A Beautiful Friendship-ARC (17 page)

Stephanie had breathed a huge sigh of relief when that parental ruling came down. She also had to admit that her parents’ decision to ground her—in every sense of the word—for three entire T-months following her . . . excursion had actually been surprisingly welcome. Even with quick-heal, a shattered arm and an all-but-broken leg (not to mention the two ribs she hadn’t realized she’d broken) would have pretty much grounded her anyway, of course. They hadn’t stopped with confining her to the freehold, though. Or, rather, they’d taken the restriction to the next level. Aside from her studies and her virtual classroom, she’d been denied all electronic excursions, as well.

She couldn’t pretend it hadn’t been deserved, although she’d discovered long ago that knowing a punishment was deserved (and most of hers were) didn’t make it any less a punishment. As her father had explained to her when she’d been much younger and full of indignation, punishments were
supposed
to be unpleasant; that’s why they were called “punishment.”

The good side of it had been that it had given her and Lionheart time to explore their relationship without a bunch of outside intrusion. Time not simply to recover from their physical injuries, but also to come to some sort of grips with the bond which had sprung up between them. She was certain, now, that Lionheart was able to read—probably actually
feel—
anything she felt, and she felt vaguely cheated by the fact that she couldn’t sense his emotions in return. And yet . . . and yet there
were
those times, those fleeting moments, when for just an
instant
she was almost certain she truly had felt something from him.

She hadn’t mentioned those times to anyone, even her parents, and she had no intention of doing so. She strongly suspected that it was one reason she was able to “read his body language” so well, but she was determined not to throw that particular bit of information out where anyone else might hear of it. She and Lionheart were dealing with too much intrusion into their lives already, and it would only have turned up the flame under the already heated debate over the treecat’s means of communicating.

Most (although not all) of the xeno-anthropologists who accepted their sentience agreed with Stephanie that the treecats’ success in hiding from humanity for so long could only have been the result of a concerted, planned strategy executed by all treecats. That clearly implied some fairly sophisticated means of communication, because they couldn’t have coordinated that kind of strategy without one.

But
how
did they communicate? And how
clearly
did they communicate? There was general agreement (based on observing her and Lionheart . . . when her parents had still been allowing scientists to watch them) that the treecat had some sort of special bond with her. But what sort of bond?
Did
he actually feel her emotions? Had humanity finally encountered a species with a true sense of empathy? A true ability to feel and share the emotions of others? And if treecats were telempathic, able to sense emotions with their minds (or some other way), was it possible they were also tele
pathic?
Could they actually
speak
to one another with their minds? And if they communicated telepathically, did they use words? Or did they simply send images to one another, like moving pictures or videos, perhaps? Or did they send thoughts directly somehow, without any need to break them up into words
or
images? And how much complexity could they communicate with one another? They were tool-users, but only of very simple tools. Was it possible they were communicators, but only of very simple
concepts?

Obviously, no one knew . . . yet.

At the moment, skepticism was in first place. The scientists seemed unwilling to leap to any conclusions. Which, in Stephanie’s opinion, was just another way of saying they were unwilling to go where the evidence seemed to point because they were afraid people would think they were crackpots, making wildly extravagant claims on the treecats’ behalf. Still, there did appear to be a sort of emerging agreement that the treecats were
at least
telempathic and that there
might
be evidence of telepathy as well.

Even that limited acceptance was electrifying. Despite literally thousands of years of effort, humanity had never managed to demonstrate the existence of any measurable, controllable “psionic” talents. Until she’d met Lionheart, Stephanie hadn’t had much of an opinion either way, but she’d been plowing through every source she could reach since, and she come to the conclusion that there was way too much evidence of at least individual cases of what might be considered “rogue talents” to ignore. Despite that, no one had ever figured out how to quantify and measure them. And perhaps even more to the point, no one had ever figured out how to reproduce such abilities or teach them to someone else. Or how to “awaken them” in someone who might have a natural potential for them, either. And no one had ever encountered an
alien
species with such abilities. For that matter, the treecats were only the twelfth alien tool-using species humanity had ever encountered, period.

Which meant everyone was very much in unexplored territory.

“Should we take it you’re not ready to give up on the chief ranger yet, though, honey?” her father asked after a moment, and she turned from the window to smile at the back of his head.

“You’ve always said I’m stubborn, Dad,” she pointed out.

“One of my more infallible statements, I see,” he replied, and she giggled.

“Well, yeah,” she acknowledged.

“I’m not sure what else we can do at this point, Steph.” Her mother sounded thoughtful, not dismissive. “Chief Ranger Shelton is the head of the Sphinx Forestry Service. I don’t know if even the Interior Minister has the authority to give him orders about something like this—assuming she’d have any interest in doing it in the first place.”

Stephanie nodded soberly. She’d gone with her parents to meet Idoya Vázquez, the Star Kingdom of Manticore’s Minister of the Interior, and she liked the minister. She was pretty sure Vázquez was on their side, too—as much as anyone could be “on their side,” anyway. But her mom had a point about Shelton’s authority. The Star Kingdom’s present Constitution was still less than forty T-years old, and it had completely changed Manticore’s
old
constitution. She understood—mostly—why the survivors of the original colonists had made the changes.
She
would have wanted to make sure her family wasn’t going to find itself completely overwhelmed by a whole flood of newcomers, too—especially by newcomers whose passage to Manticore the government had helped finance. So she guessed it made sense to establish a monarchy and turn the original settlers into nobles as a way to protect their political power, although at the moment that meant there were an awful lot of “barons” or even “earls” out there with work-callused hands while they and their families weeded the tomatoes or milked the cows.

But that meant some of the details were still a bit vague. Exactly who was in charge of what, for instance, and exactly who was qualified to vote for Parliament, was still being worked out. And that was even more true in the case of Sphinx, which—as Chief Ranger Shelton had pointed out—had only seen its first colonists arrive barely fifty T-years ago . . . just in time to get decimated by the Plague. They were
really
working things out as they went along where Sphinx was concerned, and that didn’t even
consider
Gryphon, the Manticore Binary System’s
third
habitable planet! Some of the Star Kingdom’s “great nobles” already held title land on Gryphon, but as far as she knew, nobody actually
lived
there yet.

The thought of a habitable planet with no one at all living on it seemed awfully strange to someone who’d been born on Meyerdahl, whose population had been just over six billion when Stephanie’s family departed for the Star Kingdom. Even with the current influx of new colonists, Sphinx’s population was still less than two
million
. That was barely one three-hundredth of a percent of Meyerdahl’s population—in fact, it was barely two-thirds of the population of Hollister, alone!—and it was hard for her to really get a handle on the thought of having that much planet with that few people living on it. When she thought about it that way, though, it sort of put Chief Ranger Shelton’s comment about how little of Sphinx had really been explored so far—and of how terribly understaffed he was—into perspective. And as Mom had just said, it also helped to underscore the question of just how much authority to override Shelton the royal government truly had at this point.

“If Minister Vázquez doesn’t have the authority to give him orders now, that can always be . . . clarified by Parliament,” Richard Harrington said a bit more grimly.

“Richard, you’re not seriously suggesting we try to get the Crown to take over the Forestry Service just so Stephanie can have her internship, are you? I mean, you know I’m on her side on this. But doesn’t that strike you as just a
bit
extreme?”

Marjorie Harrington looked at her husband quizzically, and he snorted.

“Put that way, I guess it does,” he acknowledged, then turned to wink over his shoulder at Stephanie before returning his attention to the air car’s HUD. “On the other hand, that wasn’t the
only
thing I had in mind, Marge.”

“No?”

“No.” His tone had turned much more serious. “The thing is, I’ve been thinking about this ever since word got out, and especially since people seem to have begun seriously considering the possibility that treecats really might be more than just cuddly little woodland creatures. I’m afraid the presence of another sentient species here on Sphinx has the potential to cause all kinds of problems. Don’t forget what happened on Barstool.”

Stephanie drew a sharp breath at his reminder. The original settlers of the planet Barstool hadn’t been aware there was a native sentient species on their new home world, either. In their case, it was because the amphibian natives built their settlements underwater for defensive reasons, given the nasty predators who prowled the planet’s land masses. From what she’d been able to read about it, the predators of Barstool weren’t as bad as hexapumas or peak bears, but that was partly because Barstool’s gravity had been only seventy-five percent of Old Earth’s, so they hadn’t been as strong or as fast.

But the colonists of Barstool hadn’t reacted well when they discovered that “their” planet already belonged to another intelligent species. The fact that the Amphors, as the natives had finally been named, were clearly not as intelligent as humans (at least not as intelligent as
humans
ranked intelligence, at any rate) had only made things worse. According to the articles Stephanie had read, the xeno-anthropologists’ ultimate conclusion was that the Amphors had probably ranked only about point-seven on the sentience scale, which would have put them considerably behind Old Terran dolphins. There wasn’t much way to know now, though. The government of Barstool had legally declared the Amphors animals, not sentients, and the species had been virtually exterminated in the space of less than thirty T-years.

As her father had once bitterly remarked when she asked him about it, it had not been “humanity’s most shining moment.”

And it was also the reason why, although treecats were the twelfth tool-using species to be discovered, they were only the
eleventh
to be studied.

So far, at least.

“Do you really think that could happen here, Dad?” she asked now, anxiously, hands tightening protectively on Lionheart. The treecat stirred, rolling over onto his back and wrapping all five of his remaining limbs around her right arm in a reassuring hug, and she smiled down at him, but her eyes were dark.

“I don’t know. I don’t
think
so, honey, but I don’t know,” Richard replied unflinchingly. “That’s one reason your mom and I have been in favor of not pushing the case for how smart they are any harder than we have. It could turn into a real can of worms.”

He glanced over his shoulder to meet her gaze for a moment, and she nodded to show her understanding. One thing about her parents: they never lied to her. They might not always be
comfortable
about answering her questions, but they were always honest when they did.

“Barstool still hasn’t recovered from how bitterly almost every other inhabited world condemned its decision where the Amphors were concerned,” he continued then, soberly, as he turned back to the controls. “The entire planet’s still got a terrible reputation, and at least some star systems continue to boycott it completely. They won’t do business with anyone from Barstool, won’t lend them money, won’t sell them anything or buy anything from them, won’t invest there. . . . Their actions have even been condemned by an official resolution of the Solarian League Assembly.” He shook his head. “Given all that, I doubt anybody else is really going to want to follow in their footsteps. But human beings can do some pretty ugly things, Stephanie. We can do some pretty
wonderful
things, too, and I happen to think the good things we do ultimately outnumber the bad ones, but there’s always someone out there ready to do some more of those ugly things if other people don’t stop them.

“In this case, the only people in any kind of position to take the treecats’ side are us—the people who think like us and Chief Ranger Shelton’s Forestry Service personnel. But the Forestry Service works for the Sphinx planetary government, not for the entire
star system’s
government. It’s a
local
agency, not a national one. So if the planetary Parliament should decide to allow the exploitation of range the treecats need to survive, or if the planetary Parliament should decide to support more . . . intrusive means of study, there’s no one higher up who could overrule it. That’s why your mom said we’re not sure if Minister Vázquez even has the authority to give the chief ranger orders. And, you know, there aren’t that many people here on Sphinx right now, and a lot of them are zero-balancers who still don’t have the vote yet.”