other things she had written, with his own personal memories. On far-off Hssin she’d wistfully remember a boy she had once known on Earth. Yankee would include her love letter to that boy in a fourteen-year-olds grammar.
Very carefully he wove through the book the saga of the hypershunt motor that had been captured at the Battle of Wunderland, and of Lieutenant Argamentine’s valiant attempts to destroy it. An almost successful mutiny. The killing of the kzinti crew. The last kzin. The recapture. The attempts to kill the last kzin. The failure. Her captor could have killed her but he found her useful, yet too dangerous to be left with a mind. Human heroes aren’t defined by their wins. A hero is the one who remains committed to principles. A hero is the one who never stops trying and never stops learning.
Why did Lieutenant Nora Argamentine try so hard to destroy that motor when she could have played it cool, been non-threatening, and perhaps saved her mind? Yankee hinted to his reader the chilling truth. Wasn’t it because she could see what a reverse-engineered hypershunt would mean to the Patriarchy? Had she seen the assembly lines on a hundred kzin worlds building a new and greater fleet to launch against Sol with all the resources of the Patriarchy behind it?
Her father died in the desperate days of the Ceres conflagration defending mankind against a fleet that had nearly brought the race to slavery-yet the enemy was only an adventurer’s ragtag knock-together manned by border barbarians whose resource base depended wholly upon the factories of Wunderland. In the next war light- lag would not protect Sol from a sluggish giant driven to anger by swarms of alien gnats who had penetrated its territory with impunity on wings that might be plucked out and turned to better use by warriors who knew what to do with such speeded reflexes.
To teach his readers how to see the man-kzin conflict with the eyes of Nora Argamentine, that was Yankee’s hope.
It was a mad project and he worked too hard on it, after his other duties. Sometimes a man just had to stop and go home.
“You’re late,” said Chloe, happy to see him. She was breast-feeding Val on the bed.
“Let me hold her.”
“After she’s fed, dummy”
“How was your day?”
“I was with Nora and the kids again. Her boys are too much for me. They still don’t know what to make of a woman who can talk. Yankee,” she added sadly, “Nora isn’t getting better.”
“She might be.” He stripped and crawled under the covers. All he wanted was to close his eyes and sink his head deep into the pillow, but you lose wives you ignore. He reached a hand out and switched on the bedroom flatscreen, fiddling with it until it networked with his office.
He called up a picture that was an obvious brain scan.
“One of Dr. Hunker’s pictures. See the white fuzz inside that gray area? Let me contrast it in false color.” He made adjustments. “Those are baby neurons.”
“She’s going to talk?”
“Hunker doesn’t know, but he’s giving it his best shot. It will be easier with the girls because of their age.”
“Didn’t that kzin grow a lot of neurons in her head?”
“He sure did. He killed a lot, too. And played around with dendritic growth like a yo-yo. Hunker has studied Trainer-of-Slaves’ notes. He’s incorporating bits and pieces of kzin biotechnology into some of his tailor-made boosterspices.”
“Is he going to make one for you so I can have a nice giggling teen-aged husband?”
“No. But I’m having to convince him to cook up a reverse boosterspice that I can sneak into your soup. Imagine the glories of waking up to a mature wife.”
“You’ve never liked boosterspice.”
“Scares me out of my mind,” said Yankee. “Especially after I’ve talked to Hunker for a while about some of the weird side-effects that can turn up.” on his rich old playboy experimental animals. Is he experimenting on Nora?”
“Yah. He’s being careful. Taking it easy. A little at a time. It’s a tough problem. Construction and repair don’t go by the same rules. It is easier to build something that can’t be repaired than it is to build something that can be repaired. Humans weren’t built to be repaired. We come in disposable containers. If we last long enough to see our children live through the terrible teens, our genes don’t see the need to have us repaired.”
“My poor daddy is ready for the junkyard?”
“You haven’t made it out of your teens yet, kid. You might still need him.”
“Men think of women as disposable containers,” said Chloe.
“Aw, no we don’t. Neither of you.” And he kissed the baby. “I didn’t design humans as disposable containers; God did. Suppose you build a gizmo and it wears out and you have to repair it. What do you do? If it is cheaper to build a new one than repair the old one, you throw away your gizmo. If it is cheaper to repair than replace, you repair it Humans are too hard to repair so they have evolved in disposable format. They are cheap to make.”
“Just wave your magic wand and say ‘Kakabuni,’ right?” She grinned.
“Not that easy.” He took Val and laid her on his chest where she burbled. “You’ve got to factor in the price of raising the little buggers until they are smart enough to leave home. There’s a bit of expense in that. You and I don’t know the worst of it yet. But still, for the price of one boosterspice shot I can raise ten teen-agers. At prices like that, what is a company going to do? They can hire a freshly weaned kid out of university train him and bury the worn-out worker, or they can buy a boosterspice shot for the older worker. At present prices they have no choice.”
“Is it costing so much to help Nora?”
“It’s costing a fortune. The Institute of Knowledge is footing the bill. They expect to learn a lot. The information in our genes tells us how to build a brain and not a damn thing about repairing it because the genetic cost of carrying that information is greater than the going price for a teen-ager, you being the exception.”
“You’re into buying me now!”
“I’m into going to sleep-and your little darling just pissed on me.”
At breakfast, refreshed, Yankee continued the discussion. He printed out pictures of Nora’s brain with enlargements of critical segments. Breakfast consisted of guinea pig jerky and flapjacks with cultured maple syrup.
“When Hunker tells me about brain repair my eyes go into orbit. That’s why nature knows enough not to try. Brain cells die and that’s it. We can’t activate the genes that grow the brain because Nora already has a brain. We can’t just plant the right kind of baby neurons where Nora’s language processor used to be because they have to grow and connect-and the rules for connecting them in an adult are different than the rules for connecting them in a baby. Hunker has to design the language-repair protocols and program it into the spice. Boosterspice already has in it half the information of the whole human genome. That’s a lot”
“Yankee, I’m miserable. You don’t come home at night. Don’t you love me anymore?”
“Just another one of my damn projects.”
“What project!?! A new one? You don’t tell me anything! Is it a military secret?”
“No. I’m too involved in this Nora thing.”
“So am I! You’re supposed to talk to me. We’re supposed to work together.”
“I thought you might be jealous. It’s almost like I’m caught up in an old love.”
“Oh Yankee!”
“You’re right.” He took her into the bedroom and transferred the whole Nora file in from his work computer. “Read it. It’ll take all day. Tell me what you think.”
Chloe had rabbit stew for dinner and he came home early. She was happy again. “It’s marvelous. Now what are you going to do with it? They’ll kill you. You never change.”
“I’ll publish it.”
“On Earth? Over the ARM’S dead body you will! You’ll never get clearance!”
