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toughest.
But you don't take waiting well, and when you hate yourself verguuz is how you
punish yourself. That, and letting yourself go." He was suddenly conscious of
his own smell. "Not while you're with me, thank you very much."
Harold stared at her for a moment, then slumped back against the bulkhead,
shaking his head in wonder. You can't fight in a singleship, he reminded
himself. Motion caught the corner of his eye; several of the screens were set
to reflective. Well . . . he thought. The pouches under his eyes were a little
too prominent. Nothing wrong with a bender now and then .
. . but now and then had been growing more frequent.
Habits grow on you, even when you've lost the reasons for them, he mused. One
of the drawbacks of modern geriatrics. You get set in your ways. Getting close
enough to someone to listen to her opinions of him-now that was a habit he was
going to have to learn.
"Gottdamn, what a honeymoon," he muttered.
Ingrid mustered a smile. "Haven't even had the nuptials, yet. We could set up
a contract-" She winced and made a gesture of apology.
"Forget it," he answered roughly. That was what his
Herrenmann father had done, rather than marry a Belter and a Commoner into the
sacred Schotman family line.
Time to change the subject, he thought. "Tell me . .
. thinking back, I got the idea you knew the kzinti weren't running this ship.
The computer got some private line?"
"Oh." She blinked, then smiled slightly. "Well, I
thought I recognized the programming. I was part of the team that designed the
software, you know? Not many sentient computers ever built. When I heard the
name of the 'kzinti' ship, well, it was obvious."
"Sounded pretty authentic to me," Harold said dubiously, straining his memory.
Ingrid smiled more broadly. "I forgot. It'd sound perfectly reasonable to a
kzin, or to someone who grew up speaking
Wunderlander, or Belter English. I've been associating with flatlanders,
though."
"I don't get it."
"Only an English-speaking flatlander would know what's wrong with kchee'uRiit
maarai as a ship-name." At his raised eyebrows, she translated: Gigantic
Patriarchal Tool.
Chapter 16
"Now will you believe?" Buford Early said, staring into the screen.
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Someone in the background was making a report;
Shigehero turned to acknowledge, then back to the UN general. "I am . . .
somewhat more convinced," he admitted after a pause. "Still, we should be
relatively safe here."
The oyabun's miniature fleet had withdrawn considerably farther; Early glanced
up to check on the distances, saw that they were grouped tightly around
another asteroid in nearly matching orbit, more than half a million kilometers
from the
Ruling Mind. The other members of the UN team were still mostly slumped,
gray-faced, waiting for the aftereffects of the thrint's mental shout to die
down. Two were in the autodoc.
"Safe?" Early said quietly. "We wouldn't be safe in the Solar system! That . .
.
thing had a functioning amplifier going, for a second or two at least." Their
eyes met, and shared a memory for an instant.
Drifting fragments of absolute certainty; the oyabun's frown matched his own,
as they concentrated on thinking around those icy commands. Early bared his
teeth, despite the pain of a lip bitten half through. It was like sweeping
water with a broom: you could make yourself believe they were alien implants,
force yourself to, but the knowledge was purely intellectual. They felt true,
and the minute your attention wandered you found yourself believing again . .
.
"Remember Greenberg's tape." Larry Greenberg had been the only human ever to
share minds with a thrint, two centuries ago when the
Sea Statue had been briefly and disastrously reanimated. "If it gets the
amplifier fully functional, nothing will stand in its way. There are almost
certainly fertile females in there, too." With an effort as great as any he
had ever made, Early forced his voice to reasonableness. "I know it's
tempting, all that technology. We can't get it. The downside risk is simply
too great."
And it would be a disaster if we could, he thought grimly. Native human
inventions were bad enough; the ARM and the Order before them had had to
scramble for centuries to defuse the force of the industrial revolution. The
thought of trying to contain a thousand years of development dumped on
humanity overnight made his stomach hurt and his fingers long for a stogie.
Memory
prompted pride. We did restabilize, he thought. So some of the early efforts
were misdirected. Sabotaging Babbage, for example.
Computers had simply been invented a century or two later, anyway. Or Marxism.
That had been very promising, for a while, a potential world empire with
built-in limitations; Marx had undoubtedly been one of the Temple's shining
lights, in his time.
Probably for the best it didn't quite come off, considering the kzinti, he
decided. The UN's done nearly as well, without so many side effects.
"There are no technological solutions to this problem," he went on, making
subliminal movements with his fingers.
The oyabun's eyes darted down to them, reminded of his obligations. Not that
they could be fully enforced here, but they should carry some weight at least.
To remind him of what had happened to other disloyal members: Charlemagne, or
Hitler back in the twentieth century, or Brennan in the twenty-second. "We're
running out of time, and dealing with forces so far beyond our comprehension
that we can only destroy on sight, if we can. The kzinti will be here in a
matter of days, and it'll be out of our hands."
Shigehero nodded slowly, then gave a rueful smile. "I
confess to hubris," he said. "We will launch an immediate attack. If nothing
else, we may force the alien back into its stasis field." He turned to give an
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order.
Woof, Early thought, keeping his wheeze of relief purely mental. He felt shock
freeze him as Shigehero turned back.
"The, ah, the . . ." The oyabun coughed, cleared his throat: "The asteroid . .
.
and the alien ship . . . and, ah, Markham's ships . .
. they have disappeared."
* * *
"Full house," the slave on the right said, raking in his pile of plastic
tokens.
"That's the south polar continent I'm to be chief administrator of, Master.
Your deal."
Dnivtopun started to clasp his hands to his head, then stopped when he
remembered the bandages. Fear bubbled up from his hindbrain, and the thick
chicken-like claws of his feet dug into the yielding deck surface. Training
kept it from leaking out, a mental image of a high granite wall between the
memory of pain streaming through his mind and the Power.
Instead he waved his tendrils in amusement and gathered in the cards. Now,
split the deck into two equal piles, faces down. Place one digit on each, use
the outer digit to ruffle them together-
The cards flipped and slid. With a howl of frustration, Dnivtopun jammed them
together and ripped the pack in half, throwing them over his shoulder to join
the ankle-deep heap behind the thrint's chair.
He rose and pushed it back, clattering. "This is a stupid game!" The humans
were sitting woodenly, staring at the playing table with expressions of
disgust.
"Carry on," he grated. They relaxed, and one of them produced a fresh pack
from the box at its side. "No, wait," he said, looking at them more closely.
What had the Chief Slave said? Yes, they did look as if they were losing
weight: one or two of them had turned gray and their skin was hanging in
folds, and he was sure that the one with the chest protuberances had had fur
on its head before. "If any of you have gone more than ten hours without food
or water, go to your refectory and replenish."
The slaves leaped to their feet in a shower of chips and cards, stampeding for
the door to the lounge area; several of them were leaking fluid from around [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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