'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, facade 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 debris 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 Peace says suggests the Pak have allowed the breeders to evolve a little more brainpower. They must have been dismantling planets by then.' He made a series of adjustments and displayed a view that was between Orion's hypothetical feet. There were hundreds of dim red specks, no longer quite in hexagonal array. 'That's the second fleet. Passed us about thirty years ago. That glow is friction with interstellar gas. Peace says the Homers must have sprayed boron vapor into its path and blown up the ram engines. That would have been sometime during the Second War. Otherwise somebody around here would have wondered about it.' He switched the view toward Sagittarius-Peace would just have rotated it, but humans had appallingly little trouble with wildly swooping views-and said, 'The wreckage of the third fleet's almost invisible in front of a nebula, and further from us anyway. Here's the fourth.' Hundreds of white specks, in nothing like hexagonal array. 'They saw the first three go and tried to scatter, but the lateral vector component is still tiny. Loosened up the fusion constriction-they should be blue-but they don't know about the boron. Peace says the change won't save them. The rams won't all blow up, but the gamma rays will roast the pilots. The fifth wave will have to be hunted. Is being hunted by now, and may be gone-this view is about a hundred and twenty years old. Here, look!' he said, making Corky jump. 'Sorry,' he said. 'But look here. See that red dot? That's a human Protector's ship. They're redshifted, so they don't show up well, but this one's right in front of a dark region. Not many of those out that way.'
'Am I a coward?' Corky asked abruptly.
It occurred to Buckminster, after he'd been staring for about half a minute, that if that had been a ruse, it would have been a good one-Corky could have gotten in a couple of pretty solid licks with an ax before he could have responded. 'No, of course not.' Though you may be the silliest person I've ever met, he reflected.
'It's been a couple of years since I did anything. Toward justice.'
Buckminster was certain he was expected to say something at this point, but couldn't think of anything relevant. He attempted, 'One of the things that used to confuse officials in treaty discussions is how some of your terms have multiple and contradictory meanings. 'Justice' is a good example. What you've been doing isn't what humans usually call justice-that tends to be more like Patriarchal arbitration. Killing the humans who got your family killed is more like kzinti justice-though we'd want it to be publicly known. Part of it is the idea that anyone else who considers duplicating the offense should feel very reluctant.'
'Deterrence,' Corky said. He was looking very intently at Buckminster.
'I think so. I've mostly encountered the human term in a political context, but it sounds appropriate.'
Corky spoke slowly. 'You claim I can't kill the Patriarch-'
'I'm not making any special claims. It just so happens.'
'Right… You're a kzin.'
Buckminster didn't see any reason to deny it. He'd watched transmissions of human gatherings, and noticed that most of the attendees didn't look comfortable until someone had stood up and told them things they already knew. It was a habit he suspected was related to why they kept defeating better warriors. It made sure everybody did know. It was awfully tedious, though. He waited for Corky to go on, then realized Corky was also waiting for
