away from Earth. Our heading was a little trickier, since nothing looks right, but my best guess is we can steer enough to pass our target about 200 AU out. I can’t figure out a way for us to get closer without risking the field collapsing. Moscow Motors overdesigned the scoop as a matter of habit, but the ramfield was never expected to have to deal with flux at this speed. One of the little private-sized ships they were building toward the last could have done it, but of course one of those would have been useless on a mission like this. However, we can hit them dead on if we jump laterally in hyperspace. Drop out just outside the singularity, dump most of the water since we won’t be needing it now-” He didn’t seem to notice the instant hostility of the rest of the bridge crew at the callous remark; the better sort of technical brain tends to miss these details-“hit it with the drive to disperse it widely, and let it spread through the kzin home system ahead of us.”

Persoff nodded, had a grabber bring in the final singleship, and said, “If we don’t mind dying before we see if we hit anything. When we came out of hyperspace we’d have hydrogen inside the ramfield, moving at a whisper short of lightspeed relative to us. Allowing for mass change, I’d say over a microgram within the ship itself. Secondary radiation from collisions should come to about half a million rads.”

“Aw, crap,” said Conreid. “Here I thought I had a way for the fins to strike one last blow. I know Monstro would have wanted to.” Someone with normal empathy would have looked depressed. The astrogator looked really annoyed.

“So where do we come to rest?” Persoff said.

“Not real sure. There’s a little cluster of stars in that direction that we’ll have to pick our way through, and it’s hard to tell what’s beyond them. Old kzin charts we got in the First War don’t show any missions that way, probably because the stars are too blue to suit them. Captain, may I suggest we get those singleships back?”

“I had intended to. What’s your reason?”

“We can use the engines as laser cannon on the way back.”

“Mr. Conreid, I like the way you think, but there’s every chance we’ll have to strip them for parts. The ramfield is just barely handling deflection, and we’ll be nursing it pretty carefully for the next twenty months.”

Conreid nodded. “In that case, sir, we should dump the water as soon as possible.”

“Less mass to decelerate, good thinking.”

“That too, sir, but what I had in mind was smashing the crap out of anything in our way.”

Persoff blinked. “Such as what, that the drive laser won’t vaporize?”

Conreid spread his hands, palms up. “Such as whatever the Eva Peron ran into. Their matrix ionizer was as good as ours is, and they weren’t going as fast.”

“Persuasive. All departments report.”

One by one, he heard from everyone at their battle stations that the ship was intact and no further enemies were available. The last was hyperdrive systems, and Kershner told him, “I don’t think we can use the hyperdrive or the hyperwave at all, sir.”

“Explain.”

“The mass of everything else in the universe has increased by a factor of fifty and a bit. At this speed, a rock that’s normally small enough to ignore turns into a boojum, coming on too fast to spot when we charge up. The hyperwave is even more fussy than the drive when it comes to general background gravity, and it’s my belief it’ll be wrecked if we turn it on. Also, we’d have to record a message and play it back slowly for them to understand it, and I honestly have no idea what relativistic effects do to whatever the hyperwave medium is anyway. I also don’t know if our tau factor would carry over in hyperspace, or what the transition effects are if it doesn’t.”

“Recommendations?”

“Let’s not find out.”

Persoff nodded. “Stand down to Condition Yellow and prepare to jettison water.” He thought about it. “Astrogator, that water will spread out enough for some of it to go through the kzin system, won’t it?”

“Yes, sir.” Conreid suddenly smiled, which he rarely did. “Ought to screw things up a little.”

“Or a lot. Our combat pilots are getting burial in space. Work out the trajectory that gives them the best chance of going through the system. The funeral will be at the start of the midwatch.”

The chance of attracting someone’s attention with the com laser wasn’t even discussed. Nobody would be wasting time monitoring a frequency that was less than two percent of normal.

The funeral necessarily took place while they were at Alert stations, as the ship was still in constant danger and would be until they at least managed to get below about point eight C. That wouldn’t be until they were well past kzin space. On the bright side, aside from a few rare and lightly-armed antique courier ships, the kzin didn’t have anything that could catch them on the way through. As long as it didn’t run into anything, the Yorktown was safe enough.

It rankled. Kzinti weren’t the only ones who’d changed their viewpoint during the First War. They had become more prudent as the reckless ones charged into overwhelming enemy fire, but humans had become more aggressive as the conciliatory ones were eaten.

Persoff established training drills in combat and ships’ systems. Not everybody was qualified to learn everything, but all of them were capable of learning something, and knowing more would make them better fighters. Someone-he never found out who, but he suspected it was Tokugawa, who in addition to his other duties was a historian-put up a sign in the rec room that said:

KILL KZINTI. KILL KZINTI.

KILL MORE KZINTI.

IF YOU LEARN A NEW JOB

YOU WILL BE BETTER

AT KILLING THE ORANGE FREEMOTHERS.

It had a profound effect on enrollment in the classes being offered.

A bigger problem was the ratio of sixty-eight men to nine women, which led to some serious fights until Persoff bluntly ordered the women to set up a rota of when they would and would not be available to any particular man. One man had to go into the ship’s organ bank before this was accepted, but after that there were no more fights-or attempted rapes.

His own partner of choice was Newmar, the ship’s master at arms, who had astonishing balance and a relaxed attitude about fidelity-which was good, because he had to pay some attention to each of the other women now and then or risk the appearance of favoritism.

The mission was never intended to last more than eight weeks. Holding the ship and crew together for more than a year and a half was a strain he’d never anticipated.

He got the remaining seventy-six of them through alive, and sane, as far as he could tell.

Persoff declared a celebration when they got down to point eight C, which was their intended cruising speed. In the midst of it, Potter, the communications officer on duty, interrupted him with the news that he was picking up a radio signal from a nearby system-transmitted on what, allowing for Doppler effects, must have started as a one-meter frequency. “It’s got to be from humans, sir.”

“What does it say?”

“Well, that’s a problem. It’s some kind of dot-dash system I’m not familiar with. Short groups, repeated.”

“What would they say if it were Morse code?”

“‘OSO OSO OSO,’ over and over.”

People of merely high intelligence need not apply for special missions, and Persoff had not been made the leader of this crew for nothing. “It sounds like someone trying to send an SOS who doesn’t know Morse.”

Potter was no slouch himself. “Good grief. Got the dots and dashes reversed.”

“Exactly. I’ll be there at once. Call Conreid and Kershner and tell them to join me on the bridge.”

Conreid showed up barefoot, and Persoff forbore to ask what he’d interrupted. Kershner had been sleeping, and was wearing a bandolier of flasks of tea. When he arrived he was foggily opening a nicotine patch. “You can smoke if you want,” Persoff told him.

“Can’t stand the smell,” Kershner said, glaring at the patch as he worked the adhesive layer off one corner. “I just want the IQ boost.”

“Oh. We’re getting a signal from human beings in a system-how far away?”

“About two lightyears,” Potter said, “almost lateral to our course.”

“Right. I want you two to plot a course that’ll take us through hyperspace and come out at a point that’ll bring us to a halt in that system when we’re done decelerating.”

“Oh. Okay. A little over fifteen days uphill from the source, then,” Kershner said.

“You worked that out just like that?” Persoff said.

“Hell, no,” Kershner said. “But I remember how long it was supposed to take us to ramp up to this speed.” He freed the patch, put it on, opened a flask, drained it, and said, “Then what?”

There had been complaints about Kershner’s manner from officers all through the trip. Hesitant ones. He’d been one of the corpsicles revived for training duty in the First War, and no one was entirely certain whether his behavior was due to an attitude problem or a touch of thawing damage-what the ARM called Ice on the Mind, and the corpsicles, even less politely, called Freezer Burn.

Some of them had been known to milk it for all it was worth. It would have been easier to deal with if so many of them hadn’t been the best in the world at something or other. Kershner, for example, had an intuitive grasp of hyperspatial relationships that rivaled that of Carmody herself. The odd part was that he wasn’t that much of a mathematician.

“Then we do it,” Persoff said.

“Okay.”

Kershner earned his pay as they came out of hyperspace. In a civilized system there would be beacons and beams providing constant, clear, insistent instructions about where the inhabited sites were and how to match course. This place just had the one repeating beacon, which wasn’t even enough to ascertain the plane of the ecliptic.

Nor, indeed, the extent of the local Oort halo. Something-just what wasn’t clear on the films afterward, but it must have been rock-sheared away a chunk of the outermost ram ring about three seconds after they returned to normal space. When they were checking, the tapes also showed that Kershner had them back in hyperspace something like a hundred and forty milliseconds after the alarm sounded, and they came out again a couple of seconds after that.

“We still have deflection,” Persoff told his crew after checking, “but that ring has to be rebuilt before we can collect fuel. We’ve got enough to make rendezvous, and what the planer can collect will run the ship while we make repairs. Kershner, that was some sweet piloting.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Kershner said, barely audible over the sound of his suit recycler starting up.

“Need anything?”

“Maybe new kidneys? I think I’ve ruined mine.”

Conreid found the beacon again, assessed its motion from the frequency changes, beat drums, burned incense, and gave an opinion of where the ecliptic was which proved to be accurate to within a tenth of a percent.

The planet was weird. It was Earth-like, but lower in density, and had a thicker atmosphere and no moon, and according to what was believed about planetary development that was just wrong. Earth had had much of its lightweight crust knocked off by a major collision, the debris had formed Luna, and the excess atmosphere had been stored as carbonates while things cooled. Just to make things more confusing, this place had too much nitrogen, about twice as much as Earth. Almost half as much as Venus.

There were huge icecaps, a lot of shallow ocean, and not much land. All of the land was islands, and all the islands had volcanoes, with the solitary exception of one big equatorial one. The source of the beacon was in synchronous orbit over that.

The source was colossal.

As they approached it kept getting bigger. It must have been half a mile long, not even counting the big spikes sticking out of each end. There was a hole in the side that the Yorktown would have just fitted into. Persoff, unable to find anything like it in the database, finally called Tokugawa as they were maneuvering for a better view of one of the spikes, to have him look at the images they were getting of it. He couldn’t believe humans had ever built a ship that big.

At his first glance the history buff screamed, “Get us away from that!”

Persoff had the planer at thirty gees before Tokugawa could inhale for the explanation. It was too late. This spike was a railgun longer than the Yorktown, and it threw one rock.

Drill called for everyone to be in suits for maneuvers, and the planer had moved the ship somewhat, but six men died when the rock hit, and most of one end of the ship was sheared off. It was the end the ram was attached to.

Persoff wrecked the railgun with a plasma shot and set about the serious business of getting them onto that island. There was no way they could stay in space to repair the ship. Half of the bio converter had gone with the ram.

He took his time setting the ship down, which was the best part about gravity planers: you could land a ship that was open to space. The bad news about the landing site was also the good news: almost all the island was covered by trees, in perfect rows, which meant that there were definitely people who thought like humans here. Kzinti liked loose forests with large clearings, Jotoki liked groves with pools in the middle, and the sonar-using Kdatlyno kept trees widely separated when they allowed them around at all.

Up close, the trees were mostly pines, which implied humans again; someone else might have taken over a world with a human ship orbiting it, but no race that wasn’t from Earth could stand the smell.

The Yorktown’s planer cut out just as they settled, and everyone and everything aboard gave a little bounce as the lower local gravity took over. Persoff froze, then said, “Emery, what was that?”

“I don’t know, Captain, but half my board just went black,” she replied. “The cutoff point…looks to be just about where that shot hit us.”

“Sweet reason. We just made it. Tokugawa, what was that ship? — Tokugawa?”

“He hit his head when he fell, sir,” said his assistant, Fiester.

“Tanj. How is he?”

“I got him to sick bay right away. He was doing well when I left.”

“Good grief, how fast were you moving? We just got down.”

“No, sir, not just now; he fainted when they shot at us.”

“Fainted?”

“Passed out? Went all pale and blotchy-”

“I’m familiar with the procedure. Sick bay, this is the captain, connect me with Tokugawa.”

“He’s not well, sir,” said Meier.

“Now, Doctor,” he told her.

“Doctors,” Kershner muttered.

“Sorry I funked, sir,” Tokugawa said.

“I gather you had reason? What is that ship, anyway?”

“It’s the Galaxias, sir. Built by Sinclair Enterprises in 2164. It was supposed to be the first manned ramship.”

“I never heard of it.”

“No, sir, it was headed in this general direction and disappeared in a big flash of light. It just dropped out of the news, and references to it disappeared.”

“That’s weird.”

“Not really. The UN didn’t want any bad publicity for the colony ships, and the ARM had draconian powers over the media even then. It was an experimental design, too. Had a whopping big Sinclair accelerator as part of its drive.”

“I would think they’d have noticed pretty quickly that it doesn’t really reduce inertia,” Persoff remarked.

“Not from outside the field,” Tokugawa agreed. “The thing is, they mounted the generator on a spike that extended way in front of the ship, and used the field as a nonmagnetic ramscoop. Everything went in just fine, but when it tried to get out the aft side of the field, it slowed way down and gathered at the middle. That was what got fed into the fusion drive. Worked great in the tests, and they kept solid objects out of the path with an early version of the medium ionizer all later ramships use, a big blue laser aimed forward from inside the field. Came out as X rays, vaporized everything. I guess the kzinti noticed the laser, attacked, and got fried like the ones we met. I was afraid that was the end pointed at us. Instead we got the exhaust accelerator.”

“Why was it so big?”

“Generation ship, sir. They were planning to go outside the plane of the galaxy and terraform planets, setting down colonies every century or so. The starting crew was three hundred, and they meant to expand to six thousand on each leg, retaining the best gene patterns in the crew for the next trip. They had embryo banks, seeds, bacteria, the works, mostly in stasis. They must have used the accelerator on the planet,” he added.

Persoff frowned. “Explain?”

“They couldn’t have had much choice about where to stop. The planet here would have been the right distance from the primary, but with no collision and no moon it would have been more like Venus or the lowlands of Plateau. If they separated the landing vessels and stocked them as lifeboats, they could have expanded the accelerator around the planet, so it radiated heat five hundred times as fast as it absorbed it. Let me see-Doctor, this computer link doesn’t work.”

“You’re injured,” came her voice.

“My hand is fine. See?” There was an exclamation and the sound of a smack. “Ow. Thanks. Now, yes, nine or ten years would be enough time for the carbonates to form, then they’d have the field timed to shut off, and seed algae and so forth.”

“You sound like you were there.”

“Oh, it’s an old idea. John Smith, an exile on Mars, came up with it before the First War as a way of terraforming Venus. He wanted to leave part of the atmosphere out to let the nitrogen boil off, then add water, and helium to keep the water from breaking down, like Jinx has.”

In spite of the urgency of the situation, Persoff had to ask, “Where was he going to get that much water?”

“Callisto.”

“The Jovian moon? The ships would roast in Jupiter’s radiation belts.”

“No ships. He wanted to hit Venus with Callisto. Ion thrusters. For some reason he couldn’t get the UN interested in moving a planet almost as big as Mars past Earth’s orbit.”

Kershner made a noise Persoff would normally have considered medically alarming, and put his face on his control board. Persoff was trying not to grin himself. “I would think not.”

“No. Anyway, Smith should be happy to hear it works, if we can get the news to him.”

“He’s still alive?”

“Was when we left. He’s one of those people who does really well in low gee. Has some weird medical condition that prevents osteoporosis, actually has to have excess calcium cleaned out of his cells on a regular basis. I’ve heard it suggested that’s inherited from our Pak ancestors.”

Persoff was not about to get into that can of worms. “Thanks. So the survivors planted these trees. Good.”

“Trees? Good lord, that’s a lot of trees.-Sir, we didn’t damage any, did we?” Tokugawa sounded badly worried.

“No. You think they’re sacred or something?”

“The Galaxias complement were handpicked, so I doubt they’d have fallen that far back, but I’m sure they’re deeply revered.”

“Well, it’s not as if we have to cut them all down or something,” Persoff said. “Get some rest. I have to check on my ship.” He signed off and said, “Damage and system reports.”

“What do you mean, we have to cut them all down?”

McCabe, the strongest man aboard, and conceivably the strongest anywhere who wasn’t from Jinx, hunched in on himself as if expecting to be hit. “The only way we can get off this planet is a launch catapult, sir. The planer is fried, and a lot of the hull is unsound. What we have to do is cobble together something that’ll get a work crew up to that hulk in orbit and strip the accelerator field generator for parts. That should allow us to fix the planer up there. The thing is, we don’t have the resources to construct an aerodynamic vehicle in less than years. We have to go straight to space all at once. No room to launch on fusion drive, because the ram’s shot, so we’d have to use the singleships for thrust, and they’re so hot the backwash would slaughter everything for miles. And they can fuse protons, so we sure can’t launch from the water. So we have to slap something together and fling it up there and leave the main fusion plant on the ground.”

“How many years would an aerospace ship take?” Persoff said.

“That depends on how many local inhabitants there are, and how fast they can learn. If they’re as smart as the Shogun says-”

“Who?”

“Uh, Tokugawa, sir. It’s kind of a running joke in Supply.”

“Go on.”

“If they’re that smart, I’d say we can have an infrastructure in place in ten years. Otherwise we’re looking at a couple of generations while we get the population up.”

“And building a spaceship would be faster than that?”

“We’ve already got spaceships, sir,” McCabe said. “They’re just not built to fly inside an atmosphere. I was going to use three fighter drives to let the orbiter maneuver in space.-And then of course we’ll also have to reassemble the Yorktown.”

Persoff sighed. Then he frowned, looked straight up, and stared very hard at the ceiling, as if seeing through it. Slowly, he said, “How long would it take to install the hyperdrive in a ship that still has a working ram?” He looked at the storesmaster again.

McCabe gaped at him, then pulled out a flaptop, unrolled it, and began working the problem out. “We’d have to do hull and systems repairs to the hulk at the same time, but it’s still less than the time we’ll spend building the catapult,” he finally said. “Maybe ten percent of what it’ll take to refit our own ship. Which we could put aboard and repair there.”

“Get together with Curtis in Engineering and work out what you need to do.” When McCabe winced, Persoff said, “What’s wrong?”

“He yells all the time.”

“That’s because he won’t accept a transplant for his hearing problem. He was running the communications in Munchen during the Hollow Moon incident. The pulse, when it went up, blew out one eardrum. Stayed at his post with blood running down his neck and the gain turned up for the other ear, so it screwed that one up too. They patched the drum, but if he ever sounds like he’s really angry, just ask to see his medals. That should keep him distracted for about half an hour.”

“He’s that proud of them?”

“There’s that many. Since you’ve got clearance for this mission, I’ll authorize you to hear the story of what really happened. Don’t ask him unless you want to hear it all, and really don’t ask unless you want to know something you won’t ever be able to tell anyone. I had to learn it to assess his value for this mission, and I wish I hadn’t. Go see him now.”

McCabe saluted and left, looking thoughtful. He was the only crewman who still fully adhered to military courtesy after all this time. He didn’t ask anyone else to, and his response to those who’d made fun of him had always been, “Permission to speak freely?” Nobody granted it twice, because they never made fun of him again after granting it once. His lecture on the purpose and value of military courtesy was sensible, cogent, and, when you considered that it was delivered by a man who might well be able to rip your arm off, gradually terrifying as it developed its theme: military courtesy allows trained expert killers to work together in difficult conditions without unnecessary loss of personnel.

There were others who had resumed using it, but only around McCabe.

About ten percent of each end of the island was loose rocks, which, since it was volcanic rock and there were no volcanoes on the island, meant it had been put there. Persoff had set the ship down near the west end, about halfway between where the trees ended and the rocks began. The trees at this end of the rows were saplings, while those near the east end must have been planted almost as soon as the colonists had landed.

Nobody had sighted any humans on the island, and nobody could figure out why. After Tokugawa’s reaction, Persoff had no intention of starting to chop down trees until he’d talked to the locals, so he was planning parties to explore other islands and find some. They’d need cars and stunners, and the stunners were the bottleneck; not many had been included in the ship’s manifest, and regs required officers on watch to wear them. Curtis had built three more from spares for the ones they had, but Persoff had wanted to send out at least six parties. There were lots of islands.

The bad part of being a commanding officer was making everyone think you weren’t working hard. He was supposed to be relaxed and confident. One of the things that troubled him badly was the fact that all through the first night, the ship in orbit had been displaying lights. Bright ones. It wasn’t the power available that worried him, since the ship dated after the invention of both black magic and electronic batteries, and half of it was in unfiltered sunlight all the time. It was the fact that its beacon had stopped transmitting when the lights began. The ship was displaying a flexible response to circumstances. Not inconceivably it had recorded their landing site. It might well be charging its com laser.

Other than abandoning the ship and scattering to the four winds, there wasn’t a thing they could do about that.

After the first night, Persoff had left his exec, Thurston, in charge, and taken a car to East Point so he could fret over the preparations uninterrupted and without making everyone panicky.

So that was where he was when the canoe showed up.

It was an awfully big canoe. If it had been another shape or style he’d have thought of it as a ship, but the oars and the hull’s lack of boards constrained his thinking.

As it came to shore, he realized that it hadn’t constrained its maker’s thinking. It had the look of a dugout, but it was almost twice as wide as the biggest tree on the island, and there surely couldn’t be any trees twice that age on the planet. The ones behind him must have been planted the day they got here, which was surely no earlier than 2305, and more likely later. The accelerator trick, if they’d used it, wouldn’t have given trees more time to grow, it would have killed them from lack of sunlight. Therefore they had stuck the trunks of two or more trees together to make this, well enough to keep the leaks down to something manageable.

It came directly toward him, and as it got close he still couldn’t see any seams. They must be awfully good at making canoes by now, but this was unbelievable.

On the other hand, selection for starship personnel had been even tougher then than it was now, and the next man after Persoff on the promotion list at the Manhattan Space Academy in Kansas had just won the Wisowaty Award for resource management. (At last update he was part of the supply liaison to the Belt Fleet, and had once succeeded in impressing them. It was no small thing, to impress a Belter when it came to making effective use of resources.)

There was a man at the prow, calling back to another man at the stern, and they seemed to be the only ones facing forward. Pilot and steersman, he guessed. The sides were too high to see much but heads and shoulders of anyone but those two men. All the rowers had longer hair than the men. The standing men wore shirts, but the shoulders of the rowers were bare.

The men were also beardless, and that abruptly stuck him as an accomplishment. They certainly had no docs to depilate them here. A history teacher at MSA had had Persoff’s class remove their facial hair with the sharpened steel wafers that had once been used for this, and his respect for the courage of the men he now saw was considerable.

The canoe struck the beach and continued up it further than he would have imagined possible. The pilot jumped ashore as soon as it stopped, turned, and called out, “Ropes!”

All the rowers jumped out. They were twenty nude women, and they hauled the canoe further up the beach until the pilot said, “Rest!” They dropped the ropes and ran to play in the surf. The steersman came forward and jumped out, and the two men, both in shirt and shorts (how had they made them?) came toward Persoff. They were both gnawing carrots. “Have a carrot,” said the steersman, holding out a spare.

Not wishing to offend, Persoff, who hadn’t eaten a carrot since he was big enough to spit, said, “Thanks,” and took a bite. It tasted a lot better than he remembered. Of course, he was used to them cooked.

“We’ve got maybe ten seconds,” said the pilot. “Is your mind being read? He’d have stopped when you bit it.”

Persoff stopped chewing to stare, then said, “No. You were expecting kzinti?”

The two looked at each other, then at Persoff. “Yes,” said the pilot. “You’re wearing clothes, but if they were rational enough to use cover they might think of that too. It’s my job to think of things like that. I’m Tom, the Johnson for this vessel. This is Ron, our Denver.”

“Micah Persoff, Captain, commanding officer of the carrier Yorktown.”

The two local men looked astonished, then came to attention and saluted.

Persoff returned their salutes. “It’s lucky for me you showed up so soon. I was here planning missions to find the colonists.”

“Colonists?” said Tom.

“We came here because the ship signaled us that someone had landed,” said Ron.

“What do you mean, ‘colonists’? We’re stranded.” Tom appeared to be getting upset.

Persoff shook his head. “Force of habit. I tend to think of settlements off Earth as colonies. We need to talk with you about getting off the planet again.”

Tom nodded shortly. “Of course. Ron, give the All Clear.”

Ron turned to the canoe and bellowed, at a volume Persoff found painful, “It’s okay!”

Eighteen men, all chewing, stood up and began methodically unloading their crossbows. The women, serious now, returned to the canoe, where men who were done early began tossing them clothing.

Persoff stared, put it together, and said, “You were going to ambush the kzinti?”

“If they were here,” said Tom. “They wouldn’t read a female’s mind right away.”

“How would you ambush them in ten seconds?”

“Oh, Ron would have knocked you out.”

Persoff looked at Ron, who had a low-gee build and seemed skinny at that. “How?”

His head hurt less than he would have expected, and he was lying before a brand-new hut, near a campfire, surrounded by women. “How many fingers do you see?” said the nearest, holding up a hand.

“Five,” he said, “three of them folded.”

“Talks like a Johnson,” said another woman. She was prettier than the one who’d spoken first, and that was odd, because they all had about the same set of features. “Good stock, I bet.”

“Well, he’s starship crew,” said yet another.

“I still think the basic stock might be deteriorating. They send off all the best.”

“And I still say-Hey, he’s right here, we can ask. Captain Micah Persoff, does the UN Fertility Board store sperm samples of men who go out to fight the kzinti, and make the samples available from the ones who did really well?”

Persoff was still a little stunned, and it took him a moment to follow the question. Then he said, “Yeah, any citable accomplishment is an automatic Birthright. Women who use donations get low numbers in the queue, too.”

“See!”

“How’d you figure that out?” he said.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense. Otherwise you’d all have been eaten before you got here.”

“They still could have repopulated from colony worlds,” said a woman who’d spoken before.

“Lightspeed and too busy.”

“Loyalty and conditioning!”

“Alienation.”

Others had begun chiming in, and it was getting loud. Persoff said, “What happened to me?”

“Oh, you got knocked out,” said the woman who’d spoken first, all the rest shutting up.

“I’d figured out that much, but how?”

A man’s voice-Tom-broke in. “Lateral impact near the left end of the mandible turns the head far enough to jar the brain stem.” He got into view, raised his hand, and snapped his fingers. “Shuts you off like a bucket of wet sand on a small fire. But without the steam.”

“Speaking of which,” said the first woman.

“I thought he’d be waking up soon-not yet, in fact; he’s tough-and he should have some things explained to him. And first he should have an apology. Captain, a Denver is identified by decisive action. Unfortunately it isn’t always preceded by thought. Often that’s a good thing, since it lets a Denver act without fear. Not always. I’m not familiar with your habits of speech, so once it was clear you were alone I should have had him stand further from you. I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted. How did he get so fast? I didn’t even see him move.”

“That’s because he did it when you blinked. An early hint of the Denver gene complex is when a child seems unobservant but, now and then, somehow does some difficult thing exactly right. Which is not the same as doing the right thing. Incidentally, would it be possible to analyze people’s DNA when your ship is back in operation? Working all this stuff out by inductive reasoning is quite a burden.”

“You Johnsons do fine,” said a woman.

“I never said otherwise. It’s just hard.”

Several women cleared their throats, and Tom looked like he’d suddenly remembered something he should never have forgotten. “Sorry. Captain, is your neck in pain? We can’t do real regeneration, but I used the things we do have that improve healing ability.”

“Actually the only thing that hurts is my teeth,” Persoff said, touching his cheek. There were things sticking out of his skin. “What are these?” he said.

“Sutures. You’d lost a tooth. I had to go in from the side to make sure circulation was restored. They should come out now, in fact.” He reached into a bag sitting nearby, and took out tweezers that looked like bamboo, and a small pair of scissors with clay handles and obsidian blades.

As threads were snipped and pulled out of his face, Persoff was able to distract himself by being deeply impressed with the quality of the tools. Ever since the kzinti attacked, History of Technology was a prerequisite for combat officers, so he knew fairly well how difficult those instruments had been to make.

He suspected even his teachers didn’t know it nearly as well as the people here, whose ancestors had grown up with the “everybody play nice” version of social development. They must have had to learn everything down to rock chipping from scratch.

Tom put some goo on the holes and said, “Wash your mouth out with this.”

Persoff obeyed, but regretted it at once. Once he’d spit it out, he said, “What was that?”

“Everyone asks that, but nobody ever likes the details. It’s something that bacteria won’t live in. You won’t have to brush your teeth for a few days.”

“I’ve never had to.”

Tom studied him silently, then said, “May I take it that the process that prevents that still works? On your ship?”

“Absolutely. There’s something I have to discuss with your people.”

Tom nodded. “The Hales aren’t all here yet.”

Persoff said, “The Hale clan are in charge?”

“That would be ‘is.’ The word ‘clan’ is singular. And they’re not a clan, they’re a type. We’d be in a sorry mess if we chose leaders by heredity.”

“You have elections?”

Tom waited until most of the crowd was pretty much done laughing. “If we chose leaders for their ability to talk people into things they’d all be Blackers!” he said, grinning.

“Sounds fair,” said the woman who’d said he was good stock. She was joking.

“Of course it sounds fair. That’s the point, isn’t it?” Tom said, followed by more laughter. When that had diminished, he explained, “Hales are identified by character, same as everybody else.”

“Who chooses them?”

Tom looked confused. “Chooses?”

“I think he means identifies,” said the woman who’d just spoken. “They identify themselves. Anybody can see it. This is interesting. Captain, you clearly have a Hale job, but you talk a lot like a Johnson. How were you chosen?”

Persoff, who was starting to worry that he’d been hit a lot harder than he’d realized, said, “I took placement exams to qualify for the Academy, and after I graduated, the people in charge put me where they needed me.”

“They all sound like Wellses,” she said, to general agreement. “A Wells helps out wherever she can be useful,” she explained.

“She?”

“They’re usually women, like Blackers or Schafers.”

As Persoff opened his mouth, Tom said, “Blackers keep track of things and give advice. A Schafer trains.”

“They’re teachers?”

“They train children, yes, but they train anything. Animals, plants-the plant that produced the sutures I used on you, for instance. Didn’t hurt coming out, did it? When we landed it started out as flax, and the fibers would have soaked up some of your blood, which would have clotted. We have bad stories about those days. There were people hurt in the last landing.” He looked grim.

Persoff could just imagine. “How many landing craft did you have working?”

“One,” said Tom.

Nobody added anything to that. Persoff sought anything to say that didn’t involve asking if anybody had ended up being left on the Galaxias. They would learn that anyway, if McCabe’s plan worked. He remembered about the trees. “I wanted to talk about-”

“They’re here!” someone shouted from down on the beach, and most of the people around him left. Six remained.

The woman who’d spoken first said, “It’ll take a while to sort out protocol. Meanwhile, do you prefer Blacker or Wells?”

“For what?”

“Sex. It’s getting really difficult to find partners with low consanguinity, and yours is zero. So, Blacker or Wells?”

“Uh, Newmar, as a matter of fact. She’s our ship’s master at arms.”

This was greeted with glum expressions. The woman who’d spoken just before the last said, “You have female crewmen.”

“Nine, in a current complement of seventy. We lost six men when your ship fired on us.”

“Oh hell,” she said. “I don’t think anyone expected to be found by anyone but the kzinti. I’m awfully sorry about that.” There was a chorus of agreement.

Lacking a useful comment-“me too” seemed tactless-he said, “What do I call you?”

She looked stunned for a moment. “You don’t know our names, of course! I’m Sophia, this is Betsy, that’s Liz, she’s Susan, and they’re Eva and Donna.” She’d alternated between types, which he took to be Blackers and Wellses. Blackers seemed more intense, Wellses more amiable.

“Hey,” said Betsy, who’d spoken to him first, “their ship only had a complement of seventy-six.”

“Seventy-seven. And forty dolphin fighter pilots. Those died when the kzin ship blew.” They’d been the reason the Yorktown hadn’t included any Wunderkzin, since dolphins became insanely hostile in the presence of kzinti. There had been training incidents.

Betsy said, “But the only way that could be enough people is if you have hyperdrive.” They all went quiet.

“We do.”

It was half an hour or so before he had another quiet moment. By that time they’d learned more than he’d realized he knew about hyperdrive and hyperwave. The first interruption came when a large man-no, a man the size of Tom or Ron, who had built himself up with exercise-came over, shook hands without using a neurotically insecure bonecrusher, and said, “I’m Henry, currently the senior Hale. Understand your ship’s damaged. We’ll be glad to help. How many of us can you take back on this trip?”

“It depends on whether we can fix the Galaxias once we’re in orbit. My storesmaster thinks we probably can, and we have better technology than when it was built, so conceivably thousands. How many of you are there to take back?”

Henry looked at Sophia, who said, “Last count was four thousand nine hundred and three, breeding and sterile. Call it five thousand until we can check.”

“I have a crewman who says the Galaxias was designed to hold up to six thousand,” Persoff said.

“That was before the battle,” said Henry.

Sophia recited: “‘Ship’s original complement was three hundred and two, with thirty-eight survivors after the collision. Thirty-one were in coldsleep and had to be awakened via emergency protocol, resulting in impaired cognition. The remaining seven included the two stowaways, who were instrumental in getting the Galaxias back in working order and the awakened into functional condition, respectively. When the ship reached a system with an adaptable planet, the only survivor of the original mission was the pilot. He died bringing the last of the supplies and the ship’s complement, then numbered one hundred and three, to the surface. He was the only casualty of the ferry trips.” She looked at Persoff and smiled. “That was Stuart William Denver. It was by his order that records were kept of accomplishments, and full acknowledgement given to stowaways Marion Johnson and Russelle Wells, without whose work none of us would have lived to get here. Stuart with a ‘u,’ Marion with an ‘o,’ Russelle with a final ‘e.’ The distinctions are made because one name derives from a profession, and both other names were then considered sexually ambiguous.”

Persoff nodded, wishing he could think of something sufficiently respectful to say about that pilot. Then he frowned. “Johnson, Denver, Hale, Wells, Blacker, and Schafer make six,” he said. “Who was the seventh survivor?”

“Foote,” said a voice from outside the firelight. An old-looking woman stepped forward, propping herself up on two canes. “James Foote.”

“Foote with a final ‘e,’” said Sophia.

“He financed the Galaxias,” said the old woman. “He was a planner.”

“One man paid for that thing himself?” Persoff said, thinking of the Cyclopean ship he’d seen so briefly.

The old woman smiled. “He was a good planner. My name is Eden. Currently I’m the senior Foote. There are seldom more than eight or nine of us. Everyone else is good at some form of implementation, but original planning is too abstruse.”

“Then I guess you’re the one I need to talk with about cutting the trees,” he said.

Everyone else had been quiet, but up to then they’d been breathing. It got quieter.

“Out of the question,” Eden said. “Those are our history. The first of them were planted by the Pilot’s own hand.”

“The thing is, to get off the planet we’ll need to build a launch catapult.”

“Do it on another island.”

“We can’t move the power plant off this one.”

“We’ll help you make others. There may not be much smeltable iron, but there’s sure plenty of thorite.”

“All the other islands are volcanic.”

“There are ways to drain off the magma, we’ve just never gone to the trouble.”

“They’ll take time.”

“We’ve waited a couple hundred years so far.”

“Goddammit, we’re forty years overdue on our mission already!” Persoff bellowed, then shut up, ashamed.

She frowned. “What’s your mission?”

“We were supposed to attack the kzin home system, but we were attacked before we got there and flung this way when their gravity planer blew.”

“Just like us,” said Eva.

Eden said, “You mean, you need to cut the trees to beat the kzinti?”

He actually felt the air go out of him. “Uh, well, yes.”

“Then cut the trees,” she said, and her voice broke. She turned to Henry and said, “Go tell the rest of the Hales, and make sure everyone’s at the first trees, first thing, morning after tomorrow. Captain Persoff, there’s something we’ll want to do before you start cutting. It’s going to take us at least a few days. Will that delay you, or are there other steps you can take while we’re doing that?”

Things were changing too fast for him. “I doubt we’d be able to start cutting for weeks,” he said.

“Good. Then we can do this properly. If you don’t mind, Captain, it would be better for your nerves if you were back with your ship while the news is spread. I have arrangements to make as well.”

“It was out of the question, but now we can cut them? Just like that?”

She gave him a look that made him wonder if he’d make it to his car, but all she said was, “Yes, Captain, just like that. Be at the first trees on time if you want to know the story.”

When he took the car up, he saw hundreds of campfires below. The entire population must have come-and if they never cut the trees, then they’d brought the firewood with them. Yet they were letting him cut them, if it meant striking against the kzinti.

He set the car to take him back to the ship, wished he drank, and got on the radio. The tech on duty was Blackwell, who was evidently startled out of watchstanding trance by the call: “Is there an emergency, sir?”

“No, I’m just coming back early. Pass the word that I’ve met the locals, and they are disposed to help.” Had he said “friendly,” it would have told his crew that he was under duress. “I did get a minor injury, but they treated it. I want Meier to look at their work. Some of the things they’ve come up with are likely to be useful.”

“Yes, sir. May I speak freely, sir?”

Wondering, he said, “Granted.”

“The ship doesn’t feel right without you here, sir. Mister Thurston’s a good man to work for, but I’m glad you’re coming back early.”

“Thanks, Blackwell. Fact is, I didn’t feel right being away from the ship. Persoff out.”

Meier kept exclaiming under her breath, and finding more things to exclaim over with every instrument she used. “Did you know your jaw had been broken?” she finally said.

“It was?”

“By some kind of blunt impact. Right at what I would judge to be the weakest spot, if that’s not a silly thing to say about a jawbone. It’s had two pins put in, which the autodoc says are made of cellulose, gelatin, and powdered sterile bone. New bone is already growing as your cells digest the protein. The tooth they restored is pegged, but that seems to have been done out of sheer thoroughness, as it’s already taken root. And as for the scars, if I hadn’t seen you without them I’d swear they were weeks old. You’re absolutely right, I do want to see what else these people have got. It’s like they had to reinvent medicine.”

“I think they did. I didn’t see any equipment from their shuttle, so I think it must have sunk in the last landing. I’d sure want to keep that stuff handy.”

“It wouldn’t have worn out, either,” Tokugawa said from his bed. “Those old colony ships had equipment that was even better than required by law. And in those days you could go to the organ banks for making defective lightbulbs.”

“Don’t exaggerate,” Meier said.

“He’s not,” Kershner said, walking in. “I hated the idea of organ banks when they thawed me out, so they had me read about one case. Indicator light on a paranoid’s autodoc burned out. He killed off an entire family, root and branch. I still hate organ banks, but I have to admit the only other thing that could possibly be appropriate for that degree of negligence, when you know how serious the risks are, is eternal damnation. Which is difficult to enforce. You need a demon on monitor duty, at least.”

“They get the paranoid?” Persoff said.

Kershner froze in place, mouth open, an odd habit he had when he couldn’t retrieve a piece of information. It could be disturbing, but he had fewer quirks than a lot of other ex-corpsicles. “I’m sure they must have, but I can’t call up the details. There was something weird about his case. But I was talking about the manufacturer. Three people went to the organ banks for negligent homicide. It was open and shut. One didn’t do maintenance on a monitor that supervised the filament composition, one was the middle manager who used to fire employees in quality inspection for failing too many products, and one was the interviewer who hired the manager and gave her instructions about keeping costs down. If any one of them had been doing a diligent job, the killer would have gone on being treated properly. What really capped it for the jury was that the ARMs investigated all the other lamps they’d sold over the same period, and found two more of inferior quality. We’re talking a specialty light here, made specifically for ’docs.” He frowned. “I wish I could remember-I do recall, the guy who did maintenance on the ’doc in question had to have some serious therapy. Totally blameless, but it was eating him up.”

Kershner didn’t look much happier than the man he was discussing. “Did you have a report for me, Mr. Kershner?”

Kershner came out of his funk and said, with a different kind of gloom, “We’ve got no spares for the hyperwave. It looks like when the railgun shot us, a piece of the bulkhead spalled through that locker. Since I have to use parts from the ’wave for redundant systems in the drive, we won’t be in contact with Earth until we get there.”

Persoff considered, then said, “And after forty years the war may have been won already, and if we carry out our mission we may be starting another.” What a freemother. He carefully did not say that aloud.

“I’m afraid so, sir.”

“The people here hold the trees we have to cut in very high regard, and they’ve given permission based on the idea that it’ll help win the war.”

“I’ll explain the situation to them, sir,” Kershner said.

“Thank you, but it’s not your duty.”

“Beg pardon, Captain, but it is my specialty. If I’m standing by, explaining the fine details as you refer them to me, it’ll look to them like you’re avoiding responsibility. I think it’d better if I explained before you said your piece.”

“Are you trying to let me off the hook, Kershner?”

The hypertech looked startled, then grinned. “Just this once, sir. It is your first time.”

Meier and Tokugawa both made strangled noises, while Persoff just rolled his eyes. “Are you off watch, Kershner?”

“Oh, yes, sir.”

“Then go engage in optional activity,” Persoff said. “Consult McCabe if you’re not certain of the term. Dismissed.”

He brought his crew to the beach as the locals were assembling for whatever they had planned. Full dress uniform, no exceptions. Tokugawa was still in a float chair, but Meier was able to get his blues around his neck brace. The only grumbling anyone did was the sort that was used to complain about the weather, since everyone understood what these people had agreed to give up.

They thought they did, anyway.

Persoff took his senior officers to where most of the orders were coming from, and addressed the elders there. “Before we go on, there’s something I need you to know. Even if everything works right, we may not be able to strike against the kzinti. It took us decades longer than planned to get here, and the war may be over by now. We can’t find out until we get to a human world, because we won’t have the hyperwave. Mr. Kershner can explain the technical details if you wish.”

One very old man said, “Johnson. I can see a civilian vessel just carrying spares, but I would expect a fighting starship to be able to fabricate replacement parts for everything it used. Why can’t you fix the hyperwave?”

Kershner stepped forward. “Sir, it isn’t practical to put something of that complexity aboard a vessel. The parts we need are of mixed composition, and have to be made to standards of molecular precision.”

The Johnson-apparently The Johnson-nodded and said, “That’s to produce an effect that’s necessary for the thing to work.”

“Yes, sir,” Kershner said, looking surprised.

“What’s the effect?”

Kershner gave a faint sigh and began explaining hyperwave physics in baby talk, as if he were describing it to a journalist.

The old man stopped him after no more than fifteen seconds and said, “It sounds like you’re setting up a standing wave to maintain a constant peak pulse, because keeping the whole system at that power level will burn it out.”

Kershner stopped dead, blinked about nine times, and said, “Yes.”

“How big is it?”

Kershner held up his thumb and forefinger a little ways apart.

“The Blacker?” said The Johnson.

An old woman said, “Yes?”

“What’s the stuff for alloys in constant friction, very rare?”

“Rhenium?”

“That’s it, thanks-Why can’t you run the wave at full strength through a cubic foot or so of rhenium? There’s plenty of asteroids.”

What Persoff knew about this subject he had mostly learned from journalists’ work, but it must have been a good idea, because Kershner got all excited. “That could work! People still think of rhenium as too rare to be used for most things, but you’re right, there’s lots of asteroids! How did you think of it?”

“Captain Persoff described hyperdrive, and we spent yesterday discussing possible causes for the Blind Spot effect and working out implications. It seemed to us that in hyperspace, normal matter must be the local equivalent of a massless particle, which accounts for the standard speed.”

“That’s right! Captain, permission to-”

“Denied. It’ll wait until after we’ve attended the ceremony.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We don’t mind,” said The Johnson.

“Yes, we do,” said someone who must have been The Hale. “Captain Persoff, there’s been some discussion, and the general opinion is that the ship’s organics will have to be replaced. Since the trees have to be cut anyway, it’ll be best all around if they’re used for that. And we’d appreciate it if you could use everything from the first row there. Roots and all.”

“Thank you, that’ll help a lot.” They were taking it a lot better than he’d dared hope.

The Blacker stepped forward. In the moment before she spoke, Persoff had a chance to notice and realize a lot of things that he hadn’t fitted together before. To begin with, she was wearing something that actually looked sort of Polynesian: a necklace of long, sharp teeth. Old teeth. Kzinti teeth. He’d been assuming the Galaxias had merely fired, survived, and gotten thrown this way, but that had to be wrong: they knew what the kzinti called themselves, which meant they’d had prisoners, and they’d forced them to learn English, because they didn’t use kzin loan words. Near the Blacker there were other women, in hearing range but not close enough to interrupt, who were dressed in clinging outfits of orange fur, extremely worn in spots.

He was suddenly very glad he hadn’t been able to bring any Wunderkzin. Something had happened back then, and these people made damned sure they remembered it.

“Captain,” said The Blacker, “are you certain you wish to be part of this? It can be a strain even for us, and we grow up with it.”

“You’re helping us, and we couldn’t do without you. It seems to me we have to show our respect.”

“Then you do understand,” she said, and turned and led the other Blackers west, toward the trees.

Eden came to his side and said, “She jumps to conclusions sometimes. Do you have recording devices?”

“Yes, why?”

“Use them. You’ll see.” The Foote walked after the Blackers.

“Recorders on, everyone,” Persoff said.

At the trees, the procession halted, and all the adults moved to let the children through. The only grownups near the front were carrying babies. The Blacker waited until the Yorktown’s officers were near, then said, “Pay attention. We can never do this again. People have come to take us home. You must say goodbye to your family.” She put her hand on the nearest tree.

“This is James Foote, who gave up everything he had to build the Galaxias. It was he who extended the field around the ship after the enemy boat rammed us, so that the drive would destroy its mothership and leave them dependent on us no matter if we won or lost. When he was dying he asked to be frozen, so that he could be buried on the planet he always hoped to reach. This was a tiny island then, but the Pilot crushed rock, buried James Foote, planted this tree over him, making the first true soil in the world, and brought rocks from other islands to protect it from the tide, and so we have done ever since when we bring our dead here.” As she moved to the next tree, all the children came up and touched the first, one by one. Last of all, mothers took their infants to the tree and guided a hand to touch it, so that each baby could be told later that this had been done.

Persoff was in something like clinical shock. This was their cemetery, and their museum.

And to beat the kzinti they were willing to cut it all down and grind it to pulp.

“This is Captain Jonas Hale, who was blinded fighting the officer of the kzin attack boat. He advised the Pilot through as much of the trip as he could, and was the best friend the Pilot could have wished for.” One by one, they all touched the tree.

“This is Olga Blacker, who kept us all from going mad, by listening to everything we needed to say, and reminding us of the good things.” The procession continued.

“This is Russelle Wells, who sneaked aboard to be with her boyfriend, who had lied and wasn’t actually part of the crew. She raised thirty-one infants with adult bodies into people who could raise children of their own, and never once had to hurt any of them.” The Blacker bowed to the tree before moving on.

“This is Lavinia Schafer, who taught kzin prisoners English, and then taught them to answer questions. And outlived them all.” The Blacker clenched a fist and raised it overhead in salute.

“This is Academician Marion Johnson, who made so many ruined things work that we could spend two days and a night naming them all, and who got aboard the Galaxias in a crate because he was judged too ill for space travel. He showed us how to cool the planet we needed, and died while we were waiting.”

The seventh tree was touched with special care. “This is Stuart William Denver, who brought us here in a damaged ship through uncharted wilderness, who gave us all hope when we despaired, and who landed all of us and all we needed to live on this world, and died of his burns after getting the last passengers out of the lander as it sank.” She kissed the tree. One by one, the rest did too. After the children had moved on, the adults moved in to do the same.

As she moved on to introduce the next rank of trees, Persoff, who was blind with tears, heard Kershner say softly, “And the kzinti call themselves Heroes?”