Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XII Read online

  Richard suddenly laughed, getting it under control just as quickly.

  Krosp didn’t seem offended, just puzzled: “What’s funny?”

  “I was just thinking: all you need to join the Gasperik Society is a motorcycle.”

  “What’s that?”

  “An outfit established a long time ago, even before space habitats, with the stated intention of being prepared for alien invasion. It was sort of a literary club, really. Every member was theoretically supposed to own, and keep in good order, a motorcycle, a guitar, a spacesuit, and an elephant gun. A kzinti sidearm could surely stop an elephant, we’ve seen your suit, and that ought to qualify as a guitar.”

  “Yes, I know about the Gasperik Division,” said Krosp. “It was part of the Hellflare Corps. What’s a motorcycle?”

  “Oops. It’s a vehicle with two wheels in a line, with a seat in between. Very popular in rough country. Blackmail?” Richard exclaimed.

  “Oh, no,” Krosp assured him. “Blackmail is an insult that warrants death, being a threat to publicly claim that the victim is dishonorable. However, when the question is one of looking like a fool for the rest of one’s life, solicitation of bribery is another matter entirely. I am pleased that you were here when he arrived, as it saved considerable explanation.”

  Gay began to laugh. Richard, thinking of the abuse they had been unable to stop, joined in. Slaverexpert came over and said, “Lord Krosp, do you want to mention the plan?”

  “Oh yes. Slaverexpert has—you have a question,” he said to Richard.

  “I never heard the kzinti Name Krosp before,” Richard said, still laughing.

  “It’s not a kzinti Name. It was a character from human literature, a brilliant leader who provided calm insight and perspective when no one around him could see a solution.”

  “What’s it from?”

  “I don’t know. The Patriarch suggested it. Did you want to hear Slaverexpert’s plan?”

  “Sure.”

  “Most of Kzrral is disagreeably hot. We plan to put gravity-planers on its moon, after which we will gradually drag it further from its primary over the course of the next few centuries—that is, Slaverexpert and my heirs will.”

  The two humans goggled at him. Gay said, “That’ll cost a fortune!”

  “We have two. We expect to get another, as we will be able to improve the health and reliability of telepaths all over the Patriarchy.”

  “How?”

  “We’re going to raise catnip.”

  FOR FRANK AND PEGGY,

  BUT ESPECIALLY FOR JIM.

  PEACE AND FREEDOM

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Matthew Joseph Harrington

  One of the less appreciated points of being the smartest organic intelligence in the known universe is that, when you find out you’ve screwed up, you get to feel much stupider than anyone else can.

  Peace Corben switched the hyperwave to the Project Supervision channel and said, “Ling.”

  “Problem?” said Jennifer Ling.

  “You need to divert resources and build a couple more Quantum II ships. The Outsiders have just informed me that someone’s mining the Hot Spot, and I need to take Cordelia back to Known Space.”

  “The Outsiders called you?” The Outsiders were a life-form whose metabolism was based on the quantum effects that cropped up at superconductive temperatures. (Probably. If anyone ever tried to dissect one, he hadn’t gotten back with details. Or at all.) They made their living all through the Galaxy by selling information to the races they encountered as they cruised past inhabited systems; the idea of them volunteering information was weirdness on the order of a Protector trusting a stranger’s good intentions.

  “They still owe me money for mass conversion and a new form of math. They’re very scrupulous. Unfulfilled obligations give them bubbles in the liquid helium or something.”

  “Can I give you backup?”

  “Wouldn’t help. I’ve got a zip, if necessary.” She could keep breeders in the zip, the Sinclair accelerator field. She could spend several years talking human breeders into becoming protectors, while a few days passed outside the field. Instant allies.

  “We’re on it,” Jennifer said.

  Peace signed off and moved Cordelia out of the main site on thrusters, to avoid dragging anything along. Of a population of almost two hundred thousand Protectors, more than half were working on the primary disintegrator array. (The region wasn’t what you could call crowded, since they were spread through an area that would not quite have fitted into the orbit of Pluto, but alignment was important, and courtesy counts. Especially between people who do things like vaporizing planets for raw materials.) She paused to note that the work was going well—arrangements to disperse the oncoming particle blast from the Core explosion could be complete in a matter of decades—then went to hyperdrive.

  She knew of two races that could be mining antimatter from Gregory Pelton’s rogue solar system. One, human, had actually visited the Hot Spot briefly. The other species might have noticed, at closest approach to their home system, the inordinate neutrino production, from annihilation of interstellar matter, that had given it its nickname among Protectors. Both races qualified as very bad news, especially since the only way for either race to be doing it would be as a result of a massive cultural shift—greater than what a human Protector had arranged three and a half centuries back.

  Therefore, somebody had done something unusually stupid. Peace never even wondered who would have to fix it.

  Shleer couldn’t take another minute of the horror in the harem, not one, so he went up the wall to the loops in the ceiling and used them to get across to the exhaust vent. The plastic wrapper was still in its crevice, and he put it on and squirmed out through a passage that shouldn’t have held a kzintosh—was specifically designed not to, in fact; that was the whole point. It had been widened at key spots by Felix, of course.

  Shleer missed Felix Buckminster. The ancient, fully-Named cyborg kzin might not have known what to do, but at least he would have been someone to talk to. Shleer was as alone as any kzin could be on his own planet.

  He got to the death trap—stasis-wire mesh—and got out a grippy to work the maintenance controls, which were designed for Jotok use. The access panel slid back, Shleer checked for observers and emerged, and the panel shut again. Shleer opened the outside of the maintenance duct with a panel which wasn’t supposed to be movable, swung out over empty air, and closed the panel, clinging to handholds invisible from below. He hung upside down by a foot while he removed the wrapper—if a human could do it, he could do it!—then hauled himself back up, took a better hold, and put it into another crevice.

  Then he turned and leapt toward the God of the Jotok as an arm went past.

  The souvenir of conquest of the Jotoki homeworld was immense, but there was no way to see the thing while settled firmly enough to leap the full distance, and as it was silent in its rotation Shleer simply had no choice but to remember the timing after seeing it upside down. If he ever got it wrong, there was going to be considerable puzzlement after they found his body; it was about a two-hundred-foot drop, from nowhere anybody knew about.

  Getting back was always a lot easier, though. He faced his target then.

  He got to the end of the arm just as it passed the floor, and gave himself a light, military-looking brushing once he was down. A front-and-back medallion went over his head, labeling him a Patriarch’s Guest—well, he was—and he padded comfortably into the more modern areas of Rrit’s Past.

  It was a bad habit to get into a routine, but this was something nobody knew about anyway, so the first place he always went was to see the Patriarch’s Peer.

  Harvey Mossbauer stood in the exact spot he had been in when the bomb decapitated him. They’d had to pretty much build a new harem anyway, so that was done in a more secure location and the House of the Patriarch’s Past was expanded to include this area. Reassembling him must have been awfully difficult, and the
re had been some dispute about whether to include both arms—one having been lost a couple of floors up. Patriarch Hrocht-Ao-Rritt had said all of him, though, and nobody had altered that since.

  He had his gear these days. Some Patriarchs had thought he looked more fierce all by himself, but he looked more right with his weapons. He stood poised to spin and kick, flechette launcher strapped to the extended forearm, anemone in the hand drawn back to thrust. Five empty slots were left in the anemone bandolier, a nice historical touch; he’d left four in Companions who had decided to engage in claw-and-fang combat.

  They were the only kzinti he’d killed before reaching the harem. He’d disabled more than sixty-four—

  The bandolier, Shleer was annoyed to see, was now filled, by the new and unhistoried Tender-of-Legends no doubt. Shleer took four and put a fifth into the Peer’s hand.

  He wished the Peer was alive. The Peer had clearly known how to manage his priorities, and wouldn’t attack kzinti until the real problem was solved.

  Shleer realized someone was coming, and began moving to remain continuously out of sight. He was extremely annoyed at the interruption, which was the first of its kind.

  A Tnuctip scurried in, through, and out the far side without so much as looking at the Peer. Shleer was doubly offended. They’d never come in here before; the least the little monster could have done was appreciate the display.

  Though it might not have had a choice.

  Come to that, what could it be doing? The only things down that way were still older history (which he doubted was its goal) or the servant quarters, with their laboratories—and the lifeboat they’d come from.

  Shleer considered. What would the Peer have done in this situation?

  Harvey Mossbauer (he deserved three Names, but no other was ever discovered, and it would have been disrespectful to assign him one) had come, after many years, to inflict justice. He had infallibly turned toward the harem wherever there was a choice; he had used ammunition that disabled without being immediately fatal, causing pursuit to be obstructed by autodoc remotes; he had blasted walls to open shortcuts, or to block reinforcements, but the only antipersonnel charge he’d set off was in the harem itself. The Patriarch had killed his family; he killed the Patriarch’s family; now they were even.

  The Peer would have gathered information. And he would have made plans.

  Shleer followed the Tnuctip.

  Larry Greenberg stepped into the stasis capsule and the door closed.

  Suddenly the gravity was different—but lighter? This wasn’t Jinx!

  The door opened. There was an alien standing there, resembling nothing so much as the mummy of a patient dead of terminal arthritis. With a head like a deformed basketball. It wore a white sleeveless singlet from neck to knees, apparently made out of filled pockets.

  A really smart alien, too. Mind too fast to read. “Speak English?” he said helplessly.

  “Yes, but I still have to point at the menus,” it replied.

  “What?”

  “Come out, will you?”

  He came out, feeling foolish, and stopped. The Lazy Eight III, colony ship to Jinx, was gone. His stasis capsule had been brought inside another, bigger(!) ship—“What the hell happened?”

  “From the damage I’d say the ramscoop field missed a good-sized speck of dust. Opened the crew module without disabling the ram, just as they were preparing for turnover. That was about eight and a half centuries ago. Nobody could afford to rescue you. It’s now 2965 CE. Read this, it’ll give you a general overview of the basics.” It handed him what seemed to be a sheet of white cardboard—with touchpads on the margin. When he reached, it clasped a cuff on his left wrist and watched it for a moment. “Medical,” it said. “—Hungry? Of course, a meal would have been extra weight. Read while you eat.” She led him to another room, where he had the novel and dubious experience of seeing food dispensed by a machine. It was good, though.

  The first part was just after his time—Lucas Garner was involved again. A Pak Protector—an alien, sort of—had arrived from the Galactic Core, with a supply of roots that would turn hominids of the right age into asexual fighting machines with superhuman intelligence. Larry got as far the description of what happened to Jack Brennan, and looked up and said, “You’re a human being?”

  “Yah. I know your name already; mine’s Peace Corben.” It was done eating—from a vessel the size of a punchbowl—and added, “It gets worse. I’ve got stuff to do, keep reading.” It stood.

  “How do you eat that fast with no teeth?” (Teeth fell out during the change, and Peace Corben’s lips and gums were fused into a bony beak.)

  “I’ve got a tongue that could shell oysters.” It ran out. (Fast, too.)

  He kept reading.

  It got worse.

  Brennan had exterminated the Martians, expanded the power of the ARM to the rewriting of history and brainwashing of all of Sol System. His successor/apprentice had released a virus on the colony world Home that killed about 90 percent of the population, turning the rest into an army of childless Protectors. (Protectors who had descendants recognized them by smell, and methodically slaughtered anything that looked like it might interfere with their populating the universe. Protectors whose instincts were not triggered by the smell of descendants either quit caring and starved, or worked to protect their entire species.) The Protectors of Home had killed off some incoming Pak scouts, then headed toward the Core to exterminate the rest of the species.

  They did this because the Pak were all coming out in the direction of Earth. Earth was known to be habitable, and their own world wasn’t going to be.

  This was because the Galaxy was exploding.

  Greenberg’s head was exploding. He took a smoke break before he read on—

  This was known hereabouts because it had been seen: The puppeteers had developed an improved hyperdrive, from mathematical hints dropped by Peace Corben after she’d become a protector. (The puppeteers had fled the Galaxy as soon as they saw the films.)

  She’d become a Protector when she’d gone to Home fleeing a kzinti invasion of her home planet. (She had subsequently won that war single-handedly by walking into the Patriarchy’s Central Command inside an accelerator field, walking out with their entire order of battle, and arranging for every kzinti attack after the first to be met with overwhelming force.)

  The kzinti were now mining antimatter, from a stray solar cloud that was passing through the Galaxy at about point eight C. And that meant that her arrangements to alter kzinti civilization had been changed by someone capable of mental control.

  The protector came back while he was reading her speculations about what was happening on Kzin. He looked up and said, “You did all this to collect me?”

  “Right. The records don’t say where the device was put.”

  Back in 2107, Larry Greenberg had been Earth’s top telepath. Greenberg had been put into contact with an alien, Kzanol, who’d been in stasis for, it turned out, two billion years. Kzanol had been a much more powerful telepath—a Slaver of the Slaver Empire, with the Power to control dozens of ordinary minds—and his transferred memories had overwhelmed Greenberg’s personality for weeks. There had ensued a hunt for something which would have made Kzanol, essentially, God:

  “You mean the stasis field with the Slaver amplifier in it?”

  “No, Lucas Garner’s hoverchair, I always wanted it for my weapon collection.” Given that Garner had then been a 169-year-old paranoid, that was almost reasonable; his travel chair probably violated all kinds of safety laws, and possibly one or two disarmament treaties.

  Greenberg flushed a little and said, “It was dropped into Jupiter.”

  “Good. I was afraid Garner would have talked them into the sun. That’d be difficult.”

  “You can retrieve it?”

  “What do you think I’ve been working on while you read, a better mousetrap?”

  “Oh…Still mice around, huh?”

  “Yeah, but
changed some. All that radiation during the Kzinti Wars. We’ve signed a treaty, though.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Yes.”

  “…You are kidding.”

  “Yes.”

  He blinked a few times, shook his head violently, and said, “Where’s everybody else?”

  “Still in stasis. I wanted you apprised of the situation before I extended the accelerator field around them. I mean to spend about fifteen subjective years in this ship, in part to get them adapted before I release them, and I need you to look after their sanity.”

  “I thought you had an emergency.”

  “To the rest of the universe it’ll be about eleven days. Stasis won’t work inside any kind of time-distortion field, so I had to tell you separately.”

  “Wait a minute, what about my wife?”

  “She’s here. I got everybody.”

  “I mean, we wanted children.”

  Peace nodded. “This vessel was built to house up to half a million Protectors and their fighter craft. You won’t find it crowded in fifteen years, I don’t care how enthusiastic you are.”

  The Tnuctip walked right past a group of older kzintosh, who were following a Pierin tutor. (Paid regular staff were a recent innovation, but one that seemed to work. All it took was regarding a contract as an oath.) There were six to avoid, not counting the Pierin, who wasn’t being paid to notice Shleer. The group fell silent as the Tnuctip scurried by.

  “Here we have the tablets of Great Sire Chof-Yff-Rrit, who, in amongst his personal tastes, specified the penalties for willfully ignoring a known gesture of surrender, which act was a great contribution to all kzinti cultures, and may be argued to have led to unification thereof under the Patriarchy. Who knows how humans signal surrender?” the Pierin asked. It would take more than the end of civilization to shut a Pierin up. Shleer crept along the wall behind his siblings—far behind.

  K’nar-Rritt, who was likely to be the next Patriarch, said dryly, “Their hearts stop beating. It’s not always a sure sign, though.”