The Man-Kzin Wars 06

by Larry Niven

  Chloe took a walk instead. She didn’t believe that a human life started at conception. Your life didn’t start until you got out of the womb and began to make your own decisions—like whether you wanted to breathe or not and which rattle to bang. So she wasn’t thinking about the fetus. She was thinking about whether she was ready to be a mother. She hadn’t built a nest yet. She was on a military base. She thought a lot about the problems of her father, a lone parent during the time of troubles just after the Battle of Wunderland with the devastation of war all about them and the economy in a shambles.

  She’d been such a brat to him, pushing, demanding, and learning how to con each of her new caretakers. She was still looking for a mother even now. She walked to the very center of Starbase, a seven-story atrium where you could catch your breath at a vista of balconies and get away from the claustrophobia of corridors. The bench in the central rock garden was an inviting place to sit. One of the cacti was flowering: a rare sight. On the bench she cried silently and watched the people go by in the shallow ethereal glides of low gravity Chloe slipped her mother’s iron wedding ring out of her blouse, still on its chain where it had always been, forgotten, and thought about the mother she had never known.

  At headquarters, where she seldom went, she wandered among the desks of busy men and women in uniform. Some nodded. No one stopped her—they all knew she was the daughter of a powerful admiral. She peeked into Yankee’s cubbyhole with its clutter of screens and plotters, a VR helmet on his cabinet, another on the plotter, and another on the floor.

  “Hi, stranger,” she said.

  He took her hand and pulled her inside. The unexpected touch of his hand made her eyes water and she couldn’t finish what she had started to say. She let him fill the void. “Good to see you today,” he said brightly. “The problems have been coming in all morning and you’re a breath of fresh air. I’d ask you to sit, but there isn’t any room.”

  “Problems seem to make you happy,” she said bravery. “We found my cousin. A flash came in from Gibraltar this morning.”

  “Nora? Is she alive?”

  “Yeah. Nora and all of her babies. She has six babies!” Yankee seemed both stunned and excited.

  Chloe burst out sobbing—it gave her an excuse.

  “That doesn’t sound like a problem to me! That’s wonderful! I mean about finding her,” she said after quickly recovering.

  He took both her hands. “You’ve got something on your mind.”

  “Just a little problem. I came to talk to you about it. It can wait.”

  “Can it wait till this evening? How about dinner?”

  “Dinner is fine.” She was relieved. That put off the awful moment. “If you’ve got time.” She began to hope that he had a good excuse to put it off even longer. Tomorrow she’d be more herself.

  Yankee continued. “My problem is that even though we’ve found Nora, she’s on W’kkai and we’ll have to extract her. Do you know W’kkai? That’s seventeen light-years from here deep inside kzin space. It’s a major kzin stronghold. They’ve given me Jay Mazzetta and my old sidekick, Beany Heinmann, to help with planning. We’ve got to do some fancy juggling in the next few hours.”

  “We could talk tomorrow”

  “Tonight I might not even be here tomorrow. Not dinner at the Caf—at my place. I saw a drum of apples in the hydroponics market. Get some. I make a good flatlander apple pie. Think up something for the main course. Make it simple—marinated rabbit stew with onions or something. At seventeen hundred.” He gave her his key “Since you don’t have my fingerprints to get in.”

  “We could postpone it”

  “Girls don’t cry for nothing.”

  Chloe fled.

  She had to hurry and bustle kept her mind off what she was going to say at dinner. She didn’t want to get the meat from the Cafs lockers, which was where they usually got it when they cooked at his apartment, so she took the maglev to the ranch where Honest Al raised chickens, turkeys, guinea pigs, and rabbits on an assembly line in the caves. Al was thinking of getting into real pigs, midget pigs, but he wasn’t sure how they’d take to cages. “Any pig I ever knowed could snort and root his way out of any cage ever built”

  She thought about turkey but Al and his Sons were butchering rabbits for freezing, so she took two because she was short on time and she was damned if she was going to pluck her own turkey! Bypassing the autochef was Yankee’s hobby but she’d already plucked and cleaned one chicken for him and enough was enough!

  At hydroponics she picked up the usual potatoes and onions, but they had some kohlrabi and peppers and leeks so she bought those, too. And a peck of green apples. The nice thing about a stew was that you could make it out of anything. In his apartment she piled up the groceries and went straight to the autochef. Yankee laughed at her, but she needed the autochef for advice. It was a baseline military model—except for the luxury spice attachment— and it was a terrible cook but it gave very good advice.

  She told it what she had bought and asked for a good recipe. It started with a lecture on how to prepare kohlrabi without ruining its taste. “But I want a stew.” It suggested stews. “But I want to marinate the rabbit! And I haven’t got time because he’s going to be here at seventeen hundred!” It provided her with an enzyme-enhanced sauce for quick marinating. She chopped up the rabbit and mixed rim a bowl with the sauce before attacking the vegetables. She didn’t know anything about spices. “What spices do I use, and they better be perfect or I’ll kill you!” It recommended five combinations and manufactured a pinch of each for her to taste with a wet finger. “Number two,” she ordered. It all went into the pot and the stew was simmering when Yankee arrived, late.

  His eyes lit up and he grabbed a green apple to taste it before he gave her his usual brotherly kiss. “A Grandma, no less!” He began to chop up each apple with six quick whacks. He never bothered to peel them. “Stew smells good. Did you fight with autochef?”

  “No. We had a very civil discussion. I had to shut him up sometimes.”

  “Watch him. He doesn’t get angry He just poisons you when you push him too far” Yankee was already mixing up the dough for the pie crust

  “How come he doesn’t make pie crust? I wanted everything ready for you when you came.”

  “Thank Murphy for small blessings! Have you ever tasted one of his pies?” Yankee was grinning. He ordered lemon-cinnamon and the machine produced a brown powder—manufactured, of course. Starbase wasn’t on the spice trade-routes. She marveled that he knew whit to ask for.

  “How did it go at work today?”

  He waited to answer until the pie was in the oven and he was seated and relaxed. “You remember that crazy kzin we took to Hssin? That ratcat found out more than he was telling me. Fry thought as much and left him with a covert beamer.”

  “You gave him hyperwave!” she exclaimed incredulously.

  “No way. Electromagnetic. He sends out a message. Our patrol relays it. We just got the relay that he found Nora.”

  “You’re sure?” She was skeptical.

  “Hwass-Hwasschoaw sent us data about her DNA that he couldn’t know. He has her. He wants to exchange her and her children for a ride to Kzin, and I’ve been elected taximan.”

  “It’s a trap! You be careful. He’s lying!”

  “Kzinti don’t lie.”

  “That’s what the alien psychologists say, but I don’t believe in kzin honesty for a minute! Do you? You’re a boy! You’re just like all the dumb adolescent boys I know! Do you really believe a kzin can’t lie?”

  Yankee smiled and made the yes-no nodding gesture with his hand and head. “What is truth? There are endless ways to tell a half-truth—and no way that any finite language is capable of telling the whole truth. For instance, I can call you up from across town and tell you that your apartment door is unlocked, and that’s true, but what you really need to know is that I slagged your lock with a laser pistol and kicked the door off its hinges and stole your Tang
Dynasty urns.”

  “You told me that Hwass hates you.”

  “He does.”

  “So now he tells you that he has Nora and to come get him! It’s a trap. He doesn’t want to go to Kzin. He’s lying! He wants to kill you!”

  “No, he’s not lying. He does want a ride to Kzin. He’s in some kind of political hot water. He needs to be met at the singularity boundary by a little ship that won’t attract the whole W’kkai navy He needs to get the hell out of there and he’s using my cousin as his ticket. I believe that. It’s what he is not telling us that worries me.”

  “So you admit he’s lying?”

  “In a culture where you are executed for lying, lying becomes a fine art indistinguishable from telling the truth.”

  “No wonder the navy hates you!” She was exasperated. “You reach into black and pullout white!”

  “Let’s get back to the subject” He was watching her eyes, waiting for the moment when she made eye contact with him. “And what have you been lying to me about?”

  That made her furious. “I’ve always told you the truth! Always! You know that!”

  “As honest as a kzin.”

  “Oh,” she said. “You mean the things I haven’t told you about”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s not fair. You’re older than I am. How about some rabbit stew first.”

  He dished out two heaping plates and they ate. “Good stew. Great recipe.”

  “Liar!”

  The conversation died so he tried again. “I’m waiting.”

  “There’s one thing I’ve never been able to say to you and it’s eating my heart out” She looked at him, begging permission to go on, a forlorn waif

  “Go on.”

  “Kakabuni!” And she was her old mischievous self again.

  He grunted from this blow to his solar plexus. “You’ve floored me. Yeah. We haven’t been able to talk about that” The taboo word. And he concentrated on his stew for a while before he had the courage to look her grin in the teeth. “I’ll be a man and take my medicine. What else?”

  “You want more? Let’s have some apple pie first,” she said miserably.

  Somehow the conversation turned back to Nora Argamentine. The topic was safe and they each had a lot to say. The chime went off for the pie. He put on his mitts and took it out of the oven. He cut her a slice. “It’s hot,” he said.

  Chloe took a forkful and blew on it “I’m pregnant.”

  Yankee was half-expecting that. He had forgotten to make his offering to Murphy. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. Murphy was a hard god who expected you to tend to the smallest details of your life. Fail him once and his wrath was upon you. Murphy, judge and executioner—and Kakabuni, tempter.

  “You’re more worried that my father is going to chop your head off than you are about me,” she sulked.

  “I did promise him I’d take care of you.”

  “You’ve taken very good care of me considering what a pest I am. You can marry me. Otherwise I have to have an abolition.”

  “Before now, have you ever thought about marrying me?” he asked.

  “You know I have—unless you’re blind. I’ve chased you mercilessly”

  “You chase all men mercilessly.”

  “Those are just boys. I keep looking for a man, and all I find are adolescent boys like you who do things on the floor and then run away.”

  “It’s a fantasy, Chloe. I’m thirty-two years older than you are.”

  “You’re lying like a kzin,” she said. “What you mean to say is that I’m thirty-two years younger than you are. You’re telling me that I’m too immature to understand you, too young to fit in your life, that I giggle too much, and that I run you ragged around your stuffy old edges.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “You’re just afraid my father’s going to kill you!”

  “There’s that.”

  “Haven’t you ever even once thought about how nice it would be to be married to me?”

  “More than you can imagine, I’m very fond of you. But it’s a fantasy.”

  “Why?”

  “The military life is hell.”

  “I’m used to it. What am I supposed to do? Marry a painter and live in a Chinese junk in the San Francisco Bay slums? Many a Wunderkind sheep rancher?”

  “I’m too old”

  “I’ll be 178 when you are 210. Big deal. You’re such an ooze! You defy the whole navy but you’re terrified that your shipmates will laugh at you for marrying a gangly pubescent!”

  “But I am too old for you.”

  “I’d eat another slice of your superior pie but I’m too mad. Sit down. I’m prepared for you. I do my research.” She dragged him over to the couch and pushed him into a seat. She pulled out her infocomp and made a directory out of the word “aging” and a subdirectory out of the word “Jinx.” “I have an article for you.” She didn’t trust him to read it by himself so she read it to him.

  More than forty-years ago the Jinxian laboratory at Sirius had produced something they called “boosterspice.” The new varieties were enormous improvements on the first product. It could run around in cells repairing DNA. It regulated the growth of cell types that had stopped reproducing—without inducing cancer. Some of the oldest test subjects were still alive.

  Yankee put his arm around her soberly with the tender affection of a man who is trying to tell a youngster that they have rediscovered the wheel. “I know all about boosterspice. I’ve been reading up on it since before you were born. Every year Jinx turns out a better product and there is more ballyhoo. They are gradually nailing down all the side effects. Do you know what happens in your brain when neurons start to reproduce and connect up at the wrong places? Do you have any idea how expensive that stuff is? And what do you get for your money? Boosterspice has been known to extend lives. Or it might cripple you. Maybe even kill you. One of the richest old men on Earth jumped on the Boosterspice bandwagon. Now he’s very young—but he’s a mentally retarded youth and slightly musclebound.”

  “That’s what rich people are for,” she said petulantly. “They are very useful experimental animals for us poor military types and carpenters. The rich pay through the nose for all the fancy new technology when it isn’t very good. They’re desperate to live so they pay thousands of crazy witch-doctors to kill them in fancy new ways. When the rich people stop dying, we know the product is ready for market and can be mass produced cheaply.”

  “Chloe!”

  “It’s like being a king and having a food-taster. The reason I want to many an older man is so you can test out the boosterspice for me. If you die, I get your money. If you stay young, I’ll know its safe to start taking boosterspice.”

  “Chloe, how come you taste my pies for me? Through thick crust and thin?”

  She snuggled. “How come you never tell me that you love me?”

  “I love you.”

  “That’s better. How come you never make love to me? I haven’t been a virgin since I was thirteen.”

  “That’s why. When I was thirteen, seventeen-year-old girls were old crones. Every year since then they’ve been getting younger. It has gotten so that I can’t keep track of how old a seventeen-year-old girl is anymore.”

  “That’s silly! Are we in a Kakabuni mood yet?”

  “I have to decide whether you are grown-up or not.”

  “I’m grown-up. I’m pregnant, remember. I’m in the army. My father is six light-years away.” She undid his belt.

  “All right. You’re grown-up. I can’t go wrong. You’re getting older every year.” He picked her up, mostly to keep her from undressing him. He carried her across the threshold of his bedroom door and let her float dreamlike to the small navy bed in the light gravity. He sat down on its edge and began to undress her.

  She grabbed his hand in both of hers, stopping him.

  She wasn’t wearing a bra. “How come we are afraid of each other?”

  He let her
fingers stay with his hand. “Who knows? Maybe you’re afraid of yourself and I’m afraid of your father.”

  She kissed his hand. “Are you a virgin? I mean before you met me.”

  “Not likely. I’m a navy man—and I used to be handsome. I even had a flatlander marriage contract once.”

  “You seem shy to me.”

  “It depends upon whom I’m with.”

  “How many women?”

  “You ask too many questions, young lady” He kissed the tip of her nose.

  She sat up. “I can undress myself I’ve had lots of men, too, you know. I sexed with your crashlander friend, Brobding What’s-his-Name.” She wasn’t used to her uniform—it didn’t come off gracefully, futz! “You can’t take off my wedding ring.” She fingered the iron ring hanging between her breasts. “I always wear it.”

  “Was your mother as beautiful as you?”

  “No. I’m prettier. I take after my father. Do I have to give you orders to strip? It’s a Wunderland custom for a man to make sex when he’s properly naked.”

  He was smiling. “It’s a flatlander custom that love-partners help each other with their clothes. Unless, of course, when proceeding by the rules of unpremeditated Kakabuni.”

  “You’re a pervert! I feel like a baby in diapers when a man tries to undress me. Is Clandeboye an Italian name?”

  “I think it comes from a gloomy Scottish castle.” He said that to the ceiling because she was ripping his pants off. ‘Wait. I’ll help you with the shirt!”

  Premeditated Kakabuni took over. The pleasure of flesh against flesh. Fond glances that cloak the human face in unnatural beauty. A hormonal passion driving bodies far past their design limits. “Had enough?” “No.” “Me neither.” It was strange to love a man who had no sweet talk.

  Sleeping in a man’s arms was an unnatural thing to do unless you were in love with him. One had no choice in a navy bed. Her rump was pressed against the wall and a foot twisted by some kind of bar She couldn’t sleep. She was both comfortable and frightened. He didn’t talk. He hadn’t said anything. She rapped him on the skull with her knuckles. “Knock, knock. Are you there?”