Man-Kzin Wars XI, Hal Colbatch [story books to read .txt] 📗

exterminate them. If so, it would first be necessary to get them far from human space, as they would doubtless panic and slaughter everything in sight once the procedure began. Doubtless they were aware of the possibility of higher levels of hyperdrive, the next of which was at (if the drive's manual of operation was based on the assumptions it seemed to be) 6!x4!x2!/10=3456 times the speed of the first level, or near enough to .8 lightyears per minute. It was always profitable to go faster, so they would be doing research already, so she would only have to have a few algorithms published in technical journals to get them out of the blind alleys. A publicity trip to the Core would give them a look at whatever the Pak migration had been fleeing, and they'd run immediately. That would give Peace a few centuries to decide what to do with them.

The kzinti could be disposed of more promptly.

When Peace was too full to eat any more, she reprogrammed and partly rebuilt the autodoc, then got in for a full scan. Brennan had created a human-infecting form of the virus that changed the Pak (or their relatives) into Protectors, and he and his descendant Truesdale had brought it to Home, to prepare a surprise for the Pak Protector scouts they'd lured away from Earth. Peace needed to find out what it did. The results showed there were things Brennan hadn't mentioned, and that Truesdale most likely hadn't known.

Each lung had an extra lobe, now, so the right had four and the left three. The lobes were now separated by membranes, so that puncturing one wouldn't collapse the rest of the lung. Ribs had thickened and spread to accommodate the change. There was now a two-chamber iliac heart in the groin, drawing blood from the lower body. It pumped it directly into the new lung lobes, which oxygenated it and added it to the blood returning from the rest of the body. Running this mix through the original lungs produced blood supersaturated with oxygen, which the expanded brain needed desperately. The original heart developed thicker muscle and redundant feeder vessels, and the extra oxygen kept it from strain. The extra pass through the lungs would also allow her to function when the partial pressure of oxygen in local air was too low to keep an unchanged human conscious.

The lymphatic system had developed one-way valves, such as veins had, so that the fluid was kept circulating by changes in pressure as muscles were used. The spleen had developed into an organ much like the liver in texture, and its new function seemed to be scavenging trace minerals.

The end joint of each finger was now able to move independently of the rest of the finger, like the end of a human thumb.

There was a hard shell contained within each eyelid. The shell was resilient, and opaque. The eye itself had a second lens behind the original. The new lens was normally flat, but could be made concave enough for work as close as an inch from the pupil. The original lens was saturated with a substance which responded to chemical cues in milliseconds, to become tinted (the usual state), polarized, or clear. Without the Protector additives, this chemical turned the lens white, producing cataracts. (Brennan and Truesdale, products of Fertility Board selection, would have known nothing of this, and would sometimes have needed sunglasses.) The pupil could now open all the way to the edge of the iris, gathering far more light, and the retina had grown a tapetum, like a cat's eye, to give the receptors a second try at the photons. The progressive die-off of the retina's color-detecting rods was compensated by the trick of tinting the lenses different colors, providing strong contrast. It occurred to her that the instinctive attempt to see this degree of contrast, by unaltered elderly humans, finally explained gingham. The preprocessing layer of the retina was thicker, too; and as a huge amount of new brain growth had been in the optic center, image persistence was longer. A Protector could read a newspaper page held up twenty feet away if the light was good.

The olfactory region of the brain was now almost half as big as the optic center used to be. This, like the finger change, was implicit in Brennan's assertions; a Protector had to be able to distinguish one protein molecule from another when they differed by only one amino acid in one place. The processing involved was tremendous.

The brain had more than tripled in size. The new material at the back of the head was mostly three big lobes of cortex, each one a bigger processing net than one of the human brain's cortex hemispheres; and the hemispheres she'd started out with had grown as well. One of these five lobes sufficed for routine activity, allowing the rest to sleep when not needed. Processing networks required something akin to a dream state from time to time, or they began giving aberrant results; a Protector must have at least one cortical lobe in dream state just about all the time. A human Protector could have two in dream state, and still be smarter than a Pak Protector going full out.

There had been nerves dealing with facial muscles and genital response, and those nerves were dead and resorbed in metamorphosis. The brain centers formerly connected to them were now sensing with, and sending commands to, new nerves in the improved fingertips. Small wonder if Protectors enjoyed making things.

The lining of the small intestine was thick, and dense with blood vessels. Intestinal tissue was being constantly converted to embryonic cells, and those were entering the bloodstream, attaching themselves to cells that were functioning improperly. Once there, a new cell wrapped completely around the target cell, took up the cell's proper function, and ate it, digesting its proteins and nucleic acids into individual amino acids and nucleotides. Most of these were released into the blood plasma. The