by David Weber
He climbed out slowly and walked very carefully towards his daughter, carrying the emergency medical kit. The sea of furry, long-tailed arboreals parted about his feet, retreating perhaps a meter to either side and then flowing back in behind him, and he felt their watchful eyes as he stepped into the small clear space about Stephanie. A single creature crouched by her side—smaller and more slender than the others, with a dappled brown-and-white coat instead of their cream and gray—and he felt its grass-green eyes bore into him. But despite the unnerving intelligence behind that scrutiny, his attention was on his daughter. This close, the bruises and blood stains—few of the latter hers, thank God!—were far more evident, and his stomach clenched at the evidence of her injuries. Her left arm hung beside her, obviously badly broken, and her right leg was stretched stiffly before her, and he had to blink back tears as he dropped to his knees.
“Hello, baby,” he said gently, and she looked at him.
“I messed up, Daddy,” she whispered, and tears welled in her own eyes. “Oh, Daddy! I messed everything up! I—”
“Hush, baby.” His voice quivered, and he cupped the right side of her face in his palm. “We’ll have time for that later. For now, let’s get you home, okay?”
She nodded, but something in her expression told him there was more. He frowned speculatively—and then his eyebrows shot up as she opened her jacket to reveal another of the creatures hovering all about them. He stared at the brutally mauled animal, then jerked his eyes to his daughter’s.
Stephanie read the question in her father’s gaze. There wasn’t time to explain everything—that would have to come later, when she also accepted whatever thoroughly merited punishment her parents decided to levy—but she nodded.
“He’s my friend.” Her voice trembled, heavy with tears—the voice of a child begging her parents to tell her the problem could be fixed, the damage mended . . . the friend saved.
“He . . . he saved me from the hexapuma,” she went on, fighting to keep that fraying voice steady. “He fought it, Daddy—fought it for me all by himself—until the others came, and he got hurt so bad. I—”
Her voice broke at last, and she stared at her father, white-faced with exhaustion, pain, fear, and grief. Richard Harrington looked back, his own heart broken by her distress, and cupped her face between both his hands.
“Don’t worry, baby,” he told his daughter softly. “If he helped you, then I’ll help him any way I can.”
* * *
Climbs Quickly floated slowly, slowly up out of the blackness.
He lay on his left side on something warm and soft, and he blinked. He felt the pain of his hurts and knew they were serious, yet there was something strange about the way they hurt. The pain was distant and far away, as if something were making it less than it should have been, and he turned his head. He looked up, seeking what he already knew was there, and made a soft sound—a weak parody of his normal, buzzing purr—as he saw the face of his two-leg.
She looked down quickly, and the brilliant flare of her joy and relief at seeing him move blazed through the odd, pleasantly lazy haziness which afflicted his thoughts. She touched his fur gently, and he realized the blood had been cleaned from her face. White bits of something covered the worst of her cuts and scratches, and her broken arm was sheathed in some stiff, equally white material. He tasted an echo of pain still coloring her mind-glow, but the echo was almost as muted as his own. She opened her mouth and made more of the sounds the two-legs used to communicate, and he rolled his head the other way as another, deeper voice replied.
His person was seated on one of the two-legs’ sitting things, he realized, but it took several more breaths to realize the sitting thing was inside one of the flying things. He might not have realized even then, without his link to his person. But that same link—and the haziness—kept him from panicking at the thought of tearing through the heavens at the speed at which the flying things regularly moved.
Two more two-legs—his two-leg’s parents—sat in front of them. One looked back at his two-leg, and he blinked again as their link helped him to recognize her as his two-leg’s mother. But it was the other adult—his two-leg’s father—who spoke. The deep, rumbling sound still meant nothing, and Climbs Quickly wondered vaguely if he would ever really learn to understand these strange creatures.
* * *
“He looked at me, Daddy!” Stephanie cried. “He opened his eyes and looked at me!”
“That’s a good sign, Steph,” Richard replied, putting as much encouragement as he could into his voice.
“But he looks awfully weak and groggy,” Stephanie went on in a more worried tone, and Richard turned his head to exchange glances with Marjorie.
Despite the painkillers, Stephanie still had to be suffering fairly extreme discomfort, but there was no concern at all for herself in her voice. Every bit of it was for the creature—the “treecat”—in her lap, and it had been ever since they’d found her. She’d insisted that her father examine the “treecat” even before he set her arm, and given the vast, silently watching audience of other treecats—and the fact that Stephanie, at least, was in no immediately life-threatening danger—he’d agreed. Neither he nor Marjorie could make much sense of the bits and pieces of explanation they’d so far heard, but they’d already concluded that Stephanie was right about one thing. Whatever else they might be, these treecats of hers were another sentient species.
God only knew where that was going to end, and, at the moment, Richard and Marjorie Harrington didn’t much care. The treecats had saved their daughter’s life. That was a debt they could never hope to repay, but they were quite prepared to spend the rest of their lives trying to, and he cleared his throat carefully.
“He looks weak because he is, honey,” he said now, turning back to his HUD as the air car sped towards the Twin Forks infirmary and his own veterinary office. “He’s hurt pretty badly, and he lost a lot of blood before you got that tourniquet on him. Without that, he’d be dead by now, you know.”
Stephanie recognized the approval in his voice, but she only nodded impatiently.
“The painkiller I used is probably making him look a little groggy, too,” he went on. “But we’ve been using it on Sphinxian species for over forty T-years without any dangerous side effects.”
“But will he be all right?” his daughter demanded insistently, and he gave a tiny shrug.
“I’m pretty sure he’s going to live, Steph,” he promised. “I don’t think we’ll be able to save his forelimb, and he’ll have some scars—maybe some that show even through his fur—but he should recover completely except for that. I can’t guarantee it, baby, but you know I wouldn’t lie to you about something like this.”
Stephanie stared at the back of his head for a moment, then swiveled her eyes to her mother. Marjorie gazed back and nodded firmly, backing up Richard’s prognosis, and a frozen boulder seemed to thaw in Stephanie’s middle.
“You’re sure, Dad?” she demanded, but her voice was no longer desperate, and he nodded again.
“Sure as I can be, honey,” he told her, and she sighed and stroked the treecat’s head again. It blinked wide, unfocused green eyes at her, and she bent to brush a kiss between its triangular ears.
“Hear that?” she whispered to it. “You’re gonna be all right. Daddy said so.”
* * *
Yes, Climbs Quickly thought fuzzily, he really did have to start learning what the two-legs’ sounds meant. But not tonight. Tonight he was simply too tired, and it didn’t matter right now, anyway. What mattered was the mind-glow of his two-leg, and the knowledge that she was safe.
He blinked up at her and managed to pat her leg weakly with his good arm. Then he closed his eyes with a sigh, snuggled his nose more firmly against her, and let the welcome and love of her mind-glow sing him to sleep.
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE . . .
1520–1521 Post Diaspora
Planet Sphinx, Manticore Binary Star System
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13
“Your fourteen-hundred appointment is here, Chief,” Chief Ranger Gary Shelton’s desk terminal announced. It would have been unfair to say he grimaced as he turned from his office window’s view of the sun-drenched sidewalks of Twin Forks, but he definitely rolled his eyes before he walked back around to his desk and seated himself.
“Thank you, Francine,” he said with scarcely a wince.
“You’re welcome,” Francine Samarina, his longtime secretary and the official chief receptionist and general all-around manager of the Sphinx Forestry Service replied from the terminal’s display. Shelton looked at her a bit suspiciously, but he decided he couldn’t really accuse her of grinning at him. No, that was probably just his imagination. Surely she wouldn’t find the thought that her boss was being stalked remorselessly by a thirteen-and-a-half-year-old girl amusing.
Of course not, he thought sourly. And if I did accuse her of it, she’d only put on her best “Who, me?” expression and deny it, anyway.
“Send them in, please,” he said instead, and rose to stand in courteous greeting as his office door opened.
A man, a woman, a child, and a . . . treecat came through the door.
The man was tall and probably in his late thirties, with dark hair just starting to silver and dark eyes. His wife was about the same age, with a fairer complexion and eyes that hovered somewhere between brown and hazel. The child looked to be about thirteen or fourteen T-years old, with her father’s dark brown eyes and a riotously curly version of her mother’s more carefully controlled hair.
And, looking around alertly from her shoulder was a treecat, a representative of the native Sphinxian species whose discovery just over T-year ago had done so much to complicate Shelton’s life.
At first, no one had paid much attention to the possibility that the creatures might actually be sentient. In fact, there’d been a pronounced tendency to scoff at the entire notion. After all, as some had pointed out, the Harringtons had only migrated to Sphinx less than three T-years earlier. Who could honestly believe that such newcomers (some, like Jordan Franchitti, leaned towards the use of less complimentary terms) could possibly have discovered a sentient species of which no one else had ever caught so much as a glimpse? And that nonsense about their having “rescued” the girl from a hexapuma (and what kind of idiot family let a twelve-T-year-old encounter a hexapuma, in the first place?) was downright ridiculous!
Shelton had been inclined to doubt the stories of sentience himself, but only until Scott MacDallan and then Arvin Erhardt had encountered them as well. Of course, Dr. MacDallan was another “newcomer” as far as someone like Franchitti was concerned, but Erhardt’s family had arrived aboard the colony ship Jason. Even Franchitti had to take him seriously when he insisted treecats not only existed but were extraordinarily smart.
Of course, there could still be a huge gap between a “smart” animal and a genuinely sentient species. Which was why Sphinx was now finding itself inundated by such a plethora of scientists—busybodies making all sorts of trouble for his chronically understaffed rangers. Which, in turn, was the reason he regarded the creature on the girl’s shoulder with decidedly mixed feelings.
Even without its tail, the treecat was was over a third as long as the girl was tall, which (Shelton thought) made her look just a bit silly carrying him around on her back. She’d rigged a light harness with a tough fabric pad on top of her right shoulder, and the six-limbed treecat had sunk the curved claws of his mid-limb feet lightly into the padding for balance. Most of his weight, however, was supported by his rearmost feet, which were dug into a second protective pad just below the girl’s right shoulder blade. His head and shoulders stuck up above that shoulder, and his tail curved up and over, draping its very tip across the top of her left shoulder where it brushed very gently against her cheek.
There were peculiar streaks, almost shadows, through his thick, silken pelt of cream and gray fur. Places where the fur didn’t lie quite the way it should because of the fierce scars underneath it. And while the long fingers of his left forepaw rested lightly on the girl’s head, there was no right forepaw to match it, for only a short stub of his amputated right forelimb remained.
“Good afternoon, Doctors,” Shelton said, holding out his hand to the parents. They shook it in turn, and he looked at the girl.
“And good afternoon to you, Ms. Harrington,” he said. “Why don’t we all be seated?”
* * *
Stephanie was on her very best behavior.
She let both of her parents and the chief ranger sit before she settled into her own chair, and then Lionheart (her father had suggested the name, since however small he was, he obviously had a lion’s heart) swarmed down from her shoulder into her lap. Had the chair back been a little wider, he would have stretched out along it lengthwise and lain against the back of her neck; instead, he settled on his rear limbs, sitting upright and leaning back against her while he cocked his head and regarded Chief Ranger Shelton with bright green eyes.
Stephanie didn’t know how well Lionheart was going to follow today’s meeting. It was pretty obvious Standard English was still going right past him. He did seem to have become increasingly adroit at figuring out what she was trying to get across in day-to-day life, but trying to explain something like this by gesture and pantomime had been well beyond her abilities. On the other hand, if he was understanding her at all he was doing better than she was at understanding him. His vocal apparatus was hopelessly ill-suited for producing the sounds of any human language, which meant he couldn’t possibly speak to her even if he ever learned to understand her, and the best she could say was that she was beginning to be able to interpret his body language with a fair degree of certainty.
Or at least I think I am. I guess it’s always possible I’m still getting all of it wrong.
She didn’t think she was, though. And if she was reading him correctly, whatever he was picking up from Chief Ranger Shelton wasn’t very hopeful.
“Thank you for seeing us, Chief Ranger,” her father said. “I know there’s always more going on than you have time to deal with. I hope we won’t have to take up a lot more of your time with this.”
“I am busy,” Shelton acknowledged, and allowed himself to grimace. “The Plague hammered all of us, but I sometimes think the Forestry Service got hammered even harder than the rest of the star system.” He shook his head, his expression tightening further. “I lost better than half my uniformed personnel, and over a third of my clerical and support staff. We’re trying to rebuild, but with so many other crying needs for manpower, well—”
He shrugged, and all three Harringtons nodded in sober understanding.
“Actually,” he continued with the air of a man taking the bull firmly by the horns, “that shortage of manpower is one of the reasons why I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to meet your request.”
Stephanie felt her face lose expression, but she couldn’t really pretend that answer came as a surprise. Her parents were firmly in her corner on this one, yet they’d all recognized that it would be an uphill fight . . . and that not all the reasons it was going to be so hard were bad ones.
And some of those reasons are going to change in the next T-year or so, too, she reminded herself firmly. Which is why the last thing we need is for me to start kicking up a fuss about it now. But, darn it, it’s hard to remember “it’s better to live to fight another day” even if Dad is right about it!
“I know that’s not what you wanted to hear, Stephanie,” Shelton said, at least doing her the courtesy of speaking to her directly. “I’m sorry about that. But I’m afraid my decision is final.”
“Can I ask why?”
She kept her voice as level as she could, but she knew there was an edge of anger in it. He obviously heard it, but he only nodded to her, as if he were acknowledging her right to feel it.
“There are several reasons,” he told her. “First, the Sphinx Forestry Service has never had
an internship program, and especially not a junior internship program. We weren’t set up for one even before the Plague hit, much less now. You have to understand, Stephanie. This entire star system’s been colonized for only about one T-century. The first colonists didn’t land on Sphinx for fifty T-years after that, so there’s only been a Sphinx Forestry Service for about thirty-five T-years. Then the Plague came along and killed sixty percent of our total population. Both my parents died, and so did my older brother, and most of the survivors of the first wave could tell pretty much the same story. You know all that, I know. The only reason I’m mentioning it is that as pleased as I am whenever I find anyone who wants to be a ranger,” (he sounded as if he truly meant that, she thought), “Sphinx isn’t Meyerdahl. We’re badly understaffed, we’re especially short of the kinds of specialists we need, we’ve got a lot more wilderness area—like, oh, ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the planet—to take care of, and that wilderness is real wilderness. The Sphinx bush isn’t like Meyerdahl’s nature preserves. We haven’t even begun to survey it properly yet, and to be brutally honest, it’s a lot more dangerous.”
He held her eyes for a moment with the last two words, then let his own eyes flick sideways to the scarred, maimed treecat in her lap.
“The fact is that you’re lucky to be alive, young lady,” he said quietly. “I’m not condemning you for having done anything wrong when I say that, either. I mean it. You’re alive because you were lucky, but also because you were smart and capable, and because you had some . . . unexpected help. But if all of that hadn’t broken exactly right, you’d be dead. You realize that, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” Stephanie said softly. The memory of that horrible afternoon washed through her on the heels of the chief ranger’s words, and she wrapped her arms tightly around Lionheart. The treecat leaned back against her, buzzing a gentle purr, and patted her forearm gently with a true-hand.
“Well, that’s the bottom line,” Shelton said, turning back to her parents. “I don’t have a program I could insert your daughter into. However much I might like to, I just don’t have the manpower or the funding to set one up, either. And, to be frank, Stephanie’s discovery of the treecats only makes that worse. We’re beginning to be flooded by out-system xeno-anthropologists and xeno-biologists, and I’m afraid most of them are a lot less adept at surviving in the bush than your daughter’s demonstrated she is. The Interior Ministry’s insisting I have to provide nursemaids to look after them, and at the same time, I have to protect the treecats from them.” He shook his head. “Governor Donaldson keeps promising me more budget and more personnel, and I believe she’s doing her best. But I also know I’m going to see the budget before I see the warm bodies, and that’s just making bad worse. I don’t see any way I could possibly justify setting up any sort of internship/training program at this point, because I simply don’t have the personnel to divert to it. And I’m not about to sign off on any kind of ‘intern’ arrangement that isn’t closely supported and monitored by fully trained, adult rangers. The bush is simply too dangerous for me to even consider anything like that.”