Protector

by Larry Niven

  “They died. The breeders were breeding without check. What happened is largely speculation on my part, but I’m pretty sure I’m right. The landing craft was fission powered. The protectors were dead, but the breeders were used to their helping out, so they hung around the ships.”

  “And?”

  “And the piles got hot without the protectors to keep them balanced. Maybe they exploded. The radiation caused all kinds of strange mutations. Everything from lemurs to apes and chimpanzees to ancient and modem man.”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Nick.

  “You will. You should now. There’s enough evidence of it, particularly in religions and folk tales. What percentage of humanity genuinely expects to live forever? Why do so many religions include a race of immortal beings who are constantly battling one another? What’s the justification for ancestor worship? You know what happens to a man without modern geriatrics; he gets stupid as he gets old. Yet people tend to respect him, to listen to him. Where do guardian angels come from?”

  “Race memory?”

  “Maybe. Or half a million years of tradition, if you’ll believe a tradition could last that long. It could, if every man, woman and child on Earth began by believing it.”

  “South Africa,” said Luke. He believed the Brennan-monster. The Outsider’s actions had been so irrational that he had been forced to expect an irrational explanation. “They must have landed in South Africa. All the primates are there, except Man.”

  “Right. You see, the breeders had lost their ability to become protectors. They had to develop other shticks, to protect themselves. There was radiation around to help them change, and the protectors had made the environment temporarily safe for them, so the population could expand. Some got strength, some got agility, some got intelligence.”

  “I seem to remember,” said Luke, “that the aging process in man can be compared to the program running out in a space probe. Once the probe has done its work it doesn’t matter what happens to it. Similarly, once we pass the age at which we can have children—”

  “You’re moving on inertia only, following your course with no corrective mechanisms.” The Brennan-monster nodded. “Of course the tree-of-life root supplies the program for the third stage. Good comparison.”

  Nick said, “What about the Outsider?”

  “He found old records, including the call for help. He was the first protector in half a million years to realize that there was a way to find Earth, or at least to narrow the search. And he had no children, so he had to find a cause quick, before the urge to eat left him. That’s what happens to a protector when his blood line is dead. More lack of programming. Incidentally you might note the heavy protection against mutation in the Pak species. A mutation doesn’t smell right. That could be important in the galactic core, where radiation must be heavy.”

  “So he came barreling out here with a hold full of seeds?”

  “And bags of thalium oxide. Thalium was what was lacking in Earth’s soil, and the oxide was easiest to carry. The construction of his ship bothered me until I understood it, but you can see why he trailed his cargo section behind the lifesystem. Radiation doesn’t matter to him, in small amounts. He can’t have children.”

  “And where is he now?”

  “I had to kill him.”

  “What?” Garner was shocked at last. “Did he attack you?”

  “No.”

  “Then why?”

  The Brennan-monster seemed to hesitate. It said, “Garner, Sohl, listen to me. Fifteen hundred miles from here, some fifty feet under the sand, is part of an alien spacecraft filled with roots and seeds and bags of thalium oxide. The roots I can grow from those seeds can make a man nearly immortal. What do you think will happen next?”

  The two men looked at each other. Luke seemed about to speak, closed his mouth.

  “That’s a tough one, right? So what did the Outsider expect? Why did he bring all those roots and seeds?”

  X

  Phssthpok dreamed.

  He knew to within a day just how long it would take for Brennan to wake up. He could have been wrong, of course. But if he were, then Brennan’s kind had mutated too far from the Pak form and would not be worth protecting.

  Knowing how long he had, Phssthpok could time his dreaming. Dreaming was a fine art to a protector. He had about ten days. For a week he dreamed about the past, up until the day he left the Pak planet. Then he moved on to the future.

  Phssthpok dreamed…

  It would begin when his captive woke. From the looks of him, the captive’s brain would be larger than Phssthpok’s; there was that frontal bulge, ruining the slope of the face. He would learn fast. Phssthpok would teach him how to be a protector and what to do with the roots and seeds of tree-of-life.

  Probably the native would take the secret for his own, using tree-of-life to make protectors of his own descendants. That was all right. If he had sense enough to spread his family around, avoiding incest, his bloodline would reach out to include most of this system’s Pak race.

  Probably he would kill Phssthpok to keep the secret. That too was all right.

  There was a nightmare tinge to Phssthpok’s dreaming. For the captive didn’t look right. His fingernails were developing wrong. His head was certainly not the right shape. His beak was as flat as his face had been. His back wasn’t arched, his legs were wrong, his arms were too short. His kind had had too much time to mutate.

  But he’d reacted correctly to the roots.

  The future was uncertain…except for Phssthpok. Let the captive learn what he needed to know, if he could; let him carry on the work, if he could. There would come a day when Earth was a second Pak world. Phssthpok had done his best. He would teach and die.

  Brennan stirred. He unfolded his curled body, stretched wide and opened his eyes. For a few moments he stared at Phssthpok, stared as if he were reading the protector’s mind. Then he began to speak.

  In two days he had learned the language. On the third day, as Phssthpok was demonstrating how to unfreeze the seeds without damage, Brennan slammed his head against the edge of the freezer. It stunned the protector just long enough to let Brennan turn him around and break his neck against the edge.

  “I wonder if I can make you understand,” said the Brennan-monster. He gazed at the two old men, one twice the age of the other but both old, and wondered that they should be his judges.

  “I wonder if you can understand how fast it was.” He kept his speech dead slow, slow enough for them (hopefully) to understand it. “He had the box open and was giving me instructions in that oddly speedy language of his, giving orders just as if I were a voice-box computer. I was about to ask, ‘Don’t I get any choices at all?’

  “I was too intelligent. I was getting answers before I could finish formulating a question. And always I saw the best answer, and always it was the only choice. My free will was gone. And is. I wondered if the Outsider had free will.

  “In that same instant I attacked him with intent to kill. Every step in the argument was in place, and there was no choice at all.”

  “Lucky you could act so fast. I gather he was dangerous?”

  “Not to me, not yet. I was his shining hope. He couldn’t have defended himself for fear of bruising me. He was older than me and knew how to fight; he could have killed me if he’d wanted to. But he couldn’t want to.

  “It took him thirty thousand years of real time to bring us those roots. He expected me to finish the job. I think he died believing he’d succeeded. He half-expected me to kill him, you see.”

  Sohl said, “And?”

  The Brennan-monster shrugged cantaloupe shoulders. “He was wrong, of course. I killed him because he would have tried to wipe out the human race when he learned the whole truth.” He reached into the bag that had brought him across fifteen hundred miles of fluid dust. He pulled out a jury-rigged something-or-other that hummed softly—his air plant, made from parts of Phssthpok’s control board—and dro
pped it in the boat. Next he pulled out half of a yellow root like a raw sweet potato. He held it under Garner’s nose. “Smell this.”

  Luke sniffed. “Kind of pleasant. Like a liqueur.”

  “Sohl?”

  “Nice.”

  “If you knew it would turn you into something like me, would you take a bite? Garner?”

  “This instant. I’d like to live forever, and I’m afraid of going senile.”

  “Sohl?”

  “No. I’m not ready to give up sex yet.”

  “How old are you, Sohl?”

  “Seventy-four. Birthday two months from now.”

  “You’re already too old. You were too old at fifty; it would have killed you. Would you have volunteered at forty-five?”

  Sohl laughed. “Certainly not.”

  “Well, that’s half the answer. From Phssthpok’s point of view, we’re a failure. The other half is that I don’t intend to turn tree-of-life loose on Earth or anywhere else.”

  “I should hope not,” said Garner. “But let’s hear your reasons.”

  “Did you see the Outsider ship?”

  “We saw films.”

  “Odd, wasn’t it? A weird combination of primitive and complex. There’s a reason for that. The Pak planet has never been free of war at any time in its history. Naturally not, with every protector single-mindedly acting to expand and protect his blood line at the expense of all the others. Knowledge keeps getting lost, and the race can’t co-operate for a single minute beyond the point where one protector sees an advantage in betraying the others. They can’t make any kind of permanent progress because of that continual state of war.

  “Can you imagine a thousand protectors on Earth deciding their grandchildren need more room? All they’d have to do would be to steal a few fusion plants.”

  He didn’t have to expand that point. Fusion plants were as common on Earth as electrical generators had been a century earlier. There were tens of thousands of spacecraft; there were seawater distilleries and power plants and public crematoriums. And each could become an exploding bomb at a flick of the switch that controlled its fusion shield.

  “Besides which, we don’t need tree-of-life, not really. Garner, when were you born? Nineteen forty or thereabouts?”

  “Thirty-nine.”

  “And look how old you are now. The science of geriatrics is moving so fast that my kids have a good chance of living for thousands of years. We’ll get our immortality without tree-of-life, without sacrificing anything at all.”

  “Now look at it from the Outsider’s viewpoint,” the Brennan-monster went on. “We’ve settled the solar system and are on the verge of moving out to the stars. We will and must refuse to use tree-of-life, and even when it’s forced on us the resulting mutated protectors are atypical. The Outsider was used to thinking in terms of the long view. He’d have realized that someday we’ll reach the core. The Pak will attack us the moment they see us, and we’ll fight back.” He shrugged. “And win, of course. The Pak won’t unite effectively, and we’ll have a much better technology.”

  “We will?”

  “I told you, they can’t keep their technology. Whatever can’t be used immediately gets lost unless someone files it in the Library. Military knowledge never gets filed; the families keep it a deep, dark secret. And the only ones to use the Library are the childless protectors. There aren’t many of them, and they aren’t highly motivated.”

  “He’d have tried to wipe us out first,” said Luke.

  “Right. You might remember that we would have been infinitely worse to him than a hostile alien species. We’re mutants, corruptions of the Pak form itself.”

  “But he couldn’t do it. He was all alone.”

  “I’ve thought of half-a-dozen things he could have done. None of them sure things, but I couldn’t risk it. Remember that the Outsider was a fanatic and more intelligent than most human geniuses. They all are.

  “If only they’d had the ability to play…”

  The sun had almost touched the horizon. Luke shivered and started the motors. He didn’t want to have to navigate the opening in the ring wall in darkness.

  Presently Nick said, “What about the seeds? Do we just leave them where they are?”

  “Not at all. Sohl, when you have finally grasped the extent of my magnificent intelligence, you’ll see what those seeds represent. They’re a fail-safe for the human race. If we ever really need a leader, we can make one. We’ll just pick a forty-two-year-old volunteer and turn him or her loose in the tree-of-life patch, making sure that he or she has no children.”

  “Children. You’ve got children, Brennan.”

  “Yes,” said the Brennan-monster. “But fear not. I don’t intend to hover over them the rest of their lives. They’ll have a much better chance for happiness without that.”

  “The hormone changes didn’t work?”

  “I think they did. At least to some extent. What the Outsider never realized was that most of the protector’s urge to die after his bloodline is dead is sociological. Some is hormones, but more is training. I don’t have that training, that conviction that a breeder can’t be happy or safe without his ancestors constantly telling him what to do. I don’t intend to let them know I’m alive. That would hurt them.”

  “We’ll give it out that the Outsider killed you.”

  “Good.” The Brennan-monster lay flat on his back in the bottom of the boat as it slowed for the opening in the ring wall. Nothing moved but his eyes. The Brennan-monster had the ability to relax. Somewhere in the future there would be regular periods of furious exercise…

  “What of you, Brennan?”

  “I can’t protect my kids because of the Principle of Uncertainty. I can’t watch them without affecting them. But I can protect the human race. Someday it may be necessary. Meanwhile, I’ll be a gardener. Pick me an asteroid, and I’ll raise tree-of-life.”

  From the front of the boat, Luke said, “I just thought of something. You know the story of Genesis?”

  “Yes.”

  Luke pulled out a cigarette. “You remember that Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge. According to Genesis, the reason they were thrown out was that they might have eaten from the tree of life, to live forever. That would have made them equivalent to angels. Now you tell us they were the same tree.” He used his lighter. “Wha—”

  In one fluid motion the Brennan-monster was beside him. He took the cigarette from Luke’s mouth stubbed it out against the side of the boat. Luke glared.

  “Sorry,” said the Brennan-monster. “The hormones worked after all. I’m a protector.”

  It was as fair a warning as the two ex-breeders would get. The Brennan-monster’s motives would always be as clear as empty space.

  —LARRY NIVEN