Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIV

So that was where he was when the canoe showed up.

It was an awfully big canoe. If it had been another shape or style he’d have thought of it as a ship, but the oars and the hull’s lack of boards constrained his thinking.

As it came to shore, he realized that it hadn’t constrained its maker’s thinking. It had the look of a dugout, but it was almost twice as wide as the biggest tree on the island, and there surely couldn’t be any trees twice that age on the planet. The ones behind him must have been planted the day they got here, which was surely no earlier than 2305, and more likely later. The accelerator trick, if they’d used it, wouldn’t have given trees more time to grow, it would have killed them from lack of sunlight. Therefore they had stuck the trunks of two or more trees together to make this, well enough to keep the leaks down to something manageable.

It came directly toward him, and as it got close he still couldn’t see any seams. They must be awfully good at making canoes by now, but this was unbelievable.

On the other hand, selection for starship personnel had been even tougher then than it was now, and the next man after Persoff on the promotion list at the Manhattan Space Academy in Kansas had just won the Wisowaty Award for resource management. (At last update he was part of the supply liaison to the Belt Fleet, and had once succeeded in impressing them. It was no small thing, to impress a Belter when it came to making effective use of resources.)

There was a man at the prow, calling back to another man at the stern, and they seemed to be the only ones facing forward. Pilot and steersman, he guessed. The sides were too high to see much but heads and shoulders of anyone but those two men. All the rowers had longer hair than the men. The standing men wore shirts, but the shoulders of the rowers were bare.

The men were also beardless, and that abruptly stuck him as an accomplishment. They certainly had no docs to depilate them here. A history teacher at MSA had had Persoff’s class remove their facial hair with the sharpened steel wafers that had once been used for this, and his respect for the courage of the men he now saw was considerable.

The canoe struck the beach and continued up it further than he would have imagined possible. The pilot jumped ashore as soon as it stopped, turned, and called out, “Ropes!”

All the rowers jumped out. They were twenty nude women, and they hauled the canoe further up the beach until the pilot said, “Rest!” They dropped the ropes and ran to play in the surf. The steersman came forward and jumped out, and the two men, both in shirt and shorts (how had they made them?) came toward Persoff. They were both gnawing carrots. “Have a carrot,” said the steersman, holding out a spare.

Not wishing to offend, Persoff, who hadn’t eaten a carrot since he was big enough to spit, said, “Thanks,” and took a bite. It tasted a lot better than he remembered. Of course, he was used to them cooked.

“We’ve got maybe ten seconds,” said the pilot. “Is your mind being read? He’d have stopped when you bit it.”

Persoff stopped chewing to stare, then said, “No. You were expecting kzinti?”

The two looked at each other, then at Persoff. “Yes,” said the pilot. “You’re wearing clothes, but if they were rational enough to use cover they might think of that too. It’s my job to think of things like that. I’m Tom, the Johnson for this vessel. This is Ron, our Denver.”

“Micah Persoff, Captain, commanding officer of the carrier Yorktown .”

The two local men looked astonished, then came to attention and saluted.

Persoff returned their salutes. “It’s lucky for me you showed up so soon. I was here planning missions to find the colonists.”

“Colonists?” said Tom.

“We came here because the ship signaled us that someone had landed,” said Ron.

“What do you mean, ‘colonists’? We’re stranded.” Tom appeared to be getting upset.

Persoff shook his head. “Force of habit. I tend to think of settlements off Earth as colonies. We need to talk with you about getting off the planet again.”

Tom nodded shortly. “Of course. Ron, give the All Clear.”

Ron turned to the canoe and bellowed, at a volume Persoff found painful, “It’s okay!”

Eighteen men, all chewing, stood up and began methodically unloading their crossbows. The women, serious now, returned to the canoe, where men who were done early began tossing them clothing.

Persoff stared, put it together, and said, “You were going to ambush the kzinti?”

“If they were here,” said Tom. “They wouldn’t read a female’s mind right away.”

“How would you ambush them in ten seconds?”

“Oh, Ron would have knocked you out.”

Persoff looked at Ron, who had a low-gee build and seemed skinny at that. “How?”

His head hurt less than he would have expected, and he was lying before a brand-new hut, near a campfire, surrounded by women. “How many fingers do you see?” said the nearest, holding up a hand.

“Five,” he said, “three of them folded.”

“Talks like a Johnson,” said another woman. She was prettier than the one who’d spoken first, and that was odd, because they all had about the same set of features. “Good stock, I bet.”

“Well, he’s starship crew,” said yet another.

“I still think the basic stock might be deteriorating. They send off all the best.”

“And I still say-Hey, he’s right here, we can ask. Captain Micah Persoff, does the UN Fertility Board store sperm samples of men who go out to fight the kzinti, and make the samples available from the ones who did really well?”

Persoff was still a little stunned, and it took him a moment to follow the question. Then he said, “Yeah, any citable accomplishment is an automatic Birthright. Women who use donations get low numbers in the queue, too.”

“See!”

“How’d you figure that out?” he said.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense. Otherwise you’d all have been eaten before you got here.”

“They still could have repopulated from colony worlds,” said a woman who’d spoken before.

“Lightspeed and too busy.”

“Loyalty and conditioning!”

“Alienation.”

Others had begun chiming in, and it was getting loud. Persoff said, “What happened to me?”

“Oh, you got knocked out,” said the woman who’d spoken first, all the rest shutting up.

“I’d figured out that much, but how?”

A man’s voice-Tom-broke in. “Lateral impact near the left end of the mandible turns the head far enough to jar the brain stem.” He got into view, raised his hand, and snapped his fingers. “Shuts you off like a bucket of wet sand on a small fire. But without the steam.”

“Speaking of which,” said the first woman.

“I thought he’d be waking up soon-not yet, in fact; he’s tough-and he should have some things explained to him. And first he should have an apology. Captain, a Denver is identified by decisive action. Unfortunately it isn’t always preceded by thought. Often that’s a good thing, since it lets a Denver act without fear. Not always. I’m not familiar with your habits of speech, so once it was clear you were alone I should have had him stand further from you. I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted. How did he get so fast? I didn’t even see him move.”

“That’s because he did it when you blinked. An early hint of the Denver gene complex is when a child seems unobservant but, now and then, somehow does some difficult thing exactly right. Which is not the same as doing the right thing. Incidentally, would it be possible to analyze people’s DNA when your ship is back in operation? Working all this stuff out by inductive reasoning is quite a burden.”