Greenberg had said there were seventeen other intelligent races-eighteen if you stretched the definition a little. Implicitly, the eighteenth race must have sometimes gotten even clear telepathic orders wrong. The tnuctipun would have been assigned to make them smarter.
They had. It must have been one of their first successes. They came up with a virus that turned vegetable protein into the most amazing prions, and altered the species to start finding it irresistible-but only after reproducing. The desexing wasn't necessary, and from an evolutionary viewpoint was actually undesirable; selection would work better if reproduction occurred after the development of intelligence. The killing of mutated descendants was another deliberate effort to prevent evolution, and it had worked for two billion years. The loss of appetite when there were no descendants was just a safety feature to keep their numbers down, and the virus' thallium requirement was a way of limiting their mobility. The breeders' genes had evidently also been altered so that their brains were hardwired to sympathize with rebels and underdogs. Even today, humans hearing about the Slaver era tended to side with the tnuctipun-who by any reasonable standard were as coldly evil a race as had ever existed. (Kzinti ate intelligent lifeforms because hunting them was such a good challenge, and this was as horrifying a practice as you could find nowadays; but even they would recoil at the thought of creating an intelligent race for use as food.)
The parent species must have averaged a good deal brighter than Homo habilis. The Protectors that worked for the tnuctipun had undoubtedly produced many of the wonders that the tnuctipun were credited with-possibly all of the nongenetic ones, such as the Slaver hyperspace jump, disintegrators, stasis fields, and gravity control.
And the Slavers would have considered them perfectly harmless, because the Power would have seemed to work just fine on them. The compartmentalization of the Protector brain, however, would have meant that a Slaver could complacently hold a full lobe under complete control, unaware that that lobe was being left out of the control loop and the Protector was coming to kill him. Which would have been their job, during the war. A Protector was an ideal field commando-eat anything, hard to see, hard to hurt, powerful senses, able to improvise anything needed from what was on hand.
When the Slavers gave the suicide command, the Protectors hadn't been affected; but the breeders had. The only survivors of that would have been mental subnormals, mutants that hadn't been killed because their Protectors had gone off to war. (The mutation rate in the Core would have been incredible.) They would have been the ones too stupid to understand the order. The rest of the breeders would have died, and the Protectors would have stopped eating. Later, the mutants became Protectors themselves, and the ones able to produce viable offspring had kept on eating, developed a language, and called themselves Pak. When the breeder population rose high enough, they had fought for living space.
For two billion years.
Protectors do not normally examine their motives.
But there had never been a paranoid Protector before.
Peace Corben, ready to question and then kill the last survivor, realized that the tnuctipun had created her condition for much the same reason that her mother had created her: to be used. Her face was hard as horn; her holocaustic wrath never showed.
She was not a tool.
She told the kzin some reassuring lies about his condition, then began doing everything she could to save him. That turned out to be a great deal.
Manexpert woke in a big soft swaddle inside a box, which turned out to be an autodoc. It opened when he moved. The lining smelled like some kind of plant fiber, woven, cleaned, and bundled up to serve as padding. Though the experience was unfamiliar, it was comfortable, and felt very natural somehow.
He looked around warily, and saw he was under shelter but not in the… entity's… ship. He must have been kept in stasis for years before the autodoc was working; a good-sized city had grown up. There were buildings of assorted sizes, all more or less hemispherical, all made of foil in stasis. Broad concrete walkways around and between them had rain canopies overhead. They were shaped to channel the rain into troughs, which was apparent because there was a fine spray falling now.
He realized he was panting, and that it wasn't any kind of threat response; the air was-not thick, no, but sort of used. Something must be producing a lot of carbon dioxide: each breath he took felt like he'd been holding it for some time.
The shelter he was under was the open one. He couldn't see a ship, or tell what any buildings were for. There were horizontal ridges on the buildings, far enough apart to serve as steps-for a kzin; they'd been put there for him, so he could look around.
He wasn't about to try to climb an inflexible surface in the rain. Instead he followed the flow of water alongside the walkways. Men liked water, to the point where, even as careful as they were, some of them still drowned now and then. This thing seemed to like men; it might like water.
Manexpert had no idea what he would do when he found the creature-or what, in fact, he could do to something that bore an appalling resemblance, in both form and capability, to the God's Appointed Enforcer. The only alternative, though, seemed to be climbing back into the autodoc.
He paused by one of the domes that had a flat patch, to look at his right eye.
The socket was at the intersection of three really impressive scars, which extended well back on his head.
The eye itself was artificial.
The iris was of fixed diameter, so it must adjust to light electronically. He tried bringing up his inner lid, and the character of the light altered in a way that indicated polarization. It tracked like his other eye; but after he'd stared at the reflection for a while, the image he saw with it began to magnify.
Astonished, Manexpert used the eye to study his fingerprints in detail. After looking at the patterns of intersecting circles for a few minutes, he realized to his further astonishment that much of the hand was new. He looked over as much of his body as he readily could, and saw that a lot of his scars were gone. He stopped wasting time and went to look for his captor.
This turned out to be easier than it had seemed. Most of the domes had open apertures, with no doors, and regardless of activity they were unlit inside. A few domes did have doors, and those were very solid ones. Manexpert didn't see a locking mechanism, but they evidently slid upward, and sheer weight would have held any of them shut against as many kzinti as could have gotten a grip. One dome did have light inside, and Manexpert found the creature there.
Gnyr-Captain and Power Officer were also there, watching control panels. They didn't look toward him as he entered. Both were considerably scarred, and short of fat. Manexpert took a step toward Power Officer, away from the doorway, and Peace called out to him, 'They're dead.'
Manexpert stared at Peace for a moment. He thought he'd been good at covering his thoughts, but Peace's face had no more expression than a tree trunk-which in fact it resembled, in both flexibility and texture. Then he went to each scarred kzin, to look them over. There were visible artificial parts to both of them. Each breathed in an absolutely regular rhythm. Their blinking was equally regular. Both had had extensive cranial surgery. Neither took any notice of him. He went to the creature and said, 'What did you do?'
Peace wore a knee-length vest, well-strapped-on and more or less made out of pockets. It was remote- manipulating something behind a wall of what looked like General Products hull material-it was too clear for glass-and never looked away from its work as it said, 'They were the most nearly intact corpses. Your ship's autodoc wouldn't regrow complex tissues, so I had to do some experiments before I could fix you up. Afterwards I had these empty kzinti, so I put some circuitry in their skulls to make up for the brain tissue they lost. There's a third, on rest shift, eating and grooming and sleeping. He's got dark patches along his back.'
Technology Officer. 'Why did you save me?'
'It was an act of defiance. I was created to protect human beings and destroy everything else-except my creators-and I just refuse to be used any longer. I tried to match the eye's signal pattern to the one the other eye
