When she opened her suit, the man's smell was severe. She'd been away for a couple of weeks, and that wasn't long enough for him to get into this condition, so he'd arrived filthy. He must be deranged.
She restored the console, then called her associate. 'Hi, Buckminster, I'm home. You leave me any butter?'
His reply began with a chuckle. With the telepathic region removed from the brain, a kzin was remarkably easygoing. 'I only had a few pounds. Is our guest still alive?'
'By the smell he could be a zombie, but I'll take a chance and say yes. How come you didn't disarm him?' she asked, though she knew; she also knew Buckminster would want to say it, though.
'I didn't want to touch him,' Buckminster confirmed. 'Besides, I didn't think it would make him stop fighting, and I didn't want to have to explain bite marks on a human corpse.'
'Difficult to do when you're swollen up with ptomaine, too. Come to the observatory and sort through his stuff. I'll be cleaning him up.'
'You humans show the most unexpected reserves of courage,' Buckminster remarked.
As she stripped, washed, and depilated the man, the remark seemed progressively less likely to have been a joke. There was a significant layer of dead skin, and the smell of him underneath it was actually somewhat worse. He must not have bathed in months, if not years.
Getting the hair off his face confirmed an impression: she'd seen him before. He'd been one of the psychists at her mother's prison. Peace hadn't actually met him, and Jan Corben hadn't given his name-she'd called him Corky. He was evidently a survivor of the kzinti occupation of Pleasance, and had probably witnessed some awful things. Peace didn't spend much pity on him-she'd been her mother's clone, created to be the recipient in a brain transplant like many before her, and she had yet to hear a worse story.
Once he was clean, he was also pretty raw in spots, so Peace had to spray some skinfilm on, to hold him while she programmed the autodoc. This took her almost half an hour, as she'd never expected to have a human breeder here, and she had to start from scratch. When she was done she stuck him in, then washed herself and went to see how Buckminster was doing.
He was having a great time. He'd taken Corky's arms to the small firing range (the big one was necessarily outside), where he had laid them out in a long row and was methodically using them to perforate targets of various compositions. 'Interesting viewpoint he has,' Buckminster told her. 'No nonlethal weapons, but not many random-effect ones. This man wants to kill in a very personal way.'
'He talk to you much?'
'Nothing informative. 'Go there, do that, you baby-eater.' Made eye contact and grinned a lot. Seemed to bother him that I didn't get hostile.'
'I expect so. Did you explain?' Peace said, amused.
'No, the baby-eater remark offended me, so I just let him pant.'
'Sweat.'
'Sweat? Yes, that would mean the same thing, wouldn't it?'
'Not quite. A human letting someone else work off his foul mood on his own doesn't need as much self- control,' Peace pointed out. 'So there's less satisfaction involved for us. Well, I'd better check his ship. Want to come along?'
'If it's as big a mess as he was I'll need my suit.'
'I'll put mine back on too,' Peace agreed.
There was only one boobytrap; it was in the airlock, and Buckminster spotted it too. The ship only had deck gravity in the exercise room, and that was turned off. There wasn't any debris floating about, but surfaces were dirty and smeared, and the air plant was in extremis. The ship's arms looked like he'd tried for the greatest lethality for the money: there was a turret with two disintegrators, plus and minus, to slice targets open with bars of lightning; and torpedo tubes that fired Silver Bullets, a weapon the Wunderlanders had devised at the end of the Third War but never got to use. These were all-but-invisible pellets of stasis-held antihydrogen, stasis shutting down on impact-the blast would punch through thick hullmetal, and the surplus neutrons from the destroyed atoms would flood a ship's interior. 'What a stupid concept,' Buckminster said. 'That'd ruin everything but the hull. You'd have to rebuild the ship almost completely for any sort of prize.'
'Though it is an excellent killing device,' Peace said.
'If that's all you want.'
'It's all he wants, and it's his ship.'
'It's still stupid. What if he had a chance at a better ship?'
Peace shrugged-which, given the swollen joints of a Protector's shoulders, was a very emphatic gesture-and said, 'I doubt he intends to live long enough for it to matter.'
'Urr,' Buckminster growled, which from a kzin qualified as tactful acknowledgment.
'I agree it's unusually stupid,' Peace added, aware that he might not have understood that.
They searched the ship without finding further portable weapons, which made some sense if he was on a suicide mission-he'd hardly go back for more. The only question was, what was he doing here? 'Did he say what he was doing here?' she said, realizing Buckminster wouldn't mention it unless it came up-small talk was 'monkey chatter' to kzinti, and Peace judged this was not an unfair assessment. It probably did derive from primate chattering.
'No, he wanted to know what I was doing here.'
'What did you tell him?'
'That I was a deserter.'
Peace, who had never thought of it in exactly that phrasing, blinked once. Then she said, 'What did he say to that?'
'Eventually, 'Oh.' Then he locked me away in my dank and lonely prison.'
'Uh huh,' said Peace, who judged that if a delay in her trip had extended Buckminster's durance vile to six months he'd have gotten too fat to sneak back into his cell. 'Okay, let's see what's behind the fake bulkhead.'
Buckminster did a good job of hiding his surprise when she opened the wall, though it took him a while to realize that that partition had had no fixtures, fittings, or access panels on either side, and therefore had no reason for existing in a one-man ship.
The interior was a shrine. Correction: a monument. There were pictures of three women, two men, and several children at progressing ages, but there were also single pictures of 51 other humans, almost all male, each with a neat black X inked onto the forehead. Peace recognized 22 of them as officials during the kzinti occupation, and had seen news stories about two of those and four of the other 29, reporting their accidental deaths. All six had struck her as being well-concealed homicides. It seemed probable that the entire 51 were dead collaborators, who had all contributed in some way to the deaths of the psychist's spouses and children.
Buckminster got it almost as soon as she did. 'I'm impressed,' he said. 'It's hard to kill one human being without being found out. I still can't understand how you can tolerate the constant monitoring.'
He didn't mind her monitoring him, so she said, 'With humans it's actually less unpleasant if it's a stranger doing it.'
'Oh, thanks, now it makes perfect sense.'
'Glad I could help.'
They blinked at each other-a grin was inappropriate for him, and impossible for her, though the broad gash of her beak partook of a certain cheerful senile vacuity-and closed the place back up before leaving. 'Cleaning robot?' Buckminster said as they passed through the airlock.
'Sure. Have to tweak the programming.'
'I'll do that. You can get to work on your new ship.'
Peace nodded, pleased with his intelligence. Obviously, things had gone well with the Outsider: she'd come back. 'Have you decided what to do after I leave?'
'Go to Home and make a fortune as a consulting ecologist with what you've taught me, then start a family somewhere else. Sarng would be good.'
'Don't know it,' she was startled to realize.
'No reason to, it's at the far end of kzinti space. Atmosphere's a couple of tons per square inch, they've been trying to kzinform it from floating habitats for about a thousand years, I think it was. I thought I could move things along.'
