Bebe (27 page)

“Humans are sentient beings,” he blurted.

Bach smiled. It was the first time Tral had ever seen the man truly, honestly smile at him. He wasn’t even showing any teeth. It was genuine and honest, and under any other circumstance, Tral would have been shocked speechless to see it. Since he was already shocked, he barely had enough collective thought to process his uncle’s having a face much less an expression.

“They aren’t animals at all,” Tral said.

Bach’s smile widened. “I know.”

“You know,” Tral echoed. He shoved his fingers through his hair. He’d done that so many times today, he was surprised he had any left at all. “You know! How can you say that so calmly?”

“I’ve had twenty-six years to become used to the idea.”

“I talk,” came Pani’s voice from somewhere off screen. Bach shifted slightly sideways to lift her onto his lap and a portion of her face rose to block out his as she peered into the monitor now, too. “Hello, Tral.”

“Hello, Pani.” Tral stared at her, the far-reaching implications of his new-found discovery leaving him deeply, profoundly disturbed. Unable to hold her steady gaze, he fixed his attention back on his uncle. “How can you keep her, knowing...what you do?”

“I went to great lengths, when I first stood as you do now, to send her back to Earth.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“What makes you think I did?” When Tral’s gaze again dipped to Pani, Bach said, “She threw herself in front of pet poachers and forced her way back to me.”

“Bad Pani,” she added, her cherubic face splitting into a well-satisfied grin. “Property of Papa, 11355921.”

Tral’s astonishment sank into dismay. “Does she even know what that means?”

“She does.”

“And you kept her?”

“It seemed the thing to do.” Bach shrugged with his eyebrows. “I also married her.”

The confession left Tral gaping. “You did not!”

“I most certainly did. It was a very quiet ceremony attended by Magistrate Remeik, himself. Of course, he was only a councilman back then, and if I recall, he also thought I was crazy. Still, to have done anything less would have reduced me to being just another pet owner. I could not reconcile my conscience to that.”

“So you married your pet,” Tral said, still shocked. He rubbed his face with both hands, staring at the monitor without really seeing it. “Your pet, who isn’t a pet at all. Do you have any idea what will happen to us when this becomes public knowledge?”

“Yes.” Bach’s smile faded a shade, the inky-black depths of his stare hardening like stone. “Why do you think I set up the Preserve? Haven’t you wondered why I picked you to be the observer—the only observer—in the entire park? Haven’t you wondered why it takes twenty-five thousand acres to house four humans and one half-ass scientist?”

“Because these are the kinds of secrets people kill to keep,” Tral realized out loud. “The pet industry alone is worth...millions.”

“This goes beyond money,” Bach told him.

Tral sat stupidly blinking at the monitor. “What’s worth more than money?”

“Power and, more importantly, the loss of it. We as a people abolished slavery more than four hundred years ago, and yet here we are, on our home world no less, oppressing an entire race of small people. It is estimated that one out of every five households has at least one pet. Stray packs roam our city streets, eating out of dumpsters, starving to death in plain sight and when they shy from a ‘helping’ hand, we call them wild. We breed them for color and docility. We take their children from them. We separate families, lovers and friends, and use them for our pleasure. If they resist, we break their spirits or put them down. I once feared we would do to Earth as we did to Kadmier, sweeping every last trace of mankind from existence out of some irrational fear they might somehow jeopardize our survival. But we have done so much worse in these last thirty years.

“They cannot go out of doors without a leash, thanks to Councilman Und’wi’s leash law. Aggressive humans who injure their owners are summarily destroyed, murdered for the crime of protesting their forced captivity thanks to the Hagn Act, pushed through congress by Senator Sa’an over twenty years ago. He’s up for re-election this year, I believe. Even the magistrate himself is not untouched by the stain of what we have become. He has known even longer than I that the intelligence lurking behind the eyes of our world’s most favorite and cherished household pet far exceeds that of any animal. Do you think Remeik will stand idly by while you forever taint his memory, tarnish all his terms of service, by making him the politician who single-handedly brought slavery back to our world? Do you think Sa’an will stand proudly at your side while humans cast off their shackles, all the while knowing that a single stroke of his pen has indirectly caused the extermination of more than 2.7 million human
people
?

“Every politician who kept a pet or wrote a law concerning them will find their public—their adoring public—turning on them as stories of pet abuse begin to find their way onto the national news. Oh, and I promise you—” Bach’s voice deepened somberly, no trace of a smile now anywhere about him. “—I promise, there will be many of them, and they will be horrific. Our propensity for cruelty has always been as boundless as our arrogance.”

“My God,” Tral said flatly. “I’m going to be killed.”

“No, you won’t,” Bach said, waving that concern aside with two fingers.

“No,
you
won’t,” Tral corrected. “You headed Central’s police division! Everybody still fears
you
!” He wilted slightly, feeling very much like a pawn. “I sincerely, sincerely regret not being feared.”

“They won’t kill you because I won’t allow it,” Bach frowned. “And because we are going to expose this to the world in such a manner that, when the news finally does break, it breaks so hard and fast as to make the truth impossible to conceal.”

“I’m dead,” Tral moaned, scraping his fingers back through his hair again. “I’m dead, and you’re insane! We’ll both be arrested as traitors—crackpot traitors—to the Central Cause! We’ll be tortured until our
bones
fall out and then—
if
we’re lucky—we’ll be shot!”

“There’s no talking to you when you get like this,” Bach tsked. “Call me when you’re done being melodramatic.”

“Why?!” Tral demanded as his uncle reached out to disconnect the call. “Why would you do this to me?! Your own flesh and blood!”

Eyebrows arching in amusement, Bach paused to grace him with yet another fond smile. “Dear boy, exactly who else
could
I do this to?”

“
Anyone
! Anyone but me!”

“Be patient, boy. Go about your work as if everything were normal. I promise, I will find a way to get us both through this with our skin and bones intact.” Chuckling, Bach disengaged the call, leaving Tral to drop his head into his hands.

He groaned. A very small hand hesitantly settled on his shoulder. Raising his head, Tral looked down at Bebe, standing quietly at his elbow and looking concerned.

Are you all right?
she signed. Softly, comfortingly, she tried to soothe him by petting his arm.

“Bebe,” he countered, pained. “Why couldn’t you have been a parrot?”

She quirked her brows at him, still petting his arm. In need of more comfort than that, he pulled her up to sit in his lap.

“Get off your feet,” he told her grumpily. Wrapping his arms around her, he cradled her close, her back against his chest, her small head resting just under his chin, and tried to think how he could get out from under the mountain of unwelcome responsibility that had just been dropped on his shoulders. His narrow shoulders. Suddenly, being condemned to crawl through endless stretches of ductwork on some distant space station didn’t seem so bad.

He sighed.

Bebe shifted her softly stroking hand from his arm to his cheek. Even more softly, she began to hum. He snorted when he recognized the lullaby and instantly regretted having done it when she fell tensely silent. Burying his face in her hair, he gave her a reassuring squeeze until gradually she began to relax again. Slowly, she stroked his cheek and then, even more tentatively, to hum. The same lullaby as before. In fact, the same short bar, softly hummed over and over again as she tried to comfort him as best she knew how.

Sighing, Tral buried his face in her hair. He closed his eyes, listening to her faint voice. The lullaby wasn’t hard to recognize, even from the partial piece of it that she kept trying to sing. Wondering if she knew any human ones—or even if humans had lullabies—any better than she knew this one, he began to hum along with her. She fell silent when they reached the end of the notes she knew and he continued on, filling in the parts she didn’t.

He hummed that lullaby twice from start to finish, and it just seemed so right to rock her while he did it. A soft and gentle side to side motion, cradling her upon his knees, with her small warm body pillowed against his chest.

Her small, warm and completely naked body.

Tral stopped, both the rocking and the humming falling still. Opening his eyes, he found himself staring down over her shoulder at the twin peaks of her breasts just above his arms, folded as they were around her waist. His palm itched to reach up and cup one.

She hadn’t been a person in his mind yet for even one full day and already he was aching to fuck her. He was more of an animal than she had ever been.

Disgusted with himself now too, Tral abruptly lifted her from his lap and stood. He set her on the chair before quickly leaving the room. He paced the hall restlessly twice before realizing just leaving the kitchen was not going to do it. He left the house, banishing himself to the frigid winter temperatures outside. He didn’t even grab his coat first but stood on the front porch, letting the snow and the wind whip around him until he was shivering and his teeth were chattering so hard it felt as if his jaw would break.

It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t anywhere near enough. He could drop to his knees right now and shovel snow by the fistfuls down the front of his pants and it still wouldn’t be enough. With an animal he had half a chance, but with a woman... There was just no way. He’d never be able to live sex-free with a naked, attractive woman who didn’t want to be close to him as much as she was conditioned to want to be.

The cold was quickly too much for him to bear remaining outside, even for the sake of self-flagellation. But as he burst back into the warmth of the house and muscled the door closed again despite the raw fury of the winter wind, one quick glance at the dining table showed it to be vacant. Bebe was gone.

Turning his head, Tral checked the small living room and was about to venture into the kitchen when a soft keening sound from the bathroom caught his attention. Walking down the hall, he tipped his ear to the door first, then opened it. She was standing at the sink, hot water flowing from the faucet, gripping the lip of the counter with one hand while using a damp cloth with the other to wash between her legs. She was sobbing, teeth gritted as she scrubbed and scrubbed. The tops of her thighs already looked red and raw.

“Bebe!” Pushing into the bathroom, Tral grabbed the cloth from her. Dropping it into the basin of the sink, he quickly shut the water off and then had to grab for the cloth again when she tried to take it back again. “Stop.”

Her hands fluttered through the air, rapidly signing who knows what. Tral only recognized one word from earlier that day. Until the day he died, he didn’t think he’d ever be able to forget it.

He grabbed her wrists, stilling her mid-sentence, and then he loomed in close to her, letting her both see and feel the full weight of his disapproval. Her tear-filled eyes grew huge and she tried to pull away, but his grip on her hands did not loosen and he only yanked her close again.

“You are not disgusting,” he said. “You ever say that to me again and I promise you, I might have to wade through ten-feet of snow first, but I will find a worthy switch and you won’t sit for a week. Now, do you understand what I just said?”

Her mouth frozen in a startled ‘o’, Bebe nodded.

“Fine.” Tral let go of her wrists and bent to pick her up. “I’m getting damn tired of telling you to stay off your feet, too.”

Carrying her into the bedroom, he set her on the farthest of the two beds. He had dug through his clothes, scattered in half-unpacked boxes throughout the room until he found the smallest shirt he owned.

“Put that on,” he told her, and then left the room. He found a soothing salve in his medical kit for her legs and tried to be as clinical as possible while he applied it, but by the time he was done he was more than ready for a punishing round two out on the front porch.

He endured almost seven fiercely-shivering, teeth-chattering minutes being buffeted by wind and a blinding storm of snow. It wasn’t quite long enough to kill his ardor, but it did bring firmly home to him one undeniable realization: He’d never last, not one week, living in such close confines with her. Not without touching her. Not without rolling her into his bed, holding her close while he touched every part of her. And especially not without succumbing to hypothermia first.

* * * * *

The house was dark and quiet. Tral lay flat on his back in bed, staring sightlessly up at the ceiling, hands folded behind his head, not in the slightest bit tired. Although relatively sure he was no longer going to be executed upon arrest, he was still much too worried to be tired.

He was worried that his computer might have been bugged and that damning call to his uncle overheard. That wouldn’t have surprised him at all, honestly. In fact, he half-heartedly expected it. Any minute now, he should see the first flashing lights of the Central police splashing across the bedroom wall and hear the slow whooop-whooop-whooop of the sirens as the transports sped their way to his front porch. That it hadn’t happened yet was not an indication that he was safe, but merely a cold reflection on the sadistic and insidious nature of the Central police. They could afford to wait. They already knew he couldn’t go anywhere. Without a transport of his own, he was as trapped on this Preserve as the humans he studied.