Man-Kzin Wars XII, Larry Niven [readnow .TXT] 📗

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