Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIV

“As one of the great philosophers of the Fission Age often said, ‘That turns out not to be the case.’ The Puppeteers were interfering with human society, and erasing the memories of any witnesses, well before the First War.” After a flash of annoyance so brief he wasn’t sure it was something she intended as a message, she added, “You’ll recall they got their name because there was a Time For Beany revival. ‘Puppeteer’ is a cute, harmless name. One of them chose it. They arranged the revival and the timing of the first contact.”

“You got that from the one you questioned?”

“Didn’t need to. I had an extensive entertainment database that predated the editing of ARM records. Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent had two eyes.” She began scribbling again, and muttered, “Give me a bit, that’s the fake one.”

Appalled, he said, “Why didn’t anyone notice that in the secure data?”

“They got to that too-I keep meaning to get around to doing that holographic indexing system.”

“But nobody can get into that.”

“Nonsense, I did. And they’ve had computers for millions of years.”

“How did you manage that?”

“I could tell you, but the shock would be so great you’d revert to infancy and I’d have to erase your memory back to before we met.”

“Come off it, I’m not that fragile.”

“You always say that.”

“What?”

She looked up, all innocence. “Oh, nothing.”

A few moments after the transition from horror to severe exasperation, Early recalled that Jack Brennan was suspected of having undertaken a number of elaborate and disturbing jokes. One had been the extermination of the Martians. He was getting off lightly.

He looked at the screen she held up to show him and saw three grayscale images side by side, the first two grainy. One was the Cecil he remembered from the cube. The second was similar, but with two eyes and some more details to the features of the head. The third was a Puppeteer’s head, which looked almost exactly like the first image. “The middle’s the original?”

“Correct.”

Early frowned. “How long?”

“Long enough to sic the kzinti on us in the first place. Locating a slowboat in interstellar space requires a technology well in advance of kzin capabilities. Brennan had made us too nice to be good cannon fodder, and the kzinti were too feral to take the job, so they decided to use both races to do selective breeding of each other. Calm down, I planted some surprises in the Puppeteer when I put him back. Have to erase my own memories of them before I talk to any Outsiders, of course, but I can promise you if they’re still in contact with us in five hundred years they’ll be much too busy to manipulate human lives.”

Early made certain his face and body didn’t shift and reveal his feelings.

So she noticed the stillness instead. “Relax, I won’t either,” she said. “I’ll make some generals, they’ll win the war, and kzin culture will be altered to the point where they won’t feel compelled to start another. The only thing I’ve done to alter Earth’s culture is rig autodocs to remove Puppeteer bugs and arrange for water from Lake Mead to reach Death Valley.”

“You did that? It looks like seepage.”

“Thank you.”

Early snorted. “And it’s not enough to make it habitable.”

“No, but it’s enough to make it more bearable for borax mining. True, the spaceports at Perth and Nairobi will get a little less business, but the important thing is that the price of boron will go down.”

“I wasn’t aware that was a vital resource.”

“It’s used in linac-fusion plants. They’re small, but they don’t need a fusion shield, so they don’t need an ARM presence to guard them from Gangreens. The ARM personnel budget will have to be cut, and with fewer ARMs around, nations will be able to show more independence. This will lead to petty quarrels in the UN. You need more practice not getting along.”

Early didn’t like that, but the part of his brain he thought of as a Roman judge had to admit she had a point. “How did you do it without disturbing anything else? Nanobots?”

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t turn something like that loose unsupervised. It…hm. It’s too hard to describe without a few months of teaching, you don’t have any words for some of the forces involved. You don’t even have terms to use in a plausible lie, like the one about how a disintegrator works.”

That confused him. “I thought it reduced the charge on electrons.”

She shook her head. “And a slug pistol causes little pieces of metal to appear inside things. Another great Fission Age philosopher likened a man surrounded by forces beyond his comprehension to a mouse on a battlefield. A little difficult to explain what’s going on. The standard explanation of a disintegrator is like telling that mouse that humans are throwing things at one another. It leaves stuff out-like why the disintegrator doesn’t turn to dust.”

“So give me the mouse version,” Early said, annoyed again.

She shook her head again. “That’s the disintegrator example. Explaining the porosity trick would be more like trying to make the mouse understand that all this stuff on the battlefield is going on because a teenage French girl was prettier than her mother, who resented her and made her finish up some rye bread that had gone bad and should have been thrown away. The concepts just aren’t there.”

He recognized the example; he was a military historian. “Is that a serious explanation of Joan of Arc?”

She shrugged again. (In a properly run world, with her Protector’s shoulders, that would have made some kind of dramatic noise.) “It explains the visions, and some of her work displays the behaviors of an abuse survivor. It’ll do.”

“How come you don’t sound like Brennan?” he said.

“I’m not in a hurry,” she said. Before he could tell her that was hardly an answer, she said, “Sorry. This may come as a shock to a respectable ARM, but sometimes people with an agenda have been known to say and do things that are misleading.”

“If sarcasm was a physical substance, I’d be getting a rash.”

“Ooh, good one-Brennan could have sounded any way he wanted, but he was planning to steal a starship. He presented limitations he didn’t possess, to create a sense of security.”

“Like not letting Garner smoke, because he ‘couldn’t help himself’?”

She stood as straight as she could, which wasn’t very, and said, “Very good! And the story he told about how he killed Phssthpok. Claimed he stunned him with a blow to the head and crushed his throat. Sheer fantasy; Protectors don’t stun. The injuries on the corpse in the Smithsonian suggest he broke the Pak’s elbows with a Martian’s spear, cut the nerves-glass is sharp enough, if you have a Protector’s strength behind it-then strangled him before Phssthpok could heal enough to use his hands again.”

“I thought Ph-the Pak was stronger than he was. And a better fighter.”

“Marshall, the Pak store calcium phosphate in their mitochondria. As a reserve to rebuild broken bone it’s wonderful, but it displaces ATP. It’s as if every cell in the body has water in the petrol tank. The trait has been bred out of their human descendants, largely though suicide. Jack Brennan was at least thirty percent stronger than Phssthpok, and he would have been able to use any fighting move he’d ever seen on the cube. His biggest problem was leaving a presentable corpse.”

“But that didn’t have anything to do with his getting the Pak ship. Why would he lie?”

“Same reason everyone does. Saves time.”

He took a final puff as he tried and failed to think of a counterexample. It did all boil down to saving time. He stubbed out the cigar and said, “Time for what?”