Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIV

“Actually I was planning on cooking the roast I have in the freezer.”

“Sorry. Gone.”

He goggled at her. “That was five pounds of cultured beef!”

“Marshall Early, Pleasance was conquered almost a year ago. We’re at war. I was hungry. And anyway, you got cheated. That was grain-fed-I distinctly tasted gluten peptides.” She handed him a plate bearing a sizzling handmeal. Doubly annoyed though he was, his mind was working; sandwich was an archaic term used by his generation and by Pleasanters, which suggested she was the latter, and must have had some fairly interesting experiences in the past year. He bit into the sandwich.

About a minute later, she handed him a hot towel and a bulb of cold milk. After he’d used both, he said, “That was good.”

“Want another?”

“Yes.” As that was being handed to him, he said, “I haven’t used the ’doc foodmaker in too long. I didn’t remember it was this good.”

“It wasn’t. I rebuilt it when I was reprogramming the ’doc to remove the Puppeteer bug from your head.”

She was fast: she caught the sandwich three feet off the ground. “The what?” he said.

“Bug. The reason you’ve been so much more relaxed and easygoing since you were wounded in the Third War.”

“Fifth.”

She waved a hand. “The one before this one. It’s why you’ve been trying negotiation.”

“Well,” he said, “they say a pacifist is just a general who’s been shot.”

“In the brain.”

“Sorry?”

“‘A pacifist is a general who’s been shot in the brain.’”

“That’s not how I remember it.”

“Of course not, you’ve been shot in the brain. I replenished the boosterspice supply while I was working on the ’doc, you’ll get up to speed soon.”

“That couldn’t have been too hard.”

“Whatever makes you-ah. No, boosterspice is not based on tree-of-life, it just activates some of the same inert gene complexes. If a Protector wanted to make people younger, the stuff would repair gene damage instead of just patching over it. Good for about fifty years. Here, eat. I’ve also added a beetle to the ’doc programming. It’ll spread into other ’docs, so they’ll recognize and remove the implants in other people after yours gets its regular update from the manufacturer. Humans have been doing entirely too well at fighting kzinti. There were supposed to be a couple of more wars to get you into shape.”

“For what?”

“For whatever the Puppeteers need you both to fight so they don’t have to. It’s a dangerous universe out there, and they want lots of cannon fodder between them and the rest of it.”

“Ursula,” he said, “that’s paranoid, and this is me saying it.”

“Marshall,” she said, “I’m a Protector. I don’t act on supposition. I confirmed it.”

“How?”

“Interrogated a Puppeteer.”

“I thought they killed themselves if anyone tried that.”

“They do. Not only that, there’s automatic reflexes that kill them in various ways if you prevent them from doing it voluntarily. Took me fifteen tries until I had them all covered.”

This time her hand was right under the sandwich. She led him to his desk, where he sat, and shook, and said, “There are fourteen dead Puppeteers now?” (“Conniptions” didn’t begin to describe how they would react. “Extinction” might.)

“Don’t be silly. I just recorded one and kept editing the pattern. I noticed the transfer booth system was bugged, so I took advantage of that.” She handed him another bulb, and he ate and drank in silence as he thought about this.

When he was done, he said, “You duplicated a Puppeteer?”

“Hell, no. I just flat-out kidnapped him, then replaced the original recording when I was done and sent him on his way. With a few minor edits, so he didn’t notice the discrepancy in the time.”

It occurred to Early that she’d killed the original.

She must have been able to read his face and body language better than he could imagine. “You do realize that, unless you assume the existence of souls, a transfer booth kills the user and delivers a replacement,” she said. “It’s how you can tell no Protector has ever been to Jinx. There are people who believe transfer booths don’t send the soul along, and on Jinx that means the only way for them to get from one End to the other in a reasonable time is by suborbital craft. A Protector would have put a hullmetal tube through the planet for them to use.”

“You’d go to that much trouble and expense to humor a superstitious belief?”

“You let people vote.”

He didn’t have an answer for that.

“Anyhow, that was why Lucas Garner suppressed the human-built version back in the twenty-first century. That and the fact that you could, technically, make copies of anyone who used one. He reckoned you’d have to make murder legal.”

“Can you? Copy people?”

“Sure. Of course, blacking out the entire planetary power grid for eight months to charge up for it would be a bit of a giveaway. Garner wasn’t so hot on the math part, more concerned about souls.”

“Do we have souls?” he said.

“How should I know? And why would I care? Souls are of significance after death. That puts them just exactly out of my jurisdiction. My job is to keep you all alive and reproducing and happy enough to stick with it.”

“The Mor-” he said, and shut up.

“The Morlocks on Wunderland took an interest because they had never been exposed to the concept, and were too busy to think the implications through.”

“You know about them.”

“Of course. I even know whose fault they were. Relax, you’re not in trouble for approving Project Cherubim. I’m a Protector, I expect breeders to screw up.”

“You have a problem with creating Protectors to fight the kzinti?”

“I have a problem with creating an army of immortal nursemaids to supervise the human race.”

“They were exposed to a lot of radiation on the trip. They were supposed to live just long enough to win the war.”

“Interesting theory.” (Somehow she made that rhyme with “you schmuck.”) “One of the reasons I think Brennan’s death was suicide was, if he’d made an effort to survive, he could have recovered. I know I could. Anything that doesn’t kill a Protector outright can heal.”

“You said he was cut in half.”

“Top half still worked.” She patted his arm. “Don’t worry about it. All the human Protectors from Home are headed for the Core to kill off the Pak, and I have serious issues with manipulative parents. I might add that you, personally, are very lucky that the plan failed.”

His mind raced but got no traction. “Why?”

“Marshall, who did you consider the sexiest woman in the world when you were growing up?”

“Well, you know, it’s been hundreds of years-”

“Buford.”

He looked at her and remembered who, or rather what, he was trying to be evasive with. “Leslie Cordwainer.”

She got a pad out of a pocket, scribbled on it, and said, “Not bad. I take it the pendulum had swung back to Rubens.”

“Hah. No, the Dead Wirehead look was in full force. She kind of stood out.”

“Literally. Mine weren’t that big. Now, can you imagine what her sex life was like?”

“I have been known to manage not to for days at a time now,” he said mordantly.

“Sorry. But I need you to imagine that, thanks to you, she has become an asexual, superintelligent killer, having nothing which would qualify as a conscience by your standards, and with reflexes so fast she can dodge pistol slugs, cells with internal reinforcements that would allow her to survive a few hits with nothing more than bruises, and bones and muscles so strong she can take the gun away and rip it apart,” she took a breath, “who remembers every detail of her sexual history and knows where you live.”