A Beautiful Friendship-ARC (16 page)

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

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, anywa
y.

“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.”

14

“I wish I could say any of that had come as a surprise,” Richard Harrington said as the family air car headed back towards the Harrington freehold.

“
I
wish he wasn’t so darned . . .
reasonable
about it all,” Stephanie replied.

“Well, he makes a lot of sense, too, Steph,” Marjorie Harrington pointed out. “It’s hard not to sympathize with him, you know.”

“That’s what I meant.” Stephanie sighed, gazing out the side window and stroking Lionheart where he lay across her lap. “I still think he’s wrong, but I think he’s being as reasonable about it as he thinks he can be. Lionheart thinks that, too.”

Her parents glanced at one another. It was hard to remember sometimes that Lionheart had come into their lives barely sixteen T-months ago. In fact, it often seemed he’d always been part of their family. Yet other times they were forcibly reminded of how short sixteen months truly were, and seldom more so than when Stephanie said something like that. There seemed to be absolutely no doubt in her mind that she was correctly interpreting Lionheart’s emotions. For that matter, having watched the two of them together, Richard and Marjorie were of the opinion that she usually
did
interpret them correctly. But was that simply because she was getting better at reading his body language? Or was . . . something else at work?

Stephanie was aware of what her parents were thinking, and she fully understood the reasons for the skepticism of many of the adults she and Lionheart had encountered. Despite which, she
knew
she was reading the treecat’s emotions correctly.

Exactly how treecats communicated with one another was only one of the countless unanswered questions about the newly discovered species. No one had paid them a lot of attention at first (since no one had really seemed to believe her story in the first place) but then, over the next four or five T-months, Dr. MacDallan and Mr. Erhardt had encountered treecats as well.

Even then, belief had been slow to grow, but the rest of the galaxy had made up for that in a hurry over the last few T-months. Stephanie had more motivation than most to keep up with the published speculation of the xeno-anthropologists and xeno-biologists beginning to swarm to study them, and because of her relationship with Lionheart, her family was under constant pressure to allow those same xeno-anthropologists and xeno-biologists to study
her
. In fact, they’d hounded her so persistently—with the very best of intentions, of course—that her parents finally laid down the law and strictly limited their access to her and Lionheart. Richard and Marjorie Harrington wanted to understand treecats just as badly as anyone else possibly could, but (as they’d pointed out rather acidly to the more persistent members of the scientific community) Stephanie wouldn’t even be fourteen for another five T-months, and they had no intention of allowing the scientific community to drive her crazy before she got there.