by David Weber
“Oh, Dr. Hobbard isn’t all that bad,” Stephanie replied. “At least she’s polite. Lionheart likes her, too. And she doesn’t act like I’m some stupid kid who doesn’t have a clue, either.”
No, she doesn’t, her father thought. On the other hand, young lady, you’ve done quite a job of convincing almost all of her colleagues you are “a stupid little kid.” Or that you really don’t have a clue, anyway. One of these days there are going to be some really . . . irritated xeno-anthropologists when they realize you’ve been systematically playing dumb with them.
“I’ve noticed that,” he said out loud. “But it’s not scientists tonight. In fact, I think you’ll probably be glad to see them.”
“I will?” Stephanie frowned suspiciously at her uni-link. She recognized that tone of voice. It was his “Dad’s up to something” tone.
“Yep.” He chuckled. “Seems we’re going to be visited by a couple of folks from over near Thunder River.”
“Thunder River?” Stephanie repeated, frown deepening. Thunder River came roaring out of the high Copperwalls close to a thousand kilometers north of the Harrington freehold.
“The person who called is an Irina Kisaevna. She says she talked to you on the com last week, and she’s coming over with a friend of hers—fellow named Scott MacDallan. Maybe you’ve heard of him?” Richard Harrington’s tone could not possibly have sounded more innocent. “I think I heard something about him, anyway, around—what, a couple of months or so ago? Something about him and his treecat, wasn’t it?”
19
Stephanie watched their visitors’ arrival with mixed feelings.
Her father had been right about how much more rapidly the stormfront was moving in off the Tannerman Ocean, and the air car came sliding down out of a sky of increasingly angry-looking black cloud. There were occasional flashes of lightning off to the west, and wind thrashed the branches of the picketwood and crown oaks around her parents’ home. Stephanie had often wondered what bad weather would be like on a planet with gravity closer to that of Old Earth’s, where rain and other things fell a bit more . . . sedately. She’d never seen that, but she was well accustomed to the kind of heavy-gravity Sphinx boasted, and there was a reason Sphinxian homeowners kept a careful eye on overhead branches. Nobody wanted a four- or five-meter crown oak branch crashing down on her head (or her roof) in a 1.35-gravity field, and tree surgeons were a well-paid specialty here on Sphinx.
Tonight’s storm promised to be a doozy even by Sphinx’s standards, though. The weather forecasters had been warning everyone about it for the better part of a week, but it had veered farther south as well as speeding up, which meant it was going to make landfall less than eighty kilometers from the Harrington freehold. It was also going to track directly across the central settlement of Lionheart’s clan (she’d decided she liked Hobbard’s term for the extended treecat family groups), and worry over her friends burned in the back of her mind, distracting her from her anticipation of the upcoming visit.
Still, she was a little surprised to discover there was another element tempering that anticipation. One she felt despite the fact she’d been the one who set this meeting in motion in the first place . . . and one she didn’t much care for when she recognized it, either.
It was jealousy. She was actually jealous of all the newsies’ recent stories about Dr. MacDallan and Fisher, and that made her feel . . . ashamed.
You ought to feel ashamed, she scolded herself. What? Is it really all that important for you to be the only heroine where the treecats are concerned? You think you need to get all the credit? And if you’re so envious about all the news coverage and all the congratulations Dr. MacDallan got, then why don’t you make it a point to spend a little more time with all those xeno-anthropologists and xeno-biologists making sure your name gets into all their reports instead of his?
She didn’t like feeling that way, and she didn’t just feel ashamed. She felt disappointed in herself . . . and she knew her parents would have felt the same way if they’d known.
“Bleek!” Lionheart said softly into her ear, and she felt him stir on her shoulder. His remaining true-hand reached out, touching her lightly on the side of the head, and somehow she sensed his gentle reprimand. Not for what she’d just realized she was feeling about Dr. MacDallan but for blaming herself for feeling it. And even though she thought he was wrong to let her off so easily, she had to admit that it wasn’t as if she’d set out to envy the doctor. She hadn’t even realized she did, and as she reached up to caress Lionheart’s ears, she promised herself she was going to stamp out that envy just as soon as she possibly could.
“Bleek!” the treecat said again, more cheerfully, as he sensed the shift in her emotions, and she chuckled.
“All right,” she whispered to him as the air car grounded. “All right, I’ll behave. You be sure you do, too!”
Lionheart buzzed a purr, pressing warmly against the side of her neck, and they watched the air car hatch open.
Scott MacDallan, Stephanie decided, was just about the reddest redhead she’d ever seen in her life. His hair looked like you could light campfires with it, and his skin was so liberally dusted with freckles she was surprised it didn’t glow.
Irina Kisaevna was shorter than he was, with a definitely feminine yet considerably more stocky build. Her hair was as dark as his was fiery, and she had big brown eyes that looked like they were designed to laugh a lot. She had a strong nose, too, and high cheekbones.
But it was the cream and gray-colored treecat riding in the crook of Dr. MacDallan’s arm that truly drew her attention. It didn’t seem to be quite as large as Lionheart, and it had fewer dark bars circling its tail, but aside from that and Lionheart’s missing arm, the two of them could have been twins, and the other treecat’s head came up, green eyes bright as he looked in their direction.
* * *
Swift Striker replied.
He raised his truncated right arm slightly, and felt Swift Striker’s acceptance of his point. Then his eyes narrowed as he and the Laughing River Clan scout sampled one another’s mind-glows. It was the treecat equivalent of what a human might have called “getting acquainted,” except that it was far quicker—and far more thorough—than any pair of humans could have managed. Of course, neither of them was a memory singer, so there were depths they couldn’t plumb, but in the time it took Swift Striker and his humans to climb out of their air car and cross to the waiting Harringtons, he and Climbs Quickly had become something very like old friends.
With that out of the way, they each turned to sampling the mind-glows of the humans they hadn’t previously met. It was an interesting experience, since both MacDallan’s and Stephanie’s mind-glows had been included in the memory songs passed from clan to clan over the previous few months. The memory songs had made it clear to every listener that the two humans had exceptionally powerful mind-glows even for two-legs, yet it was obvious now that the songs had done them less than full justice.
He flirted the tip of his tail, thinking hard, trying to find a way to express what he felt.
he said a moment later,
Swift Striker replied.
* * *
“Dr. MacDallan, Ms. Kisaevna—Fisher,” Richard Harrington said, extending his hand to each of the humans in turn and nodding a greeting to the treecat. “Welcome! Now come inside before the rain starts!”
“That,” Scott MacDallan said in a deep, pleasant baritone, “sounds like a very good idea, Dr. Harrington.”
“Amen,” Irina Kisaevna echoed, then looked across at Stephanie with a grin. “And you must be Stephanie.” She winked. “Glad to actually meet you in person. Especially since you and I seem to be the only non-doctors present this evening!”
Stephanie laughed and came forward to hold out her own hand.
“Yeah,” she said, shaking her head. “I get a lot of that around these two.” She tilted her head in her parents’ direction, and Marjorie Harrington smacked her gently on the top of that same head.
“Just remember who’s handing out the hot chocolate later tonight,” she told her daughter in an ominous tone, and it was Irina’s turn to chuckle.
She had a nice laugh, Stephanie decided. And a nice face, too.
The Harringtons’ guests accompanied them inside and into the big, comfortable living room, where a fire crackled and popped in the huge stone hearth. That hearth wasn’t entirely a relic from the distant past, either. One thing Sphinx had plenty of was firewood. And if the house were to lose power in the middle of a Sphinx winter, that anachronistic fireplace (and the ones like it in almost every other room) might well make the difference between survival and freezing to death.
Tonight, though, the fire was simply for friendliness, and the five humans found themselves gathering around it in a shallow half-circle as the hiss of burning wood exercised its ancient, welcoming magic.
“I love those paintings,” Irina said, looking at a trio of old-fashioned oils on the living room wall.
She stepped closer, studying the painting at the right end of the line with obvious pleasure and admiring the play of sunlight and shadow, the deep greens and the gray, black, and brown of the tree trunks, in the summer landscape. The painting to its left showed the same landscape, but in the earth tones, pale green, and robins egg-blue skies of spring. And the painting at the extreme left end of the row showed the same landscape yet again, this time clad in the sun-sparked whiteness of snow and embellished with the crystalline daggers of icicles. All of them were filled with a very different sense of the vibrant, ongoing life of Sphinx as the planet swept through the slow, stately march of its seasons. It was almost as if the viewer could reach into the pictures, actually touch the seasons they portrayed, and there was a bare patch of wall to the right of the summer landscape. It was clearly waiting for autumn, she thought, and turned back to the Harringtons.
“I thought I knew most of the artists here on Sphinx,” she said, “but I certainly don’t recognize this one’s work. I’d love to get whoever did these to come out to my brother’s place and do the same kind of series for him!”
“I think that might be arranged,” Richard Harrington said with a slow smile, and nodded in his wife’s direction. “I happen to know the artist pretty well.”
“You did these?” Irina looked at Marjorie. “They’re wonderful!”
“Well, I’ve still got to wait another T-year or so before I can add autumn to the wall,” Marjorie responded. “It’s not exactly something you can do in a rush here on Sphinx. But if your brother doesn’t mind investing four or five T-years in the project, I can probably manage to squeeze him into my busy schedule.”
The two women smiled at each other, and MacDallan shook his head.
“We’re doomed, you know,” he said to Richard and Stephanie. Stephanie arched her eyebrows at him, and he shrugged. “Your mom paints. Well, Irina sculpts—not just clay, either. She really likes bronze, too. She’s already done three life-size studies of Fisher, and as if that weren’t bad enough, she’s a potter, too. Her place is littered with bowls, goblets, vases, plates, platters, saucers, pitchers, bowls, mugs, carafes, salad plates—did I mention bowls? And she gives them away at the drop of a hat, too. Fills all her friends’ platter rails and cupboards with stuff. I did mention bowls, didn’t I?”
“All the better for breaking over your thick skull,” Irina told him sweetly, then looked at Marjorie with a chuckle. “All the same, though, I’m sure we could work out a little trade in kind, if you’re interested. I’d love to do a sculpture of Lionheart.” Her expression turned more serious as she looked at Stephanie. “I think the way he wears his honor scars says a lot about him.”
“So do I,” Stephanie said softly, reaching up to the treecat on her shoulder.
“And on that note,” Richard Harrington said firmly, “let’s get washed up and eat.”
* * *
Supper was a decided success.
Both Harringtons were excellent cooks, and neither MacDallan nor Irina had ever experienced Meyerdahl-style cuisine. It reminded MacDallan of a sort of cross between Old Earth Oriental and Iberian cooking, combining elements of each in ways which would never have occurred to him but worked beautifully. It began with a starter course of mushrooms sautéed in olive oil, garlic, scallions, and parsley, accompanied by a salad with what his aunt from Nueva Madrid would have called romescu sauce—a tangy, tomato-based sauce with garlic, almonds, and hazel nuts. The almonds were the original Old Terran version, although the “hazel nuts” were from a local tree which offered its own variation on the original theme. The same was true of the “anchovies” in the salad, which had come from a fish which filled very much the same ecological niche on Sphinx’s sister planet Manticore, although the bib lettuce and endive were the original Old Terran article, courtesy of Marjorie Harrington’s gardens and greenhouses right here on Sphinx. The olives, like the “anchovies” had come from Manticore, whose orbital position closer to the system primary gave it a climate better suited to things like olive trees and orange groves.
The main course consisted of chicken thighs with sage, rosemary, and thyme, but served over rice in a coconut milk-based sauce with just a hint of curry, and accompanied by spinach with small slivers of pineapple and orange. Home baked bread completed the menu . . . aside from the homemade coconut milk and red bean ice-cream which followed for dessert.
“That,” MacDallan said with a sigh of repletion, sitting back from the table with an after dinner cup of coffee, “was delicious.”
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like a little more?” Marjorie Harrington offered with a smile, nodding at the sadly depleted serving dishes still mounting guard at the center of the table.
“Couldn’t,” he said. “Not after all that.”
“It was delicious,” Irina agreed. “And I’m stuffed, too.”
She had not, Stephanie noticed, eaten nearly as much as the other humans at the table. Which, coupled with her stockier figure, suggested that, unlike Stephaine’s own family, her metabolism and muscles hadn’t been genetically engineered for a heavy-gravity environment. She was obviously accustomed to Sphinx’s gravity, but Stephanie wondered what it must be like for an unmodified human to live day in and day out in a gravity thirty-plus percent higher than the one in which mankind had originally evolved.
The treecats, on the other hand, weren’t done yet. Stephanie suspected that treecat notions of cuisine were very . . . basic. She’d been a littl
e surprised, actually, to discover that they preferred their food cooked at all, although they were perfectly capable of eating it raw if they had to. But Lionheart had almost tried to dive right into the serving bowls and wallow there in pure delight the first time he’d encountered her parents’ cooking, and Fisher seemed equally taken by it. He was currently working on his fifth chicken thigh, at any rate.
He hadn’t cared much for the spinach, though, she reflected. Maybe if they’d spiked it with a little celery . . .
“In that case, if everyone’s done, why don’t we migrate back into the living room?” Marjorie suggested.
“Only if you let Scott and me help you clean up, first,” Irina responded.
“If you’re sure,” Marjorie said, and Irina chuckled.
“Oh, I’m sure, believe me! I don’t want him developing any bad habits just because we’re not at home.”
“All right,” Marjorie agreed, and the human members of the party descended upon the table, hauling the wreckage off to the kitchen to be stored in the refrigerator, scraped into the compost bag, sorted into the trash, or scoured by the dishwasher’s sonic emitters, as the case might be.
* * *
Some time later, they sat in a comfortable, conversational ring around the fireplace once more, listening to the thunderous waterfall-beat of rain on the roof and the roar of wind. Thunder rumbled—still distant, but coming steadily closer—and Richard Harrington shook his head.
“I think you guys better plan on spending the night here,” he said.
“If we won’t be putting you out, I think that’s probably a good idea,” MacDallan said ruefully, smiling as he reached up to gently touch the thoroughly stuffed treecat stretched sleepily across the back of his armchair. “The first time Fisher and I met, I wound up flying with him through the middle of a thunderstorm with a concussion. I think that’s probably going to do both of us for a while where bad-weather flying is concerned.”
“I can see how that might be,” Richard said, then cocked his head slightly and arched an eyebrow. “Of course, bringing up the way you two met also offers the opportunity for a segue into the reason you’re visiting us in the first place, doesn’t it?”