A Beautiful Friendship-ARC (7 page)

Ah! There was the cluster stalk scent from Sings Truly’s song! His eyes lit, and he swarmed easily up the side of the raised part of the plant place, then paused as he came face-to-face with cluster stalk for the very first time.

The growing heads seemed bigger than the ones from Sings Truly’s song, and he wondered if the scout who’d first brought that song to his clan had sampled his first cluster stalk before it was fully grown. Whether that was true or not, each of
these
plants was two-thirds as long as Climbs Quickly himself, and he was glad he’d brought the carry net. Still, net or not, he would have to be careful not to take too much if he expected to carry it all the way home. He sat for another long moment, considering, then flipped his ears in decision. Two heads, he decided. He could manage that much, and he could always come back for more.

But even as he decided that, he realized he’d used the need to decide to distract him from the marvelous scent of the cluster stalk. It was like nothing he’d ever smelled before, and he felt his mouth water as he drew it deep into his lungs. He hesitated, then reached out and tugged gently on an outer stalk.

It responded with a springy resistance, like the top of a white-root, and he tugged harder. Still it held out, and he tugged still harder, then bleeked in triumph as the stalk came loose in his true-hands. He raised it to his nose, sniffing deeply, then stuck out his tongue.

Magic filled his mouth as he licked delicately. It was like hot, liquid sunlight on a day of frozen ice. Like cold mountain water on a day of scorching heat, or the gentle caress of a new mother, just ruffling her first kitten’s delicate fur while her mind-glow promised him welcome and warmth and love. It was—

Climbs Quickly shook his head. It wasn’t actually like any of those things, he realized, except that each of them, in its own way, was wonderful and unique. It was just that he didn’t have anything else to which he could really compare that first blissful taste, and he nibbled gently at the end of the stalk. It was hard to chew—People didn’t really have the right kind of teeth to eat plants—but it tasted just as wonderful as that first lick had promised, and he crooned in pleasure as he devoured it.

He finished the entire stalk and reached quickly for another, then made himself stop. Yes, it tasted wonderful, and he wanted more. But he was no ground burrower to gorge himself into insensibility on yellow stalk. He was a scout of Bright Water Clan, and it was his job to carry this home for Short Tail, Bright Claw, even Broken Tooth, and the memory singers to judge it for themselves. Even if they hadn’t been the leaders of his clan, they were his friends, and friends shared anything this marvelous with one another.

It was actually easier to get an entire head out of the soft earth in which it grew than it had been to peel off that single stalk, and Climbs Quickly soon had two of them rolled up in his carry net. They made an awkward bundle, but he tied the net as neatly as he could and slung it onto his back, reaching up to hold the hand loops with his mid-limbs hand-feet while he used true-feet and true-hands to climb back down to the floor. Getting to the opening to the outer world would be more difficult with his burden than it had been coming in, but he could manage. He might not be very fast or agile, but not even a death fang would be out on a night like this!

* * *

Stephanie was glad her jacket and trousers were waterproof, and her broad-brimmed rain hat kept her head and face dry. But holding the camera on target required her to raise her hands in front of her, and ice-cold rain had flooded down the drain pipes of her nice, waterproof jacket sleeves. She felt it puddling about her elbows and beginning to probe stealthily towards her shoulders—just as her forearms were raised, her upper arms were parallel to the ground, providing an all-too-convenient channel for the frigid water—but all the rain in the world couldn’t have convinced her to lower her camera at a moment like this.

She stood no more than ten meters from the greenhouse, recording steadily. Each of her camera’s storage chips was good for over ten hours, and she had no intention of missing any of this for the official record. Excitement trembled inside as the minutes passed in the splashing, lightning-slivered darkness. Whatever it was had been inside the greenhouse for nine minutes now.
Surely
it would be coming back out pretty s—

* * *

Climbs Quickly reached the opening with a profound sense of relief. He’d almost dropped his carry net twice, and he decided to catch his breath before leaping down into the rain with his prize. After all, he had plenty of ti—

* * *

A whisker-fringed muzzle and prick-eared head poked out of the opening, green eyes glittering like emerald mirrors as lightning stuttered, and the universe seemed to stop as their owner found himself staring into the glassy eye of a camera in the hands of an eleven-T-year-old girl. Excitement froze Stephanie’s breath even though she’d known this moment was coming, but Climbs Quickly
hadn’t
known. His surprise was total, and he went absolutely motionless in astonishment.

Seconds ticked past, and then he shook himself mentally. Showing himself to a two-leg was the one thing he’d been most firmly instructed
not
to do, and he cringed inwardly at how Broken Tooth would react to this. He knew he could claim distraction on the basis of the storm and his first experience with cluster stalk, but that wouldn’t change his failure into success, and he stared down at the two-leg while his mind began to work once more.

It was the youngling, he realized, for it was smaller than either of its parents. He didn’t know what it was pointing at him, but from all reports he would have been dead already if the two-leg had intended to kill him. Yet deciding the thing aimed his way wasn’t a weapon didn’t tell him what it
was
. Those thoughts flashed through his brain in a heartbeat, and then, without really thinking about it, he reached out to the two-leg’s mind-glow in an effort to judge its intentions.

He was totally unprepared for the consequences.

It was as if he’d looked straight up into the sun expecting to see only the glow of a single torch, and his eyes flared wide and his ears flattened as the intensity of the two-leg’s emotions rolled over him. The glow was far brighter than before, and he wondered distantly if that was simply because he was closer and concentrating upon it, or if the cluster stalk he’d sampled might have something to do with it. But it didn’t really matter. What mattered was the excitement and eagerness and wonder that blazed so brightly in the two-leg’s mind. It was the first time any of the People had ever come face-to-face with a two-leg, and nothing could have prepared Climbs Quickly for the sheer delight with which Stephanie Harrington saw the marvelous, six-limbed creature crouched in the ventilation louver with the woven net of purloined celery slung over its back.

The representatives of two intelligent species—one of which had never even suspected the other’s existence—stared at one another in the middle of a howling thunderstorm. It was a moment which could not last, yet neither wanted it to end. Triumph and excited discovery flooded through Stephanie like a fountain, and she had no idea that Climbs Quickly felt those emotions even more clearly than he would have felt them from another of his own kind. Nor could she have guessed how very much he wanted to
continue
feeling them. She knew only that he crouched there, gazing at her for what seemed like forever, before he shook himself and leapt suddenly down and outward.

* * *

Climbs Quickly pulled free of the two-leg’s mind-glow. It was hard—possibly the hardest thing he’d ever done—yet he had his duty. And so he made himself step back from that wonderful, welcoming furnace. Or, rather, he stepped
away
from it, for it was too strong, too intense, actually to disconnect from. He could turn his eyes away from the fire, but he could not pretend it did not blaze.

He shook himself, and then he launched outward into the rain and darkness. He was slow and clumsy with the net of cluster stalk on his back, but he knew as surely as he’d ever known anything in his life that this young two-leg meant him no harm. The secret of the People’s existence was already revealed, and haste would change nothing, so he sat upright in the rain for a moment, gazing up at the two-leg, who finally lowered the strange thing it had held before its face to look down at him with its own eyes. He met those odd, brown, round-pupilled eyes for a moment, then flipped his ears, turned, and scampered off.

* * *

Stephanie watched the intruder vanish with a sense of wonder which only grew as the creature disappeared. It was small, she thought—no more than sixty or seventy centimeters long, though its tail would probably double its body length. An arboreal, her mind went on, considering its tail and the well-developed hands and claws she’d seen as it clung to the lip of the louver. And those hands, she thought slowly, might have had only three fingers each, but they’d also had fully opposable thumbs. She closed her eyes, picturing it once more, seeing the net on its back, and knew she was right.

The celery snatcher might
look
like a teeny-tiny hexapuma, yet that net was proof the survey crews had missed the most important single facet of Sphinx. But that was all right. In fact, that was
just
fine. Their omission had abruptly transformed this world from a place of exile to the most marvelous, exciting place Stephanie Harrington could possibly have been, for she’d done something tonight which had happened only eleven other times in the fifteen centuries of mankind’s diaspora to the stars.

She’d just made first contact with a tool-using, clearly sentient, alien race.

5

Climbs Quickly lay on his back outside his nest, belly fur turned to the sun, and did his best to convince the rest of the clan he was asleep. He knew he wasn’t fooling anyone who cared to taste his mind-glow, but good manners required them to pretend he was.

Which was just as well, for blissful as it was, the comfort of the drowsy sunlight was far too little to distract him from the monumental changes in his life. Facing his clan leaders and admitting he’d let one of the two-legs actually see him—and even worse, see him in the very process of raiding their plant place—had been just as unpleasant as he’d feared it would.

People seldom physically attacked other People. Oh, there were squabbles enough, and occasional serious fights—usually, though not always, limited to younger scouts or hunters. And there were even rarer situations in which entire clans found themselves feuding with one another, or fighting for control of their ranges. No one was particularly proud of such situations, but the ability to hear one another’s thoughts and taste one another’s emotions didn’t necessarily make other People any easier to live with or fill a clan’s range with prey when it was needed. A clan’s leaders normally intervened before anything serious could happen
within
a clan, though, and it was rare indeed for one member of a clan to deliberately attack another unless there was something fundamentally wrong with the attacker.

Climbs Quickly himself could remember one occasion on which High Crag Clan had been forced to drive out one of its scouts, a rogue who
had
attacked other People. The exile had crossed into Bright Water’s range, killing prey not just to live but for the sheer joy of killing, and raided Bright Water’s storage places. He’d even attacked and seriously injured a Bright Water scout while attempting to steal a mother’s kittens . . . for purposes Climbs Quickly preferred not to consider too deeply. In the end, the clan’s scouts and hunters had been forced to hunt him down and kill him, a grim necessity none had welcomed.

So Climbs Quickly hadn’t expected any of the Bright Water leaders to actually assault him, and they hadn’t. But they
had
left him feeling as if they’d skinned him and hung his hide up to dry. It wasn’t even the things they’d said so much as the way they’d said them.

Climbs Quickly’s ears flicked, and he squirmed, trying to catch the sun more fully, as he recalled his time before Bright Water’s leaders. Sings Truly had been present as the clan’s second singer and the obvious heir to the first singer’s position when Song Spinner died or surrendered her authority. But even Sings Truly had been shocked by his clumsiness. She hadn’t scolded him the way Broken Tooth or Short Tail had, yet tasting his sister’s wordless reproach had been harder for Climbs Quickly to bear than all of Broken Tooth’s cutting irony.

He’d tried to explain, as clearly and un-defensively as possible, that he’d never
meant
to let the two-leg see him, and he’d suggested the possibility that somehow the two-leg had known he was there in the plant place even
before
seeing him, since it hadn’t been surprised to see him when he emerged from it. Some things about its reaction
had
been surprised, but there’d been far more excitement, almost delight. Indeed, he was virtually certain the two-leg’s surprise had been from seeing who (and what) he truly was, not because the two-leg hadn’t already known that
someone
was in the plant place.

Unfortunately his suspicion rested on things he’d tasted in two-leg’s mind-glow, and although none of the others actually said so, he knew they found it difficult to believe a two-leg’s mind-glow could tell one of the People so much. He even knew why they thought that way, for no other scout had ever come close enough to—or concentrated hard enough upon—a two-leg to realize how wonderfully, dreadfully powerful that mind-glow truly was.

Short Tail had told him judiciously, his mind-voice grave,

Climbs Quickly had replied as honestly as possible.