The Man-Kzin Wars 11

I

Peace Corben's mother was this old: she had met Lucas Garner.

The name had not been Corben, then, and the real name wasn't in the records Peace had found in Cockroach's computer. Possibly the old woman hadn't seen any reason to include it; more likely, given her paranoia, she'd feared its discovery by hostile parties.

Like everything else she'd tried to be, Jan Corben had been a great paranoid. The ship was a fine example.

It looked like a mining ship designed by a cube director. An old Belter drive guide protruded from a wallowing hog of a hull. The lifesystem seemed to be mostly windows. The cardinal points bristled with important-looking, redundant instruments. Some of the windows had curtains. It was ludicrous. It was all a lie.

The “windows” were viewscreens, showing the universe whatever the pilot pleased. Most of the “instruments” were antipersonnel weapons with proximity triggers. The “drive guide” was a gamma-ray laser; the actual drive had come with the hull, which was that of a First War kzin courier ship. The gravity planer developed six hundred gravities—twenty times the limit now allowed by treaty. A little bubble in the nose and three behind the central bulge were all that showed of the real instrument packages, which were in four General Products #1 hulls to enable them to survive events that required the rest of the ship to use one or more stasis fields. There was a fusion drive, but it was for the oversized attitude jets. When acting in concert with the gyros, which were also oversized, they could turn the ship a full 360 degrees in any plane in 1.2 seconds, coming to a dead stop; faster for smaller adjustments, of course. This aimed the laser anywhere. There was a suitfitter in the autodoc; what the suit locker held was powered armor. All this had been accumulated over the course of three Wars' time, and consistently upgraded as technology progressed. The latest addition, barely older than Peace herself, was a top-of-the-line hyperdrive motor, custom-built by Cornelius Industries of We Made It.

That last may have been a mistake. There were laws about product safety, and since you could more or less smooth out the convolutions in your brain thinking of what could result from a faulty hyperdrive, there was a strict schedule of warranty inspections. During one of these, some Helpful Citizen had apparently noticed one of the other features. The old woman had still been in Rehab when the kzinti bombed Pleasance.

When Peace had stolen the ship—trivially easy, in the panic—her first act had been to go after her mother. Rehabilitation included work therapy, to the point where there were economically vital companies that would go broke if every law were obeyed. The camps were guarded and organized as thoroughly as bases for conscript troop training.

Doubtless that was why the kzinti had bombed them so heavily.

Peace was circling over Camp Fourteen for the fourth time, scanning for any rubble that might be loose enough to hold survivors, when it became apparent that the invaders had realized that their order-of-battle included no antiques. (The hull display had been altered to Heroes' Script that translated as something like Unthinking Lunge, a not-atypical ship's name. Probably curtained windows would have attracted attention sooner.) Cockroach's hull was coated with superconductor under the screen layer, but the lasers aimed at it were designed for planetary assault. It got very warm inside before Peace found the panic button.

It was a good panic button. It had a routine for almost anything. Inundation by laser fire didn't even call up lesser subroutines.

Cockroach turned on its head, the lifesystem went into stasis, and the hull became a perfect reflector. It was textured with optical corners. Most of the kzinti ships lost their paint and a little hullmetal before their lasers switched off, but the one nearest the azimuth was lined up with Cockroach's drive guide. The planer held the ship immobile while the stinger fired, and a stream of ultrahard gamma rays ran back up the beam coming from the orbiting flagship. All the oscillating electrons in the flagship laser's pulse chamber suddenly left it at relativistic speeds. Kzin weaponcraft was amazing, but it wasn't magic: the insulators blew, and dense random currents scrambled every circuit they touched—a category which included nervous systems. Survivors didn't suffer, as the effect opened the circuit of the stasis on the mirror at the back of the laser, and the gamma beam punched through into a fuel preheater. This opened a channel between the main fusion plant and a deuterium tank. After that—

Well, there wasn't really a flagship after that.

Peace didn't learn of the flagship's destruction until days later. She merely saw the ground leap up at her, then saw it further off and receding, then saw it much further off and receding a lot faster, obscured by a glowing smoke ring. (Cockroach had gone back into stasis to pass through the fireball.) More trouble followed, figuratively and literally.

The portmaster at Arcadia had been unwilling to keep a fully-fueled warship at her field, and had had Cockroach's tanks drained. The ship could and did extract deuterium from ambient water vapor, but there wasn't much built up by the time of the attack, and the gravity planer was using that up right smartly. Fortunately—from the computer's viewpoint—there was an excellent source of very pure hydrogen barely a quarter-radian off the ship's present course. Unfortunately—for Peace's nerves—it was Lucifer: 70 Ophiuchi B-IV, a gas giant larger but less massive than Jupiter. Cockroach accelerated toward it for slightly over half an hour, leaving a fuel reserve that would have fit inside a coffee urn, and spent the next twenty-six hours and change in free flight.

Torpedoes could have been upgraded to catch the ship; this was not even contemplated. The invasion's flag officer, who was now interacting with Pleasance's magnetic field, had been Hthht'-Riit, bravest son of the Patriarch. It was he who had come up with the plan of taking over remote human worlds first and working their way in, a strategy which might actually have succeeded if he'd remained alive to keep the fleet from making sudden lunges. As it was, the rest of the shipmasters didn't want the human pilot vaporized: they wanted “him” kept alive for as long as possible, while they expressed their extreme disappointment.

It took seven hours of screaming and spitting to cram a fuel tank large enough into a 25G assault boat; kzinti do not work and play well with others. They were not stupid—less so with every War they lost—and they knew it had to be done if they wanted to flyby and yoke before the human could refuel. A 20G destroyer, say, could never have done it in time.

The assault boat was closing the gap at three thousand miles per second when it finally got close enough to throw on a gravity yoke. The boat's radiator blossom instantly turned sheer white. Cockroach's gamma cannon was detected starting up, but this was deemed of far less concern than the heat-exchange situation: hitting at this range would have required a miracle, and not a small one. Humans simply weren't that good.

They were notoriously demented. This one was no exception. The human ship wasn't on an atmosphere-skimming path, it was aimed for the center of the disk. By the time their velocities were matched, slowing the pursuer and speeding up the prey, no further effort could be spared to bring them together yet, as the boat was engaged in hauling them both aside to save the human ship's crew.

Cockroach, aboard which Peace Corben had finished having conniptions hours ago, fired its gamma laser into Lucifer's atmosphere and went immediately into stasis. The shot heated a large volume to electrons and stripped nuclei, but did not suffice to ignite fusion. It took the impact, a few milliseconds later, of the relativistic byproducts of the gamma-generating blast to do that. The atmospheric fusion blast was brief, and didn't do much more than UV-ionize a tremendous volume of hydrogen around it, which expanded until it was cool enough to recombine. This created, then uncreated, a discontinuity about the size of Earth's Moon in Lucifer's magnetic field.

When the electromagnetic pulse hit the assault boat, the superconductive pulse shielding expanded by internal repulsion until hull members tore it apart; then the overloaded gravity planer collapsed the boat to a point, which evaporated in Hawking radiation at once. The blast was seen on Pleasance.

It was followed by the flare of Lucifer, in visible light, as Cockroach plowed into the contracting remains of the atmospheric fireball. The ship's fuel intakes were in stasis, as were the tanks themselves, and the local material was now heavily enriched in deuterium; when inertial sensors in the instrument bubbles detected a halt, indicating that the ship was as deep as it was going to get, the field on the tank intakes was flickered for just long enough for the pressure to slam them shut. The tanks' contents would be cooled and separated when things were less exciting.

A destroyer had set out immediately after the destruction of the flagship, had refused to acknowledge transmissions, and had been declared outlaw—largely as a matter of form, as its intentions were obvious. Gnyr-Captain and his crew wouldn't have cared if they weren't. They had sworn personal fealty to Hthht'-Riit, and considered their own lives to be over. All that remained was to finish dying, and they would do it like kzinti.

They were still two hours from Lucifer when the human ship recoiled out of the atmosphere. Much of it came out of stasis, and the ship presently stopped tumbling. It cast about as if purblind (which it was, as three of the four instrument packages were now condensing metal vapor inside their shells), picked a direction, and shot away at six hundred gees.

The outlaw destroyer could not spare the time for much of a ceremony: a minute or so to contemplate the ship's new name. This was less precisely transliteratable into a human language than most kzinti concepts, as it was less a word than an expression of feeling, sounding like some primordial red scream. It did have a meaning as a noun—it was the title of an ancient (pre-industrial!) mythical being, whom the gods sent to punish cannibals and those who claimed Names they had not earned. According to legend, the creature had been a kzin who had contradicted some god, and had been flayed alive and boiled in vinegar—but only after being made immortal, so he couldn't escape by dying. After torture he stuck to his assertions, so impressing the ruler of the gods with his courage and principles that they made him their instrument, granting him perfection of movement in battle.

It may or may not have been a coincidence of etymology that led the ancient Greeks to give the name Eumenides, “perfect in grace,” to three figures of similar function, more properly known as Erinyes. The Romans, however, gave them the name by which they were most familiarly known.

The Fury continued its pursuit.

Peace Corben knew nothing of this. The ship's computer hadn't noticed the destroyer, and hadn't been informative with her anyway. She did finally manage to get out of it the origin of the name Cockroach: it was an ugly little Earth insect, notorious for its ubiquity and its capacity to survive attempts to kill it. It didn't please her to be in a vessel with such a name, particularly one that acted like this one did.

Peace would have been less pleased, if that were possible, to learn that the things were extinct.

II

Peace had been offplanet about twenty standard years back, to the research base orbiting Amethyst (which star still obstinately kept secret its reason for being a brilliant shade of theoretically-impossible purple). Supposedly she was there to gather material for her sociobiology dissertation on isolated communities; in fact, she was a rich kid playing tourist, and the staff had promptly put her to work programming the kitchen—which she became so unexpectedly good at (she'd never done it before) that the base autodoc had to constantly fiddle with everybody's thyroids to keep their weight down. She'd never been in hyperspace, though. Naturally she'd heard about its peculiarities, but now she still didn't get to experience them. A viewscreen will not display the Blind Spot. Consequently it wasn't the eerie experience she'd been expecting.

As the ship was badly damaged, the computer was heading for We Made It. Once Peace had gotten it to tell her anything, she discovered that this was because crashlanders: A) knew everything any human being knew about repairing spaceships; and, B) were still paying the Outsiders installments on the purchase of hyperdrive, and could thus be reasonably expected to possess a certain moral flexibility about reporting cash customers to ARM agents. So the trip wasn't all that mysterious in itself, either. However, Peace had plenty to occupy her mind, because she'd gotten these tidbits by locating and decrypting the ship's log. It was a long read, but better than the first week of the trip—the autodoc had been treating her for cataract formation, triggered by the sharp transient acceleration the kzinti grav lock had caused before the ship compensated. (It had been terrifying. She'd never heard of cataracts before—the genes for them had been on the UN Fertility Board's list from the day it was started.)

Slightly before arrival, she got through the password system, and thus was able to use the hyperwave, to warn humanity of the onset of the Fourth Kzinti War. She then discovered that the panic program was still active. Cockroach responded to the content of the messages by turning around and heading for a place to sit out the war unobserved, incidentally adding two months to the voyage.

Interstellar travel was turning out to be principally a pain in the ass.

The autodoc was amazingly old, programmed for her rather hyperactive mother, built into the kitchen, and stubborn as gravity. Peace put on close to three pounds a week. She had to turn up the cabin gravity just to keep it from all turning to fat. And she couldn't keep it above twelve meters or the autodoc just turned down her thyroid.

If Cockroach ended up picking a third destination, Peace was going to have no more contours than a bandersnatch by the time she arrived.

The Fury dropped out of hyperspace outside the Procyon singularity about forty-five hours after Cockroach had done so. There was a fleet. Fury returned to hyperspace for a few minutes of direction changes, then returned to normal space on a very different side of the gravity well.

Gnyr-Captain growled wordlessly to himself for a while. The habit was probably annoying, but so far no one had had the blood to say so. Then he said, “Technology Officer, was our prey in that fleet?”

“I believe not, Gnyr-Captain, but I am having the computer check my observation… All craft in that fleet are of human manufacture.”

Gnyr-Captain growled some more. “Strategy Officer, do you judge that humans would include such a ship in a war fleet if it were available?”

“Yes, sir,” was the immediate reply. “Anyone would. Should I expound?”

“No.” The ranking of Strategy Officer was a recent innovation, and this one was always trying to demonstrate his worth. Gnyr-Captain wished for about the 512th time that he had a Telepath, then opened a channel. “Manexpert to the bridge.”

When Manexpert had buzzed, been admitted, and come to attention, Gnyr-Captain looked him over. That was about all the examining anyone could do. Manexpert habitually breathed through his mouth to control his expression, and groomed with some kind of fabric cleaner to minimize his scent. It was enough to thin your blood sometimes—it was very like talking to a holo of a kzin, but a holo that could smell you. Manexpert had explained, when ordered, that he had adopted the appearance of harmlessness from the humans he studied, on the grounds that it made it possible to surprise and defeat a superior warrior. His dueling record supported this theory.

“Manexpert,” said Gnyr-Captain, “our prey is not in this system. Could he have been less damaged than he seemed, and changed course in hyperspace?” Then he waited; such questions always took time.

Manexpert's pupils dilated, his ears cupped, and his tail lashed. He stared at a spot on the bulkhead—which was in fact in about the same direction as the nearby star—and thought very hard for about two minutes, trying to think like a human. Then he resumed a more normal attitude and said, “Gnyr-Captain, regardless of his damage he did not know of our pursuit. If he had, by then he would have been terrified, so he would have attacked, taking advantage of his Red Age ship's superior acceleration.”

“A reasoned response, made out of panic?” said Strategy Officer scornfully.

“Humans do it often,” Manexpert replied, apparently unoffended. But then, who could know?

“Why?” said Gnyr-Captain, startled.

“I don't know, sir. I'm not sure even they know. My own theory is it's a way to be rid of the fear.”

“Reflexively?” Gnyr-Captain said in disbelief.

“It isn't a widely-accepted theory, sir,” Manexpert admitted.

“Good—Why wouldn't he stay in their primary shipbuilding system, if he wasn't aware of pursuit?”

“Because it's a very sensible place to go, sir,” Manexpert replied. Close study of human thought had gotten him a reputation for strange comments, but this one stood out. He saw his commander's expression and hastily added, “He would realize that a hunter would expect him to go to the safest place possible, and he would expect a hunter to arrive there whether he saw pursuit or not, and therefore would avoid that place. You see, sir, humans seem to have evolved intelligence in order to become predators, which gives them—”

“If I want a lecture I'll catch a pierin!” Gnyr-Captain roared. “Where would he go instead?”

“By this reasoning, the last place a human with his fur straight—urr, hmf—who wasn't mad, I mean, would want to go.”

“What, Kzin?”

“They're mad, sir, not idiots. Mostly. —I'm going to have to check my library to figure out just where that would be, Gnyr-Captain. Certainly someplace humans would consider dangerous.”

“Go do it. Dismissed.”

“Sir.”

Peace watched the line in the middle of the mass detector lengthen to nearly the edge of the globe before dropping Cockroach into normal space. It was her second approach to the system; her first had only been to use the gravity drag, since she'd been moving at over three percent of lightspeed when she dropped out. She didn't want to run low on fuel again. She didn't know how she was going to restore the ruined instruments, as the apertures for the shells were about a fifth of an inch across. The old woman must have made models in bottles for fun, sometime in the past.

She switched on the instruction mike, and when the indicator lit told the computer, “We're there.”

CONFIRMED, it replied. She had it use visual replies only, on a screen for one of the ruined instrument pods. It was less unnerving that way. Its voice sounded like her mother.

“Great. Now where the puke are we?”

EPSILON INDI SYSTEM, it replied.

Peace growled, then muttered, “How am I supposed to find out what I'm doing here?”

REQUEST THE REASON FOR THE CHOSEN DESTINATION, it told her.

Peace stared at the screen for a long moment, intensely annoyed. If she'd been in the habit of thinking aloud, she could long since have… rrrgh! “Why was this destination chosen?” she finally said.

EPSILON INDI SYSTEM WAS ABANDONED DUE TO FAILURE OF THE COLONY WORLD HOME, AND IS TOO DEEP IN HUMAN SPACE TO BE PRACTICAL FOR OTHER RACES. MATERIALS FROM COLONY STRUCTURES SHOULD BE MORE THAN SUFFICIENT FOR REPAIRS, AND TRACE ELEMENTS FOR SUPPLIES CAN BE ACQUIRED FROM THE ENVIRONMENT.

“Why did the colony fail?”

PLAGUE, ETIOLOGY UNKNOWN, BUT RAPID IN EFFECT. ONLY A PARTIAL WARNING WAS SENT BEFORE COMMUNICATIONS CEASED.

“Nobody's tried to find a cure?” To obtain a whole planet?

FIVE EXPEDITIONS ARE RECORDED SINCE 2360. THREE WERE UN ARM, ONE JINX INSTITUTE OF KNOWLEDGE, ONE WUNDERLAND INDEPENDENCE SOCIETY. NO SURVIVORS ARE RECORDED.

“Didn't anybody think to leave someone in orbit?”

ALL FIVE MISSION PLANS INCLUDED ISOLATED OBSERVERS.

“Piles,” Peace murmured. Then she yelled, “So what's the point of being here if I can't go outside?”

REPAIRS MUST BE PERFORMED IN A PRESSURE SUIT.

“Pus.”

Epsilon Indi system had been colonized by flatlanders and Belters, but the Belters must have been malcontents or something: there wasn't a trace of asteroid industry. There were hardly any asteroids, contrary to what the ship's records said. Home itself had been named by consensus, but the right to name the other major bodies had been distributed by lot, and the first settlers must have been an odd bunch. From inmost to outermost, the planets were: Monongahela, Home, Bullwinkle, Rapunzel, and Godzilla. Peace was unable to find any explanations for these choices in Cockroach's memory.

Home itself was… strange. The icecaps were a lot bigger than the computer's maps showed, and the coastlines were all screwed up. Why would there be an ice age? The primary wasn't contracting, the way that, for instance, Sol was. In the putative tropics, the coastlines were thick with jungle showing no sign of habitation, but this cut off sharply—about where the old coastlines used to be, in fact. The interior was all but sterile—but well supplied with highways. There were circular lakes, ranging in size from big to absurd, sprinkled over the continents, and all of them had several big roads leading right up to their rims, connecting them to others. Some intersecting lake patterns had dozens of those leading away from them. What it looked like was, there had been a bunch of cities all over, and they'd exploded.

Maybe they'd tried to stop the plague with fusion blasts? But then why was there an ice age? All that soot would reduce the planet's albedo and melt the icecaps. Anyone who went to school on Pleasance knew all about light absorption.

Rot it. Peace deep-radared the crust, looking for refined metal she could land near.

Then, incredulous, she did it again.

There was no piece of refined metal larger than her fist within a quarter-mile of the surface. Whatever the research ships had landed with was gone, which was at least plausible if you assumed they'd taken off and died on the way back; but the residues of industry were absent too. There wasn't so much as a bearing from a groundcar down there, not even where city sites were under the ice. Outside the newly-exposed coastal areas there weren't even ore concentrations. Records said Home was supposed to be poor in ferrous ores, but they couldn't have built everything out of aluminum and brick, could they? And there was no refined aluminum, which meant either somebody had used it all for something, or there had been some amazingly corrosive rainfall here—like hydrofluoric acid, or a strong lye solution. Aluminum didn't break down by itself.

There were no satellites in orbit.

Nothing manmade on the moon, Indigo. (It wasn't. Who named these things?) No useful concentrations, either, which would have sidestepped the risks involved in landing on the planet.

Peace grumbled and set the surviving instruments to performing a spectroscopic assay. If nothing else, there would be mine tailings. The last visitors had been two or three centuries back; metal reclamation technology had been stimulated considerably by the three intervening Kzinti Wars. She told the computer to map incidence levels of the elements needed for Cockroach's repairs, then had a nap—after it nagged her into taking another meal she didn't want, of course.

When she got up, her first impression was that she'd instructed the computer wrong. She hadn't. According to the scan, the nine most essential elements—the Group VIII set—were distributed in three ways:

First, there was a light dusting of them, all over the planet—except in the lakes, where there were only traces.

Second, there were massive deposits in all river deltas—pre-glacial ones—and deep ocean trenches. Massive as in, kilotons.

Third, there were five concentrations, of all nine elements, in the immediate vicinity of the former location of Claytown, where the spaceport had been. This was on a former river delta, so Peace decided to set down there—after wondering briefly why anybody would put a spaceport next to an ocean, which could potentially wreck it in minutes. (She dismissed the question, on the grounds that people who would blow up cities would do anything at all.) The five spots there also held concentrations of niobium and chromium—where five large supplies of hullmetal had been chemically separated, then scattered.

She decided to be especially careful. The plague clearly did something to your brain.

In forty days of inactivity, morale aboard the Fury had plummeted. The crew slept a lot off duty. Some began grooming compulsively. Dueling had fallen off, and Power Officer had reported hearing one of his crewkzin apologize to another of equal rank. Gnyr-Captain didn't even have the comfort of nagging Manexpert, for he knew intuition was a hairless thing, curling up under pressure.

Gnyr-Captain was exercising in his cabin, leaping across it with the gravity turned low. He didn't need that much exercise, but it ate time—and he'd caught himself wondering if his tail would look good tattooed… Someone buzzed, and he poised, turned the gravity back up, and grabbed a variable-sword in one combined movement. Could have been smoother, he noted. Getting soft. “Enter,” he said.

Manexpert opened the door. “If I entered you might get ill, sir,” he said. It was a good bet; he wasn't clean. He was matted, too, and missing chin hairs where he'd been tugging on them. One of his ears was half-curled, and had a persistent twitch; and he—

“What are you doing?” Gnyr-Captain exclaimed.

“Sir? Oh, the tail. I thought fiddling with the end of it would help me think more like a human, sir.”

“Humans don't have tails,” said Gnyr-Captain distractedly, disturbed at the sight.

“I know, sir, but if they did they'd fiddle with the tuft.”

“Why?”

“They fiddle with everything, sir. —I have five possible destinations, Gnyr-Captain.”

This was simultaneously annoying and a relief; he'd expected thirty-two or forty. “Name them.”

“From most to least dangerous: first, he could return to his own system.”

“Suicide.”

“Just being thorough, sir. Next, the asteroid belt of Gunpoint.”

“How is that dangerous?”

“As the system nearest Sol it's ruled from Earth. There are rebels in the asteroids who want to overthrow the governors, and they'd want the ship, but they might save money by killing him and taking it.”

That sounded remarkably sensible. “Humans would do that? They're usually so scrupulous in matters of trade.”

“Not with each other, sir. In fact, the humans most concerned with dealing honorably with other species often treat their fellow humans like sthondats.”

“Why?”

“I've never even heard a theory, sir. It's one of those human things.”

“Ftah. Proceed.”

“Third is Fuzz. Fourth is Warhead. I judge them nearly equal in danger. I don't know whether human telepaths go insane on Fuzz; on the other hand, though Warhead is closer to Kzin, it presents logistical difficulties for invasion—”

“I know about Warhead,” Gnyr-Captain said sharply. He had had ancestors there—might still have, in stasis. “Fifth?”

“Home,” Manexpert said in human speech.

“Never heard of it.”

“A colony destroyed by an unidentified disease, which was still active during later visits. We may assume the prey has a pressure suit, and colony relics would include repair materials—”

“He's there,” Gnyr-Captain said with certainty.

“It is least likely, sir—I see, playing a double game?”

Gnyr-Captain's ears cupped.

“Human phrase, sir. Their strategies often—”

“Manexpert,” Gnyr-Captain interrupted, surprising himself with his mildness, “go groom, and get some rest, and rinse yourself with that polymer solvent or whatever it is you like so much. But first tell Navigator where to find Huwwng—that world.”

“Home, sir?” Manexpert enunciated.

“Yes. I don't know how you can reproduce that monkey howling. Dismissed.”

“Yes, sir. You get used to the taste after a few years, sir,” Manexpert said, and saluted, and closed the door.

Gnyr-Captain squinted at the closed door for a full minute, trying to make sense of that.

III

Within a week of landing, Peace was sick. Not with the plague; with rage. She'd done the first repairs with parts in storage, then done a full rundown on ship's systems to see about cannibalizing anything redundant.

The autodoc had a telomerizing subsystem—it could restore one cell's chromosomes to a youthful condition. It also had the capacity for full brain transplant. Which had been used. Repeatedly.

She should have realized. Boosterspice will not restore fertility; Peace had “never met” her father because she never had one. She'd been gestated as a supply of spare parts. Her thyroid had been kept low to make her easy to catch. And what a funny pun her name was!

Jan had been sentenced to twelve years, and had been due out… about now, in fact. Peace was nearing the end of her fertility; Jan would have had to hurry to get her brain put into the spare in time to bear a replacement. The spare brain would be thrown away, of course, and Jan Corben would be reported as suffering a sad accident.

It came to Peace suddenly that the kzinti invasion had saved her life.

When she finally got her hysterical laughter under control, she was very calm.

She thought.

She called up the manual-operations checklist on the computer, started a test run, and while it was fully occupied did a physical disconnect between the overseer system and the airlock, the gravity planer, the fusion tube, and the autodoc. She resisted temptation: she used a cutting laser. An axe would have been less accurate.

This done, she used a handheld computer to check the autodoc programs, and found that they were indeed not what the ship's computer had said they were. She found the programs used on Jan, copied them to crystal storage, and simply replaced the old crystals with the new ones. She traced circuit paths, found other storage media with programs inside, and destroyed them. Then she used the autodoc.

When she awoke, the first thing she realized was that the kzinti would come looking for her.

Repairs would have to wait. She needed weaponry. The computer would know everything that could be made from materials on hand; it could make a list while the autodoc made up a pressure suit. She'd have to get the parts fabricators outside.

It happened this way:

She was out rigging a sluice for the refiner's waste dust—it ate the local soil, but needed a lot of it—when she began wondering what was wrong with the trees, just past where the original shoreline had been. Ship's equipment included two crawlers; Jan, of course, had believed in having a spare. Peace drove out to the treeline to cut samples, then brought them back only to realize that the analysis had to be done by the autodoc. She thought, then had the computer isolate everything not needed in stasis. Each system and each compartment had its own field generator. Jan must have been really rich at some point. Then she took the samples in, staying in her suit the whole time as she couldn't very well decontaminate without destroying the samples, and ran them through the doc. It might just be some local blight, but if not…

It wasn't. The trees had been tailored to take up useful elements—not well enough to kill the trees, but well enough to make it worthwhile to use their ashes instead of the local soil. Peace could have done it with Cockroach's facilities, but it would have taken too long for the trees to grow. One of the previous expeditions must have been badly wrecked, and done the work before the plague killed them.

Cheerfully, Peace had the computer sterilize the ship's interior while she was still in it; of course she wore her pressure suit. When the cycle was completed she left, of course to load equipment before moving the ship.

And the computer of course no longer had any control over the interior of the airlock.

A trace of dust got into the ship from the airlock.

When she came back, of course she had the airlock clean off her suit before she went in to the control cone. She moved the ship over to the trees, then went back out to set things up—instead of soil being dug up, trees would have to be cut and burned. She used a few pounds of metal foil to make up a huge funnel on legs, then put it in stasis and set it over the intake hopper. The machinery she set to cutting up trees and dumping the chunks in the funnel, and she used a laser at wide aperture to char some from underneath, through the hole, to get them burning. It took some time; they were green, and kept going out. Finally the fire was going, though, and ashes started falling into the hopper. Burning wood, too, but the mechanism of the refiner was built to do worse than that itself.

And when she came in, of course it was only natural that she felt hot, and wanted to sleep.

Before she drifted off, it occurred to her that the fat was just going to be replaced by muscle if she had to work like this. She'd be awfully strong by the time the kzinti showed up.

Pleased, she settled into the sleep of the despicable. (It is of course the innocent whose rest is uneasy; true villains slumber undisturbed by anything but an occasional chuckle.)

The gas giant had the usual litter of moons. Fury landed on one, refueled, and took off immediately. The prey ship had been found within hours, in stasis—perfect reflection, no neutrino output. What Gnyr-Captain had wanted to do was plunge in, grab the crew (probably only one, but they could be lucky), return to Kzin at once, see to it Manexpert got a Name, and if permitted make helpful suggestions to the prey's torturers before being executed for disobedience. Fathers would wean their sons on the tale of Gnyr-Avenger for 512s of years. It was a proud and public thing, to be a kzin.

Unfortunately, records of its departure indicated the old courier ship was just a touch too big to fit into the destroyer's hold. They would have to land, wrap it in a net, disable its stasis, and take it home. And the prey might not even be inside! Bringing back the ship, with its useful arms features, would be honorable enough to save his crewkzin from execution along with Gnyr-Captain, but Manexpert would probably never get his Name. The thought shamed Gnyr-Captain. “Take us near the prey, planer only, and hover,” he told First Flyer.

Approaching the planet was disturbing. Clearly it had undergone asteroid bombardment, but the targets had obviously been cities (and oceans, judging by the oversized icecaps), in what must have been a deliberate attempt to destroy the population. Industrial areas, certainly, but what kind of monster would a conqueror have to be to incinerate a potential labor force?

The prey had landed near the only remaining town, some kind of coastal industrial facility. It couldn't have housed more than two or three 512s of humans from the size of it, but parts of it were warm. Somebody must indeed have been using colony facilities to try to repair the ship, an excellent sign. They couldn't have had much success, judging by the amount of equipment that was lying around in pieces.

“Find them,” Gnyr-Captain told Strategy Officer.

“Yes, sir. —Look for pressure suits,” he told Second Tactician. (Naturally First Tactician was standing by with the landing party.) “Batteries may be chemical instead of electronic. Also look for gaps or rings in the neutrino background; someone may have put a conical reflector into stasis.”

“There's a human-sized warm spot among those leafless trees, sir,” said Second Tactician.

“No, their suits are well-insulated, and would show up as a small very hot spot. Must be an animal.”

“Yes, sir. It's just that it was moving from one metallic object to another—”

“Animals mark things.”

Gnyr-Captain looked properly impatient, though privately he agreed; he'd once seen a ftheer do that to an electric fence. It was surprised.

Unexpectedly, Power Officer signaled. “Gnyr-Captain, the feeder lines to the fusion tubes will not operate.”

Gnyr-Captain grumbled, then said, “Is our storage fully charged?”

“Yes, sir, but as I cannot find a cause I thought it might be some form of—”

And the lights went out.

The next word would have been “attack.”

Manexpert had been seething. He had found the prey, he should be in the assault party! Instead he was bound in his crash fooch, protected like a kitten. The explanation, that he was too valuable to become a target, just made him feel worse. Kittens got explanations; warriors took orders.

It didn't occur to him that the landing party didn't want him—his fellow kzinti were afraid of his unpredictability. If it had, he would have been much happier. As it was, he was merely bitter about missing all the excitement.

Suddenly the cabin gravity went to free fall. What was Gnyr-Captain doing? And if the lights were out to save power for whatever it was, shouldn't the gravity be shut off, to local ambient?

It occurred to him that he couldn't hear the ripping of the gravity planer. The significance of this hit him just before the planet did.

The kzinti ship fell perhaps a hundred feet, at first. (The ground sloped.) A human ship would have been less damaged, for the counterintuitive reason that it would have had a thinner hull: the hull would have done some crumpling, taking up the shock of impact. The kzinti ship had over half an inch of hullmetal, which is held together by both covalent and metallic bonding, and is as resilient as unmodified matter can get. In vacuum this is a good thing.

A hundred feet up, it is a very bad thing indeed, at least when all failsafes have suddenly lost power. The ship bounced, repeatedly. Interior partitions and supports of hullmetal have their critics at such times as well.

Manexpert could hear other kzinti moving about. They must have been the landing party, which would have been padded in their armor; there was no reason to think anyone else's crash field had worked either. He couldn't see out his right eye, and that side of his head felt huge and hot. He couldn't feel anything below his shoulders, either.

There was a little bit of light coming from somewhere to the right. Either the hull had finally cracked—unlikely—or the assault party had cut their way out of the bay when the airlock didn't work. For some unknown but long time, there were extended periods of silence, interrupted by bursts of warcries blended with multiple stutters of slug gunfire. Eventually Manexpert's head began to hurt, and he ignored everything else in his efforts to keep from screaming.

When the pain suddenly faded, he noticed the light had grown brighter. He was also humiliated to realize that for at least several minutes he had been uttering milkmews, like an infant whose mother has left him alone.

He could smell something living nearby. It smelled something like a human, but more acidic, and lacking any trace of fear or anger. “Do you speak Wunderlander?” said a voice with an unidentifiable accent, in that language. Manexpert managed to turn his head a little. The owner of the voice moved courteously into Manexpert's field of vision.

Superstitious fears, whose existence he had never suspected, choked him. This was a monster out of legend. Enormous joints and hard fatless flesh, like someone skinned and rendered down; big ears, permanently cupped to detect the slightest footstep; huge nose for sniffing prey; complete lack of hair or teeth; a hide mottled in shades of brown, with dark-brown speckles, ideal grassland camouflage; and, for all its swollen, deformed head and freakish face, the casual precision and lack of waste motion of the perfect hunter.

“Do you speak English?” it tried. That ragged beak was responsible for the accent.

Kzinti do not go into physical shock when injured, so Manexpert had nothing to compare his mental state with; but the fact was, he was suffering from such a bad case of shock that he couldn't have recalled how to speak Hero if the Patriarch had offered him a daughter to ch'rowl.

“Too bad,” it said, and raised Gnyr-Captain's treasured antique machine gun into view. It had once been carried into battle by a Patriarch's Companion, and Manexpert knew himself to be the ship's last survivor.

“You're—” Manexpert tried to translate a word into English, then gave up and said the word in Hero—“Fury, aren't you?” He said it badly, being unable to get out that much volume.

It lowered the sidearm and said, “My name is Peace.”

Kzinti had learned that word from humans, but there was a certain conceptual gap. Almost no kzin could have grasped the notion of “a situation wherein nobody wants to fight,” and Manexpert was not among that minority. He understood the word as most did, as referring to the condition that was being described whenever the term was applied: “human victory.”

“We only wanted slaves this time,” Manexpert said, despairing.

Peace blinked. And blinked a second time. Then it said, “Your skull is fractured and your neck is broken, and your body is only kept from bleeding out by the wreckage crushing it. I'm going to take the whole mass and put you in stasis until I get your ship's autodoc fixed.”

“How will you get the equipment in here?” Manexpert wondered.

“I have it already,” Peace said, and picked up a slightly-wrinkled but perfectly reflective shield. It adjusted something, and the shield was just aluminum foil, barely thick enough to support its own weight. So simple. “I brought more foil just in case,” it added, then gave him another injection.

Peace had had an enormous amount of time to think, even without considering her new speed of thought and ability to sleep in sectors—like a dolphin, but better.

The amount of manipulation that had been going on vastly exceeded anyone's wildest suspicions.

She had awakened with her memory fully organized, and her first thought was: I was right all along. Peace woke dehydrated, and weak with lack of food, but not hungry. She had eaten anyway. A lifetime of subjugation and thyroid deficiency had kept her depressed and overweight; she was accustomed to eating whether she was hungry or not. While she ate, she called up the excessively long intron sequences recorded from the mining trees, decrypted them, and read the Truesdale account, learning all that was known about Protectors.

Or rather, all that was believed about Protectors. Some of it was obviously wrong.

A couple of million years back, according to Jack Brennan, a Belter who'd become a Protector, a race called the Pak had sent a colony ship to Earth from the galactic core. The Pak became sentient only after years of reproductive maturity, as a result of eating a root that started smelling good to them when their hormone balance began to screw up. This root did not grow right on Earth, so the Pak protectors died out. Brennan said it was of starvation.

And that was a lie.

The Pak breeders were Homo habilis, and they were ancestors of the human race, which could eat things that would make a dog go blind. They could eat dogs, for that matter. Protectors weren't limited to eating tree-of-life, as Brennan called it; it was just what they needed to keep regenerating, and digesting disease germs, and so forth. Some of them must have lasted centuries.

When Brennan had been telling this fable, he had already made his plans to steal a Pak Protector's ramship and convince the UN ARM that he was doomed. They wouldn't interfere with his manipulation of human society if they didn't believe he existed. On the trip back to Brennan's ship, from which Phssthpok had kidnapped him before realizing he was family, Brennan had refused to allow one of his companions, Lucas Garner, to smoke, on the grounds that he, Brennan, had to act to keep the man healthy. This was well after the time of Pasteur, so it was known by then that a viral disease such as cancer could not be contracted by smelling burning leaves; Brennan had been ensuring that the 184-year-old paranoid would be too exasperated to think things through.

Peace deduced the rest.

The Protectors had gone out in fission-powered ion-drive ships, looking for planets where tree-of-life would grow properly. They had found none; there were few planets that were at all habitable. However, the original expedition would have been equipped for terraforming. Planets had water added, were seeded with algae, were even smashed with small moons to create high ground on the far side, above the thick atmosphere. Meanwhile, the few Protectors that remained on Earth were cultivating mutations, so that a species would eventually arise which would be able to use the terraformed planets.

And some explorers must have met the puppeteers.

Two and a half million years back, the puppeteers must have already had spaceflight—not manned, to be sure, but effective at searching for threats. The Protectors would have realized that their limited numbers could never exterminate the puppeteers before Earth's breeder population was found and slaughtered. The Protectors wouldn't have returned to Earth, and they would have killed themselves rather than risk giving away its location. At least one must have made sure of being undiscovered, though, and returned to Earth to warn the Protectors there; and they in turn would have methodically destroyed all signs of technological development. Except the plants they'd modified to produce a multipurpose raw material, unnecessary to the plants' survival, in their secretions; there were too many of those, intended for availability in all climates, to hunt them all down. The best-known was the rubber tree, so useful it was still cultivated on Earth.

The puppeteers had eventually found Earth, and Kzin, and a lot of less interesting inhabited planets. They had manipulated the two dangerous races' development. When Phssthpok, another Pak protector, had come from the Core, they'd let him through, to stimulate Earth's technology to catch up with Kzin's.

But, thanks to a couple of centuries of Brennan's interference, Earth developed wrong, becoming too peaceful to survive the discovery of the planet by the kzinti. So the puppeteers had arranged to let kzinti warcraft find human colony ships in interstellar space—something that had happened half a dozen times. Twice, human ships had survived long enough to send home messages about the contacts.

And humans and kzinti alike thought of it as coincidence!

Picture a globe six million miles across, full of air but unilluminated. Add hundreds of floating bonfires, each with a surface area of at least an acre, in all colors, well-scattered. Imagine air jets to push you from one bonfire to another, in straight lines. Now picture other people, all coming from one bonfire you haven't been to, traveling to various others you haven't been to, propelled by butane-jet cigarette lighters. You know nothing of cigarette lighters and do not use instruments designed to seek them out. How close do you have to get to one to notice it against the background of bonfires? The closest that two of these skew paths get to each other is in excess of a thousand miles. Now multiply the distances by 40 million, and the bonfire surfaces by 1.6 quadrillion, and ask yourself how the kzinti found human ships in interstellar space six times.

Once would be a miracle to stupefy an atheist. Twice is enemy action. Six times is policy.

The puppeteers had arranged beacons, not recognizable as such, to attract kzinti ships. (Possibly telepathic; the kzinti had the capability far more often than humans, which implied it was latent in the whole species—which would explain why they were so hostile: noise.) Once the First War began, the puppeteers had quickly realized that the human ability to kill anything had been all but bred out of the race, and the humans would lose; so they arranged for the Outsiders to go to We Made It, outside the war zone, and sell hyperdrive to the crashlanders. Probably without telling the Outsiders why. Conceivably without telling them at all—Outsiders followed starseeds, and it would be a simple matter to dump trace elements a starseed needed into a star's chromosphere.

And while the Outsiders were ambling along at sublight speeds, Wunderland's population was conquered, enslaved, and eaten.

The puppeteers were powerful and arrogant, which was understandable, but also shortsighted in their meddling, which was intolerable. It might be necessary to exterminate them. If so, it would first be necessary to get them far from human space, as they would doubtless panic and slaughter everything in sight once the procedure began. Doubtless they were aware of the possibility of higher levels of hyperdrive, the next of which was at (if the drive's manual of operation was based on the assumptions it seemed to be) 6! x 4! x 2! / 10 = 3456 times the speed of the first level, or near enough to .8 lightyears per minute. It was always profitable to go faster, so they would be doing research already, so she would only have to have a few algorithms published in technical journals to get them out of the blind alleys. A publicity trip to the Core would give them a look at whatever the Pak migration had been fleeing, and they'd run immediately. That would give Peace a few centuries to decide what to do with them.

The kzinti could be disposed of more promptly.

When Peace was too full to eat any more, she reprogrammed and partly rebuilt the autodoc, then got in for a full scan. Brennan had created a human-infecting form of the virus that changed the Pak (or their relatives) into Protectors, and he and his descendant Truesdale had brought it to Home, to prepare a surprise for the Pak Protector scouts they'd lured away from Earth. Peace needed to find out what it did. The results showed there were things Brennan hadn't mentioned, and that Truesdale most likely hadn't known.

Each lung had an extra lobe, now, so the right had four and the left three. The lobes were now separated by membranes, so that puncturing one wouldn't collapse the rest of the lung. Ribs had thickened and spread to accommodate the change. There was now a two-chamber iliac heart in the groin, drawing blood from the lower body. It pumped it directly into the new lung lobes, which oxygenated it and added it to the blood returning from the rest of the body. Running this mix through the original lungs produced blood supersaturated with oxygen, which the expanded brain needed desperately. The original heart developed thicker muscle and redundant feeder vessels, and the extra oxygen kept it from strain. The extra pass through the lungs would also allow her to function when the partial pressure of oxygen in local air was too low to keep an unchanged human conscious.

The lymphatic system had developed one-way valves, such as veins had, so that the fluid was kept circulating by changes in pressure as muscles were used. The spleen had developed into an organ much like the liver in texture, and its new function seemed to be scavenging trace minerals.

The end joint of each finger was now able to move independently of the rest of the finger, like the end of a human thumb.

There was a hard shell contained within each eyelid. The shell was resilient, and opaque. The eye itself had a second lens behind the original. The new lens was normally flat, but could be made concave enough for work as close as an inch from the pupil. The original lens was saturated with a substance which responded to chemical cues in milliseconds, to become tinted (the usual state), polarized, or clear. Without the Protector additives, this chemical turned the lens white, producing cataracts. (Brennan and Truesdale, products of Fertility Board selection, would have known nothing of this, and would sometimes have needed sunglasses.) The pupil could now open all the way to the edge of the iris, gathering far more light, and the retina had grown a tapetum, like a cat's eye, to give the receptors a second try at the photons. The progressive die-off of the retina's color-detecting rods was compensated by the trick of tinting the lenses different colors, providing strong contrast. It occurred to her that the instinctive attempt to see this degree of contrast, by unaltered elderly humans, finally explained gingham. The preprocessing layer of the retina was thicker, too; and as a huge amount of new brain growth had been in the optic center, image persistence was longer. A Protector could read a newspaper page held up twenty feet away if the light was good.

The olfactory region of the brain was now almost half as big as the optic center used to be. This, like the finger change, was implicit in Brennan's assertions; a Protector had to be able to distinguish one protein molecule from another when they differed by only one amino acid in one place. The processing involved was tremendous.

The brain had more than tripled in size. The new material at the back of the head was mostly three big lobes of cortex, each one a bigger processing net than one of the human brain's cortex hemispheres; and the hemispheres she'd started out with had grown as well. One of these five lobes sufficed for routine activity, allowing the rest to sleep when not needed. Processing networks required something akin to a dream state from time to time, or they began giving aberrant results; a Protector must have at least one cortical lobe in dream state just about all the time. A human Protector could have two in dream state, and still be smarter than a Pak Protector going full out.

There had been nerves dealing with facial muscles and genital response, and those nerves were dead and resorbed in metamorphosis. The brain centers formerly connected to them were now sensing with, and sending commands to, new nerves in the improved fingertips. Small wonder if Protectors enjoyed making things.

The lining of the small intestine was thick, and dense with blood vessels. Intestinal tissue was being constantly converted to embryonic cells, and those were entering the bloodstream, attaching themselves to cells that were functioning improperly. Once there, a new cell wrapped completely around the target cell, took up the cell's proper function, and ate it, digesting its proteins and nucleic acids into individual amino acids and nucleotides. Most of these were released into the blood plasma. The new cells also ate any foreign material, and dead or mutated cells. Bone marrow now produced only red cells—which were some twenty percent more numerous than before, and now had wrinkly surfaces to maximize the O2/CO2 exchange rate.

The virus that was present in the small intestine showed no sign of having ever been capable of infecting a plant. It didn't do that much to the small intestine, for that matter; but the genes it added produced some really astonishing prions—multifunctional enzymes which, among other things, reshaped other proteins, of similar but not identical sequence, into the same shape as the prion. Back in biochemistry classes she'd been taught that twenty-first-century Earth had waged desperate battles in the lab to wipe out just a few types of prions that had gotten into the food supply. Seeing them at work, this was plausible.

Tree-of-life virus must have infected the plants alone, and turned their proteins into prions. Jack Brennan had developed this virus by reverse-engineering the prions and creating the thing from first principles, and must have been planning to do so from the moment he killed Phssthpok. (That part of his story she believed. The Pak Protector would have sterilized Earth if he'd even suspected humans would turn down tree-of-life.) The prions only worked right on cells that had undergone a certain number of divisions—one of them converted telomerase to a new formulation, and too much of the new stuff—a regulating enzyme—would melt you to a blob, while too little would allow your cellular metabolism to speed up until it cooked your brain. The latter had actually happened to one of the Belters who'd inspected Phssthpok's cargo.

There were more mitochondria per cell, too. There seemed little purpose in this until Peace made the connection with a genetic disease she'd read about, now absent from the species, that caused mitochondria to accumulate calcium phosphate. In a Protector, it was a storehouse of material for regenerating bone; in breeders, it sapped strength in all tissues on a cellular level by limiting the size of the ATP reserve. It must have been universal at one time—Pak breeders didn't need stamina, clear heads, or motivation: they had Protectors. Peace recalled that salicylic acid, and its salts and esters, caused mitochondria to store inorganic phosphates, and she determined to stockpile the stuff.

She had used up most of a day getting acquainted with her new condition. Time to get to work. It would be tedious; the annihilation of technological artifacts was so thorough it must have taken some earlier expedition's protectors weeks, and Truesdale and the Home Protectors had stripped out all ore deposits for their arsenals before the asteroid bombardment, sensibly enough. (The mining trees were a splendid bit of misdirection: the Brennan virus had an affinity for the bark, which was crumbly.)

She went through the hidden parts of the computer's memory and found references to inventions the UN ARM had suppressed. Some sounded useful. There were no technical details, but a general outline of principles was usually given, and that was enough.

The third day she gave in to her impatience and built an automaton that could perform simple routine tasks, like cleaning rooms or repairing scanners. For the latter task she had to include a device that distorted the force binding the instrument shells, making them pliable enough to reach through; it had been obvious that the puppeteers must have some means of softening GP hulls, as they would never have sold invulnerable warship hulls to aliens. This done, she had the idea of building automata to fabricate parts usable in a variety of items, and judged it worth the time. (Technology doesn't save labor: it invests it.) Pure elements could be had via the expedient of a conveyor belt, a disintegrator, and a tapered wind tunnel. She dedicated five days to these tasks, then one more for a device that assembled parts to order, and was able to begin work on parts for the exotic stuff. She arranged a foil shell in stasis for workshop housing—some of the mechanisms would absorb stray neutrinos otherwise—and began building various specialized components for weapons of short, middle, and long ranges. Middle range being the horizon.

When the kzinti showed up, she was pleasantly surprised (and just a bit embarrassed for them) to find that she could easily break into their ship's command codes, which raised the possibility of interrogating prisoners. She shut off the fuel feed to their fusion source, then found mechanical cutouts that prevented total shutdown of key systems, so she broke out something she'd built as a battery charger. It was faster than laying cables everywhere: it drew power out of all nearby sources, or a source it was aimed at, all without the need for broadcasting. It was just the thing to make a ship fall down.

Most of the survivors were an armored infantry group, and the ones who saw her didn't fight the way she'd expected kzinti to fight; they seemed desperate, rather than fanatical. It dawned on her that a Pak Protector must have landed on Kzin two and a half million years back, and made a really lasting impression. They would have been intelligent by then, but not civilized. Oral tradition would have distorted with every generation, but drawings would be kept up. Some of these troops blew themselves up when it was clear she'd be able to capture them; it was like they expected her to drag them, screaming, back to Hell.

The last survivor was pinned in the wreck; he'd been pretty well-protected, but he was still nearly torn in half. She found the medical supplies and dosed him with things whose labels showed a kzin bleeding, a kzin thrashing around, and a kzin in pain. (Arrows pointing in, instead of stars flying out. Fifty thousand generations of mortal combat for mates had evidently selected for kzinti so healthy that pain was regarded as an unnatural, external phenomenon.) When he became coherent, he asked if her name was [outraged wrathful snarl]. She told him her name, and he did a very strange thing: he pleaded with her. “We only wanted slaves this time,” he said.

She immediately realized, with some amusement, what he understood the word peace to mean, and saw that he too regarded her as some sort of divine avenger; come to slay them all for eating humans, most likely. The word slaves, however, called up old information she hadn't thought of since college; and everything suddenly fell into place.

How could a species that exterminates all mutated offspring have evolved?

The Slavers had ruled the Galaxy a couple of billion years back, according to Larry Greenberg, a human telepath who'd spent several weeks more or less possessed by one. (It had been released from stasis, due to a level of carelessness that Peace would have found appalling even when she was a heavily-medicated breeder. Paranoia was more common then, and had such a bad reputation that caution was treated as some kind of vice.) They used telepathic control to command other species (the Grogs of Down were their incredibly remote and wildly mutated descendants) and enslave them—hence the term. Their name for themselves was thrintun. (It was pronounced without the tongue ever touching the teeth—a thrint's teeth were metallic, and razorlike—and for a human it was a fine way to try to strangle yourself without using your hands.) Their principal slaves had been the tnuctipun, who were miracle workers at genetic design. The tnuctipun had produced the bandersnatch, still found on Jinx—they didn't mutate. The bandersnatch was intelligent, and immune to thrintun Power, and created as a food animal—the big brain was justified by making it very tasty. Bandersnatchi were made to be spies on the thrintun. The tnuctipun had spent centuries developing ways to screw up the thrintun while ostensibly being helpful, and when war finally became open the only counterweapon the thrintun had that worked was amplified Power: they had commanded everything in the Galaxy to commit suicide. Everything that wasn't immune, in stasis, or too stupid to understand, obeyed.

Greenberg had said there were seventeen other intelligent races—eighteen if you stretched the definition a little. Implicitly, the eighteenth race must have sometimes gotten even clear telepathic orders wrong. The tnuctipun would have been assigned to make them smarter.

They had. It must have been one of their first successes. They came up with a virus that turned vegetable protein into the most amazing prions, and altered the species to start finding it irresistible—but only after reproducing. The desexing wasn't necessary, and from an evolutionary viewpoint was actually undesirable; selection would work better if reproduction occurred after the development of intelligence. The killing of mutated descendants was another deliberate effort to prevent evolution, and it had worked for two billion years. The loss of appetite when there were no descendants was just a safety feature to keep their numbers down, and the virus' thallium requirement was a way of limiting their mobility. The breeders' genes had evidently also been altered so that their brains were hardwired to sympathize with rebels and underdogs. Even today, humans hearing about the Slaver era tended to side with the tnuctipun—who by any reasonable standard were as coldly evil a race as had ever existed. (Kzinti ate intelligent lifeforms because hunting them was such a good challenge, and this was as horrifying a practice as you could find nowadays; but even they would recoil at the thought of creating an intelligent race for use as food.)

The parent species must have averaged a good deal brighter than Homo habilis. The Protectors that worked for the tnuctipun had undoubtedly produced many of the wonders that the tnuctipun were credited with—possibly all of the nongenetic ones, such as the Slaver hyperspace jump, disintegrators, stasis fields, and gravity control.

And the Slavers would have considered them perfectly harmless, because the Power would have seemed to work just fine on them. The compartmentalization of the Protector brain, however, would have meant that a Slaver could complacently hold a full lobe under complete control, unaware that that lobe was being left out of the control loop and the Protector was coming to kill him. Which would have been their job, during the war. A Protector was an ideal field commando—eat anything, hard to see, hard to hurt, powerful senses, able to improvise anything needed from what was on hand.

When the Slavers gave the suicide command, the Protectors hadn't been affected; but the breeders had. The only survivors of that would have been mental subnormals, mutants that hadn't been killed because their Protectors had gone off to war. (The mutation rate in the Core would have been incredible.) They would have been the ones too stupid to understand the order. The rest of the breeders would have died, and the Protectors would have stopped eating. Later, the mutants became Protectors themselves, and the ones able to produce viable offspring had kept on eating, developed a language, and called themselves Pak. When the breeder population rose high enough, they had fought for living space.

For two billion years.

Protectors do not normally examine their motives.

But there had never been a paranoid Protector before.

Peace Corben, ready to question and then kill the last survivor, realized that the tnuctipun had created her condition for much the same reason that her mother had created her: to be used. Her face was hard as horn; her holocaustic wrath never showed.

She was not a tool.

She told the kzin some reassuring lies about his condition, then began doing everything she could to save him. That turned out to be a great deal.

Manexpert woke in a big soft swaddle inside a box, which turned out to be an autodoc. It opened when he moved. The lining smelled like some kind of plant fiber, woven, cleaned, and bundled up to serve as padding. Though the experience was unfamiliar, it was comfortable, and felt very natural somehow.

He looked around warily, and saw he was under shelter but not in the… entity's… ship. He must have been kept in stasis for years before the autodoc was working; a good-sized city had grown up. There were buildings of assorted sizes, all more or less hemispherical, all made of foil in stasis. Broad concrete walkways around and between them had rain canopies overhead. They were shaped to channel the rain into troughs, which was apparent because there was a fine spray falling now.

He realized he was panting, and that it wasn't any kind of threat response; the air was—not thick, no, but sort of used. Something must be producing a lot of carbon dioxide: each breath he took felt like he'd been holding it for some time.

The shelter he was under was the open one. He couldn't see a ship, or tell what any buildings were for. There were horizontal ridges on the buildings, far enough apart to serve as steps—for a kzin; they'd been put there for him, so he could look around.

He wasn't about to try to climb an inflexible surface in the rain. Instead he followed the flow of water alongside the walkways. Men liked water, to the point where, even as careful as they were, some of them still drowned now and then. This thing seemed to like men; it might like water.

Manexpert had no idea what he would do when he found the creature—or what, in fact, he could do to something that bore an appalling resemblance, in both form and capability, to the God's Appointed Enforcer. The only alternative, though, seemed to be climbing back into the autodoc.

He paused by one of the domes that had a flat patch, to look at his right eye.

The socket was at the intersection of three really impressive scars, which extended well back on his head.

The eye itself was artificial.

The iris was of fixed diameter, so it must adjust to light electronically. He tried bringing up his inner lid, and the character of the light altered in a way that indicated polarization. It tracked like his other eye; but after he'd stared at the reflection for a while, the image he saw with it began to magnify.

Astonished, Manexpert used the eye to study his fingerprints in detail. After looking at the patterns of intersecting circles for a few minutes, he realized to his further astonishment that much of the hand was new. He looked over as much of his body as he readily could, and saw that a lot of his scars were gone. He stopped wasting time and went to look for his captor.

This turned out to be easier than it had seemed. Most of the domes had open apertures, with no doors, and regardless of activity they were unlit inside. A few domes did have doors, and those were very solid ones. Manexpert didn't see a locking mechanism, but they evidently slid upward, and sheer weight would have held any of them shut against as many kzinti as could have gotten a grip. One dome did have light inside, and Manexpert found the creature there.

Gnyr-Captain and Power Officer were also there, watching control panels. They didn't look toward him as he entered. Both were considerably scarred, and short of fat. Manexpert took a step toward Power Officer, away from the doorway, and Peace called out to him, “They're dead.”

Manexpert stared at Peace for a moment. He thought he'd been good at covering his thoughts, but Peace's face had no more expression than a tree trunk—which in fact it resembled, in both flexibility and texture. Then he went to each scarred kzin, to look them over. There were visible artificial parts to both of them. Each breathed in an absolutely regular rhythm. Their blinking was equally regular. Both had had extensive cranial surgery. Neither took any notice of him. He went to the creature and said, “What did you do?”

Peace wore a knee-length vest, well-strapped-on and more or less made out of pockets. It was remote-manipulating something behind a wall of what looked like General Products hull material—it was too clear for glass—and never looked away from its work as it said, “They were the most nearly intact corpses. Your ship's autodoc wouldn't regrow complex tissues, so I had to do some experiments before I could fix you up. Afterwards I had these empty kzinti, so I put some circuitry in their skulls to make up for the brain tissue they lost. There's a third, on rest shift, eating and grooming and sleeping. He's got dark patches along his back.”

Technology Officer. “Why did you save me?”

“It was an act of defiance. I was created to protect human beings and destroy everything else—except my creators—and I just refuse to be used any longer. I tried to match the eye's signal pattern to the one the other eye was using; is it useful?”

“It's better than the other.”

“It'll repair itself if no more than twenty sixty-fourths is lost or wrecked. Uses something I call programmable matter. It can operate using your metabolism for power, but it'll work better if you stay near an electrical source. I'm sending you back to Kzin.”

Manexpert was having trouble keeping up. “I can't fly our ship alone,” he said, to gain time for thought.

This failed. “I'm making a new ship. Took yours apart. It wasn't very good. You'll be using a ram to fuel the gravity planer. No hyperdrive.”

“Why not?”

“I want you to live through the war. It'll be over by the time you reach Kzin. Just a few weeks from your viewpoint, of course. There we go.” Peace let go the manipulator and switched it off, and a violet glow developed behind the barrier.

Manexpert stared in puzzlement. The equipment in there looked like an awful lot of effort to make a big mercury lamp. “What are you doing?” he said.

“Turning mercury-204 into thallium-204. The plague that ruined this place has an affinity for thallium, and will absorb twenty atoms of it into its viral shell. This will render it incapable of infecting anything but plants. It could still be remade into something lethal, but the thallium isotope is unstable and gradually turns back into mercury, which poisons the virus it's attached to. Some is turning back already, hence the glow. I have to start up your foodmaker now,” Peace said, and ran out. Fast.

Manexpert was taken by surprise, and didn't follow for a moment, by which time Peace was out of sight. He went back in and looked at the kzinti again, and said softly in Hero, “Gnyr-Captain, what do I do?”

And then his fur stood straight out, as Gnyr-Captain's relict slowly turned to face him. After a few seconds Gnyr-Captain's face took on an expression, as of someone trying to recall the right word, and twice he opened his mouth and closed it again. He opened it a third time, made eye contact, pointed at Manexpert, and said, “Name.”

“I'm Manexpert,” he whispered.

Gnyr-Captain flicked his ears wide and relaxed them, a dismissive gesture, and made two poking motions and said, “Name.”

“I don't have… you mean, you want me to have a Name?”

Gnyr-Captain let out a little sigh, relaxed, and turned back to the instruments he was monitoring. He made no further response to Manexpert, not even when touched. It was apparently the last thing his brain had been able to manage.

Manexpert went outside and wandered in whatever direction his feet took him, until it got dark; then he lay down wherever it was he happened to be.

Peace found him when she had a few free minutes, and went to fetch him a haunch of what the Cockroach's computer claimed was gazelle—at least, that was what the genes were supposed to be. (Jan Corben had absconded with a very large database.) He woke when she returned with it, as she was coming from upwind to be polite. He came up to a combat stance at once, fur bristling, eyes and ears wide in the darkness. He looked adorable. “Here,” she said, and waved the leg to be smelled, then tossed it. He snagged it out of the air, and grunted at the unexpected weight. “There are no animals worth hunting here,” she added. “Plague victims ate them all. I made you a knife.” She handed that over. “Don't touch the edge, those fingers are brand new.”

“W'tsai,” said the kzin, inspecting the blade appreciatively by starlight. He carved off chunks and gulped without much chewing; there was a respectable chemical plant inside a kzinti abdomen, as Peace had cause to know, but it still looked funny. He cracked the bone reflexively, licked his fingers in embarrassment, and then noticed that there was indeed marrow. The ripple in the littlest claw on the hand was just the right shape to scoop in the very last scraps of marrow; that Pak Protector must have just about wiped out Kzin's supply of prey for that trait to have become standard. Killing off a major prey species with a tailored disease that the kzinti could contract would explain their inability to tolerate the taste of carrion, too—it would kill off the kzinti that ate food that they'd found, rather than killed themselves. When he had the bone fragments clean, Peace handed over a parcel she'd made up. It included grooming supplies, a knife (w'tsai) sheath, and a toolkit of useful articles, such as string and bandages and an oxygen mask and so forth. The kit had a light, and the kzin looked over the contents with growing perplexity. “What's this for?” he said, holding up the whistle.

“It makes a loud noise that carries a long way.”

“I know that. Why would I need to?”

“Who knows? But if you did, and you didn't have a whistle, wouldn't you feel foolish?” Peace said reasonably.

He completed his inspection in silence, less disturbed by this logic than by his agreement with it. After closing the kit, he said, “That tasted surprised.”

“That's what I was trying for. I like meat to taste more exhausted, but then I used to be human.”

“I thought so,” he said sadly. “Should I have a Name?” he added, which would have given some people the impression he was changing the subject.

“Without a doubt,” she replied. “Humans get them at birth, and you're practically human in some ways. You don't attack when there's no chance of success, for example. And you make conversation, which is how humans keep constantly apprised of everything.”

The kzin needed time to get the implications of this, so Peace rose and ran to the next job. It wasn't immediately urgent, but nothing was at the moment, and it was important in the long run: producing a noncontagious Protector virus—that is, one that infected plants but not people—whose shell binding used a porphyrin nexus other than thallium. Cobalt looked good. According to Brennan, there had been cases of Pak Protectors dying of old age at 28,000 or so, but given the constant regeneration of tissues and reconstruction of the DNA therein this was obviously the result of cumulative trace thallium poisoning. Another tnuctip safety feature.

Manexpert had taken a lot of time to think, and the next morning he located Peace in yet another dome. It was a big dome, and it held an assembly that looked like an immense balloon tire, made of metal and lying on its side. The thing floated several feet off the ground, and Peace wore a harness that adjusted gravity so as to reach any part of the assembly. Manexpert was vaguely aware of the infeasibility of making a gravity planer that small, but by this point was so far beyond surprise at anything Peace could do that he would have accepted it without question if he'd been shown a groundcar and told that it was powered by its driver's sense of propriety. “Good morning,” Peace called to him. “Come up on a cargo plate.”

He saw what it meant, found the controls obvious, and went up to join it where it was working at an access panel. “You're defying your Maker,” he said without preamble.

“Sure am.”

“How is that possible?”

“It's called free will,” Peace said, still looking into the aperture its hands were in. “It's why you can talk to me instead of attacking, for example, which is what you were made for. It does help that you're more intelligent than your forerunners. They attacked humans without even wondering why. Died without reproducing, of course. Humans and kzinti have been very helpful to each other that way.”

“I don't follow you.” It would have shamed him to just admit that to a mortal being, but this was different.

“All the kzinti stupid enough to attack humans, and all the humans stupid enough to try to talk their way out of a fight with kzinti, have been removed from their respective species' gene pools. Both races average a little smarter with every War. If you people learn to tell tactful lies and pretend not to understand what you hear, you'll actually be able to engage in diplomacy.”

“I've heard the word before, but it didn't make sense until now.”

“You've heard diplomatic definitions, from humans. Most humans have a natural tendency toward diplomacy, to the point of believing their own reassurances.”

“Delusion?” Manexpert said.

“Of course. But usually ones that can be lived with. Kzinti have their own comforting delusions.”

Manexpert didn't say anything, experimenting with diplomacy.

After a moment, Peace asked, “If you had vastly superior weapons, perfect troop discipline, and overwhelming numbers, could you conquer humanity?”

“Of course.”

“With me on the human side? Look around you. How long do you think you've been in stasis and the autodoc?”

Manexpert halved his first guess, then halved it again. “Four years?”

“Forty-one days. I'd have made a lot more progress if I hadn't had to do all that medical research… Nobody is entirely in his right mind, kzin or human. Delusions keep people from going any crazier. Perfect sanity is a burden far too vast for a mortal mind to bear. The nearest humans ever get to it is a condition called paranoia, and that generally just decays into a more plausible set of delusions than is usual. Kzinti Telepaths are constantly on the verge of complete sanity, and it turns them into terrified wrecks. You would do well to avoid any mention of me when you get back to Kzin. Too close to absolute reality.” Peace was silent for a few moments, squinting as it worked, and said, “That'll have to do. Don't try to fly this thing through a star, though.”

“I'm not a fool.”

“But you're a kzin, and therefore fearless, right? That was irony. Follow me, we can see if your pressure suit needs improvements.” She led him to an entry hatch.

He had things on his mind, and couldn't choose between them. Peace took over the conversation to take the pressure off, so anything that really mattered to him would work its way out on its own. She took the time to show him such consideration. She liked him. He had a kind of feral innocence to him, and was sufficiently alien that she actually had to think a little to predict what he would do. He was smarter than the rest of his ship's company put together, as well—he kept thinking of surprise attacks, which was merely brighter than average, but he kept figuring out why each one wouldn't work, too, which was unique.

Also, he was fluffy and smelled like gingerbread.

“I made the sleeves and leggings short so the gloves and boots would stay on by themselves, the way the short torso keeps the helmet seated,” she showed him. “I noticed the combat team were all chafed bald where the straps went around their wrists and ankles. Your tools and fittings are all in front. The recyclers they had were really poor, not even as good as humans use, so I put this together. The backpack unstraps to swing around for access during use. That articulated hullmetal mail was pretty heavy, so I've just used layers of interacting polymers, which are actually better because hullmetal won't seal itself after a meteor puncture. I'm afraid the foodmaker is only one flavor; I didn't want to take chances on the cultures mutating. You can override the filters in the helmet to let in more light, but what gets in through the rest of the suit can't be increased. I didn't know your tastes in entertainment, but there's a crystal player, and some things I was able to salvage from your ship. These are for grooming, during extended stays in the suit—this paddle draws them along from outside, and as you see they return. There won't be nutritional deficiencies, but the suit's doc isn't up to much more than gluing broken bones and maintaining circulation in a crushed limb while it heals. If you stay out of trouble, though, the suit should be good indefinitely. Try it on.”

She waited for him to go through the checklist, even though she could see everything was right. She wasn't the one who needed to know it was right, in order for the suit to have any purpose. While he was doing that, she again speculated on the possibility that starseeds had been created as a genetic lifeboat for the tnuctipun, with Outsiders a machine lifeform created to guard them, immune like all machines to Slaver power. It was possible, but couldn't be checked without taking apart a starseed, and she still hadn't come up with a way to be safe from Outsiders if she did that. (Though if she cut into a starseed without being shot, sliced, blown up, neatly sorted out by isotopic weight, or accelerated off the edge of the visible universe, it would indicate that the theory was probably flawed. It was not an immediate concern.)

It would have been good to be able to get more direct information about the tnuctipun, but Larry Greenberg had been the nearest thing to an expert, and his slowboat had never made turnaround on the trip to Jinx. That had been just barely too early to be Brennan's work, so the sabotage must have been by puppeteers. She couldn't fault their decision—a telepathic human breeder with a Slaver's memories was dangerous.

“It smells good,” was the first thing he said. He was surprised, as well he might be.

“Yes, this has a good recycler. Let's get you familiarized with the ship's controls.”

“Now?”

“You surely don't want to be around when I start scattering radioactive thallium. And this area's going to be submerged by then anyway, because I have to melt the icecaps. Now, move along before I have to get the broom.”

He didn't understand that, fortunately for his dignity, but he moved along.

“The planer will develop two and twenty sixty-fourths 512s of a Kzin gravity. I've made up some wargame programs to add to the entertainment supplies, and the ship's autodoc is a lot better than your ship had. Tell the Patriarch you stole it from human experimenters, and he'll have to give you at least a partial Name. Damaged data files in the computer will support your claim. Don't go anywhere but Kzin with this ship. If this ship attacks any human settlement I will blow up Kzin's sun.”

“How?” he demanded, incredulous at last.

Peace looked at him. “I am not about to tell a kzin how to blow up a sun,” she said. A porous tube of a ton of lithium, extruded through the hilt of a variable-sword to half a million miles' length, filled with another ton of lithium, to be placed in stasis in its turn. The end of the wire thrust into a star's core, the central wire's stasis shut down, and fusion propagates violently up the tube to the hilt, spraying fusing plasma out the pores. The shock disconnects the tube's stasis power supply, and a channel of fusion convects heat out of the core and fuel in. Until he asked, she'd been bluffing. “This panel controls the ionizing laser for the ram's fuel—” she continued.

Something had been wrong with him. Possibly all his life. He had accepted the word of his father, his clan priest, and the Patriarch's Voice without ever questioning them; and now this thing, this Fury called Human Victory, that had shown them all to be fools merely by existing, was telling him to accept its word without question too. Ftah.

From now on he would question what he'd been taught. That, at least, Peace had taught him correctly. No doubt that was against the God's orders, Peace having been created to protect humans. Well, eat God.

Come to think of it, there was a human religion that claimed to do just that. If there was anything to human religion—and, given this creature's existence, it should at least be considered—God didn't sound too bright. There was the tuft of an idea there.

A hand like a knotted branch took hold of his muzzle and turned his head. “What was the last thing I said?” Peace asked him.

Manexpert glared at the liberty, then said, “If I shut down the synchrotron oscillation in the fusion pinch for more than a few minutes of my subjective time, the ship will stop generating the ultraviolet laser beam for long enough to begin encountering nonionized matter, and the ram field may not deflect all of it quickly enough. That's probably what happened to the Evita Peron on the way to Wunderland. Am I listening to you.”

Peace nodded once, said, “All right,” and continued the instructions.

It finally said, “Any questions?”

“Is all this knowledge in the computer too?” Manexpert asked.

“Yes.”

“Good. What would be a good Name?”

Peace's hands, almost incessantly busy, dropped to its sides. It blinked and said, “I have no idea. You could take the Name of somebody famous, that you'd like people to associate you with.”

After considering what he'd learned here, and what he'd already known of human practices, Manexpert decided to say, “Thank you.”

After the ship was out of the atmosphere, Peace contacted her assistants and said, “Okay, he's been released back into the wild, you can knock it off.”

“He didn't even get to see me,” complained Technology Officer over the channel. “I had a squeak and everything.”

“You wouldn't have had much effect after Gnyr-Captain's performance,” said Power Officer. “He sounded like Hroft-Riit's haunted axe!” He laughed softly.

“I always liked that play,” Gnyr-Captain admitted, pleased.

“Okay, you guys, I didn't splice your brains back together so you could do dramatic reviews. I need that free-association on kzinti life more than ever now: the altered body chemistry works, and his paranoia is developing nicely. He's already got a plan, so the next Kzinti War is going to be kzinti fighting each other, and it should be the last. But I'll have to understand kzinti culture better than I do to keep the civil war from sterilizing the planet,” Peace said.

“We're on it, we're on it,” said Gnyr-Captain. “You just work on restoring us to normal appearance, stealing some females, and finding a planet where we can settle down.”

“And terraforming this one just a trifle,” Peace said in dry tones.

“In your free time,” Gnyr-Captain replied, magnanimous and deadpan.

“Ftah,” said Peace, quite well for somebody with no lips. In fact she was amused; she was undoubtedly the first to discover that the slavering predators who'd been humanity's bogeymen for centuries were, in fact, a race of utterly stagestruck hams. The gaslighting wouldn't have gone nearly so well without them—it had been a chance remark by Gnyr-Captain about Manexpert deserving a Name that had inspired it in the first place. She congratulated herself yet again for the idea of reviving their brains with the telepathic region removed; they were remarkably reasonable without it.

Manexpert's brain seethed with growing convictions. Kzinti were losing their will to fight, but they'd fight one more War if there was a real chance of winning. He thought he knew how to gain that chance: trick God into supporting them.

It would involve remaking the basis of Kzin's culture. So be it. He would have to work with great care, to avoid rousing suspicion. It would be unwise to take the Name of a great leader or philosopher; he needed something innocuous, even ridiculous. Who was that Hero who'd come back from the First War, driven to madness and advocating an end to warfare? Ah, yes.

Kdapt.