Von Pelt and the nameless kzin brought the jar forward and placed it on a table covered with cloth of gold. Marmalade, Rykermann noticed, looking a little nervously behind him, was staring at them with an unusual intensity. The pair bowed to Vaemar-Riit. Then, with a few well-chosen words from the old man, they stepped modestly back into the crowd. Their aircar was nearby.
The next part of the ceremony called for Nils Rykermann to present the jar to Vaemar on behalf of humanity, an enduring symbol of the respect in which humanity held him. Vaemar would then make a speech of acknowledgement, to be followed by a feast for which two sorts of food had been prepared.
Marmalade’s telepathic sense was dormant and unschooled but not completely absent. Screaming a single word, he burst out of the crowd like a rocket, scattering humans and kzin left and right. He snatched up the jar and ran with it to the edge of the crowd. He threw it to the ground and flung himself upon it to cover it before it exploded, scattering hydrofluoric acid in all directions.
Between the acid and the explosion there was not enough left of Marmalade to place in a shrine. One of Vaemar-Riit’s kittens bears his name.
LEFTOVERS
by Matthew Joseph Harrington
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.
He was certainly not accustomed to being so badly startled, ever. There was a head floating outside the observation window.
It was a head of truly astonishing ugliness, resembling nothing so much as a really cruel caricature of a dragon. A bulging snout of a nose hung over a rigid and lipless bony beak, whose molar-textured gash extended back to the hinge of the jaws. Huge ears flanked a face with the texture of boiled leather, which had been crammed into the bottom third of a swollen bald head, which looked as if someone had overinflated the brain and then stuck another on in back.
Which was more or less what had happened. The thing belonged to a Protector, which meant that the human race was about to begin a long period of being micromanaged like so many small and rather stupid children.
Buford reached into the receptacles adjacent to his hands, but instead of finding a stunner and a one-shot puncher, he felt only small pieces of paper. He brought them up to look at them. Each had one word printed on it: COLD.
Next to the head, his robe, draped over nothing, waved itself at the window. He’d have to bide his time, keep his mind off the subject, wait for a chance, and take it. Meanwhile, he opened the lid of the ’doc, sat up, and said, “George Olduvai?”
The Protector rolled its eyes and said, “Puns are the pornography of mathematicians. Jack Brennan is dead.”
“How did that happen?” he exclaimed, taking the robe as he got out.
“A weapon whose programming he hadn’t supervised himself activated a laser and cut him in half at the waist. Aberrantly careless, I suspect suicide. As a breeder he seems to have been sociable, so he never got used to being the smartest person he knew.”
As Early tied his robe sash, he felt for the coil of Sinclair filament in the capsule at the end. The capsule was there, but it held another piece of paper that read COLD. “So who are you?” he said, crumpling the paper and tossing it toward the cleaner.
“You can call me Ursula.”
“You’re female?” he said, then winced at the gaffe.
She let it go. “If memory serves. Let me get you a sandwich,” she said, and the control panel started doing things.
“Can I see something besides a head, please?”
“Sure.” A pressure suit appeared below the head, mostly covered with pockets. It looked like a suit of medieval armor that had just been swallowed by an enormous mutant potholder. Though she didn’t have the accent, it was like a Belter’s suit, with a conspicuous and distinctive emblem on the chest. The picture was of a wheel station, seen from along its axis, and covered with weapon emplacements, with two of the eight spokes shot away on either side. “How’s grilled cheese and bacon suit you?”
“Actually I was planning on cooking the roast I have in the freezer.”
“Sorry. Gone.”
He goggled at her. “That was five pounds of cultured beef!”
“Marshall Early, Pleasance was conquered almost a year ago. We’re at war. I was hungry. And anyway, you got cheated. That was grain-fed-I distinctly tasted gluten peptides.” She handed him a plate bearing a sizzling handmeal. Doubly annoyed though he was, his mind was working; sandwich was an archaic term used by his generation and by Pleasanters, which suggested she was the latter, and must have had some fairly interesting experiences in the past year. He bit into the sandwich.
About a minute later, she handed him a hot towel and a bulb of cold milk. After he’d used both, he said, “That was good.”
“Want another?”
“Yes.” As that was being handed to him, he said, “I haven’t used the ’doc foodmaker in too long. I didn’t remember it was this good.”
“It wasn’t. I rebuilt it when I was reprogramming the ’doc to remove the Puppeteer bug from your head.”
She was fast: she caught the sandwich three feet off the ground. “The what?” he said.
“Bug. The reason you’ve been so much more relaxed and easygoing since you were wounded in the Third War.”
“Fifth.”
She waved a hand. “The one before this one. It’s why you’ve been trying negotiation.”
“Well,” he said, “they say a pacifist is just a general who’s been shot.”
“In the brain.”
“Sorry?”
“‘A pacifist is a general who’s been shot in the brain.’”
“That’s not how I remember it.”
“Of course not, you’ve been shot in the brain. I replenished the boosterspice supply while I was working on the ’doc, you’ll get up to speed soon.”
“That couldn’t have been too hard.”
“Whatever makes you-ah. No, boosterspice is not based on tree-of-life, it just activates some of the same inert gene complexes. If a Protector wanted to make people younger, the stuff would repair gene damage instead of just patching over it. Good for about fifty years. Here, eat. I’ve also added a beetle to the ’doc programming. It’ll spread into other ’docs, so they’ll recognize and remove the implants in other people after yours gets its regular update from the manufacturer. Humans have been doing entirely too well at fighting kzinti. There were supposed to be a couple of more wars to get you into shape.”
“For what?”
“For whatever the Puppeteers need you both to fight so they don’t have to. It’s a dangerous universe out there, and they want lots of cannon fodder between them and the rest of it.”
“Ursula,” he said, “that’s paranoid, and this is me saying it.”
“Marshall,” she said, “I’m a Protector. I don’t act on supposition. I confirmed it.”
“How?”
“Interrogated a Puppeteer.”
“I thought they killed themselves if anyone tried that.”
“They do. Not only that, there’s automatic reflexes that kill them in various ways if you prevent them from doing it voluntarily. Took me fifteen tries until I had them all covered.”
This time her hand was right under the sandwich. She led him to his desk, where he sat, and shook, and said, “There are fourteen dead Puppeteers now?” (“Conniptions” didn’t begin to describe how they would react. “Extinction” might.)