A Beautiful Friendship-ARC (28 page)

“Exactly! That’s why it’s so important to make sure nobody can do that to the treecats!”

“I agree. But right now, there aren’t a lot of humans on Sphinx, which means there aren’t going to be that many people suddenly worrying about what happens to the land they’re actually living on. Most of the planet is still public domain, too, which means it belongs to the Star Kingdom as a whole, not to individual people.
Except
that there are land speculators over in Landing and here in Yawata Crossing, who’ve already acquired options on some of it.”

“Options?” Stephanie repeated.

She didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, but the City of Landing on the planet of Manticore was the Star Kingdom’s capital. Yawata Crossing was the current planetary capital here on Sphinx, though there was talk of moving the Planetary Parliament to the more central city of Tillingham. But anyone living in either of those places right now would have ready access to their system or planetary parliaments. And that, she thought sinkingly, meant politics were going to be involved somehow. She didn’t know a lot about politics—yet—but she’d learned enough in her history classes to know politics could always be counted on to make a bad situation worse.

“It was an idea the government came up with during the worst of the Plague,” Irina explained. “Before the colonists ever left Old Earth, Roger Winton took everything the expedition had managed to scrape together and hadn’t spent on the cryo ship and supplies and invested it. It wasn’t all that much compared to what they’d already invested, but since it took better than six hundred and forty T-years for the ship to get here, that investment had a
lot
of time to earn interest. By the time
Jason
got to Manticore, that ‘minor’ investment had grown into an enormous sum. Most of the colonies hadn’t bothered with anything like that, since the whole object was to leave Old Earth (and everything on it) behind forever. Besides, it would have taken centuries for light-speed ships in normal-space to make the trip back to the Sol System to
do
anything with money invested there, anyway. But King Roger—only he wasn’t king then, of course—suspected that somebody might make a breakthrough into a practical commercial hyper-space drive that made faster-than-light travel practical for
everybody
, not just survey ships, while his expedition was on its way. In that case, money back on Old Earth might come in handy, after all.”

She shrugged.

“Obviously, he was right about that, and Manticore wound up a whole lot better off than the vast majority of colonies because of that. And it helped a lot when the Plague hit, too—helped pay to bring in doctors and researchers, helped fund the immigration program and the land credits. But even with the Star Kingdom’s investments back on Old Earth, we were really strapped for funds at the height of the Plague. We needed cash to pay for supplies, medicines, all kinds of stuff, from people out
here
, and it’s five and a half T-months from here to Old Earth one-way, even for a high-speed courier boat in hyper-space. Some of the people we needed things from weren’t real eager to wait around for eleven T-months until money could be requested from the Sol System and then transported out here to pay them, so the government decided to raise cash locally by selling options on public lands.”

“But what
kind
of options?” Stephanie asked. “You mean they sold off public lands? That’s not what they told me in school!”

“Because that’s not exactly what they
did
,” Irina said. “Some of the land and mineral rights here on Sphinx have already been assigned, even if no one’s tried to develop them yet. They’re
not
public lands anymore; they were deeded over to first-shareholders from the original colony fleet.

“Of course, some of those people died without heirs during the Plague Years, and their lands and rights have reverted to the Crown, so those are back in the public lands category. Other first-shareholder grants are like my brother’s land—or my husband’s and mine. Or like the land that’s been distributed under the immigration incentive program, like your parents’ freehold, for that matter. It’s already been settled, claimed, and proved, so that’s not public land anymore, either.

“But what
does
still come under the ‘public lands’ heading is the better than ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the planet that hasn’t been distributed or sold yet. What the Crown
did
sell was the option to be first in line to buy public lands when they
are
sold. The idea was always that, ultimately, except for a modest wilderness reserve, most of the land on all three habitable planets here in the Manticore system would end up in private hands, you know, Stephanie. Given their climates—and gravity wells—Manticore itself is the obvious first prize, which is why something like seventy percent of its land and mineral rights have already been distributed. Sphinx is attractive, too, but mostly to people like your family and Scott’s, who are . . . particularly well-suited to heavy-gravity planets, let’s say. Gryphon’s generally considered the consolation prize, though, since it orbits the system’s other stellar component which puts it a long way from Manticore and Sphinx. And then there’s its climate.”

She made a face, and MacDallan chuckled. Stephanie hadn’t really paid that much attention to Gryphon, yet, but what she’d seen about its seasons—exceptionally violent, thanks to its extreme axial tilt—suggested Irina was right about that!

“Anyway,” Irina resumed, “Sphinx is where most of the
desirable
undistributed land is located. So everybody’s figured all along that eventually the public lands here would mostly be sold, probably at pretty good prices when the time finally comes. What the government did to raise cash during the emergency was to allow people to put down a relatively tiny payment—only about four or five cents on the dollar, actually—for chunks of land so that they’d be guaranteed the
first
chance to buy that land whenever it finally goes on the market. There’s a little more to it than that, including a provision that the government agrees to discount the price for option-holders—by up to forty percent of the current market value, in some cases—at the time it goes up for sale. So, especially since the option prices were based on the land’s
current
value, not what it’s going to be worth when there are hundreds of thousands or even millions of people ready to bid against each other for it, the people holding those options stand to make a
lot
of money on their initial investment.”

“But at the rate people are settling on Sphinx, most of the people who bought the options will be
dead
by the time the government gets around to selling all that land!” Stephanie protested.

“Of course they will. But in the meantime, the options can be sold and traded just like any other property or investment, and they have been. Not only that, but their value can be expected to do nothing but increase over the long term. So what Scott is getting at is that if the government decides the entire planet belongs to the treecats, there are going to be people—quite a lot of them, in fact—who will suddenly find that the options they’ve invested in are worthless. And since options like that tend to end up in the hands of professional speculators, the people that could happen to are likely to already have a lot of money . . . and a lot of political influence. If the government wants to give Sphinx back to the treecats, they aren’t going to like it very much, and it’s possible some of them will decide to use that money and influence of theirs to keep it from happening.”

Stephanie’s eyes widened in horrified understanding, and Lionheart reared up on the back of her chair, hissing, ears flattened as he sensed her distress.

“I don’t think anyone’s going to really believe the Crown’s likely to declare the entire planet off limits to everybody else, no matter how intelligent it decides treecats are, Stephanie!” MacDallan said quickly. “And it’d probably take something that radical to start any organized effort to turn them into more Amphors anytime soon.”

“But if people start thinking they
are
that smart, then some of those option holders you’re talking about
are
liable to think that!” Stephanie protested. “You know they are!”

“Maybe,” MacDallan agreed, “but they’re going to try to limit the damage first—restrict how
much
of the planet might be set aside for the treecats—not go directly to an all-out ‘exterminate the little monsters’ campaign. And that would probably be a more workable approach for them in the first place. Just like there aren’t all that many two-legged people on Sphinx yet, there aren’t all that many
treecats
here, either, unless I’m sadly mistaken. If I’ve understood what Hobbard’s been telling me correctly, she’s thinking they’re only just beginning to make the transition from a basically hunter-gatherer society to one that grows its own food, and that means their population can’t be anywhere near as dense as a human population might be. So I doubt they’re going to need the entire planet no matter what happens. I imagine the government’s going to see it that way, anyway. And let’s be fair, here, the people who traveled all the way out here to build new homes for themselves, new lives for their families, do have a legitimate interest in what happens to the land here on Sphinx. So I doubt most of the speculators Irina’s talking about are likely to find themselves really desperate when the time comes.

“That doesn’t mean there won’t be
any
opposition to setting a good-sized chunk of the planet aside for the treecats, though. That’s what I think we need to be concerned about. What we want to happen—what I think we need to be working for—is to see to it that when those public lands we’ve been talking about are finally sold, the treecats are guaranteed enough of the planet for them and their children and their children’s children.”

“But how do we do that?” Stephanie asked, gathering Lionheart into her arms as she—and the treecat—calmed down again.

“I’m not sure about that,” MacDallan admitted. “Not yet. It’s going to be tricky, especially since the original colonization charter gave most of the authority to the local planetary governments when it comes time to deal with this particular question. And if the planetary administrations exercise that authority, then two-thirds of the revenue generated from the sale of the lands go to the
planetary
governments, not to the system government. That’s going to make a lot of planetary administrators feel mighty greedy, and I’m not sure where that provision stands under the new Constitution. I’m inclined to doubt that anyone really wants to push real hard to find out at the moment, either.

“But the point I was trying to make is that there probably are people who are going to feel economically threatened if somebody suddenly starts making noises about handing the entire planet over to its ‘indigenous intelligent species.’ At this point, no one’s really worried about those ‘cute, fluffy’ little treecats of yours. Or, at least, I don’t think they are. And we need to keep it that way as long as we can, because no matter what we do, sooner or later, the people who stand to lose all that money are going to wake up to the fact that they do. I think we need to keep them from realizing that long enough for us to get as many protections—and as much good publicity—as possible for the treecats in place before anybody does start organizing a political campaign to turn them into Sphinx’s Amphors.”

Stephanie looked at him for several more seconds, then nodded slowly and looked at her parents.

“That’s what you and Mom have been thinking about, isn’t it, Dad?”

“More or less,” Richard admitted, glancing at Marjorie. “It sounds to me like Scott’s been giving it a lot of thought, too, though, and I’m inclined to agree with him. On the other hand,” he looked back at MacDallan, eyes narrowing slightly, “I’m also inclined to wonder about something you said earlier, Scott. Something about
knowing
the treecats are even smarter than anyone else thinks. Would it happen that however it is you come to know that has you particularly worried?”

“In a way,” MacDallan admitted.

Then he paused, visibly steeling himself, and Fisher raised his head. He put his triangular chin on his person’s shoulder, leaning his whiskered muzzle against MacDallan’s cheek, and crooned encouragingly. MacDallan’s expression eased slightly, and he pressed his cheek back against the treecat and looked back at Richard.

“The thing is, I’m afraid that if the people who might worry about treecats staking a claim to all of Sphinx realized how smart they
really
are, they might be panicked into taking some kind of . . . preemptive action after all. Or worse.” His expression tightened again, although not as much as it had before. “It’s bad enough to think about having xeno-anthropologists poking and prodding at them in their native environment, but if anyone ever
confirms
that they’re genuine telepaths—extremely
capable
telepaths—then every black-ops genetic lab in the galaxy is going to want treecat
specimens
so they can figure out how it works. And that doesn’t even consider how the ‘fear factor’ could play into the hands of anyone who wants to sweep them out of his way here on Sphinx. Your family’s from Meyerdahl; mine’s from Halakon. We know how much prejudice there is against human genies, how many times stupid people have started rumors about genies’ ‘sinister powers.’ You think that kind of crap wouldn’t be used against ‘evil telepathic treecats’ if it worked to get them out of someone’s way?”

“And you’re saying it
would
work?” Richard asked slowly. “That they really are—what was it you called them? ‘Extremely
capable
telepaths’?”

“Yes, they are.”

“And you know this because—?”

“I know it because I’ve got ‘the sight,’ ” MacDallan sighed. He managed a particularly crooked smile. “Runs in my family—Highland Scots, you know.” He shrugged. “My grandmother, God rest her soul, could be five thousand kilometers away when one of her kids or grandkids broke an arm, and it would turn out she’d already been in the air headed for the hospital before he did it. That kind of thing.”