'Traditional.'
Simultaneously exasperated and amused, he said, 'Goddamn it, I can never tell when you're kidding!'
'True,' she said sadly. She looked at the doc readout and said, 'Odd. His ribosomes are just like ours.'
'Aren't everybody's? I mean, they're how DNA gets implemented, right?' He'd been a colonist back in the days when it took a city's annual income to send a ship to another star, and he'd studied everything that might be useful to qualify. And it wasn't like some Ivy League education-he'd had to understand the material.
She nodded, pleased with him. 'Yes. But our Pak ancestors, and bandersnatchi, and the photosynthetic yeast everybody else is evolved from, all came from Tnuctipun design labs. The chukting were never anywhere near them, and they have the same ribosomes.'
'The what?'
'The chukting. Tinchamank here.'
'Oh. Kzanol called them 'racarliwun.' '
'Why?'
The question seemed to startle him. 'Well, he named the planet after his grandfather Racarliw, who built the family stage-tree farm up into a major industrial enterprise.'
'So this would be someone who used all his income to recapitalize the business, and didn't set anything aside for his descendants, which would be why Kzanol was out prospecting and ended up on Earth to cause the deaths of hundreds of human beings?'
'Um. Yeah.'
'So the hell with him. As I said, the chukting have ribosomes just like ours, but are of completely unconnected origin. Which is weird.'
'Panspermia?' Theorists had often speculated that life had only needed to evolve once per galaxy, then spread offplanet due to meteor impacts, and to other stars via light pressure.
'Their home system is far enough outside the then-explored Galaxy for any spores to die en route.'
'Carried on something else?'
'The only things,' she began, and blinked as everything finally fitted together. 'Of course. Good thinking.'
'Thanks,' he said, not really understanding.
Tinchamank adjusted to circumstances better than Peace did. His had been the most adaptable mind of an advanced industrial society, chosen from among many thousands of trained experts to sit in judgment on any matter that arose, and he was able to serve in this capacity for the colonists as well. He actually settled some feuds that had been developing.
Peace, on the other hand, had no knack for direct mind contact at all. Seeing what breeders were thinking was something any Protector could do, but it wasn't telepathy; it was on the order of a breeder seeing a dog snarl and bare its fangs and guessing what would happen next. Monitoring and feedback devices were invaluable for telling her what, in her brain, was simply not happening.
They kept working at it for almost three years.
One day Larry stopped in the middle of another adjustment and said miserably, 'I have to go in.'
'You'd just die,' she said.
He sighed. Then he said, 'You're not that obtuse.'
'I'm not that cold, either. I sure as hell wouldn't have given up sex if I'd had a choice.'
He blinked. 'I had an image of you as kind of a spinster.'
She chuckled audibly. 'I know. If I'd told you stories about my sex life your brain would have cooked in its own juices. Now, though-Larry, I want you to imagine being employed at the most enjoyable activity-sustainable activity, that is-you can think of.'
'Hitting baseballs through the windows of ARM headquarters?' he said with a straight face.
'Damnation,' she said earnestly.
'Sorry, I'll be serious.'
'No, it's just I don't know when I'll get back there again, and I never once thought to do that.' She enjoyed his astonishment for a moment, then added, 'The top of that dome would be an ideal place to stand, too.'
Hesitantly, he said, 'Kidding?'
She waggled a hand. 'Not entirely. Larry, imagine feeling like that all the time.'
'Look, I'm volunteering, right?'
'I wonder. This is what I originally planned, and I worked on you to push you in that direction, at least at first. I decided a few years back to learn telepathy myself instead.'
'Well, you can't.' He was as terrified as she'd ever seen anyone, not excepting kzinti who had supposed her to be the Wrath of God Incarnate; and he was going to go through with it. He had courage she'd never dreamed of as a breeder, and she loved him for it more than she'd loved any other human who'd ever lived.
'I know. Come on,' she said, removing the contact helmet: 'I'll buy you lunch.'
Shleer had the disruption helmet finished in two days. He tried it out the only way he could, as befit a Hero: on himself. He put it on and hit the switch.
Everyone went away. The quiet was unbelievable.
He immediately switched it off and got moving out of the harem, in case the effect had been noticed.
It hadn't. In the Residence they had other things on their minds.
How can they move that fast? Gnix Screamed at the Patriarch, who staggered.
'Speed field,' slurred Rrao-Chrun-Riit. 'Reduced inertia, almost five hundred and twelve times as fast as normal.'
Aircraft had dropped into the atmosphere all over the planet, swarms of them, moving at something like two million miles an hour in all directions.
Suddenly they were in a ring, converging on the Patriarch's Palace.
Do something!
The Patriarch opened the master panel of his fooch and tapped a switch.
The incoming craft slowed to about Mach 6 on the monitor system, and the palace defenses began shooting them down.
WELL DONE… WHAT DID YOU DO?
'I accelerated us as well. The system was installed three hundred years ago, after we found signs that someone had gotten in undetected.'
IF THEY WERE 'UNDETECTED,' HOW DID YOU FIND SIGNS?
'Things worked better, like food dispensers and data retrieval.'
One of the craft hit the palace, not far from Riitt's Past.
A pilot hurtled out in a suit of powered armor, and began charging in through automatic defensive fire. Pieces of armor were jettisoned as lasers heated them intolerably-which was possibly their principal reason for existing. The pilot got a long way before the armor was down to a single flexible suit. That was black, coated with superconductor, and appeared to be venting coolant whenever lasers touched it.
The lasers made contact less often with each passing minute. The pilot was fast, almost invisibly so on the security screens. A funny-looking human.
Gnix detected recognition in two nearby minds. One was the Patriarch, whose perplexing and repetitive thought was Peace. The other was Darfoor.
Darfoor was terrified out of his mind, and he was thinking assassin, assassin! Gnix Told him,
COME HERE. TELL ME WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS THING.
'I made them,' whimpered the Tnuctip. 'The tarkodun were too stupid to follow instructions, and we were told to make them smarter. We gave them a third stage of life. They have brains Thrintun can't control all at once. They're smarter than anything else, and they live forever, and we made them to kill you. They gave us the hyperjump and disintegrator and stasis field when we asked for ways to disrupt your lives. We're all going to die.'
SHUT UP. STAY PUT AND ATTEND UNTIL I TELL YOU OTHERWISE. FIGHTING SLAVES, STOP THAT THING!- NOT YOU, CHIEF SLAVE.
