The mask shifted, and she was about to tell him something unpleasant. “Protectors recognize their descendants by smell, and can detect the mutation of a single codon. Any creature not under protection is a threat to descendants. And Protectors make maximum use of resources. When someone big and wrinkly leans over close enough to smell you, there’s a chance you’re about to be eaten.”
He didn’t want to believe that, but he had quite a good memory-and that was exactly the way he’d felt about his grandmother the first time he’d been shown to her.
It would have shown on his face to someone not nearly as smart as she was. “You’re safe,” she said.
Badly wanting to change the subject, he said, “What do you want with the Freezer Banks?”
“We need generals.”
“There’s not an intact head in the lot,” he said.
“Not a problem. I plan to use sections of at least three brains each and splice them together, rectify the DNA, and use the combined experience to make encyclopedic geniuses. I’ll grow them new bodies.”
The thought was ghastly. “Three sets of memories? They’ll be insane!”
She shrugged. “Insanity in a breeder is about as serious as warts on a leper. I have a Sinclair accelerator, so I can provide enough therapy to get the personality fragments to establish a working relationship. They’ll have the advantage of being genetic supermen-superwomen, rather, since the rectifying process would treat a Y chromosome as a defect.”
“Are you talking about nanomachines?”
“Right.”
He snorted. “Good luck with that. We’ve had people working on that since before I was born. They always break down.”
“I know. Brennan saw it happening, made nanotech that attacks all other nanotech, and turned it loose. I have to do all my work in a chamber that’s been cleared of the hunters.”
“What in hell did he do that for?”
“Marshall, consider what may be defined as nanomachinery. When photosynthetic life began releasing free oxygen as a byproduct, it exterminated almost everything on the planet and replaced it with its own kind. The plants you live with and eat aren’t nearly as efficient at using light as what I’ve made. And that’s just an intentional feature. Can you imagine what someone might make if he screwed up? Brennan may have been a quintessential Belter, but even his imagination was good enough for that.”
Early reeled. “That’s a hell of a note for Weeks,” he said.
He evidently didn’t have to explain who Weeks was. “When I looked in on him he was moving in that direction. Would have made a ’bot that hunted the hunters. Fortunately I stopped him before he could do any damage.”
He closed his eyes. “He’s dead?”
“Humph,” she said. She didn’t grunt, she pronounced it. “Thanks to Phssthpok and the Morlocks, people think of Protectors as casual murderers. It’s most unfair. I’m not casual at all. Besides, as soon as I saw him I realized he was a Cellar Christian.”
Early hated that term. “Religion has never been prohibited.”
“No, just heavily edited. And a good thing, too. Weeks was raised on source material, and he’s peculiar even for a breeder. I altered my cloaking system, appeared in his room, and offered to teach him all the secrets of nanomachinery in return for his soul. I expect he’s still at church.”
Early stared, gaped, and said, “You’re a fiend.”
“You know, that’s just what he said. Slightly different emphasis, though.”
Early got up, breathing heavily, and went into the bathroom. Here and there, where his weapons of opportunity had been, he found a few more notes that read COLD. It was getting annoying.
It became more annoying when he realized he didn’t need a shower. He got out casual clothing, dressed, and said, “I like taking showers.”
“You can switch off the ’doc’s body cleaner if you’re just going to sleep. It wasn’t very good, so I redesigned it while I was undoing the Puppeteer hacks.”
Something that had been bothering him-besides Ursula-came to a point: “I was wounded before humans had encountered Puppeteers,” he said.
“As one of the great philosophers of the Fission Age often said, ‘That turns out not to be the case.’ The Puppeteers were interfering with human society, and erasing the memories of any witnesses, well before the First War.” After a flash of annoyance so brief he wasn’t sure it was something she intended as a message, she added, “You’ll recall they got their name because there was a Time For Beany revival. ‘Puppeteer’ is a cute, harmless name. One of them chose it. They arranged the revival and the timing of the first contact.”
“You got that from the one you questioned?”
“Didn’t need to. I had an extensive entertainment database that predated the editing of ARM records. Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent had two eyes.” She began scribbling again, and muttered, “Give me a bit, that’s the fake one.”
Appalled, he said, “Why didn’t anyone notice that in the secure data?”
“They got to that too-I keep meaning to get around to doing that holographic indexing system.”
“But nobody can get into that.”
“Nonsense, I did. And they’ve had computers for millions of years.”
“How did you manage that?”
“I could tell you, but the shock would be so great you’d revert to infancy and I’d have to erase your memory back to before we met.”
“Come off it, I’m not that fragile.”
“You always say that.”
“What?”
She looked up, all innocence. “Oh, nothing.”
A few moments after the transition from horror to severe exasperation, Early recalled that Jack Brennan was suspected of having undertaken a number of elaborate and disturbing jokes. One had been the extermination of the Martians. He was getting off lightly.
He looked at the screen she held up to show him and saw three grayscale images side by side, the first two grainy. One was the Cecil he remembered from the cube. The second was similar, but with two eyes and some more details to the features of the head. The third was a Puppeteer’s head, which looked almost exactly like the first image. “The middle’s the original?”
“Correct.”
Early frowned. “How long?”
“Long enough to sic the kzinti on us in the first place. Locating a slowboat in interstellar space requires a technology well in advance of kzin capabilities. Brennan had made us too nice to be good cannon fodder, and the kzinti were too feral to take the job, so they decided to use both races to do selective breeding of each other. Calm down, I planted some surprises in the Puppeteer when I put him back. Have to erase my own memories of them before I talk to any Outsiders, of course, but I can promise you if they’re still in contact with us in five hundred years they’ll be much too busy to manipulate human lives.”
Early made certain his face and body didn’t shift and reveal his feelings.
So she noticed the stillness instead. “Relax, I won’t either,” she said. “I’ll make some generals, they’ll win the war, and kzin culture will be altered to the point where they won’t feel compelled to start another. The only thing I’ve done to alter Earth’s culture is rig autodocs to remove Puppeteer bugs and arrange for water from Lake Mead to reach Death Valley.”
“You did that? It looks like seepage.”
“Thank you.”
Early snorted. “And it’s not enough to make it habitable.”
“No, but it’s enough to make it more bearable for borax mining. True, the spaceports at Perth and Nairobi will get a little less business, but the important thing is that the price of boron will go down.”
“I wasn’t aware that was a vital resource.”
“It’s used in linac-fusion plants. They’re small, but they don’t need a fusion shield, so they don’t need an ARM presence to guard them from Gangreens. The ARM personnel budget will have to be cut, and with fewer ARMs around, nations will be able to show more independence. This will lead to petty quarrels in the UN. You need more practice not getting along.”
Early didn’t like that, but the part of his brain he thought of as a Roman judge had to admit she had a point. “How did you do it without disturbing anything else? Nanobots?”