“Problems seem to make you happy,” she said bravery.
“We found my cousin. A flash came in from Gibraltar this morning.”
“Nora? Is she alive?”
“Yeah. Nora and all of her babies. She has six babies!” Yankee seemed both stunned and excited.
Chloe burst out sobbing—it gave her an excuse.
“That doesn’t sound like a problem to me! That’s wonderful! I mean about finding her,” she said after quickly recovering.
He took both her hands. “You’ve got something on your mind.”
“Just a little problem. I came to talk to you about it. It can wait.”
“Can it wait till this evening? How about dinner?”
“Dinner is fine.” She was relieved. That put off the awful moment. “If you’ve got time.” She began to hope that he had a good excuse to put it off even longer. Tomorrow she’d be more herself.
Yankee continued. “My problem is that even though we’ve found Nora, she’s on W’kkai and we’ll have to extract her. Do you know W’kkai? That’s seventeen light-years from here deep inside kzin space. It’s a major kzin stronghold. They’ve given me Jay Mazzetta and my old sidekick, Beany Heinmann, to help with planning. We’ve got to do some fancy juggling in the next few hours.”
“We could talk tomorrow.”
“Tonight I might not even be here tomorrow. Not dinner at the Caf—at my place. I saw a drum of apples in the hydroponics market. Get some. I make a good flatlander apple pie. Think up something for the main course. Make it simple-marinated rabbit stew with onions or something. At seventeen hundred.” He gave her his key. “Since you don’t have my fingerprints to get in.”
“We could postpone it.”
“Girls don’t cry for nothing.”
Chloe fled.
She had to hurry and bustle kept her mind off what she was going to say at dinner. She didn’t want to get the meat from the Caf’s lockers, which was where they usually got it when they cooked at his apartment, so she took the maglev to the ranch where Honest Al raised chickens, turkeys, guinea pigs, and rabbits on an assembly line in the caves. Al was thinking of getting into real pigs, midget pigs, but he wasn’t sure how they’d take to cages. “Any pig I ever knowed could snort and root his way out of any cage ever built.”
She thought about turkey but Al and his Sons were butchering rabbits for freezing, so she took two because she was short on time and she was damned if she was going to pluck her own turkey! Bypassing the autochef was Yankee’s hobby but she’d already plucked and cleaned one chicken for him and enough was enough!
At hydroponics she picked up the usual potatoes and onions, but they had some kohlrabi and peppers and leeks so she bought those, too. And a peck of green apples. The nice thing about a stew was that you could make it out of anything. In his apartment she piled up the groceries and went straight to the autochef. Yankee laughed at her, but she needed the autochef for advice. It was a baseline military model—except for the luxury spice attachment—and it was a terrible cook but it gave very good advice.
She told it what she had bought and asked for a good recipe. It started with a lecture on how to prepare kohlrabi without ruining its taste. “But I want a stew.” It suggested stews. “But I want to marinate the rabbit! And I haven’t got time because he’s going to be here at seventeen hundred!” It provided her with an enzyme-enhanced sauce for quick marinating. She chopped up the rabbit and mixed it in a bowl with the sauce before attacking the vegetables. She didn’t know anything about spices. “What spices do I use, and they better be perfect or I’ll kill you!” It recommended five combinations and manufactured a pinch of each for her to taste with a wet finger. “Number two,” she ordered. It all went into the pot and the stew was simmering when Yankee arrived, late.
His eyes lit up and he grabbed a green apple to taste it before he gave her his usual brotherly kiss. “A Grandma, no less!” He began to chop up each apple with six quick whacks. He never bothered to peel them. “Stew smells good. Did you fight with autochef?”
“No. We had a very civil discussion. I had to shut him up sometimes.”
“Watch him. He doesn’t get angry. He just poisons you when you push him too far.” Yankee was already mixing up the dough for the pie crust.
“How come he doesn’t make pie crust? I wanted everything ready for you when you came.”
“Thank Murphy for small blessings! Have you ever tasted one of his pies?” Yankee was grinning. He ordered lemon-cinnamon and the machine produced a brown powder-manufactured, of course. Starbase wasn’t on the spice trade-routes. She marveled that he knew what to ask for.
“How did it go at work today?”
He waited to answer until the pie was in the oven and he was seated and relaxed. “You remember that crazy kzin we took to Hssin? That ratcat found out more than he was telling me. Fry thought as much and left him with a covert beamer.”
“You gave him hyperwave!” she exclaimed incredulously.
“No way. Electromagnetic. He sends out a message. Our patrol relays it. We just got the relay that he found Nora.”
“You’re sure?” She was skeptical.
“Hwass-Hwasschoaw sent us data about her DNA that he couldn’t know. He has her. He wants to exchange her and her children for a ride to Kzin, and I’ve been elected taximan.”
“It’s a trap! You be careful. He’s lying!”
“Kzinti don’t lie.”
“That’s what the alien psychologists say, but I don’t believe in kzin honesty for a minute! Do you? You’re a boy! You’re just like all the dumb adolescent boys I know! Do you really believe a kzin can’t lie?”
Yankee smiled and made the yes-no nodding gesture with his hand and head. “What is truth? There are endless ways to tell a half-truth—and no way that any finite language is capable of telling the whole truth. For instance, I can call you up from across town and tell you that your apartment door is unlocked, and that’s true, but what you really need to know is that I slagged your lock with a laser pistol and kicked the door off its hinges and stole your Tang Dynasty urns.”
“You told me that Hwass hates you.”
“He does.”
“So now he tells you that he has Nora and to come get him! It’s a trap. He doesn’t want to go to Kzin. He’s lying! He wants to kill you!”
“No, he’s not lying. He does want a ride to Kzin. He’s in some kind of political hot water. He needs to be met at the singularity boundary by a little ship that won’t attract the whole W’kkai navy. He needs to get the hell out of there and he’s using my cousin as his ticket. I believe that. It’s what he is not telling us that worries me.”
“So you admit he’s lying?”
“In a culture where you are executed for lying, lying becomes a fine art indistinguishable from telling the truth.”
“No wonder the navy hates you!” She was exasperated. “You reach into black and pull out white!”
“Let’s get back to the subject.” He was watching her eyes, waiting for the moment when she made eye contact with him. “And what have you been lying to me about?”
That made her furious. “I’ve always told you the truth! Always! You know that!”
“As honest as a kzin.”
“Oh,” she said. “You mean the things I haven’t told you about.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s not fair. You’re older than I am. How about some rabbit stew first.”
He dished out two heaping plates and they ate. “Good stew. Great recipe.”