Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIV

“Splice and clone, and they need at least a quarter of a cortex per donor. Personally I think if the Belt wants genius lunatics they should start with the guy who thought this up.”

“Who says they didn’t? They need more than one.”

“Might as well take you straight to the Beneficiaries, then. Not many of those. This way.” He led Early down a corridor and through a doorway.

Corpsicles had once been kept in separate Dewar tanks. Later they were more numerous, and space was at a premium, so most had been packed in rows, side by side.

Not these. There would have been too much risk of getting the parts mixed up. As they passed one carcass, Early said, “Good Christ, what happened to him?”

“Run over by a sugar train. Wore a lottery bracelet, so he was frozen,” Marty said without looking. “Everyone asks that,” he added, clearly accustomed to people wondering how he knew which one.

“Lottery?”

“It was a fad for a while to have local lotteries award freezer slots as prizes. If we could ever get him stuck back together right he’d have a lot of money waiting for him.”

“How did a guy that lucky get hit by a train?”

“Crossed the tracks when the barricades were already down. It was a jurisdiction where pedestrians had right-of-way.”

“So he expected the train to stop for him? I’d have made the freemother pay for the engineer’s therapy! A jaywalker never has the right-of-way.”

Marty just grunted agreement.

In Early’s ear, Ursula’s voice said, “We do not want that brain.”

Early nearly choked from trying not to laugh aloud.

Fortunately, he was able to let it out when Marty said, “He’s probably not quite what you’re looking for.”

This chamber had originally been excavated as a bomb shelter, which, since the building overhead had once been where the UN held its meetings, said something about the original General Assembly’s opinion about their own effectiveness. Dividers and equipment had gone in during the First War, while the delegates met under a mountain in Switzerland. They got to the end of the ranks of bodies, most of which reminded him of people he’d last seen right after a battle, and got to a section near the end that struck him as different. Early immediately studied his surroundings to see why.

The lighting was better. The windows over the bodies had no frost on the inside, meaning they were of a different material. The ID tags at each body were of hullmetal, with the lettering inset, and given the properties of hullmetal, that meant they’d been formed that way. “These are the Beneficiaries,” Marty said. “People who couldn’t afford to be frozen, or hadn’t thought of it, so strangers who admired them paid for it or took up collections. They were all heroes to someone. This is Wu Kim,” he said, pointing to the left half of a woman whose right side had not been entirely found. “Tiananmen. A few of the people who got the body out and on ice in time later ended up in the First War. Not too surprisingly, they all distinguished themselves.”

“Tiananmen?” Ursula said in his ear.

“Chinese word meaning Waco,” Early remarked. Marty glanced at him and nodded.

There were only sixty-one Beneficiaries, and Marty had something to say about them all. The last and earliest was Hugo van Trast. “He was still at Caltech when he came up with the rejection buffer,” Marty said.

“What did that to him?”

“Carlists. They blamed van Trast for the organ bank that saved the life of Francisco Bahamonde. They kind of overlooked the fact that that same organ bank also saved the life of Marissa Colby, who invented the fusion shield and replenished the depleted fishing grounds and gave us free water. She was on vacation in Majorca when she was exposed to some kind of pesticide. You know, the ones they used in the period when DDT was illegal? Really horrible stuff-There are royalists today who hold annual parties where they burn Bahamonde in effigy.”

“I don’t know why. He’s still dead,” Early said, shaking his head.

“Take them all,” Ursula told him.

“Tag them for shipment.”

“Some don’t have that much brain left,” Marty objected.

“We can at least get their DNA,” Early said without being told. “These are miracle workers. The kzin get smarter with every war. We could use some miracles.”

Marty nodded, but looked sad. He looked around at the dead, made a gesture with his right hand which could have turned into a wave if he hadn’t stopped it, and said, “You need any others?”

“I hope not,” Early said.

Marty nodded again. “Was it Napoleon who said he’d rather have a general who was lucky than one who was smart?”

“It’s been attributed to him,” Early agreed, “but look how he turned out.” He studied Marty. “You’ll miss them, won’t you?”

Marty nodded. “I liked to sit here and read. It was a good feeling, to be with the best people their times could produce.”

“Get a DNA cheek swab from him,” Ursula said. “Imply that he’s got this job because he’s the most diligent organizer willing to do it. That’ll make him feel better.”

“Martin,” Early said, “they need orderly minds to sort their memories out. How would you like to have any good genes you carry added to the mix of every general they’re made into?”

“I think I’d like it a lot.”

Back in the elevator, Early murmured, “That was a damn nice thing to do.”

“I like when I can combine that with doing a good job,” Ursula said. “I also like when someone displays intelligence. You picked up on the idea right away.”

“Thanks,” Early said, keeping his own counsel.

It didn’t help. “I see. You got the purpose and the method, but you thought I was just being considerate. Two out of three.”

“Two out of three-”

“-Is a D, Buford.”

He was fuming by the time he got back to his apartment. Ursula became visible again, and he went over to his desk and gave the nearest leg a vicious kick. It broke off, bounced against the wall, and rebounded where he could grab it. He turned and aimed the stub at her. “You missed one,” he said.

“And you missed my companion,” she said.

“Are you serious? ‘There’s someone behind you’? That’s the oldest trick in the book.”

A huge, gloved feline hand reached over his head and plucked the puncher out of his grasp.

“Actually, the oldest trick in the book is kidnapping a couple of teenagers, brainwiping them, waking them up in a prepared habitat, and saying, ‘I made you out of dust and I made her out of one of your ribs,’” said Ursula.

Early turned carefully and looked at the indubitable kzin in his apartment. His suit looked like it was made out of balloons. “Oh, hell,” Early said.

“I thought it was ‘hello,’” said the kzin. “Human languages are weird.”

“I need to recreate the roast I ate earlier. Stun him and put him back to bed, then we have to get moving to arrange the supposed wreck of the ship with the bodies.”

As the kzin brought up his other hand-the one with the stunner-the only thing Buford Early could think of was, I am the very model of a modern major general-

He saw the room tilt, then stop as he was caught. The rest was silence.

Unless he was staying over with a woman he’d met, Buford Early slept in his autodoc. At his age most people died in their sleep, and while he wasn’t as afraid of dying as most people, it struck him as an undignified way to go after surviving five wars. On the other hand, his psychist program told him it was really a way of distancing himself, since the lack of a bed in his apartment meant that any woman who came home with him couldn’t stay over herself. The clincher, however, was that it was the most comfortable place he’d ever had to sleep.