by David Weber
“Of course.” Anders sighed and shook his head, feeling sympathy for both his father and Dr. Hobbard.
Sonura Hobbard was the current chair of the Anthropology Department at Landing University. She was also the head of the Crown Commission on Treecats and so, in a sense, his dad’s boss here in the Star Kingdom. However, the Whitaker expedition had been allowed to work on Sphinx in direct reaction to the Bolgeo disaster. The Crown wanted to be certain the people studying the ’cats were real—and reputable—scientists, and they’d been granted a considerable amount of latitude in their operations in light of their academic credentials. And their contract had specifically protected the all important academic rights of first publication.
But that had been before Dr. Whitaker had taken his entire team off and marooned it in the bush without mentioning his plans to anyone. It was inevitable that there’d be tighter oversight in the wake of that near disaster—his dad had to know that even better than Anders did—and if there was one thing his father understood—outside of xenoanthropology, of course—it was academic politics and funding. And that meant that he knew he had no more choice about accepting these newcomers than Dr. Hobbard had about taking her dean’s “request” to heart.
“Is Dad sure these people are legit?” he asked.
“He says they look that way so far.” Kesia shrugged. “Apparently, this has been brewing for a while and Dr. Hobbard says the background checks have been in motion for a couple of T-months now.”
“When will they get here?”
“Probably not for at least another T-month. From your dad’s message, they’re already on their way, but they’re coming from several different out-System universities.”
“So this Adair Foundation gets an inside look at the treecats and Landing University gets the money for a chair.” Anders snorted. “Sounds as if everyone except Dad and you guys get something out of this!”
“Your father’s feelings exactly.”
“Hey!” Anders perked up, interest briefly pushing back his depression over Stephanie’s departure. “If Dad plays this right, you could get some prepublicity for your work out of this when these visiting scientists head home again. The sort of thing that will have people panting to read your ‘full and complete’ definitive reports when they come out!”
“You really are your parents’ son, aren’t you?” Kesia said with a laugh. “I foresee a bright future in politics for you if you can only stay out of the swamps of academia! I think that’s a suggestion you should make to him as soon as he gets off the shuttle. Maybe even sooner if you want to message him!”
“Oh, I can wait till I see him in person,” Anders replied, the reference to messaging reminding him that he wouldn’t be seeing Stephanie again in person for another whole three months. The gloom came rushing back, but it was a lot less deep this time.
No, I won’t see her for another three months. But if Kesia’s right, we’ll have at least six months together after she gets back. And if Dad really is able to extend his contract into an open-ended study . . .
It was amazing how much brighter the universe had just become.
* * *
The taxi slowed, banking to the left across Jason Bay and circling toward the landing pad, and Stephanie rested one elbow on Lionheart’s carrier as she peered out the window beside her.
Her regret at leaving Anders behind on Sphinx was never far from the surface, but she had to admit that the trip had had its amusing moments. She’d completely forgotten that Karl had never been off the surface of Sphinx in his life—never been aboard even a little puddle-jumper ship like HMS Zephyr, their transport to the planet Manticore, far less on a visit to the “big city” of Landing. Big, tough, strong, competent Karl had been completely out of his depth aboard ship, and Stephanie had found herself in the role of senior partner for the voyage.
Nor had Karl been able to conceal his near awe at the sheer size of Landing and its gleaming pastel-tinted ceramacrete towers. After so long on Sphinx, Stephanie had been a little taken aback herself, but that hadn’t lasted long. For all its impressive ground plan, there was still plenty of room for Landing to grow, and none of the towers were much over a hundred meters tall yet. In fact, the total population of the Star Kingdom’s capital city was less than a quarter of the population of Hollister, back on Meyerdahl where she’d grown up.
Was kind of interesting to see where “Mount Royal Palace” is going to go, though, she reflected. The taxi pilot had deliberately detoured over the construction site to give the off-world kids a look. It’ll have a really nice view of the Bay, anyway. Going to be big, too, but I’d think they’d want a tower all their own, and from the architect’s drawings posted all over the city landing pad’s smart screens, they won’t be over four or five stories anywhere.
Now, as the taxi settled the last few dozen meters, she looked around Landing University of Manticore’s campus and decided she liked what she saw. They could have put the entire university into a single tower easily, since the total student body was no more than thirty thousand, but they’d chosen to scatter it around the ample four hundred-hectare site.
They’d fitted it elegantly into the landscape, doing as little damage as possible to the local ecostructure, too, and her eyes brightened as she saw species of Manticoran trees for the first time. Somehow, even though she’d known better (especially after boning up for this trip), she’d half expected Manticore’s flora to be similar to Sphinx’s, yet they looked nothing at all alike. Most of the trees she could see had a distinctively blue cast to their foliage, and everywhere she looked she saw brilliant blossoms nodding under the late morning sun. Landing was almost on Manticore’s equator, and the Star Kingdom’s capital world was almost ten light-minutes closer to the Sun than Sphinx, which gave it a substantially higher average temperature to begin with.
“It’s going to be a lot hotter out there than we’re used to,” she said, turning her head to look at Karl, and then glancing down at Lionheart’s carrier. “A lot.”
“I did read the handout, too, Steph.” Karl sounded just a little snappish, she thought. Maybe he was feeling more nervous about visiting the “big city” than he wanted to appear? “I slathered on plenty of sunscreen, too,” he added a bit pointedly.
“And a good thing you did,” she agreed equably, then leaned closer to the carrier, looking into the open side at Lionheart. “Too bad we can’t use sunscreen on you,” she told him.
* * *
Climbs Quickly’s ears pricked and his nose twitched as Death Fang’s Bane made her mouth noises at him. He didn’t much care for the scents inside this flying thing—there were too many of them, as if hands of hands of two-legs had come and gone—but new, different ones were coming to him now. He could smell them only faintly so far, since the flying things were stingy about letting smells in and out, but they were much more interesting. Indeed, they were very interesting, for they were obviously the smell of plants, yet he’d never smelled anything quite like them before, and he felt a burning need to be out and about to explore them.
But that is going to have to wait, he reminded himself. You are in a new place, Climbs Quickly! Best you not rush off like a new-weaned kitten so sure of all you think you know that you come nose-to-nose with a death fang!
He laughed silently at the thought, though he knew there was truth as well as humor to it. And even as he laughed, he wondered how much of his eagerness to explore was a way to distract himself from anxiety. He had no idea how far he and his two-leg had come from their home, but he was beginning to suspect it was even farther than he had believed it could be before they departed. The trip aboard the big flying thing from the two-legs’ nesting place hadn’t seemed to take that long, but when his person had lifted the carrying thing and let him look out the window, he had quickly realized they were traveling far faster than they had ever traveled before. They had been far higher, as well, and they’d gone on getting higher until the very sky had turned from blue to black! Yet e
ven that had been only the beginning of their trip, for they had transferred to the biggest flying thing he had ever seen through a vast, hollow tube, and it seemed reasonable to conclude that it was probably even faster than the one which had delivered them to it. After all, it had even farther to go and there was clearly no limit to the sorts of speeds at which two-legs could travel when the mood took them! And the hollow tube had had windows, too—windows that let him look down upon the world . . . and know he had been right about the reason Death Fang’s Bane and Windswept had used round blue shapes of their images for this journey. They had not been islands, whatever others of the People might have believed.
Yet Climbs Quickly had found himself almost more daunted than pleased at being proved right. The blue shapes were entirely separate worlds . . . and that meant he was far, far away from Bright Water’s nesting place. That was a sobering thought for even the hardiest scout, for it meant he was the only Person in an entire world, and he was surprised how small that made him feel.
Still, he could not feel lonely, even if there were no other People to whom he might speak, for he was with Death Fang’s Bane, and he looked back up at her, holding tight to the flare of her mind-glow and treasuring its welcome.
* * *
“Bleek!”
There was something especially warm, especially loving, about Lionheart’s sound, and Stephanie blinked quickly. Somehow, she knew he was trying to reassure her that he was fine . . . and probably to take reassurance from her, as well.
“It’ll be fine,” she told him just a bit gruffly, reaching into the carrier’s side to stroke his ears with her forefinger while Karl popped the hatch. “It’ll be fine.”
5
“I think you’ve grown,” Bradford Whitaker said, standing just inside the apartment door.
He was a big man, and he’d put back on at least a little of the weight he’d lost on Sphinx. He’d always struck Anders as being tall, and Anders supposed he was, yet he didn’t seem quite as tall as he had, and Anders realized with something of a shock that he truly had grown in the six and a half T-months his father had been away. Not all that much, perhaps, but enough. Only it wasn’t just physical height, he thought. It was that he was older . . . and not just by six and a half months.
Anders had already recognized that their near-disastrous excursion into the Sphinxian bush had changed his relationship with his father, but he hadn’t really thought about just how it might have changed. Dr. Whitaker had not showed to advantage dealing with the consequences of their destroyed air van, Dr. Nez’s near death, the forest fire, and the swamp siren which would have killed them all without the treecats’ intervention. He’d retreated into a sort of obsessive behavior in which his decisions had been . . . suspect, to say the very least, and it was his subordinates—and his son—who’d managed somehow to keep all of them alive until rescue came.
There hadn’t been much time to talk about what had happened before Dr. Whitaker had been jammed aboard the courier boat and sent home to Urako. Frankly, Anders doubted his father had been in any great hurry to talk about it, anyway. He’d probably seen the tiny starship’s cramped isolation as an escape from the way he’d humiliated himself. But Anders knew now that he’d never be able to forget that he’d been right and his father had been wrong. That he, Anders, truly had stepped up and contributed to the expedition’s survival while Dr. Whitaker occupied himself excavating treecat waste dumps and cataloging potsherds.
And yet, as he looked at his father—at the receding brown hair, the complexion which had regained its library pallor since his departure from Sphinx—he realized something else, as well.
He wasn’t angry anymore. He’d been so mad at his father—and, he finally admitted, ashamed of him. Embarrassed by him. His father had failed him, and he’d failed in his academic responsibilities . . . and in his responsibility for the lives of his team. Kesia had told him even while it was happening that Dr. Whitaker had been suffering from “displacement.” That he’d been so overwhelmed by his own awareness of his ruinous decisions and their consequences that he’d withdrawn into that obsessive concentration on something he understood, something he could convince himself he was actually capable of dealing with. But Anders was his son, and Anders had been failed not simply by the leader of their expedition, but by his father. And that had been the true source of his anger—that sense of betrayal.
But somehow, during Dr. Whitaker’s absence, he’d gotten past it. Not completely, of course. Their relationship would never be the same again, but perhaps it didn’t have to be ruined after all.
“Maybe I have grown . . . a little,” he conceded after a moment.
“I think you have. But, you know, I think most parents really have a memory of their kids as children, no matter how old they get,” Dr. Whitaker said. “Silly, I know, but here you are, almost seventeen standard, and somehow the mental picture of you I carry around is maybe twelve.” He smiled. It was an odd, almost tentative smile, and he shook his head.
“I brought you a stack of messages from your mom,” he went on in a lighter tone. “I won’t say she’s delighted by the prospect of having you here in the Star Kingdom for at least another eight to ten months, but I told her it was being good for you. In fact, I told her something that she told me it was time I told you, too.”
His voice had turned serious once more and Anders cocked his head, wondering why.
“Told me what, Dad?” he asked.
“How proud of you I am,” Dr. Whitaker said softly.
Anders blinked. He couldn’t help it, and he felt himself staring at his father. He couldn’t help that, either, and to his astonishment, his father met his eyes levelly, his expression as serious as Anders had ever seen it.
“I screwed up, son,” he said. “I made mistakes, I almost got people—including you—killed, and it was all my own stupid fault. And after I’d made the mistakes, I didn’t know how to fix them, so I didn’t even try. I let you and Kesia and Calida and Virgil and Dacey deal with them, because . . . because I didn’t know how to.”
Anders couldn’t have been more surprised if a hexapuma had walked in the door and begun singing “Auld Lang Syne.” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard that steady, serious tone from his father. It was obvious Dr. Whitaker didn’t like saying that—admitting that—but he went on unflinchingly.
“I had a lot of time to think about it on the courier boat, and before I went to talk to the chancellor and the department chair and the faculty senate. And before I had to face your mom, too.” His voice changed slightly on the last sentence and he rolled his eyes. “If I’d been tempted to lie to anyone else about it, I knew I’d never be able to fool her. So I didn’t try, and she was just as mad at me as I expected her to be. Especially when she looked at the vids Calida made. She was ready to take my head off for putting you in a position like that, but—somewhat to my surprise, actually—she was mad at me for putting myself into it, too.
“But that was when I told her how you’d stepped in to take up the slack. I had to go over my notes, and Calida and Virgil’s, to prepare my report for the chancellor. That didn’t leave me a lot of room to fool myself, Anders. It’s all there in the record and the vids, even if I wasn’t paying enough attention at the time. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the mistakes I made, sorry for the responsibilities I dumped on your shoulders, and sorry for not being the person—the father—you needed me to be. But one thing I’m not at all sorry for.” Dr. Whitaker’s eyes met his son’s unflinchingly. “I’m not sorry that you showed me that whatever other mistakes I’ve made along the way, and however much your mom deserves the lion’s share of the credit, between us, we raised a boy who’s turned into a fine young man. One I’m prouder of than I’ll probably ever be able to tell you.”
Anders swallowed hard, feeling his eyes burn. For some reason, his father’s words—the kind of words he’d wanted to hear from him for so long—made him want to
break down and bawl.
He wanted to tell his dad that it was all right. That it didn’t matter, since everyone was safe in the end after all. That it was okay. But it wasn’t all right. His father’s apology couldn’t change the past. What had happened, had happened. It couldn’t be undone anymore than a chicken could return to the egg. And even now, he knew his father was still his father. That he was going to be himself again—focused, driven, ambitious—once he got back to work. But maybe if they couldn’t change the past, they could at least change the future. Maybe his dad really had learned something, been humbled by his experiences. He certainly sounded as if he had, and he must have been able to convince the university—and Anders’ mom!—that he had, or he wouldn’t be back here to stay. But there were limits to just how much someone could change, weren’t there?
And would I even want him to really turn into someone else completely? I mean, he is my dad, and despite everything, I really do love him. Anders shook his head mentally. Sure, he’s going to backslide. But not as far—not when he knows how much is on the line if he screws up again and that everyone in the Star Kingdom’s going to be keeping an eye on him! And if he does start screwing up again, this time I’ll have a little something to say to him about it, too.
He looked at his father for another moment or two, then gave him a smile that was only a little lopsided.
“Hey, anybody can screw up,” he said. “Even me, I guess. Maybe not quite that spectacularly, but I’ll probably find a way to do something just about as dumb sooner or later. Heck, I’m your son, aren’t I?”
Dr. Whitaker’s serious, almost somber expression, transformed into a smile and he shook his head.