Pet Trade

by Carol Van Natta

  Nuñez left. The doors stayed open long enough for Bakonin to limp in. She glanced at him briefly as she made her way to the table. Her shuttered expression changed to interest when she got to the birds.

  Axur watched as she opened the cage with the four birds and deftly pulled the brightly colored male out and turned him upside down to look at his chest and feet. “Yes, yes,” she said soothingly. Her voice had a warm, husky timbre. She did the same with the others, then closed the cage door.

  She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, then turned to look at him. “Nuñez said you’ve only had the animals for about nine months, and that you’ve got more at home. Were they in your ship when you crashed?”

  Axur looked up at her, startled. “How did you know about the ship?”

  One corner of her mouth twitched. “Hard to miss a streaking fireball that left a kilometer-long gouge at the north end of Park Plateau. No one knew anyone had survived until you came into town two weeks later offering exotic trade goods. People talk.” She pointed skyward. “You’re lucky the weather satellites were malfing again, or the company auditors would have levied a huge fine for terraform destruction, confiscated anything you had of value, then expatriated you to the nearest Concordance lockup for illegal trespass and occupation.”

  He ducked his head, embarrassed that it hadn’t occurred to him that others might have seen his ungraceful entry into Del’Arche’s atmosphere. “I didn’t know about the animals until the hard landing ripped open the freighter’s smuggling hold. I’ve tried to care for those that lived. The ship’s library has good reference files.”

  Bakonin nodded. “Pet-trade dealers often ship on the sly to get around inspections and quarantines, and to deter thieves. It’s a ruthless business.” She pointed to the cage. “Your birds are healthy, but cold intolerant. If you don’t give them a warm habitat and a diet of insects and fruit, they’ll die. They’re fertile, so if you do have a habitat, you’ll have fledglings by the spring.”

  “Okay.” He could work around the diet problem, but had no idea how he’d create a warm space out of the ship’s wreckage, miscellaneous cargo, and the deadfall trees he’d hauled in for building materials. The possibility of offspring hadn’t even crossed his mind. Like everyone else in the Concordance, he’d gotten a birth control implant at the first hint of puberty, so reproduction took a deliberate decision between two people.

  She turned to the chimera. Kivo exhibited intense curiosity, his leaf-shaped nose working and his ears swiveling forward. He stood, briefly, but his two back sets of legs shook, and he half sat. She opened the cage door. Kivo oozed out and crouched. She approached slowly, then gently ran her hands over his ribs, shoulder joints, and sharply articulated spine. Kivo leaned into her as she crooned nonsense words while she examined his ears, eyes, and wicked-looking teeth. He was soon rolling onto his back, stretching his six legs out, begging for attention. She smiled and rubbed his belly, and even laughed when he sloppily licked her nose when she got close enough. “Does he have a name?”

  Axur was so mesmerized by her obvious skill and the glimpse of beauty in her smile that it took him a moment to realize she was talking to him. “Kivo.”

  She kept one hand on Kivo’s broad head and stroked his ear muscles with her thumb. “I’m guessing you fed him fresh meat and produce from your garden, which is the best thing you could have done, because it’s kept him alive. The dealer was probably returning him to the research company’s designers as a failure.” Sadness stole across her face. “Even if we eradicate the blood parasite and tailor some nutritional chems to counter the anemia it caused, which is his current issue, other problems are coming. He’s already got early-onset arthritis, especially in his double hips and flexible spine, and his fine-motor control is degrading.”

  It sounded like Kivo had the chimera equivalent of waster’s disease, a pernicious problem that plagued Jumper veterans across the galaxy. The CPS researchers conducting the “special project” claimed to have cured him of it as compensation for taking his arm. Last he’d heard, that was impossible, so he really hoped that wasn’t another one of their lies. His tried not to focus on his resentment and turned his attention back to Kivo. “Why did they create him at all?”

  She shrugged. “Pretend alien fauna for the wealthy, maybe? It’s a fad.” She stroked the large hump of Kivo’s middle shoulder joints. “The bio-engineers actually got the six legs to work, but the rest of him is a fantasy hodgepodge.” She snorted disdainfully. “Two tails.” She rested her hip against the table and eased the weight off her stiffer leg.

  “He follows me everywhere. He keeps the peace among the other animals, too.” He tilted his head. “Can animals be empaths? I think he tries to cheer me up sometimes.” It sounded daft after he said it out loud, so he was grateful she didn’t laugh.

  “Maybe?” She shrugged. “Human medical scientists still don’t know what combination of DNA and subtrans amino arrays make the difference between human minders and non-minders, or even predict the gender expression continuum. Who’s to say that animals aren’t evolving along with us?”

  “Makes sense to me. What’s the treatment protocol for him?”

  “A tailored antibiotic to kill the parasite and immune boosters. If we can’t trade with the local chems and alterants shop, we might have to use hard credit at the human med clinic down in Asgorth.”

  “I’ve got some reserve freighter stock to trade.” He sat up straight and immediately regretted it, because it caused Bakonin to catch her breath and step back. “Sorry.” He hunched over again.

  Bakonin’s lips thinned, and she shook her head. “I just hadn’t realized how tall you are. Ex-Jumper?”

  Axur gave her a humorless smile and held up his left hand, where exposed biometal gleamed at his knuckles. “My cybernetic arm and legs didn’t give it away?” Most people preferred flesh and bone.

  “Cybernetics are fine.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m phobic around men, sometimes, which is my problem, not yours.”

  Kivo’s ears swiveled toward the sliding doors, and he rolled to a sitting position. A moment later, Nuñez appeared, the front of her tunic covered in blood. “I need your help.”

  3

  * GDAT 3241.155 *

  After Bethnee hosed down the instruments of the large-animal surgical suite with steaming hot water, she stood next to the floor drain and turned the hose on her unlovely but waterproof, tear-resistant work tunic.

  Axur, as he’d asked them to call him, had proven to be more than just a pretty face. Nuñez dragooned him into helping extricate a buffalo cow from a tangled coil of spikewire. Nuñez used her minder talent to control the cow while Axur used the superior strength of his cybernetic hand to stop the wire from springing out when Bethnee cut it. As long as she stayed on the other side of the cow and focused on using her talent to heal the cow’s deepest lacerations, she’d managed to keep her mind clear and her stupid shaking to a minimum. Nevertheless, she felt like she’d hiked to the top of towering Mount Taruka and back.

  Axur hadn’t flinched at the blood or injuries. When Nuñez commented on it, he’d admitted he’d been a trained field medic in the Jumper Corps.

  Nuñez had laughed. “What the hell are you doing trying to make a homestead the hard way? The townspeople would be thrilled to build you a clinic, like they did mine.”

  Axur had looked away and mumbled something about it being complicated. Bethnee sympathized. She lived that every day.

  Axur turned out to have another invaluable skill. The rattled, panicky owner of the cow only spoke halting English, but Axur figured out the woman spoke Korean, and served as their translator. He admitted to speaking eight languages fluently, and could get by in a lot more. Bethnee knew Nuñez was adding it to her arsenal of arguments of why he should move to town. Under her bluff and blunt exterior, Nuñez had a heart the size of the Andromeda galaxy, and didn’t believe in complications.

  It fell to Bethnee, with Axur’s translatio
n help, to negotiate a complex trade for their cow-saving services that resulted in Axur getting the drugs he needed for his chimera using a credit the rancher had at the chems shop, in exchange for Axur giving his food-trade goods to Nuñez, who would share them with Bethnee so she could make further trades for the ingredients for nutritional supplements for her animals and Kivo.

  Bethnee found Nuñez and Axur in the holding pen outside. Unexpectedly, the chimera and the dire wolf also roamed the pen, pretending disinterest in one another. Bethnee sent a thread of her talent out to both animals, and found that Kivo considered the wolf a new friend, and the wolf was considering everyone in the pen, including Bethnee, as potential pack mates that needed guarding from the dangerous, grunting yaks in the neighboring paddock.

  Axur laughed at something Nuñez said. Despite his untamed hair and the peculiar cloak he refused to remove, he was a surprisingly handsome man, especially when he smiled. And such was the irrational tangle of her phobia that she could admire a tall, good-natured man from afar, then be too scared to get close enough to see the color of his eyes.

  “I’m going to remove the tracers from the wolf,” she said loudly. “Want me to do the same for Kivo while I’m at it?”

  Axur gave her a puzzled look. “Tracers?”

  When Nuñez explained about the pet-trade practice of implanting active tracers that broadcast a valuable animal’s location to the net, and passive tracers that showed up on bio scanners, Axur readily agreed.

  With Nuñez’s help and the portable surgical suite’s micro instruments, Bethnee finished with both animals in thirty minutes. Nuñez planned to trade the active tracers to a client who could use them for tracking goats.

  In the lobby, Kivo sidled up to the tolerant wolf and licked at her muzzle. Bethnee could well believe that Kivo was the peacekeeper among Axur’s menagerie.

  Nuñez entered and crossed to Axur to hand him a cup of hot coffee.

  He smiled as he closed his eyes and smelled it, then sipped it with obvious enjoyment. “Stars, but I’ve missed this.”

  Nuñez grinned and sipped from her own cup. “I trade for it whenever I can.” She pointed a thumb toward Bethnee. “Don’t ever let Bethnee make it for you, unless you have a biometal stomach.”

  Bethnee shrugged. It tasted like burned acid to her, so how was she to know what was too strong? A thigh muscle in her bad leg spasmed. She needed to soak in her single luxury, the geothermal pool. She should just go home and...

  “Dammit,” she said. “I can’t take the wolf with me today. I only have the glide board, and no den big enough for her.” She caught Nuñez’s eye. “Can she stay a few days?”

  “Sure, but she’ll be alone except for the geese and the yaks, and she’ll hate it.”

  “I know you don’t know me or my setup,” said Axur, “but I could take her for as long as you need. My barn is big, and she wouldn’t lack for company.”

  Bethnee looked at him in surprise.

  Axur splayed his hands. “I have an ulterior motive. I was hoping you’d come out to my place and look at the rest of my pets. Tell me what they are, and how to care for them.”

  Nuñez nodded. “You can borrow the flitter.”

  The idea of going alone to a man’s homestead spiked Bethnee’s anxiety, but Axur had scrupulously accommodated her by keeping his distance, and it was a good solution for the new wolf. If she didn’t like what she saw, she could jet. Besides, she had to admit she wanted to see the exotic animals Axur had told them about.

  “Okay.”

  Axur looked pleased.

  Nuñez blinked and raised her eyebrows. “You trust him?”

  Bethnee pointed to the chimera, draped across Axur’s sturdy cybernetic knees like a lapdog, and the wolf, who was licking Axur’s hand.

  “I trust them.”

  4

  * GDAT 3241.155 *

  If Bethnee hadn’t been following Axur’s runabout, she wouldn’t have found his high-country homestead. Which, she surmised, was as deliberate as his choice to stay away from town, as well as his choice to wear his awkward heavy cloak.

  She landed the flitter in a clearing about a hundred meters southwest of the edge of his loosely fenced perimeter. She wished she’d thought to bring her glide board, to save her leg from the uphill hike while carrying her vetmed bag. Fortunately, the dire wolf stayed near with very little coaxing via her talent.

  Axur backed up as she approached, staying well out of her discomfort range. “Sorry, I didn’t think about the distance.” Behind him rose two buildings fashioned out of starship freighter sections. The taller one had wide doors made from an airlock. “It’s windy up here, so I want to give you an earwire so we can talk without shouting. It’ll take me a few minutes to program.”

  “Okay.” The wolf remained by her side, nose working overtime as she checked out her new surroundings. Bethnee reached out with her talent to do the same.

  Axur cleared his throat. “Some of the animals are in the barn.” He pointed toward wide, open doors. “I’ll knock on the wall when I’m ready with the earwire.”

  Forty minutes later, Bethnee sat on a rough-hewn bench at the worktable inside the barn, packing her equipment back into her bag and talking via the earwire to Axur, who was in his living quarters area. She didn’t subvocalize; animals didn’t care if she spoke out loud. “You’ve got a fortune in stolen and illegal pet-trade animals.”

  “Stolen?” The earwire made his rich baritone sound thin and distant.

  “Your e-dog, for one. ‘E’ for enhanced. He’s military-trained, and his sensory implants and command processor are still active. If you knew the passcode and comm band, you could program a percomp to give him complex sets of orders to follow, and get a feed through his implants.”

  “That makes sense. I named him Trouble because that’s what he gets into unless I give him jobs to do. Just like some Jumpers I know.”

  “Your three cats are illegal because the designer spliced in a few primate genes to give them those long, flexible toes and a broader diet, and left them fertile. Any CGC health inspector would destroy them on sight, in case the splice bred true. Feed them meat and dairy, and any fruits or vegetables they’ll eat. You could trade with Nuñez for some yak milk. They’ll probably go into their first estrus cycle in the spring.”

  “Lucky they’re all female. Can you or Nuñez fix their playgrounds so I don’t have kittens on my hands if some equally fertile male comes looking for love?”

  The big dire wolf warily poked her head into the barn’s entrance. The boldest of the young cats had already left a stinging wound across her nose leather.

  Bethnee laughed. “Fix their playgrounds? Yeah, we can neuter them. What did you name them?”

  She held out her hand, and the wolf trotted over. She sent another thread of healing to the wound, but couldn’t repair the wolf’s injured dignity.

  “Alpha, Bravo, and Delta. There were four, but one of them died the first day.” He was silent for a long moment. “I never liked cremation duty.”

  “Me, neither.” She ran her fingers through the wolf’s rough coat and sighed for all the beloved animals she’d lost over the years. “Your two ravens are a non-fertile mated pair and bred to be pets, but they’re about half again the standard size, and their wings are intact, so they’d be destroyed for unfair ecosystem advantage. They’ll tolerate the cold, but they need clean water and bone-in meat every day, or they’ll starve. There won’t be enough winter carrion at this elevation. That huge aviary you built them is good, but give them more branches to sit on.”

  “I traded for extra cases of dog food this summer. What else do they need?”

  “Grains, leftovers, especially any real meat, maybe some rotting fruit. They’ll eat almost anything. You might make them some toys and puzzles with food rewards. Train them to do new tasks. Keeps their busy brains active instead of destructive.”

  “I named them Shade and Shadow, after that tri-D serial about thieves. I recover an ama
zing amount of stuff every time I clean out their bowls and baths.”

  She chuckled at how disgruntled he sounded. “Your foo dog, Shiza, is legal, probably stolen. They’re designed to look like little curly-haired lions from pre-flight Chinese legends, but underneath, they’re mostly dog, so you can feed him whatever you feed Trouble. Don’t let Shiza bite you out of anger or fear. Foo dogs are designed to protect children, and his teeth can inject a nasty toxin. I can use Nuñez’s lab to tailor vaccines for you and the others, as well as Nuñez and me, but it’ll take a ten-day or so.”

  The big wolf sat on her haunches and rested her head on Bethnee’s shoulder. She stroked the wolf’s broad head. “Long day, huh?”

  “I’m sorry, I’ve taken up a lot of your time.”

  “No, I was talking to the dire wolf. Her life is in flux at the moment, and she’s in here with me, wanting affection and reassurance.”

  Axur mumbled something in a language she didn’t recognize. Her minimal education hadn’t included anything but Standard English, and whatever rude words she could pick up on the streets. “What about the miniature dinosaur? I think it’s supposed to be a stegosaurus. Its name is Ankle Biter.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t do reptiles, amphibians, or fish. Can’t feel them at all. Your reference manuals are your best bet. It might need to stay inside for the winter.”

  “Can I ask how you know so much about the pet trade? You don’t seem like the type.”

  Ordinarily, she zeroed personal questions, but he was trusting her with the animals he loved. More tellingly, they all cared for him and trusted him without reservation.

  She considered what she wanted to say. Jumpers willingly volunteered to work for the Citizen Protection Service’s elite military force. The CPS hadn’t done nearly as well by her, though to be fair, the huge agency had multiple missions, and it had been just the one corrupt woman.

  “Never mind, it’s none of my business.”