Man-Kzin Wars XIV (23 page)

He nodded, then went out the door.

On the long walk down the hall to the elevator—he’d had an apartment near an elevator back when he was (good God!) in his twenties; never again—he said in a low voice, “Just what’s the plan?”

“Shipping the materials to a secret lab offworld, where a crazed doctor has a plan.”

“So we’re sticking to the truth.”

“Hm! Right.”

“I surmise you have most of the arrangements in the system already,” he said.

“Of course.”

“Enthusiasm is no substitute for experience,” he said, and every part of the corridor was swept with sonic cannon except where he was. He dove for the hatch that opened up in the wall, went five stories down a slide that he’d swear hadn’t been that steep in the drill, came out into another hallway, and rolled against a transfer booth, whose door popped open. He wasn’t even tempted, he knew she could trace him if he used it. His phone was obviously bugged, so he came to his feet and ran to the emergency phone. Hand on the scanner, he said, “Marshall Buford Early crisis priority to Osiris Chen.”

The screen lit up.

It said COLD.

A bag of rocks wrapped around the back of his neck, and a rubber ball fitted neatly into his gaping mouth. Ursula’s head appeared next to his.

“Huh, yeah, what, Buford?” said the Chief of Internal Security.

Buford Early heard his own voice come out of Ursula’s mouth. “Ozzie,” she slurred, “I jus’ wanna tell you, you’re a rilly beau’ful person.”

“Where’s the picture?”

“Oh, off, ’m naked.”

There was a pause. “And you had to call me up at 3:18 to tell me.”

“Din wanna forget again. You deserve to know, an’ you can tell everyone I said so.”

“Oh, I will,” said Chen, who assuredly would.

“You gessum sleep now,” Ursula said, and the phone shut off.

The ball came out of his mouth, and he looked at her and said, “You unbelievably horrible bitch.”

“What? He sounded glad to hear it.”

It was boasted, in White Medical’s advertising, that nobody who used one of their ’docs every day had ever died of any of a number of ailments. The list included apoplexy. This turned out to be true.

When he had calmed down somewhat, largely due to lack of breath, Ursula said, “Do you know why ARM HQ security has never been breached? It was designed by Jack Brennan. The cheats are conspicuous, to me. And you really hoped you could catch a Protector.”

“Hope is a virtue,” he muttered.

“Hope is a narcotic, and it kills more people than wireheading. As witness the planet Pleasance. Marshall, you are free to waste your own time, but wasting mine is an act of sabotage in wartime. Do it again and I’ll dose you with something that’ll make you compulsively truthful for about five hundred hours, then turn you loose at the Belt Embassy. The next three weeks will be historic.”

He’d been doubting the existence of such a substance until she used that last word. Given some of the things he knew about what the ARM had done over the centuries to minimize Belter trade advantages, the term was precisely accurate.

“And by the bye,” she said as her helmet formed again, “no amount of practice will create talent.”

“What?”

“My reply to your trigger code. I found it an unusually foolish statement.”

“My father used to say it, back when I was starting to date.” It suddenly occurred to him that his father used to get divorced every ten years or so.

“You might want to listen to someone smarter than you for a change. As in, ‘Protectors don’t stun.’ The sleep center is under voluntary control and can’t be triggered by an external signal, and the tissue is too tough for a shockwave to shut off circulation, those being the two ways a stunner can work.” Her head vanished again.

The trip down to the Freezer Bank was without further incident.

Doctor Massoglia was IN, according to the little card on the door. It always said that. He’d checked once, and the other side of the card did indeed say OUT, but he’d never seen that side in use. He seemed to live here.

What the tanj, lots of people had apartments in the building; why not one in your office?

He’d always have ice at parties.

He shook that thought off and entered his ID in the reception screen. A few moments later, an astonished-looking woman he didn’t know came out of another room and said, “Good morning, Marshall, I’m Jane Rancourt.”

“Pleased to meet you, Doctor.”

“Jane.”

“Buford. Is Martin up? It’s about the new project.”

In his ear, Ursula’s voice said, “Penzance.”

He got the reference instantly, clenched his teeth, and said, “Penzance. You get a memo?” The damn tune would be running through his head for years, he just knew it.

“Just today. Well, yesterday. I wasn’t expecting anyone at this hour, though.”

“It’s the only time I’m not doing something else. And the appeasers are less likely to get wind of it if it’s done quietly.”

“I’ll call him.” Jane went back into her office.

“Penzance?” he muttered.

“It’s at least as good a codename as ‘Overlord’ or ‘Desert Storm,
’”
Ursula said. “And much better security than ‘Cherubim.
’”

“I wanted to call that ‘Pumpkin,
’”
he said.

“The kzin are highly literate and fond of alien fables. They’d have understood it was a reference to transformation.”

Early was shocked. He hadn’t thought of that himself. He’d been thinking of sweet potatoes, which he loathed in pie. He liked pumpkin pie, that’s all. “What codename would you have given it?”

“Supposing I was silly enough to do it, you mean? Mighty Mouse. Complete irrelevance. Of course, there’d be some minor risk of them stocking up on limburger, but the Protectors would be in pressure suits most of the time anyway. Dummy up.” Massoglia was coming out.

“Hey, Buford.”

“Marty. Sorry about the hour.”

“Nah, makes sense. And you are always Early.” The only enjoyment he got from that tired old joke was hearing Ursula’s beak grind at the pun. “You want the full tour at last?”

“Not hardly, but I’m taking it. How much did the memo tell you?”

“Splice and clone, and they need at least a quarter of a cortex per donor. Personally I think if the Belt wants genius lunatics they should start with the guy who thought this up.”

“Who says they didn’t? They need more than one.”

“Might as well take you straight to the Beneficiaries, then. Not many of those. This way.” He led Early down a corridor and through a doorway.

Corpsicles had once been kept in separate Dewar tanks. Later they were more numerous, and space was at a premium, so most had been packed in rows, side by side.

Not these. There would have been too much risk of getting the parts mixed up. As they passed one carcass, Early said, “Good Christ, what happened to him?”

“Run over by a sugar train. Wore a lottery bracelet, so he was frozen,” Marty said without looking. “Everyone asks that,” he added, clearly accustomed to people wondering how he knew which one.

“Lottery?”

“It was a fad for a while to have local lotteries award freezer slots as prizes. If we could ever get him stuck back together right he’d have a lot of money waiting for him.”

“How did a guy that lucky get hit by a train?”

“Crossed the tracks when the barricades were already down. It was a jurisdiction where pedestrians had right-of-way.”

“So he expected the train to stop for him? I’d have made the freemother pay for the engineer’s therapy! A jaywalker never has the right-of-way.”

Marty just grunted agreement.

In Early’s ear, Ursula’s voice said, “We do not want that brain.”

Early nearly choked from trying not to laugh aloud.

Fortunately, he was able to let it out when Marty said, “He’s probably not quite what you’re looking for.”

This chamber had originally been excavated as a bomb shelter, which, since the building overhead had once been where the UN held its meetings, said something about the original General Assembly’s opinion about their own effectiveness. Dividers and equipment had gone in during the First War, while the delegates met under a mountain in Switzerland. They got to the end of the ranks of bodies, most of which reminded him of people he’d last seen right after a battle, and got to a section near the end that struck him as different. Early immediately studied his surroundings to see why.

The lighting was better. The windows over the bodies had no frost on the inside, meaning they were of a different material. The ID tags at each body were of hullmetal, with the lettering inset, and given the properties of hullmetal, that meant they’d been formed that way. “These are the Beneficiaries,” Marty said. “People who couldn’t afford to be frozen, or hadn’t thought of it, so strangers who admired them paid for it or took up collections. They were all heroes to someone. This is Wu Kim,” he said, pointing to the left half of a woman whose right side had not been entirely found. “Tiananmen. A few of the people who got the body out and on ice in time later ended up in the First War. Not too surprisingly, they all distinguished themselves.”

“Tiananmen?” Ursula said in his ear.

“Chinese word meaning Waco,” Early remarked. Marty glanced at him and nodded.

There were only sixty-one Beneficiaries, and Marty had something to say about them all. The last and earliest was Hugo van Trast. “He was still at Caltech when he came up with the rejection buffer,” Marty said.

“What did that to him?”

“Carlists. They blamed van Trast for the organ bank that saved the life of Francisco Bahamonde. They kind of overlooked the fact that that same organ bank also saved the life of Marissa Colby, who invented the fusion shield and replenished the depleted fishing grounds and gave us free water. She was on vacation in Majorca when she was exposed to some kind of pesticide. You know, the ones they used in the period when DDT was illegal? Really horrible stuff—There are royalists today who hold annual parties where they burn Bahamonde in effigy.”

“I don’t know why. He’s still dead,” Early said, shaking his head.

“Take them all,” Ursula told him.

“Tag them for shipment.”

“Some don’t have that much brain left,” Marty objected.

“We can at least get their DNA,” Early said without being told. “These are miracle workers. The kzin get smarter with every war. We could use some miracles.”

Marty nodded, but looked sad. He looked around at the dead, made a gesture with his right hand which could have turned into a wave if he hadn’t stopped it, and said, “You need any others?”

“I hope not,” Early said.

Marty nodded again. “Was it Napoleon who said he’d rather have a general who was lucky than one who was smart?”

“It’s been attributed to him,” Early agreed, “but look how he turned out.” He studied Marty. “You’ll miss them, won’t you?”

Marty nodded. “I liked to sit here and read. It was a good feeling, to be with the best people their times could produce.”

“Get a DNA cheek swab from him,” Ursula said. “Imply that he’s got this job because he’s the most diligent organizer willing to do it. That’ll make him feel better.”

“Martin,” Early said, “they need orderly minds to sort their memories out. How would you like to have any good genes you carry added to the mix of every general they’re made into?”

“I think I’d like it a lot.”

Back in the elevator, Early murmured, “That was a damn nice thing to do.”

“I like when I can combine that with doing a good job,” Ursula said. “I also like when someone displays intelligence. You picked up on the idea right away.”

“Thanks,” Early said, keeping his own counsel.

It didn’t help. “I see. You got the purpose and the method, but you thought I was just being considerate. Two out of three.”

“Two out of three—”

“—Is a D, Buford.”

He was fuming by the time he got back to his apartment. Ursula became visible again, and he went over to his desk and gave the nearest leg a vicious kick. It broke off, bounced against the wall, and rebounded where he could grab it. He turned and aimed the stub at her. “You missed one,” he said.

“And you missed my companion,” she said.

“Are you serious? ‘There’s someone behind you’? That’s the oldest trick in the book.”

A huge, gloved feline hand reached over his head and plucked the puncher out of his grasp.

“Actually, the oldest trick in the book is kidnapping a couple of teenagers, brainwiping them, waking them up in a prepared habitat, and saying, ‘I made you out of dust and I made her out of one of your ribs,
’”
said Ursula.

Early turned carefully and looked at the indubitable kzin in his apartment. His suit looked like it was made out of balloons. “Oh, hell,” Early said.

“I thought it was ‘hello,
’”
said the kzin. “Human languages are weird.”

“I need to recreate the roast I ate earlier. Stun him and put him back to bed, then we have to get moving to arrange the supposed wreck of the ship with the bodies.”

As the kzin brought up his other hand—the one with the stunner—the only thing Buford Early could think of was,
I am the very model of a modern major general
—

He saw the room tilt, then stop as he was caught. The rest was silence.

Unless he was staying over with a woman he’d met, Buford Early slept in his autodoc. At his age most people died in their sleep, and while he wasn’t as afraid of dying as most people, it struck him as an undignified way to go after surviving five wars. On the other hand, his psychist program told him it was really a way of distancing himself, since the lack of a bed in his apartment meant that any woman who came home with him couldn’t stay over herself. The clincher, however, was that it was the most comfortable place he’d ever had to sleep.

He was not accustomed to being startled when he woke up.

Certainly not by a group of stern-faced guards. He checked his weapons by reflex, but left them; he’d spent his entire career doing what he believed was right, and however someone had disagreed on what that might have been, shooting his way through his fellow ARMs wasn’t it. He opened the ‘doc and said, “Do I get to eat?”