by David Weber
Despite her sudden emotional turmoil, Stephanie managed to talk naturally to Karl during the trip back to Twin Forks from Yawata Crossing. Thankfully, they had a lot to talk about. If Karl thought Stephanie was acting at all oddly, he probably put it down to her thinking about ways to convince her parents to let her go off-planet for three months.
“I’ll com you later,” he said, as she got out of his air car, “and let you know how it goes with my folks.”
“Me, too,” she replied. “Remember—don’t let your folks call mine until I get a chance to talk with them first. I need to figure out how best to let them know.”
“I promise,” Karl agreed. Then he shifted the car up to where he could pour on speed as soon as he was out of the city limits. The Zivoniks lived near Thunder River, a good many hours travel away even at top speeds, but Stephanie didn’t doubt Karl would have the car on autopilot and be on the com to his mother as soon as he was in clear airspace.
Her own mind swirled as she walked to her dad’s office. Of course, the fact that Richard Harrington had an office in Twin Forks didn’t mean he’d be in it. Stephanie’s father was a veterinarian, a job that, on Sphinx, embraced not only the care of the animals belonging to the colonists, but often of creatures native to Sphinx, as well. Add to that the numerous genetically altered creatures that were being tried out as the colonists looked for the best way to work with their environment and still have some of the meat and dairy products they were accustomed to, and one could argue that Richard Harrington was one of the most irreplaceable professionals on Sphinx. Certainly Richard’s interest in exotic creatures, combined with the fact that his wife was a plant biologist and geneticist, had assured the Harringtons of a warm welcome when they had immigrated to Sphinx back when Stephanie had been ten.
Six years later, Stephanie could hardly understand the girl she’d been then—a girl who’d been so overwhelmed by her changed environment and the loss of all her previous dreams and goals that she’d spent a lot of time sulking. Now Stephanie loved Sphinx with all her heart. She’d be happy to go visit Meyerdahl, but she knew she’d always come home to Sphinx.
Given how scattered Sphinx’s human settlers were, Stephanie wasn’t surprised when she got to her dad’s office and found both him and the Vet Van missing. Besides, his recently hired assistant, Saleem Smythe, would be in shortly to cover the evening shift. Under the circumstances, she wasn’t unhappy to have the office to herself until Dr. Smythe’s arrival, though. There was celery in the fridge, and she gave Lionheart a big stalk as a thank you for his support during the meeting. Uncharacteristically, she didn’t feel very hungry, but she got herself a fruit and nut bar, which she nibbled more from duty than desire. Next, she commed her parents to let them know where she was. She didn’t mention the meeting with Chief Ranger Shelton. She hadn’t been lying to Karl when she said she needed to figure out the best way to present the proposed trip to Manticore to them, but there was something else she needed to figure out first.
Anders.
Anders Whitaker had come to Sphinx last year, not long before Stephanie’s fifteenth birthday, as part of an anthropological expedition from Urako University, headed by his father and formed for the express purpose of studying the treecats. From the first time Stephanie had seen Anders, she’d been overwhelmed. It wasn’t just that he was good-looking, although with his wheat-blond hair and dark blue eyes he was undeniably handsome. Anders was also smart, smart enough that he didn’t feel a need to hide his enthusiasms—and one of his enthusiasms turned out to be treecats.
At nearly seventeen, Anders was quite a bit younger than the next older member of the Whitaker expedition, which meant he was happy to spend time with Stephanie. She’d found ways for the two of them to be together, although often enough Karl (who frequently boarded with the Harringtons, since Thunder River was so far from where he and Stephanie did their ranger work) made a third. In fact, for the first time since Stephanie met him—back when Stephanie had started learning how to use firearms—Karl had definitely become less than welcome company.
Things might have gotten uncomfortable, but then the Whitaker expedition’s air van had gone missing. In the intensity of search, rescue, and forest fire, somehow any uneasiness had vanished. Then after . . .
Stephanie felt her lips twist in an unwilling smile as she remembered the first time she’d kissed Anders. It hadn’t been much of a kiss, but it had been her first time kissing a boy. Later, Anders had reciprocated a lot more enthusiastically than her careful lips against his cheek.
Although nothing had been formally declared, they’d become more or less a couple. It helped that part of Stephanie’s and Karl’s job as provisional rangers had been to act as advisors to the Whitaker expedition. Then, too, although he could assist, Anders wasn’t a professional anthropologist. That meant he was free to ride along when Stephanie and Karl did their patrols. Before long, he was learning to hang-glide and becoming as much a part of Stephanie’s circle of friends as any of those who lived in Twin Forks.
Things had appeared to be moving along very satisfactorily, but then, shortly after the fire, Dr. Whitaker had been sent back to their home world, Urako in the Kenichi System. His behavior on Sphinx had been . . . erratic, and the potential consequences could have ended his expedition to the Star Kingdom in academic disgrace. Stephanie knew Dr. Hobbard and Chief Ranger Shelton had both argued in favor of allowing the university’s expedition to remain on Sphinx, with a Sphinx Forestry Service ranger or two permanently assigned to it to keep it out of trouble. Unfortunately, the Manticoran government had been unwilling to go along. Neither Governor Donaldson nor Interior Minister Vásquez had been satisfied with Dr. Whitaker’s simple promise to behave himself. They wanted the same sort of guarantee from the university itself, and that meant sending him home to face a review of his actions by the chancellor of the university and the chairman of his department.
Dr. Whitaker hadn’t been at all happy about that, but he’d clearly realized that he had no choice. However, getting there was easier to say than to do because the Star Kingdom of Manticore was so small and so far from the core systems . . . like Kenichi. There was very little interstellar traffic into or out of the Star Kingdom, especially now that the assisted immigration following the Plague Years had almost entirely wound down. There was little cargo to attract freighters, passenger ships had become less frequent, and even mail couriers arrived only at intervals which were erratic, to say the least. Worse, Kenichi was 400 light-years from Manticore, so even one of the fast courier boats would take literally months to make a one-way trip between them. By the best passenger ship connection Dr. Whitaker could arrange, the trip home would have taken at least six months, which meant it could easily be well over a T-year before he returned—if he’d returned—so he’d intended to take Anders with him.
The thought of having Anders snatched away for at least an entire T-year had been devastating to Stephanie, and she’d spent more than a night or two railing to Lionheart about stupid, small-minded, chip-pushing bureaucrats. There’d been more than a few tears involved, as well, despite Lionheart’s comforting presence.
But then Dr. Whitaker’s plans had changed.
Anders’ mother was a cabinet minister in the Kenichi System government, and Kenichi turned out to have close trade ties—and treaty agreements—with the Beowulf System. Beowulf was one of the few core systems which maintained a full time consulate on Manticore, and Dr. Whitaker had appealed to the consul for assistance. As it turned out, a Beowulfan courier had been in orbit, there to collect the consul’s regular quarterly report to his home government, and Kenichi lay almost directly on the route between Manticore and Beowulf. The courier boat was scarcely a luxury liner, but it did have the capacity to carry a few passengers, and the consul had offered the available space to Dr. Whitaker.
Unfortunately (from Dr. Whitaker’s perspective; Stephanie had seen things a bit differently), there’d been room for only one additional passenger: him
. There would be no place for Anders, if he took advantage of the courier boat, and he’d had only two days to make up his mind about accepting the consul’s offer, given the courier’s scheduled departure date.
In the end, he’d decided speed was of the essence, for several reasons, including the fear that some other anthropology team would be credentialed to study the treecats instead of his if the delay stretched out too long. So instead of taking Anders back to Urako, he’d left him in the Star Kingdom under the supervision of Dr. Emberly, the expedition’s xenobiologist and botanist, and her mother, Dacey.
At first, Stephanie had been ecstatic over Dr. Whitaker’s decision, but her joy had been short-lived. Until Urako University responded with the required assurances, Governor Donaldson had barred the Whitaker Expedition’s team from further exploration. None of its members came from heavy-gravity worlds like Sphinx, and Sphinx, with a total population of less than two million, didn’t offer a great many attractions to people who were prohibited from doing the one thing they’d come to the Star Kingdom to accomplish. Dr. Emberly had certainly felt that way, at any rate, and she’d decided to withdraw the expedition’s personnel from Sphinx to Manticore, the Star Kingdom’s capital planet, whose lower gravity was far more comfortable and whose larger population provided a lot more in the way of “civilization.”
The decision had not met with unanimous approval. Unfortunately, the two people who’d most strongly objected—Anders and Stephanie—hadn’t gotten a vote. And, in her more reasonable moments, Stephanie actually understood Dr. Emberly’s thinking. Sphinx truly could be an uncomfortable planet for people who hadn’t been genetically engineered for heavy-gravity environments, like the Harringtons, or grown up on its surface, like the Zivoniks, and Dacey Emberly, Calida’s mother, wasn’t a young woman. Not only that, but Dr. Whitaker had been adamant that Anders keep up his studies, and it was hard to deny that the planet Manticore’s educational opportunities were better than Sphinx’s.
But none of that changed the fact that Manticore and Sphinx were almost ten light-minutes apart even at their closest approach and, at the moment, they were over twenty-five light-minutes from one another. That meant any real-time conversation between someone on Sphinx and someone on Manticore was impossible, since it took nearly a half hour for any lightspeed transmission to make the trip between them. Somehow, asking a question and then waiting an hour for an answer put a damper on lively discussions.
Twenty-five light-minutes was a lot better than 400 light-years, but the communication delay had still limited Stephanie and Anders to letters and recorded vids. True, they could be sent back and forth a lot more quickly than they could have been transmitted between Kenichi and the Star Kingdom, but it just wasn’t the same as face-to-face conversation . . . and Stephanie had discovered that even the warmest letter was a poor substitute for kisses and cuddling. There were things she just couldn’t say, or explain, even in a personal vid. Not when she couldn’t see his expression or hear his voice when she said them. It was a lot better than having him go all the way home with his father, but in some ways it was actually worse.
She’d been resigned to spending a whole half T-year pushing electronic mail back and forth, but she hadn’t counted on Dacey Emberly, the expedition’s painter and scientific illustrator. Dacey had decided that even if the entire team wasn’t permitted to study treecats, there was no reason she couldn’t be working on her portfolio of the rest of Sphinx. In addition, she’d discovered that Stephanie’s mother was also a painter, as well as at least as good a botanist as her daughter, Calida. Marjorie Harrington had cheerfully offered her services as tour guide and fellow artist and invited Calida to join them. The botanist in Calida had jumped at the chance to explore Sphinx’s plant life with a Sphinxian resident who was not simply a fellow botanist but probably the planet’s best plant geneticist.
There were times when Stephanie thought it was just possible her mother had extended the invitation because she’d realized how miserable it was for Stephanie and Anders to be in the same star system but on different planets. There were other times when she wasn’t so sure about that, but the result had been wonderful. For the last two months, both Doctors Emberly had been back in Twin Forks . . . which meant that Anders had been back on Sphinx, too.
The day they’d returned from Manticore, her parents had invited them to a huge welcome back party, with all of Stephanie’s—and Anders’—friends in attendance. Stephanie would have preferred to have Anders to herself, but her parents did so love a party and, anyhow, she’d suddenly felt a little shy. They’d never actually declared themselves “a couple”—not like Chet and Christine—but even so, there was a lot of teasing.
Later, they’d gotten some time by themselves. Soon they were over being shy and everything had been great.
“Great,” Stephanie said to Lionheart, “except that now I’m going to be the one going away to Manticore! Three more entire months of nothing but letters . . . Can I do it? And even if Dr. Whitaker’s university lets him come back, it won’t let him stay here forever. I doubt Anders wants to give up his family. I mean, the only reason he’s here now is that his mom’s so busy with her position. What if it turns out Urako won’t let Dr. Whitaker come back? What if Anders finds out he has to go home before I even get back from Manticore?”
The treecat evidently sensed her distress. He leapt lightly onto her lap and laid his true-hand—still damp and smelling of celery—on her cheek. His leaf-green eyes met hers, and he bleeked a gentle sound of comfort and inquiry.
“The problem is,” Stephanie told him, “I don’t know what I want. When Chief Ranger Shelton started telling us about the training program there was nothing in the world I wanted more than to go. Now . . . Now I find myself thinking that maybe it would be a good idea to let my parents talk me out of it for another year. I am only fifteen and a half—okay, fifteen and eight months. I could wait. A year won’t matter too much. It’s not likely the SFS will let me become an assistant ranger until I’m at least seventeen anyhow . . .”
The sound of her father’s air van settling into its space alongside the clinic brought her back to herself. Impulsively, she hugged Lionheart, feeling his fluffy tail curl around her in return. Then she took a deep breath and straightened up.
“Whatever I decide,” she said softly, “I can’t let Dad see I’m upset. That would sway him before I’ve even made up my own mind. Shall we go see if Dad needs help with his gear or a patient?”
“Bleek,” Lionheart agreed, the sounds meaning far less than the enthusiastic flirt of his tail and the expectant prick of his ears as he led the way toward the door. “Bleek! Bleek! Bleek!”
* * *
Climbs Quickly didn’t know exactly what had happened to generate such a stew of mixed emotions in his two-leg. When they had been in the meeting with Old Authority (as the treecats had dubbed the male two-leg to whom so many of their two legged friends deferred) Death Fang’s Bane had begun by being excited and happy, her mind-glow overflowing with anticipation and delight. But then, somewhere in the midst of all the mouth noises, uneasiness had begun to tint the exuberance.
Climbs Quickly had not been concerned. For many season turnings, long before he had met Death Fang’s Bane, he had served his clan as a scout. He was accustomed to the excitement that came with a new assignment, and how that excitement could be muted when one began to consider the challenges that would be involved.
However, at the very end of the meeting, Death Fang’s Bane had experienced a surge of such intense emotional pain that it had been all Climbs Quickly could do not to wail aloud in response. One of the differences he’d discovered between two-legs and the People was that two-legs frequently attempted to conceal their feelings from one another. It had seemed bizarre, but then he had remembered the two-legs were mind-blind. They could not taste one another’s mind-glows even if they tried, and it actually seemed to embarrass them sometimes if they revealed their emotions too clearly.
&nbs
p; Sensing that the youngling was doing her best to hide what she felt at that moment, Climbs Quickly had muted his response and instead offered her a touch of comfort. He might not truly understand two-legs’ odd attitude towards sharing their emotions, but he was proud to see that Death Fang’s Bane was strong and had managed to hide her distress with very little help from him.
Once they had left Old Authority’s place and Shadowed Sunlight had gotten into his flying thing and departed, Death Fang’s Bane had let her feelings have freer play. At that point, Climbs Quickly isolated the source of her distress more clearly. He recognized the emotional notes that meant his two-leg was absorbed in thoughts about Bleached Fur, the young male in whom she had invested so much energy since his arrival back in the early days of the fire season.
Climbs Quickly liked Bleached Fur. The young male was full of lively curiosity. His mind-glow might not be as brilliant as that of Death Fang’s Bane, but it had an enthusiasm that was very appealing, and Climbs Quickly had been happy to see his return from wherever he had vanished to. Despite this, there were times when Climbs Quickly was surprised by how intensely Death Fang’s Bane cared for this young male.
At that thought, Climbs Quickly bleeked to himself in quiet amusement. Even among the People, understanding why one Person chose to be attracted to another could be a mystery—and at least the People could speak mind-to-mind. He supposed that, even as deeply as he and Death Fang’s Bane were bonded, there would always be mysteries between them.
With her usual self-control, Death Fang’s Bane had moderated at least the outer appearance of distress when her sire, Healer, had returned. She had helped Healer to settle in his latest patients—a pair of medium-sized plant-eaters with what smelled like some sort of respiratory distress—and had waited while he made mouth noises at the male who was his chief assistant. However, as soon as they were alone in the big flying thing, Death Fang’s Bane started making mouth noises.
