With interest.
In the early moments of their first passionate kiss he learned four important things: One, her mouth was not that of an animal, and certainly didn’t taste like carrots; two, kissing her soft, velvety lips wasn’t anything like he’d imagined kissing someone with a mustache would be like; three, her bifurcated upper lip simply added another fascinating dimension to the experience.
And finally, he really liked kissing her.
* * *
Ross woke to the outraged, always-changing cacophony of a nearby mockingbird. He realized most of his body was cool and slightly damp, and when he pried his gummy eyelids open he discovered he was lying on his back in the thick grass near the edge of a large hibiscus bush. He was as naked as the day he was born, and a few brave black ants were inspecting his left hand, which was perilously close to their modest anthill.
S’leen, equally undressed but, due to her natural fur covering, not as naked as he, was curled up on the soft cedar mulch under the hibiscus, her sleek, furry back and wonderful fluffy tail pressed solidly against his right side. He carefully reached his right arm down her body, his hand coming to rest on her firm rump. Resisting the urge to do something rude, he instead gently patted her rear, saying, “Rise and shine, fuzzybutt. It’s a brand new day.” He wearily took stock of his abused body, muttering, “And I need a bath, along with a big box of Band-Aids, before the day gets much older.”
Climbing to his feet was a feat in itself, and as he stood naked, blearily looking around, he hoped that he had remembered to kill most of the outdoor lights last night before— Well, he just hoped nobody had been watching, or videotaping, from the top of the perimeter wall.
Vague, confused mumbling emanated from the golden-furred body still prone under the bush, then S’leen twisted her head around to peer bleary-eyed up at Ross as he stood unsteadily nearby. She coughed, then sneezed, and Ross asked, “Are you OK? Sounds like you’re catching a cold.”
“I’m not sick,” she said after another sneeze. “I…I think I have bits of mulch and a few tiny bugs in my nose,” and she sneezed again, “but other than that I am all right.” She blinked several times, peering more intently at Ross. “Jack, are you all right? You do not look well.”
He laughed dryly. “There’s nothing wrong with me that a hot shower and some antiseptic won’t cure, but,” and he pointed out numerous small lacerations and bruises all over his body, “now do you see one of the reasons why I don’t like it when you bite me? Besides it hurting like hell, it makes me look like I fought with a runaway Weed Eater—and lost!”
His whining didn’t impress her, though, and she stated primly, “I might have sympathy for you, Jack, if you didn’t ‘give’ at least as much as you ‘take’.” S’leen was exceptionally limber, and after she rolled out into the lush grass she made a show of inspecting various parts of her body, some of them very personal parts. As she did this she pointed out a multitude of ‘transgressions’ he was apparently responsible for.
“Well, in the spirit of the moment maybe we both got a little carried away,” he admitted, “but for now we need to carry ourselves inside and spend some serious time with soap and hot water. You, my love, smell like a rabbit.”
“And you are a stinky monkey!” she retorted, bouncing to her feet and quickly skipping out of his reach.
“No doubt,” he muttered, “but I’m going to do something about my problem right now. Care to join me?”
* * *
Lunchtime found them feeling and smelling much more presentable; Ross, however, still looked much the worse for wear.
“I’m going to have to lie to people, S’leen, about where I got all these wounds,” he stated, scowling around a peanut butter and banana sandwich. “Luckily there’s a large rose bush next to the porch, and I can maybe get away with telling them that, after everyone left, I got drunk, became overbalanced and fell into it.” He looked dejectedly at the multitude of obvious bite marks, then added, “Maybe I should say I fell into it twice.”
“Do you really think your friends will believe you?” she said, pausing as she attacked a large salad. “Have you done anything like that before?”
He frowned, then smiled wistfully. “Will they believe me? No. Accept my explanation? They’ll have to. Then they’ll spend the next week trying to figure out just how I actually got all these little cuts and bruises. The obvious reason, that my companion BITES when she’s horny, will, I’m sure, be politely overlooked.”
After worrying his sandwich a few moments more he added, “And, no, I’ve never had to lie to people because of a tooth-happy lover, either.”
“That is because,” she stated matter-of-factly around a mouthful of salad, “you never had an H’kaah lover.”
After a time she ventured, “Jack, do you remember me telling you last night that we have much to discuss?”
He sighed, saying, “Yeah, I wondered how long you’d let me skate on that.” He finished his sandwich and washed it down with a tall glass of milk. S’leen patiently continued munching on her salad, and in time her patience was rewarded when Ross began to talk. What he told her, however, brought her lunch to an abrupt end. Ross spoke of terrifying events and top-secret government details, and he told her of things that only a few people alive knew.
Things, in fact, she never even dreamed of.
* * *
“Before I even begin this, S’leen, I want you to keep in mind—keep this in the front of your mind!—that I really, truly love you with all my heart.” He surprised her with the intensity of that statement, but before she could bask in its warmth he continued. “And with that said I’m now going to tell you that I am not the person you and almost everyone else thinks I am.” She paused with her loaded fork halfway to her mouth, but before she could comment on his statement Ross added, “In fact, when you discover just who I am, what I am, you…you probably won’t want anything more to do with me. In—” and he hesitated as a terribly sad expression momentarily darkened his features, “—in that event I’ll see to it that your contract with me is voided entirely in your favor, and if it’s your wish you can start over with…with another person— a better person.”
“Jack!” she barked, spraying salad bits across the table, “I don’t EVER want to hear you say such a terrible thing again! I love YOU, and after knowing you this long I can’t think of anything you could say that would change that.”
He shook his head and looked away for a moment, muttering faintly, “You have no idea, no idea at all,” and such was his emotional distress it appeared for a time that he would be unable to continue. But after nearly a minute had passed he got himself back under control, and when he looked back at her his gaze bore straight into her eyes. Looking back on that moment from a comfortably distant time in the future S’leen would only say she believed that she looked straight into the nightmare realm the humans call Hell.
“Never let your emotions make definitive statements for you, S’leen,” he warned. “Such statements have a way of coming back to haunt you when you least expect it.” He frowned for a moment, then firmly declared, “And with that said, I’ll begin by telling you that I am a killer. At this point the only sentients I’ve killed have been my own kind, humans of virtually every race and both sexes. However, many years ago I came to the sad conclusion that some of those I killed probably didn’t deserve that fate. And what’s worse, there’s a chance that in the future I’ll have to kill again, and once again some of those I kill may not deserve the ultimate punishment.”
S’leen knew that Ross had, with his own hands, executed his ex-wife’s murderer, yet his blanket admission of killing others, possibly some who should not have been killed, rattled her to her lapin core.
“The Jack Ross you know is a businessman, and has the honor of being Patrons’ first client. You’ve heard me claim that military service gave me combat training, and you’ve also heard me say that I’ve taken pride in maintaining my physical conditioning since my separat
ion from the military. You with me so far?” She nodded, having heard nothing new in the statement so far. “It’s true that I’m a successful businessman, and it’s also true that I received military training. That, however, is where your knowledge of the ‘real’ Jack Ross stops. You see,” he said, “keeping myself in top physical shape is the only thing that’s kept me alive.” S’leen blinked but said nothing. Waiting.
“Shortly after my basic military training ended,” he continued, “I was offered a chance to enter the highly secret and often terribly illegal world of military covert operations, and being young and full of piss and vinegar and blind idealism I gladly accepted. They gave me extensive training in all forms of deadly mayhem and I faithfully served my country’s interests for almost eight years, traveling the world over and seeing the underside of humanity’s rocks and rotten logs.”
Ross paused for a moment, then stated, “I killed or helped kill a lot of the nasty, disgusting ‘bugs’ that you find wiggling and squirming when you turn over sociopolitical rocks and logs, S’leen. But one of the things, the important things, that it took far too long for me to learn is, no matter how many monstrous ‘bugs’ you kill there’s always plenty more where those came from. And in killing the ‘bad bugs’, you often squash some ‘good bugs’ in the bargain.” He paused to study her reaction, but the only thing he saw was that she had gotten very quiet. He figured that was her instinctive rabbit responses taking control: Be still, be quiet, maybe the danger will go away. Ross, however, had no plans to go away, at least not yet.
“During that time period,” he finally continued, “the horrors of what I was doing eventually forced me to look elsewhere for answers to the questions I dared not ask my bosses. Religions seemed to hold the answers until I pried open the many doctrine-sealed doors, behind which I discovered that that organized religions are, as they have always been, little more than smoke-and-mirrors. They mainly deal with social control of their followers, not the sociological and political problems I was facing at the time. And I also came to realize that, contrary to what I’d been told, my own government was often no more ‘humane’ or ‘moral’ than the various governments and individuals I was working against.” S’leen had become quietly attentive, Ross noted, and now showed no indication of wanting to jump and run. He took that as a positive sign.
“During this time I began reading various kinds of literature, both fiction and non-fiction,” he continued, “looking for thoughts and ideas that might relate to the issues that were literally tearing my soul apart. One basic concept kept showing up in literature from virtually all societies, and from all ages:
Given the opportunity and economic and/or political justification, an advanced, aggressive human society will overwhelm a less-advanced society.
“Throughout the entire span of human history there are no long-term contradictions, yet for a time I honestly believed my country was ‘above’ such a petty thing. I…I learned the hard way that I was wrong, so very wrong.”
S’leen had been letting her self-preservation instincts keep her from showing overt reaction to Ross’ terrifying revelations. Yet she couldn’t help but feel the hurt and anguish that, even more than twenty years after the fact, still haunted him. She also remembered that he had warned her that she really didn’t know him, and it gave her a chill to realize how much of an understatement that warning had been. Ross wasn’t just a warrior, he was a murderer.
“S’leen, I read lots of speculative fiction stories of alien monsters invading Earth and doing terrible things to ‘poor, defenseless humanity’. Yet there were just as many, if not more, stories of just the opposite, of wonderful, gentle species of non-humans suffering unspeakable horrors under the yoke of mankind’s rule. In time I came to realize that, in reality, should we ever make contact with such beings—” Ross stopped, momentarily unable to speak. He coughed, sniffed and wiped his eyes, then said, “I knew—I knew— mankind would inevitably follow that second scenario. S’leen, regardless of what the aliens looked like, regardless of their society’s sophistication or art or culture—WE would be the horrible, murderous alien monsters.”
He stopped again, emotion and deep anger briefly choking him. “It’s our very nature to destroy other civilizations! We’ve done it for thousands of years, why should we stop now? Humans have to feel superior to every other living thing, and unless a non-human species exhibits technology superior to ours AND is tougher, meaner, and—” he laughed, but there was little true humor in it, “—and proves to us that it’s willing and able to kick our butts back to the stone age, we’ll do everything in our power to annihilate it and claim it was our ‘moral duty’ to do so.”
This was a brutally cold side of humanity, and of Jack Ross, that she’d never known of, and true to his statement, never imagined. She was as much frightened by it as she was fascinated by what he was telling her. In flashes of sudden comprehension a multitude of off-hand comments and statements Ross had made to her in the past four months took on new meanings, and despite her species’ pacifistic nature she finally began to understand what Ross had been doing to her, with her, literally from the moment they had met.
He was conditioning her to survive.
S’leen forced herself to break free of her instinctual ‘freeze, be still!’ response, and she timidly ventured, “Are you trying to turn me into a…a carnivore, Jack?”
“Oh God no, S’leen!” he cried. “The thought of you, of ANY H’kaah, eating…eating meat makes my skin crawl,” but then he added, a strange expression on his face, “and yet, on occasion certain varieties of your Earth-born rabbit cousins DO eat meat.” To her horrified reaction he stated, “It’s the honest-to-God truth; it’s just that most people have never seen it, and I really doubt that any modern-day H’kaah does such a thing, either.” Her question had shocked him, but he was also pleased that her intellect wasn’t running entirely on instinctual autopilot.
“What Patrons is trying to do,” he explained, “is give your people a fighting chance in a universe populated by predators. But to survive in such an environment you have to understand how predators think, what motivates them and what their weaknesses are.” He sighed, then wistfully smiled. “This is another part of my deception, S’leen. You see,” he gently said, “I’m not only Patrons’ first client, Patrons is my baby, my idea—and MY company. Teddy Shapiro is Patrons’ ‘front man’, the public head of the company, but Teddy actually works for me. Yours truly, Jack Ross, is the driving force behind Patrons.”
She thought she was beyond surprise, beyond shock. She was wrong, and for several moments S’leen couldn’t speak; she could barely even breathe. Finally she sucked in a lung full of air and expelled it in a wordless, ear-splitting shriek. But once she had vented her outrage she fell quiet, and after Ross quit cringing and got both of his eyes focusing again he continued his explanation.
“After the jumperdrive began changing our world I thought, ‘What if we really DO find aliens out there, and what if the aliens really ARE less-advanced than we are?’ At that time I was a good two decades removed from the covert black operations lifestyle, but I’d still maintained my contacts in both the national and world governments. I voiced my concerns to some key people and I was overjoyed to find that I was not alone in my fears that we, as a species, would most likely harm or ultimately destroy any less-advanced species we discovered. Over months of secretive, high-level meetings we hashed out scenario after unpleasant scenario. I even brought science fiction and fantasy writers into the discussions in hopes that they could show us that we were wrong, but the writers gave us little hope for the survival of our hypothetical alien species should they be confronted by a technologically-advanced humankind.”
To Ross’ most pleasant surprise S’leen not only appeared to be following his explanation, her look of amazement told him she approved of what he’d done! He quickly continued.
“And then, as they say in movies, it happened! While poking around in his ugly little ‘ti
n can’ of a starship, a lone human explorer by the dubious name of Filbert Ashwhistle stumbled across the cluster of stars that contained your world as well as dozens of others, each inhabited by a different sentient species. Ashwhistle kept a level head, exploring just enough to determine that this discovery was WAY bigger than he could handle. He hurried back here with the news, and before anyone in authority could do anything there were dozens of Earth ships making “first contact” visits to your homeworld, among others.
“The news had been incredibly exciting, yet humanity had already been thrown into terrible social instability by the advent of the jumperdrive itself. Before irreparable damage could be done concerning relations between Earth and the various non-human governments, the United Nations put strict flight restrictions into place, and then they contacted me.
“We knew we had to do something,” he told his wide-eyed companion, “but nobody really had a viable solution to the problem of how to keep our own aggressive people and our crazy-quilt cultures from overwhelming all these non-humans. My God, by that time human groups had already tried colonizing distant worlds, and more times than not they’d had their butts literally chewed off by the harsh conditions or by hostile alien monsters, or even more deadly microorganisms.” He paused to shakily pour himself another glass of milk, then drained half of it in one gulp.
“And then there were the various fringe elements we had to contend with,” he said around a wet burp. “Not only did we have the religious zealots, most of whom either wanted to save your souls or nuke your worlds to dust so you wouldn’t spread your ‘ungodliness’, we also had a small but worldwide faction of people known as furries who desperately hungered for contact with sentient anthropomorphic-style non-humans. That fancy scientific term covers those species that appear to be based on animals native to Earth—the H’kaah, the Mn’rii and the Ruug’h, among many others—but have at least limited human-type physical and social characteristics. A small, idealistic segment of the furries crowd dreamed of some kind of ‘magical’ process that could physically transform them from their unhappy human lives into an existence where they could BE just like these non-human anthropomorphic beings. And…and here’s the punch line to the whole miserable joke: They felt that when such a thing took place, however it was supposed to happen, everything under the sun would be just…just wonderful.”
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