vegetables. She didn’t know anything about spices. “What spices do I use, and they better be perfect or I’ll kill you!” It recommended five combinations and manufactured a pinch of each for her to taste with a wet finger. “Number two,” she ordered. It all went into the pot and the stew was simmering when Yankee arrived, late.
His eyes lit up and he grabbed a green apple to taste it before he gave her his usual brotherly kiss. “A Grandma, no less!” He began to chop up each apple with six quick whacks. He never bothered to peel them. “Stew smells good. Did you fight with autochef?”
“No. We had a very civil discussion. I had to shut him up sometimes.”
“Watch him. He doesn’t get angry He just poisons you when you push him too far” Yankee was already mixing up the dough for the pie crust
“How come he doesn’t make pie crust? I wanted everything ready for you when you came.”
“Thank Murphy for small blessings! Have you ever tasted one of his pies?” Yankee was grinning. He ordered lemon-cinnamon and the machine produced a brown powder-manufactured, of course. Starbase wasn’t on the spice trade-routes. She marveled that he knew whit to ask for.
“How did it go at work today?”
He waited to answer until the pie was in the oven and he was seated and relaxed. “You remember that crazy kzin we took to Hssin? That ratcat found out more than he was telling me. Fry thought as much and left him with a covert beamer.”
“You gave him hyperwave!” she exclaimed incredulously.
“No way. Electromagnetic. He sends out a message. Our patrol relays it. We just got the relay that he found Nora.”
“You’re sure?” She was skeptical.
“Hwass-Hwasschoaw sent us data about her DNA that he couldn’t know. He has her. He wants to exchange her and her children for a ride to Kzin, and I’ve been elected taximan.”
“It’s a trap! You be careful. He’s lying!”
“Kzinti don’t lie.”
“That’s what the alien psychologists say, but I don’t believe in kzin honesty for a minute! Do you? You’re a boy! You’re just like all the dumb adolescent boys I know! Do you really believe a kzin can’t lie?”
Yankee smiled and made the yes-no nodding gesture with his hand and head. “What is truth? There are endless ways to tell a half-truth-and no way that any finite language is capable of telling the whole truth. For instance, I can call you up from across town and tell you that your apartment door is unlocked, and that’s true, but what you really need to know is that I slagged your lock with a laser pistol and kicked the door off its hinges and stole your Tang Dynasty urns.”
“You told me that Hwass hates you.”
“He does.”
“So now he tells you that he has Nora and to come get him! It’s a trap. He doesn’t want to go to Kzin. He’s lying! He wants to kill you!”
“No, he’s not lying. He does want a ride to Kzin. He’s in some kind of political hot water. He needs to be met at the singularity boundary by a little ship that won’t attract the whole W’kkai navy He needs to get the hell out of there and he’s using my cousin as his ticket. I believe that. It’s what he is not telling us that worries me.”
“So you admit he’s lying?”
“In a culture where you are executed for lying, lying becomes a fine art indistinguishable from telling the truth.”
“No wonder the navy hates you!” She was exasperated. “You reach into black and pullout white!”
“Let’s get back to the subject” He was watching her eyes, waiting for the moment when she made eye contact with him. “And what have you been lying to me about?”
That made her furious. “I’ve always told you the truth! Always! You know that!”
“As honest as a kzin.”
“Oh,” she said. “You mean the things I haven’t told you about”
“Yeah.”
“That’s not fair. You’re older than I am. How about some rabbit stew first.”
He dished out two heaping plates and they ate. “Good stew. Great recipe.”
“Liar!”
The conversation died so he tried again. “I’m waiting.”
“There’s one thing I’ve never been able to say to you and it’s eating my heart out” She looked at him, begging permission to go on, a forlorn waif
“Go on.”
“Kakabuni!” And she was her old mischievous self again.
He grunted from this blow to his solar plexus. “You’ve floored me. Yeah. We haven’t been able to talk about that” The taboo word. And he concentrated on his stew for a while before he had the courage to look her grin in the teeth. “I’ll be a man and take my medicine. What else?”
“You want more? Let’s have some apple pie first,” she said miserably.
Somehow the conversation turned back to Nora Argamentine. The topic was safe and they each had a lot to say. The chime went off for the pie. He put on his mitts and took it out of the oven. He cut her a slice. “It’s hot,” he said.
Chloe took a forkful and blew on it “I’m pregnant.”
Yankee was half-expecting that. He had forgotten to make his offering to Murphy. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. Murphy was a hard god who expected you to tend to the smallest details of your life. Fail him once and his wrath was upon you. Murphy, judge and executioner-and Kakabuni, tempter.
“You’re more worried that my father is going to chop your head off than you are about me,” she sulked.
“I did promise him I’d take care of you.”
“You’ve taken very good care of me considering what a pest I am. You can marry me. Otherwise I have to have an abolition.”
“Before now, have you ever thought about marrying me?” he asked.
“You know I have-unless you’re blind. I’ve chased you mercilessly”
“You chase all men mercilessly.”
“Those are just boys. I keep looking for a man, and all I find are adolescent boys like you who do things on the floor and then run away.”
“It’s a fantasy, Chloe. I’m thirty-two years older than you are.”
“You’re lying like a kzin,” she said. “What you mean to say is that I’m thirty-two years younger than you are. You’re telling me that I’m too immature to understand you, too young to fit in your life, that I giggle too much, and that I run you ragged around your stuffy old edges.”
“Well, yeah.”
“You’re just afraid my father’s going to kill you!”
“There’s that.”
“Haven’t you ever even once thought about how nice it would be to be married to me?”
“More than you can imagine, I’m very fond of you. But it’s a fantasy.”
“Why?”
“The military life is hell.”
“I’m used to it. What am I supposed to do? Marry a painter and live in a Chinese junk in the San Francisco Bay slums? Many a Wunderkind sheep rancher?”
“I’m too old”
“I’ll be 178 when you are 210. Big deal. You’re such an ooze! You defy the whole navy but you’re terrified that your shipmates will laugh at you for marrying a gangly pubescent!”
“But I am too old for you.”
“I’d eat another slice of your superior pie but I’m too mad. Sit down. I’m prepared for you. I do my research.” She dragged him over to the couch and pushed him into a seat. She pulled out her infocomp and made a directory out of the word “aging” and a subdirectory out of the word “Jinx.” “I have an article for you.” She didn’t trust him to read it by himself so she read it to him.
More than forty-years ago the Jinxian laboratory at Sirius had produced something they called “boosterspice.”
