The Billion Year Backup System (working title)(Workshop & Comments thread)

[Rusty Edge]

In an office on Earth, the following year:

  Everybody calls me by my surname, even my own family. It's our tradition.

  "Congrats again, Garvey, on stepping up with the Grogs. Please, have a seat," said my great grandfather, affectionately know as G-Squared, the founder of the family business. Rather than get fat and soft as he aged, he seemed to get leaner and tougher, like beef jerky. You'd  think he might last forever. He had invented dolphin hands, which allowed them to use tools and computers and become both productive and wealthy, and Garvey Limited, too, in the process. My title was Vice President of Business Development, and my main accomplishment was discovering another handicapped sentient species, the Grogs, and negotiating contracts with them. The young ones resemble cone shaped dogs. Mature females become sessile, that is, stationary, attaching themselves to rocks. Not only do their bodies enlarge, but their brains do, too, while their spinal cords shrivel and everything but their mouths become practically useless. They could summon their prey telepathically, and summon scavengers to groom them. They made telepathic contact with me because they wanted technology and trade.

  "Thanks," I said, sinking into a hover chair across the desk from him. Hover chairs weren't actually chairs, but they served the same purpose. Like sleeping plates, they automatically adjusted the gravity so that you could float in comfort, without falling off. "I had an inspirational example to live up to." Ripples in the artificial gravity field massaged my back.

  "When are you going to settle down and give me my great, great, grandson so I can claim the title of G-Cubed and retire as chairman of the board ?" he teased.

  "Well, there is this special girl on Down, Sharon Jilson, but I've got something I need to do first, before I try to get married," I confessed. Down was a planet in the system of a numbered, not named, cool, red star, I can never remember which one... "It will take time, money, and space travel. My thoughts have been dominated by this riddle: Bandersnatchi shouldn't have such huge brains, but they do. They were designer food beasts. There was no need for them to be sentient. The less brains, the better. I know they also served as spies, but Tnuctipun sized brains should've been more than adequate for a spy. So what's the purpose? "

  Bandersnatchi were our clients, too, much like the dolphins. My grandfather, "G-Prime" was responsible for finding that market. He was now the Chief Executive Officer, and my dad, Big G, is the Chief Operating Officer. Bandersnatchi lived in the Lowlands of Jinx, grazing upon yeast on the shores of it's equatorial ocean. Jinx was the ultra massive moon of the gas giant Primary, in the Sirius system, having the most gravity anywhere inhabited by humans. The  Bandersnatchi were slug-like single celled life forms scaled up to twice the size of an Apatosaurus. Externally they had a hard shell cell wall with a broad mouth and sensory bristles clustered at each corner. They were created by the Tnuctipun.

  The Tnuctipun were a very intelligent race of bipeds, gifted in the ways of bioengineering and other advanced technologies. Unfortunately for them, they were enslaved by the Thrintin, a species of modest intelligence with natural mind control powers so mighty that they ruled most of the galaxy. At least until the Tnuctipun revolted about a billion and a half years ago and everyone died as a result, except for some Bandersnatchi on Jinx.

  My great grandfather handed me a mug of Irish coffee, and sat down behind his desk with one of his own.

"G-Prime is our executive expert, what did he have to say about it?"

  I sipped and savored my coffee. The whipped cream on top kept it hot."He thinks maybe the Tnuctip just scaled up a microbe which could convert anything into palatable protoplasm, and the brains and genetic immutability were simple side effects of size. The spying was an afterthought, otherwise they'd have been designed with eyes. I wanted to get your input."

  G-Squared rubbed his chin and furrowed his brow. "Brains used to be a delicacy, called sweetmeats, until somebody discovered you could get prion diseases from eating them."

  "Wait," I said, "what are prions?"

  "Prions are infectious misfolded proteins of a sort. You know how a crystal kind of organizes the formation of other crystals around it? A prion caused the proteins around it to unfold and refold in it's own image, in a sort of slow motion chain reaction or domino effect. Since they infected nerve and brain cells in those with susceptible genes, it was particularly bad. Destructive as a software worm, only incurable and lethal. They once called it spongey brain disease, then mad cow disease. Prions could go dormant for years, making it hard to track and contain outbreaks."

  "Maybe," continued G-Squared, "it's because brains were simply worth more per kilo than meat. Maybe they had over-sized livers, too, for the same reason. Bleep, according to legend they could eat anything, they had to have over-sized livers, I'd bet my shares on it. Did you think of that?" he asked.

  "That's disgusting, of course not," I said. "Far before my time. My gut says there's another answer...No pun intended,"   

  He chuckled. "Your gut was right about Grogs, and they're making us a lot of money now. Not just as animal herdsman, zookeepers, and police interrogators, as they suggested, but as pet and infant psychologists, memory retrieval specialists, doctor's assistants, interpreters, etc. They can even cure gambling, smoking, drinking and current addictions! Go figure it out, you have my carte blanche as majority shareholder of Garvey Industries. If it's bothering you, I have a hunch we're leaving money on the table."

  G-Squared fumbled with biometric keys and combinations on his bottom desk drawer for a moment.

  "Take this, it came from the Belt. You can have it if you don't ask any other questions of me, it's probably best that way for all concerned," G-squared said, handing me a cylindrical-shaped bronze-like metal object the size of a toolbox. Apparently an open stasis box, it could only have been smuggled. Stasis boxes were like buried treasure, they often contained advanced technology, some of it weaponry. Because of that, the UN claimed first right to it in the name of public safety.

  Stasis fields were so dense that they reflected everything, they were indestructible, as far as anyone had proven, and whatever was inside was suspended in time while the box was closed and the stasis field was active. The boxes were relics of the Thrintin Slavers, built for them by the Tnuctipun slaves. This one contained a plasticized claw with 3 fingers, some cubes of meat in transparent wrappings, a flat rectangular gadget, a colorful cap, an empty drinking bulb, and a canister of golden liquid. "It should provide some clues in your quest. The labs say the meat is toxic, and that big bottle contains a unique ethanol liqueur."

  "Truth be told, I'd rather smoke than drink," continued G-squared, putting down his empty mug.

  "Go ahead," I said, following his lead and changing the subject. I was both alert and relaxed, feeling the effects of the fine Irish Coffee. "How has this dangerous smoking habit endured in humanity for over a thousand years, if you don't mind my asking? It doesn't make sense that it would."

  "I suppose not," he said, as he took out a tabac stick, or a cigarette, as they were formerly known, put it in his mouth, and touched the other end against his ring. There were some blue high voltage sparks, then the tabac stick  smoldered, and the tip glowed orange as he inhaled. "You might have reasonably expected it to die out after the Surgeon General's warning appeared on the product, and they banned advertising from TV, around the time of the Moon landing. Maybe they should have outlawed it altogether, but Prohibition on alcohol didn't work, and besides, the government was a partner in crime with the tobacco companies through vice taxes. So  it survived."

  He blew a few smoke rings. "Well, obviously it's an acquired taste, but an addictive one. Like all acquired tastes, the pleasure exceeds the pain in the short to intermediate term, at least after the instinctive unpleasant reflex. So a lot of people continued to smoke, and a lot of people got curious enough to find out what it was all about for themselves. Meanwhile the commercial interests were trying to revise their business plan with healthier, smokeless, and electronic versions of cigarettes, to grant themselves an extension. When marijuana was decriminalized in the early 21st century, the big tobacco interests muscled in on the market, and added tobacco to regulate the strength of the product, and make it more addictive, too"...

  G-squared flicked off the excess ash from his cigarette. "As the population of Earth grew into the tens of billions, the do-gooders ended tobacco cultivation subsidies, and replaced them with stiff taxes. When that failed, they instituted an outright ban, claiming it was immoral to grow tobacco rather than food."

  "Why didn't that work?" I wondered.

  "The Belters. Before the Moon Landing, the cowboy was the iconic symbol of American self-reliance. It dominated entertainment. People wore the boots, hats, and blue jeans. They even listened to the music. The cigarette advertising campaigns were built around cowboys. As the Earth became crowded and regulated, people with those independent streaks moved to the Asteroid Belt. Smoking was their homage to the cowboys, and a way to relax when they got out of their space suits." G-Squared took a long pull on his tabac stick.

  "The Belters were now the new cowboys of the new century. Only they were a worldwide symbol, not just an American one. When tobacco production went underground on Earth, the Belters took up the slack, transforming another asteroid into a hollow nickel-iron sphere, with soil and atmosphere inside, like Farmer's Asteroid, called Nicotina. Most cigarettes were smuggled, which was a way for everybody who used them to identify with their iconic heroes, or defy the U.N., or to appear wealthy. They made smoking cool again."

  He let out a long stream of smoke. "Eventually medicine caught up, and you could use the auto doc at the pharmacy every week when you dropped by to pick up your cigarette supply, neutralizing most of the harmful effects. Booster spice made a big difference, too. Then, under popular pressure, the UN threw in the towel and deregulated tobacco, making it tax free." Automated doctors were sort of like tanning beds, you laid down in the tank, closed the lid, and the machines scanned you, then used drugs in your blood stream to make adjustments to your body and personal chemistry while you received a massage. Booster spice was a supplement people took that not only neutralized the aging process, but made them youthful as well.

  "The other reason smoking survived the intervening centuries," He took the tabac stick out of his mouth and pointed it at me for emphasis, "was those kidnapping organ legger gangs! To them, a person was either a potential product or a potential black market customer, and smokers make way better customers than marketable product. Statistically, smoking made you less likely to die young!"

  I went slack jawed. "Damned if you do, and damned if you don't!" 

****

[Rusty Edge]

  I chartered Jason and Anne-Marie Papandreou, who actually had previous experience with a stasis box, and their hyperdrive star liner, "Court Jester" for my quest, paying a premium for discretion. Jason was a veteran of the Man-Kzin Wars, and a former "Flatlander", or Earthling, like me. Anne-Marie was a willowy "Crashlander", from the low gravity planet We Made It, in the Procyon system. Jason was brave, but light hearted. Anne-Marie was clever and curious. Not only were they both able pilots, mechanics, observers, and improvisers, they were proven survivors. I would be in safe hands. I have no idea how, but Anne-Marie could make a soufflé in any gravity or acceleration. Their base of operations was Jinx, which was convenient, because I had a feeling I'd end up there sooner or later. That's where the surviving Bandersnatchi lived, and it was also the location of The Institute of Knowledge, the greatest research university beyond Earth. I wanted to pick their brains.

****

Aboard Court Jester:

  Once we were safely out of Sol System's gravity hazards and into hyperspace on a Silvereyes heading, an Earthlike planet in the Beta Hydri system, I told them about my quest. I also told them about my experience with telepathic Grogs on the planet Down.

  I realized they were the devolved descendants of the Thrintin Slavers, who ruled the galaxy with such powers 1.5 billion years ago. The Grogs had no recollection of any past on other planets. Or so they telepathically said. But as long as my mind still harbored doubts, I felt humanity was secure. If I began to think with crystalline certainty, I would be worried.

  The Papandreous told me about their adventure with a stasis box purchased from the Outsiders by the Piersen's Puppeteers. They were transporting it and a Puppeteer named Nessus when they were ambushed and captured in a secret Kzinti operation. A computerized spy's weapon found inside the box presumed the Kzinti had killed the rightful owner of the secret weapon, and self-destructed, killing all of the Kzinti. The Popandreous narrowly escaped because they were safely in a crash web at that moment. The Outsiders were aliens that migrated from the galactic core to it's rim and back, trading in information. The Puppateers  where named for their appearance, but it also described their nature- they were an advanced but cowardly race that acted behind the scenes. The Kzinti were an intelligent martial race that resembled bipedal tigers with ratlike tails.

  "How would you go to war against a race of alien telepathic mind readers with mind control, Jason?" I asked.

"I want to understand how the Tnuctipun did it. I want to know their mindset so that I can know why they made the Bandersnatchi the way they did. So please try to put yourself in their place for a moment."

   "Hmm..." Jason furrowed his brow, then stood and paced. "We humans were no match for the Kzinti, in man to "tiger" terms, in size, speed, strength or ferocity. It was the Kzinti's impatience for planning, preparing, and organizing which was their downfall. But if you tried to organize against the Slavers, they would know before you knew they knew. They would know your network, your numbers, your plans, your bases and supply caches and time tables. Whenever you decided to act and give a general order, the Slavers would know instantly. There would be no surprise. They would counter-order or ambush. If the Slavers ever failed, they would simply order the rebels to halt, retreat, or commit fratricide/suicide." It would be over before you could start. You'd be fools to try."

  "Or desperate," quipped Anne-Marie.

  Jason hedged a little. "The more you did to prepare, the more likely the Slavers were to find out and thwart you. Perhaps a few living alone on the frontier somewhere could work towards a revolution undetected," he said, then folded his arms emphatically," but that's it."

  "Any communication would probably have to be by secret couriers who didn't know what they carried...or better yet, didn't even know that they were couriers. Computer networks, lasers, hyper waves, and telecommunications could all be monitored, so that's out," Anne-Marie added, throwing her hands up in a gesture of futility. 

  "Sure, Tnuctipin could turn mining disintegrators and energy beams against the Slaver planets and compounds, but as soon as you moved against them, or even gave the order to, the mentally interconnected Slavers would retaliate. Most likely making you fight your own. Or if they wanted to make an example, they could force somebody to publicly flay themselves alive with a variable sword until they went into shock or bled out", Jason explained.

  Anne-Marie shuddered at first, then she wondered..."But really, wouldn't the Tnuctipun try to kill only the Slavers, not destroy the infrastructure they built and the other innocent slave species? They wanted to commit instant genocide, to liberate all from the overlords, not trigger Doomsday."

  "That made it much harder," I realized. "No super anti-matter weapons, if such things were even possible. No mining disintegrators or energy beams from orbit, either."

  "I just don't see how it could be done. You'd have to degrade the enemy intelligence before you could even hope to plan & prepare," said Jason. "Then you would have to use a super-powerful first strike, or it would all be over."

  "Well", I concluded," I guess we know why the Slavers ruled the whole galaxy, and for so long."

  "What do you make of this?" I said, showing them the open stasis box given to me by G-Squared, and placing it on the table in the main cabin.

  "It looks just like the one we bought from the Outsiders!," said Anne-Marie. "So does this stuff inside it. Where's the secret ray gun?"

   "This is all that there was when I got it. Interesting...Tell me about each of these objects and the secret ray gun," I said, adding "Feel free to touch them, but I should warn you that the meat is toxic."

  "And there's more of it," Jason observed. "Our box only had one cube of it, but it was poisoned, too."

  "Why?"

  "We concluded that the contents of our box were a sort of spy's survival kit. Maybe the meat was for suicide," Jason suggested.

  "It could just as easily have been for assassination, since it was for spy use," Anne Marie offered.

  "I knew I hired the right people!," I said as I hit the table with my fist for emphasis.

  She picked up the laminated claw. "We figured it's a Slaver's hand, and that it was a trophy, hence my assassination theory. The secret soft weapon was more humane than suicide by poison in the self-destruct mode, and contained a variable sword for quiet work, a projectile pistol, a laser for long range, a stunner for live capture, an energy absorber and a rocket lift for quick escape, a computer to store info, and a ray gun for mass destruction. Spy and assassin gear. Jay figured out it belonged to a spy, not a soldier," 

  "Maybe the rocket gizmo for interrogation", Jason joked. "That soft weapon wasn't like a pocket phone that is a phone, a camera, a watch, a health monitor, a calendar, and a computer all in the same rigid gadget. It was like a hammer that magically transformed into other proper tools, one at a time- adjustable wrench, a set of locking pliers, a hunting knife, a hand saw, only weapons instead of tools. It was as if it were made out of living liquid metal - total conversion of matter. That's what convinced me it was spy gear."

  I was speechless.

  "Speaking of pocket phones," said Anne-Marie, "The Kzinti telepath ran some tests on this rectangular gadget, and determined it was a communicator that worked in hyperspace, but their captain saw no use for it as a weapon, and didn't care about it."

  "Typical ratcats!" said Jason, using navy slang for the Kzinti.

  "WAIT!" I said. "A hyperspace pocket phone?! Where's this Tnuctipun stuff you saw before, now?"

  "In fragments plastered across the cabin wall of the wrecked Kzinti ship, next to the remains of the pilot", Jason explained, "after the secret soft weapon got suspicious and self-destructed."

  "So this is the only hyperspace pocket phone known in the universe?" I asked.

  "Yes," they said in unison.

  "Have I mentioned that I hired the right people? I think we just paid for this expedition, and Garvey Limited is about to have a subdivision bigger than the parent company. I'll arrange a generous finder's fee once we successfully crack the device."

  Jason and Anne-Marie did a high five and a happy dance.

  "There was a cap like this in our box," observed Jason," but the Kzinti had no interest in it either. It could have offered the wearer invisibility for all I know."

  Anne-Marie picked up the cap and put it on. "Perfect for bad hair days, or when you run out of makeup."

  "I can you still see you, beautiful."

  "TANJ! It doesn't work." Everybody laughed. "Maybe it offered some protection from the Slaver power, maybe our spy should have worn his instead of storing it."

  I smiled. "I like that idea even better! I can test it with the Grogs next time I'm on Down."

  "Maybe he couldn't," Jason speculated. "The cap would be great at night, for stealth, but if a Slaver could see him, but couldn't read his mind, it would blow his cover. Slavers would send his own people after him, and he'd be forced to kill them, or surrender. What he would really need is some sort of a temporary amnesia pill.."

  Anne-Marie picked up the empty drinking bulb. "Our kit had one of these filled with a 40% hydrogen peroxide solution. We never figured out why.. Fuel? Water purification? Torture? First aid? For destroying evidence? Suicide? Who knows?"

  "Ostensibly for water purification," I suggested," but since it's a spy kit, secretly for destroying evidence, too, is my best guess. We'll never know."

  "Well, well, what have we here?" said Jason, picking up the transparent canister which contained about 1.5 liters of golden liquid and holding it up to the light. "Looks like beer."

  "G-Squared said it was "a unique ethanol liqueur."

  "That's justification for carrying it in the kit, as far as Jay's concerned," teased Anne-Marie, "He always has me pack booze. Can we toast the future of the hyperspace pocket phone?"

  "I'm all for that, but let's keep things scientific, for now," I cautioned. "Only one of us at a time."

  "I volunteer to be guinea pig," stated Anne-Marie, raising her hand, "because I've never tasted anything more than a century old...and besides, Jay is officer of the watch right now."

  "TANJ!" he said.

  Anne-Marie transferred some of the elixir to her drinking bulb. "Mmmm. It smells yeasty, like... baking bread."

She took a slow sip. "It tastes like fresh bread, too!" She worked the liqueur around her palate, then swallowed.

 "Very creamy in texture, and slightly savory. The finish is sweet and there's a hint of something else.."

  "So it tastes like a cream ale?" asked Jason.

  "No," she said emphatically, and took a long pull from her bulb. " It's a... It's a drink of croissant fresh from the oven, with butter and Myer lemon honey! I could sip this stuff any time, hot or cold."

  That sounded too good to pass up. I transferred some liqueur into a clean drinking bulb, in preparation for a toast.

  "Is it ...Is it hot in here?" asked Anne-Marie, letting down her long brunette hair, and shaking it out. It floated sensuously in the .8G ship's acceleration. "Hey Jay, where are we going?"

  "Anne, are you okay?"

 "Never better, Big Guy! Who's your sexy friend and why haven't you introduced me?"

  "We're on our way to the planet of Silvereyes in the Beta Hydri system, under hyperdrive, at the direction of Garvey, here, who is our charter. We met him a few days ago. Don't you remember?"

  "Nope!" She threw her arms around her husband's neck, held him close and kissed him hard for half a minute.

  When they came up for air, Jason said "her mouth does taste delicious-"

  "We'd be willing to take this canister as payment for our finder's fee..." offered Anne-Marie.

  "Not happening," I said. "This is all there is." They started kissing again.  "Okay, you two, take all of the time off you need. Jason, please stay sober, and I'll call you if any alarms go off."

  "DEAL!" He said, sweeping the blue-eyed beauty off of her feet, as she took another sip. He rushed into their cabin, and I didn't see them again for about 48 hours.

  Maybe we found our 'temporary amnesia pill,' I thought. So... this 'unique liqueur' tasted delicious, got you drunk, cleared your head of short term memories, and was some kind of legitimate aphrodisiac. The perfect weekend beverage! Or the perfect way to get your great grandson to give you a great, great grandson faster...G-Squared played me. I love that guy!

****

[Rusty Edge]

Silvereyes:

  We decided to keep the Jester in orbit and take a shuttle to the surface, that way we didn't have to deal with space harbor pilots or customs officials coming aboard and finding a stasis box. That could only lead to uncomfortable questions and undesirable outcomes.

  Jason and Anne-Marie wanted to conduct an experiment with the liqueur to discover the effects on men when they drank it. I was pretty curious myself, but since I didn't have a partner here, I gave them the bulb I had poured the other night, and let them stay aboard.

  I got a good view of a couple of shimmering silver-green sunflower patches the size of countries on Earth when I took a shuttle to the space port, a simple customs check when I landed, and then a displacement booth to the home of Dr. Richard Harvey Shultz-Mann in Bradbury's Landing. He was expecting me.

  He had a head of close cropped hair, and an asymmetrical beard with a waxed goatee on the left side of his chin, all of it sandy or white in color. It gave him a very striking aristocratic appearance, but it showed his age and revealed his poverty. He'd been off of booster spice for decades. He'd been discredited for misusing a spaceship belonging to the Institute. He was rendered unemployable and unpublishable, even though he was perhaps the leading  xeno-archeo-bontanist in Known Space. So he was akin to the Bandersnatch who had intelligence and nothing to do with it. He was willing to pontificate for a price paid in advance.

  We spoke of the Grogs at length. Then about the book he intended.

  "Was there any possible revolutionary purpose for the bio-relics?" I asked.

  "I can speculate," Dr. Schultz-Mann began, "but I don't have scientific proof. My intuition indicates that the key to understanding the Tnuctipun is that they were inherently duplicitous, that everything they created was designed with an ulterior application for their eventual revolution. They always played the long game. The stage trees could easily be repurposed as rockets, explosives, or IPBMs." Mature stage trees were like multi-stage solid fuel rockets, 800 meters high. They were designed to lift ships and payloads out of planetary gravities. When gravity polarizer drives were introduced, the plantations went bankrupt.

  "IPBMs?" I asked.

  "Inter Planetary Ballistic Missiles," Shultz-Mann explained. " There are no surviving viprin, they all would have starved with the Slavers, after the slaves committed suicide and the Thrintin ate the last Bandersnatch brain.  So while they are examples of Tnuctipun genetic-engineering, they aren't relics in the true sense. We only know of them from stasis box records and Kzanol. They would have been the obvious choice for spy creatures, but perhaps excessively obvious." The viprin were racing beasts like greyhounds. The Tnuctipun improved them, removing digestive tracts, to save on weight, and hair to reduce drag. They were fed refined liquids intravenously and beloved by the Slavers. They were immune to the Slaver's Power. They had to be, otherwise races could be rigged, affecting the gambling. The improved strain revolutionized racing, and wreaked economic havoc, putting most kennels out of business.

  "What about those air plants," I asked? Air plants were botanical, (not mechanical ) plants that recycled the air on space ships, or in the mansions of the Slavers in less than ideal worlds. "What was duplicitous about them? Could they be turned off and cause suffocation?"

  Dr. Schultz-Mann pondered the problem and stroked the waxed spike of his asymmetrical beard. "There's no method to shut down the air plants remotely. Anything that would terminate them would terminate the passengers and crew as well, so suffocation by air plant failure would be redundant in that scenario. The discovered specimens vary significantly. They've probably mutated considerably over 1.5 billion standard years. There may be examples which we don't even recognize as being of the same taxonomical division. Most evolved to not only create air, but to store it. Many were contaminated with dormant viruses. I can't generalize, other than to say that they are remarkably reliable to still be producing breathable air in our lifetimes. Certainly no machine could function for such an extended duration unattended, not even for one one- thousandth of that. That's the beauty of bio-engineering!"

  "And the sunflowers?", I suggested. Slaver 'sunflowers' resembled sunflowers on Earth, but they were stunted, and had parabolic mirror-like heads, which turned easily and accurately. Normally they focused all of the sunlight onto the black bulb in their center, but they could focus on a threat, such as a bird, and blind or burn it, depending how many of each there were. They could turn predator into prey by broiling it into dry fertilizer. The heads looked like silver eyes, and so was the planet named.

  "The sunflowers were planted on the estates, surrounding the Slaver mansions, as a solar powered "laser" perimeter defense. Devastatingly powerful in daylight, useless without the sun. Best suited to some planet or moon with a light side and a dark side. We know that the Tnuctipun used them as weapons against the Thrintin. Perhaps the sunflowers could be queued, or re-trained to become dormant, or even to perceive the Slavers as a menace, and prevent them from entering or leaving their homes at a critical juncture. That would be insidiously problematic.  Or some combination of oxygen enriched air from the airplants, stage trees as fuel/explosives and sunflowers as a detonator. Nobody actually knows why the Thrintin used the sunflowers as a defense, or how the Tnuctipun utilized them against them, only that they did."

  "As a perimeter defense." Mann stated, "they are excessively hazardous to have adjacent to populated areas, with the significant probability of some inhabitants being burned or blinded. Death to humans is a lesser peril. Intelligent life can flee or seek cover when they begin to be targeted at the range limits. As a defensive system, the sunflowers could be rather easily neutralized by lagomorpha leporidae... "

  "Leopards?!"

  "Bunnies," Mann declared. "Bunnies love to eat sunflower stalks. They live underground. They are normally active at dusk and dawn. Raptors are primary predators of rabbits, but the sunflowers would burn the birds out of the sky. Bunnies tend to run in zigzags too quickly for the sunflowers to track, or run into cover and circle. In other words, when the sunflowers would attack the bunnies, they would end up burning each other. When things get too hot for the bunnies, they would duck underground, and when they have a plentiful food supply they breed like clichés."

  I laughed at the picture he painted of an estate security system overrun by rabbits. "Hardly a credible deterrent, but couldn't a slaver stop the bunnies?"

  "Certainly, but if you need a security guard just to guard the security system, it defeats the purpose of it, doesn't it?" Mann countered.

  "Well, I gotta admit a system that dangerous and ineffective doesn't seem sensible, not at all. Was that how it was a Tnuctip trap?"

  "My research over the decades here suggests that the sunflowers were originally designed as a terraforming tool," Mann continued. "Seed the continents with sunflowers to clear the land, and colonize the oceans with yeast as a future food source. Both could be delivered by stage tree rockets. The sunflower patch expands like a toadstool ring, or perhaps a toadstool ring within a grass fire, killing and burning all before it, then dying off from the center as the nitrogen in the soil was depleted, and leaving organic matter behind. The growing ring stopped when it reached naked rock, water or salt. I think the Tnuctipun devised these for their own use, before they became enslaved. They started with fresh seed from the original source for each application. The plant was designed to self-destruct rather than evolve.

  "The sunflowers you see here today have mutated to fix atmospheric nitrogen in the soil by means of symbiotic bacteria, so that the center of the patch continues to live. That's what enables them to thrive in various soils. I've determined that they must have been trapped beneath an ice shelf in seed form until relatively recently- say a million years ago, and evolved thereafter. Stopped by a blizzard, most likely."

  "Last, but not least..." I suggested, getting to the point of my quest.

  "We all know the Bandersnatchi were spies," stated Dr. Shultz-Mann. "We academics haven't determined how they could have procured anything of use as information. They lack psychic aptitude. They can't see in the least, and never could until you built prosthetics for them. They're tactile, but they lack mammalian hands, mollusk tentacles, and Puppeteer prehensile tongues. The brain organelles were certainly capable of storing data, but the neurological sensors were certainly inadequate for gathering it. It remains an unanswered question. I might well have gone to the lowland wilds to interview one for myself, rather than accept some Jinxian brute's word on the matter, but the gravity of that mutant moon was torment enough on it's own. The equatorial humidity would have been unbearable. My beard would have curled out of control!"

****

Aboard Court Jester in close orbit of Silvereyes: 

  I really liked Mann, and I certainly believed him, but not enough to take a risk and offer him a job with responsibility. There was something slightly suspicious about him. Perhaps he was a little too greedy or clever to trust. I wouldn't have showed him the stasis box contents, even if I had them on me. I had a feeling his pomposity was his way of withdrawing from his imposed poverty to protect his pride. But I liked him enough to buy him a booster spice subscription, and call it a retaining fee for a consultant. He was due for a big surprise tomorrow!

  The Popandreous confirmed that the liqueur worked much the same for Jason as it did Anne-Marie, who was able to duplicate her previous results. It cleared his mind, it gave him sexy breath and bedroom eyes, it made him amorous and improved his stamina. I was really looking forward to using it to celebrate my marriage engagement on Down at the end of this trip.

****

[Rusty Edge]

Orbiting Jinx:

  I was standing next to the air lock, awaiting the authorities, when Anne-Marie placed a drinking bulb filled with golden liquid in each of my hands and winked her eye.

  The door opened and the Jinxian officials, a female harbor pilot and a male customs agent entered Court Jester. They were massive, just like the moon they lived on. I placed drinking bulbs of liqueur in their powerful hands. "Welcome aboard! Garvey of Garvey Limited, at your service."

  They looked at each other, preparing to politely refuse, when Anne-Marie rushed over, and seized them both by the wrists and pulled as hard as she could - "Hey! Don't be givin' away the reserve vintage stuff, it's too good for 'em. Let me have it!"

 The Jinxians just lifted the bulbs to their mouths, to re-assert control, and pulling the spindly Anne-Marie into the air in the process. Her grip tore free and she safely tucked, rolled, and landed on her feet. The Jinxians took long draughts and  grunted. "I'd like to see the manifests," said the pilot to Jason, ignoring Anne-Marie.

  ..."And I'd like to see the contents of that locked walk-in safe labeled 'DANGER! Airlock Out of Order' because I know this spaceship model, and it only has the airlock by which we entered!" said the customs agent, shouldering past Jason.

  Uh-oh, I thought, they are going to find my stasis box with the hyperspace pocket phone, and start confiscating, fining, and asking awkward questions. Their mass must make them resistant to the liqueur. I stalled..." What'd you think of the drink? "

  "It tastes and smells delicious, best thing I ever drank, thank you Mister....  uh, What was your name again?"

  I showed him my passport and credentials.

  "Now let me get this straight.." said the agent, loud enough for all to hear. "Your name is
Marvin Gardner Garvey the fourth... Can anyone tell me what a Gardner does?"

  "He gardens?" quipped Jason.

"Exactly!"  said the agent. "That means that the guy who has the Monopoly on dolphin hands was named for Marvin Gardens, a location in Atlantic City!"

  The two Jinxians doubled over in laughter. Always trust a Jinxian to spot a pun. When they finished slapping each other on the back, they were sweating, holding each other's muscular arms, and gazing into each other's eyes.

  "Uhh..." said the pilot, "Look at the time! I think we're finished here, aren't we Attila?"   

  "AGREED!" he said, and they left arm in arm. We landed on our own.

****

The Institute of Knowledge, Jinx:

  The Bandersnatchi Specialist, Dr. Pablo Singh, was bored to tears. He told me the facts I already knew and ignored my perplexing question about Bandersnatchi brains. He droned in a monotone as if he were reciting a memorized speech. He said they are intelligent, but not intellectual. They have remarkable memories, but they're such boors.  All they want to talk about is sex and food, and the sex is kind of biologically pointless because they are all genetically identical. They can talk for weeks about their ancestors and how the texture and flavor of yeast has subtly changed over the millennia. He didn't know who that would be of interest to besides somebody studying the evolution of yeast!

  "Except for the shell," said the biologist, "they resemble the Earth protozoan brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, in my opinion. Those are particularly interesting, and the reason I came here to study the Bandersnatch. T. Gondii has all kinds of fascinating abilities. They can go dormant, and they are practically incurable in that stage. Maybe the shell is just a variant of the cyst. They can alter the immune system, to weaken the host in order to spread the infection, or they can boost the host's immune system to fight off competing parasites. Infection is passed in various ways, including from mother to child, by eating undercooked meat, and it can also be sexually transmitted. They infect multiple species, but they prefer to reproduce in cats, and to that end they can dramatically reduce a rat's olfactory sensitivity to cat urine, so that the infected rat will likely be eaten by a cat, which will in turn become infected. It can even make infected rats confuse fear with attraction. In the case of "crazy cat ladies", it seems to regulate their dopamine levels, and change their behavior. When T. Gondii infect cats they can reproduce and shed cysts through the feces, which are incredibly durable and infectious-

  Ick! I got out of there quick. The professor wasn't much more interesting of a conversationalist than he claimed his subjects of study were. I decided to take Dr. Schultz-Mann's suggestion, and find out for myself. I made some arrangements. Since we were at their base of operations, the Popandreous busied themselves with maintenance and re-supply. For two nights we had dinner at their home.

****

[Rusty Edge]

The Lowlands of Jinx:

  We flew the Court Jester to the company hanger at the edge of the fog belt on the Lowlands of Jinx, where the Bandersnatchi came for their prosthetic surgery. One of the Bandersnatchi, who preferred to be known as "Slick" had agreed to an interview in exchange for a complete set of prosthetics in advance... hands, sensors, and communicators.  The hardware was going to make things easier for us to communicate anyway. At least the atmosphere and temperature was comfortable for me here, in the hanger, even if the gravity was still oppressive. Thank Finagle for hover chairs!

  The Bandersnatchi earned money for trade and to control their population and relieve boredom by selling hunting rights. The hunt was regulated so that the humans in an armored car had a 60% chance of killing a 'snatch, and they had a 40% chance of killing the hunters. Strange, but true. So this was a much safer way of paying for prosthetics.

  The Bandersnatchi made a sound like distant thunder. Laughter? "You are the first to ask!  Well, besides gossip and news, we use our brains for sex- seduction, variation, memorization and telling the stories. Simple really. Isn't it true that the dolphins of your wet rock Sol-3 spend 8 hours of the their day fishing, 6 hours of it napping, 10 hours playing, and 60% of that is sexually oriented? Are not your Sol-3 Bonobos equally salacious?"

  "OH...Sorry." Maybe my gut was wrong, and G-Prime was right about 'snatches. The expert at the Institute of Jinx, Singh, wasn't far off either.

  "Be not sorry," Slick said. "The Creators said it was important to multiply. Frankly we enjoy -"

  "Waait! The Creators?"

  "They called themselves Tnuctipun. Even tinier than you humans, but more clever. They made us from protozoan brain parasites. The Creators said they designed us to live here where no Master would ever go, in fog so thick laser weapons and sunflowers were useless".

  "You talked to the Creators?"

  "We did not really speak before your wonderful devices, we used a kind of sign language, bristle cluster to bristle cluster.. 'Speak' is an idiom. No, not I. The ancestors signed with the Creators... and the Masters observing would simply see it as scratching and herding a beast, much as if we were oxen. The sign language being too abstract in a Morse or binary code sort of way for the Masters to recognize it as meaningful communication when they read the Creator's minds while they signed. Terribly boring nonsense to them, like horse talk. It was many, many ancestors ago. As to when, I can not say. Time is meaningless in the Lowlands of Jinx. There is nothing to see, even with your prothsetics and we only know what we are told. This is my first time out of the fog."

  "What about the Masters?"

  "We never met the Masters, the Creators called them Thrintun, you call them Slavers. The Masters lived in luxury and leisure on their estates. They hated everything about the Lowlands of Jinx - the gravity, the associated joint pain, the gloom, the air pressure, the heat, the humidity, and the smell here made them queasy. Even if the Masters tried to read anyone's mind in the Lowlands and began to succeed, the sensory input would feel like torture to the Masters, and they would be forced to quit involuntarily. The Creators armored our brains against mindreading. Our chromosomes are so big they are immutable, and our minds themselves are impervious to disease, prions, and failure. Perhaps it's because they are organelles, and not brains as you know them. We have neither neurons nor synapses. They told the Masters that we had no minds to read, nor need of them.  The Creators told us we were privileged to be the only sentient species in the galaxy who did not have to serve the Masters."

  "Yeah", Jason whispered, "you didn't serve the Masters, you were served to them."

  "When we become food, and except for our brains we were served to the slaves", Slick corrected, "we achieve the purpose for which we were created. How many humans can say the same? I understand you humans cannibalize each other for spare parts as a form of capital punishment, do you not? We sent our rapists to slaughter to remove them from society. Are we so different? Regardless, that ended many ancestors ago, when the Creators died."

  I considered the 'snatch. Apparently Bandersnatchi  with our products hear better than humans. Could they hear with those sensory bristles? If they were designed as spies as well as food beasts, that only stands to reason. The more acute their senses, the better. But how effective is a spy with no eyes against a species that communicates telepathically, rather than verbally? What good would hearing do? How would it gather useful information? That makes no sense. Well, neither does a single celled animal with immutable chromosomes exchanging genetic material when they are all identical, and perfectly capable of asexual reproduction. Aha! The most effective spy is the one you never suspect. Who would ever suspect a blind single celled animal with no discernable intelligence?

  "I spoke to the surviving descendants of the Slavers," I stated, "They were still telepathic, but they had devolved almost beyond recognition, and had no recollection or history of previous forms and planets. How is it that you and your people remember something from a billion and a half Earth years ago?"

  "I believe it is a matter of intelligent design," answered Slick. "You probably see us as monstrous meat beasts. We were designed to eat anything plentiful and convert it to white food - yeast, grass, ferns, moss, cacti, or even garbage. We had to be able to ingest and neutralize or shed almost any poison. In the cities of the Masters, our people roamed the streets collecting garbage and information. On the estates we normally had fenced pastures. Those Bandersnatchi on other diets were analogous to beef cattle. Here, where we originated, we graze upon yeast and are more like your dairy type cattle than beef type, older and more tame on average. Sure, we normally became meat at the end of our life cycle, but that wasn't our primary function. Our bodies broke down the yeast and sorted out anything that obstructs memories from our bodies, an alcoholic concentrate containing hormones and pheromones for discharge. The Creator couriers brought us protein snacks and in exchange we released these stored fluids to them. It was called Lowland Liqueur -

  Anne-Marie interrupted -"And it was highly prized for it's ability to clear people's heads, relieve guilt and stress, facilitating relaxation, reducing inhibitions, and for enhancing sexual prowess! The perfect thing for a Slaver wanting to forget the stress of slave minds at the end of the week! Or a rebellious Tenuctip wanting to wipe his mind clean before going near the Slavers."

  "You tried some of it?" asked Slick.

  "Oh, yeah!"

  "How, we have not given any away for an aeon or so...since the era of the Creators?"

  "From a Tnuctipun stasis box."

  "Did you find any protein snacks? I always wanted to try some, and I could produce some Lowland Liqueur in exchange."

  "No, just poisoned meat."

  "You mean preserved. It is a protein snack. Do we have a have a deal?"

  "Garvey?"

  "Aha! Yes, it's a deal, Slick," I said. "Of course. To a human, salt is a tasty preservative. To bacteria, it's a deadly toxin. Ethanol is much the same. You Bandersnatchi were designed to eat anything, probably up to and including formaldehyde. The Tnuctipun were duplicitous to the core. They had to be. Everything had a Slaver purpose, and a Creator purpose. This preserved meat was a treat essential to trigger the production and release of Lowland Liqueur as far as the Slavers thought, but to the Tnuctipin spies and couriers, it was a suicide or assassination pill. Your beef type Bandersnatchi cousins on Slaver worlds were garbage recyclers and food, but they were also spies. The stage trees were lift rockets, but they could as easily be missiles, explosives, or message couriers- "

  "Who told you we were spies?" interrupted Slick after Anne-Marie tossed a snack in his mouth. Anne-Marie was obviously more comfortable around this giant than Jason and I were. She went to scrub her hands after touching the toxic stuff.

  "The stasis box records, mostly," I said.


  "Wrong. How could we spy on them?"

  "Uhhh,,," I stalled, "could you hear them with your sensory bristles?"

  "We could, and we could feel vibrations in the ground with our bellies, but since they didn't use audible communication, we could only locate and track them at best, and not too well when they flew."

  "Oh," I said disappointedly, "Well, Anne-Marie, could you please show Slick the other stuff in the spy kit so he can tell us about it ?"

  "Wait..." she said. "African elephants can communicate ultrasonically over several kilometer's distance. They listen through their toes for bone contact and place their trunks on the ground to triangulate direction. Can you communicate like that, too?"

  "Sure, only we place our shells on the ground to hear, and our necks on the ground to triangulate. We signal with our belly foot."

  Coded sign language and multi-kilometer subsonics as communication options in a spy above suspicion sounds intentional to me, but it doesn't add up... yet.

  She held the canister of Lowland Liqueur against Slick's Bristles.

  "This was a Luxury item," explained Slick. "Nectar for the masters. They sent couriers with protein snacks here to get it. Ours had the best flavor. For the Creators it was a temporary amnesia inducer or short term memory eraser, depending on the dosage."

  She held up the trophy claw.

  "A Master's claw, also a biometric key for accessing gates, computers and spaceships."

  The three of us were shocked. We should have thought of that! Next came the colorful cap.

  "The Creators wore these when they crept into the sunflower patch at night and sat down. They would cut sunflowers and attach them to the cap and a net they wore over their body. The cut sunflowers fooled the other sunflowers, the cap shielded the Creator's mind from the Master's. That's how the spying was done," Slick explained.

  "Ghillie suit! That's how they could use a protective cap without being seen, I should have known!" said Jason.

  She held up the gadget next. "A hyperspace communicator. It has a secret feature, it jams Thrintin psionic amplifier helmets," stated Slick.

  "Active countermeasure," Jason declared. "Of course, this would alert the Slavers to the presence, if not the location, of an enemy. An act of desperation or open rebellion."

  Next Anne-Marie held up the empty drinking bulb, saying " Sometimes they held a powerful hydrogen peroxide solution."

  "The Masters thought it was just for water purification. The Creators actually used it for sterilization, critical when handling brain destroying infectious agents", said Slick.

  "WAIT!" I said, "What 'brain destroying infectious agents'? By agents do you mean spies? And why did they sterilize them? To torture them?"

  "No. They did not. No. 'Infectious agents' were bioengineered weapons which spread and went dormant for a standard decade or two. There was a memory destroying prion, but we were designed without the susceptible gene, a brain parasite which manipulated brain chemistry and decreased intelligence as it feasted, but we were modified versions of it, so it identified us as family rather than food, and a designer virus which attacked the brain and central nervous system, degrading psychic powers. Of course as a single cell, we have no nervous system."

  "Your herd serves as your neural network", I said.

  "You might be right," Slick considered. "We never thought about it."

  For somebody that knows so much, these Bandersnatchi guys are remarkably lacking in intellectual curiosity. They seem preoccupied with information only as trivia.

  "What can you tell me about Creator duplicity in bioengineering?" I asked.

  "The air plants were used to generate and recycle air in homes and space ships, but they also spread the designer brain and central nervous system virus. The viprin were used to entertain the Thrintun, but also as a host vector to the brain parasite."

  Jason interjected- "The Creators had turned the tables on the Masters! Instead of the Tnuctipun being defeated before they could rise up, Slavers were all terminally ill with dormant  incurable neuron infections before they realized the revolution had begun. Now we know how they found a way to degrade the enemy intelligence first. " 

  Slick continued- "Sunflowers were designed as terraforming tools for the Creators, before they were enslaved by the Masters, their seed to be delivered by stage trees. They were designed to be gone when the settlers arrived. It wasn't until the Masters started losing their minds that sunflowers were repurposed as a home defense. The stage trees were lift rockets, until replaced by the new ships with air plants and gravity polarizers, then the Creators waited for them to mature on the plantations and fitted them with Anti-matter warheads contained in stasis fields."

  So Mann was essentially correct about the sunflowers, I thought. I'll have to tell him. I guess I know why the Outsiders sold unopened stasis boxes to the Puppeteers. The question is who would pay me more for that secret? Bleep! I need to warn G-Squared not to buy any more unopened boxes!

  Slick lowered his long neck, which seemed to have a conspicuous blister near the end. A prosthetic hand positioned a transparent plastic bag, and the neck filled it with 10 or 15 liters of the golden Lowland Liqueur. I could almost taste that yeasty fresh bread fragrance. We and the Bandersnatchi were going to have some lucrative commerce, at least until the Liqueur got outlawed for making workers unproductive. If we play our cards right, and find the right price point, it will be strictly a special occassion luxury. That way we can make the government our de facto partners through vice taxes, and it will become addicted to the revenue.

  "Well Garvey," said Anne-Marie, bringing me back to reality, "how about this batch of Liqueur as our finder's fee, plus a pair of free pocket phones if and when you get them into production, with lifetime replacement guarantees? Oh, and we want paid for the charter in shares of Garvey Limited valued at the current market price, before anything is announced about phones or Bandersnatch dairies."

  "Done. You've earned it," I said.

  "So what's actually in this stuff?" wondered Anne-Marie.

  "It's a mixture of alcohol form the yeast digestion, hormones and pheromones from the protein snack, and some others produced by my own body. Allowing this stuff to accumulate in my own body and retaining it interferes with my memory," said Slick.

  Well, that made some sense, sex hormones could interfere with a lot of functions if they didn't dissipate, but I had a nagging sense that as much as I'd learned, I knew even less about what I really wanted to know than when I started. Finally, I got to the crucial question. "What can you tell me about the way your people were designed? Why were your brains so big? Why were you created intelligent if not for spying?"

  "We were designed for converting biomass to white food for the slaves, and sweetmeats for the Masters. The Creators designed us for recycling prions to re-infect the Masters, and data recovery and permanent storage."

  "How did you do that?"

  "We ate brains...and assimilated the information in them via the Rna. Anyone might provide useful information. Creator spies could snatch a Master at night, or a servant, remove the brain and toss the body into the Slaver sunflower patch for incineration at dawn. When a spy committed suicide, or was captured and killed, the memories could be recovered by digesting and absorbing the brain. The fresher the better, of course, but one from a recent grave would provide useful information, too. The slavers got stupid and crazy before they died, forcing other slavers to kill them. Paranoid and demented people with the Power were dangerous. Or brains and pituitary glands could be processed, preserved, and compressed into brain paste cubes- protein snacks for travel. A Master's delicacy, or an essential required for us to produce Lowland Liqueur. To the Creators it was an information medium, suicide pill, or Master poison."

  Jason scratched his head. "You were designed for the Slavers to eat your brains, but secretly for you to eat the Slaver brains, and give them prions in the process? Your Creators were TANJing devious!"

  "So...", I said," not only was the herd a neural network, each of you were cells in a giant brain, only you used bristle sign language or subsonics, not electro synapses, so you're unreadable. TANJ! ...So you were spies after all."

  "Unreadable to the Masters, at least. I think your terms for us are  'contact', 'control', or 'analyst'," explained Slick. "We seldom made covert observations personally. We handled information. We were the network into which the intelligence was fed."

  We all started to laugh at that turn of phrase.

  "Funny," said Jason. "I thought the Creators in the Ghillie suits were the network, and you guys were mouthpiece." We laughed some more...

  "Wait a moment," said Anne-Marie." Your primary purpose is to remember what the Creators couldn't afford to record or remember, for fear of being caught by the mind reading Masters, and to help them forget what they knew when need be?"

  "That is so," said Slick.

  "Your brains weren't big to make big bites," said Jason with a grin, "they were big to make big multi-terabytes!"

  So now I had my answer, their brains were big so that they could contain the memories of many brains. But it raised more questions. "Uh... why do you need to have sex when you are all identical? What did your learn from the brain you just ate? When the revolution started, and the Slavers had already been infected with terminal neurological maladies, and the Tnuctipun fought with everything they had- stage tree missiles with antimatter warheads, mining disintegraters, total conversion destructor beams, sunflower patches, immature stage trees, conventional lasers, and projectiles, etc.,  the Slavers countered with amplified die commands. How is it that the ancestors of the Grogs survived at all?"

  "We have sex to share information, not genes. When we reproduce, we carry a copy of the memories. The Masters would see their food beasts breeding, not sharing data, so they approved."

  "It was a Master's brain. His memory was damaged from prions. He was very wealthy once. He lost fortunes in stage trees, viprin kennels, and a Bandersnatchi dairy. He was forced to sell off slaves each time. When his memory started to go, he began forgetting and displacing things. Then he began accusing family, slaves and other Masters of stealing them. After that he began hiding things, which made matters worse. He became very fearful and suspicious. Paranoid is your term-"

  Jason interrupted "Paranoid is a smart way to be when everybody is out to get you."

  Slick continued-"He suspected conspiracies everywhere. When other Masters were struck with various brain afflictions, they put the Creators to work on it. They came up with a vaccine for the neuro virus. It was given to all of the slaves, but it created a controversy for the Masters. Some, said a vaccine vindicated the Creators. Others, including this one, said the vaccine was actually the cause of the problem, and refused it for their families, and insisted other Masters do the same. He said the only defense was a healthy Bandersnatch brain diet. When the Master's Council ruled that each should decide for themselves, he said it was proof that their brains were already infected, and told them so emphatically. After that, nobody took his conspiracy theories seriously, and all of his younger children perished from the virus. His older ones were waiting to replace him.

  "He blamed the Council and Creators for everything, and he was always looking for proof. One night he hid in the stage tree plantation, and caught the Creators loading antimatter warheads onto the stage trees instead of sunflower seeds... and that was the last thing he saw."

  "I knew nothing of the Grogs before you told me," said Slick.

  "I think I know how the Grogs survived," said Jason. "Their ancestors have been aboard a slow boat to Down when the Revolt occurred. One built before gravity polarizer drives and air plants. They left before the neurological afflictions, so they were traveling safely in a stasis field. When they arrived the sunflowers had cleared the planet, except for the deserts where they couldn't grow. There was an estate built for them, but everything was dead or destroyed in the war when they arrived. So they ate their supplies, then their servants, then started hunting and scavenging in the desert, in a downward spiral into species extinction, cannibalism and devolution."

  I said "I just realized, you don't license hunting parties to hunt your people just to earn credits, you are also hunting humans for brains with new memories and information..."

****

[Buster's Uncle]

-The nanobot action in autodocs doesn't work for the timeline -maybe- Carlos Wu's autodoc from a long generation earlier was kinda top secret, and worth taking along on the second Ringworld expedition, and Louis -no sign but the surname he knew Carlos was his father, and some he didn't know the father he knew was Beowulf Shaffer, IF Bey made it to Home and raised him- seemed quite impressed by its capabilities...

Only gotten that far just yet...

[Rusty Edge]

EPILOGUE-

   I called G-Squared before he could open another stasis box. I told him it was a very successful expedition and to meet me at the hanger on Jinx ASAP with a team of our best electronics guys. He better bring Big G and G-Prime, too. We had a lot to talk about...

  There was a potential security problem. Civilians with stasis boxes could get a death sentence from the UN, and G-Squared lived on Earth. Jason and Anne-Marie I could trust to keep secrets. But Slick was a potential problem because he would share all of his information with the herd, so he agreed to move to Down without telling the herd, and start one of his own. His price was the rest of those brain bullion cubes he called protein snacks from the stasis box. I have a feeling he would have moved just for the novelty, and the change in diet to alfalfa. He was going to be my Grog monitor and enforcer. My Fail Safe against them, but not the only one.

   All I had to do was get him some human brains to eat to check for Grog mind control. How? Well maybe people would be willing to give their brains to a Bandersnatch when they died, rather than cremate them, so that their memories could be perpetually preserved and accessible by friends, family and historians. Maybe there's another new business...

  I think I might want to import some Jinxian yeast for Slick if he were going to eat some brains now and then, too..

  The Grogs couldn't read my mind with the cap on, so that worked. I labeled it "pilot" and put it aboard the Bussard Ramjet rocketship in close orbit around it's sun, just to be sure. If the Grogs ever got ambitious with mind control, the ship would use the sun as fuel and cook the planet with it's exhaust plasma.

  Dr. Richard Harvey Schultz-Mann was grateful for the Booster Spice. He was delighted for the validation of his sunflower theories. I paid him a year in advance in shares of Garvey Ltd., got him a com link with a 'snatch named Chilli ( Mann was right, they were tactile ) and put him to work interviewing him. He retained the book rights, but this way his clever mind was seeking ways to make us both rich from Bandersnatchi memories..

  Sharon eagerly accepted my marriage proposal, even before she heard about my recent adventures and discoveries. I guess being wealthy enough to buy her planet if I wanted was good enough for her. Then we finished off the original canister of Lowland Liqueur together. Good thing we hologrammed the proposal, because neither of us remembered it! But she absolutely declined to leave Down permanently, so she started house hunting, and Garvey Ltd. made plans to build a regional headquarters. On the bright side, the Grogs there were sworn to stop any invasion, so we didn't have to concern ourselves with Kzinti dreams of recapturing the planet.

  The Papandreous considered buying another ship and become a regular space line, but that would have meant more time apart, more drudgery, and not much adventure. So we formed a partnership as a luxury charter cruise line. I bought the new ship and supplied the Liqueur and pocket phones for the guests. They managed and operated things. They hired some help, and we traveled in style, as needed.. Sharon and I formed a lasting friendship with them. You never know, we might go on another adventure once Garvey the Fifth is born...

****

[Rusty Edge]

-The nanobot action in autodocs doesn't work for the timeline -maybe- Carlos Wu's autodoc from a long generation earlier was kinda top secret, and worth taking along on the second Ringworld expedition, and Louis -no sign but the surname he knew Carlos was his father, and some he didn't know the father he knew was Beowulf Shaffer, IF Bey made it to Home and raised him- seemed quite impressed by its capabilities...

Only gotten that far just yet...

No hurry. I'm cooking for extras tonight and I'm just getting started. Looking at unified timelines, this story probably happens in Louis' lifetime, but before he becomes a character. The history of smoking has no bearing on the rest of my story so much as to rationalize why the Bleep do people smoke so much in Niven's stories.

So just booster spice?

Gotta go-

[Buster's Uncle]

Just leave the nanos out of the 'docs.

Hard to believe it took to Bey's era for someone to work out medical nanos in a 'doc, but given that, the Puppeteers sat on the vanished prototype (biding their time for a business opportunity?  Was General Products moving mass quantities of boosterspice?)  and nobody else tried or something.  (If Carlos made it to Home and settled - maybe he kept the Wu but not the Carlos, and Louis DID know him, but didn't know any super-doc recreated in the basement for family use for what it was and hadn't seen/used it in 200 years...)

The Handicapped was pre-some of the Bey stories, as Grogs were around and not a new marvel as of Grendel now that I think about it, but I wasn't making any assumptions about when other than it wasn't after Ringworld Engineers when Louis left Canyon and Human space for a couple decades...

[Buster's Uncle]

...In fact, there's a timeline problem about G²'s aged appearance - it seemed nobody had to look old in the Beowulf stories -Grendel again- what with boosterspice.  Need to account for that gaunt leatheriness, as Protector indicated that spice went back as far as the later half, and Lucas Garner just missed living forever by a few decades, poor fellow..

[Rusty Edge]

Right you are! There is a sessile grog in Grendel. I assume it's in space travel as a sentient, one time line has it as a zoo critter, before The Handicapped.  Regardless this still puts my story approximately in the Louis has been born but hasn't done anything era.

Uh searched another timeline. Well, I guess it's a matter of which facts you choose to overlook. Whether a # in the 2000s on a bottle or space ship model is a hard fact year to work with or not.

Beowulf Born 2600
Neutron Star 2641
Louis was born around 2650.
Relic 2644
At the Core 2645
Handicapped 2646 OR 2728
Soft Weapon 2656-57
Silver Eyes 2685

Well, I'm working with Handicapped as gospel since Garvey is my main character. Of course we could say he had a bad reaction to tannin pills or something.... an overdose maybe from being around the ocean working with dolphins...

[Buster's Uncle]

Could be boosterspice allergy, could be some rare resistance but not immunity to it's effects - Gsquared could have been too old to rejuvenate completely when he first got spice, though that would make him about 600 years old or something -or something like the tannin or something else- not that hard to handwave.

Like the new subforum that was your idea?

[Rusty Edge]

Yes I do.

Well, I'll think about the leathery skin.

Good night, Buster's Uncle.

[Rusty Edge]

I hate it when I inadvertently lose pots.

Booster Spice seems to be attributed to an extract of ragweed or tree of life.

Hand Wave Options-

1) Protector- got a dose with some Thallium or Thorium or whatever, and his skin began the transformation. Too much trouble/ too much of a tangent.

2) Allergy - to ragweed essence. But since he can afford the finest medical care, his autodoc found a balance between immune response (increasingly important on a crowding Earth ), booster spice, and drug side effects. It gives him vitality, even if it doesn't fully reverse the effects of aging and/ or smoking.

3) Resistance. It only works up to a point.

4) Tannin. He was a heavy user being in and around the ocean developing the dolphin hand business. That might explin the skin. But it would suggest that he would tend towards body fat in a Polynesian kind of way, and he's lean. Also, Wouldn't it be common among Belters, too? But apparently it isn't.


That leaves 2 and 3.
 2 being the most scifi explanation.

-------------------------------------------

I don't think the Jinx orbit scene flows well. How about this?


  The two Jinxians doubled over in laughter. Always trust a Jinxian to spot a pun. Back slapping one another led to holding...led to hugging...led to squeezing...

  "Uhh..." said the pilot as she let her blonde hair down, "Look at the time! I think we're finished here, aren't we Attila?"   

  "AGREED!" he said, and they left arm in arm.

  We shared a round of high fives and happy dances as soon as the airlock cycled. Didn't I tell you I'd be in safe hands? We landed on our own.

[Buster's Uncle]

I'm still behind.  Surprisingly busy morning on what feels like a weekend day, and I'm running on five hours.  I probably ought to go nap in fact...