Man-Kzin Wars XI

existence—and the human race thereby owed many millions, possibly billions, of lives—to some nameless twenty-second-century organlegger, who'd provided money, idea, and madness to the woman who'd finally been known as Jan Corben. Human history was filled with flukes like that: like the discovery of beer, so people would grow grain instead of starving, once overgrazing had turned the forests of Southwest Asia and North Africa to desert; or the introduction of fossil fuels and electricity right as the latest Ice Age was reaching its peak, keeping the planet insulated with carbon dioxide just long enough for fusion and superconductors to take up the slack. If there was some outside influence arranging these breaks, it was beyond Peace's power to locate—beer had assuredly been discovered when stale bread was left in water too long, a bizarre error when people were hungry, and steam engines and generators were made possible by the work of a couple of young men who tinkered because they were too socially inept to find dates, in a culture and era where women were prepared to marry anybody. There were plenty of other examples, equally counterintuitive.

* * *

"You'd make a fascinating monograph," Corky tried again.

"You wouldn't make a decent pair of knee boots. Too leaky. You had enough pimples to supply a middle school."

"I was too busy to bother washing."

"How about half a minute to tell the computer run the pressure down to two hundred millibars of pure oxygen? Decompression breaks the pimples and cleans them out, and pure oxygen kills the bacteria. Sol Belter trick, close to six centuries old. Of course, their singleships just lacked bathing facilities—they did want to be clean. Speaking of which—" Peace hauled him along by the arm again, this time to the shower. "Scrub all over."

"Why should I?" he demanded.

"Buckminster and I will both know if you don't," she replied.

"So what?"

"Ever seen the body cleaner in an autodoc at work? It uses an elegant feedback system, doesn't miss a speck, beat everything else off the market. There's thirty-one companies that make autodocs, but only one subcontractor for the body cleaner: Snark Limited. I own it. I invented the cleaner. I can whip one together in about ten minutes. It won't have a sleep inducer attached. Scrub all over."

* * *

Buckminster was almost done eating when Corky got back to the kitchen, and watched him curiously as Corky puzzled over the dispenser settings. Finally, with enormous reluctance and a veneer of condescension, Corky turned and said, "How is clothing acquired?"

The kzin thought for a moment. "My sire used to skin and cure a ftheer for a new ammo belt every year, but of course most people just go to an arms shop. Why?" he asked innocently.

"I mean, how is it acquired here?"

"It isn't. What would we do with it?"

"I want to get something to wear!" Corky said, façade cracking.

"Ah. You should have said. I can understand that; that thing must get caught in stuff all the time." He got up and punched for a few hand towels. "These should be easy to tie together."

Corky was now standing in a peculiar, slightly-hunched posture. "Aren't there settings for garments?" he said.

"I can turn up the heat. Peace won't mind."

"It's warm enough. Something to protect skin."

Buckminster also got him some ship's slippers and a hardhat. "You want knee or elbow pads?" he said, but Corky didn't say anything. After some thought, Buckminster found a setting for a sewing needle and some thread. Corky took these, nodded, and left.

Buckminster looked after him, blinking. Presently his ears waggled a bit.

Peace was in the second biochemistry lab when Corky found her. She'd spent what added up to a couple of thousand hours there since it was built, investigating her own body chemistry and duplicating the useful compounds. "Don't touch anything, and especially don't open anything," she told him without looking his way.

"I am capable of functioning in a laboratory," he said.

Peace glanced at him. Slippers, hardhat, diaper. "Hm!" she said, blinking—Buckminster had obviously been having some fun. "Since you know what a Protector is, you know what happened to Jack Brennan. Do you know what happened to Einar Nilsson?"

"Smelled the roots and ate until his stomach burst," Corky said.

"He smelled one root, freeze-dried by vacuum, and gnawed one bite off before he could be subdued, and aged to death in an hour. Nilsson was a good deal younger than you. Boosterspice doesn't correct genetic age; it just overrides it. He cooked his brain; you could conceivably catch fire and burn to the ground. Don't touch anything. Don't open anything. What do you want?"

In what would normally have been a good imitation of firmness, he said, "What are your intentions?"

"I'm not going to tell you."

"Why not?" he said in reasonable tones.

"That either."

"I'm entitled to know something," he insisted.

"Why? What have you done with your knowledge since you killed the last collaborator? It was easy to look them up, and the last died two years ago. Lose your nerve?"

As expected, that cracked him right down the middle. He staggered, righted himself, then looked around helplessly. "I—" he said, then ran out of the room.

He was coming along. Peace adjusted the proportions of what she was mixing, based on new information.

* * *

Buckminster smelled him on the way into the observatory: very upset. It wasn't an ambush, though, because Corky promptly said, "I can leave."

"No need. Need any help with the controls? Peace does tend to build for her own level of precision."

"I worked that out. I was just looking at Pleasance. What do you want to look at?"

"The fourth Pak fleet," Buckminster said. "The human Protectors are just getting to it. Judging from the debrís of the first three, the battle shouldn't be all that interesting, but the Pak may have worked out something they can do."

"Fourth? How censored many are there?"

Buckminster cocked an ear at this archaism, but said, "Nineteen. Sixteen, now. The six furthest off show some design innovations, like carbon-catalyst fusion—pure helium exhaust, thin and very fast—which