Pets: Bach's Story (2 page)

“As I was saying,” Ralhan coughed out a nervous half-laugh. “He, uh…he’s not pet quality. Much too aggressive. Maybe too much even to place him in a breeding program. Wild ones like that have been known to hurt the females.”

“What are you going to do with him?” Bach asked, stepping back from the glass when the agitated male began to beat and kick his confining walls.

“If we can tame him down, we’ll sell him to a breeding facility. If not,” Ralhan shrugged one shoulder and left the rest unsaid before moving on.

A thin cloudy mist began to pour into the room from a ceiling vent. The male dropped immediately to his knees when he saw it. He covered his mouth and nose with both hands, but the mist continued to fill the room in a fog of sedation. Within seconds, the male’s hands dropped one after the other from his face to the floor. Slowly, limply, he rolled from his knees onto his side and simply lay there.

A half a dozen rooms down, Ralhan announced proudly, “This is the first of the females that I have lined up to show you.”

Bach walked to his side and looked through the viewing window.

“She’s the smallest pet we’ve got. Slender and graceful, her brown skin is unblemished and smooth. She has magnificent eyes. Notice the slant, and how the color matches her mane—”

“No dark pelts,” Bach said the instant he looked in the window at the sleeping female.

Dark manes made the animals look too much like people. The female even wore hers short, much like Laan had. The last thing he wanted was a pet who’d remind him of his wife and children every time he looked at her.

“No dark manes.” Ralhan blinked in at the little female in surprise, but Bach had already turned away and continued on without him. “Well…that takes care of the next one then, too. All right, this way.”

The consultant led him all the way to the end of the hall and turned the corner. Bach counted six more aisles just like this one, all linked together like a grid of single-doored cages.

Ralhan skipped the next aisle and turned down the third.

“This next one is one of my favorites. She’s a pleaser, so personable and sweet tempered.”

They stopped in front of a viewing door and Bach found himself looking in at a plump blonde. She immediately jumped up from where she was sitting by the wall and trotted over to the window. Grasping the ledge, she jumped twice, trying to get her head up high enough to see them, then consigned herself to pressing one hand to the bottom of the window, so high above her head.

Ralhan tickled her fingers through the glass. “Yellow mane, blue eyes. There’s not an aggressive bone in her body. So far, she’s only earned herself one really good bottom smacking, and that was during the first week of her introduction here. She has been a model of good behavior ever since. A very low maintenance pet in that regard. Very sweet.” Ralhan looked at Bach and in a conspiratory voice said, “But dumb as a bag of rocks. We’ve had her a year and she’s only mastered one word: hello.”

The female wiggled her fingers over to Bach’s side of the window, and he obligingly tapped at them through the glass. He smiled when he saw her mouth moving, a welcoming greeting without so much as a whisper of sound heard through the door.

“She’s a possibility,” he said, admiring her mane and her eagerness as she tried one last time to jump high enough to see him above the bottom edge of the viewing window. “Let’s see the rest.”

They moved on to the next aisle.

“Too dark?” Ralhan asked, stopping in front of the door to a lanky brunette, sitting in the middle of the room, picking at her toes.

“Yes,” he said.

Ralhan took him to another blonde.

Sitting in the far back corner of her cage, hugging her knees to her chest, she glanced up once when Bach peered in at her through the door, then turned her face to the wall.

“We’ve only had her a few months,” the consultant said. “She’s a relatively high-maintenance pet. She requires close supervision, is somewhat high strung, quick to temper, but highly predictable. Any rules you lay down for her, go ahead and plan for her to break. So long as you’re watching her, she’ll make attempts at obedience, but I personally wouldn’t trust her to remain so once you’ve left the room. She’d probably do better in a breeding program than a recreational one, but she has begun to make a few small gestures towards appeasing the staff.

She knows how to say ‘hello’, ‘I’ll be good’, and ‘no’. Naturally, she uses ‘no’ a lot.”

“She’ll be something of a challenge, in other words,” Bach said.

“Some people like that,” Ralhan said. “I’ll even be the first to admit, a little naughtiness does make them more interesting companions. It shows they’re thinking, constantly trying to figure us out. The highlight of my day has always been walking through my front door and hearing about all the little misbehaviors my pets got into while I was at work.”

Bach made a noncommittal sound, and the female turned all the way around so that her back was to them.

“She’ll need socializing,” Ralhan said. He tapped his fingers together apologetically before moving off down the hall.

“Mm,” Bach said again.

“Here is the darling little female I was telling you about earlier,” Ralhan called out.

Two doors down on the opposite side of the hall, the consultant beckoned him up to the viewing window of another narrow room, a small smile on his face. “This is the one I wanted to show you. Isn’t she beautiful?”

For the first time, there was no nervousness in the consultant’s manner or tone. Quiet passion, spoken from the heart of a species specific connoisseur, had taken its place.

Bach walked over to the door and looked inside.

Covered only to the waist by a thin blanket, she lay curled in a fetal position on her side with a number of diodes attaching her to a machine, its blinking lights busily monitoring her heart rate and breathing. She was fast asleep. Her long mane had been twisted into a single braid of copper-red strands that swept down over one small shoulder to partially hide her face. Her breasts were little more than small mounds, crowned by tiny pink nipples, and her limbs were very thin, only a third the size of his, and rather frail looking. Someone had tucked a stuffed toy into the crook of one arm to look as though she were hugging it, but it was obvious that she hadn’t been awake enough to move for some time.

“She’s still under sedation,” Ralhan said softly. “Poor thing had a reaction to the tranquilizer during shipping. She was sick all night long. Her stomach will likely be tender for a while.”

“She’s very tiny,” Bach said.

“Not even six feet in height,” Ralhan told him. “Five-seven, I believe her measurement was. I can check on the chart, if you like. Although that height is about normal for the females of the human species.”

“Is that all the bigger she’ll grow?”

“Oh, yes. Though young, she is a fully adult specimen.” The consultant’s smile widened.

“We rarely get a female with such vibrant coloring. At least not when said color is genuine.

Sometimes their manes don’t match their pelts when they first arrive. I don’t know if it’s something they eat in their natural environment, which they simply don’t get here, maybe something that affects their pigmentation. Whatever the reason, natural manes like hers are very rare. And look closely. Do you see them? She’s got spots.” Ralhan grinned excitedly. “Spots! Not just one or two, either; she’s got them everywhere. An absolutely gorgeous little female! Very wild, of course. We haven’t had a chance to handle her yet. But with patience and consistency, and utilizing the proper training methods, naturally, I’m sure you’ll have her tamed in no time at all.”

Bach’s breath fogged the glass as he moved closer to the door.

“Loving discipline,” Ralhan said fondly. “I’ve got two of my own, so I know. They respond very well to a firm hand, so long as that hand is also tender. It’s like having a perpetual two-year-old running though the house. They’re very intelligent, very curious, and tend to misbehave when not watched closely.

“My first pet, Minmin, I’ve had now for six years. She’s got a vocabulary of almost two hundred words and phrases, although she understands just about anything you say to her. She pretends not to, of course, the naughty little thing. That should tell you how smart they can be.

Mischievous, too. Not a week goes by when my wife isn’t forced to take her across her knee and just paddle—” Ralhan’s eyes slid to Bach as if for one startled moment he suddenly realized to whom he was talking. He steepled his fingers and bowed, stepping back from the door. “Your pardon, Sir Bauer. I could talk about my pets all day. Sometimes I forget this is about you and getting to know your own.”

“Not at all,” Bach said sincerely. “I have read that they can be difficult unless kept on a short leash. You are a man with six years experience on the subject. Please go on.”

Ralhan blinked twice. Then a smugly pleased expression melted across his features and his chest puffed out. “What would you like to know, Sir Bauer?”

“When I spoke with Remeik, he claimed both his male and his female pets were cuddlebugs for affection. But the books I’ve read say you shouldn’t devote more than an hour or two of your attention to them per day, or they could become spoiled.”

“Not true,” the consultant said with a shake of his head. “They can’t be spoiled. Not from affection alone. Pets are like children. Beyond meeting their basic physical needs, like food, shelter, etc., they need to be loved and disciplined. A happy and well-mannered pet—in my humble opinion—is one enshrouded by rules and boundaries, cause and consequences. Those kept on a tight leash are always the ones with the fewest behavioral problems. Apart from their natural naughty tendencies, that is. You’ll never break them of that, but that’s also what makes them interesting.”

Bach inclined his head, watching as the tiny fingers of her right hand flexed once. “How naughty is this one?”

“Much too soon to tell. We only received her last night, you see.” Ralhan leaned over his shoulder, smiling as he peered in through the door’s viewing window. “Have you ever seen anything so dainty? And her eyes, she opened them briefly yesterday when they brought her off the ship. Slate grey. Lovely long lashes. She actually tried to reach for me. Oh, but she was so sick. Poor thing.”

“May I go inside?”

“I knew you’d like her.” Ralhan looked inordinately pleased with himself. “But of course!

She’s quite safe. We do ask that you wash your hands before handling her, naturally, since the poor thing isn’t well. But how else are you to know if this pet’s the right one for you, if you don’t see her up close?”

Inside the room, high up on the wall was a single narrow shelf with an assortment of bottles. At eight-foot-two himself, Bach had to reach to take down the solution of waterless antibacterial soap. As he rubbed the liquid on his hands, he looked from the shelf to the tiny human female sleeping on the floor in the back of the room. “Can they jump that high?”

The agent chuckled. “No, no. As a species, they aren’t accomplished jumpers. But some can reach fairly high up. As I’ve said, they can be quite intelligent, especially when getting into mischief. We had one, he put his hands on one wall and his feet upon the other, and just walked himself up to the ceiling. We couldn’t see him through the viewing window and thought he’d escaped. He did escape, of course, when the staff member left his cage door open while he ran to get the manager on duty. We caught the little beast before he left the building, certainly, but it shows how smart they can be.”

As the solution dried upon his hands, Bach crossed the narrow room to kneel beside the sleeping pet. Her hand next to his was positively tiny in comparison, and she did indeed look very dainty. Very much like a child, but with a musky scent that was pleasant and not too strong.

“She looks like a pigmy person,” he mused, gently unfurling her fingers to look at her nails. Very sharp. They’d need to be trimmed to keep her from scratching him, either accidentally or otherwise.

“If one had to judge from appearances alone,” Ralhan said, then nodded. “Yes, I suppose she does. But intelligent though they may be as a whole, they aren’t quite as smart as we are.

Minmin, my first pet, speaks very well for her species. She uses phrases that make sense and at appropriate moments in conversation, which makes me think she might have some sort of comprehension ability. But it’s limited, to be sure. She’ll never progress beyond the level of a nine-or a ten-year-old child, and that’s likely an optimistic assumption on my part that she’ll even get to be that high. It’s remarkable how much they do look like real people, but it’s important not to forget, pets are animals. Nothing more or less.”

The little pet’s hand closed around two of his fingers, faintly squeezing. Thin lines of copper-red hair above each of her closed eyes quirked together, arching upwards as she made a soft gasping sound in her drugged sleep.

Brushing back from her forehead a wayward wisp of copper that had escaped her braid, Bach then folded back her blanket and looked at her.

“Lovely spots,” Ralhan said, as Bach smoothed a hand down over her shoulder, down the dip of the waist and over the curve of her haunch.

Animal though she was, she looked almost exactly like any other proper female he’d ever met. Her skin was smooth and soft and a healthy shade of pink. A little bald, though, except for a downy red swath that crowned her genitalia.

“I’ll take her,” he decided aloud.

Ralhan clapped his hands together in his exuberance and bowed low. “A beautiful specimen, deserving of a loving home, to which she’s going, of course, of that I have little doubt!”

Bach picked her blanket up and lay it back over her, carefully tucking the edges around her.

“We’ll bring her safely out of sedation and then you can take her home. Oh, happy day!”

Ralhan said as he turned and walked out of the room. “A breeder was scheduled to come in later today, too. While I would love to see other pets with her magnificent coloring and spots, I was so hoping someone would take her home as a recreational pet instead. No brutish male mountings and frequent impregnations for her, no sir! She’s much too sweet for that.”