A Beautiful Friendship-ARC (32 page)

He had time to think about it, he decided. Time to collect more information, insert himself into the “scientific community” looking into the treecats locally. For that matter, even though no one at Liberty University had actually ever heard of him, he probably did know more about xeno-anthropology—and he for darned sure knew more about xeno-
biology!
—than at least half the “genuine scientists” falling over their own feet here on Sphinx. He didn’t anticipate any problem passing himself off as the xeno-anthropologist he claimed to be, and the letter from Idoya Vázquez was completely genuine. No one out here in Manticore had ever seen a
real
Paulk Grant, so it wasn’t too surprising the Interior Minister had accepted his credentials without question.

That letter would open all sorts of official and semi-official doors for him—as long as he didn’t overplay the card, at least. He didn’t want to throw his weight around so much he irritated the locals into passive resistance; he’d seen that happen before, and the consequences were seldom good. It was even distinctly possible that someone who felt his toes had been stepped on by a pushy outsider might go to the trouble—and expense—of sending a query back to the Chattanooga System for a background report on one Dr. Tennessee Bolgeo. Sending messages over that kind of distance wasn’t cheap, but it was amazing how much some people would spend if it offered the possibility of whacking somebody who’d irritated them sufficiently.

On the other hand, even if someone sent an inquiry off today, it would take literally months to reach Chattanooga. That was one reason he’d chosen Liberty University, although the fact that it was one of the most respected and prestigious institutions in the explored galaxy had also been a factor. And so had the fact that it was so
big
, had so many satellite campuses scattered about the Solarian League. With a faculty that large, someone like Dr. Hobbard probably wouldn’t be all that surprised they’d never heard of some of its professors, no matter how good a reputation they had in the field. Like the aforementioned Dr. Tennessee Bolgeo. Of course the
university
knew who was on its faculty, and it would be astounded to learn it had a professor of that name. So it was, perhaps, fortunate all round that he’d have time to complete his operation here and depart, treecats in hand (figuratively speaking, at least; he wasn’t going to actually risk his hand anywhere near something with those teeth and claws), long before any embarrassing responses from Chattanooga could reach the Star Kingdom.

Assuming he could get around that entire empathy angle somehow.

He hummed tunelessly, tapping one index finger against the rim of his glass while his agile brain revolved possibilities.

It all came down to range, he thought. How close could he get before they detected him? And, conversely, how far away could he be and successfully take one of them alive? But how did one go about determining the range of an invisible sense of a previously completely unknown species without already having one for examination and experimentation?

Indirection, he decided. He needed an
indirect
way to evaluate the treecats’ range. Now how
. . . ?

He stopped whistling, and his eyes narrowed slowly. Could it really be that simple? Oh, it would probably be expensive, and it would take him at least a few days to set up, but still
. . .

He began to chuckle, shaking his head, then snorted. Maybe it
would
be that simple! And if it was, it would actually be amusing to use that little creature’s very dislike for him against it.

* * *

“I don’t like him, Scott,” Stephanie said, frowning at her bedroom com terminal. “And Lionheart doesn’t like him, either. I talked to Mom about it, and she came up with two or three different explanations that could all be pretty harmless, I guess. But I still don’t like him.”

“Your mom
may
be right, Steph,” Scott MacDallan said from his Thunder River office. “On the other hand, smart as your mom is, she hasn’t been adopted by a treecat. I have, and nothing I’ve ever seen out of Fisher suggests he takes a dislike to humans for no good reason. In fact, he seems to like some people I don’t have much use for a lot more than
I
do. From what I’ve seen of Lionheart so far, I’d say it’s pretty much the same for him.”

A corner of MacDallan’s mind was a little bemused by the fact that he was very seriously discussing this topic with a fourteen-year-old.

“That’s what I think,” Stephanie agreed now. “Still, I’ve got to admit he hasn’t actually
done
anything I could object to. I mean, except for smiling too much and making me wonder when he’s going to offer me a lollipop or jellybean, anyway.” She grimaced with so much disgust MacDallan found it difficult not to chuckle. “By grown-up standards, he was just being polite, I guess. And I know I look even younger than I am to a lot of people, but I’m not exactly still in kindergarten, you know.
Blechhhh!

“Unfortunately, we can’t go around shooting people for that,” MacDallan pointed out. “Mind you, it sounds like he ought to come under the ‘Needs Killing’ rule, but I don’t think the Star Kingdom’s adopted that one yet.”

“ ‘Needs killing rule’?” Stephanie repeated, grinning as she heard the laugh he’d tried to keep out of his voice.

“Yeah, that’s the one that says it’s justifiable homicide if you can convince a jury of your neighbors that he was such a pain he needed killing,” MacDallan explained, grinning back at her. “I always thought it was a good way to encourage good manners and common courtesy, personally. But like I say, I don’t think Parliament’s gotten around to passing that one locally.”

“In that case, King Michael better get in gear and get it adopted quick. We need it on the books before he gets out of range again!” Stephanie said tartly.

“Why don’t you drop him an e-mail with the suggestion?”

“People already think I’m weird enough, thank you.”

“Yeah, I guess they do.” It was his turn to grimace, obviously thinking about how “weird” some people had considered him over the years because of his psychic talent or whatever it was.

“But since we can’t shoot him, what
do
we do about him?” Stephanie asked more seriously.

“I don’t see anything we
can
do . . . yet. You say all he’s done is basically ask the same questions Dr. Hobbard’s asked. Oh, sure, he’s been irritating, but he hasn’t actually done anything out of line yet. And the truth is, we need to maintain at least some objectivity ourselves. We need to make sure we’re not letting our own eagerness for the ’cats to be even more special than they really are lead us into leaping to conclusions that turn out later not to have been justified.”

“You’re saying that even if Lionheart doesn’t like him, that may not really prove anything about
Dr. Bolgeo
,” she said slowly. “That Lionheart might be wrong about him. Or that
I
might be wrong about the
reasons
Lionheart doesn’t like him.”

“That’s
part
of what I’m saying,” he agreed, nodding to her from the terminal. “Maybe he just wears a cologne that smells really disgusting to a treecat. Maybe he thinks on a ‘frequency’ that’s like a ringing in the ears, or some kind of irritating background whine, as far as a ’cat is concerned. We don’t really know yet how reliable a treecat’s empathic sense is where human beings are concerned, and we need to find out. In fact, this might be an opportunity to do a little experimenting of our own.”

“What do you mean?” Stephanie asked, eyes narrowing in sudden speculation.

“Well, if this Bolgeo’s really serious about studying the treecats, he’ll probably want to talk to me, too, which should give me a chance to size him up for myself. Then you and I will have something more definite in the way of impressions to compare. And if he comes back into range of Lionheart—or Fisher, for that matter—we watch how the treecats react to him. Let’s try and get something a little more specific than just a feeling that they ‘don’t like him,’ and let’s see if he eventually does something that would justify their dislike. Until we can establish some more definite way to communicate with them, assuming we ever do, we can’t just
ask
them why they’re reacting this way. From where I sit, that means we need more observational data. And before we could get anyone to take us seriously about someone with credentials like Bolgeo’s, we’re going to have to understand what’s happening ourselves well enough to be able to convince someone else to accept the treecats’ judgment.”

“You mean I have to go ahead and talk to him again,” Stephanie said distastefully.

“ ’Fraid so, kid,” he said sympathetically.

Scott MacDallan, Stephanie had discovered, was one of the few people who, like her parents, could call her “kid” without instantly irritating her. Normally, at least. At the moment, though, as she glowered sourly at his com image and thought about enduring more of Bolgeo’s company, she wasn’t inclined to cut him any slack. Especially since she realized he was right and she didn’t want him to be.

Good thing for you Lionheart’s asleep
, she thought, glancing at the treecat sprawled along his perch beside her bed and snoring gently.
He’d give you one of those “Stop-being-such-a-crybaby” bleeks of his. And you’d
deserve
it
.

“All right,” she sighed. “All right! I’ll be good. But I’m telling you right now, Scott MacDallan, you
owe
me for this one. You owe me big. And I’ve got a feeling that one of these days, even if I don’t get to shoot him, I’m at least going to be perfectly justified in kicking him right in the kneecap!”

22

Dr. Bolgeo, Stephanie decided, wasn’t one of those people who got more likable the better you got to know them.

She still couldn’t decide exactly why she disliked him so intensely. It wasn’t just because he gave her that big smile while pretending he didn’t think of her as just one more kid. And it wasn’t—or shouldn’t be, anyway—just because she had the distinct impression he was working on wheedling more information out of her, since it wasn’t as if he was alone in
that
. Dr. Hobbard kept trying to get more out of her, and she actually liked Dr. Hobbard. It was almost as if the two of them were playing a game with rules they both understood, and Dr. Hobbard was an opponent Stephanie could respect. Of course, Dr. Hobbard played the game openly, without trying to sneak around and trick Stephanie into telling her things. She was quite sure Bolgeo would play any trick he could, but she could have lived with that. In fact, she would normally have taken a certain pleasure out of dropping false information on him while letting him think he was tricking her into revealing the truth, so
that
wasn’t what she found so irritating. And she didn’t dislike Bolgeo this much just because he wouldn’t leave her alone, either.

No, there was more to it than any of that . . . she just wished she could figure out what that “more” was.

Scott MacDallan and Irina Kisaevna had both met the Chattanoogan now, and they didn’t much care for him, either. Neither did Karl, for that matter. None of them could put a finger on exactly why they disliked him so much any more than Stephanie could, but they knew he wasn’t high on their list of favorite people. And, interestingly, Fisher had reacted to him very much as Lionheart did.

Unfortunately, as MacDallan had pointed out, “We really,
really
don’t like him” wasn’t enough to get her out of being polite to him, which was why she currently found herself, to her considerable disgust, sitting at a checkerboard cloth-draped table in the Red Letter Café, an open-air sidewalk restaurant in what passed for Twin Forks’ business district, waiting for yet another interview with him. She was pretty sure her parents would have found a way to politely decline the luncheon invitation if Bolgeo hadn’t gotten Dr. Hobbard and Chief Ranger Shelton to front for him.

Stephanie didn’t know how the Chattanoogan had found out about her campaign to secure an internship with the Forestry Service, although it probably hadn’t been too hard, given how all the news stories had emphasized the “human interest” angle of her intention to eventually pursue a Forestry Service career. But the opportunity to eat lunch with Shelton and improve her relationship with him couldn’t hurt, and she was actually eager to show the chief ranger more of her relationship with Lionheart. And she liked Dr. Hobbard too much to be impolite by refusing to have lunch with
her
. She knew her parents felt the same way about both of Bolgeo’s other table guests, and she had to admit that inviting them along had been a shrewd move on his part.

The Harringtons had gotten to the café early in case the restaurant’s proprietor and staff took a little convincing before they allowed an “animal” onto their premises. For that matter, Stephanie wasn’t sure there wasn’t something in the health code which would have prevented a restauranteur from allowing that. But Twin Forks really was a small town, one where everybody knew everybody else—or at least knew all
about
everyone else—and she and Lionheart had become celebrities. Besides, Eric Flint, the Red Letter’s owner, was one of Stephanie’s friends. Despite something of a reputation as a curmudgeon, he always spoke to her as an equal (which a lot of adults seemed constitutionally unable to do), and he’d pointed her towards some interesting sources for her history and economics classes. Not only that, he was from the planet of New Chicago, and New Chicago had been a dumping ground for radical anarchists, socialists, and—especially—every member of the Levelers’ Association the government could round up after Old Earth’s Final War. The descendents of those deportees had a zealously maintained reputation as scofflaws and rule-breakers, and it seemed pretty clear to Stephanie that Mr. Flint actually
hoped
some Public Health busybody would come and object to his decision to seat Lionheart.

No objections had been raised, however, and now she listened to the juicy crunching sound as Lionheart ecstatically devoured celery sticks.

“You know if you keep pigging up celery that way, we’re going to have to start feeding you even more laxatives. And this time I think I’ll ask Dad to find one you
don’t
like,” she said warningly. Lionheart, predictably, paid her no attention, and her father chuckled.

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