Fire Season-eARC (15 page)

Adults were arriving now. Anders was delighted to meet Scott MacDallan and Fisher, “his” treecat. MacDallan proved to be the red-haired man he’d seen rushing toward what had seemed like Stephanie’s inevitable crash—not a big surprise, since he was a medical doctor. The stocky woman with brown hair proved to be both Scott’s wife and Karl’s aunt, Irina Kisaevna, a very nice woman. Ranger Lethbridge came, making apologies for his partner, Ranger Jedrusinski, and saying that he couldn’t stay for dinner.

“We drew straws for fire watch,” he said, “and she lost. I’ve promised to bring her a dry crust or two for consolation.”

“We can do better than that,” Stephanie promised, and immediately started piling a plate with finger foods to set aside. “Mom won’t want me to cut the cake yet, but I’ll bring you both some tomorrow.”

One by one, the members of the hang-gliding club emerged, each dressed in some interesting variation on formal wear. Karl, it turned out, actually owned a tuxedo, and looked very dashing in it. Toby’s outfit consisted of flowing robes made from a pale golden fabric that set off his dark skin and flowing black hair to perfection. He seemed momentarily shy about his attire until Christine and Jessica started gushing about how they wished Star Kingdom clothes were as elegant. Chet wore something less flashy, but still quite respectable.

The girls all looked pretty good, Anders thought. Trudy—predictably, he thought, although he’d only known her for something like an hour—wore a pink-and-lavender gown with both slit seams on the sides
and
a plunging neckline. She claimed it was an ancestral costume from Old Earth itself.

Christine and Stephanie both wore slacks and blouses, a simpler variation on the Star Kingdom tuxedo. The cummerbunds showed off trim waists and made an asset of their relative lack of busts. Jessica emerged arrayed in frothy layers of silk and taffeta in pale yellow and green touched with hints of white lace.

“It’s actually my mom’s,” she explained shyly. “Neo-Victorian was all the rage on our last planet.”

Talking about clothing inevitably led to discussion of birthday customs. Toby admitted that his culture didn’t even celebrate birthdays.

“We celebrate Saint’s Days instead. Mine is Saint Tobias.”

Christine, Chet, Karl, and Trudy all proved to have been born on Sphinx.

“My father was one of the first children born on Sphinx,” Trudy boasted. “For a while, his birthday was practically a planetary holiday.”

“There were problems with childbirth initially,” Scott MacDallan agreed. “The heavier gravity and air pressure made it difficult for women to carry to term. However, now, between nanotherapies and wider use of counter-gravity, more and more pregnancies are successful.”

Karl added. “I remember when Scott was delivering my little brother Lev. A treecat showed up at the door all beat up. Scott ended up going to the rescue.”

“And leaving your mother to suffer?” Trudy sounded genuinely shocked.

“It wasn’t quite like that,” Scott MacDallan said. He might have explained further, but Irina called to him from the house.

“Scott! We need a surgeon to carve the roast.”

Most of the adults seemed to take this as a summons to dinner but, perhaps because Stephanie stayed outside, perhaps because there was still finger food, the younger guests lingered near the appetizers.

Trudy took a step toward Stephanie, but her gaze rested on the males in the group.

“There’s an important Star Kingdom tradition we haven’t followed for our birthday girl’s special day,” Trudy said, her voice filled with teasing laughter. “She hasn’t had her spankings.…”

Something in the way Trudy said “spankings” made Anders feel she’d said something a lot more risqué. Maybe it was the way she winked at him when she said it.

“In my family,” Trudy continued, “the guys hold the birthday girl and then the girls give the whacks—one for each year. If she can take it without crying out, then she’ll be lucky all year.”

“My family doesn’t do that,” Christine protested.

Karl looked uncomfortable, so Anders was willing to bet that his family practiced some variation of the rite. Chet was shifting restlessly from foot to foot. Clearly, Trudy might be overselling her point, but she wasn’t flat-out lying.

“Well, you may have been born here,” Trudy said to Christine, “but your family is relatively new. Mine is tough, pioneer stock. We don’t have any use for wimps and pansies. I’m sure Stephanie doesn’t either. After all, she goes around slaying hexapumas with her bare hands, if we’re to believe the stories.”

Stephanie looked both angry and somehow trapped. Lionheart, pressed against her leg, his ears canted in concern. Anders could see that Stephanie didn’t want to be taken as anything less than tough, but the idea of being held down and hit on didn’t appeal either.

Trudy smiled silkily. “So, Stephanie. Are you up to showing you’re a real Sphinxian girl?”

At that moment, Dr. Richard came to the door. “Are you all waiting for individual invitations? Soup’s on!”

“Saved by the bell…” Trudy murmured softly. “But then our Stephanie is always getting saved, isn’t she? What a lucky girl.”

No one replied, but more than one pair of eyes strayed to where Lionheart, his scars and mutilations all too evident, testified to the price of Stephanie’s “luck.”

Anders noticed that Stephanie was the one who looked the longest.

*
 
*
 
*

As dinner progressed, Stephanie realized she was enjoying her birthday party more than she had thought possible. Yeah…Trudy was there, but so were Chet, Christine, Toby, and Karl. Jessica had surprised Stephanie by not sucking up to Trudy (who had already been there when Jessica arrived), but by making herself part of the general crowd. And, best of all, Anders was there.

The weather for hang gliding had been great. Her folks had given her one of their gifts early—a modified harness that made Lionheart’s flight experience safer, while at the same time allowing Stephanie to “trim” the treecat’s weight more efficiently.

She’d used it to pull off the spectacular dive that had gotten her around Trudy. She was still flushed by the exhilarating experience, enough that she just might have taken her “spanks” if Dad’s call to dinner hadn’t saved her the humiliation. Right then, she’d felt like she could take anything.

Or
was
it the hang gliding that had her so high? Stephanie tried not to make her interest too obvious, but Mom had seated Anders Whittaker across the table from her, just one seat over. He looked really, really good in the green-and-cream tunic and trousers he wore, but even more admirable—because he couldn’t help being hot—he was doing a great job holding his own in a conversation with a bunch of near strangers.

Stephanie had been given a great excuse to look at Anders a lot during the first course. This featured extra-long noodles in a sesame-oil sauce served over near-lettuce, a leafy plant native to Sphinx that tasted like Romaine lettuce with a light hint of onion. The taste combination was one of Stephanie’s favorites, but the extra-long noodles were a birthday tradition on the Harrington side of the family.

“You need to eat the noodles without cutting them,” Richard Harrington explained as he expertly demonstrated how to twirl them around paired chopsticks. “The long noodles are symbolic of long life, so you don’t want to cut the noodles in case you cut off your own life! We’ve provided a variety of tools, so give it a try.”

Everyone did, with lots of giggles and a few protests when a noodle seemed to develop a life of its own. Stephanie wished she was sitting next to Anders, so she could demonstrate, but watching him—he proved to be a dab hand with chopsticks—was nearly as good. He had great lips. She found herself wondering what they’d be like to kiss.

As the noodle plates were cleared away, Irina turned to Anders.

“Dr. Hobbard,” Irina said, “has already interviewed Scott and Stephanie, who are the only living humans to have been adopted by treecats. She took advantage of the proximity of the two treecats Richard kept here for rehab after that business with Bolgeo to collect even more information. What does your father hope to add?”

Stephanie thought a lesser person than Anders would have been offended by the aggressive note that underlay the question. Stephanie knew she probably would have been, since it implied that the xenoanthropological team had nothing new to offer.

Irina was a really sweet person, but she knew how wearing being continually cross-examined could be, and she was protective of both Scott and Fisher—and probably of Stephanie and Lionheart, too. Clearly, she saw the arrival of Dr. Whittaker as more trouble for her favorite people.

However, Anders didn’t show the least sign of being offended by the question. He began by telling a bit about each of the specialists his father had brought with him, going on to explain how each individual would contribute something new to human understanding of treecats.

“Dr. Hobbard,” Anders concluded, “has and had other responsibilities than the treecats. She’s Chair of the Anthropology Department at Landing University on Manticore, for one. Although she does have xenoanthropological experience, it would be too much to expect her also to be a linguistics expert like Ms. Guyen or a specialist in anthroarcheology like my dad.”

Trudy’s voice, polite as could be, added when Anders paused, “My dad says the fact that Dr. Hobbard is associated with Landing University makes her biased. He says that Dr. Hobbard has too much invested in
wanting
Sphinx—and that means the Star Kingdom—to be the place where another intelligent life-form is discovered. Dad says that one reason he agreed to an outside team being sent in was because he felt a team from another system wouldn’t share that bias and so could look at the issues more clearly.”

The ways Trudy inflected “he agreed” implied that without Jordan Franchitti’s approval, no such team would have been permitted to as much as get a sniff of a treecat.

Stephanie saw a couple of the adults smile slightly at Trudy’s confident assertion that Sphinx politics revolved around her dad, but she didn’t think what Trudy said was at all funny. Trudy might have an inflated idea of her dad’s importance, but even a few months working with the SFS had shown her how much influence the First Families—especially those like the Franchittis, that held enormous amounts of land—wielded.

Trudy directed the gaze of her big violet-blue eyes on Anders. “Your dad’s unbiased, isn’t he? He isn’t going to make any pronouncements about treecat intelligence without speaking to all sorts of people—not just the ones who already keep treecats as pets.”

At the word “pets,” Stephanie stiffened. She started to say something, but Lionheart tugged gently on her ear, drawing her attention to where Scott MacDallan was very, very slightly shaking his head “no.”

Anders looked appropriately serious. “My dad is unbiased. Sure, Dad would like to be head author on the report that announces to the universe that humanity has located another intelligent species, but he’s also aware that he’d look like an idiot if he made a premature judgement. Even before humanity left Terra, humans wanted to believe they shared the universe with other intelligences. More often than not, those who declared that we did found themselves mocked.”

“I guess,” Trudy responded, “that would be interesting, but even if the treecats are intelligent, well, they’re not ever going to be like us, are they? I mean, I’ve heard they use tools, but I don’t call a broken-off bit of rock a ‘knife’—no matter what label Dr. Hobbard and the SFS have put on it in a museum.”

“Humans,” Scott MacDallan said very gently, “started out with stone knives. Treecats make nets, too, remember. And they build dens up in the trees.”

Trudy shrugged, setting her assets jiggling provocatively. “My brother says those nets aren’t real tools. He says he’s seen spiderwebs more complicated than those ‘nets.’ Heck, he says that near-beavers make more complicated dams than any treecat ‘house’ he’s seen.”

No one answered. Perhaps taking silence for agreement, Trudy turned her attention back to Anders. Stephanie felt sure that Trudy thought that if she could win Anders over, he would influence Dr. Whittaker in favor of her point of view.

“I’m not saying that treecats aren’t really interesting and clever. I’d love to have one as a…” This time Trudy stopped before actually using the ill-advised word “pet,” and amended it. “Companion. I think treecats are marvelous, really marvelous. But they’re not humans and that’s just how it is.”

More silence. Stephanie thought she knew exactly what was going on in the minds of those gathered around the long dining room table. The adults—all of whom except her mom and dad thought Trudy must be Stephanie’s friend or she wouldn’t have been invited to the party—were reluctant to argue and so ruin Stephanie’s fun. The kids, all of whom labored under no such illusion, were too polite to want to start a fight. Nonetheless, from the way his broad shoulders were shifting under his tuxedo jacket, Karl was definitely about to say something, and whatever he said wouldn’t be in agreement with Trudy.

Stephanie guessed what Trudy would say to any opinion of Karl’s…Something like, “Oh!” Giggle. Giggle. Flutter of eyelashes. Bounce of assets. “But you’re Stephanie’s special friend. Of course you’d say that…”

Trudy might even say “you’re Stephanie’s boyfriend,” and then what would Anders think?

I mean, I can’t go to him later and say, “Listen, Karl’s not really my boyfriend, no matter what Trudy said. I mean, he’s my buddy, but he’s not my boyfriend, and I want you to know this because…”

Feeling herself about to become embarrassed over a conversation that hadn’t even happened, Stephanie spoke into the uncomfortable silence. She had meant to take anything Trudy said with stoic silence, so her mom wouldn’t feel bad about inviting Trudy, but this was getting serious!

She spoke in her sweetest, most reasonable tone of voice, the one she’d perfected in what seemed like millions of interviews. “Trudy, does ‘just how it is’ mean that even if Dr. Whittaker’s study ends up showing that treecats aren’t ‘intelligent’ or ‘sentient’ or whatever term they decide to use, you don’t think treecats have any rights? They were here on Sphinx before us. This is their only planet.”