The Man-Kzin Wars 11

War And Peace Matthew Joseph Harrington

Attention Outsider vessel. Please hold your fire. I have been able to override my genetic programming.

My name is Peace Corben, and I am a Protector of human origin. I wish to engage in commerce.

It came to her, as she awaited a reply through the relay, that for the first time in almost thirty years she was afraid. It would have been interesting, if it hadn't been so unpleasant. She found herself constantly formulating contingency plans whenever her mind wandered, and it was designed to wander, and none of the plans were worth a thing.

Her plan to lie dead in space and use passive instruments to monitor the relay's fate was no good either. A maypole of metal ribbons, seemingly billowing around its central shaft, suddenly manifested nearby, appallingly huge, having decelerated at what instruments said was a couple of hundred thousand gees. As this was over 170 times what Peace could get out of a gravity planer before it became unable to compensate for anything outside its housing, she was at least reassured that she wasn't wasting her time.

Whether she was wasting her life remained to be seen.

The being that would eventually be known as Outsider Ship Twelve had been carrying its children exposed to space, as was usual, its maturity limbs arranged to maximize shadow borders in the illumination it provided for them. At .9c, with Doppler effects bringing gamma bursters into their spectral range aft, and the microwave background just visible forward with a starseed silhouetted against it, life was pleasant. The youngest and oldest enjoyed watching things change color as they went by, too, though the ones in between preferred to watch the starseed.

They had been moving into a region of considerable modulated radio noise, its largest source about eighteen light-years away. Trade was good in such areas. It took time to be noticed, though, so things were quiet—until a hyperwave message came in, using a chord that should have been known only to Outsiders. The content of the message explained why it wasn't, but raised other issues of interest. The Outsider saw that the transmission came from a relay, looked around, and spotted an inactive hyperdrive motor. The Outsider ability to do this was not advertised. Some species tried to erase debts by erasing creditors. It moved over there for a better look.

There was a well-made ship, and its sole occupant was indeed a Protector. If it had made the ship, it was much smarter than a Pak. Not attacking the Outsider was also evidence of this. The ship had lots of mountings for weaponry, as was to be expected, but the equipment that fitted them had been not merely dismantled, but distributed, so that it would take at least half a minute to assemble the easiest items—plenty of time for an Outsider to do practically anything. This Peace Corben was displaying what must have been, to a Protector, near-suicidal good faith.

Of course, it might still be up to something. Protectors were like that.

The Protector sent power through a radio receiver, and the Outsider said, “Greetings. What did you wish to purchase?”

“I have information to sell first, to establish a credit balance.”

“We do not normally purchase information. We sell it, and use the proceeds to pay for supplies.”

“I doubt you possess this information, and you'd be able to sell it to customers you trusted for amazing sums.”

Interesting. “What price do you set on it?”

“I'll trust you to be fair.”

“We may not be able to afford a fair price.”

“I'll stipulate that my credit balance will not be drawn on if you show me that the matter and/or circumstances of a request would work a hardship on you.”

More interesting. “How would a hardship be defined?”

“Inability to meet your other bills, or worse.”

“Agreed. What is the item?”

“Direct conversion of mass to photons, via suppression of the spin on the neutron.”

Peace waited.

It was almost half a minute before the Outsider replied. “Is there a working model?”

“Yes. Not nearby; it was too obviously usable as a weapon. About a light-hour away, in stasis. If you examine my ship, you'll see there's a vacant space near the fusion tube. The converter fits in there.” Peace waited a couple of minutes for a response—a huge interval for an Outsider—and finally said, “Are you okay?”

“There is some difficulty in calculating your credit balance,” the Outsider said. Its voice, which had been pleasantly sociable, was now a clearly-synthetic monotone.

“Enact an upper limit of the total value of information available, excluding personal questions,” Peace said at once.

“Thank you,” said the Outsider in its usual tones. “What do you wish to know?”

“I need my math checked,” Peace replied. “I'm trying to design a ship that can travel at the second quantum of hyperdrive, but the parts interactions are too complex for me to be sure I've worked them out right, and whenever I build a computer big enough to do the work it promptly goes into a state of solipsistic bliss.”

“Transmit the converter design and the equations.”

“Right… I had to invent 3-D matrices for the equations; I hope the notation is implicit enough.” Peace sent the data.

“It is,” the Outsider said. “Interesting approach,” it added.

Peace waited, and watched the Outsiders.

They were linking their tendrils together, as she expected.

It was a difficult problem, requiring network processing. Technically, doing this before a customer qualified as giving away personal information; but the Protector wouldn't have come here if it hadn't figured out that Outsider families linked up mentally sometimes.

The technique of cubic matrices would have paid for that knowledge anyway. It simplified problems that normally required vast computations. However, it in turn was being unavoidably given away. Information exchange of this value normally occurred only during prenuptial adoptions—Peace Corben was sparing no pains to ingratiate itself. The possibility that a Protector would not have worked these concepts out in advance was considered only in order to dismiss it, for the sake of thoroughness.

The motor design was unusually compact for what it was meant to do—it would fit into a prolate spheroid 150 feet wide by 200 long. This was accomplished by using hyperwave pulses instead of electronic ones to regulate it, so there was a failsafe of sorts: if it was switched on in a region where space was excessively curved, it wouldn't make the ship disappear into a tangent continuum—it would simply blow all its circuits and destroy the motor. The really tricky part of the design was the throttle: an interrupter that flickered the field state between the first and second hyperdrive levels, allowing speed to vary from 120 to 414,720 times the speed of light. There was a risk of affecting the hyperwave control pulses with the changes in field state, so the signal generators were fed power in inverted rhythm, to exactly counter this. The question was whether the transition waveforms could be precisely matched and simultaneous. The whole concept of simultaneity was an uncomfortable one to Outsiders, which was another reason for preferring travel at sublight speeds; but other races seemed to like it a lot.

After long minutes of work, the network disassembled, and the Outsider told Peace Corben, “Your reckoning is correct. However, the mechanism will need retuning at regular intervals, as natural radioactive decay will alter compositions unpredictably.”

“Thanks, I was planning on using isotopically pure materials.”

“The incidence of quantum miracles in such is anomalously high,” the Outsider warned.

“Is it. That's interesting. Any idea why?”

“Many theories, none capable of accurate prediction. There is considerable documentation of the effect in all isotopes, however. Do you want it?”

“I do, but I'd better not take it. It sounds like something that would occupy all my unused attention. Thanks for the warning. What's the charge?”

“None. It is not personal, and therefore you are entitled to it. Neutron conversion offers a means of rejuvenating stars and thus extending the life of the Universe, and potentially that of all species living here. Volunteering information you might find useful merely simplifies the process of paying a fair price, within the ceiling you set.”

There was a pause as the Protector absorbed this. “I see… In a similar spirit of courtesy I suggest that any information you provide me that you hope to sell within, say, sixty light-years from here, be tagged as such, so I don't spread it around and screw up your market.”

“Many thanks. Do you need any other information?”

“Undoubtedly,” the Protector replied, “but I don't know what yet. I can find this starseed again when I do know. You can keep the relay, in case you have to leave the starseed's vicinity—you can mark it with an encrypted message saying where you've gone.”

“Why would we have to leave?” the Outsider said, unable to think of a compelling reason.

“If I knew that, I wouldn't have to leave you the relay.”

That was reasonable. “Very well. Are you aware that your converter could be adapted to suppress the spin on the proton?”

“Certainly, but I don't need yet another kind of large bomb. It'd annihilate the generator. Unless I beamed two partial fields and had them intersect—which seems like a lot of trouble, for not much more result. Here are the coordinates for the working model.”

“Thank you.”

Neither of them saw any necessity for formal goodbyes.

Peace hadn't even thought of rejuvenating stars. The converter beam was a statistical effect, and beyond a certain dispersion of the cone it simply didn't work; but partial fields intersecting in a star's core would do a decent enough job of cleaning it out, as slowly as you liked. Warming the core would expand it, and since it would be ridiculously difficult to do so symmetrically there would be massive convection, extracting trapped fossil heat and delaying helium ignition. Sol could be restored to full luminosity in time to keep it from turning red giant. The star was plainly older than current theory supposed; but then, so was the Universe.

She moved off a ways in hyperspace, dropped out and put her arsenal back together, then continued to her primary base at 70 Ophiuchi. The old homestead.

It was a binary star, and her birthworld, Pleasance, was at one of the system's Trojan points. By rights it should have been a frozen ball of rock, but evidently some 25,000 centuries or so back a Pak Protector had added most of the system's asteroidal thorium and uranium, and they'd been soaking in and giving off heat and helium ever since.

Her base was in the dustcloud at the other Trojan point. At 36 A.U. from Pleasance, it was never visited after the first colonists' survey—nothing there worth the trip. Peace found it especially handy because it was easy to reach from hyperspace—it was outside the system's deflection curvature. It was also handy for spotting arriving Outsiders, as it was the human system closest to the galaxy's center.

There was a human intruder when she got there. A kzin would have used a gravity planer, which would have roiled up the dust. Other species wouldn't have come here. The ship was hidden in one of the shelters, but the heat of its exhaust was all through the dust. Not a roomy ship; the heat patterns indicated sluggish maneuvering.

Peace had a look inside the main habitat before docking. Buckminster—a cyborg kzin once known as Technology Officer, who had enjoyed her unending stream of gadgets so much he'd stuck with her when she relocated his companions—was in his suite, whose visible entrance was sealed from the outside. He had evidently been coming out to raid the kitchen while his putative captor was asleep, as he had put on some weight. At the moment he was reading a spool and having a good scratch. The intruder was at a control console in the observatory, monitoring her arrival. He had a largely mundane but decent arsenal, including a pretty good bomb.

Peace took over the monitor system, told it lies, suited up, had her ship dock on its own, and used the softener to step through the hull. She jumped to the observatory, came through the wall, reached over his shoulder to pluck the dead-man detonator out of his hand, and stunned him. It was a good detonator: it took her a couple of seconds of real thought to figure out the disarm.

When she opened her suit, the man's smell was severe. She'd been away for a couple of weeks, and that wasn't long enough for him to get into this condition, so he'd arrived filthy. He must be deranged.

She restored the console, then called her associate. “Hi, Buckminster, I'm home. You leave me any butter?”

His reply began with a chuckle. With the telepathic region removed from the brain, a kzin was remarkably easygoing. “I only had a few pounds. Is our guest still alive?”

“By the smell he could be a zombie, but I'll take a chance and say yes. How come you didn't disarm him?” she asked, though she knew; she also knew Buckminster would want to say it, though.

“I didn't want to touch him,” Buckminster confirmed. “Besides, I didn't think it would make him stop fighting, and I didn't want to have to explain bite marks on a human corpse.”

“Difficult to do when you're swollen up with ptomaine, too. Come to the observatory and sort through his stuff. I'll be cleaning him up.”

“You humans show the most unexpected reserves of courage,” Buckminster remarked.

As she stripped, washed, and depilated the man, the remark seemed progressively less likely to have been a joke. There was a significant layer of dead skin, and the smell of him underneath it was actually somewhat worse. He must not have bathed in months, if not years.

Getting the hair off his face confirmed an impression: she'd seen him before. He'd been one of the psychists at her mother's prison. Peace hadn't actually met him, and Jan Corben hadn't given his name—she'd called him Corky. He was evidently a survivor of the kzinti occupation of Pleasance, and had probably witnessed some awful things. Peace didn't spend much pity on him—she'd been her mother's clone, created to be the recipient in a brain transplant like many before her, and she had yet to hear a worse story.

Once he was clean, he was also pretty raw in spots, so Peace had to spray some skinfilm on, to hold him while she programmed the autodoc. This took her almost half an hour, as she'd never expected to have a human breeder here, and she had to start from scratch. When she was done she stuck him in, then washed herself and went to see how Buckminster was doing.

He was having a great time. He'd taken Corky's arms to the small firing range (the big one was necessarily outside), where he had laid them out in a long row and was methodically using them to perforate targets of various compositions. “Interesting viewpoint he has,” Buckminster told her. “No nonlethal weapons, but not many random-effect ones. This man wants to kill in a very personal way.”

“He talk to you much?”

“Nothing informative. 'Go there, do that, you baby-eater.' Made eye contact and grinned a lot. Seemed to bother him that I didn't get hostile.”

“I expect so. Did you explain?” Peace said, amused.

“No, the baby-eater remark offended me, so I just let him pant.”

“Sweat.”

“Sweat? Yes, that would mean the same thing, wouldn't it?”

“Not quite. A human letting someone else work off his foul mood on his own doesn't need as much self-control,” Peace pointed out. “So there's less satisfaction involved for us. Well, I'd better check his ship. Want to come along?”

“If it's as big a mess as he was I'll need my suit.”

“I'll put mine back on too,” Peace agreed.

There was only one boobytrap; it was in the airlock, and Buckminster spotted it too. The ship only had deck gravity in the exercise room, and that was turned off. There wasn't any debris floating about, but surfaces were dirty and smeared, and the air plant was in extremis. The ship's arms looked like he'd tried for the greatest lethality for the money: there was a turret with two disintegrators, plus and minus, to slice targets open with bars of lightning; and torpedo tubes that fired Silver Bullets, a weapon the Wunderlanders had devised at the end of the Third War but never got to use. These were all-but-invisible pellets of stasis-held antihydrogen, stasis shutting down on impact—the blast would punch through thick hullmetal, and the surplus neutrons from the destroyed atoms would flood a ship's interior. “What a stupid concept,” Buckminster said. “That'd ruin everything but the hull. You'd have to rebuild the ship almost completely for any sort of prize.”

“Though it is an excellent killing device,” Peace said.

“If that's all you want.”

“It's all he wants, and it's his ship.”

“It's still stupid. What if he had a chance at a better ship?”

Peace shrugged—which, given the swollen joints of a Protector's shoulders, was a very emphatic gesture—and said, “I doubt he intends to live long enough for it to matter.”

“Urr,” Buckminster growled, which from a kzin qualified as tactful acknowledgment.

“I agree it's unusually stupid,” Peace added, aware that he might not have understood that.

They searched the ship without finding further portable weapons, which made some sense if he was on a suicide mission—he'd hardly go back for more. The only question was, what was he doing here? “Did he say what he was doing here?” she said, realizing Buckminster wouldn't mention it unless it came up—small talk was “monkey chatter” to kzinti, and Peace judged this was not an unfair assessment. It probably did derive from primate chattering.

“No, he wanted to know what I was doing here.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That I was a deserter.”

Peace, who had never thought of it in exactly that phrasing, blinked once. Then she said, “What did he say to that?”

“Eventually, 'Oh.' Then he locked me away in my dank and lonely prison.”

“Uh huh,” said Peace, who judged that if a delay in her trip had extended Buckminster's durance vile to six months he'd have gotten too fat to sneak back into his cell. “Okay, let's see what's behind the fake bulkhead.”

Buckminster did a good job of hiding his surprise when she opened the wall, though it took him a while to realize that that partition had had no fixtures, fittings, or access panels on either side, and therefore had no reason for existing in a one-man ship.

The interior was a shrine. Correction: a monument. There were pictures of three women, two men, and several children at progressing ages, but there were also single pictures of 51 other humans, almost all male, each with a neat black X inked onto the forehead. Peace recognized 22 of them as officials during the kzinti occupation, and had seen news stories about two of those and four of the other 29, reporting their accidental deaths. All six had struck her as being well-concealed homicides. It seemed probable that the entire 51 were dead collaborators, who had all contributed in some way to the deaths of the psychist's spouses and children.

Buckminster got it almost as soon as she did. “I'm impressed,” he said. “It's hard to kill one human being without being found out. I still can't understand how you can tolerate the constant monitoring.”

He didn't mind her monitoring him, so she said, “With humans it's actually less unpleasant if it's a stranger doing it.”

“Oh, thanks, now it makes perfect sense.”

“Glad I could help.”

They blinked at each other—a grin was inappropriate for him, and impossible for her, though the broad gash of her beak partook of a certain cheerful senile vacuity—and closed the place back up before leaving. “Cleaning robot?” Buckminster said as they passed through the airlock.

“Sure. Have to tweak the programming.”

“I'll do that. You can get to work on your new ship.”

Peace nodded, pleased with his intelligence. Obviously, things had gone well with the Outsider: she'd come back. “Have you decided what to do after I leave?”

“Go to Home and make a fortune as a consulting ecologist with what you've taught me, then start a family somewhere else. Sårng would be good.”

“Don't know it,” she was startled to realize.

“No reason to, it's at the far end of kzinti space. Atmosphere's a couple of tons per square inch, they've been trying to kzinform it from floating habitats for about a thousand years, I think it was. I thought I could move things along.”

Peace shook her head. “That'll mostly be carbon dioxide. Even without the impact and combustion of hydrogen for oceans, there's millennia of red heat latent in carbonate formation.”

Removing his suit, Buckminster was nodding. “I had an idea from Earth news. Transfer booths are getting cheap enough for something besides emergencies, so I thought: refrigeration.” He looked at her quizzically. “I don't think I've ever mentioned this, but are you aware that you hop up and down when you hear a new idea you really like?”

“Yes. Were you thinking convection, or Maxwell's Demon?”

“Both in one step. Transmitter in the atmosphere, receiver in orbit. Only the fast molecules get transmitted, the rest are pushed out and fresh let in. Dry ice comes out near true zero, slower than orbital speed, and falls in eccentric orbit to make a shiny ring. Less heat arriving, and the gas returns to the atmosphere very gradually for slow heat release. You're doing it again.”

“I know. Suggestion: send all the molecules in the transmitter, and draw the momentum shortage from the adjacent atmosphere. Faster turnover, massive downdraft, more hot air comes in from the sides.”

Buckminster thought about it. Then he carefully hung up his suit, turned back to her—and hopped up and down.

Buckminster had the cleaner on monitor when Peace came up and said, “He's ready to come out. Want to be there?”

“No.”

“Okay,” she said, and went off to the autodoc.

She'd naturally set it so Corky didn't wake up until it was opened, so the first thing he saw was a Protector. He stared, appalled—she was something of a warning notice for “Don't Eat Spicy Foods At Bedtime”—and then, astoundingly, said, “You're Jan Corben's little girl?”

Widening her eyes was just about her only option in facial expressions. “Now how did you arrive at that?” she exclaimed.

“You have her eyes,” he said.

“It didn't actually work out that way,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“Not unless you can come up with a really good reason for breaking into my home.”

She watched him catch up. “Protector,” he said to himself, just grasping it. Then he said, “Where were you during the War?”

She scooped him out of the autodoc, shut it, and plunked his bare behind down on the lid, stingingly hard. “You are an invader in my home,” she said, looking up at him. “You may now explain yourself to my full satisfaction.”

“You can't kill a human breeder,” he said skeptically.

“You're not a relative. Even if you were, invasive brain readout wouldn't damage your testicles.”

For the first time he looked worried. “I thought it was a kzinti base. I wanted to steal a ship.”

Peace blinked, then said, “Buying a ship would be recorded. You wanted to attack their home planet.”

“To land. And kill the Patriarch.”

Peace blinked again, then touched her caller and said, “Buckminster, come to the kitchen. You have to hear this.”

“Four minutes,” came the reply.

She hauled Corky off the 'doc by his elbow, and walked to the kitchen still holding his arm. He stumbled a few times, then got his feet under him. She was exasperated enough to contemplate changing step just to louse him up, but refrained, as it would be waste work to haul him the rest of the way. She had the floor produce a seat, stuck him in it, and dispensed a few small dishes. “Eat,” she said.

“What is this stuff?” he said suspiciously.

“Stewed rat heads, giant insect larvae, and assorted poisonous plants.”

He scowled, but got the message—don't be ridiculous—and began eating. Presently he said, “This is wonderful.”

“Good, that'll be the neurotoxins kicking in.”

He scowled again, shut up, and ate.

Buckminster came in soon, got something hot with alcohol in it, took a good gulp, and said, “What is it I have to hear?”

“This fellow came to this kzinti base, that we're in, here, to steal a ship, to take to Kzin. Guess what he wanted to do there?”

Buckminster shrugged. “Assassinate the Patriarch?”

“Right.”

Buckminster took another gulp and said, “No, really.”

“Really.”

Kzinti rarely laugh, and it is even rarer for a human to be present when it happens; but the sound was similar enough to human laughter for Corky to stop eating and scowl. “What's so funny about it?”

Buckminster had an analytical mind, for an evolved creature, so he sat down and made a serious attempt to answer. “Many years ago,” he said, “when I was first allowed out, still almost a kitten, I used to hunt… birds, sort of… out on the grounds. I was very good at it. Some were bigger than I was, and all of them wanted their meat even more than I did, but I devised snares and weapons and brought them down. All but one. It was big, and kept going by higher than I could shoot an arrow, and I was never able to find the right bait to lure it down. However, it had very regular habits, so I built a sort of giant crossbow thing—”

“Ballista,” said Peace.

“Thanks. A ballista, to shoot at it. Just to get the range, at first. As it turned out, I only got to fire it once. The shot landed in a neighbor's grounds, stampeding some game. I was too little to know yet that there was a world outside my sire's estate, which included things like other estates. And orbital landing shuttles.”

It took Corky a few moments to realize: “You were trying to shoot down a spaceship.”

“With a crossbow. Yes.”

“And my plan reminds you of that.”

“Vividly. Almost perfectly.” Buckminster was chuckling again.

Corky had been getting himself carefully poised for the last couple of minutes. Now he launched himself over the edge of the table at Buckminster.

Buckminster threw the rest of his drink on the table.

Corky's right foot came down in the liquid, and he spun sideways and tumbled the rest of the way. Buckminster swung his mug into Corky's hip, knocking him aside, and Corky slid past him off the edge of the table. He hit the ground about four feet away—then six feet away—then seven—then he rolled a few more feet. After that he tried to get up a few times, but kept slipping.

Buckminster got up and dispensed himself a towel, refilled his mug, and said, “You want a drink? It'll reduce bruising.” The reply he got wasn't articulate enough to be obscene. The kzin flapped one ear, and went to mop up his first drink.

When Corky had finally managed to get as far as sitting upright on the floor, Peace—who'd seen it coming and known she didn't need to move—said, “Buckminster and I have been working together, and working out together, for years. He's a strategic minimalist, and he's got enough cyborg enhancements that I hardly have to hold back. If he'd been holding your previous rude remarks against you, he might have been mean enough to let you actually use that Hellflare nonsense on him, and shatter your bones in the process.”

Buckminster tossed the towel at the trash and told Corky, “What's on you is your problem. Likely to remain so, judging from your past habits. Do you use a name, or just mark things?”

Corky scowled again, evidently his default expression, but said, “Doctor Harvey Mossbauer.”

“Doctor?” Buckminster exclaimed in disbelief. “What kind of a doctor are you supposed to be?”

“I'm a psychist.”

Buckminster was speechless for the fifth time in the twenty-eight years Peace had known him, and that was counting when she'd first met him and shot him in the head. “He really is,” Peace confirmed. “My mother was one of his inmates. She called him Corky. One of her puns.” Buckminster looked unenlightened, so she added, “Moss grows on trees. 'Bauer' is Wunderlander for 'farmer.' A moss farmer would be a tree. Cork is a kind of tree bark.”

An appalled exclamation from the floor indicated that Corky had just gotten it, after something like forty years since he'd first heard it. The wordless exclamations went on for a while.

Buckminster put up with a couple of minutes of it, then went to the dispenser and got some Irish coffee. He handed it to Corky, who said, “I don't drink,” and took a swig.

“Do you know how many assassins try to kill the Patriarch each year?” Buckminster said, beginning to be amused again.

“No,” Corky grumped.

“Neither does he. Most don't get as close as the horizon. I did security contracting before I joined the military. There have been two Patriarchs assassinated in the history of the Patriarchy. The more recent was about twelve hundred years ago, and it was done with a thermonuclear warhead, arriving at relativistic speed to overload the palace shielding. The design defect was corrected during repairs to that wing, by the way.”

“For a fearless leader of 'Heroes,' he sure puts a lot of defenses around him,” Corky said.

Buckminster looked at Peace. “Was that supposed to offend me?”

“Yes,” she said. “You can scream and leap anytime.”

“I'll make a note on my watch. The Patriarch doesn't put the defenses around himself. The rest of us do that. This leaves him free to deal with serious matters, like settling disputes or conquering the universe.”

“Or discrediting religious cults,” Peace said cheerfully.

Buckminster's tail lashed, and his ears closed up for a moment. Then he reopened them and said, “I never really understood that you were going to make him that crazy.”

“The Patriarch?” said Corky, startled.

“No, Kdapt-Preacher,” Buckminster said.

“But—”

“Not the original, a crewmate of mine. Before he was Named, his title would have translated as Manexpert. He took the pacifist's Name to make people think he was a harmless lunatic.”

Corky looked interested. “You know, I don't believe I've ever heard a kzin title of Expert before.”

“Usually a kzin who's that good at something already has a partial Name. Manexpert was a little too weird. He identified with his subject matter—to the point where he tried to confuse the God by praying in a disguise made of human skin.”

“What?”

“He thought Peace was a divine avenger who'd mutinied, and decided the Fanged God was on your side but could be gotten around. He had some technology Peace had built him, so he convinced a lot of kzinti. The Patriarch had to kill him personally, and barely managed before Kdapt-Preacher could kill him.”

“Too bad,” said Corky.

Peace spoke up. “If he'd won the duel, the first the human race would have heard of it would have been a simultaneous attack on every star with humans on its planets. Flares from relativistic impacts would keep everyone busy coping with heat, and they could pick off worlds one by one.”

“And where would you be this time?” Corky said, repressing fury.

“For the Patriarch to lose that duel I would have had to be years dead,” she said. “I spent a lot of effort—more than you're equipped to comprehend—making changes in kzinti society, opening minds, getting precedence for some cultures and taking it from others. There won't be another attack on humanity, by this Patriarch at least.”

“'Cultures,' plural?” Corky said.

Buckminster looked at Peace. “I should have bit him,” he said.

“You'd have expired in convulsions.”

“I may anyway. —Have you bothered to learn anything about the enemy you're planning to kill? What do you think the Patriarchy is for?”

“'The purpose of power is power,'” Corky quoted.

Buckminster's ears cupped. Then they curled tight, and reopened with a snap that must have been like thunder to him, and cupped again. Then he said, “I think that may literally be the stupidest thing I've ever heard.”

“People who have power want to keep it and try to get more,” Corky said.

“I understood you. The purpose of power is action. They try to get more because they keep seeing more things they can almost do. Kzinti are not a tribal people, which is one thing that worked in your favor in the Wars. We argue a lot, and fight almost as much. We would never have entrusted the Patriarchy with power over the rest of us if there was any alternative.”

Corky narrowed his eyes. “'Entrusted'? It's a hereditary monarchy,” he said suspiciously.

Buckminster blinked. “And before a human is sworn in as a government official, he has to give homage to a flag. Tell me, before you became a psychist, did you have to actually learn anything, say about symbolism and rituals for example?” Peace kept an eye on him—sarcasm was one thing, but when Buckminster got rhetorical it meant he was really angry—but when Corky didn't answer, he just went on, “You seem to be under the impression that the Patriarch is someone whose primary qualification is the ability to beat up everybody else, like a medieval human king. The Patriarch is called that because he has a lot of sons. The firstborn isn't automatically the heir—less than half the time, I believe—”

“Thirty sixty-fourths and a little,” Peace said.

“Thanks. The heir is chosen to be the best available leader at the time. A good deal of medicine is the result of many occasions of trying to keep an aged Patriarch alive long enough for a really smart son to come of age. The principal attribute of a good leader is stopping fights.”

That finally got through Corky's skull. “Stopping fights? It's not divide and rule?”

“In a civilization with fusion weapons?” Buckminster exclaimed.

“Aren't they all under government control? Human weapons are.”

“Of course they're not! Neither are human weapons. Humans must have half a million private spaceships—” He paused, and both of them looked at Peace.

“Close enough,” she said, amused, “carry on.”

“Each has a fusion drive that can carve up a city. And the weapons supposedly under government control are each controlled by some individual.”

“Very few people have the authority to use them,” Corky protested.

“An enormous number have the ability to use one. Look at your own ship's arsenal. The Patriarchy is a means of preserving civilization, by giving us an absolute arbiter we can't help but respect.”

“What happens to kzinti who won't listen to reason? Organ banks?” Corky said curiously.

“Very few kzin cultures have tolerated cannibalism in any form,” Buckminster said with frost in his voice. “Organ banks and property taxation are major reasons why human slaves were regarded with such contempt. Normally we establish degrees of rank and the rights of each rank—we do have thousands of generations of experience dealing with slave species.”

Corky scowled again, but said, “So are they executed?”

“No, they're sent out with the conquest troops.”

Corky became very still. “My family was eaten to make the Patriarch's job easier?” he said quietly.

“Oh, no,” Buckminster assured him. “People were getting frantic for revenge. We'd never lost before. We didn't know the routine, either. The first treaty was seen as an incredibly naïve act by humanity, giving us the opportunity to rearm and prepare another attack. Of course, you were familiar with the concept,” he added dryly. “The first three treaties were also disastrous in terms of reparations. By your standards, our emissaries had no concept of negotiation. In fights between kzinti cultures, negotiations tend to consist of demonstrating to your opponent that you can destroy him, then getting whatever tribute you demand. The fourth treaty was much better, but that was Peace's doing, directly and indirectly.”

Corky looked at her, scowling again, and before he could speak Peace said, “Get up, go wash, and return to eat.”

Once Corky was out of the room, Buckminster said, “If you keep him I'm not cleaning up after him.”

“Hm!” said Peace, a one-beat chuckle, which qualified, for her, as uproarious laughter. “No, no more pets.”

“Good. Since you sent him out, am I correct in supposing you don't want him told why the Fourth War was so short?”

“Yes. He demanded an explanation of why I hadn't come and killed all the kzinti on Pleasance.”

“Ah.” Buckminster had occasion to know that Peace didn't take orders. “What are you going to do with him?”

“Clarify his thinking,” she decided, and rose. “You should eat, too.”

“Where are you going?”

“To get him away from the airlock.”

“Good,” Buckminster said. “If you don't catch him in the act he won't learn.” When she gave him a sidelong look he just waggled his ears at her.

The brain of a Protector is interconnected well enough that there is no need to talk to oneself to keep all the regions clearly informed. This didn't keep Peace from feeling the urge, though. She did shake her head as she walked.

Corky, still sticky, had the lock panel open, the links right, and the dogs back, and was pulling up the release lever without result, muttering, “Why won't it open?”

“It weighs about a ton,” Peace said, and allowed him to hit her five times before giving him a fingertip in the ganglion below the left ear. While he attempted to curl up around that, sideways, she restored the panel and replaced the dog lever, then got out an injector she'd scaled down for breeder skin and gave him a local. When he relaxed, she said, “The power assist is disabled. Buckminster and I can use it, but you're too weak.”

That word shocked him, as well it might—his ship's exercise room was set at three gees. “What are you going to do?” he said.

“In a few months I'm going out to assist the Titanomachia Fleet.”

“I mean—the what fleet?”

“Titanomachia. Classical reference. Depending on genes, demographics, and the incidence of adequate body fat, somewhere between one hundred thousand and five hundred thousand human Protectors left the colony world Home about two and a half centuries back, in ramships, to fight an invasion of probably fifty million Pak Protectors.”

Corky's eyes grew huge, and the rest of his face got yellowish and blotchy, so she gave him an injection for shock. His lips moved silently, to the words fifty million, just once before his circulation evened out again.

Peace decided not to mention that that was the lower limit, assuming the Pak population to assay out at no more than 72 percent Protectors—the other metastable ratio for the Pak homeworld was with a bit over 94 percent Protectors, breeders numbering about twenty million in either case, giving an upper limit of about three hundred million. As she didn't want him visualizing the entire population of Jinx, turned into superintelligent homicidal maniacs, and coming to get him, she lectured, “Titanomachia is a term from Greek mythology. It refers to the war in which the gods overthrew their ancient and powerful but less competent Titan ancestors. As one human Protector with advance notice can outproduce several thousand Pak Protectors, this title is entirely appropriate. Which is unfortunate, as I have some cause to detest puns.”

“Puns?” said Corky, lost.

“The principal means by which Greek mythology, such as the Titanomachia, is known to modern people is through the works of the poet, Homer. The Titanomachia Fleet is made up of thousands of Homers.”

He winced. “You and your mother.”

Peace picked him up by his neck, one-handed, and held him at arm's length for a moment; then she set his feet on the deck and said, “If at some time you believe I have more than usual on my mind, that would be a good time not to compare me to Jan Corben. As I have pointed out, massive brain damage will not harm your genes.” She let go his neck.

He gasped and held it, coughing—and got over his fear, and the resulting intelligence, almost immediately. “Her real name was Charlotte,” he said, attempting dominance again.

“Charlotte Chambers,” Peace said, nodding.

He hadn't known the last name. “Oh, she told you.”

“No,” she said. “All it took was logic and persistence and a ten-pound brain.”

Charlotte Chambers' name hadn't been in the historical database of Jan Corben's ship, Cockroach, but had been included in the classified UN ARM records Peace had gotten on Earth—for a shockingly cheap bribe, considering it was wartime. Peace had simply compared the two and found the only very rich person her mother had chosen to delete.

There was corroborative evidence, too.

Charlotte Chambers had been a latent paranoid with a generous trust fund, which was drained for ransom when she was kidnapped. The kidnapper had been an organlegger, strapped for cash when the Freezer Bill of 2118 filled the public organ banks to capacity. He had brainwashed her to keep her from testifying against him, but had been caught when a highly original money-laundering scheme was exposed. Once the means of brainwashing had been revealed, Charlotte had responded to treatment and begun to function—and sued the organlegger. An outraged and horrified jury had awarded her a staggering sum, which she invested with all the care her now-manifesting paranoia could provide.

She'd gotten around the Fertility Laws of the time by emigrating to Luna and bearing her own clone.

The records had it that she died when her daughter was just short of voting age, in an accident that required her body to be identified by its DNA. Her daughter had taken over her investments like she'd been doing it for years, and presently moved to the Belt to raise her own clone. The fifth in this sequence had bought a ramship and gone to live on Mount Lookitthat after her mother's tragic demise, and as mountaineers had by then developed a society that tolerated very little government intrusion the trail was lost.

In the course of four and a half centuries, she'd have borne, and murdered, anywhere from twelve to twenty daughters. Cockroach had had facilities for restoring a cell to a youthful state, and prepared eggs in stasis.

A curious corollary was that Peace Corben owed her existence—and the human race thereby owed many millions, possibly billions, of lives—to some nameless twenty-second-century organlegger, who'd provided money, idea, and madness to the woman who'd finally been known as Jan Corben. Human history was filled with flukes like that: like the discovery of beer, so people would grow grain instead of starving, once overgrazing had turned the forests of Southwest Asia and North Africa to desert; or the introduction of fossil fuels and electricity right as the latest Ice Age was reaching its peak, keeping the planet insulated with carbon dioxide just long enough for fusion and superconductors to take up the slack. If there was some outside influence arranging these breaks, it was beyond Peace's power to locate—beer had assuredly been discovered when stale bread was left in water too long, a bizarre error when people were hungry, and steam engines and generators were made possible by the work of a couple of young men who tinkered because they were too socially inept to find dates, in a culture and era where women were prepared to marry anybody. There were plenty of other examples, equally counterintuitive.

“You'd make a fascinating monograph,” Corky tried again.

“You wouldn't make a decent pair of knee boots. Too leaky. You had enough pimples to supply a middle school.”

“I was too busy to bother washing.”

“How about half a minute to tell the computer run the pressure down to two hundred millibars of pure oxygen? Decompression breaks the pimples and cleans them out, and pure oxygen kills the bacteria. Sol Belter trick, close to six centuries old. Of course, their singleships just lacked bathing facilities—they did want to be clean. Speaking of which—” Peace hauled him along by the arm again, this time to the shower. “Scrub all over.”

“Why should I?” he demanded.

“Buckminster and I will both know if you don't,” she replied.

“So what?”

“Ever seen the body cleaner in an autodoc at work? It uses an elegant feedback system, doesn't miss a speck, beat everything else off the market. There's thirty-one companies that make autodocs, but only one subcontractor for the body cleaner: Snark Limited. I own it. I invented the cleaner. I can whip one together in about ten minutes. It won't have a sleep inducer attached. Scrub all over.”

Buckminster was almost done eating when Corky got back to the kitchen, and watched him curiously as Corky puzzled over the dispenser settings. Finally, with enormous reluctance and a veneer of condescension, Corky turned and said, “How is clothing acquired?”

The kzin thought for a moment. “My sire used to skin and cure a ftheer for a new ammo belt every year, but of course most people just go to an arms shop. Why?” he asked innocently.

“I mean, how is it acquired here?”

“It isn't. What would we do with it?”

“I want to get something to wear!” Corky said, façade cracking.

“Ah. You should have said. I can understand that; that thing must get caught in stuff all the time.” He got up and punched for a few hand towels. “These should be easy to tie together.”

Corky was now standing in a peculiar, slightly-hunched posture. “Aren't there settings for garments?” he said.

“I can turn up the heat. Peace won't mind.”

“It's warm enough. Something to protect skin.”

Buckminster also got him some ship's slippers and a hardhat. “You want knee or elbow pads?” he said, but Corky didn't say anything. After some thought, Buckminster found a setting for a sewing needle and some thread. Corky took these, nodded, and left.

Buckminster looked after him, blinking. Presently his ears waggled a bit.

Peace was in the second biochemistry lab when Corky found her. She'd spent what added up to a couple of thousand hours there since it was built, investigating her own body chemistry and duplicating the useful compounds. “Don't touch anything, and especially don't open anything,” she told him without looking his way.

“I am capable of functioning in a laboratory,” he said.

Peace glanced at him. Slippers, hardhat, diaper. “Hm!” she said, blinking—Buckminster had obviously been having some fun. “Since you know what a Protector is, you know what happened to Jack Brennan. Do you know what happened to Einar Nilsson?”

“Smelled the roots and ate until his stomach burst,” Corky said.

“He smelled one root, freeze-dried by vacuum, and gnawed one bite off before he could be subdued, and aged to death in an hour. Nilsson was a good deal younger than you. Boosterspice doesn't correct genetic age; it just overrides it. He cooked his brain; you could conceivably catch fire and burn to the ground. Don't touch anything. Don't open anything. What do you want?”

In what would normally have been a good imitation of firmness, he said, “What are your intentions?”

“I'm not going to tell you.”

“Why not?” he said in reasonable tones.

“That either.”

“I'm entitled to know something,” he insisted.

“Why? What have you done with your knowledge since you killed the last collaborator? It was easy to look them up, and the last died two years ago. Lose your nerve?”

As expected, that cracked him right down the middle. He staggered, righted himself, then looked around helplessly. “I—” he said, then ran out of the room.

He was coming along. Peace adjusted the proportions of what she was mixing, based on new information.

Buckminster smelled him on the way into the observatory: very upset. It wasn't an ambush, though, because Corky promptly said, “I can leave.”

“No need. Need any help with the controls? Peace does tend to build for her own level of precision.”

“I worked that out. I was just looking at Pleasance. What do you want to look at?”

“The fourth Pak fleet,” Buckminster said. “The human Protectors are just getting to it. Judging from the debrís of the first three, the battle shouldn't be all that interesting, but the Pak may have worked out something they can do.”

“Fourth? How censored many are there?”

Buckminster cocked an ear at this archaism, but said, “Nineteen. Sixteen, now. The six furthest off show some design innovations, like carbon-catalyst fusion—pure helium exhaust, thin and very fast—which Peace says suggests the Pak have allowed the breeders to evolve a little more brainpower. They must have been dismantling planets by then.” He made a series of adjustments and displayed a view that was between Orion's hypothetical feet. There were hundreds of dim red specks, no longer quite in hexagonal array. “That's the second fleet. Passed us about thirty years ago. That glow is friction with interstellar gas. Peace says the Homers must have sprayed boron vapor into its path and blown up the ram engines. That would have been sometime during the Second War. Otherwise somebody around here would have wondered about it.” He switched the view toward Sagittarius—Peace would just have rotated it, but humans had appallingly little trouble with wildly swooping views—and said, “The wreckage of the third fleet's almost invisible in front of a nebula, and further from us anyway. Here's the fourth.” Hundreds of white specks, in nothing like hexagonal array. “They saw the first three go and tried to scatter, but the lateral vector component is still tiny. Loosened up the fusion constriction—they should be blue—but they don't know about the boron. Peace says the change won't save them. The rams won't all blow up, but the gamma rays will roast the pilots. The fifth wave will have to be hunted. Is being hunted by now, and may be gone—this view is about a hundred and twenty years old. Here, look!” he said, making Corky jump. “Sorry,” he said. “But look here. See that red dot? That's a human Protector's ship. They're redshifted, so they don't show up well, but this one's right in front of a dark region. Not many of those out that way.”

“Am I a coward?” Corky asked abruptly.

It occurred to Buckminster, after he'd been staring for about half a minute, that if that had been a ruse, it would have been a good one—Corky could have gotten in a couple of pretty solid licks with an ax before he could have responded. “No, of course not.” Though you may be the silliest person I've ever met, he reflected.

“It's been a couple of years since I did anything. Toward justice.”

Buckminster was certain he was expected to say something at this point, but couldn't think of anything relevant. He attempted, “One of the things that used to confuse officials in treaty discussions is how some of your terms have multiple and contradictory meanings. 'Justice' is a good example. What you've been doing isn't what humans usually call justice—that tends to be more like Patriarchal arbitration. Killing the humans who got your family killed is more like kzinti justice—though we'd want it to be publicly known. Part of it is the idea that anyone else who considers duplicating the offense should feel very reluctant.”

“Deterrence,” Corky said. He was looking very intently at Buckminster.

“I think so. I've mostly encountered the human term in a political context, but it sounds appropriate.”

Corky spoke slowly. “You claim I can't kill the Patriarch—”

“I'm not making any special claims. It just so happens.”

“Right… You're a kzin.”

Buckminster didn't see any reason to deny it. He'd watched transmissions of human gatherings, and noticed that most of the attendees didn't look comfortable until someone had stood up and told them things they already knew. It was a habit he suspected was related to why they kept defeating better warriors. It made sure everybody did know. It was awfully tedious, though. He waited for Corky to go on, then realized Corky was also waiting for something. He nodded. That seemed to do.

“What would you do to someone that killed your family?”

“I don't have a family.”

“Supposing you did.”

“I wouldn't let him.”

Corky was getting angry, though he kept his face and voice from showing it. “Suppose you couldn't be there when he attacked.”

“I'd have no business starting a family if I was going away,” Buckminster said. Abruptly he realized that Corky was taking his hypothetical reasoning as personal criticism, and said, “Kzinti females are nearly helpless outside of childrearing.”

That worked: Corky calmed down at once. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Bad example. Suppose—”

“Are you trying to ask me what you should do to the Patriarch?” Buckminster interrupted.

“… I guess I am.”

“Nothing. You can't even get near the palace if he's in residence. And you can't get near him on visits of state, either—his security force is much tougher than the fleet that invaded Pleasance.”

That fleet had crushed the planetary defenses in a couple of hours. “I see,” said Corky, who seemed to lose track of his surroundings after that.

Buckminster waited a little, then started zooming the view for the more distant fleets.

Peace found Corky sleeping under a table in the kitchen, on top of seventy hand towels. She got herself corn muffins and a crock of stew, brought up a seat, and began eating. Presently Corky said, “Why don't you wear clothes?” irritably.

“Why don't you wear chain mail?” she replied.

“Chain mail isn't about keeping your organs of excretion out of sight,” he said.

“No, it's about keeping the rest of your organs from coming into sight,” she said.

Evidently he understood the implicit comment: That's usually irrelevant, too. After a moment he said, “Are those muffins?”

“Yes.”

“They smell unusual.”

“It's maize. Didn't get sent out with any first-wave colony ships—lacks some amino acids. So it's sort of an Earth specialty. Try one.”

She was handing it under the table when Buckminster came in. The kzin's tail lashed once, his ears curled tight, and he blinked rapidly a few times and fled the room.

“What just happened?” Corky said indistinctly, around a muffin.

Peace waited until he swallowed the first bite. “He's been kidding me about keeping pets,” she replied.

After a few seconds Corky burst out laughing.

The laughter went on too long, and when she moved the table and saw him weeping hysterically it was no surprise—he was long overdue. When it started to exhaust him she got him a mirror and some more muffins, these with honey.

His reflection calmed him in seconds, and he wiped his face and bit into a muffin. Once he'd swallowed he said, “That's good. What's on it?”

Honey was unknown on Pleasance—bees steer by the sun. “Bug vomit,” she said.

He made a brief scowl and went on eating. Presently he got up and tossed the towels out, then worked the dispenser. “How do I get a chair?” he said. She brought one up, and he said, “Why not just tell me?” as he sat.

“I don't want the place filled up with brooms,” she said. It went right by him, as he hadn't gotten acquainted with the entire seven centuries of recorded visual entertainment history. “You're not a coward, you know,” she added.

He stopped chewing. Then he resumed, swallowed, and said, “I didn't expect him to tell you.”

Another expression Peace had on tap was rolling her eyes. “Because it was between guys? I'd give a lot to learn how to inhibit the human tendency to Identify With Everything. You're an alien. It wasn't important enough for him to tell me. This place is fully monitored. What else would you expect?”

“… I hadn't thought about it.”

Peace refrained from saying, Miraculously I conceal my astonishment. “What's happened is, you've worked very hard, and you're tired enough that you're not completely crazy any more. So now you care if you live or die.”

“We don't like the word crazy,” Corky said.

Peace paused, then leaned right, then left, to look carefully past him on either side. Then she sat straight and laced her fingers. “Do your friends have any messages for me?” she said interestedly. “Or do they only talk to you?”

Corky looked annoyed, which was a more participatory expression than the usual scowl. “Psychists,” he grumbled.

“Yes, I know that,” she said patiently. “And I do like the word. It's to the point. You're not as crazy as you were twenty-two years ago.”

“I'm forgetting them,” he whispered, haunted.

Peace shot him.

The dart hit the thick pad of his left pectoral muscle, hard, and he screamed and went over backwards out the right side of the chair, which of course didn't go with him. He came to his feet with dart in hand, face bright red, and screamed, “What the hell was that for?”

“Memory,” she replied.

He stood glaring and panting for a long moment, then looked down at the dart. Then he threw it on the floor. “Why didn't you just tell me and give me the shot?”

“Seeing as how you're so cooperative and such a good listener, you mean?”

Corky scowled. “So what happens now?” he said eventually.

“Now you eat,” she said, and got up to toss out her dishes.

“I want some answers!” he roared.

“Emulating Richard Sakakida,” she said, and left.

He was too baffled to follow her at once, and naturally after that there was no catching her.

“Buckminster, is there—what are you doing?”

“Cleaning your ship.”

Corky clearly had a lot of thoughts about that, most of them disagreeable. Finally he said, more or less humbly, “Thank you.”

“It'll all be on the bill,” Buckminster said.

“Bill?” Corky said blankly.

“Joke. What were you asking?”

Corky shook his head a little. He seemed easily confused. “Can I get into the databank here?”

“You can't be serious.”

“Just to look something up.”

“Oh. Certainly. Let me shut this down.” The cleaning robot was in an air duct at the moment, which meant it could just be shut off—it wouldn't drift. “What did you need?” Buckminster said, fingers poised over the screen.

“Richard Sakakida,” Corky said.

Buckminster thought about it. Then he sent some commands, and handed Corky the screen. “You'd better do it. Too many ways to spell 'Richard' in Hero.”

Richard Sakakida was the name of an intelligence academy-ship in the Third War, and a singleship-infiltration carrier in the Second—the same vessel. The name had been held by various people over previous years, but the search for relevance went all the way back to the 20th century, to the war that had established the UN's existence.

Richard Sakakida, an American of Japanese ancestry, had washed ashore in Japanese-held territory during the war and explained that he was a defector. After some torture to make certain that he wasn't lying, he was accepted as a civilian servant. His work as a servant was exemplary, and he was soon taken into the service of the local commanding officer. He was a fine valet, though not much of an aide—when told to clean the CO's sidearm, he displayed a thorough ignorance of military matters by polishing the exterior to a high shine, without taking it apart.

In the course of his duties as a servant, he also acquired, and delivered to US Army Intelligence, the entire Imperial Japanese order of battle: name and function of every division, where the men in each were from, who their officers were, organization of the chain of command, and the overall war plan. That is, what places would be attacked, what size and type of force would be used to do it, what contingencies had been anticipated, and how they would be responded to. Once this was in American hands, the Japanese never won another battle.

In the Fourth War, the kzinti had won exactly one battle: the surprise attack on Pleasance. After that, every attack force they sent anywhere had been ambushed by human fleets, usually within minutes of entering a region where they couldn't use hyperdrive to escape. The forces guarding Kzin itself had ultimately been drawn off by diversions, allowing individual stasis capsules of Hellflare troops to hit the planet at hundreds of miles per second, unmolested. The Fourth War had lasted less than six years, from the invasion of Pleasance to acceptance of the terms of surrender. The Patriarch had called for armistice about a week after the arrival of the human commandos, who displayed an understanding of kzinti anatomy rather better than that of most kzinti field surgeons. Peace Corben must have gone to Kzin at the start of the War, gotten into their toughest security areas, and walked out with the entire military database.

A childless Protector could adopt the entire species; Peace Corben had done a fine job indeed of caring for her wards. Decidedly better than a certain psychist.

Buckminster flinched as Corky burst—almost exploded, really—into tears. He said, “You want me to take that?” and reached for the screen.

Corky looked at him.

Buckminster carefully drew back his hand. Corky was taut as a bowstring, and his face bore an expression of kzinlike wrath. “I'll just go get a drink,” Buckminster said, and kept his movements slow as he got up and left.

Buckminster called Peace as soon as he was clear. “Corky's in death-seek,” he said.

“That was quick.”

“Oh. What did you do?”

“Injected him with one of my witch's brews. He thought he was forgetting his family, so I put together some stuff that'll let him call up old memories without swamping them with irrelevant associations.”

“How did you manage that?”

“I synthesized the things that let me do it,” she said. “Do you want details, or did you have plans for the next month?”

“I was thinking of eating and sleeping, which I'm sure would slow things down. What do we do now?”

“Have you gotten the Silver Bullets out of his ship?”

“Oh yes.” He'd done that before starting the cleanup.

“Then you keep out of sight, and we wait for him to come see me.”

Corky was waiting for her in the kitchen when she went in for a scheduled meal. (As a breeder she'd suffered from depression and hypothyroidism, so she was accustomed to eating whether she felt hungry or not—yet another lucky break for humanity, since there was no tree-of-life growing where she made the change to Protector.) He said, “I need to leave.” Then he actually looked at her.

Peace was wearing a knee-length singlet, in white, with the usual array of pockets down both sides to the knees. There were black letters on the chest:

BECAUSE I'M THE PROTECTOR, THAT'S WHY!

His fierce expression went blank with surprise, then developed into amusement and dismay—the latter largely at the amusement. He cleared his throat superfluously, then said, “I need a pressure suit and a schedule of the Patriarch's movements—I want to know when he'll be away from his palace.”

“You've given up on assassination.”

“Yes,” he confirmed unnecessarily. “I still don't think it's a bad idea, but his successor wouldn't understand. The trouble with kzinti is they're still too much in shock over losing. They don't take it personally.”

“True,” she realized, suddenly admiring his plan. “He won't be traveling for a few months yet.”

“I have to get back in condition anyway, and practice with my lift belt, so the pressure suit first, I think.”

“First we eat.”

“I'm not hungry.”

“Don't make me cut up your meat for you.”

That look of dismayed amusement returned. Corky shut up.

Less than a day later he was gone. Peace had gotten a tissue sample in the course of fitting the suit, and was telomerizing some cells when Buckminster found her. “You let him go,” the kzin said.

“Had to.”

“Are those his cells? Are you cloning him?”

“Yes and no.”

“What does that mean?”

“Yes, they are, and no, I'm not. I'd been planning to provide infertile women of good character with viable ova containing my original gene pattern, suitably modified to meet local fertility laws, and large trust funds. I had enough for one or two Peace Corbens per human world. Now, though, I'm adding his genes to the recipe. The paranoia can be retained as a recessive, and there'll be more variety in their appearance.”

“You're having children with him, you mean.”

“Near as I can.”

“Why?”

Peace looked up at him. “Same reason I had to let him go. He's a good father, Buckminster. Whether he believes it or not—he's a very good father.”

Harvey Mossbauer's family had been killed and eaten during the Fourth Man-Kzin War. Many years after the truce and after a good deal of monomaniacal preparation, Mossbauer had landed alone and armed on Kzin. He had killed four kzinti males and set off a bomb in the harem of the Patriarch before the guards managed to kill him… The stuffed skin was so scarred that you had to look twice to tell its species; but in the House of the Patriarch's Past it was on a tall pedestal with a hullmetal plaque, and there was nothing around it but floor…

It's safer to eat white arsenic than human meat.