Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XI

by Larry Niven

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

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

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

  “No,” Corky grumped.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Or discrediting religious cults,” Peace said cheerfully.

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

  “The Patriarch?” said Corky, startled.

  “No, Kdapt-Preacher,” Buckminster said.

  “But—”

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

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

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

  “What?”

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

  “Too bad,” said Corky.

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

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

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

  “‘Cultures,’ plural?” Corky said.

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

  “You’d have expired in convulsions.”

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

  “‘The purpose of power is power,’” Corky quoted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get him away from the airlock.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I mean—the what fleet?”

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

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

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

  “Puns?” said Corky, lost.

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

  He winced. “You and your mother.”

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

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

  “Charlotte Chambers,” Peace said, nodding.

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

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

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

  There was corroborative evidence, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I was too busy to bother washing.”

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

  “Why should I?” he demanded.

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

  “So what?”

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

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

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

  “I mean, how is it acquired here?”

  “It isn’t. What would we do with it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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