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 original, a crewmate of mine. Before he was Named, his title would have translated as Manexpert. He took the pacifist's Name to make people think he was a harmless lunatic.'
Corky looked interested. 'You know, I don't believe I've ever heard a kzin title of Expert before.'
'Usually a kzin who's that good at something already has a partial Name. Manexpert was a little too weird. He identified with his subject matter-to the point where he tried to confuse the God by praying in a disguise made of human skin.'
'What?'
'He thought Peace was a divine avenger who'd mutinied, and decided the Fanged God was on your side but could be gotten around. He had some technology Peace had built him, so he convinced a lot of kzinti. The Patriarch had to kill him personally, and barely managed before Kdapt-Preacher could kill him.'
'Too bad,' said Corky.
Peace spoke up. 'If he'd won the duel, the first the human race would have heard of it would have been a simultaneous attack on every star with humans on its planets. Flares from relativistic impacts would keep everyone busy coping with heat, and they could pick off worlds one by one.'
'And where would you be this time?' Corky said, repressing fury.
'For the Patriarch to lose that duel I would have had to be years dead,' she said. 'I spent a lot of effort-more than you're equipped to comprehend-making changes in kzinti society, opening minds, getting precedence for some cultures and taking it from others. There won't be another attack on humanity, by this Patriarch at least.'
''Cultures,' plural?' Corky said.
Buckminster looked at Peace. 'I should have bit him,' he said.
'You'd have expired in convulsions.'
'I may anyway. -Have you bothered to learn anything about the enemy you're planning to kill? What do you think the Patriarchy is for?'
''The purpose of power is power,'' Corky quoted.
Buckminster's ears cupped. Then they curled tight, and reopened with a snap that must have been like thunder to him, and cupped again. Then he said, 'I think that may literally be the stupidest thing I've ever heard.'
'People who have power want to keep it and try to get more,' Corky said.
'I understood you. The purpose of power is action. They try to get more because they keep seeing more things they can almost do. Kzinti are not a tribal people, which is one thing that worked in your favor in the Wars. We argue a lot, and fight almost as much. We would never have entrusted the Patriarchy with power over the rest of us if there was any alternative.'
Corky narrowed his eyes. ''Entrusted'? It's a hereditary monarchy,' he said suspiciously.
Buckminster blinked. 'And before a human is sworn in as a government official, he has to give homage to a flag. Tell me, before you became a psychist, did you have to actually learn anything, say about symbolism and rituals for example?' Peace kept an eye on him-sarcasm was one thing, but when Buckminster got rhetorical it meant he was really angry-but when Corky didn't answer, he just went on, 'You seem to be under the impression that the Patriarch is someone whose primary qualification is the ability to beat up everybody else, like a medieval human king. The Patriarch is called that because he has a lot of sons. The firstborn isn't automatically the heir-less than half the time, I believe-'
'Thirty sixty-fourths and a little,' Peace said.
'Thanks. The heir is chosen to be the best available leader at the time. A good deal of medicine is the result of many occasions of trying to keep an aged Patriarch alive long enough for a really smart son to come of age. The principal attribute of a good leader is stopping fights.'
That finally got through Corky's skull. 'Stopping fights? It's not divide and rule?'
'In a civilization with fusion weapons?' Buckminster exclaimed.
'Aren't they all under government control? Human weapons are.'
'Of course they're not! Neither are human weapons. Humans must have half a million private spaceships-' He paused, and both of them looked at Peace.
'Close enough,' she said, amused, 'carry on.'
'Each has a fusion drive that can carve up a city. And the weapons supposedly under government control are each controlled by some individual.'
'Very few people have the authority to use them,' Corky protested.
'An enormous number have the ability to use one. Look at your own ship's arsenal. The Patriarchy is a means of preserving civilization, by giving us an absolute arbiter we can't help but respect.'
'What happens to kzinti who won't listen to reason? Organ banks?' Corky said curiously.
'Very few kzin cultures have tolerated cannibalism in any form,' Buckminster said with frost in his voice. 'Organ banks and property taxation are major reasons why human slaves were regarded with such contempt. Normally we establish degrees of rank and the rights of each rank-we do have thousands of generations of experience dealing with slave species.'
Corky scowled again, but said, 'So are they executed?'
'No, they're sent out with the conquest troops.'
Corky became very still. 'My family was eaten to make the Patriarch's job easier?' he said quietly.
'Oh, no,' Buckminster assured him. 'People were getting frantic for revenge. We'd never lost before. We didn't know the routine, either. The first treaty was seen as an incredibly naive act by humanity, giving us the opportunity to rearm and prepare another attack. Of course, you were familiar with the concept,' he added dryly. 'The first three treaties were also disastrous in terms of reparations. By your standards, our emissaries had no concept of negotiation. In fights between kzinti cultures, negotiations tend to consist of demonstrating to your opponent that you can destroy him, then getting whatever tribute you demand. The fourth treaty was much better, but that was Peace's doing, directly and indirectly.'
Corky looked at her, scowling again, and before he could speak Peace said, 'Get up, go wash, and return to eat.'
