Protector

“Whereas there’s no law against a UN citizen going anywhere he wants to in terrestrial space, or hiring anyone he wants to. A number of our round-the-Moon pilots are Belters.”

Nick shook his head as if to clear it. “Garner, I don’t get you. You can’t think we can find the Outsider in a two man ship. Even I know about the Martian dust. He’s hidden in one of the dust seas, dissecting Jack Bre

“Right. But when the politicians realize that you’ve started searching Mars, what do you think they’ll do? You being hired as a pilot is a technicality, obvious to anyone. Suppose we did find the Outsider? The Belt would get the credit.”

Nick closed his eyes and tried to think. He wasn’t used to such circular logic. But it looked like Garner was right. If they thought he was going to Mars, with or without a flatlander for company… Nick Sohl, First Speaker for the Belt, empowered to make treaties. Ominous. They’d send a fleet to start searching first.

“So I need a flatlander to hire me as pilot. Why you?”

“I can get a ship now. I’ve got contacts.”

“Okay. Get the ship, then get a tough explorer-type flatlander. Sell him the ship. Then he hires me as his pilot, right?”

“Right. But I won’t do it.”

“Why?” Nick looked at him. “You aren’t seriously thinking of coming along?”

Luke nodded.

Nick laughed. “How old are you?”

“Too old to waste my remaining years sitting in the Struldbrugs’ Club waiting to die. Shake hands, Nick.”

“Mph? Sure, but — Yipe! All right, dammit, so you’ve got strong hands. All you flatlanders are overmuscled anyway.”

“Hey, now, I didn’t mean to push any buttons. I’m sorry. I wanted to demonstrate that I haven’t gone feeble.”

“Stipulated. Not in the hands, anyway.”

“And we won’t be using our legs. We’d be riding everywhere we went.”

“You’re crazy. Suppose your heart gave out on me?”

“It’s likely to survive me for a good long time. It’s prosthetic.”

“You’re crazy. All of you. It comes from living at the bottom of a gravity well. The gravity pulls the blood from your brains.”

“I’ll show you to a telephone. You’ll have to pay in your million marks before the UN catches on where we’re going.”

Phssthpok dreamed.

He had hidden the cargo pod deep beneath the fluid dust of the Lacis Solis region. It showed as an ochre wall beyond the twing hull. They would be safe here for as long as the life support system held out: a long, long time.

Phssthpok stayed in the cargo hold where he could watch his captive. After landing he had disassembled every machine in the cargo pod to make what repairs and adjustments were needed. Now he only watched his captive.

The native required little care. He was developing almost normally. He would be a monster, but perhaps not a cripple.

Phssthpok rested on his pile of roots and dreamed.

In a few weeks he would have completed his long, long task… or failed. In any case he could stop eating. He had been alive long enough to suit him. Soon he would end as he had nearly ended thirteen hundred shiptime years ago, at the core of the galaxy…

He had seen light flare over the Valley of Pitchok, and known that he was doomed.

Phssthpok had been a protector for twenty-six years. His remaining children in the radiation-blasted valley were twenty-six to thirty-five years of age; their own children were of all ages up to twenty-four or so. Now his lifespan would depend on who had survived the bomb. He had returned immediately to the valley to find out.

Not many breeders were left in the valley, but such as were still alive had to be protected. Phssthpok and the rest of the Pitchok families made peace, the terms being that they and their sterile breeders should have the valley until their deaths, at which time the valley would revert to Eastersea Alliance. There were ways to partially neutralize radioactive fallout. The Pitchok families used them. Then, leaving their valley and its survivors in the hands of one of their number, they had scattered.

Of the several surviving breeders, all had been tested and all had been found essentially sterile. “Essentially” being taken to mean that if they did have children, the children would be mutants. They would smell wrong. With no protector to look after their interests, they would quickly die.

To Phssthpok, the most important of his surviving descendants was the youngest, Ttuss, a female of two years.

He was on a time limit. In thirty-two years Ttuss would reach the age of change. She would become an intelligent being, and a heavily armored one, with skin that would turn a copper knife and strength to lift ten times her own weight. She would be ideally designed for the purpose of fighting, but she would have nothing to fight for.

She would stop eating. She would die, and Phssthpok would stop eating. Ttuss’s lifespan was his own.

But sometimes a protector could adopt the entire Pak species as his descendants. At least he would have every opportunity to find a purpose in life. There was always truce for a childless protector, for such had no reason to fight. And there was a place he could go.

The Library was as old as the radioactive desert which surrounded it. That desert would never be recultivated; it was reseeded every thousand years with radiocobalt so that no protector could covet it. Protectors could cross that desert; they had no gonadal genes to be smashed by subatomic particles. Breeders could not.

How old was the Library? Phssthpok never knew, and never wondered. But the section on space travel was three million years old.

He came to the Library with a number of — not friends, but associates in misery, childless former members of the Pitchok families. The Library was huge and rambling, a composite of at least three million years of Pak knowledge, crossfiled into sections according to subject. Naturally the same book often appeared in several sections. The associates divided at the entrance, and Phssthpok didn’t see any of them again for thirty-two years.

He spent that time in one vast room, a floor-to-ceiling labyrinth of bookshelves. At scattered corners there were bins of tree-of-life root kept constantly filled by attendants. There were other foodstuffs brought at seeming random: meats, vegetables, fruits, whatever was available to childless protectors who had chosen to serve the Library rather than die. Tree-of-life root was the perfect food for a protector, but he could eat nearly anything.

And there were books.

They were nearly indestructible, those books. They would have emerged like fluttering meteors from the heart of a hydrogen fusion explosion. All were written more or less in the present language, and all were constantly being recopied by librarians as the language changed. In this room the books all dealt with space and space travel.

There were treatises on the philosophy of space travel. They all seemed to make a fundamental assumption: someday the Pak race must find a new home; hence any contribution to the techniques of spaceflight contributed to the immortality of the species. Phssthpok could discount that assumption, knowing that a protector who did not believe it would never write a book on the subject. There were records of interstellar and interplanetary flights, tens of thousands of them, starting with a fantastic trip some group had made almost three million years ago, riding a hollowed-out asteroidal rock into the galactic arms in search of yellow dwarf suns. There were technical texts on anything that could possibly bear on space: spacecraft, astrogation, ecology, miniaturization, nuclear and subnuclear physics, plastics, gravity and how to use it, astronomy, astrophysics, records of the mining of worlds in this and nearby systems, diagrams for a hypothetical Bussard ramjet (in an unfinished work by a protector who had lost his appetite halfway through), ion drive diagrams, plasma theory, light-sails…