Man-Kzin Wars XII by Larry Niven (books you have to read .TXT) 📕

Peace looked at him. "You're a telepath."

"Uh—"

"You have to have gotten that from a Tnuctip, because no kzin who ever lived could possibly have come up with a reason that stupid."

They were making eye contact. Shleer gave it a try.

Peace shook her head. "I realize you're distressed," she said, "but if you ever give me another headache this bad, the slap you get is gonna give you an ear like a grapefruit. You're looking at it from the wrong end. This doesn't discredit you; it makes telepaths respectable. Are you aware that you've single-handedly saved civilization? Everybody's civilization? I intend to make damn sure everyone else is."

Judy was loading kzinretti into the autodoc that had arrived, and Peace joined in.

Notwithstanding their removal of the Thrintun—and Tnuctipun—embryos, and restoration of the kzinretti to health, the Patriarch had clearly been glad to see the Protectors go. While the Greenbergs had been tailoring plagues for kzinti ships to spread, to kill off any Thrint or Tnuctip that got loose in Known Space thereafter, Peace had spent some time interviewing survivors about the chain of events, and it had evidently upset her. Nobody really welcomes a cranky Protector.

She piloted Cordelia out to the local Oort cloud, then got on the hyperwave and said, "We need to talk."

Such was the seriousness in which she was held that the Outsider came via hyperdrive, which they normally didn't use. "It is good to see you were successful."

"Yeah, you don't have to blow up their sun or whatever. You're in contact with the puppeteer migration."

"That information is not available for sale."

"It wasn't a question. I have a message for you to relay to them, to be paid for out of my credit balance."

"Proceed."

"Keep going."

There was a pause. "Is that all?"

"If they don't seem to respond appropriately, add this:

"The kzinti found a stasis box you had neither opened nor destroyed, in the debris you abandoned in your system when you left Known Space. It held a Slaver and several Tnuctipun genetic engineers. They were found by the kzinti. The Slaver had the Tnuctipun growing Slaver females by the time they were stopped, and had the kzinti fleet preparing antimatter weapons. All you had to do was drop the thing into a quantum black hole. Your interference is offensive, but your irresponsibility is toxic. In the event that you inflict either upon humans, or their associates, ever again, you will be rendered extinct. Message ends."

"Peace Corben, you should be aware that we have contractual agreements with the puppeteers for their well-being. Whatever you have planned, we would have to stop it."

"Planned? What am I, Ming the Merciless?" she exclaimed. "I'm not going to warn someone about something I haven't done yet! I set up my arrangements over three hundred years ago."

"What arrangements?"

"It's the bald head, isn't it? I don't know. I expected to have this conversation someday, and I knew you could do a brain readout, so I erased it from my memory. If you're bound by an obligation to look out for their safety, the best help you can give is to have them get out of our lives and stay out.

"And as regards debts and contracts, diffidently I point out that I have just taken action to clean up the leftover results of your big mistake. Nobody will hear about that but Protectors, by the way."

"Thank you." And the Outsider was gone.

"Damn, I didn't mean to humiliate them," she said.

"Hm?" said Larry.

She glanced at him. "They—What are you doing?"

He took the tennis ball he'd been chewing out of his beak. "I just ate. Flossing."

The true tragedy of the Pak had been their utter lack of humor. Conversely, every human Protector was an Olympic-class smartass.

"Hm!" she said, and shook her head. "We got the name 'starseed' from the Outsiders, and nobody ever questioned it in spite of the fact that the damn things never sprout. The Outsiders made them. Starseeds go around sowing planets with microorganisms that are meant to evolve into customers. Outsiders keep track of what worlds are seeded and monitor development to make sure nothing really horrible happens. Three billion years ago they were lax in this, and two billion years ago a species they'd missed exterminated all organic intelligence in the Galaxy. They charge high for questions about starseeds because they're ashamed. So what's the verdict?"

"The kids all wanted to name whatever planet we settle everybody on Peace. I persuaded them it was against your religion."

"Thank you."

"Everybody else wants to call it For a Breath I Tarry. Including Judy and me."

Pleased, she said, "What about Tinchamank?"

"We thought we'd clone him some mates and find them their own planet. After that it's up to them. Can we go look at Altair One?"

"The Altairians didn't have time travel," she said.

He didn't read her mind. (He'd tried it once after the change. She was still a lot smarter than he was, so it had been much like peeking through a keyhole and seeing a really big eye looking back.) After a second he said, "You already looked." At her self-conscious nod he said, "So how did they vanish?"

"Kind of an immaterial stasis field is the best I can describe it. The math's on record if you care. They'll reappear in a couple of thousand years, probably shooting. I left the kzinti a note."

He nodded. "I'm still a little sore about our kids smelling wrong. Judy's not."

"I did the same with my own."

"I didn't say I didn't understand it. We won't restart the Pak wars, fine. They just seem like strangers."

She nodded. "Yah."

Rrao-Chrun-Rrit signed the edict. Anyone using slaves would henceforth have no trade or tax advantages over anyone using paid free employees, and would face a choice of slowly going broke or changing over to workers who had a motive to do their work well. He had recently acquired some strong views on the subject of slavery.

He turned to his son, who had saved everything that mattered to anyone. Before the assembled clan of Rrit he declared,