A Beautiful Friendship-ARC (21 page)

“I don’t think you want to do that, Stan,” she said simply.

He hovered, irresolute, but something inside him seemed to shrivel before the armor plating of that smile. Then he darted a look past her shoulder, where Mayor Sapristos had finally landed and was striding in their direction.

“Looks like the mayor just saved your butt, Harrington,” he hissed. “Yours and that furry little freak of yours. For
now
at least.” He gave her one last, hot-eyed glare, then turned away. “Come on, Trudy.”

He twitched his head and the two of them turned and walked away before Sapristos could get there.

“Is there a problem?” the mayor asked a moment later, looking around as Stephanie bent once again to gather up her hang glider.

“No, sir,” she replied as she straightened.

He looked at her sharply, obviously not deceived by her response, but she only looked back calmly. After a moment, he nodded.

“Good,” he said, then surprised her by reaching out and resting one hand on her treecat-less shoulder. “Good,” he repeated.

“I guess I’d better be going,” Stephanie said then, glancing at her chrono. “Dad’s going to be waiting for me. Bye, Mayor Sapristos. Guys.”

She nodded to the other teenagers, who’d watched the entire confrontation goggle-eyed, then shouldered the hang glider and headed away.

The spectators—who, she reflected, had gotten to witness rather more than they’d probably expected to—parted before her. Several of them seemed to be watching Lionheart a bit warily, but she only nodded politely to them, thanking them for getting out of her way. One of the ones she’d never met—a dark-haired boy, at least four or five centimeters taller than Stan, who looked to be a T-year or so older than she was—met her eyes squarely for a moment. Then he grinned, raised his right hand in an approving thumbs-up, and stepped aside.

Wonderful
, she thought.
Not only the entire town of Twin Forks but even people I’ve never even
seen
before are going to hear all about this. I can just imagine how
that’s
going to help convince people to listen to what I’ve got to say about the treecats
.

Yet somehow even that thought didn’t make her feel one bit less satisfied by the memory of Trudy’s spluttering.

16

“Dr. Hobbard screened this morning,” Marjorie Harrington said as Stephanie came thundering into the dining room for lunch with Lionheart in her arms. “She asked if she could come by and talk to you tomorrow. I told her”—her mom looked Stephanie in the eye—“yes.”

“Awwww,
Mom!
” Stephanie groaned, rolling her eyes.

“That’s enough of that, young lady,” her mom said firmly. “Dr. Hobbard is only doing her job—a job
somebody
has to do, which you know perfectly well. The least you can do is be polite to her.”

Stephanie glowered down at the floor for a moment, her shoulders tight with resentment. Then Lionheart made a soft, slightly scolding sound, and she shook herself. The treecat turned his head to look into her eyes, and after a moment, Stephanie drew a deep breath and nodded.

“Sorry, Mom,” she said contritely. “You’re right. It’s just . . . just . . .”

“Just that you’re sick and tired of people asking questions about Lionheart and his family.” Marjorie nodded. “That’s exactly why your father and I have laid down the law about access to the two of you. To be honest, honey, I wish we could just tell all of them you’re permanently ‘unavailable,’ but we can’t. This is too important. Besides, if you don’t talk to them at all, they’re just going to go rummaging around out there on their own, and you know how well
that’s
likely to work out!”

Personally, and despite her own experience, Stephanie wouldn’t have minded too much if some of the noisier (and nosier) “scientists” making her life a misery encountered a hexapuma. Or maybe a peak bear, although they’d have to go higher up into the mountains for that, and the peak bears were nowhere near as territorial as the hexapumas were. Still, one could hope.
. . .

“Bleek!” Lionheart said, and this time it was clearly a laugh, not a scold.

“I know, Mom,” she said out loud, looking up at her mother. “And the truth is, I don’t really mind talking to Dr. Hobbard as much as I do some of the others. At least I’m pretty sure she’s on the treecats’ side!”

“Only ‘
pretty
sure’?” Marjorie asked quietly.

“Well, that’s sort of the problem, isn’t it?” Stephanie replied, and her mother nodded. “And I guess part of it is that Lionheart and I were planning on spending tomorrow visiting his family,” Stephanie went on. “If Dr. Hobbard’s coming to visit, there won’t be time for that.”

“No, there won’t.” Her mother nodded. “On the other hand, one reason I went ahead and invited her to come out and talk tomorrow is that I don’t really like the weather forecast. I think it would probably be a good idea for you to stay home, anyway, which means we can kill two birds with one stone this way. And without costing you a day you
could
go visit them.”

It was Stephanie’s turn to nod. She hadn’t personally checked the weather forecasts yet today, but she wasn’t about to argue with her mother’s judgment. Not after what had happened the day she first met Lionheart! And she knew how lucky she was that her parents had not only decided she could use her hang glider—her
new
hang glider—to visit Lionheart’s family group, but actually encouraged her to do it.

With Lionheart to provide navigational input by the simple expedient of sitting upright in the air car’s front seat and pointing in the right direction, it hadn’t been difficult for them to locate his clan’s central settlement, and it wasn’t far from the freehold by air car. On the other hand, Stephanie had been worried from the very outset about leading other humans to them. Her exchange with Trudy had only sharpened that concern, and her parents were more than half-afraid she might have a point. They knew the Franchitti family, and her mom and dad didn’t care for them any more than Stephanie did. Unfortunately, the Franchittis weren’t as unique as the Harringtons might have wished. So until they had some sort of regularized, formal protection in place to guard the treecats against human interlopers and interference, keeping them as far below the radar as possible struck them as a very good idea. Which was the real reason her father had helped customize her replacement glider (once she was un-grounded again). With its upgraded counter-grav to boost their combined weight to a higher altitude, she could reach the clan’s settlement in no more than an hour or so, and a single hang glider was almost impossible for anyone to track without a direct visual lock.

She knew her parents had felt a qualm or two at the thought of allowing her to fly back and forth by herself, especially in light of her original venture in that direction. She also knew there were several reasons they hadn’t, including the fact that they would never have been cruel—or stupid—enough to try to keep her away from the rest of Lionheart’s family. She
had
been sternly forbidden to set foot on the ground between the freehold and her destination, and she was absolutely required to file flight plans before departure—and to demonstrate that
this
time she’d checked the weather carefully—for each trip, but after her unfortunate earlier experience, she was fine with that.

“I understand, Mom,” she said now, crossing to let Lionheart flow out of her arms and onto the sturdy perch her father had built for him.

The treecat stretched himself out along the artificial “limb,” and Stephanie grinned as his ears pricked and he sniffed happily. Lionheart approved of ham and cheese sandwiches. Despite his clearly carnivorous teeth, he even liked the thick slabs of homemade bread—most of the time, anyway. There were days when he peeled the bread away to get at the sandwich stuffings, instead. Not as many of them, anymore, since her mom disapproved of wasting food. She was just as capable of folding her arms and looking sternly at treecats as she was at daughters.

He didn’t care too much for the mustard Stephanie liked to slather thickly into her own sandwiches, and he was no great fan of sliced tomatoes, either. But he was very fond of onion—he liked his slices thick—and he’d almost swooned in ecstasy the first time he encountered Swiss cheese. They were still exploring human foods with him, and they were being a little cautious about it. Richard Harrington, in particular, was monitoring his health closely, trying to make sure he was getting what he actually needed, not just what he liked. Fortunately, treecats’ digestion seemed highly . . . adaptable, and Lionheart was willing to try almost anything at least once. Of course that inexplicable passion of his for celery posed its own problems. Adaptable or not, his essentially carnivorous digestion objected to processing that much cellulose, with predictable consequences. Fortunately it wasn’t something that couldn’t be handled with a little laxative, and her father had discovered that a local fish extract did the trick nicely. Lionheart even liked the way it tasted, although Stephanie was none too delighted by the way it made his breath smell.

Now she worked quickly to put his sandwich together. He watched attentively, head cocked and eyes bright with interest, but he didn’t offer to help. They were still working on his sandwich-constructing skills, and Marjorie Harrington had informed her daughter that they could practice on their own time—preferably during one of her picnic meals with his family. Given the messiness of his current culinary attainments, Stephanie didn’t really blame her mother for that.

Besides, cleaning up after their experiments wasn’t exactly her own favorite thing to do in all the world.

She finished assembling Lionheart’s meal, and he bleeked his thanks, then waited while she slid into her chair at the table and began building her own sandwich. The bread smelled wonderful, fresh and still ever so slightly warm from the bread machine her father filled with dough every morning. Mayonnaise, a thick layer of shaved ham, onions, mustard, tomato, slice of Swiss cheese, more ham, and a layer of lettuce to finish it off. A huge, juicy kosher dill pickle on the side, along with a hefty serving of potato salad, a spoonful or two of baked beans, and a glass of milk, and she was ready to say grace.

Some people might have considered the towering sandwich and the more-than-adult-sized serving of potato salad (not to mention the baked beans . . . with plenty of brown sugar) a bit much for a small-framed fourteen-T-year-old girl, but not if they knew about her genetically modified metabolism. It took a
lot
of fuel to keep her going, and she could put away an impressive load of calories when she put her mind to it.

Besides, she
really
liked potato salad!

* * *

“So you still don’t have any idea whether or not they use some sort of written language or recordkeeping, Stephanie?” Dr. Sanura Hobbard asked.

“No, ma’am,” Stephanie said politely, and shook her head, her expression studiously intent. “I mean, I haven’t
seen
anything like that, but that doesn’t really prove anything, does it? One way or the other, I mean.” She waved one hand around the living room in which she and Hobbard had been seated for the last three hours or so, indicating the old-fashioned bookcases on either side of the fireplace. “If somebody didn’t know what
books
were, they might not realize we’re sitting in a whole roomful of written records, right?”

“A valid point,” Hobbard acknowledged with a nod.

The xeno-anthropologist was a pleasant-faced woman in her late forties, with dark brown eyes and brown hair that verged on auburn. There was a lot of intelligence in those eyes, and Stephanie saw more than a little frustration to keep it company as she sat back in her chair.

That frustration made her feel a bit guilty. She
liked
Dr. Hobbard. She also respected her, and she knew only someone a lot stupider than Hobbard could possibly have failed to realize Stephanie wasn’t telling her everything she could have. Stephanie knew she could get away with holding back a lot by falling back on her “just a kid” persona, but that didn’t mean she liked doing it. For that matter, she was pretty sure Dr. Hobbard knew what she was doing—maybe even why—even as she continued to pretend she didn’t . . . and treated Stephanie and Lionheart courteously, as equals, anyway.

None of which was going to change Stephanie’s mind at this point.

It’s not that I don’t trust
her,
anyway
, she thought.
Or not mostly, anyway. But given who she is and why she’s here, we’ve almost got to be more careful with
her
than with anyone else!

Dr. Hobbard’s area of specialization, the study of nonhuman societies, had been hugely understaffed here in the Star Kingdom when Stephanie’s discovery of the “treecats” (and at least Stephanie’s name for them seemed to be standing up) had burst upon the scene. In fact, Hobbard was the only qualified xeno-anthropologist on Landing University’s faculty . . . which was how she’d ended up heading the Crown commission charged to explore and study this brand-new species.

Hobbard hadn’t migrated to the Star Kingdom because of her interest in xeno-anthropology, of course, since no one had even suspected the Manticore Binary System might have a native sentient species. Stephanie knew that she and her husband, like Stephanie’s own family, were part of the new wave of colonists, although they’d arrived on the planet of Manticore—the most Earthlike of the Star Kingdom’s three habitable planets, orbiting ten light-minutes closer than Sphinx to the binary system’s G0-class primary star—twenty-three T-years ago.

The Star Kingdom had originally started subsidizing immigration in 1489, although it hadn’t been easy to attract new settlers at first, even with the subsidies. The Plague had first appeared in 1464 Post Diaspora, but its threat hadn’t been recognized until its first mutation, sixteen T-years later. When
that
happened, people had begun dying within T-months. Worse, the Plague virus had entered a period of rapid, frequent mutations, which had complicated the vaccine researchers’ task horribly. It had taken almost four more dreadful years, until 1484, to come up with a vaccine that worked, and by then the Manticore System’s population had been reduced to a level which threatened the colony’s very survival.