The Man-Kzin Wars 11

by Larry Niven

  "I know. Suggestion: send all the molecules in the transmitter, and draw the momentum shortage from the adjacent atmosphere. Faster turnover, massive downdraft, more hot air comes in from the sides."

  Buckminster thought about it. Then he carefully hung up his suit, turned back to her—and hopped up and down.

  * * *

  Buckminster had the cleaner on monitor when Peace came up and said, "He's ready to come out. Want to be there?"

  "No."

  "Okay," she said, and went off to the autodoc.

  She'd naturally set it so Corky didn't wake up until it was opened, so the first thing he saw was a Protector. He stared, appalled—she was something of a warning notice for "Don't Eat Spicy Foods At Bedtime"—and then, astoundingly, said, "You're Jan Corben's little girl?"

  Widening her eyes was just about her only option in facial expressions. "Now how did you arrive at that?" she exclaimed.

  "You have her eyes," he said.

  "It didn't actually work out that way," she said.

  "Excuse me?"

  "Not unless you can come up with a really good reason for breaking into my home."

  She watched him catch up. "Protector," he said to himself, just grasping it. Then he said, "Where were you during the War?"

  She scooped him out of the autodoc, shut it, and plunked his bare behind down on the lid, stingingly hard. "You are an invader in my home," she said, looking up at him. "You may now explain yourself to my full satisfaction."

  "You can't kill a human breeder," he said skeptically.

  "You're not a relative. Even if you were, invasive brain readout wouldn't damage your testicles."

  For the first time he looked worried. "I thought it was a kzinti base. I wanted to steal a ship."

  Peace blinked, then said, "Buying a ship would be recorded. You wanted to attack their home planet."

  "To land. And kill the Patriarch."

  Peace blinked again, then touched her caller and said, "Buckminster, come to the kitchen. You have to hear this."

  "Four minutes," came the reply.

  She hauled Corky off the 'doc by his elbow, and walked to the kitchen still holding his arm. He stumbled a few times, then got his feet under him. She was exasperated enough to contemplate changing step just to louse him up, but refrained, as it would be waste work to haul him the rest of the way. She had the floor produce a seat, stuck him in it, and dispensed a few small dishes. "Eat," she said.

  "What is this stuff?" he said suspiciously.

  "Stewed rat heads, giant insect larvae, and assorted poisonous plants."

  He scowled, but got the message—don't be ridiculous—and began eating. Presently he said, "This is wonderful."

  "Good, that'll be the neurotoxins kicking in."

  He scowled again, shut up, and ate.

  Buckminster came in soon, got something hot with alcohol in it, took a good gulp, and said, "What is it I have to hear?"

  "This fellow came to this kzinti base, that we're in, here, to steal a ship, to take to Kzin. Guess what he wanted to do there?"

  Buckminster shrugged. "Assassinate the Patriarch?"

  "Right."

  Buckminster took another gulp and said, "No, really."

  "Really."

  Kzinti rarely laugh, and it is even rarer for a human to be present when it happens; but the sound was similar enough to human laughter for Corky to stop eating and scowl. "What's so funny about it?"

  Buckminster had an analytical mind, for an evolved creature, so he sat down and made a serious attempt to answer. "Many years ago," he said, "when I was first allowed out, still almost a kitten, I used to hunt... birds, sort of... out on the grounds. I was very good at it. Some were bigger than I was, and all of them wanted their meat even more than I did, but I devised snares and weapons and brought them down. All but one. It was big, and kept going by higher than I could shoot an arrow, and I was never able to find the right bait to lure it down. However, it had very regular habits, so I built a sort of giant crossbow thing—"

  "Ballista," said Peace.

  "Thanks. A ballista, to shoot at it. Just to get the range, at first. As it turned out, I only got to fire it once. The shot landed in a neighbor's grounds, stampeding some game. I was too little to know yet that there was a world outside my sire's estate, which included things like other estates. And orbital landing shuttles."

  It took Corky a few moments to realize: "You were trying to shoot down a spaceship."

  "With a crossbow. Yes."

  "And my plan reminds you of that."

  "Vividly. Almost perfectly." Buckminster was chuckling again.

  Corky had been getting himself carefully poised for the last couple of minutes. Now he launched himself over the edge of the table at Buckminster.

  Buckminster threw the rest of his drink on the table.

  Corky's right foot came down in the liquid, and he spun sideways and tumbled the rest of the way. Buckminster swung his mug into Corky's hip, knocking him aside, and Corky slid past him off the edge of the table. He hit the ground about four feet away—then six feet away—then seven—then he rolled a few more feet. After that he tried to get up a few times, but kept slipping.

  Buckminster got up and dispensed himself a towel, refilled his mug, and said, "You want a drink? It'll reduce bruising." The reply he got wasn't articulate enough to be obscene. The kzin flapped one ear, and went to mop up his first drink.

  When Corky had finally managed to get as far as sitting upright on the floor, Peace—who'd seen it coming and known she didn't need to move—said, "Buckminster and I have been working together, and working out together, for years. He's a strategic minimalist, and he's got enough cyborg enhancements that I hardly have to hold back. If he'd been holding your previous rude remarks against you, he might have been mean enough to let you actually use that Hellflare nonsense on him, and shatter your bones in the process."

  Buckminster tossed the towel at the trash and told Corky, "What's on you is your problem. Likely to remain so, judging from your past habits. Do you use a name, or just mark things?"

  Corky scowled again, evidently his default expression, but said, "Doctor Harvey Mossbauer."

  "Doctor?" Buckminster exclaimed in disbelief. "What kind of a doctor are you supposed to be?"

  "I'm a psychist."

  Buckminster was speechless for the fifth time in the twenty-eight years Peace had known him, and that was counting when she'd first met him and shot him in the head. "He really is," Peace confirmed. "My mother was one of his inmates. She called him Corky. One of her puns." Buckminster looked unenlightened, so she added, "Moss grows on trees. 'Bauer' is Wunderlander for 'farmer.' A moss farmer would be a tree. Cork is a kind of tree bark."

  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.