“Maybe you didn’t want to,” said Alice.
“You can believe that!”
“Why here? Why come to us?”
“To the only known habitable world outside the galactic core? Besides that, we’ve had time to find them some others.”
“Yah.”
Brennan turned to look at them. “Are you hungry? I am.”
Deep within the eye-twisting maze of “Esher’s Relativity” was a miniature kitchen. It was a landing from one viewpoint, but from another it was a wall, and the wall held cookwear closets and a sink and a pair of ovens and a pull-down platform with burners in it. Raw materials had been dumped near the walclass="underline" a squash, a canteloupe, two rabbits whose necks were broken, carrots, celery, handfuls of spices.
“Let’s see how fast we can produce,” said Brennan. He became a many-armed blur. Roy and Alice stood back from his flashing hands. One held a knife, and it moved in silver streaks, so that carrots became rolling discs and the rabbits seemed simply to fall apart.
Roy felt disoriented, cut off from reality. Those little blue lights above the tower room had no intuitive connection with a fleet of superbeings bent on exterminating mankind. This pleasant domestic scene didn’t help. While a knife-wielding alien prepared his dinner, Roy Truesdale looked through the great castle door at a landscape tilted on its side.
Alice said, “That food is all from outside, isn’t it? Why didn’t you want us to eat anything?”
“Well, there’s always the chance that tree-of-life virus has gotten to something. Cooking kills it, and there’s precious little chance it can live in anything anyway unless I’ve spread thalium oxide through the soil.” Brennan did not look up or interrupt his work. “I had a Finagle’s Puzzle facing me when I cut loose from Earth. There was food, but what I needed was the virus in the tree-of-life roots. I tried to grow it in various things: apples, pomegranates—” He looked up then, to see if they’d catch the reference. “I got a variant that would grow in a yam. That was when I knew I could survive out here.”
Brennan had arranged rabbit and vegetables as for a still-life painting. He put the pot in the oven. “My kitchen had all kinds of freeze-dried produce. I used to like to eat well, luckily. Later I got seeds from Earth. I was never in danger; I could always just go home. But I didn’t like what was going to happen to civilization if I did.” He turned. “Dinner in fifteen minutes.”
She asked, “Weren’t you lonely?”
“Yah.” Brennan pulled a table out of the floor. It was not memory plastic extruding itself, but a thick slab of wood, heavy enough to require Brennan’s own muscles. A look back at Alice may have told him that she expected more of an answer. “Look, I’d have been lonely anywhere. You know that.”
“No, I don’t. You’d have been welcome.”
Brennan seemed to go off at a tangent. “Roy, you’ve been here before. You guessed that?”
Roy nodded.
“How did I wipe out just that section of your memory?”
“I don’t know. Nobody knows.” Roy tensed inside himself.
“Simplest thing in the world. Just after I stunned you, I took a recording of your brain. Your complete memory. Before I left you in the Pinnacles I wiped your mind completely, then played the recording into it. It’s more complex than that — the process involves memory RNA, and very complex electrical fields — but I don’t have to select the memories I want to remove.”
Roy’s voice came out faint. “Brennan, that’s horrible.”
“Why? Because for awhile you were a mindless animal? I wasn’t going to leave you that way. I’ve done this twenty times now, and never had an accident.”
Roy shuddered. “You don’t understand. There was a me that spent four months with you. He’s gone. You murdered him.”
“You’re beginning to understand.”
Roy looked him in the eye. “You were right. You’re different. You’d be lonely anywhere.”
Brennan set the table. He held chairs for his guests, moving with the smooth lack of haste that marks a perfect headwaiter. He served, taking half the food for himself, then sat down and ate with the efficiency of a wolf. He was neat, but he finished long before they did. There was now a noticeable bulge beneath his sternum.
“Emergencies make me hungry,” he said. “And now I’d like to excuse myself. It’s not polite, but there’s a war to fight.” And he left, sprinting like a roadrunner.
For the next few days Roy and Alice felt like unwanted guests of a perfect host. They didn’t see Brennan much. When they glimpsed him across the landscape of Kobold he would be moving at a dead run. He would stop to ask them how they were enjoying themselves, tell them of something they might have missed, then be off again — at a dead run.
Or they would find him in the laboratory making ever-finer adjustments in his “telescope.” There was only one ship in the field now, seen against a background of red dwarfs and interstellar dust clouds: a blue fusion flame, blue-shifted yellow helium light, sparkling around the edges.
He would talk to them, but without interrupting his work. “It’s the Phssthpok configuration,” he told them with evident satisfaction. “They didn’t mess with a good thing. See the black dot in the center of the flame? Cargo pod comes first during deceleration. And it’s a bigger cargo pod than Phssthpok was carrying, and the ships are moving slower than his did at that distance. They aren’t that close to the speed of light. They won’t be here for a hundred and seventy-two or -three years.”
“Good.”
“Good for me, or it should be. Cargo pod first, and breeders in the cargo pod in frozen sleep. A vulnerable configuration, wouldn’t you say?”
“Not at odds of two hundred and thirty to one.”
“I’m not crazy, Roy. I’m not going to attack them myself. I’m going for help.”
“Where?”
“Wunderland. It’s closest.”
“What? No. Earth is closest.”
Brennan looked around. “Are you crazy? I’m not even going to warn Earth. Earth and the Belt are eighty percent of humanity, including all my descendants. Their best chance is to miss the fight. If some other world does the fighting, and loses, the Pak may still miss Earth for awhile.”
“So you’re using the Wunderlanders as a decoy. Are you going to tell them?”
“Don’t be silly.”
They toured Kobold, and tried to keep out of Brennan’s way. He would come on them unexpectedly, jogging around a boulder or out of a grove of trees, eternally hurried or eternally keeping himself in fighting trim; he never said which. Always he wore that vest. He didn’t need modesty, he didn’t need protection from the elements, but he needed the pockets. For all Roy knew the vest held protection too: a fold-up pressure suit, say, in one of the larger pockets.
Once he found them near one of the rounded huts. He led them into an airlock, and showed them something beyond the glass inner wall.
Floating within a great rock-walled cavity: a silvery sphere, eight feet across, polished to a mirror brightness.
“Takes a damn finicky gravity field to keep it there,” said Brennan. “It’s mostly neutronium.”
Roy whistled. Alice said, “Wouldn’t it be unstable? It’s too small.”
“Sure it would, if it weren’t in a stasis field. I made it under pressure, then got the stasis field around it before it could blow up in my face. Now there’s more matter on top of it. Would you believe a surface gravity of eight million gees?”