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

amusement. Greenberg had the unusual combination of perfect comprehension coupled with no ear at all. The alien was of a race called chukting, and of his names and titles the important one was Tinchamank. He was having a lot of trouble figuring out what Greenberg was saying. Admittedly there was a trick to the accent: the language was fourth-stage. (Much vocabulary is onomatopoetic. Tribal gatherers hear and repeat the sounds made by sticks and rocks. Hunters, herders, and farmers pick up animal sounds. Civilized people add metallic noises, and advanced peoples include sounds made by complex machinery. Names of things tend to change last as a language alters, so the chuktings must have been civilized for thousands of years.)

"There's a map in the sleeve," Greenberg said.

"Thanks." She got it out. The Milky Way had been a little sloppier in shape two billion years ago; of course the spiral arms bore no relationship to present arrangements. The sapphire pin would be Tinchamank's home system—well outside the main galactic lens. Might be worth looking at later. She spoke to him: "A long time has passed. Your home is gone. I will learn what you need to eat. Come."

Greenberg gasped suddenly, then recovered as he put up his shield. Tinchamank curled into what must be his fetal posture. Doubled wrist joints, looked useful. Peace picked him up and took him to the analytical doc. She limited the stunner effects to local anesthesia, since the hearing nodes looked very efficient and thus vulnerable, and waited while the microprobes sampled organs.

"Get any samples of that agent? Hamilton?" Greenberg said.

"Obviously not," she replied. "I'd have set up a culture tank at once. You should have figured that out without asking."

"Big talk from someone who can't walk and chew gum," he retorted, nettled.

A beak was no good for chewing gum. She gave him another stare. "You've been saving these up."

"I find you inspiring. How did you manage to scare the director of the ARM?"

"Threatened to build a giant robot and destroy Tokyo."

"Holy cow. Why Tokyo?"

"Traditional."

Simultaneously exasperated and amused, he said, "Goddamn it, I can never tell when you're kidding!"

"True," she said sadly. She looked at the doc readout and said, "Odd. His ribosomes are just like ours."

"Aren't everybody's? I mean, they're how DNA gets implemented, right?" He'd been a colonist back in the days when it took a city's annual income to send a ship to another star, and he'd studied everything that might be useful to qualify. And it wasn't like some Ivy League education—he'd had to understand the material.

She nodded, pleased with him. "Yes. But our Pak ancestors, and bandersnatchi, and the photosynthetic yeast everybody else is evolved from, all came from Tnuctipun design labs. The chukting were never anywhere near them, and they have the same ribosomes."

"The what?"

"The chukting. Tinchamank here."

"Oh. Kzanol called them 'racarliwun.' "

"Why?"

The question seemed to startle him. "Well, he named the planet after his grandfather Racarliw, who built the family stage-tree farm up into a major industrial enterprise."

"So this would be someone who used all his income to recapitalize the business, and didn't set anything aside for his descendants, which would be why Kzanol was out prospecting and ended up on Earth to cause the deaths of hundreds of human beings?"

"Um. Yeah."

"So the hell with him. As I said, the chukting have ribosomes just like ours, but are of completely unconnected origin. Which is weird."

"Panspermia?" Theorists had often speculated that life had only needed to evolve once per galaxy, then spread offplanet due to meteor impacts, and to other stars via light pressure.

"Their home system is far enough outside the then-explored Galaxy for any spores to die en route."

"Carried on something else?"

"The only things," she began, and blinked as everything finally fitted together. "Of course. Good thinking."

"Thanks," he said, not really understanding.

Tinchamank adjusted to circumstances better than Peace did. His had been the most adaptable mind of an advanced industrial society, chosen from among many thousands of trained experts to sit in judgment on any matter that arose, and he was able to serve in this capacity for the colonists as well. He actually settled some feuds that had been developing.

Peace, on the other hand, had no knack for direct mind contact at all. Seeing what breeders were thinking was something any Protector could do, but it wasn't telepathy; it was on the order of a breeder seeing a dog snarl and bare its fangs and guessing what would happen next. Monitoring and feedback devices were invaluable for telling her what, in her brain, was simply not happening.

They kept working at it for almost three years.

One day Larry stopped in the middle of another adjustment and said miserably, "I have to go in."

"You'd just die," she said.

He sighed. Then he said, "You're not that obtuse."

"I'm not that cold, either. I sure as hell wouldn't have given up sex if I'd had a choice."

He blinked. "I had an image of you as kind of a spinster."

She chuckled audibly. "I know. If I'd told you stories about my sex life your brain would have cooked in its own juices. Now, though—Larry, I want you to imagine being employed at the most enjoyable activity—sustainable activity, that is—you can think of."

"Hitting baseballs through the windows of ARM headquarters?" he said with a straight face.

"Damnation," she said earnestly.

"Sorry, I'll be serious."

"No, it's just I don't know when I'll get back there again, and I never once thought to do that." She enjoyed his astonishment for a moment, then added, "The top of that dome would be an ideal place to stand, too."

Hesitantly, he said, "Kidding?"

She waggled a hand. "Not entirely. Larry, imagine feeling like that all the time."

"Look, I'm volunteering, right?"

"I wonder. This is what I originally planned, and I worked on you to push you in that direction, at least at first. I decided a few years back to learn telepathy myself instead."

"Well, you can't." He was as terrified as she'd ever seen anyone, not excepting kzinti who had supposed her to be the