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

adopt the entire species; Peace Corben had done a fine job indeed of caring for her wards. Decidedly better than a certain psychist.

* * *

Buckminster flinched as Corky burst—almost exploded, really—into tears. He said, "You want me to take that?" and reached for the screen.

Corky looked at him.

Buckminster carefully drew back his hand. Corky was taut as a bowstring, and his face bore an expression of kzinlike wrath. "I'll just go get a drink," Buckminster said, and kept his movements slow as he got up and left.

Buckminster called Peace as soon as he was clear. "Corky's in death-seek," he said.

"That was quick."

"Oh. What did you do?"

"Injected him with one of my witch's brews. He thought he was forgetting his family, so I put together some stuff that'll let him call up old memories without swamping them with irrelevant associations."

"How did you manage that?"

"I synthesized the things that let me do it," she said. "Do you want details, or did you have plans for the next month?"

"I was thinking of eating and sleeping, which I'm sure would slow things down. What do we do now?"

"Have you gotten the Silver Bullets out of his ship?"

"Oh yes." He'd done that before starting the cleanup.

"Then you keep out of sight, and we wait for him to come see me."

* * *

Corky was waiting for her in the kitchen when she went in for a scheduled meal. (As a breeder she'd suffered from depression and hypothyroidism, so she was accustomed to eating whether she felt hungry or not—yet another lucky break for humanity, since there was no tree-of-life growing where she made the change to Protector.) He said, "I need to leave." Then he actually looked at her.

Peace was wearing a knee-length singlet, in white, with the usual array of pockets down both sides to the knees. There were black letters on the chest:

BECAUSE I'M THE

PROTECTOR,

THAT'S WHY!

His fierce expression went blank with surprise, then developed into amusement and dismay—the latter largely at the amusement. He cleared his throat superfluously, then said, "I need a pressure suit and a schedule of the Patriarch's movements—I want to know when he'll be away from his palace."

"You've given up on assassination."

"Yes," he confirmed unnecessarily. "I still don't think it's a bad idea, but his successor wouldn't understand. The trouble with kzinti is they're still too much in shock over losing. They don't take it personally."

"True," she realized, suddenly admiring his plan. "He won't be traveling for a few months yet."

"I have to get back in condition anyway, and practice with my lift belt, so the pressure suit first, I think."

"First we eat."

"I'm not hungry."

"Don't make me cut up your meat for you."

That look of dismayed amusement returned. Corky shut up.

* * *

Less than a day later he was gone. Peace had gotten a tissue sample in the course of fitting the suit, and was telomerizing some cells when Buckminster found her. "You let him go," the kzin said.

"Had to."

"Are those his cells? Are you cloning him?"

"Yes and no."

"What does that mean?"

"Yes, they are, and no, I'm not. I'd been planning to provide infertile women of good character with viable ova containing my original gene pattern, suitably modified to meet local fertility laws, and large trust funds. I had enough for one or two Peace Corbens per human world. Now, though, I'm adding his genes to the recipe. The paranoia can be retained as a recessive, and there'll be more variety in their appearance."

"You're having children with him, you mean."

"Near as I can."

"Why?"

Peace looked up at him. "Same reason I had to let him go. He's a good father, Buckminster. Whether he believes it or not—he's a very good father."

* * *

Harvey Mossbauer's family had been killed and eaten during the Fourth Man-Kzin War. Many years after the truce and after a good deal of monomaniacal preparation, Mossbauer had landed alone and armed on Kzin. He had killed four kzinti males and set off a bomb in the harem of the Patriarch before the guards managed to kill him. . . . The stuffed skin was so scarred that you had to look twice to tell its species; but in the House of the Patriarch's Past it was on a tall pedestal with a hullmetal plaque, and there was nothing around it but floor. . . . 

It's safer to eat white arsenic than human meat. 

The Hunting Park

Larry Niven

October 20, 2899 CE

"Why do they call you 'white hunter'?"

I smiled but didn't grin. "It's anyone from somewhere else who conducts hunting for sport in Africa. I was born in Confinement Asteroid and raised in Ceres and Tahiti." He was wondering about my skin, of course. The parts he could see, hands and face, are jet black, from moderately black American ancestry subjected to three decades of raw sunlight in space and in the islands.

"Odd," said the kzin, but he waved a big furry hand, claws sheathed, dismissing the subject. Waldo had ordered hot milk with black rum; he slurped noisily. I'd ordered the same. He asked, "Why is it taking so long to arrange a safari?"

"First rule is, everything takes forever when you're gearing up. When you're out in the field, everything interesting happens before you can blink. That's when you find out what you forgot to take."

We studied each other. Waldo was big for a kzin, maybe five hundred pounds, maybe eight feet four or five inches tall. No chairs here could hold him; he squatted in a cleared space in a corner of the restaurant. His fur was marmalade, with a darker stripe diagonally down his chest and abdomen that followed four long runnels of scar tissue, and a shorter scar, also darkly outlined, that just missed his left eye and ear. A thong around his neck held a few leathery scraps: dried ears, I presumed. He kept his claws sheathed as carefully as I kept my lips closed. You don't show your teeth to a kzin.

I hadn't volunteered for this. What sane person would? It was