Man-Kzin Wars XII Larry Niven (list of ebook readers .TXT) 📖

"Who knows? Lots of people on Mars took the name Smith after the Blowout. Classical allusion. In his case, though, it was just a standard label for someone whose name was unknown." He led them toward the rocks.

" 'Toxic dump'?" Perpetua said, alarmed at the unfamiliar term.

"Another ancient reference. People didn't use to reduce sewage and garbage to simple organics with superheated steam. They just left things in pits."

"How did they make plastics?" wondered Ginger.

"The raw materials originally came from underground." Smith paused to look at Ginger. "Your homeworld hasn't had petroleum for about ten thousand years, has it?"

"Wunderland has petroleum," Ginger said, surprised.

"He means Kzinhome," Perpetua said. "Like his is Earth."

Smith scowled, and Ginger snorted amusement. "I see. Probably not. What did people do about the smell?"

"Lived somewhere else," Smith said.

"The fellow who first began mining those pits must have gotten awfully rich," Ginger speculated as they got to the entrance. There was a door a little ways in.

"No, on Earth it's a branch of government. There's still some garbage fortunes in the Belt, though," said Smith, lifting a sign that said scoppy fever and tapping the keypad underneath. The door opened, and he went in first.

They heard, "What the hell do you—Waldo!"

"Hilda!" Smith replied as they moved into better lighting than the entryway's.

After a short silence the woman said, "Theo. Good to see you. What do—Theo, there's a kzin behind you."

"Yes, he keeps me out of trouble. I gather Larch is still mooching off his mother."

The shop was something out of Davidson, with counters and racks and display cases crammed with unrelated oddities. There was actually a stuffed crocodile up by the ceiling; it must have been ruinously expensive. The 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