woman behind the sales counter was very tall, like most other locals, and beige, but with hair going gray and lines at the corners of her eyes. 'Yes,' she said, watching Ginger. Then she pointed at him and said, 'Don't think you can try your telepathy for a better price. I'm a junk dealer, the only thing that works on me is money.'
Smith held up a hand in front of Ginger-unnecessarily, as Ginger was too astonished and offended to speak- and stepped forward to tell her in a very low voice, 'Mom, first of all, it was the Slavers who used telepathy to control minds; second, damn few kzinti are telepaths; third, none of those have Names, which he does, indicating high social value; and fourth, telepaths are all addicted to a drug that enhances the facility and destroys their health, so you've just done the equivalent of greeting a total stranger by calling him a wirehead.'
She opened her eyes wide, then closed them and kept them shut for a bit. She hunched down about a handspan-human handspan-and her face changed color, getting lighter in some places and darker in others. She took a deep breath, opened her eyes, and said in a low voice, 'Sir, I apologize. Please feel welcome.'
'Thank you,' said Ginger.
There was a moment of awkward silence. Perpetua broke it by saying, 'Was Larch the short one?'
Smith gave her a stare, then apparently realized that she was shorter than every person they'd met except one, and said, 'Yeah. Hey Mom, you should have heard Ginger. Managed to convey the idea that I was some kind of trained killer.'
'You are a trained killer,' said his mother.
'I don't go around single-handedly massacring groups of kzinti when I get offended, which is what he implied.'
'Of course, you couldn't talk about it if you did,' she observed with a straight face.
Smith sighed heavily, then said, 'How quickly I recall why I don't drop by more often. We need two hyperdrives.'
His mother gave an incredulous chuckle-a little late, Ginger thought. 'You want inertialess drives along with those?'
'It's Marley Foundation business.'
Her manner changed utterly. She leaned back, her face grew still, and her eyes narrowed. She said, 'What have you done for it?'
'I got transferred to the Belt eleven years ago. Check funding and dates for the Outback Restoration Project.'
She nodded once and went through a door. Ginger heard tiny clicks from different parts of the room they were in, and held quite still. Perpetua said, 'T.C., what's going on?'
'The Marley Foundation is a private charity dedicated to saving people from foolish planning, often their own. Very old. I was assigned to investigate them and wound up joining, about fifty years back. Twelve years ago there was a big ARM project to clear out the Australian Outback-a large desert-so it could be preserved in its natural condition, without a lot of tourists coming in. I was in charge of selling the idea to the voters. The thing is, there were people who'd been living there for thousands of years, and they couldn't be expelled-they were arguably part of the natural condition. I went and talked to a lot of them, and we cooked up a plan. I sold the ARM on the idea of making them official caretakers of the region, and I arranged to supply them with plans and equipment, and as soon as they were put in charge of the region they cut a channel from the sea to the middle of the desert. Logarithmic spiral, uniform grade, so Coriolis force caused air to move up the channel of its own accord. Water condensed out as the air rose, and a little stream formed. In another century it'll be a pretty decent river. They didn't particularly like the desert, you see. They were just the descendants of people who knew how to survive there.'
Perpetua was openmouthed and shaking with silent laughter. 'How did they mask the explosions?' she finally got out.
'Oh, I gave them a couple of disintegrators.'
'That's the shape!' Ginger exclaimed, making them both jump. 'This cavern was carved with a disintegrator, wasn't it?'
Smith recovered and said, 'Yeah, they didn't have too much intact dome material. Bored down, ran an air tube in to blow the dust out, and had another disintegrator up on the surface aimed at the falling dust. Opposite charge, so when it came down it fused to the ground.'
'And the current fused the wall of the chamber,' Ginger said, as pleased as if he'd done it himself. 'There are caverns back home that humans carved that way during the Second War, with openings a kzin couldn't get a leg into. A lot of invaders died after passing by one of those.'
'Oh, yeah,' said Perpetua.
'How come it took you so long?' Smith wondered.
'This one's a lot bigger,' Ginger said.
'Never saw one with trees in it, either,' said Perpetua.
'True.'
The proprietor returned. 'Excuse me; what's your name?' said Perpetua.
'Joanna.' She seemed a little startled, but went on with what she had come back for: 'This way.'
'Perpetua, and Ginger.'
'How do.'
They followed her into a back corridor, then into a cramped chamber which looked like a storeroom for things too odd to keep out front-which was saying something. Ginger just had time to notice that while things sat on the floor or hung on the walls, nothing on the floor leaned against a wall. Then the floor descended.
The elevator was slower than the one before. 'I keep meaning to study tap dancing,' Joanna said after a while, for no discernible reason.
T.C. seemed to find it funny. 'Another archaic reference,' he told them. 'One reason the ARM presence here is so thin on the ground. They have to do constant data searches to find out what people are saying. Usually just conversation-drives them nuts.'
The light was from overhead, and grew fainter as they went down. The walls ended, leaving blackness at the edge of the floor. They were in a big volume, and still descending. Ginger's tail tried to lash.
When they stopped, Joanna said, 'Basement dungeon, everybody out.'
'As I said,' T.C. remarked, but didn't go on.
When they were off the platform, lights began to go on.
This took a while.
Eventually Ginger said, 'Why don't you all live down here? There's more room than all the domes.'
'We do. Different families have their own caverns, but they all connect up-how do you think we got this stuff down here?'
The equipment could have made up a well-equipped multifunction carrier-troopship, fighter station, hospital, and kzinforming-though the assembled hull sections would have given it an awfully odd profile. And extra nacelles would have had to be custom-made for all the weaponry. Possibly a tertiary power plant to supply them, too.
'This way,' Joanna said, interrupting Ginger's reverie. They stepped onto a slidewalk, one of many, and began moving through what might have been the toy box of a precocious infant Titan. 'What do you need two hyperdrives for?' she said.
'Equipping a couple of transport ships to evacuate a lot of humans from a kzinti world,' T.C. said.
'And Jotoki,' said Perpetua.
'What's that?' Joanna said.
Ginger and Perpetua stared at her, speechless with astonishment.
'They look sort of like starfish,' T.C. said. 'They don't come to Sol System much,' he explained to the Wunderlanders. 'The ARM harasses them about what they can sell.'
'They're aquatic?' Joanna said.
'Amphibious, if I remember right,' T.C. said.
'They have an immature aquatic stage, and five sexes,' Ginger said. 'Each limb starts as a separate nonsentient creature. They meet and join at maturity. They develop intelligence just before they breed.'
'Oh,' said Joanna. 'Just the opposite of us, then.'
They had to get off to go back and get Perpetua; she was laughing so hard she fell off the slidewalk.
Once they were going again, Joanna asked T.C., 'You two up to something?'
