The Tnuctip had been working on another mental shield. Cruder-looking, but with an active power source. Jamming? Would that work?
He looked it over carefully, Felix having taught him a great deal. It most certainly would not work. There were conductors that would melt if full power were applied for more than a few seconds. The Tnuctip had been Programmed to waste its time here.
Shleer almost pitied the evil little creature. Almost. He replaced the deadfall and the hairs, and began trying to remember, as he headed back toward the harem, where he'd last seen a camera.
The design seemed worth copying-and Shleer hadn't been Told to use flawed components.
The Slaver Gnix watched a movie and sucked a gnal, or at least the best approximation his slaves had produced so far. He had nobody to tell it to-yet-but he was mostly pleased. He'd been lucky beyond belief.
He'd manifested full Power later than usual for a Thrint. This had led to his being employed at a food developer's, which was where he'd discovered the spy among the Tnuctipun. Darfoor, the spy, had had a generator for one of the new stasis fields, which had been developed in the course of his last spying job. All Tnuctipun innovations turned out to be part of a long-term plan to disrupt Thrintun commerce. Gnix had taken over Darfoor and his contacts, and they had been working on ways for Gnix to profit from the disruptions when a competing food company had attacked the development habitat.
By then Darfoor had installed the stasis field in the escape boat, and Gnix had Told him to forget to put on his Power shield.
The stasis had held while the galaxy rotated several times.
Amusingly, the creatures that had opened the field had been looking for a weapon to use to escape from slavery. They had built Gnix an amplifier, and he had taken over the rest of the creatures here and set his Tnuctipun to growing some females from his genetic material. There was some problem, not too clear-Tnuctipun minds wandered so-with getting the chemistry right in the host females, but there were plenty of them. His new chief slave had apparently been collecting females.
There were plenty of potential slave races, too, but the fighting slaves' records said some of them knew how to shield against the Power, so Gnix had sent some of the fighting slaves to gather antimatter from a source that had passed by a while back. (For some reason they hadn't done so before.) He was the only Thrint alive-stasis didn't count-and ruler of a small interstellar empire, soon to be a large interstellar empire.
Not bad for a foreman in a food workshop.
The only thing he really disliked was the slave telepaths. All the fighting slaves had a touch of it-his sire Gelku would have been terribly upset by that, as he'd been deeply religious-but some had so much that they'd developed mental shielding techniques to stop the noise. He'd finally ordered those removed from the palace. Not killed, since they were useful; but he didn't like running into them. It was too startling. The amplifier could get through a shield to detect them, of course, but that tended to paralyze anyone in range who didn't have one, which in this case meant most of the planet.
Too much oil, he Told the slave burnishing his scales.
The Patriarch of Kzin wiped off the excess.
It was almost two years before Greenberg saw the protector again. Judy was expecting a daughter, according to the autodoc, and he was edgy: "Hey! Where've you been?"
"Working" was the reply. "What the hell did you think?"
"How should I know? There're discrepancies in the history you gave us."
"This is your idea of news? How are the rest getting along?"
That diverted him briefly. "They're afraid of you. They doubt the explanation of why they can't look outside the ship." Cordelia was in hyperdrive. "-And the history doesn't add up!"
"Okay, name some problems."
"How many wars were there with these 'kzinti'?"
"Depends who you ask. Flatlanders say six, because they got involved in all of them. Kzinti and Pleasanters say four because there have been that many peace treaties: Kzinti needed some kind of conceptual dividing line to get a handle on the idea of peace, and Pleasanters are almost all descended from lawyers. Old Wunderland vets say one, because there are still kzinti alive, so the war's still running." She spread her hands, momentarily resembling a cottonwood tree. "Take your pick. Next?"
"How many do you say?"
The look she gave him produced, in him, the exact feeling other people got when they first learned he was a telepath. After a moment she said, "Two. The first began with the invasion of Wunderland, and ended when I arranged for the subordination of the kzinti religion to secular authority. The second was an act of personal retaliation by one man, Harvey Mossbauer, whose family was killed at the end of the first, against the Patriarch; he killed the Patriarch's family in return. Since then the Patriarch of Kzin has understood that humans are, by kzinti terms, people, and has treated them as such in law. They can't be held as slaves or raised for meat, for example-though if a kzin from one of the cannibal cultures kills a human in a dispute, eating him is deemed fair. The cannibals are dying out, though. They get in too many fights. Next?"
"How come humans are related to primates that have been on Earth since long before the Pak supposedly brought us?"
"Obviously there must have been previous visits, with much smaller breeder populations. Lots more drift that way. The first was probably just a few million years after the Dinosaur Killer."
"Ah. Yucatan," he said wisely.
"Oh, were the ARMs still flogging 'nuclear winter' in your time? I thought that was just when they were getting set up."
"Excuse me?"
"Guess not, must have been residual. 'Nuclear winter' was the notion that throwing a lot of dust and soot into the atmosphere would cause an Ice Age in spite of halving the planet's albedo. It was one of those political hypotheses, meant to frighten people into accepting the need for restricting technology. The ARMs spread a lot of those in the early days. Anyway, the Yucatan crater has K-T iridium in it and is therefore older. Only an ocean strike will produce an Ice Age, and only if it's big enough to punch through the crust and boil a few cubic miles of ocean with magma. In this case it obviously was, as it also produced Iceland.
"As I was saying, the protectors in that migration saw a world with no big predators and settled in. Obviously they sent back word of what a nice place it was, and just as obviously the expedition that brought our ancestors destroyed the records before they left home, to keep from being followed."
"But Brennan and Truesdale never mention any earlier expeditions."
"Truesdale had other things to deal with. Brennan didn't care. He was a Belter, and Belters who lived long enough to establish their society were not the ones who let their minds wander or indulged casual curiosity. Next?"
"There's an implausible coincidence between the departure of human Protectors and first contact with the kzinti-"
"Coincidence my ossified ass!" she snapped, startling him badly. "The puppeteers first brought us to the kzinti's attention about two months after the Fleet left for the Core."
"That's the part I have trouble with. Puppeteers are herbivores. Peaceful."
"I should have cloned a bull."
"Huh?"
"In case it has escaped your attention, the class of herbivores includes cattle, horses, elephants, the Roman legionaries who conquered Gaul, and Pak Protectors. Herbivores casually obliterate anything that encroaches on their territory-or that looks like it might. Carnivores come in all types of personality, but dedicated herbivores are merciless killers. Anything else?"