L. Neil Smith - North American Confederacy 02 Read Online Free

to savor local color— oughta see the way they dress the girls in ancient Crete! Sooner or later, I got bored enough to go out for a walk. That’s how I ran into the Freenies, although they weren’t in any condition to appreciate my godlike qualities then.
    Y’see, they were animals.
    No kidding, they weren’t just primitives or savages. They didn’t use tools. They didn’t make fires. They didn’t even follow the sports pages. They just hung around, well, being animals.
    At the time, I thought (and never since) that they were kinda cute, in a stomach-turning sorta way. Same as they are now, of course: a foot-diameter hot-pink hemisphere, Ochskahrt knows how many wiggly little lime-green legs sticking out underneath, and this rubbery, wrinkled, turkey-neckish thing poking out the top, with a giant fly’s eye nesting in the end.
    Anyway, I started playing around with them, lacking anything more constructive t’do, building little traps and labyrinths t’see how bright they were, what they could be trained to do. For once, I could interfere all I wanted to with local events. This place—and the Freenies—didn’t have any future history to screw up. Everything was scheduled to go up in subatomic particles at the stroke of the millennium.
    Naturally, training required rewards. I tried all kindsa garbage, and it turned out they preferred percolator-leav-ings. Or old tea-bags. Even certain underhanded brands of artificially-processed orange-juice. In short, anything with caffeine in it. Hell, they even went for Midol.
    Now it says here that caffeine measurably enhances human intelligence, and I believe it. Modem civilization’d be downright impossible without that first cup of coffee—what else could get a perfectly sane anthropoid up off his warm nest and out into the rat race every morning, day in and day out?
    Notice that the “Age of Reason” didn’t get into full swing until the little brown beans started getting imported and that the First Industrial Revolution cranked itself into gear on an island where everything comes to a screeching halt for the afternoon cuppa.
    Thus it was, Freenie-wise, as well. They were bright little critters, as animals go, just teetering on the edge of whatever separates us from horses and kangaroos, and those well-used tea-bags of mine shoved ’em right over.
    Our mission called for skipping ahead a few decades at a time, taking observations until the onboard whiz-kids figured out what’d made the sun go boom.
    I’m telling you, before we left that planet, the Freenies (named by me, if y’want the ugly truth, for the sound of their voices) had bootstrapped themselves through a couple Industrial Revolutions of their own, begun using atomic power, and practiced a religion with me, Bernard M-for-Moron Gruenblum, as its Entity-in-Chief.
    I’ve thought about hara-kiri, but I get woozy from a paper cut.
    The Freenies hadn’t quite invented starships, so after I made the mistake of opening my big fat face back at the Academy, we rescued ’em: huge fleets of starships, time-buggies in their cargo holds, ferried millions of the critters off their doomed planet, first to Luna, later to a Yama-guchiformed Ganymede.
    The Red Cross served doughnuts and coffee.
    I wish it’d been Sanka.
    Cuthbert shifted nervously in his chair.
    Afraid he’d take to pacing again, I essayed quickly, “What does all this have t’do with the price of fish-meal, anyway?
    What does the Yamaguchian legation really want?” Experimentally, I let another cigar ash fall. Sure enough, the mechanical mousoid got to it before it actually hit the carpet.
    Cuthbert blinked but stayed planted on his fundament. “Why simply to send a group out with you on your next full-dress assignment.” He hesitated, and I began to get an awful feeling about what was coming. “It’s a religious experience for them, Bemie, sort of a pilgrimage.”
    “A pilgrimage?” Yep, I’d figured right. Mentally, I started adding up my