by David Weber
“Sure. What?”
“Remember how I told you that when Bolgeo had that ’cat trapped, Morgana—Lionheart’s sister—kept staring at me like she was trying to put ideas into my head?”
“Sure. You didn’t understand, did you?”
“Not really, but I did understand that whatever it was she wanted was important, and I’ve often wondered how it might work the other way around. After all, I’m not a telepath, but clearly Lionheart can read me more than I can him. I’m going to try get across to him that this isn’t just an image or something fun we made, but that it’s real—a representation of what’s going to happen.”
Jessica nodded. “We know they could at least get a mental picture through to Scott MacDallan. From the way he described what happened, it took a bunch of treecats working together for them to communicate even with someone who has ‘the sight.’ Well, we’re not telepaths, but maybe if both of us concentrate really hard on our specific ’cat then we can boost the signal strength enough that they’ll be able to understand this isn’t just pretty art.”
“Right. After all, if they can talk to each other . . .”
“And we’re both sure they can . . .”
“Then they can discuss what we’re showing them. It might help them work through what we’re telling them.”
“I like it,” Jessica agreed. “Anyway, it can’t hurt to try, can it?”
* * *
“Guess who’s coming to Manticore?” Oswald Morrow couldn’t hide a certain sly, self-satisfied smile as he spoke. He was a big man with dark skin against which his teeth flashed in brilliant contrast.
“Who?” Gwendolyn Adair asked, not even looking up from examining her manicure.
“Stephanie Harrington. I have it on good authority that not only is she coming without any adult supervision, she’s bringing the treecat with her.”
That got Gwendolyn’s full attention. She sat up straight, showing off a trim, youthful body.
“You’re joking! That’s too perfect.”
Oswald Morrow gave her another flash of the dealmaker smile that was so very well known in certain exclusive Manticoran business circles. “I’m not joking. I’m perfectly sincere. Stephanie Harrington is coming here with the famous ‘Lionheart.’ I’m not one to brag—”
“Hah!” Gwendolyn’s comment was little more than a breath.
“—but I might even say I had something to do with arranging their trip.”
“How could you have done that?”
“You know I keep alert for any information at all having to do with the SFS.”
“Through your brother-in-law, Harvey. Yes, I know.”
“Well, I asked a few leading questions when Joan and I had dinner with Harvey and his family a while back. Harvey started ranting about how Shelton of the SFS had actually had the audacity to suggest two kids be enrolled in the Forestry Service training class. Harvey was pretty indignant. He had a hand in getting that program into its current shape, and he sickeningly proud of it for turning out tough, well-trained men and women who can deal with flood, fire, or panicked tourists with equal ease. He felt Shelton was degrading the program by assuming two kids could pass.”
“And you asked who the kids were . . .”
“I did. And when he’d confirmed that they were indeed Stephanie Harrington and her sidekick, Karl Zivonik, I hinted that it might be a good idea to admit them. It would show he has an open mind towards those backwoods bumpkins. If—I might even have said ‘when’—the kids failed his demanding program, well, the one who’d look bad would be Shelton, not Harvey.”
“Brilliant!”
Morrow shrugged in mock humility. “I’m not saying I was the only one speaking out in favor of including them. In fact, the number of people who wanted the Harrington kid included was part of what had Harvey so riled. My comments might have tipped the balance, that’s all.”
“But Stephanie and Lionheart will be here!” Gwendolyn looked as pleased as a cat that had gotten the cream. She was an attractive enough woman, but her real gift was not beauty. It wasn’t even her family connections, valuable as those had been on occasion. It was in acting. She was a chameleon, filtering effortlessly through other people’s lives and being whoever she had to be for each of them. She’d worked profitably with Morrow before, shifting appearance and attitude with such skill she sometimes frightened him. “It’s been so hard to influence the treecat question from off planet. The Bolgeo plan was a disaster because he had a few too many irons in the fire. If he’d stuck to doing what we paid him for instead of resorting to poaching—”
“That’s water under the bridge,” Morrow said dismissively. “Bolgeo didn’t do us any favors, but now Shelton’s ambition has handed us just what we need. With Ms. Harrington and her ’cat here, we can engineer situations that show them in a less than ideal light. And with them off Sphinx, we can send in new agents without worrying about her interference.”
“You’re not afraid of a fifteen-year-old girl, are you?” Gwendolyn’s laugh held an acid bite.
“I’m not afraid of anything,” Morrow countered. “We simply can’t ignore that Stephanie Harrington seems to view anything to do with the ’cats as her personal domain, or that the SFS plays up to her because it’s good for their public image. No one else is the ‘treecat discoverer,’ though, so no one else can butt in quite so objectionably. We’ll do very well out of both her presence here and her absence there.”
Gwendolyn looked at her manicure again as if she were considering it in a new light. “Yes, we will indeed. I have some very interesting thoughts on how we might befriend the young lady.”
“I’m sure you do, my dear,” Morrow chuckled. “I’m sure you do.”
* * *
Climbs Quickly watched as the images moved before him. If he had not lived with Death Fang’s Bane for so long, observing her as she spent long hours in front of the thing—and if he had not watched Eye of Memory creating images of her own—he was not sure he would have grasped what his two-leg was trying to show him. Indeed, if she had not been so intense in her desire for him to look, to pay attention, to understand, he was not sure he would have grasped the importance of what he was seeing at all. As it was, he felt at least reasonably confident that he understood her meaning.
Mostly.
He thought, however, that some confirmation would be a good idea, just in case he was jumping from limb to limb without testing his footing—something his elders were always telling him was one of his failings.
The older Person—Dirt Grubber’s long tail had two more full rings than did Climbs Quickly’s own—rubbed at his nose with his true-hand, much as he did when he had finished digging and wanted to clean his whiskers.
Climbs Quickly shook his head, a mannerism he had picked up from the two-legs.
Dirt Grubber said.
Climbs Quickly was pleased that his friend agreed. He had not looked forward to arguing with him. Dirt Grubber could be as stubborn as the deep-rooted weeds he was always pulling from his garden patches.
Climbs Quickly continued,
Climbs Quickly agreed. Bonded pairs could separate, sometimes for days on end, else how would a male feed his mate and kittens? However, a long separation was wearing on both. Many mated males tried not to be away from their nesting places overly long. Some, especially the older ones, chose to give up hunting entirely, focusing on contributing to the clan in other ways. Making stone tools took time and patience, and so did scraping straight shafts and tying nets. Or a mated pair might go foraging together, for although the People mostly ate meat or fish, they supplemented their diets with nuts and roots.
Since the coming of the two-legs, the People had begun to imitate them in the cultivation of plants. At first this had merely been the tending of plants that were already in place, bringing them water when the season was dry, clearing away competing plants that might choke them. In this way, the yield had increased. Now there were those such as Dirt Grubber who wanted the People to actually put useful plants where they would thrive, or bury seeds and protect the young shoots from opportunistic bark-chewers. Plant growing took a lot of attention. It was proving a very good way for bonded pairs to help provide food for the clan without taking the same degree of risk as when the male went hunting.
And avoiding that risk was important. Only rarely did one half of a bonded pair survive the death of the other. Minds that had been so intertwined that they intensified each other’s glow did not often survive the loss of their match. Sometimes a female with kits would survive because they needed her, but often the clan would need to care for doubly orphaned younglings.
Climbs Quickly shook himself as if he could shake away the unhappy memories as easily as he could a bug climbing through his fur.
* * *
Anders tried not to let Calida—or even Dacey—know how mixed up he felt about Stephanie’s going off to Manticore. For the moment, he was glad Bradford Whitaker wasn’t on Sphinx. Dr. Whitaker wasn’t the most sensitive of humans, and Anders doubted he would really have understood his son’s feelings—or even noticed them. Of course, there was something to be said for that. If Anders’ mother had been there, he would have been forced to have a heart-to-heart or two whether he wanted to or not. There was a reason she was a politician—and a good one of the old type, the type who’d gone into politics not because she saw it as a route to fame and fortune, but because she saw it as a way to help people.
He’d had to message Mom, of course, but the nice thing about interstellar communication—well, nice in this case, although he doubted his father saw it the same way at the moment—was that there would be a considerable time lag. By the time he had to answer Mom’s well-meaning and thoughtful questions, he thought he’d have his head together.
For now, though . . .
His heart twisted painfully whenever he saw Stephanie. He thought she didn’t guess, but he was pretty sure Lionheart did. Oddly enough though, Anders also felt sure the treecat was keeping his secret. It made him realize the ’cat was his friend in a way he’d never felt before, so he guessed at least one good thing had come out of this impending heartbreak.
Geez, though, I’m an insensitive jerk, aren’t I? All the time Stephanie and I have been ‘canoodling,’ as Dacey puts it, I hadn’t given a lot of thought to how Steph would feel when I went back home. I knew how bad I felt when I got dragged off to Manticore and she got left behind, but at least we could still message each other and get a reply back the same day! I figured that felt pretty darn bad anyway, but now that the shoe’s on the other foot, I know she felt even worse watching me go than I felt going, and I was so busy feeling sorry for myself I never realized it. Now that I’m the one being left, well, I can say it doesn’t feel good. In fact, it feels worse than being the one doing the leaving. The leaver has something to do; the left just gets to build life around the hole where the other person should be. And what are we going to do when I have to leave and we both know I won’t be coming back? There won’t be any same-day messages then!
Stephanie was being really sweet, Anders had to admit that. Even though she must be up to her ear in plans—he knew there’d been a shopping expedition all the way to Yawata Crossing for stuff that couldn’t be found in little Twin Forks—still she never chattered about how excited she was. Even better, the holiday Stephanie’s parents had let her have from her studies meant they still had time to meet every day, even with preparations for departure.
Today they were linking up in Twin Forks where they planned to join the hang-gliding club meeting, then go out—just the two of them—afterwards. Anders had his own glider now—a cutting-edge model that had been an “I’m sorry I screwed up” gift from his dad before Dr. Whitaker’s departure. It was really nice looking, in vibrant green and turquoise that the girls had all assured him went well with his own coloring. A few months hadn’t been enough to get Anders up to speed with the rest of Stephanie’s gang, but at least he no longer embarrassed himself.
Maybe because Stephanie’s pending departure was making him think back to when everything was fresh and new, Anders found himself thinking how much people had changed in the last six months as he hurried over to join the others.
The changes were most obvious in Toby Mednick. Toby was just a few months younger than Stephanie, and when Anders had first met him, he’d been Stephanie’s size or a little shorter. Certainly, the way the boy had carried himself—shy and meek—meant he might have been three meters tall and still have seemed small. Now nature had stepped in to give Toby more height. His shoulders were showing powerful muscle, although overall his build remained gazelle-graceful. The biggest change, though, was in his attitude.
Toby came from a very conservative family. The hang-gliding club was the only such organization he was allowed to join, and that was because it was run by Mayor Sapristos. But hang-gliding had proven to be just what Toby needed. He was well on the way to making good his vow at Stephanie’s fifteenth birthday party to become the best flyer in the club. No longer did dark brown eyes peek up shyly through a curtain of silky black hair. They met other people’s eyes directly, and the dark hair was tied back in a fashion that Anders thought—without undue modesty—was copied from how Anders wore his own.
The “Double Cs,” Chet Pointier and Christine Schroeder, had changed differently. Chet had finally slowed the growth spurt that had—he admitted cheerfully—been the bane of his parents’ clothes-buying budget. At seventeen, he was settling in at something over 188 centimeters in height, and these days his body seemed determined to fill in the frame it had stretched out. Chet’s natural hair color was just slightly lighter than Anders’ own wheaten gold, but he and his girlfriend Christine had recently indulged in matching dye jobs. Both now sported indigo
blue hair, highlighted with violet. When they got set to go out, they also sported matching cat’s-eye contact lenses in silver.
On Chet, the alterations looked a little affected—or so Anders thought—but from their very first meeting Anders had always thought that Christine had something of the exotic bird about her. She’d kept her cockatoo crest, and it looked as good in indigo and violet as it ever had in white-blond. If Christine’s graceful, willowy figure had changed at all, it had been to smooth her curves into something more delightfully feminine. Silver contact lenses were hardly an improvement over her naturally ice-blue eyes, especially when contrasted with the warm sandalwood hue of her skin, but if she wanted to experiment, Anders wasn’t going to complain.
Stephanie and Jessica arrived in Jessica’s junker just as Anders was unfolding his glider. He turned to meet them, his heart lifting as always when he saw Stephanie smile at him.
How am I ever going to let her get on the shuttle without me? I’ve got to do it. I know I’ve got to do it, but I can’t let her know just how very much letting her go is going to hurt.
4
When Keen Eyes ventured into the foothills, he found himself fighting the sensation that he had moved in time, rather than space. In the mountains, snow was falling at night. The icy whiteness was neither deep nor dense, and it melted within a short time after the sun’s rising. But the coming of snow meant that many of the small ground grubbers and bark-chewers upon which the Swaying Fronds Clan had been relying to augment their food were harder to find.
Some of those creatures slept all through the winter. Others were simply spending more time in burrows beneath the earth. When true snowfall came, many of them would make tunnels in the snowpack itself, their foraging concealed from all but the sharpest-eared hunters. Knowing this time of relative safety was coming, they waited patiently for the same snow that Keen Eyes dreaded.