by Larry Niven
“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-Rrit. “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 Rritt’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 mad
e 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 Rrit’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 wtsai 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-Rrit 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-Rrit 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?”
