A Beautiful Friendship-ARC (33 page)

“Don’t worry, Steph. I’m pretty sure I can come up with one that tastes bad enough he won’t be in a hurry to repeat the experience.”

“Good,” Stephanie said, grinning up at her father. “The
last
time he ate his weight in celery, he kept me up all night!”

“He
does
like it, doesn’t he?” Marjorie Harrington observed, and her husband snorted.

“That’s sort of like saying that
I
‘like’ oxygen, Marge! I only wish I could figure out what it is about celery—
celery
, of all things!—that seems to generate such addictive behavior in every treecat.”

“As long as it doesn’t turn out to have any kind of long-term ill effects, I don’t suppose it really matters,” Marjorie said slowly. “Still, you’re right. We really do need to figure out why they all seem to crave it so much. Among other things.”

“Yeah, like why they don’t—” Stephanie began, then paused as Lionheart abruptly stopped chewing on the current celery stick.

The treecat straightened, sitting bolt upright in the highchair Mr. Flint had provided. Treecat teeth and celery made for a messy meal, and the end of his current stalk hung down in wet, well-shredded ruins as he held it in his remaining true-hand, but he wasn’t paying it any attention. Instead, he turned his head, ears more than half-flattened, and stared up the sidewalk on the other side of the low wall separating the Red Letter’s tables from the pavement.

“Lionheart?” Stephanie asked, her eyes narrowing as she took in the treecat’s stiffness. He seemed to be listening intently, focused on something human ears couldn’t hear, and he obviously wasn’t delighted with whatever had attracted his attention.

Stephanie looked up at her parents, both of whom were clearly as baffled as she was. Her father shrugged, and all three of them turned to look in the direction Lionheart was staring so fixedly.

Twin Forks was small enough for people to walk to most destinations, and the warm (for Sphinx) sunlight and deep, comfortable shade of the green belts the city planners had incorporated into the town made that the preferred mode of travel. Even a relatively small population could provide a lot of pedestrians under those conditions, especially during the lunch hour, and the sidewalks were crowded. Nothing about the various passersby seemed especially significant, though. Certainly not anything which should have fixed Lionheart’s attention so firmly, and Stephanie frowned in perplexity as the seconds trickled past, turning slowly but steadily into minutes.

Finally, after what felt like half an hour but was probably closer to five minutes, max, just as she was about to start asking Lionheart questions in an effort to figure out what was bothering him, a trio of pedestrians strolled around the corner towards the restaurant. It wasn’t hard for her to recognize Dr. Hobbard, Chief Ranger Shelton, and Dr. Bolgeo.

Lionheart saw them at the same instant she did, and again she heard that low, almost-snarl she’d heard the first time they met Dr. Bolgeo. She glanced at him quickly, then looked up at her parents.

“Do you hear that, Mom?” she asked her mother.

“Hear what, honey?” Marjorie asked, looking down at her with a frown, and Stephanie’s curiosity sharpened. Now why was
she
able to hear it when clearly neither of her parents could?

“Never mind,” she said quickly, lowering her voice slightly as Dr. Bolgeo and his other lunch guests came closer. “I’ll explain later.”

Her mother cocked an eyebrow, her expression curious, but she also nodded. That was one of the thing Stephanie loved about her mother—she knew there were times when it was better not to ask questions. And she was willing to trust Stephanie’s judgment about things like that, too.

Stephanie smiled across the table at her, then reached out and touched Lionheart gently. He looked at her, ears coming back up almost into their normal position, and made a soft sound all of them could hear.

“Time for us to behave—for
both
of us to behave,” she warned him, simultaneously concentrating hard on the thought herself. He looked back at her for another moment, and she gazed into his green eyes, hoping he’d understand the message she was trying to get across. Then he blinked and nodded in the gesture he’d learned from his human family.

I don’t think he understands
why
we have to behave, though
, she reflected,
and I don’t blame him. I’m starting to think treecats probably
do
have that “Needs Killing” rule of Scott’s! They’re obviously what Mom likes to call “direct personalities,” anyway. So maybe it’s just as well Dr. Bolgeo arranged for us to meet someplace nice and public where Lionheart’s less likely to try to rip his eyeballs out
.

Somehow, she found the possibility of the Chattanoogan’s suffering a certain degree of bruising and laceration at Lionheart’s hands rather attractive. Then she made herself put that thought away and rose and to smile politely at her host as the three adults entered the restaurant.

* * *

Well, that worked rather well, actually
, Dr. Tennessee Bolgeo congratulated himself later that same evening, as he sat studying the imagery on his hotel room’s desk terminal.

He hadn’t expected to learn very much from his afternoon’s conversation, but he’d ended up garnering a few extra tidbits after all, not so much from anything the Harringtons had offered as from interpreting comments Hobbard made. The xeno-anthropologist had obviously been putting things together for quite a while, and her contributions to the table conversation had clarified several points Bolgeo was pretty sure the close-mouthed Harringtons would have preferred to keep
un-
clarified.

That was nice, yet it wasn’t what he’d actually been after, and he carefully considered the numbers displayed in the small windows opened in the imagery in front of him. The numbers in the window in the lower right corner of the terminal were a time display from the camera which had recorded the imagery; the numbers in the window in the lower
left
corner of the terminal were from his uni-link’s GPS tracker. At the moment, that uni-link was networked to the terminal, and the computer was comparing the locator’s time-stamped record of Bolgeo’s movements to the timestamps on the video. From there, it was an easy matter for the computer to display his exact distance from the Red Letter Café at any instant.

Which was how he knew he’d been precisely one hundred and fourteen meters from the restaurant when Lionheart suddenly stopped chewing his celery and turned to stare in the very direction from which Bolgeo was approaching.

It had turned out to be less expensive than Bolgeo had anticipated. The immediate furor had died down a great deal, but the girl and her treecat remained figures of considerable interest both here on Sphinx and on Manticore, and it hadn’t been hard to convince one of the local news stringers to let him have a copy of the imagery. It had been a straightforward
quid-pro-quo
, after all. Bolgeo had explained that he really wanted an opportunity to examine video of Lionheart when Lionheart didn’t realize he was being recorded. Solely from the highest of scientific motives, of course. And the cameraman had been more than willing to let him have it in return for the advance tip about the Harrington family’s luncheon engagement with the Sphinx Forestry Service’s uniformed commander and the head of the Crown commission studying the newly discovered treecats. He’d been in place, carefully concealed at an upper-floor office window on the other side of the street, almost an hour before the Harringtons had arrived at the Red Letter, and he’d recorded every moment of their time in the restaurant.

Bolgeo had figured he’d probably have to retain a private investigator to follow the kid and the treecat to get that kind of footage, and he’d expected that to cost a pretty centicredit. There weren’t many PIs on such newly settled colony worlds, as a rule, so he’d been afraid he’d have to recruit someone from the much more populous planet of Manticore, where there were now enough people to make finding someone to sneak around and spy on his neighbors fairly straightforward. He hadn’t liked the prospect, though. The sort of PI who’d follow a fourteen-year-old girl around at the behest of an off-world stranger was also the sort who was likely to wonder why the off-worlder in question was interested in the kid. The possibility that he’d try to blackmail money out of Bolgeo in return for not mentioning his interest in Stephanie Harrington to the authorities—purely as a concerned citizen, of course!—had not seemed beyond the realm of possibility. And given most colonial planets’ attitude towards child molesters, Bolgeo was pretty sure explaining his interest to those authorities would not have been the most enjoyable experience of his life.

Instead, he’d pulled it off for no more than the cost of lunch for six humans and one treecat, which made it one of the best bargains he’d ever managed.

He ran the imagery again, checking the moment at which Lionheart had become aware of his approach for the third time, then fast forwarding to when he took his own departure. He’d excused himself early in response to a previously arranged com call, but he’d urged his guests to finish their meals at their leisure and instructed their waiter to put whatever deserts they might choose to order on the credit voucher he’d already authorized. Then he’d left . . . and Lionheart’s turned head had tracked him with unerring accuracy even after he’d vanished into the pedestrians. In fact, the treecat had looked after him until his GPS indicated he’d been one hundred and eleven meters from the restaurant.

So
, he thought now, tipping back in his chair and clasping his hands on the back of his head as he gazed up at the ceiling,
the little critter picked me up at just over a hundred meters. And he tracked me
outbound
to just over a hundred meters. So I think we can probably take his . . . “empathic detection range,” for want of a better term, as a hundred meters. Of course, that’s here in town. Twin Forks may be a podunk little burg, but there’s probably enough people around to produce a lot of . . . background noise
.

He frowned thoughtfully. There was no way to know just how distracting an empath might find the emotions of others. Would it be like trying to listen for a single voice in a roomful of talking people? Or could the treecats block out emotions they didn’t want to hear? Could they listen for a single emotional . . . fingerprint, call it, without being distracted by the other humans in the area?

Best to assume his range
is
knocked back if there are a lot of other people in the vicinity
, Bolgeo decided.
It’ll be a lot smarter to operate on the assumption that he can “hear” me—or someone else—from a lot farther away out in the woods. On the other hand, let’s not get too carried away with allowing for that. So if he could pick me up at a hundred meters here in town, let’s assume he could pick me up at . . . oh
, two
hundred meters in the bush
.

His frown turned into a smile, and he chuckled.

I can work with that
, he thought.

23

Stephanie watched the treetops slide by below as she and Lionheart floated towards the heart of his clan’s territory. Sphinx’s slow, ongoing seasons were turning those treetops steadily denser and leafier, and a part of her still wanted to slip her glider through the nearest opening in that canopy and land so that she and her companion could explore the cool, green depths of the forest. She felt all those yet unseen trees and hills and streams and creatures calling to her, and someday she would answer that call. But not today. Today she was bound for yet another visit with Lionheart’s relatives, and she’d found that the lengthy flight was a good time to think things through.

She banked slightly, compensating for a crosswind and felt Lionheart shifting his weight in tandem with her. Whatever else the link between them did, it had turned him into the ideal passenger. Maybe it was his arboreal evolution, but he seemed to possess an instinctive grasp of how to help control their flight . . . and to be aware of what she was going to do even before she was.

She smiled at the thought, but then the smile faded as she contemplated her problem. At least some of her and Scott’s friends and allies were prepared to do what they could to hamper whatever Dr. Bolgeo might be up to, yet there really wasn’t much they
could
do. Frank Lethbridge and Ainsley Jedrusinski had agreed to help keep an eye on him, but the Forestry Service wasn’t giving them much time off lately. In fact, the Interior Ministry’s pressure to provide guides for all the off-world scientists so eager for excursions into the bush in search of treecats had most of the rangers working overtime.

That could have worked for them, since having Lethbridge or Jedrusinski assigned as Bolgeo’s guide would have been the perfect way to make sure he wasn’t getting into anything he shouldn’t. Unfortunately, Bolgeo wasn’t venturing out into the bush anymore. In fact, he hadn’t been for several weeks now. In a more reasonable world, the fact that he was staying peacefully in Yawata Crossing should have made her
less
suspicious, Stephanie supposed, but not in his case.

If he’s really here to study treecats, then he ought to be out in the bush trying to
study
them, not sitting on his butt in town
, she thought grimly.
But he’s not even trying to get onto the request list for Forestry Service guides. Or hire a private guide, like Mr. Franchitti. For that matter, he’s not even pestering Dr. Hobbard anymore! So if he’s not going to be studying them, why doesn’t he just buy himself a ticket back home and leave all of us alone?

She squeezed the button on her right hand grip to bring up the holographic display from her glider’s built-in GPS. The moving map popped into existence on her helmet’s visor, transparent enough for her to see through but automatically kept centered in her field of vision as long as she held the button down, and she allowed herself a certain sense of smug satisfaction as the green icon tracked directly across the map towards her destination. Now if only the rest of her life could stay that firmly on track!