"What is this stuff?" he said suspiciously.
"Stewed rat heads, giant insect larvae, and assorted poisonous plants."
He scowled, but got the message—don't be ridiculous—and began eating. Presently he said, "This is wonderful."
"Good, that'll be the neurotoxins kicking in."
He scowled again, shut up, and ate.
Buckminster came in soon, got something hot with alcohol in it, took a good gulp, and said, "What is it I have to hear?"
"This fellow came to this kzinti base, that we're in, here, to steal a ship, to take to Kzin. Guess what he wanted to do there?"
Buckminster shrugged. "Assassinate the Patriarch?"
"Right."
Buckminster took another gulp and said, "No, really."
"Really."
Kzinti rarely laugh, and it is even rarer for a human to be present when it happens; but the sound was similar enough to human laughter for Corky to stop eating and scowl. "What's so funny about it?"
Buckminster had an analytical mind, for an evolved creature, so he sat down and made a serious attempt to answer. "Many years ago," he said, "when I was first allowed out, still almost a kitten, I used to hunt . . . birds, sort of . . . out on the grounds. I was very good at it. Some were bigger than I was, and all of them wanted their meat even more than I did, but I devised snares and weapons and brought them down. All but one. It was big, and kept going by higher than I could shoot an arrow, and I was never able to find the right bait to lure it down. However, it had very regular habits, so I built a sort of giant crossbow thing—"
"Ballista," said Peace.
"Thanks. A ballista, to shoot at it. Just to get the range, at first. As it turned out, I only got to fire it once. The shot landed in a neighbor's grounds, stampeding some game. I was too little to know yet that there was a world outside my sire's estate, which included things like other estates. And orbital landing shuttles."
It took Corky a few moments to realize: "You were trying to shoot down a spaceship."
"With a crossbow. Yes."
"And my plan reminds you of that."
"Vividly. Almost perfectly." Buckminster was chuckling again.
Corky had been getting himself carefully poised for the last couple of minutes. Now he launched himself over the edge of the table at Buckminster.
Buckminster threw the rest of his drink on the table.
Corky's right foot came down in the liquid, and he spun sideways and tumbled the rest of the way. Buckminster swung his mug into Corky's hip, knocking him aside, and Corky slid past him off the edge of the table. He hit the ground about four feet away—then six feet away—then seven—then he rolled a few more feet. After that he tried to get up a few times, but kept slipping.
Buckminster got up and dispensed himself a towel, refilled his mug, and said, "You want a drink? It'll reduce bruising." The reply he got wasn't articulate enough to be obscene. The kzin flapped one ear, and went to mop up his first drink.
When Corky had finally managed to get as far as sitting upright on the floor, Peace—who'd seen it coming and known she didn't need to move—said, "Buckminster and I have been working together, and working out together, for years. He's a strategic minimalist, and he's got enough cyborg enhancements that I hardly have to hold back. If he'd been holding your previous rude remarks against you, he might have been mean enough to let you actually use that Hellflare nonsense on him, and shatter your bones in the process."
Buckminster tossed the towel at the trash and told Corky, "What's on you is your problem. Likely to remain so, judging from your past habits. Do you use a name, or just mark things?"
Corky scowled again, evidently his default expression, but said, "Doctor Harvey Mossbauer."
"Doctor?" Buckminster exclaimed in disbelief. "What kind of a doctor are you supposed to be?"
"I'm a psychist."
Buckminster was speechless for the fifth time in the twenty-eight years Peace had known him, and that was counting when she'd first met him and shot him in the head. "He really is," Peace confirmed. "My mother was one of his inmates. She called him Corky. One of her puns." Buckminster looked unenlightened, so she added, "Moss grows on trees. 'Bauer' is Wunderlander for 'farmer.' A moss farmer would be a tree. Cork is a kind of tree bark."
An appalled exclamation from the floor indicated that Corky had just gotten it, after something like forty years since he'd first heard it. The wordless exclamations went on for a while.
Buckminster put up with a couple of minutes of it, then went to the dispenser and got some Irish coffee. He handed it to Corky, who said, "I don't drink," and took a swig.
"Do you know how many assassins try to kill the Patriarch each year?" Buckminster said, beginning to be amused again.
"No," Corky grumped.
"Neither does he. Most don't get as close as the horizon. I did security contracting before I joined the military. There have been two Patriarchs assassinated in the history of the Patriarchy. The more recent was about twelve hundred years ago, and it was done with a thermonuclear warhead, arriving at relativistic speed to overload the palace shielding. The design defect was corrected during repairs to that wing, by the way."
"For a fearless leader of 'Heroes,' he sure puts a lot of defenses around him," Corky said.
Buckminster looked at Peace. "Was that supposed to offend me?"
"Yes," she said. "You can scream and leap anytime."
"I'll make a note on my watch. The Patriarch doesn't put the defenses around himself. The rest of us do that. This leaves him free to deal with serious matters, like settling disputes or conquering the universe."
"Or discrediting religious cults," Peace said cheerfully.
Buckminster's tail lashed, and his ears closed up for a moment. Then he reopened them and said, "I never really understood that you were going to make him that crazy."
"The Patriarch?" said Corky, startled.
"No, Kdapt-Preacher," Buckminster said.
"But—"
"Not the
