Man-Kzin Wars – XIV

LEFTOVERS

by Matthew Joseph Harrington

Unless he was staying over with a woman he’d met, Buford Early slept in his autodoc. At his age most people died in their sleep, and while he wasn’t as afraid of dying as most people, it struck him as an undignified way to go after surviving five wars. On the other hand, his psychist program told him it was really a way of distancing himself, since the lack of a bed in his apartment meant that any woman who came home with him couldn’t stay over herself. The clincher, however, was that it was the most comfortable place he’d ever had to sleep.

He was not accustomed to being startled when he woke up.

He was certainly not accustomed to being so badly startled, ever. There was a head floating outside the observation window.

It was a head of truly astonishing ugliness, resembling nothing so much as a really cruel caricature of a dragon. A bulging snout of a nose hung over a rigid and lipless bony beak, whose molar-textured gash extended back to the hinge of the jaws. Huge ears flanked a face with the texture of boiled leather, which had been crammed into the bottom third of a swollen bald head, which looked as if someone had overinflated the brain and then stuck another on in back.

Which was more or less what had happened. The thing belonged to a Protector, which meant that the human race was about to begin a long period of being micromanaged like so many small and rather stupid children.

Buford reached into the receptacles adjacent to his hands, but instead of finding a stunner and a one-shot puncher, he felt only small pieces of paper. He brought them up to look at them. Each had one word printed on it: COLD.

Next to the head, his robe, draped over nothing, waved itself at the window. He’d have to bide his time, keep his mind off the subject, wait for a chance, and take it. Meanwhile, he opened the lid of the ’doc, sat up, and said, “George Olduvai?”

The Protector rolled its eyes and said, “Puns are the pornography of mathematicians. Jack Brennan is dead.”

“How did that happen?” he exclaimed, taking the robe as he got out.

“A weapon whose programming he hadn’t supervised himself activated a laser and cut him in half at the waist. Aberrantly careless, I suspect suicide. As a breeder he seems to have been sociable, so he never got used to being the smartest person he knew.”

As Early tied his robe sash, he felt for the coil of Sinclair filament in the capsule at the end. The capsule was there, but it held another piece of paper that read COLD. “So who are you?” he said, crumpling the paper and tossing it toward the cleaner.

“You can call me Ursula.”

“You’re female?” he said, then winced at the gaffe.

She let it go. “If memory serves. Let me get you a sandwich,” she said, and the control panel started doing things.

“Can I see something besides a head, please?”

“Sure.” A pressure suit appeared below the head, mostly covered with pockets. It looked like a suit of medieval armor that had just been swallowed by an enormous mutant potholder. Though she didn’t have the accent, it was like a Belter’s suit, with a conspicuous and distinctive emblem on the chest. The picture was of a wheel station, seen from along its axis, and covered with weapon emplacements, with two of the eight spokes shot away on either side. “How’s grilled cheese and bacon suit you?”

“Actually I was planning on cooking the roast I have in the freezer.”

“Sorry. Gone.”

He goggled at her. “That was five pounds of cultured beef!”

“Marshall Early, Pleasance was conquered almost a year ago. We’re at war. I was hungry. And anyway, you got cheated. That was grain-fed-I distinctly tasted gluten peptides.” She handed him a plate bearing a sizzling handmeal. Doubly annoyed though he was, his mind was working; sandwich was an archaic term used by his generation and by Pleasanters, which suggested she was the latter, and must have had some fairly interesting experiences in the past year. He bit into the sandwich.

About a minute later, she handed him a hot towel and a bulb of cold milk. After he’d used both, he said, “That was good.”

“Want another?”

“Yes.” As that was being handed to him, he said, “I haven’t used the ’doc foodmaker in too long. I didn’t remember it was this good.”

“It wasn’t. I rebuilt it when I was reprogramming the ’doc to remove the Puppeteer bug from your head.”

She was fast: she caught the sandwich three feet off the ground. “The what?” he said.

“Bug. The reason you’ve been so much more relaxed and easygoing since you were wounded in the Third War.”

“Fifth.”

She waved a hand. “The one before this one. It’s why you’ve been trying negotiation.”

“Well,” he said, “they say a pacifist is just a general who’s been shot.”

“In the brain.”

“Sorry?”

“‘A pacifist is a general who’s been shot in the brain.’”

“That’s not how I remember it.”

“Of course not, you’ve been shot in the brain. I replenished the boosterspice supply while I was working on the ’doc, you’ll get up to speed soon.”

“That couldn’t have been too hard.”

“Whatever makes you-ah. No, boosterspice is not based on tree-of-life, it just activates some of the same inert gene complexes. If a Protector wanted to make people younger, the stuff would repair gene damage instead of just patching over it. Good for about fifty years. Here, eat. I’ve also added a beetle to the ’doc programming. It’ll spread into other ’docs, so they’ll recognize and remove the implants in other people after yours gets its regular update from the manufacturer. Humans have been doing entirely too well at fighting kzinti. There were supposed to be a couple of more wars to get you into shape.”

“For what?”

“For whatever the Puppeteers need you both to fight so they don’t have to. It’s a dangerous universe out there, and they want lots of cannon fodder between them and the rest of it.”

“Ursula,” he said, “that’s paranoid, and this is me saying it.”

“Marshall,” she said, “I’m a Protector. I don’t act on supposition. I confirmed it.”

“How?”

“Interrogated a Puppeteer.”

“I thought they killed themselves if anyone tried that.”

“They do. Not only that, there’s automatic reflexes that kill them in various ways if you prevent them from doing it voluntarily. Took me fifteen tries until I had them all covered.”

This time her hand was right under the sandwich. She led him to his desk, where he sat, and shook, and said, “There are fourteen dead Puppeteers now?” (“Conniptions” didn’t begin to describe how they would react. “Extinction” might.)

“Don’t be silly. I just recorded one and kept editing the pattern. I noticed the transfer booth system was bugged, so I took advantage of that.” She handed him another bulb, and he ate and drank in silence as he thought about this.

When he was done, he said, “You duplicated a Puppeteer?”

“Hell, no. I just flat-out kidnapped him, then replaced the original recording when I was done and sent him on his way. With a few minor edits, so he didn’t notice the discrepancy in the time.”

It occurred to Early that she’d killed the original.

She must have been able to read his face and body language better than he could imagine. “You do realize that, unless you assume the existence of souls, a transfer booth kills the user and delivers a replacement,” she said. “It’s how you can tell no Protector has ever been to Jinx. There are people who believe transfer booths don’t send the soul along, and on Jinx that means the only way for them to get from one End to the other in a reasonable time is by suborbital craft. A Protector would have put a hullmetal tube through the planet for them to use.”

“You’d go to that much trouble and expense to humor a superstitious belief?”

“You let people vote.”

He didn’t have an answer for that.

“Anyhow, that was why Lucas Garner suppressed the human-built version back in the twenty-first century. That and the fact that you could, technically, make copies of anyone who used one. He reckoned you’d have to make murder legal.”

“Can you? Copy people?”

“Sure. Of course, blacking out the entire planetary power grid for eight months to charge up for it would be a bit of a giveaway. Garner wasn’t so hot on the math part, more concerned about souls.”

“Do we have souls?” he said.

“How should I know? And why would I care? Souls are of significance after death. That puts them just exactly out of my jurisdiction. My job is to keep you all alive and reproducing and happy enough to stick with it.”

“The Mor-” he said, and shut up.

“The Morlocks on Wunderland took an interest because they had never been exposed to the concept, and were too busy to think the implications through.”

“You know about them.”

“Of course. I even know whose fault they were. Relax, you’re not in trouble for approving Project Cherubim. I’m a Protector, I expect breeders to screw up.”

“You have a problem with creating Protectors to fight the kzinti?”

“I have a problem with creating an army of immortal nursemaids to supervise the human race.”

“They were exposed to a lot of radiation on the trip. They were supposed to live just long enough to win the war.”

“Interesting theory.” (Somehow she made that rhyme with “you schmuck.”) “One of the reasons I think Brennan’s death was suicide was, if he’d made an effort to survive, he could have recovered. I know I could. Anything that doesn’t kill a Protector outright can heal.”

“You said he was cut in half.”

“Top half still worked.” She patted his arm. “Don’t worry about it. All the human Protectors from Home are headed for the Core to kill off the Pak, and I have serious issues with manipulative parents. I might add that you, personally, are very lucky that the plan failed.”

His mind raced but got no traction. “Why?”

“Marshall, who did you consider the sexiest woman in the world when you were growing up?”

“Well, you know, it’s been hundreds of years-”

“Buford.”

He looked at her and remembered who, or rather what, he was trying to be evasive with. “Leslie Cordwainer.”

She got a pad out of a pocket, scribbled on it, and said, “Not bad. I take it the pendulum had swung back to Rubens.”

“Hah. No, the Dead Wirehead look was in full force. She kind of stood out.”

“Literally. Mine weren’t that big. Now, can you imagine what her sex life was like?”

“I have been known to manage not to for days at a time now,” he said mordantly.

“Sorry. But I need you to imagine that, thanks to you, she has become an asexual, superintelligent killer, having nothing which would qualify as a conscience by your standards, and with reflexes so fast she can dodge pistol slugs, cells with internal reinforcements that would allow her to survive a few hits with nothing more than bruises, and bones and muscles so strong she can take the gun away and rip it apart,” she took a breath, “who remembers every detail of her sexual history and knows where you live.”

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, well 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 keep 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.

A bag of rocks wrapped around the back of his neck, and a rubber ball fitted neatly into his gaping mouth. Ursula’s head appeared next to his.

“Huh, yeah, what, Buford?” said the Chief of Internal Security.

Buford Early heard his own voice come out of Ursula’s mouth. “Ozzie,” she slurred, “I jus’ wanna tell you, you’re a rilly beau’ful person.”

“Where’s the picture?”

“Oh, off, ’m naked.”

There was a pause. “And you had to call me up at 3:18 to tell me.”

“Din wanna forget again. You deserve to know, an’ you can tell everyone I said so.”

“Oh, I will,” said Chen, who assuredly would.

“You gessum sleep now,” Ursula said, and the phone shut off.

The ball came out of his mouth, and he looked at her and said, “You unbelievably horrible bitch.”

“What? He sounded glad to hear it.”

It was boasted, in White Medical’s advertising, that nobody who used one of their ’docs every day had ever died of any of a number of ailments. The list included apoplexy. This turned out to be true.

When he had calmed down somewhat, largely due to lack of breath, Ursula said, “Do you know why ARM HQ security has never been breached? It was designed by Jack Brennan. The cheats are conspicuous, to me. And you really hoped you could catch a Protector.”

“Hope is a virtue,” he muttered.

“Hope is a narcotic, and it kills more people than wireheading. As witness the planet Pleasance. Marshall, you are free to waste your own time, but wasting mine is an act of sabotage in wartime. Do it again and I’ll dose you with something that’ll make you compulsively truthful for about five hundred hours, then turn you loose at the Belt Embassy. The next three weeks will be historic.”

He’d been doubting the existence of such a substance until she used that last word. Given some of the things he knew about what the ARM had done over the centuries to minimize Belter trade advantages, the term was precisely accurate.

“And by the bye,” she said as her helmet formed again, “no amount of practice will create talent.”

“What?”

“My reply to your trigger code. I found it an unusually foolish statement.”

“My father used to say it, back when I was starting to date.” It suddenly occurred to him that his father used to get divorced every ten years or so.

“You might want to listen to someone smarter than you for a change. As in, ‘Protectors don’t stun.’ The sleep center is under voluntary control and can’t be triggered by an external signal, and the tissue is too tough for a shockwave to shut off circulation, those being the two ways a stunner can work.” Her head vanished again.

The trip down to the Freezer Bank was without further incident.

Doctor Massoglia was IN, according to the little card on the door. It always said that. He’d checked once, and the other side of the card did indeed say OUT, but he’d never seen that side in use. He seemed to live here.

What the tanj, lots of people had apartments in the building; why not one in your office?

He’d always have ice at parties.

He shook that thought off and entered his ID in the reception screen. A few moments later, an astonished-looking woman he didn’t know came out of another room and said, “Good morning, Marshall, I’m Jane Rancourt.”

“Pleased to meet you, Doctor.”

“Jane.”

“Buford. Is Martin up? It’s about the new project.”

In his ear, Ursula’s voice said, “Penzance.”

He got the reference instantly, clenched his teeth, and said, “Penzance. You get a memo?” The damn tune would be running through his head for years, he just knew it.

“Just today. Well, yesterday. I wasn’t expecting anyone at this hour, though.”

“It’s the only time I’m not doing something else. And the appeasers are less likely to get wind of it if it’s done quietly.”

“I’ll call him.” Jane went back into her office.

“Penzance?” he muttered.

“It’s at least as good a codename as ‘Overlord’ or ‘Desert Storm,’” Ursula said. “And much better security than ‘Cherubim.’”

“I wanted to call that ‘Pumpkin,’” he said.

“The kzin are highly literate and fond of alien fables. They’d have understood it was a reference to transformation.”

Early was shocked. He hadn’t thought of that himself. He’d been thinking of sweet potatoes, which he loathed in pie. He liked pumpkin pie, that’s all. “What codename would you have given it?”

“Supposing I was silly enough to do it, you mean? Mighty Mouse. Complete irrelevance. Of course, there’d be some minor risk of them stocking up on limburger, but the Protectors would be in pressure suits most of the time anyway. Dummy up.” Massoglia was coming out.

“Hey, Buford.”

“Marty. Sorry about the hour.”

“Nah, makes sense. And you are always Early.” The only enjoyment he got from that tired old joke was hearing Ursula’s beak grind at the pun. “You want the full tour at last?”

“Not hardly, but I’m taking it. How much did the memo tell you?”

“Splice and clone, and they need at least a quarter of a cortex per donor. Personally I think if the Belt wants genius lunatics they should start with the guy who thought this up.”

“Who says they didn’t? They need more than one.”

“Might as well take you straight to the Beneficiaries, then. Not many of those. This way.” He led Early down a corridor and through a doorway.

Corpsicles had once been kept in separate Dewar tanks. Later they were more numerous, and space was at a premium, so most had been packed in rows, side by side.

Not these. There would have been too much risk of getting the parts mixed up. As they passed one carcass, Early said, “Good Christ, what happened to him?”

“Run over by a sugar train. Wore a lottery bracelet, so he was frozen,” Marty said without looking. “Everyone asks that,” he added, clearly accustomed to people wondering how he knew which one.

“Lottery?”

“It was a fad for a while to have local lotteries award freezer slots as prizes. If we could ever get him stuck back together right he’d have a lot of money waiting for him.”

“How did a guy that lucky get hit by a train?”

“Crossed the tracks when the barricades were already down. It was a jurisdiction where pedestrians had right-of-way.”

“So he expected the train to stop for him? I’d have made the freemother pay for the engineer’s therapy! A jaywalker never has the right-of-way.”

Marty just grunted agreement.

In Early’s ear, Ursula’s voice said, “We do not want that brain.”

Early nearly choked from trying not to laugh aloud.

Fortunately, he was able to let it out when Marty said, “He’s probably not quite what you’re looking for.”

This chamber had originally been excavated as a bomb shelter, which, since the building overhead had once been where the UN held its meetings, said something about the original General Assembly’s opinion about their own effectiveness. Dividers and equipment had gone in during the First War, while the delegates met under a mountain in Switzerland. They got to the end of the ranks of bodies, most of which reminded him of people he’d last seen right after a battle, and got to a section near the end that struck him as different. Early immediately studied his surroundings to see why.

The lighting was better. The windows over the bodies had no frost on the inside, meaning they were of a different material. The ID tags at each body were of hullmetal, with the lettering inset, and given the properties of hullmetal, that meant they’d been formed that way. “These are the Beneficiaries,” Marty said. “People who couldn’t afford to be frozen, or hadn’t thought of it, so strangers who admired them paid for it or took up collections. They were all heroes to someone. This is Wu Kim,” he said, pointing to the left half of a woman whose right side had not been entirely found. “Tiananmen. A few of the people who got the body out and on ice in time later ended up in the First War. Not too surprisingly, they all distinguished themselves.”

“Tiananmen?” Ursula said in his ear.

“Chinese word meaning Waco,” Early remarked. Marty glanced at him and nodded.

There were only sixty-one Beneficiaries, and Marty had something to say about them all. The last and earliest was Hugo van Trast. “He was still at Caltech when he came up with the rejection buffer,” Marty said.

“What did that to him?”

“Carlists. They blamed van Trast for the organ bank that saved the life of Francisco Bahamonde. They kind of overlooked the fact that that same organ bank also saved the life of Marissa Colby, who invented the fusion shield and replenished the depleted fishing grounds and gave us free water. She was on vacation in Majorca when she was exposed to some kind of pesticide. You know, the ones they used in the period when DDT was illegal? Really horrible stuff-There are royalists today who hold annual parties where they burn Bahamonde in effigy.”

“I don’t know why. He’s still dead,” Early said, shaking his head.

“Take them all,” Ursula told him.

“Tag them for shipment.”

“Some don’t have that much brain left,” Marty objected.

“We can at least get their DNA,” Early said without being told. “These are miracle workers. The kzin get smarter with every war. We could use some miracles.”

Marty nodded, but looked sad. He looked around at the dead, made a gesture with his right hand which could have turned into a wave if he hadn’t stopped it, and said, “You need any others?”

“I hope not,” Early said.

Marty nodded again. “Was it Napoleon who said he’d rather have a general who was lucky than one who was smart?”

“It’s been attributed to him,” Early agreed, “but look how he turned out.” He studied Marty. “You’ll miss them, won’t you?”

Marty nodded. “I liked to sit here and read. It was a good feeling, to be with the best people their times could produce.”

“Get a DNA cheek swab from him,” Ursula said. “Imply that he’s got this job because he’s the most diligent organizer willing to do it. That’ll make him feel better.”

“Martin,” Early said, “they need orderly minds to sort their memories out. How would you like to have any good genes you carry added to the mix of every general they’re made into?”

“I think I’d like it a lot.”

Back in the elevator, Early murmured, “That was a damn nice thing to do.”

“I like when I can combine that with doing a good job,” Ursula said. “I also like when someone displays intelligence. You picked up on the idea right away.”

“Thanks,” Early said, keeping his own counsel.

It didn’t help. “I see. You got the purpose and the method, but you thought I was just being considerate. Two out of three.”

“Two out of three-”

“-Is a D, Buford.”

He was fuming by the time he got back to his apartment. Ursula became visible again, and he went over to his desk and gave the nearest leg a vicious kick. It broke off, bounced against the wall, and rebounded where he could grab it. He turned and aimed the stub at her. “You missed one,” he said.

“And you missed my companion,” she said.

“Are you serious? ‘There’s someone behind you’? That’s the oldest trick in the book.”

A huge, gloved feline hand reached over his head and plucked the puncher out of his grasp.

“Actually, the oldest trick in the book is kidnapping a couple of teenagers, brainwiping them, waking them up in a prepared habitat, and saying, ‘I made you out of dust and I made her out of one of your ribs,’” said Ursula.

Early turned carefully and looked at the indubitable kzin in his apartment. His suit looked like it was made out of balloons. “Oh, hell,” Early said.

“I thought it was ‘hello,’” said the kzin. “Human languages are weird.”

“I need to recreate the roast I ate earlier. Stun him and put him back to bed, then we have to get moving to arrange the supposed wreck of the ship with the bodies.”

As the kzin brought up his other hand-the one with the stunner-the only thing Buford Early could think of was, I am the very model of a modern major general-

He saw the room tilt, then stop as he was caught. The rest was silence.

Unless he was staying over with a woman he’d met, Buford Early slept in his autodoc. At his age most people died in their sleep, and while he wasn’t as afraid of dying as most people, it struck him as an undignified way to go after surviving five wars. On the other hand, his psychist program told him it was really a way of distancing himself, since the lack of a bed in his apartment meant that any woman who came home with him couldn’t stay over herself. The clincher, however, was that it was the most comfortable place he’d ever had to sleep.

He was not accustomed to being startled when he woke up.

Certainly not by a group of stern-faced guards. He checked his weapons by reflex, but left them; he’d spent his entire career doing what he believed was right, and however someone had disagreed on what that might have been, shooting his way through his fellow ARMs wasn’t it. He opened the ’doc and said, “Do I get to eat?”

“You’re not under arrest,” said Smith. The Marsborn agent was the only man he recognized. “But we really do want to ask you an awful lot of questions. The ship you sent off last night has disappeared.”

“Ship?”

Smith squinted, then said, “Aw, tanj, he’s had an erasure. Assume lethal traps and search the place.”

“I can point things out if you like,” Early said, utterly at a loss. Why would he have an erasure?

“You might have had some things erased,” Smith said.

Early got up, went into the bathroom, showered, dressed-he’d apparently remembered to run the laundry last night, all his clothes were in the cabinet-and went to the kitchen to start the roast.

After a while he heard an exclamation and came to the doorway to see who’d made what mistake. They were all standing at the desk looking at the screen. Smith looked at him and said, “Where the fuck did you get this crystal?”

Early spread his hands, shook his head, and went over to see what it was.

It was in kzin script, with a running translation down the side of the screen.

If it was genuine, it was the entire kzin order of battle, including the target schedule for the current war. They were making copies already.

He must have had an erasure to protect the identity of one king-hell insider in the Patriarch’s Palace.

“If this checks out,” Smith said, “that funny business last night isn’t going to cause you much trouble. You’ll probably be promoted to a directorship to keep you out of trouble, but I imagine you’d find it difficult to get out from behind your desk under the weight of all the medals anyway. Marshall, you’re either the smartest man alive, or the luckiest.”

The copying was done, and the screen reverted to a desktop that wasn’t his: a reclining woman he’d never seen before, almost entirely Caucasian, nude, built like he liked ’em, and smiling at the camera with what looked much very like love in her eyes. Below it was perhaps the most unnecessary caption imaginable:

HOT.