by David Weber
“All right. All right!” He laughed and threw one arm around her. “So, maybe actually catching something is a little more important than I might have implied.”
“Maybe, huh?” She regarded him skeptically. Then she shrugged. “Well, at least you don’t fling yourself bodily into the water the way Fisher does. No wonder he spends so much time sunning on warm rocks. He’s thawing out from all those swims of his!”
MacDallan laughed again, although she probably had a point. Fisher’s technique consisted of lying very still on an overhanging limb or shelf of rock, staring down into the water until he spotted a fish, then pouncing on his unsuspecting victim with all claws spread. MacDallan had watched him doing it and been deeply impressed by the treecat’s blinding speed and skill, but it was undeniably a wet, cold way to fish. A technique that probably did help explain why sun-warmed rocks were so high on his list of favorite things.
“Anyway,” Irina continued, waving one hand in the direction of her nephew, Karl Zivonik, “Karl and I have been loyally preparing provisions as our share of this expedition.”
Karl looked up and grinned from where he was cutting fresh lemons into wedges. The old-fashioned cast-iron skillet his mother had sent along sat ready by the fire, oiled and awaiting the salted fish fillets Irinia had dredged with flour and fresh-ground black pepper. The outsized bread pan at his elbow was filled with fresh, golden cornbread; he’d just taken the snap-on top off a huge bowl of coleslaw; and the plastic tumblers were waiting beside the thirty-liter thermos of tea.
The doctor felt his mouth watering as he smelled the mingled scents of woodsmoke and cornbread. Right off the top of his head, he couldn’t think of anything better than fresh-caught and fried fish, garnished with fresh-squeezed lemon juice, and Evelina Zivonik’s homemade cornbread and coleslaw. Especially not eaten outside with friends.
“Well, in that case, by all means, let’s eat!” he said.
* * *
Much later that evening, MacDallan and Irina sat in an old-fashioned glider on the veranda of Aleksandr and Evelina Zivonik’s sprawling farmhouse.
As the son of one of the colony’s first-shareholders, Aleksandr Zivonik was technically entitled under the new Constitution to call himself “Baron Zivonik.” One of these days, MacDallan thought, that title was probably going to have some genuine meaning. For the moment, it was simply an indication that the Zivoniks had been on Sphinx as long as anyone else. The steadily expanding farmhouse was additional evidence of that. He’d delivered Aleksandr’s youngest child in this house little more than a T-month ago, and its core was already fifty T-years old. He wondered how many more generations of hands were going to add on to it, how many more generations of children’s feet were going to run and play and work under its roof, in the fullness of time.
It was a soothing sort of thought, one that consoled the heart of someone who’d seen far too many people die of the Plague.
“Comfortable?” he asked quietly as Irina nestled her head down on his shoulder while he used one foot to move the glider gently back and forth.
“Oh, yes,” she murmured, looking up past the edge of the veranda’s roof at the stars beginning to creep shyly into the darkening cobalt blue of the sky. “I love this place,” she continued softly. “Hard to remember sometimes—like when it snows for fifteen T-months without a break. But then we get fifteen months of spring and another fifteen months of this.”
She swept one hand in a gesture at the near-pines and enormous crown oaks towering over the farmhouse and the night sky settling above them like clear, clean velvet, and MacDallan nodded.
“And don’t forget the surprises,” he said wryly. “I guess we should’ve remembered how little of the planet we’ve actually explored, but still—!”
“And the surprises,” she agreed. Then she sat up a bit, leaning back so she could look directly into his eyes. “All the surprises,” she added in an even softer voice.
MacDallan looked back at her. He knew what she meant. In fact, she was the only person on the planet he’d trusted with the full truth, and it hadn’t been easy even with her.
He’d spent most of his life hiding his “oddity.” He was lucky he hadn’t had as much of the “gift” as his grandmother had, but it had always been there, always threatening to rear its head, especially in moments of stress. And people still didn’t understand. In fact, he sometimes thought people were even less understanding about little personal “quirks” like that now than they’d been before the Diaspora carried humanity to the stars. The prejudice against “genies” could extend itself to almost anything someone found peculiar or different, whether or not the difference in question really had anything at all to do with actual genetic manipulation. And the fact that people who allowed themselves to be prejudiced that way were seldom exactly mental giants didn’t mean they couldn’t do a lot of damage.
But here on Sphinx, with Fisher and the other treecats, he’d finally found that his “oddity” truly was a gift. It still had its dark sides, of course, he thought, remembering the night—had it really been only three T-months ago?—when the treecats had proved to him they truly were telepaths. The night they’d made him see what one of them had seen, shown him the devastation one of his own kind had unleashed upon the forests of Sphinx, and begged him to do something about it.
He still had nightmares about that entire adventure. Nightmares about how close he’d come to dying . . . and of a treecat who had died to save his life. But more important than the nightmares, he knew—knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt—that the treecats were far more than anyone else, with one possible exception, had even begun to guess.
“You need to talk to her, you know,” Irina said. “She’s probably the only person on the planet who knows as much—if not more—about treecats than you do. And I think you can safely assume you can trust her. She and her parents certainly aren’t ever going to do anything that could hurt them, you know.”
“But she’s still only a kid, Irina,” MacDallan protested. “Only—what? Thirteen? Fourteen, now?” He shook his head. “This is an awful lot to dump on a kid that age.”
“That ‘kid’ single-handedly discovered that we share this planet with another sentient species,” Irina pointed out a bit tartly. “And in case you haven’t noticed it yet, Scott MacDallan, ‘kids’ tend to grow up pretty quick here on Sphinx. You’ve noticed my nieces and nephews, perhaps?”
“Point,” he acknowledged. “Definitely a point.”
“Well, what you may not be aware of is that Karl’s actually met Ms. Harrington. In a manner of speaking, at least.”
“Huh?” MacDallan blinked and looked at her sharply.
“That’s one of the things I love most about you,” Irina said dryly. “That wonderful vocabulary of yours, I mean.”
“Stop criticizing my vocabulary and tell me about Karl and young Harrington,” he said with a grin.
“It was when he went in to Twin Forks for that trip to the main ranger station Frank Lethbridge arranged for him last month. He didn’t actually talk to her, but she and a bunch of other kids around her age were hang gliding. Karl says they’re organizing a formal hang-gliding club, and he wishes we were closer. I think he’d really love to learn how to float around the sky himself. Anyway, they were flying around for at least a couple of hours, and he and Frank ended up going down to their landing field to watch. And it seems young Harrington had a bit of a set to with one of the other kids. Two of them, actually, if Karl got it right. One of them was a guy, quite a bit bigger than Harrington, and I think Karl figured he might have to take a hand if it got physical. But he says Harrington faced both of them down. ‘Kicked both of them right in the butt without ever actually laying a finger on them,’ I believe was his elegant summation of what happened.” She smiled and shook her head. “From the way he said it, I think he rather admires her.”
“Which wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that she’s not only about his own age but already has a tre
ecat of her own, would it?” MacDallan asked with a chuckle.
“Oh, it might,” Irina conceded. “On the other hand, you know he’s got his head fairly well screwed on. I think his judgment’s usually pretty good.”
“You’re right about that,” MacDallan agreed, and frowned up at the stars—brighter now, as the sky continued to darken—for several minutes, then shook his head again.
“You’re probably right about the maturity quotient of Sphinxian teenagers,” he said. “On the other hand, if I talk to her and anyone finds out about it, they’re going to assume—correctly—that it was about the treecats. I mean, what else is anyone going to think when two of the three—really the only two, I guess, now that Erhardt and the Stray are dead—humans known to have adopted treecats get together for a little chat?”
“So?”
“So they’re going to wonder just why I wanted to talk to her. What have I discovered that I want to check with her? Or what has she discovered that she wants to share with me? And the people who wonder things like that are going to remember that whole BioNeering catastrophe. They’re going to be trying to put two and two together, and I’m afraid too many of them really will get ‘four’ this time. You know how much trouble I’m having with people like Hobbard, despite the fact that I’ve been stonewalling on this whole thing from the very beginning. You really think I want to bring that down on her, too?”
“Um.” Irina frowned.
He had a point, she reflected. Irina actually thought quite highly of Dr. Hobbard, but she was like a bloodhound on a particularly marvelous scent, and she obviously suspected that MacDallan was concealing something from her.
On the other hand, she was a lot better than some of the other “scientists” beginning to swarm around Sphinx (and one Dr. Scott MacDallan) to investigate the newly discovered species. She might suspect that MacDallan wasn’t telling her everything, but she seemed deeply and sincerely concerned with protecting the treecats, as well as studying them.
“All right, I agree that exposing a fourteen-year-old to that kind of intrusiveness wouldn’t exactly be a good thing,” she said finally. “At the same time, the way she talked makes me think she’s probably the only person on the planet who’s already being pestered more by people like Hobbard—or the rest of them—than you are! You may be the one who kept that lunatic Ubel from getting away with murder—more murders, anyway—and worse, but she’s the one who discovered the treecats in the first place. And don’t forget just how she discovered them! I doubt that your going to have a talk with her is likely to make things any worse in that regard.”
“Maybe not, but how much good would it do? I don’t want to sound like I’m putting her down because she’s a kid, but she is only fourteen, Irina. It’s not just a question of how mature she is. It’s a question of how much she understands about what’s going on. For that matter, it’s a question of how much someone her age can do to keep things from sliding entirely out of control.”
“Granted.” Irina nodded. “On the other hand, I think this is something you need to do, if only to find out if she knows something you ought to find out about. And if you have any qualms about her . . . capabilities, let’s say, why don’t you discuss them with Frank? He’s probably in a position to give you a better feel about that than I possibly could.”
* * *
“Scott! Fisher!” Frank Lethbridge waved an enthusiastic greeting as MacDallan walked into his office with Fisher on his shoulder. “I didn’t know you two were coming clear out here today.”
“Well, we were in the neighborhood,” MacDallan replied.
“Just in the neighborhood, huh?” Lethbridge raised a skeptical eyebrow, then looked out the office window. His isolated Sphinx Forestry Service ranger station was over six hundred kilometers from MacDallan’s Thunder River medical office. Even for a counter-grav air car, that was a fair trip.
“As it happens, we were in the neighborhood because I wanted to talk to you . . . privately,” MacDallan admitted, and Lethbridge’s expression sobered as the doctor’s tone registered.
“Talk to me about what?” the ranger asked a bit cautiously. “And why in person instead of by com?”
“Partly because I wanted a chance to get a feel—a personal feel—for what you might have to say,” MacDallan told him levelly. “But also, to be honest, because I don’t want to take a chance on anybody overhearing us.”
“You’re starting to make me a little nervous here, Scott.”
“Sorry.” MacDallan grimaced. “It’s not really anything sinister, Frank. It’s just . . .” He paused. “It’s just that I’m worried. About the treecats.”
He reached up, stroking Fisher’s head, and the treecat butted his palm gently.
“What about the treecats?” Lethbridge asked, eyes narrowing intently.
“First, let me be up front about this,” MacDallan said. “I’m talking to you as my friend, not as a Forestry Service ranger. I’m not going to ask you to violate any professional codes, and I’m not going to ask you to do anything you shouldn’t be doing. But if what I’m about to say to you gets to the wrong set of ears, it could have some pretty unfortunate repercussions.”
Something like a hint of anger sparked in Lethbridge’s gray eyes, and MacDallan shook his head quickly.
“I’m not saying I think you’d betray any confidences, Frank! I just want to be sure you understand how serious my worries are. And, to be honest, I’m a lot more concerned with protecting Fisher and the other treecats than I am with helping those busybodies poking and prying around them.”
Lethbridge’s expression cleared, and he snorted harshly.
“Don’t think I don’t agree with you about that!” He shook his head in disgust. “Hobbard and her crowd aren’t too bad, but I wouldn’t trust some of these other . . . scientists as far as I could spit upwind in a hurricane! And most of them would make some hungry hexapuma really happy if we let them go wandering around all by themselves in the bush like a herd of Old Terran elephants! For that matter, I’m scheduled to take a half dozen of them out to ‘observe the treecats in the wild’ next week. The only thing I can think of right off hand that I’d enjoy more would be regrowing a broken tooth without quick-heal.”
MacDallan chuckled.
“Somehow I’m not too surprised to hear you say that,” he said. “Anyway, are you okay with talking to me?”
“Sit down and we’ll see,” Lethbridge said, pointing at the chair on the far side of his desk. “If you start saying anything that makes me uncomfortable, I can always tell you to stop, can’t I?”
“I guess you can.”
MacDallan took the indicated chair, urged Fisher down into his lap, and tipped back comfortably.
“The thing is, Frank,” he said quietly after a moment, “more went on with that BioNeering business than I ever officially admitted. I don’t want to go into the details even with you, for a lot of reasons—some of them purely personal. But what it comes down to is that I’ve got what I think is pretty darned convincing personal evidence the treecats are a lot smarter than most people are guessing even now. Not only that, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got proof they really are telepaths.”
Lethbridge pursed his lips in a silent whistle and leaned back in his own chair, folding his arms across his chest. He looked at his friend—both his friends—for several seconds, then nodded to himself.
“I wondered about that,” he said simply. “You went awfully straight to the heart of things, and I never did buy all that business about your ‘playing a hunch.’ So it was Fisher here who spilled the beans to you?”
“No, not really. Oh, he helped—he was part of it. But it was the Stray. Erhardt’s treecat.”
Lethbridge’s expression hardened into something like cold, hammered iron, and Fisher made a soft sound of distress. MacDallan scooped him up, hugging him, pressing his face against the soft fur in apology for taking all three of them back to that horrible day when the half-starved, emaciated
treecat MacDallan had known only as “the Stray”—Erhardt had never shared his name for his friend, if he’d ever given him one—had led MacDallan and Aleksandr Zivonik to the crashed air car and the three dead bodies.
One of those bodies had been Arvin Erhardt’s. Erhardt had been a cargo pilot, hired by the BioNeering research group and assigned to their research facility here on Sphinx . . . and he and the other two men aboard his air car had been murdered by Dr. Mariel Ubel, the facility’s lead scientist. She’d sabotaged the air car’s flight computers to ensure that it would crash on its way back to civilization in an effort to keep them from revealing the fact that she’d released a deadly pathogen into the planetary environment, poisoning and destroying the very heart of a treecat clan’s home range. It had apparently been an accident, but it was the sort of accident competent scientists didn’t have, and her career would have been over if the news had gotten out. For someone like Ubel, that had been more than sufficient reason to casually murder three human beings.
She’d darned near murdered MacDallan, too, when he turned up at the research facility following up on the “hunch” he’d offered to the authorities as his official reason for being there. In fact, she would have killed him . . . if the Stray hadn’t flung himself directly onto the muzzle of her rifle just as she fired and deflected her shot at the cost of his own life.
“The Stray, huh?” Lethbridge said after a moment. “Poor little guy. Bad enough to lose Erhardt, but then . . .”
The ranger sat silent for several more seconds, then shook himself and drew a deep breath.
