Man-Kzin Wars XIV

by Larry Niven

  He was also able to throw a little light in the mystery of Marmalade’s origins. Among the Admiral’s kittens there had been a small, weak one which had seemed to exhibit the telepath syndrome. As soon as he could be weaned, admiral had had him isolated to protect him from the other kits. Telepaths in the family were not anything to be proud of, but too rare to be wasted. The ship’s own telepath had been ordered to begin work on him. He was to have been sent for more advanced training when the ship was jumped by a squadron of Dart-class fighters. When the ship’s gravity planers were failing, and it was falling towards the surface, most of the crew dead and the engines about to destabilize, he had been jettisoned in one of the ship’s boats. He could have come down anywhere. When Nils Rykermann told them about the kitten, the old human prospector was moved.

  “Poor little chap,” he said. “After my . . . partner . . . told me what had happened to him in the battle, I wondered what his fate had been. I was never able to hate the kzin, you know. An old desert-rat like me, living in the back-blocks. I was fortunate, I know. They left me alone and I left them alone . . . I hardly even saw one until after the war, though I was able to help a few humans, and I’m glad of that . . . I’m glad he’s been looked after.”

  “He’s quite appealing, in a way,” said Leonie. “I know fear makes some creatures into bullies, but he is quite gentle.”

  The pair wished to present the precious jar to Vaemar-Riit. Of course, they had been put to considerable expense travelling from the Joyuns, and if anything could be done to recompense them for their outlays, this would be appreciated. Nils Rykermann promised to speak to Vaemar about the matter, and they left, taking the jar with them. The Rykermanns, who were glad of a chance to spend a day out of the city, flew to Varmar-Riit’s palace the following day and told him the story.

  “The seals are unbroken, you say,” he put to them. “Urrr . . . it would go well on the mantlepiece.” No one said as much, but there was an unspoken thought in all their minds that it would do something to reinforce the legitimacy of his position and help reduce the stigma of “collaborator,” which, among some kzin, he had never entirely lost. “And this . . . this Marmalade?”

  “A kitten,” said Leonie, “a weak kitten. A failed telepath, I think. Or rather, he was separated from other Heroes before the training began.” It was just permissible, given her relationship with Vaemar, to describe the kitten as “weak.” Some, after all, were born so, and could not help it. But for a human to describe one kzin to another, even Vaemar (and she knew Vaemar would die for her if Honor required it) as a coward . . . !

  “It would be useful if he finished his telepath training,” said Vaemar.

  “I think he is too old for that.”

  “I should like to have a look at him, anyway. ”

  Leonie was not happy at the prospect of Vaemar-Riit meeting Marmalade, but there was no argument she could put against it. She was unhappily aware that if Marmalade disgraced himself before the greatest kzin on the planet, the consequences could be unfortunate.

  The day of the presentation was cool and cloudy. The kzin did not need to wear the hats and sunglasses which sometimes gave them an odd appearance. Vaemar, with his mate Karan, Rarrgh, and other members of his household, were dressed in finery, Rarrgh with his two ear-rings on prominent display. Also present were the Rykermanns, the abbott, and several other human dignatories. Marmalade was to be presented to Vaemar-Riit.

  However, Terrified of the gathering crowd, Marmalade was nowhere to be found. Leonie, the abbott and Rarrgh went in search of him while Vaemar and Nils Rykermann took refreshments.

  Using Rarrghh’s ziirgrah sense and his artificial eye with its infrared vision, they eventually found Marmalade cowering in the darkest corner of the monastery’s old and disused chicken coop. Rarrgh, shocked, was in favor of tearing him to pieces then and there, as a disgrace to the Heroes’ Race, but Leonie, to whom Rarrgh also was secretly devoted, talked him out of it, saying Marmalade was under her protection. The fact that Marmalade was still young enough to have retained the juvenile spots on his fur may also have inhibited Rarrgh—though mature male kzin sometimes killed kittens, they also developed a protective reflex towards them, and Rarrgh now had new kittens of his own. Still, Rarrgh was boiling with rage and vicarious shame, perhaps, indeed, to the extent that his ziirgrah sense was affected by the effort of keeping his emotions in check.

  With somewhat more difficulty, Leonie talked Marmalade out of his hiding place. “Will he hurt me?” he asked, gazing up at Rarrgh with huge, terrified eyes. In all her dealing with kzin, Leonie wore unobtrusive but very strong armor under her clothes. It was just as well, for Marmalade seized her arm for comfort, too frightened to retract his claws, now looking down with fear at a small mouse-like creature that had been eating some spilled grain. Rarrgh seized the arm and threw it off her. Marmalade’s claws had not penetrated Leonie’s shielding or drawn blood, but still Marmalade was closer to death than he had ever been in that moment.

  They joined the little crowd. Fortunately, there were a number of other kzin in the gathering, and this made Marmalade a little less conspicuous, at the back of the group and partly hidden from the VIPs on the ceremonial dais by a tree-stump. He was, if anything, even more frightened of telepaths than of ordinary kzinti, and Leonie was relieved to find there were none present. Some drums, an important part of many kzin ceremonies, were produced, and Vaemar’s younger kittens danced on them.

  Von Pelt and the nameless kzin brought the jar forward and placed it on a table covered with cloth of gold. Marmalade, Rykermann noticed, looking a little nervously behind him, was staring at them with an unusual intensity. The pair bowed to Vaemar-Riit. Then, with a few well-chosen words from the old man, they stepped modestly back into the crowd. Their aircar was nearby.

  The next part of the ceremony called for Nils Rykermann to present the jar to Vaemar on behalf of humanity, an enduring symbol of the respect in which humanity held him. Vaemar would then make a speech of acknowledgement, to be followed by a feast for which two sorts of food had been prepared.

  Marmalade’s telepathic sense was dormant and unschooled but not completely absent. Screaming a single word, he burst out of the crowd like a rocket, scattering humans and kzin left and right. He snatched up the jar and ran with it to the edge of the crowd. He threw it to the ground and flung himself upon it to cover it before it exploded, scattering hydrofluoric acid in all directions.

  Between the acid and the explosion there was not enough left of Marmalade to place in a shrine. One of Vaemar-Riit’s kittens bears his name.

  UNLESS HE WAS STAYING over with a woman he’d met, Buford Early slept in his autodoc. At his age most people died in their sleep, and while he wasn’t as afraid of dying as most people, it struck him as an undignified way to go after surviving five wars. On the other hand, his psychist program told him it was really a way of distancing himself, since the lack of a bed in his apartment meant that any woman who came home with him couldn’t stay over herself. The clincher, however, was that it was the most comfortable place he’d ever had to sleep.

  He was not accustomed to being startled when he woke up.

  He was certainly not accustomed to being so badly startled, ever. There was a head floating outside the observation window.

  It was a head of truly astonishing ugliness, resembling nothing so much as a really cruel caricature of a dragon. A bulging snout of a nose hung over a rigid and lipless bony beak, whose molar-textured gash extended back to the hinge of the jaws. Huge ears flanked a face with the texture of boiled leather, which had been crammed into the bottom third of a swollen bald head, which looked as if someone had overinflated the brain and then stuck another on in back.

  Which was more or less what had happened. The thing belonged to a Protector, which meant that the human race was about to begin a long period of being micromanaged like so many small and rather stupid children.

  Buford reached into the receptacles adjacent to hi
s hands, but instead of finding a stunner and a one-shot puncher, he felt only small pieces of paper. He brought them up to look at them. Each had one word printed on it: COLD.

  Next to the head, his robe, draped over nothing, waved itself at the window. He’d have to bide his time, keep his mind off the subject, wait for a chance, and take it. Meanwhile, he opened the lid of the ‘doc, sat up, and said, “George Olduvai?”

  The Protector rolled its eyes and said, “Puns are the pornography of mathematicians. Jack Brennan is dead.”

  “How did that happen?” he exclaimed, taking the robe as he got out.

  “A weapon whose programming he hadn’t supervised himself activated a laser and cut him in half at the waist. Aberrantly careless, I suspect suicide. As a breeder he seems to have been sociable, so he never got used to being the smartest person he knew.”

  As Early tied his robe sash, he felt for the coil of Sinclair filament in the capsule at the end. The capsule was there, but it held another piece of paper that read COLD. “So who are you?” he said, crumpling the paper and tossing it toward the cleaner.

  “You can call me Ursula.”

  “You’re female?” he said, then winced at the gaffe.

  She let it go. “If memory serves. Let me get you a sandwich,” she said, and the control panel started doing things.

  “Can I see something besides a head, please?”

  “Sure.” A pressure suit appeared below the head, mostly covered with pockets. It looked like a suit of medieval armor that had just been swallowed by an enormous mutant potholder. Though she didn’t have the accent, it was like a Belter’s suit, with a conspicuous and distinctive emblem on the chest. The picture was of a wheel station, seen from along its axis, and covered with weapon emplacements, with two of the eight spokes shot away on either side. “How’s grilled cheese and bacon suit you?”

  “Actually I was planning on cooking the roast I have in the freezer.”

  “Sorry. Gone.”

  He goggled at her. “That was five pounds of cultured beef!”

  “Marshall Early, Pleasance was conquered almost a year ago. We’re at war. I was hungry. And anyway, you got cheated. That was grain-fed—I distinctly tasted gluten peptides.” She handed him a plate bearing a sizzling handmeal. Doubly annoyed though he was, his mind was working; sandwich was an archaic term used by his generation and by Pleasanters, which suggested she was the latter, and must have had some fairly interesting experiences in the past year. He bit into the sandwich.

  About a minute later, she handed him a hot towel and a bulb of cold milk. After he’d used both, he said, “That was good.”

  “Want another?”

  “Yes.” As that was being handed to him, he said, “I haven’t used the ‘doc foodmaker in too long. I didn’t remember it was this good.”

  “It wasn’t. I rebuilt it when I was reprogramming the ‘doc to remove the Puppeteer bug from your head.”

  She was fast: she caught the sandwich three feet off the ground. “The what?” he said.

  “Bug. The reason you’ve been so much more relaxed and easygoing since you were wounded in the Third War.”

  “Fifth.”

  She waved a hand. “The one before this one. It’s why you’ve been trying negotiation.”

  “Well,” he said, “they say a pacifist is just a general who’s been shot.”

  “In the brain.”

  “Sorry?”

  “ ‘A pacifist is a general who’s been shot in the brain.’ ”

  “That’s not how I remember it.”

  “Of course not, you’ve been shot in the brain. I replenished the boosterspice supply while I was working on the ’doc, you’ll get up to speed soon.”

  “That couldn’t have been too hard.”

  “Whatever makes you—ah. No, boosterspice is not based on tree-of-life, it just activates some of the same inert gene complexes. If a Protector wanted to make people younger, the stuff would repair gene damage instead of just patching over it. Good for about fifty years. Here, eat. I’ve also added a beetle to the ’doc programming. It’ll spread into other ‘docs, so they’ll recognize and remove the implants in other people after yours gets its regular update from the manufacturer. Humans have been doing entirely too well at fighting kzinti. There were supposed to be a couple of more wars to get you into shape.”

  “For what?”

  “For whatever the Puppeteers need you both to fight so they don’t have to. It’s a dangerous universe out there, and they want lots of cannon fodder between them and the rest of it.”

  “Ursula,” he said, “that’s paranoid, and this is me saying it.”

  “Marshall,” she said, “I’m a Protector. I don’t act on supposition. I confirmed it.”

  “How?”

  “Interrogated a Puppeteer.”

  “I thought they killed themselves if anyone tried that.”

  “They do. Not only that, there’s automatic reflexes that kill them in various ways if you prevent them from doing it voluntarily. Took me fifteen tries until I had them all covered.”

  This time her hand was right under the sandwich. She led him to his desk, where he sat, and shook, and said, “There are fourteen dead Puppeteers now?” (“Conniptions” didn’t begin to describe how they would react. “Extinction” might.)

  “Don’t be silly. I just recorded one and kept editing the pattern. I noticed the transfer booth system was bugged, so I took advantage of that.” She handed him another bulb, and he ate and drank in silence as he thought about this.

  When he was done, he said, “You duplicated a Puppeteer?”

  “Hell, no. I just flat-out kidnapped him, then replaced the original recording when I was done and sent him on his way. With a few minor edits, so he didn’t notice the discrepancy in the time.”

  It occurred to Early that she’d killed the original.

  She must have been able to read his face and body language better than he could imagine. “You do realize that, unless you assume the existence of souls, a transfer booth kills the user and delivers a replacement,” she said. “It’s how you can tell no Protector has ever been to Jinx. There are people who believe transfer booths don’t send the soul along, and on Jinx that means the only way for them to get from one End to the other in a reasonable time is by suborbital craft. A Protector would have put a hullmetal tube through the planet for them to use.”

  “You’d go to that much trouble and expense to humor a superstitious belief?”

  “You let people vote.”

  He didn’t have an answer for that.

  “Anyhow, that was why Lucas Garner suppressed the human-built version back in the twenty-first century. That and the fact that you could, technically, make copies of anyone who used one. He reckoned you’d have to make murder legal.”

  “Can you? Copy people?”

  “Sure. Of course, blacking out the entire planetary power grid for eight months to charge up for it would be a bit of a giveaway. Garner wasn’t so hot on the math part, more concerned about souls.”

  “Do we have souls?” he said.

  “How should I know? And why would I care? Souls are of significance after death. That puts them just exactly out of my jurisdiction. My job is to keep you all alive and reproducing and happy enough to stick with it.”

  “The Mor—” he said, and shut up.

  “The Morlocks on Wunderland took an interest because they had never been exposed to the concept, and were too busy to think the implications through.”

  “You know about them.”

  “Of course. I even know whose fault they were. Relax, you’re not in trouble for approving Project Cherubim. I’m a Protector, I expect breeders to screw up.”

  “You have a problem with creating Protectors to fight the kzinti?”

  “I have a problem with creating an army of immortal nursemaids to supervise the human race.”

  “They were exposed to a lot of radiation on the trip. They were supposed to live j
ust long enough to win the war.”

  “Interesting theory.” (Somehow she made that rhyme with “you schmuck.”) “One of the reasons I think Brennan’s death was suicide was, if he’d made an effort to survive, he could have recovered. I know I could. Anything that doesn’t kill a Protector outright can heal.”

  “You said he was cut in half.”

  “Top half still worked.” She patted his arm. “Don’t worry about it. All the human Protectors from Home are headed for the Core to kill off the Pak, and I have serious issues with manipulative parents. I might add that you, personally, are very lucky that the plan failed.”

  His mind raced but got no traction. “Why?”

  “Marshall, who did you consider the sexiest woman in the world when you were growing up?”

  “Well, you know, it’s been hundreds of years—”

  “Buford.”

  He looked at her and remembered who, or rather what, he was trying to be evasive with. “Leslie Cordwainer.”

  She got a pad out of a pocket, scribbled on it, and said, “Not bad. I take it the pendulum had swung back to Rubens.”

  “Hah. No, the Dead Wirehead look was in full force. She kind of stood out.”

  “Literally. Mine weren’t that big. Now, can you imagine what her sex life was like?”

  “I have been known to manage not to for days at a time now,” he said mordantly.

  “Sorry. But I need you to imagine that, thanks to you, she has become an asexual, superintelligent killer, having nothing which would qualify as a conscience by your standards, and with reflexes so fast she can dodge pistol slugs, cells with internal reinforcements that would allow her to survive a few hits with nothing more than bruises, and bones and muscles so strong she can take the gun away and rip it apart,” she took a breath, “who remembers every detail of her sexual history and knows where you live.”