The Man-Kzin Wars 12

Peace and Freedom Matthew Joseph Harrington

One of the less appreciated points of being the smartest organic intelligence in the known universe is that, when you find out you've screwed up, you get to feel much stupider than anyone else can.

Peace Corben switched the hyperwave to the Project Supervision channel and said, “Ling.”

“Problem?” said Jennifer Ling.

“You need to divert resources and build a couple more Quantum II ships. The Outsiders have just informed me that someone's mining the Hot Spot, and I need to take Cordelia back to Known Space.”

“The Outsiders called you?” The Outsiders were a life-form whose metabolism was based on the quantum effects that cropped up at superconductive temperatures. (Probably. If anyone ever tried to dissect one, he hadn't gotten back with details. Or at all.) They made their living all through the Galaxy by selling information to the races they encountered as they cruised past inhabited systems; the idea of them volunteering information was weirdness on the order of a Protector trusting a stranger's good intentions.

“They still owe me money for mass conversion and a new form of math. They're very scrupulous. Unfulfilled obligations give them bubbles in the liquid helium or something.”

“Can I give you backup?”

“Wouldn't help. I've got a zip, if necessary.” She could keep breeders in the zip, the Sinclair accelerator field. She could spend several years talking human breeders into becoming protectors, while a few days passed outside the field. Instant allies.

“We're on it,” Jennifer said.

Peace signed off and moved Cordelia out of the main site on thrusters, to avoid dragging anything along. Of a population of almost two hundred thousand Protectors, more than half were working on the primary disintegrator array. (The region wasn't what you could call crowded, since they were spread through an area that would not quite have fitted into the orbit of Pluto, but alignment was important, and courtesy counts. Especially between people who do things like vaporizing planets for raw materials.) She paused to note that the work was going well—arrangements to disperse the oncoming particle blast from the Core explosion could be complete in a matter of decades—then went to hyperdrive.

She knew of two races that could be mining antimatter from Gregory Pelton's rogue solar system. One, human, had actually visited the Hot Spot briefly. The other species might have noticed, at closest approach to their home system, the inordinate neutrino production, from annihilation of interstellar matter, that had given it its nickname among Protectors. Both races qualified as very bad news, especially since the only way for either race to be doing it would be as a result of a massive cultural shift—greater than what a human Protector had arranged three and a half centuries back.

Therefore, somebody had done something unusually stupid. Peace never even wondered who would have to fix it.

Shleer couldn't take another minute of the horror in the harem, not one, so he went up the wall to the loops in the ceiling and used them to get across to the exhaust vent. The plastic wrapper was still in its crevice, and he put it on and squirmed out through a passage that shouldn't have held a kzintosh—was specifically designed not to, in fact; that was the whole point. It had been widened at key spots by Felix, of course.

Shleer missed Felix Buckminster. The ancient, fully-Named cyborg kzin might not have known what to do, but at least he would have been someone to talk to. Shleer was as alone as any kzin could be on his own planet.

He got to the death trap—stasis-wire mesh—and got out a grippy to work the maintenance controls, which were designed for Jotok use. The access panel slid back, Shleer checked for observers and emerged, and the panel shut again. Shleer opened the outside of the maintenance duct with a panel which wasn't supposed to be movable, swung out over empty air, and closed the panel, clinging to handholds invisible from below. He hung upside down by a foot while he removed the wrapper—if a human could do it, he could do it!—then hauled himself back up, took a better hold, and put it into another crevice.

Then he turned and leapt toward the God of the Jotok as an arm went past.

The souvenir of conquest of the Jotoki homeworld was immense, but there was no way to see the thing while settled firmly enough to leap the full distance, and as it was silent in its rotation Shleer simply had no choice but to remember the timing after seeing it upside down. If he ever got it wrong, there was going to be considerable puzzlement after they found his body; it was about a two-hundred-foot drop, from nowhere anybody knew about.

Getting back was always a lot easier, though. He faced his target then.

He got to the end of the arm just as it passed the floor, and gave himself a light, military-looking brushing once he was down. A front-and-back medallion went over his head, labeling him a Patriarch's Guest—well, he was—and he padded comfortably into the more modern areas of Riit's Past.

It was a bad habit to get into a routine, but this was something nobody knew about anyway, so the first place he always went was to see the Patriarch's Peer.

Harvey Mossbauer stood in the exact spot he had been in when the bomb decapitated him. They'd had to pretty much build a new harem anyway, so that was done in a more secure location and the House of the Patriarch's Past was expanded to include this area. Reassembling him must have been awfully difficult, and there had been some dispute about whether to include both arms—one having been lost a couple of floors up. Patriarch Hrocht-Ao-Riit had said all of him, though, and nobody had altered that since.

He had his gear these days. Some Patriarchs had thought he looked more fierce all by himself, but he looked more right with his weapons. He stood poised to spin and kick, flechette launcher strapped to the extended forearm, anemone in the hand drawn back to thrust. Five empty slots were left in the anemone bandolier, a nice historical touch; he'd left four in Companions who had decided to engage in claw-and-fang combat.

They were the only kzinti he'd killed before reaching the harem. He'd disabled more than sixty-four—

The bandolier, Shleer was annoyed to see, was now filled, by the new and unhistoried Tender-of-Legends no doubt. Shleer took four and put a fifth into the Peer's hand.

He wished the Peer was alive. The Peer had clearly known how to manage his priorities, and wouldn't attack kzinti until the real problem was solved.

Shleer realized someone was coming, and began moving to remain continuously out of sight. He was extremely annoyed at the interruption, which was the first of its kind.

A Tnuctip scurried in, through, and out the far side without so much as looking at the Peer. Shleer was doubly offended. They'd never come in here before; the least the little monster could have done was appreciate the display.

Though it might not have had a choice.

Come to that, what could it be doing? The only things down that way were still older history (which he doubted was its goal) or the servant quarters, with their laboratories—and the lifeboat they'd come from.

Shleer considered. What would the Peer have done in this situation?

Harvey Mossbauer (he deserved three Names, but no other was ever discovered, and it would have been disrespectful to assign him one) had come, after many years, to inflict justice. He had infallibly turned toward the harem wherever there was a choice; he had used ammunition that disabled without being immediately fatal, causing pursuit to be obstructed by autodoc remotes; he had blasted walls to open shortcuts, or to block reinforcements, but the only antipersonnel charge he'd set off was in the harem itself. The Patriarch had killed his family; he killed the Patriarch's family; now they were even.

The Peer would have gathered information. And he would have made plans.

Shleer followed the Tnuctip.

Larry Greenberg stepped into the stasis capsule and the door closed.

Suddenly the gravity was different—but lighter? This wasn't Jinx!

The door opened. There was an alien standing there, resembling nothing so much as the mummy of a patient dead of terminal arthritis. With a head like a deformed basketball. It wore a white sleeveless singlet from neck to knees, apparently made out of filled pockets.

A really smart alien, too. Mind too fast to read. “Speak English?” he said helplessly.

“Yes, but I still have to point at the menus,” it replied.

“What?”

“Come out, will you?”

He came out, feeling foolish, and stopped. The Lazy Eight III, colony ship to Jinx, was gone. His stasis capsule had been brought inside another, bigger(!) ship—“What the hell happened?”

“From the damage I'd say the ramscoop field missed a good-sized speck of dust. Opened the crew module without disabling the ram, just as they were preparing for turnover. That was about eight and a half centuries ago. Nobody could afford to rescue you. It's now 2965 CE. Read this, it'll give you a general overview of the basics.” It handed him what seemed to be a sheet of white cardboard—with touchpads on the margin. When he reached, it clasped a cuff on his left wrist and watched it for a moment. “Medical,” it said. “—Hungry? Of course, a meal would have been extra weight. Read while you eat.” She led him to another room, where he had the novel and dubious experience of seeing food dispensed by a machine. It was good, though.

The first part was just after his time—Lucas Garner was involved again. A Pak Protector—an alien, sort of—had arrived from the Galactic Core, with a supply of roots that would turn hominids of the right age into asexual fighting machines with superhuman intelligence. Larry got as far the description of what happened to Jack Brennan, and looked up and said, “You're a human being?”

“Yah. I know your name already; mine's Peace Corben.” It was done eating—from a vessel the size of a punchbowl—and added, “It gets worse. I've got stuff to do, keep reading.” It stood.

“How do you eat that fast with no teeth?” (Teeth fell out during the change, and Peace Corben's lips and gums were fused into a bony beak.)

“I've got a tongue that could shell oysters.” It ran out. (Fast, too.)

He kept reading.

It got worse.

Brennan had exterminated the Martians, expanded the power of the ARM to the rewriting of history and brainwashing of all of Sol System. His successor/apprentice had released a virus on the colony world Home that killed about 90 percent of the population, turning the rest into an army of childless Protectors. (Protectors who had descendants recognized them by smell, and methodically slaughtered anything that looked like it might interfere with their populating the universe. Protectors whose instincts were not triggered by the smell of descendants either quit caring and starved, or worked to protect their entire species.) The Protectors of Home had killed off some incoming Pak scouts, then headed toward the Core to exterminate the rest of the species.

They did this because the Pak were all coming out in the direction of Earth. Earth was known to be habitable, and their own world wasn't going to be.

This was because the Galaxy was exploding.

Greenberg's head was exploding. He took a smoke break before he read on—

This was known hereabouts because it had been seen: The puppeteers had developed an improved hyperdrive, from mathematical hints dropped by Peace Corben after she'd become a protector. (The puppeteers had fled the Galaxy as soon as they saw the films.)

She'd become a Protector when she'd gone to Home fleeing a kzinti invasion of her home planet. (She had subsequently won that war single-handedly by walking into the Patriarchy's Central Command inside an accelerator field, walking out with their entire order of battle, and arranging for every kzinti attack after the first to be met with overwhelming force.)

The kzinti were now mining antimatter, from a stray solar cloud that was passing through the Galaxy at about point eight C. And that meant that her arrangements to alter kzinti civilization had been changed by someone capable of mental control.

The protector came back while he was reading her speculations about what was happening on Kzin. He looked up and said, “You did all this to collect me?”

“Right. The records don't say where the device was put.”

Back in 2107, Larry Greenberg had been Earth's top telepath. Greenberg had been put into contact with an alien, Kzanol, who'd been in stasis for, it turned out, two billion years. Kzanol had been a much more powerful telepath—a Slaver of the Slaver Empire, with the Power to control dozens of ordinary minds—and his transferred memories had overwhelmed Greenberg's personality for weeks. There had ensued a hunt for something which would have made Kzanol, essentially, God:

“You mean the stasis field with the Slaver amplifier in it?”

“No, Lucas Garner's hoverchair, I always wanted it for my weapon collection.” Given that Garner had then been a 169-year-old paranoid, that was almost reasonable; his travel chair probably violated all kinds of safety laws, and possibly one or two disarmament treaties.

Greenberg flushed a little and said, “It was dropped into Jupiter.”

“Good. I was afraid Garner would have talked them into the sun. That'd be difficult.”

“You can retrieve it?”

“What do you think I've been working on while you read, a better mousetrap?”

“Oh… Still mice around, huh?”

“Yeah, but changed some. All that radiation during the Kzinti Wars. We've signed a treaty, though.”

“You're kidding.”

“Yes.”

“… You are kidding.”

“Yes.”

He blinked a few times, shook his head violently, and said, “Where's everybody else?”

“Still in stasis. I wanted you apprised of the situation before I extended the accelerator field around them. I mean to spend about fifteen subjective years in this ship, in part to get them adapted before I release them, and I need you to look after their sanity.”

“I thought you had an emergency.”

“To the rest of the universe it'll be about eleven days. Stasis won't work inside any kind of time-distortion field, so I had to tell you separately.”

“Wait a minute, what about my wife?”

“She's here. I got everybody.”

“I mean, we wanted children.”

Peace nodded. “This vessel was built to house up to half a million Protectors and their fighter craft. You won't find it crowded in fifteen years, I don't care how enthusiastic you are.”

The Tnuctip walked right past a group of older kzintosh, who were following a Pierin tutor. (Paid regular staff were a recent innovation, but one that seemed to work. All it took was regarding a contract as an oath.) There were six to avoid, not counting the Pierin, who wasn't being paid to notice Shleer. The group fell silent as the Tnuctip scurried by.

“Here we have the tablets of Great Sire Chof-Yff-Riit, who, in amongst his personal tastes, specified the penalties for willfully ignoring a known gesture of surrender, which act was a great contribution to all kzinti cultures, and may be argued to have led to unification thereof under the Patriarchy. Who knows how humans signal surrender?” the Pierin asked. It would take more than the end of civilization to shut a Pierin up. Shleer crept along the wall behind his siblings—far behind.

K'nar-Riit, who was likely to be the next Patriarch, said dryly, “Their hearts stop beating. It's not always a sure sign, though.”

“Wittily phrased, though possibly misleading. Humans do not have a surrender gesture. They are descended from the Pak, a species that knew nothing but war, and are as a consequence the least reasonable or tractable intelligent race presently known. They are never satisfied until things are entirely the way they want them, and genuinely expect everyone else to cooperate.”

One of his siblings was turning toward Shleer. Shleer froze, turned only his head, and made eye contact as soon as he was seen. The kzintosh flexed his ears a little and turned back to the Pierin. Shleer continued out of the hall, head pounding terribly.

The Tnuctip was out of his sight, but passed through somebody else's. Shleer took the correct exit from the next chamber, doing military respiration exercises to get the headache under control. It got a little easier each time.

He evaded the guards who'd seen the thing, which was indeed heading for the Jotoki labs. Shleer shortened the distance between them to get through the (manifestly useless) containment doors on the same activation, then let it get ahead. It went into the lifeboat, out of sight.

Then it vanished from his perception.

Shleer immediately took cover. The Tnuctip came out of the lifeboat wearing a cap of metal mesh, then went over to where the Jotoki traditionally worked on weapons they fondly imagined the kzinti didn't know about, entered, and was invisible again.

The Tnuctip was wearing a shield against telepathy. The sthondat-nuzzling imbeciles had had a mental shield, but hadn't been using it when they went into stasis! Shleer noticed his claws were out, and retracted them with an effort. A phrase he'd picked up from Felix crossed his mind: “unusually stupid.” It certainly seemed to apply.

What would the Peer do now? Examine his options.

Shleer could sneak in on just nose and ears.

He could wait and follow the Tnuctip further.

He could wait and look inside after the Tnuctip left.

Or he could leave now—at least in theory; he only listed it to be thorough.

Shleer waited.

Eventually the Tnuctip came out—looking directly toward him. Pure chance, but bad. Shleer hoped really hard their brains were arranged like modern ones, and maintained eye contact. The Tnuctip sniffed a few times, then turned and went to put the shield back in the lifeboat.

After it had scurried away, Shleer moved for the first time in over an hour, stretching slowly. The only place for the Tnuctip to go was the Residence; it could therefore be ignored now. Shleer entered the Jotoki secret weapon shop for a look.

Nothing was lying out, but compartments had been handled. He sniffed them out, then checked for traps. One had a hair across the opening, another hair hanging from the hinge, and a deadfall of a canister of dry lubricant powder inside. Intended only to reveal Jotoki interference—so kzinti reflexes kept the powder from spilling a grain.

The Tnuctip had been working on another mental shield. Cruder-looking, but with an active power source. Jamming? Would that work?

He looked it over carefully, Felix having taught him a great deal. It most certainly would not work. There were conductors that would melt if full power were applied for more than a few seconds. The Tnuctip had been Programmed to waste its time here.

Shleer almost pitied the evil little creature. Almost. He replaced the deadfall and the hairs, and began trying to remember, as he headed back toward the harem, where he'd last seen a camera.

The design seemed worth copying—and Shleer hadn't been Told to use flawed components.

The Slaver Gnix watched a movie and sucked a gnal, or at least the best approximation his slaves had produced so far. He had nobody to tell it to—yet—but he was mostly pleased. He'd been lucky beyond belief.

He'd manifested full Power later than usual for a Thrint. This had led to his being employed at a food developer's, which was where he'd discovered the spy among the Tnuctipun. Darfoor, the spy, had had a generator for one of the new stasis fields, which had been developed in the course of his last spying job. All Tnuctipun innovations turned out to be part of a long-term plan to disrupt Thrintun commerce. Gnix had taken over Darfoor and his contacts, and they had been working on ways for Gnix to profit from the disruptions when a competing food company had attacked the development habitat.

By then Darfoor had installed the stasis field in the escape boat, and Gnix had Told him to forget to put on his Power shield.

The stasis had held while the galaxy rotated several times.

Amusingly, the creatures that had opened the field had been looking for a weapon to use to escape from slavery. They had built Gnix an amplifier, and he had taken over the rest of the creatures here and set his Tnuctipun to growing some females from his genetic material. There was some problem, not too clear—Tnuctipun minds wandered so—with getting the chemistry right in the host females, but there were plenty of them. His new chief slave had apparently been collecting females.

There were plenty of potential slave races, too, but the fighting slaves' records said some of them knew how to shield against the Power, so Gnix had sent some of the fighting slaves to gather antimatter from a source that had passed by a while back. (For some reason they hadn't done so before.) He was the only Thrint alive—stasis didn't count—and ruler of a small interstellar empire, soon to be a large interstellar empire.

Not bad for a foreman in a food workshop.

The only thing he really disliked was the slave telepaths. All the fighting slaves had a touch of it—his sire Gelku would have been terribly upset by that, as he'd been deeply religious—but some had so much that they'd developed mental shielding techniques to stop the noise. He'd finally ordered those removed from the palace. Not killed, since they were useful; but he didn't like running into them. It was too startling. The amplifier could get through a shield to detect them, of course, but that tended to paralyze anyone in range who didn't have one, which in this case meant most of the planet.

TOO MUCH OIL, he Told the slave burnishing his scales.

The Patriarch of Kzin wiped off the excess.

It was almost two years before Greenberg saw the protector again. Judy was expecting a daughter, according to the autodoc, and he was edgy: “Hey! Where've you been?”

“Working” was the reply. “What the hell did you think?”

“How should I know? There're discrepancies in the history you gave us.”

“This is your idea of news? How are the rest getting along?”

That diverted him briefly. “They're afraid of you. They doubt the explanation of why they can't look outside the ship.” Cordelia was in hyperdrive. “—And the history doesn't add up!”

“Okay, name some problems.”

“How many wars were there with these 'kzinti'?”

“Depends who you ask. Flatlanders say six, because they got involved in all of them. Kzinti and Pleasanters say four because there have been that many peace treaties: Kzinti needed some kind of conceptual dividing line to get a handle on the idea of peace, and Pleasanters are almost all descended from lawyers. Old Wunderland vets say one, because there are still kzinti alive, so the war's still running.” She spread her hands, momentarily resembling a cottonwood tree. “Take your pick. Next?”

“How many do you say?”

The look she gave him produced, in him, the exact feeling other people got when they first learned he was a telepath. After a moment she said, “Two. The first began with the invasion of Wunderland, and ended when I arranged for the subordination of the kzinti religion to secular authority. The second was an act of personal retaliation by one man, Harvey Mossbauer, whose family was killed at the end of the first, against the Patriarch; he killed the Patriarch's family in return. Since then the Patriarch of Kzin has understood that humans are, by kzinti terms, people, and has treated them as such in law. They can't be held as slaves or raised for meat, for example—though if a kzin from one of the cannibal cultures kills a human in a dispute, eating him is deemed fair. The cannibals are dying out, though. They get in too many fights. Next?”

“How come humans are related to primates that have been on Earth since long before the Pak supposedly brought us?”

“Obviously there must have been previous visits, with much smaller breeder populations. Lots more drift that way. The first was probably just a few million years after the Dinosaur Killer.”

“Ah. Yucatán,” he said wisely.

“Oh, were the ARMs still flogging 'nuclear winter' in your time? I thought that was just when they were getting set up.”

“Excuse me?”

“Guess not, must have been residual. 'Nuclear winter' was the notion that throwing a lot of dust and soot into the atmosphere would cause an Ice Age in spite of halving the planet's albedo. It was one of those political hypotheses, meant to frighten people into accepting the need for restricting technology. The ARMs spread a lot of those in the early days. Anyway, the Yucatán crater has K-T iridium in it and is therefore older. Only an ocean strike will produce an Ice Age, and only if it's big enough to punch through the crust and boil a few cubic miles of ocean with magma. In this case it obviously was, as it also produced Iceland.

“As I was saying, the protectors in that migration saw a world with no big predators and settled in. Obviously they sent back word of what a nice place it was, and just as obviously the expedition that brought our ancestors destroyed the records before they left home, to keep from being followed.”

“But Brennan and Truesdale never mention any earlier expeditions.”

“Truesdale had other things to deal with. Brennan didn't care. He was a Belter, and Belters who lived long enough to establish their society were not the ones who let their minds wander or indulged casual curiosity. Next?”

“There's an implausible coincidence between the departure of human Protectors and first contact with the kzinti—”

“Coincidence my ossified ass!” she snapped, startling him badly. “The puppeteers first brought us to the kzinti's attention about two months after the Fleet left for the Core.”

“That's the part I have trouble with. Puppeteers are herbivores. Peaceful.”

“I should have cloned a bull.”

“Huh?”

“In case it has escaped your attention, the class of herbivores includes cattle, horses, elephants, the Roman legionaries who conquered Gaul, and Pak Protectors. Herbivores casually obliterate anything that encroaches on their territory—or that looks like it might. Carnivores come in all types of personality, but dedicated herbivores are merciless killers. Anything else?”

“Um. I need to think some—yah, hey, what the hell did you mean by putting that big warning in the movie archive: 'DO NOT WATCH FOR A BREATH I TARRY AND FIREBIRD IN ONE SITTING!'?” He brimmed with outrage.

“It's a bad idea,” she said ingenuously. “I take it you did?”

“Everybody did!” he bellowed. “And guess who got it all secondhand, as well?”

“Didn't like them?”

He shook all over, very abruptly, but forced himself back under control. “Don't you make fun, goddamn it,” he said softly.

“I'm sorry,” she said at once, and brushed fingertips on his shoulder; those, at least, weren't rocklike.

“There's only so much of anything we can stand. Even beauty.”

“I know. That's why I did it.”

He stared at her. “What?”

“Now everyone knows I don't give warnings without a good reason. Would you rather I'd set a trap that blew somebody's hand off?”

He glared, but she was right—no one would ever ignore one of her warnings after that shattering experience. Finally he nodded. Then he said, “We could only find the author for one—glad we looked, though, this guy Zelazny is incredible! Was Firebird published under some different title? The only other reference I could find was a piece of classical animation with the same music.”

She nodded. “The one where the Firebird is the bad guy? This one was done in rebuttal, I believe. Later it was suppressed by the ARM because of its accurate depiction of the history of industrial development. I've never found the credits, but clearly somebody couldn't bring himself to destroy the last copy. The other one I made myself. I don't think anybody else ever trusted themselves to be able to convey Zelazny's imagery adequately. The old woman and the cube, for instance.”

“ 'Go crush ore!'” he murmured, and his voice caught.

“It wasn't easy to get the timing on that pause right,” she remarked. “Look, if there's nothing else right now I've got an errand. I'll be gone a couple of months your time.” And she was off again.

Shleer had to spend six days out of sight while the Thrint wandered through the harem, nagging the Tnuctipun and their Jotoki assistants. Gnix had been an immensely powerful telepath even before he had the amplifier, but he was too stupid to follow his slaves' thoughts very far when they did something as simple as free-associating. The Tnuctipun had delayed the adaptation of the kzinretti as long as they could, simply to put off the day when they had another Thrint to cope with; still, Gnix's constant pestering—Pestering, rather—forced them to maintain some kind of progress, however slow.

About one surviving kzinrett in four was hairless and developing skin flakes—the biological modifications seemed to be trying to produce scales. The survivors weren't going toxic, so it appeared the Tnuctipun had stalled as long as they could.

Then, while Gnix was doing another nag-through, a kzinrett began screaming and thrashing. The thrashing continued after the screaming stopped; though her arms and legs gradually fell still, her torso kept jerking. Then a greenish larval thing tore a hole into the open air from inside her, shuddered, and died.

CLEAN THAT UP, Gnix commanded irritably. AND FIX THE PROBLEM. Then he left.

The Tnuctipun had not been surprised. That was what made Shleer risk detection and go searching for a camera that night. They hadn't been surprised.

Shleer's own birthing tunnel gave him a private place to work; his mother had been one of the first to die.

Peace shut down Cordelia's accelerator as soon as she was in range.

Larry had living quarters set up outside the control area, so he could work on the door every day. Being able to draw on the expertise of dozens of colonists had actually gotten him through the first lock. He'd been working on the second long enough not only to grow a beard, but to start grooming it during the times when he couldn't think of what to try. He'd quit smoking and resumed, too, probably twice.

“I apologize,” she said as soon as he saw her. “I should have set the field to shut down. Please come in, so I can show you how to run things in case I'm killed or trapped.”

He said nothing as he entered.

“One of the things I was looking for was any residue of an ARM agent named Hamilton,” she said, leading him to a workshop. “He was a telekinetic esper who lost an arm and an eye, and the shadow organs his brain produced in compensation let him feel inside things and see in the dark, and like that. I figured the proper training would allow a clone to develop an entire remote presence, very handy. Unfortunately the woman running the ARMs now really hates Protectors, and they wasted a lot of my time before I could meet her and frighten her into cooperation. There's a lot less margin now for what I need to do before we get to Kzin.”

“So we'll just go out and have fun while you sit at home, alone, in the dark, and go blind,” he said as they reached the shop.

She stared at him a little longer than necessary; it was no mean feat to surprise a Protector, and he was entitled to something for it. He kept his gratification off his face, but it had grown to be considerable by the time she said, “Sorry. I'll watch that.” She opened the door and led him to where a crumpled perfect mirror lay. “I'll need to study your telepathy to develop some myself,” she said as she got out the control for the accelerator field and switched it back on.

“Um,” he said as the suit went from perfect reflection to merely shiny.

She looked at him, and saw that he was horribly embarrassed all of a sudden.

Something inside the suit moved.

She drew and aimed, realized what had to have happened, and was putting the gun away when he said, “It's a slave! Kzanol found a planet and brought one back with him.”

“Yes. Let's get him out.” She removed the helmet and opened up the suit, and a head the size of a breeder's fist poked warily out. Two eyes; those refractive nodes would serve as ears; a generally humanoid shape aside from thumb displacement; traces of something more like feathers than hair; and some pretty fine clothes and jewelry. Of course Kzanol had taken their leader.

“Oh my God, he was their High Judge,” Greenberg said.

“Figures. And it never mattered to the Slaver, so you never realized it before. Talk to him while I rummage.”

There was a baroquely embroidered cloth bundle, and as she got it out the trace of scent on it made her want to kill something. Hardwired response; the Pak were survivors of the Slaver era, and the Protectors had been created as a Tnuctipun weapon. (They hadn't evolved in two billion years because they ate mutated descendants; there wasn't really a tactful way to mention that to Greenberg.) She had to spend several seconds learning how to override it, then unwrapped the bundle to reveal a remarkably prosaic watch—with a casing of niobium chromide, so that it would survive events that would vaporize the wearer. Absurd: Anybody who could afford a watch like this didn't have to be on time. Two more bundles held figurines of extraordinary repulsiveness: Thrintun females. Next was the amplifier helmet.

She'd been listening and building up vocabulary, not without amusement. Greenberg had the unusual combination of perfect comprehension coupled with no ear at all. The alien was of a race called chukting, and of his names and titles the important one was Tinchamank. He was having a lot of trouble figuring out what Greenberg was saying. Admittedly there was a trick to the accent: the language was fourth-stage. (Much vocabulary is onomatopoetic. Tribal gatherers hear and repeat the sounds made by sticks and rocks. Hunters, herders, and farmers pick up animal sounds. Civilized people add metallic noises, and advanced peoples include sounds made by complex machinery. Names of things tend to change last as a language alters, so the chuktings must have been civilized for thousands of years.)

“There's a map in the sleeve,” Greenberg said.

“Thanks.” She got it out. The Milky Way had been a little sloppier in shape two billion years ago; of course the spiral arms bore no relationship to present arrangements. The sapphire pin would be Tinchamank's home system—well outside the main galactic lens. Might be worth looking at later. She spoke to him: “A long time has passed. Your home is gone. I will learn what you need to eat. Come.”

Greenberg gasped suddenly, then recovered as he put up his shield. Tinchamank curled into what must be his fetal posture. Doubled wrist joints, looked useful. Peace picked him up and took him to the analytical doc. She limited the stunner effects to local anesthesia, since the hearing nodes looked very efficient and thus vulnerable, and waited while the microprobes sampled organs.

“Get any samples of that agent? Hamilton?” Greenberg said.

“Obviously not,” she replied. “I'd have set up a culture tank at once. You should have figured that out without asking.”

“Big talk from someone who can't walk and chew gum,” he retorted, nettled.

A beak was no good for chewing gum. She gave him another stare. “You've been saving these up.”

“I find you inspiring. How did you manage to scare the director of the ARM?”

“Threatened to build a giant robot and destroy Tokyo.”

“Holy cow. Why Tokyo?”

“Traditional.”

Simultaneously exasperated and amused, he said, “Goddamn it, I can never tell when you're kidding!”

“True,” she said sadly. She looked at the doc readout and said, “Odd. His ribosomes are just like ours.”

“Aren't everybody's? I mean, they're how DNA gets implemented, right?” He'd been a colonist back in the days when it took a city's annual income to send a ship to another star, and he'd studied everything that might be useful to qualify. And it wasn't like some Ivy League education—he'd had to understand the material.

She nodded, pleased with him. “Yes. But our Pak ancestors, and bandersnatchi, and the photosynthetic yeast everybody else is evolved from, all came from Tnuctipun design labs. The chukting were never anywhere near them, and they have the same ribosomes.”

“The what?”

“The chukting. Tinchamank here.”

“Oh. Kzanol called them 'racarliwun.' ”

“Why?”

The question seemed to startle him. “Well, he named the planet after his grandfather Racarliw, who built the family stage-tree farm up into a major industrial enterprise.”

“So this would be someone who used all his income to recapitalize the business, and didn't set anything aside for his descendants, which would be why Kzanol was out prospecting and ended up on Earth to cause the deaths of hundreds of human beings?”

“Um. Yeah.”

“So the hell with him. As I said, the chukting have ribosomes just like ours, but are of completely unconnected origin. Which is weird.”

“Panspermia?” Theorists had often speculated that life had only needed to evolve once per galaxy, then spread offplanet due to meteor impacts, and to other stars via light pressure.

“Their home system is far enough outside the then-explored Galaxy for any spores to die en route.”

“Carried on something else?”

“The only things,” she began, and blinked as everything finally fitted together. “Of course. Good thinking.”

“Thanks,” he said, not really understanding.

Tinchamank adjusted to circumstances better than Peace did. His had been the most adaptable mind of an advanced industrial society, chosen from among many thousands of trained experts to sit in judgment on any matter that arose, and he was able to serve in this capacity for the colonists as well. He actually settled some feuds that had been developing.

Peace, on the other hand, had no knack for direct mind contact at all. Seeing what breeders were thinking was something any Protector could do, but it wasn't telepathy; it was on the order of a breeder seeing a dog snarl and bare its fangs and guessing what would happen next. Monitoring and feedback devices were invaluable for telling her what, in her brain, was simply not happening.

They kept working at it for almost three years.

One day Larry stopped in the middle of another adjustment and said miserably, “I have to go in.”

“You'd just die,” she said.

He sighed. Then he said, “You're not that obtuse.”

“I'm not that cold, either. I sure as hell wouldn't have given up sex if I'd had a choice.”

He blinked. “I had an image of you as kind of a spinster.”

She chuckled audibly. “I know. If I'd told you stories about my sex life your brain would have cooked in its own juices. Now, though—Larry, I want you to imagine being employed at the most enjoyable activity—sustainable activity, that is—you can think of.”

“Hitting baseballs through the windows of ARM headquarters?” he said with a straight face.

“Damnation,” she said earnestly.

“Sorry, I'll be serious.”

“No, it's just I don't know when I'll get back there again, and I never once thought to do that.” She enjoyed his astonishment for a moment, then added, “The top of that dome would be an ideal place to stand, too.”

Hesitantly, he said, “Kidding?”

She waggled a hand. “Not entirely. Larry, imagine feeling like that all the time.”

“Look, I'm volunteering, right?”

“I wonder. This is what I originally planned, and I worked on you to push you in that direction, at least at first. I decided a few years back to learn telepathy myself instead.”

“Well, you can't.” He was as terrified as she'd ever seen anyone, not excepting kzinti who had supposed her to be the Wrath of God Incarnate; and he was going to go through with it. He had courage she'd never dreamed of as a breeder, and she loved him for it more than she'd loved any other human who'd ever lived.

“I know. Come on,” she said, removing the contact helmet: “I'll buy you lunch.”

Shleer had the disruption helmet finished in two days. He tried it out the only way he could, as befit a Hero: on himself. He put it on and hit the switch.

Everyone went away. The quiet was unbelievable.

He immediately switched it off and got moving out of the harem, in case the effect had been noticed.

It hadn't. In the Residence they had other things on their minds.

HOW CAN THEY MOVE THAT FAST? Gnix Screamed at the Patriarch, who staggered.

“Speed field,” slurred Rrao-Chrun-Riit. “Reduced inertia, almost five hundred and twelve times as fast as normal.”

Aircraft had dropped into the atmosphere all over the planet, swarms of them, moving at something like two million miles an hour in all directions.

Suddenly they were in a ring, converging on the Patriarch's Palace.

DO SOMETHING!

The Patriarch opened the master panel of his fooch and tapped a switch.

The incoming craft slowed to about Mach 6 on the monitor system, and the palace defenses began shooting them down.

WELL DONE… WHAT DID YOU DO?

“I accelerated us as well. The system was installed three hundred years ago, after we found signs that someone had gotten in undetected.”

IF THEY WERE “UNDETECTED,” HOW DID YOU FIND SIGNS?

“Things worked better, like food dispensers and data retrieval.”

One of the craft hit the palace, not far from Riit's Past.

A pilot hurtled out in a suit of powered armor, and began charging in through automatic defensive fire. Pieces of armor were jettisoned as lasers heated them intolerably—which was possibly their principal reason for existing. The pilot got a long way before the armor was down to a single flexible suit. That was black, coated with superconductor, and appeared to be venting coolant whenever lasers touched it.

The lasers made contact less often with each passing minute. The pilot was fast, almost invisibly so on the security screens. A funny-looking human.

Gnix detected recognition in two nearby minds. One was the Patriarch, whose perplexing and repetitive thought was Peace. The other was Darfoor.

Darfoor was terrified out of his mind, and he was thinking assassin, assassin! Gnix Told him, COME HERE. TELL ME WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS THING.

“I made them,” whimpered the Tnuctip. “The tarkodun were too stupid to follow instructions, and we were told to make them smarter. We gave them a third stage of life. They have brains Thrintun can't control all at once. They're smarter than anything else, and they live forever, and we made them to kill you. They gave us the hyperjump and disintegrator and stasis field when we asked for ways to disrupt your lives. We're all going to die.”

SHUT UP. STAY PUT AND ATTEND UNTIL I TELL YOU OTHERWISE. FIGHTING SLAVES, STOP THAT THING!—NOT YOU, CHIEF SLAVE.

On the screen, the assassin came into Riit's Past at high speed, faster than a Hero's charge. Companions were still assembling in its path, and it produced a needlegun and shot them all. There was respectable return fire, but there was impact armor under the superconductor, and the assassin was either immune to stunners or shielded somehow. The needles got through all the armor the Companions had, but apparently didn't tumble—none of them began vomiting blood, anyway; they just fell asleep at once.

A Companion in powered armor was beyond the next archway. He fired a staggered laser array—and none of it hit. The assassin had turned sideways and bent backward and tilted its head, and all the beams passed it by. Then the assassin fired the needlegun into the wrist control of the armor, and the armor fell off. The Companion drew his w'tsai and leapt even as the armor was hitting the ground, and the assassin dodged the blade and hit him with both hands, one on either side of the rib cage. The Companion fell, gasping. He wasn't dead or dying, but he wasn't going to be getting up until someone came with a medikit and pulled back his dislocated rib joints, where the assassin had caved them into his lungs.

The assassin got to where the stuffed alien stood on a pedestal and hesitated for an instant. That was enough for the lasers to slice up the needlegun. The assassin ran on.

A section of the monitoring system went dead, just as the assassin was getting to it.

HOW DID IT DO THAT? Gnix demanded.

“It couldn't have,” the chief slave replied. “It could be damage from the crash.”

FIND THAT THING!

“There are Heroes massing in its only path.”

The statue looked like a six-legged Jotok. Given its imposing size, it was a religious image, probably based on a real individual; each Jotoki limb had its own brain lobe, so a six-legged Jotok would have been far smarter than usual, and probably also a holy cripple. Certainly a legend.

From above came a voice, speaking Flatlander: “Hey. Protector. Up here.”

There was a half-grown kzintosh hanging by one foot. “I know a shortcut,” he said.

An army could be heard ahead—could be smelled ahead.

After the youngster had been hauled into the duct and the hatch closed, he said, “There's one Thrint and four Tnuctipun. Rrao-Chrun-Riit is obeying as slowly as feasible. And,” he said, “and he is my father, so—”

“Alive if any chance exists,” the Protector said, and sniffed. “Harem? Right. Stay someplace safe.”

“Felix said Protectors liked jokes.”

“Felix?”

“Felix Buckminster. Former technology officer on the Fury. I'm a Patriarch's Son.”

“Okay, but be inconspicuous.”

The kzintosh wrapped a piece of metal mesh around his head and touched a switch. “The Thrint won't notice me. Felix taught me a lot.”

“Good for him.” The Protector wriggled down the duct, came out the access hatch, and pretty well ran along the ceiling loops to the wall handholds. It went down the wall and was working out the door mechanism before Shleer was all the way out of the hatch, and was gone well before he reached the ground.

It hadn't been patronizing him, though: It had scratched the combination into the wall before it left. Shleer followed as quickly as he could.

I CAN'T FIND IT! Gnix Shrieked, and slaves howled and fell.

“It may have a shield,” Darfoor said.

MY AMPLIFIER CAN GET THROUGH A SHIELD, FOOL! UNLESS YOU MEAN THE KIND YOU WERE MAKING.

Despair added flavor to the spy's thoughts. “I do.”

CAN YOU DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT? Darfoor seemed much too pleased at this question, so Gnix learned why and said, CAN YOU DO IT WITHOUT SHUTTING DOWN THE AMPLIFIER?

“No,” Darfoor said miserably.

THEN WAIT A MOMENT. Gnix paused to exclude his immediate group of slaves, then Told the rest of the palace:

GO TO SLEEP.

Then he Told Darfoor, NOW SHUT IT DOWN.

Shleer staggered a bit as his jammer quit, but it wasn't bad—almost everyone in range had gone to sleep.

He got to the Place of Contemplation, which the Thrint had had redone as a TV room, just as Rrao-Chrun-Riit was stunned asleep by the Protector.

The Thrint had three of the Tnuctipun in front of him in a pyramid, and said something that the Tnuctipun understood to mean, “Drop your weapons.” There was a strong Push behind it. It didn't work, and the Thrint raised a variable knife—the Patriarch's, Shleer noted, offended—and pushed the switch.

The glowing red ball fell off the end and rolled away. The Thrint stared after it. Then he looked up.

The Protector shot his eye out with a plain old slug pistol. “Apparently a knife doesn't always work,” it said as Gnix fell backward.

Then it blew the three Tnuctipun's brains out too.

It turned to the fourth, Darfoor, who screeched desperately, “Fa la be me en lu ki da so mu nu e ti fa di om sa ti po ka et ri fu…” and more of that general nature.

The Protector said, “Glossolalia?… Machine code?… Hard… wire… ta… lo…”

Shleer pulled out one of the Peer's anemones, leapt into the room, and thrust its disk against the Tnuctip's side. As designed, the disk stayed put against the target's skin, while the ultrafine hullmetal wires it bound together passed through it, resuming their original shapes: curves, varying from slight to semicircular. In combination they made up a rather fluffy blossom: an anemone.

They had to pass through the Tnuctip to do it. It fell into two pieces and a good deal of goo.

The Protector shook its immense head in relief and said, “Kid, I owe you a big one.”

“You don't either,” said Shleer.

“I do. The Tnuctipun created my ancestors, and they clearly hardwired our brains to respond to a programming language this one knew. I was about to become his adoring slave. I owe you big.”

“You gave me my father back.”

“I wanted him healthy anyway. Give me a minute here.” It went to the control panel and looked it over. “Wow, good traps you guys make. Got it.” It shut down the acceleration field. Then it opened a belt pouch and got out a disk about the size of a decent snack, pulled a switch, and set it down to inflate into a globe.

“How did you do that with the variable knife?” Shleer said.

“One time-alteration field won't work inside another. The wire was too thin to support the weight of the ball when it wasn't in stasis. Sorry, I'm being rude. I'm Judy Greenberg.”

“Who?” said Shleer, utterly surprised.

When he'd come out of it, Larry had abruptly sat up in his rinse tank and said, “Why the hell do kzinti dislike eye contact?”

They were felines, after all. “Good question,” said Peace. “That's Judy there. She insisted. She'll be out tomorrow.”

“What about the girls?” They had four daughters, Gail, Leslie, Joy, and Carolyn. Carolyn was four. (All had blond hair the young Peace Corben would have given up three fingers for.)

“Old Granny Corben explained everything, and they're all proud of you two.” The colonists' children, at least, trusted her, not least because kids usually know a pushover when they see one. (It is a protector's duty to spoil children absolutely rotten.)

Larry had then said, “Oh god damn. Telepath in orbit to be sure the situation is resolved.” So Judy had to be the one going in with the amplifier.

“At least she's a precog.” So she'd duck before being shot at.

“Thanks.” That had helped. Larry picked up a pack of cigarettes, left thoughtfully nearby, and lit one. “Gaahhh!” he bellowed, and threw it into the rinse tank he'd just left. “What did you put in that?”

“Tobacco,” Peace said.

He looked her over. “They've always smelled like that to you?”

“Yes, but you seemed to enjoy them.”

He spent almost a full second thinking this over. Then he said, “Thanks.”

When the globe had inflated, it split open, and another Protector came out. Shleer goggled for a moment, then realized the globe had been a portable transfer booth.

The new Protector looked at the red ball, then at Judy Greenberg, and said, “Aristocrat.” Judy snorted.

“What?” said Shleer.

“Sorry, ancient Earth joke,” said the new one. “At a gunfight, how do you recognize an aristocrat—that is, a noble who inherited his rank? He's the one with the sword.”

Shleer began laughing and found it hard to stop. He'd been through a lot lately. The new arrival got out a brush and did Shleer's back a little, which calmed him down. “Thanks,” he said.

“You would have done this yourself if we hadn't shown up, wouldn't you?”

“Not as fast.”

“Details. I'm Peace Corben.”

“Felix Buckminster told me about you.”

“Felix? Hm! He did love gadgets. What's your Name?”

Shleer got self-conscious. “It's a milkname. I'm only four. Shleer.” He took a deep breath, and said, “Can you help the harem?”

It was interesting to see that Protectors had claws that came out when they were upset too. Peace looked at Judy and said, “Doc.”

“Larry's on it,” said Judy, who had begun inflating a bigger receiver.

Peace was shaking her head. “The thing that gets me,” she said, “is why the hell someone who can do this didn't just tailor a disease to exterminate the Thrintun?”

“Against their religion,” Shleer said.

Peace looked at him. “You're a telepath.”

“Uh—”

“You have to have gotten that from a Tnuctip, because no kzin who ever lived could possibly have come up with a reason that stupid.”

They were making eye contact. Shleer gave it a try.

Peace shook her head. “I realize you're distressed,” she said, “but if you ever give me another headache this bad, the slap you get is gonna give you an ear like a grapefruit. You're looking at it from the wrong end. This doesn't discredit you; it makes telepaths respectable. Are you aware that you've single-handedly saved civilization? Everybody's civilization? I intend to make damn sure everyone else is.”

Judy was loading kzinretti into the autodoc that had arrived, and Peace joined in.

Notwithstanding their removal of the Thrintun—and Tnuctipun—embryos, and restoration of the kzinretti to health, the Patriarch had clearly been glad to see the Protectors go. While the Greenbergs had been tailoring plagues for kzinti ships to spread, to kill off any Thrint or Tnuctip that got loose in Known Space thereafter, Peace had spent some time interviewing survivors about the chain of events, and it had evidently upset her. Nobody really welcomes a cranky Protector.

She piloted Cordelia out to the local Oort cloud, then got on the hyperwave and said, “We need to talk.”

Such was the seriousness in which she was held that the Outsider came via hyperdrive, which they normally didn't use. “It is good to see you were successful.”

“Yeah, you don't have to blow up their sun or whatever. You're in contact with the puppeteer migration.”

“That information is not available for sale.”

“It wasn't a question. I have a message for you to relay to them, to be paid for out of my credit balance.”

“Proceed.”

“Keep going.”

There was a pause. “Is that all?”

“If they don't seem to respond appropriately, add this:

“The kzinti found a stasis box you had neither opened nor destroyed, in the debris you abandoned in your system when you left Known Space. It held a Slaver and several Tnuctipun genetic engineers. They were found by the kzinti. The Slaver had the Tnuctipun growing Slaver females by the time they were stopped, and had the kzinti fleet preparing antimatter weapons. All you had to do was drop the thing into a quantum black hole. Your interference is offensive, but your irresponsibility is toxic. In the event that you inflict either upon humans, or their associates, ever again, you will be rendered extinct. Message ends.”

“Peace Corben, you should be aware that we have contractual agreements with the puppeteers for their well-being. Whatever you have planned, we would have to stop it.”

“Planned? What am I, Ming the Merciless?” she exclaimed. “I'm not going to warn someone about something I haven't done yet! I set up my arrangements over three hundred years ago.”

“What arrangements?”

“It's the bald head, isn't it? I don't know. I expected to have this conversation someday, and I knew you could do a brain readout, so I erased it from my memory. If you're bound by an obligation to look out for their safety, the best help you can give is to have them get out of our lives and stay out.

“And as regards debts and contracts, diffidently I point out that I have just taken action to clean up the leftover results of your big mistake. Nobody will hear about that but Protectors, by the way.”

“Thank you.” And the Outsider was gone.

“Damn, I didn't mean to humiliate them,” she said.

“Hm?” said Larry.

She glanced at him. “They—What are you doing?”

He took the tennis ball he'd been chewing out of his beak. “I just ate. Flossing.”

The true tragedy of the Pak had been their utter lack of humor. Conversely, every human Protector was an Olympic-class smartass.

“Hm!” she said, and shook her head. “We got the name 'starseed' from the Outsiders, and nobody ever questioned it in spite of the fact that the damn things never sprout. The Outsiders made them. Starseeds go around sowing planets with microorganisms that are meant to evolve into customers. Outsiders keep track of what worlds are seeded and monitor development to make sure nothing really horrible happens. Three billion years ago they were lax in this, and two billion years ago a species they'd missed exterminated all organic intelligence in the Galaxy. They charge high for questions about starseeds because they're ashamed. So what's the verdict?”

“The kids all wanted to name whatever planet we settle everybody on Peace. I persuaded them it was against your religion.”

“Thank you.”

“Everybody else wants to call it For a Breath I Tarry. Including Judy and me.”

Pleased, she said, “What about Tinchamank?”

“We thought we'd clone him some mates and find them their own planet. After that it's up to them. Can we go look at Altair One?”

“The Altairians didn't have time travel,” she said.

He didn't read her mind. (He'd tried it once after the change. She was still a lot smarter than he was, so it had been much like peeking through a keyhole and seeing a really big eye looking back.) After a second he said, “You already looked.” At her self-conscious nod he said, “So how did they vanish?”

“Kind of an immaterial stasis field is the best I can describe it. The math's on record if you care. They'll reappear in a couple of thousand years, probably shooting. I left the kzinti a note.”

He nodded. “I'm still a little sore about our kids smelling wrong. Judy's not.”

“I did the same with my own.”

“I didn't say I didn't understand it. We won't restart the Pak wars, fine. They just seem like strangers.”

She nodded. “Yah.”

Rrao-Chrun-Riit signed the edict. Anyone using slaves would henceforth have no trade or tax advantages over anyone using paid free employees, and would face a choice of slowly going broke or changing over to workers who had a motive to do their work well. He had recently acquired some strong views on the subject of slavery.

He turned to his son, who had saved everything that mattered to anyone. Before the assembled clan of Riit he declared, “Felix Buckminster taught you as well as I had hoped. Yes, I assigned him to you,” he said, amused at Shleer's astonishment. “I'd have arranged for you to be brought out of the harem if he hadn't been sterile! You really thought I wouldn't know that a kzinrett came from a lineage of telepaths? My own mother did! But it's recessive. My son, you are not merely a telepath, you are a full telepath, with the ability humans call Plateau eyes. You can vanish, yes—but you can also charm disputants out of fighting.

“And you make plans.

“Good plans.

“You followed an enemy to gain information, you acted on what you learned to gain more, you built a mechanism to enable you to fight an unbeatable enemy, and when that enemy was dead you acted instantly and correctly to destroy another that proved even worse.

“My son of all sons:

“Choose your Name.”

“Harvey,” said the next Patriarch of Kzin.