Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XI

by Larry Niven

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

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

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

  For two billion years.

  Protectors do not normally examine their motives.

  But there had never been a paranoid Protector before.

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

  She was not a tool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The eye itself was artificial.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Technology Officer. “Why did you save me?”

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

  “It’s better than the other.”

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

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

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

  “Why not?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “I’m Manexpert,” he whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I know that. Why would I need to?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Sure am.”

  “How is that possible?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Delusion?” Manexpert said.

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

  Manexpert didn’t say anything, experimenting with diplomacy.

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

  “Of course.”

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

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

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

  “I’m not a fool.”

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

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

  Also, he was fluffy and smelled like gingerbread.

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