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

shield to detect them, of course, but that tended to paralyze anyone in range who didn't have one, which in this case meant most of the planet.

TOO MUCH OIL, he Told the slave burnishing his scales.

The Patriarch of Kzin wiped off the excess.

It was almost two years before Greenberg saw the protector again. Judy was expecting a daughter, according to the autodoc, and he was edgy: "Hey! Where've you been?"

"Working" was the reply. "What the hell did you think?"

"How should I know? There're discrepancies in the history you gave us."

"This is your idea of news? How are the rest getting along?"

That diverted him briefly. "They're afraid of you. They doubt the explanation of why they can't look outside the ship." Cordelia was in hyperdrive. "—And the history doesn't add up!"

"Okay, name some problems."

"How many wars were there with these 'kzinti'?"

"Depends who you ask. Flatlanders say six, because they got involved in all of them. Kzinti and Pleasanters say four because there have been that many peace treaties: Kzinti needed some kind of conceptual dividing line to get a handle on the idea of peace, and Pleasanters are almost all descended from lawyers. Old Wunderland vets say one, because there are still kzinti alive, so the war's still running." She spread her hands, momentarily resembling a cottonwood tree. "Take your pick. Next?"

"How many do you say?"

The look she gave him produced, in him, the exact feeling other people got when they first learned he was a telepath. After a moment she said, "Two. The first began with the invasion of Wunderland, and ended when I arranged for the subordination of the kzinti religion to secular authority. The second was an act of personal retaliation by one man, Harvey Mossbauer, whose family was killed at the end of the first, against the Patriarch; he killed the Patriarch's family in return. Since then the Patriarch of Kzin has understood that humans are, by kzinti terms, people, and has treated them as such in law. They can't be held as slaves or raised for meat, for example—though if a kzin from one of the cannibal cultures kills a human in a dispute, eating him is deemed fair. The cannibals are dying out, though. They get in too many fights. Next?"

"How come humans are related to primates that have been on Earth since long before the Pak supposedly brought us?"

"Obviously there must have been previous visits, with much smaller breeder populations. Lots more drift that way. The first was probably just a few million years after the Dinosaur Killer."

"Ah. Yucatán," he said wisely.

"Oh, were the ARMs still flogging 'nuclear winter' in your time? I thought that was just when they were getting set up."

"Excuse me?"

"Guess not, must have been residual. 'Nuclear winter' was the notion that throwing a lot of dust and soot into the atmosphere would cause an Ice Age in spite of halving the planet's albedo. It was one of those political hypotheses, meant to frighten people into accepting the need for restricting technology. The ARMs spread a lot of those in the early days. Anyway, the Yucatán crater has K-T iridium in it and is therefore older. Only an ocean strike will produce an Ice Age, and only if it's big enough to punch through the crust and boil a few cubic miles of ocean with magma. In this case it obviously was, as it also produced Iceland.

"As I was saying, the protectors in that migration saw a world with no big predators and settled in. Obviously they sent back word of what a nice place it was, and just as obviously the expedition that brought our ancestors destroyed the records before they left home, to keep from being followed."

"But Brennan and Truesdale never mention any earlier expeditions."

"Truesdale had other things to deal with. Brennan didn't care. He was a Belter, and Belters who lived long enough to establish their society were not the ones who let their minds wander or indulged casual curiosity. Next?"

"There's an implausible coincidence between the departure of human Protectors and first contact with the kzinti—"

"Coincidence my ossified ass!" she snapped, startling him badly. "The puppeteers first brought us to the kzinti's attention about two months after the Fleet left for the Core."

"That's the part I have trouble with. Puppeteers are herbivores. Peaceful."

"I should have cloned a bull."

"Huh?"

"In case it has escaped your attention, the class of herbivores includes cattle, horses, elephants, the Roman legionaries who conquered Gaul, and Pak Protectors. Herbivores casually obliterate anything that encroaches on their territory—or that looks like it might. Carnivores come in all types of personality, but dedicated herbivores are merciless killers. Anything else?"

"Um. I need to think some—yah, hey, what the hell did you mean by putting that big warning in the movie archive: 'DO NOT WATCH FOR A BREATH I TARRY AND FIREBIRD IN ONE SITTING!'?" He brimmed with outrage.

"It's a bad idea," she said ingenuously. "I take it you did?"

"Everybody did!" he bellowed. "And guess who got it all secondhand, as well?"

"Didn't like them?"

He shook all over, very abruptly, but forced himself back under control. "Don't you make fun, goddamn it," he said softly.

"I'm sorry," she said at once, and brushed fingertips on his shoulder; those, at least, weren't rocklike.

"There's only so much of anything we can stand. Even beauty."

"I know. That's why I did it."

He stared at her. "What?"

"Now everyone knows I don't give warnings without a good reason. Would you rather I'd set a trap that blew somebody's hand off?"

He glared, but she was right—no one would ever ignore one of her warnings after that shattering experience. Finally he nodded. Then he said, "We could only find the author for one—glad we looked, though, this guy Zelazny is incredible! Was Firebird published under some different title? The only other reference I could find was a piece of classical animation with the same music."

She nodded. "The one where the Firebird is the bad guy? This one was done in rebuttal, I believe. Later it was suppressed by the