Gay, who had gotten curious and was having a look, said, "It isn't. It's split in half. Look, there." She pointed at one of the screens. The seam was at an inconvenient angle, so nobody else had noticed it.
And it hadn't been as big. The split was getting wider.
"Battle stations," Charrgh-Captain said. Still in Interworld, addressing the two humans-kzinti routine was Battle Stations. The Guthlacs got to their couches and strapped in.
"Sir," Telepath said dopily, drugged with sthondat-lymph extract, "I detect no life."
"You can't read Slaverexpert, either," Charrgh-Captain replied.
"No, sir, but I can tell where he is."
"Noted. Slaverexpert, report."
"The only energy I detect is heat, in amounts consistent with being present before stasis began, plus the separation of the shell. Shall I deep-radar?"
"Yes. Display the results."
The image on the humans' screens was divided into wedge-shaped compartments, almost all full of materials slightly denser than water. One held even denser material, probably metallic, in boxes. "It looks like an orange designed by ARMs," Richard said.
Charrgh-Captain, relieved of tension, snorted amusement. "An orange? The fruit?"
"Sure. Armor-plated for safety, big so it's easy to find, opens automatically when ripe."
"So what's all the metal?" Gay chuckled, pointing at the last wedge.
Slaverexpert spoke up. "Emergency escape pods for the seeds?" After a moment of utter silence, he looked up to find everyone else staring at him-even Telepath. "Sorry, sir," he said faintly to Charrgh-Captain, and looked back down at his instruments in a marked manner.
"We'll examine that section before taking the box in tow," Charrgh-Captain said.
Probably the best thing about working in space with kzinti was that they had been doing it for so long. Lighting, for instance. Humans, even those in the mining industries, tended to put up one or two bright lights, and wear one or two smaller lights on their helmets, producing sharp-edged shadows and a nagging conviction that something was hiding just out of sight. Here, though, Second Trooper strewed fistfuls of little spheres toward the partitions: where they hit, they stuck, and presently began to glow gently. They had frosted surfaces, so the light was diffuse. The kzinti suits also had multiple lights: a couple at each wrist, and two rows of three each down the torso, where things would be held to work on them. A light under the chin illuminated things directly ahead.
The Guthlacs were given clusters of faint blue lights to strap onto their suits, which in conjunction with standard kzinti lighting gave them a spectrum they could use easily. The amount of thought and preparation this implied was extremely flattering: They were being extended enormous courtesy. Richard found himself wondering if Charrgh-Captain had known all along that human-model food dispensers included a toilet.
There wasn't much time to dwell on this. The parcels were full of gadgets.
Most of them were pretty straightforward power tools: drills, saws, hammers, trimmers, shapers, diggers, a couple of amazingly elaborate grippies, and something that Gay and Slaverexpert tentatively labeled, after much consultation, as a handheld turret lathe. "These must have been for the use of a slave race," said Slaverexpert. "They are too large for Tnuctipun hands, and Thrintun would rather starve than toil." He sounded troubled.
"What's wrong?" said Richard.
"There is something familiar about the workmanship. Disturbing."
"What would this be?" Charrgh-Captain said, holding up a thing that included a short spike, a knife, a crank, and little spring-loaded rollers. "It hardly seems useful as a weapon."
Slaverexpert took it and turned it over a few times. "I am open to any suggestion," he said, baffled.
"It looks…" Richard began, then said, "Nah, crazy."
"So?" said Charrgh-Captain.
"Good point. Well, it looks like an apple peeler. A good one, too."
"It does, doesn't it?" Gay agreed.
Slaverexpert worked the crank a little. "It seems articulated to follow a complex surface."
"Potato peeler, then?" Gay said.
Slaverexpert looked at her, then at Richard. His ears were distinctly cupped, as if he were expecting ambush. He said, "Charrgh-Captain, it may be prudent to inspect the other sections as well."
"Very well, once we're done with this one."
Other devices were more complex. Several were lasers, or included lasers, but would have required great modification of focus for use as weapons. Another seemed intended to take in some kind of powder and extrude solid material in any desired shape. The purpose of a few remained unclear. All the tools that required power had to be plugged in; they had no power supplies of their own.
And it was Telepath, whose drugs were wearing off, who said, "Are there two of anything?"
Charrgh-Captain gave a startled grunt. "He's right," he said. "There are no duplications. Or spare parts," he realized. He picked up an object that had been mysterious a moment before. "This could be used to wind wire around a rotor." He added in Hero, "Everyone pick up an object and examine it for signs of usage."
His tone of command was such that the Guthlacs did so along with the rest. Richard inspected the peeler and found the blade and spike unstained. "Clean, no wear," he said. Similar remarks were made by others.
"These may be models," Charrgh-Captain declared. "Meant only to be copied. Were not the Slavers highly mercantile?"
"Charrgh-Captain, they were," said Slaverexpert. "These may indeed be articles of commerce. Shall I see what organic goods they stocked?"
"Certainly."
Slaverexpert had gone from being taciturn to interested, and had now gone from interested to stiffly formal. If Richard understood kzinti reactions (and he had some reason to think he might), Slaverexpert was experiencing immense stress, about something he didn't want to discuss.
Slaverexpert's conduct while inspecting the other segments verged on bizarre. One held thirty-one bacterial-containment canisters, and he barely glanced at them. The next three held clear plastic shells, each containing seeds of different sizes and shapes, which were also virtually ignored. The fifth held larger bins, that fitted into the shell segment; he shone a light on one, then said, "Charrgh-Captain, I have a security problem."
"From plants?"
"Tree-of-life," said Slaverexpert. There was a moment's silence.
Then, "Discuss it with the humans. The rest of you withdraw and switch to a music channel. Telepath, take your sedative."
"Thank you, sir."
"Tree-of-life" was a term coined over seven centuries earlier by a man who had eaten some. It had been brought by a Pak protector, a sort-of-alien from the Galactic Core, and it had turned the man into an asexual killing machine with vastly increased intelligence and the single goal of ensuring his descendants' propagation-just the effect it had on the Pak. An ill-conceived attempt by the ARM to do the same thing deliberately during the First War had misfired, and had things gone even a little worse all other intelligent life in Known Space would have been methodically exterminated.
Richard was beginning to recover from the shock, but only in stages. "This can't be tree-of-life," he protested. "The time is off by a factor of, of eight hundred. How the tanj do you know about tree-of-life, anyway?"
"It's in my area," said Slaverexpert. "The Pak were a Tnuctip bioweapon."
Richard stared for a moment, then said, "Impossible. In two billion years they would have evolved beyond recognition."
"They ate their mutations," said Slaverexpert. "They could distinguish variation of a single codon by smell."
"Richard, I read a monograph on that once," Gay said. "The author made a good case."
"Where was this?" he exclaimed.
"Fractal Edge netzine."
Richard sighed. "Gay, the only people who contribute to that are conspiracy theorists."