Protector

They listened in silence to the recorded voice of Lit Shaeffer.

“Too bad about Nilsson,” Bre

Nobody answered.

“Shaeffer’s right, you know. Doing it that way, it’ll take you a couple of years to drag Phssthpok’s ship home.”

“Have you got a better idea?”

“Of course I’ve got a better idea, Nick, you idiot. I can fly that ship home myself.”

“You?” Nick stared. “When did the Outsider ever let you operate the controls?”

“He never did. But I saw them, and they didn’t look cryptic. Just complicated. I’m sure I can figure out how to fly it. All you’ve got to do is fuel the ship and fly me to it.”

“Uh huh. What do we do about the cargo pod? Leave it where it is?”

“No. Theres a gravity polarizer in that pod.”

“Oh?”

“Not to mention the supply of roots, which I need, even if you don’t. The seeds count too. Gentlemen, when you have finally grasped the extent of my magnificent intelligence, youll see what those seeds represent. They’re a failsafe for the human race. If we ever really need a leader, we can make one. Just pick a forty-two-year-old childless volunteer and turn him or her loose in the tree-of-life patch.”

“I’m not sure how well I like that,” said Garner.

“Well, the gravity polarizer’s important enough. You and the UN fleet can retrieve it while Nick and I go after Phssthpok’s ship—”

Nick said, “Just a—”

“—You won’t have to worry about the martians for awhile. I dumped Phssthpok’s share of the water into the dust, just before I left. Don’t let anyone into the pod without a pressure suit. Need I elaborate?”

“No,” said Garner. He felt like an amateur on skis. Somewhere he had lost control, and now events were moving too fast.

Nick spoke with a certain amount of anger. “Hold it. What makes you think we’d trust you to fly the Outsider ship?”

“Take your time. Think it through,” said Bre

Nick’s face wore a trapped look. Where was his own free will?

“It’s probably the most valuable artifact in human space,” said Bre

The Bre

They left Lucas Garner on Phobos, refueled there, and took off. Garner did not see Nick again for seven months. He did not see Bre

For the rest of his life he remembered that cramped conversation. Bre

An indefinite tension went out of Nick once they were in free fall. Mars converged slowly on itself, a bright varied landscape reddening as it lost detail.

“Children. You’ve got children,” Luke remembered suddenly.

“I’m aware of that. But fear not. I don’t intend to hover over them. They’ll have a better chance for happiness without that.”

“The hormone changes didn’t work?”

“I’m as neuter as a bumblebee. They must have worked to some extent. I think most of a Protector’s urge to die after his blood line is dead must be cultural. Training. I don’t have that training, that conviction that a breeder can’t be happy or safe without his ancestors constantly telling him what to do. Nick, can you give it out that the Outsider killed me?”

“What? What for?”

“Best for the children. I couldn’t keep seeing them without affecting their lives. Best for Charlotte too. I don’t intend to rejoin society as such. There’s nothing there for me.”

“The Belt doesn’t look down on cripples, Bre

“No,” Bre

Garner said, “You called it tree-of-life?”

“It’s a good name. You remember that Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. According to Genesis, the reason they were kicked out was that they might also have eaten from the Tree of Life, to live forever. ‘And be as one of us’ — it would have made them equivalent to angels. Now It looks like both trees were the same.”

Luke found a cigarette. “I don’t know that I like the idea of you producing tree-of-life crops.”

“I don’t much like the idea of a State secret,” said Nick. “The Belt has never had State secrets.”

“I hope I can convince you. I can’t protect my children, but I can try to protect the human race. If I was needed, I’d be there. If more were needed, there would be the root.”

“The cure would be worse than the disease, most likely.” Luke used his lighter. “Wha—” A knotted hand had reached around the crash couch and taken the cigarette from his mouth and stubbed it out against the hull.

It had been a shock. He remembered it with a shiver as he traversed the double airlocks at the axis of Farmer’s Asteroid.

Long ago, Farmer’s Asteroid had been an approximate cylinder of nickel-iron orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Then Belt industry had bubble-formed it: set it rotating, heated the metal nearly to melting and inflated it, via exploding bags of water, into a cylindrical bubble five miles in radius. Its rotation produced half a gravity. Much of the Belt’s food supply was grown here.

Luke had been in Farmer’s Asteroid once before. He enjoyed the landscaped interior, the wedding-ring lake, the checkered farmlands that rolled out and away and up and over, to where tiny tractors plowed furrows ten miles overhead.

The airlock let him out at the axis. It was cold here behind the sunshield, where the rays of the axial fusion tube never fell. Icebergs condensed out of the air here; and eventually broke loose and slid downslope, and melted into rivers that flowed in carved beds to the wedding-ring lake that girdled Farmer’s Asteroid. Nick Sohl met him here, and helped him tow himself downslope to where a travel chair waited.

“I can guess why you’re here,” Nick told him.

“Officially, I’m here at the request of the Joint Interstellar Colony Authority. They got your request to send a warning message to Wunderland. They weren’t at all clear on what the situation was, and I couldn’t give them much help.”

“You had my report,” Nick said a bit stiffly.

“It wasn’t much of a report, Nick.”

After a bit Nick nodded. “My fault. I just didn’t want to talk about it — and don’t now, for the matter of that — and it was too bloody late. We didn’t just give up, you know. We’ve been tracking him.”

“What happened, Nick?”

“They’d done considerable work when I got there with Bre

“So we boarded the Pak lifesystem sphere and Bre