A Beautiful Friendship-ARC (23 page)

The problem was what to do about it.

He waded clear of the water on the other side of the river, and Fisher sprang down from his shoulders. The treecat flowed across the rough ground, head up and ears pricked, and MacDallan heard another delighted “Bleek!” of pleasure as Fisher saw the skillet and the cleaned fillets of his catch.

“Aren’t you just a
little
put out”—Irina held up her right hand, thumb and forefinger about two centimeters apart—“that he managed such a haul when you and all that fancy equipment you carry around didn’t manage to catch a thing?”

“Not really,” he said. “Oh, it’s always a little frustrating if you don’t catch anything, but most fishermen will tell you the fishing itself is the real reward. When you actually hook one of the real monsters, when you spend half an hour fighting until you manage to land it, that’s
great
. But those are the high points. What really brings you back again and again is just spending the time out here—you and the river. That’s what it’s really all about.”

Irina Kisaevna cocked her head, considering him sidelong, and knew he meant it. Not that she intended to let him off the hook that quickly. She and MacDallan had known one another ever since his arrival on Sphinx twelve T-years ago as a brand new doctor, fresh out of medical school and brimming with dedication. The assisted immigration policies had helped pay his way, but he’d come more because of the Star Kingdom’s desperate need for doctors than for any incentives its government might have offered.

By the time he arrived, the researchers had finally broken the Plague’s back, but it had died hard, with periodic flare-ups which had required constant tweaking of the vaccines. The situation had still been pretty horrible, the need for trained doctors still acute, and he’d dived straight into it fearlessly, despite the fact that new immigrants, without the resistance the survivors had built up, were far more vulnerable to the Plague. Not that it had killed
only
the newcomers. In fact, Irina had met him because her husband had been one of the pandemic’s last native-born victims. MacDallan had done everything anyone could have done to save Stefan Kisaevna, but Stefan had been one of the patients who’d had an especially severe response to the Plague. Despite everything MacDallan could do, his own immune system had killed him, trying to fight off the disease.

Irina had taken his death hard, but she’d seen a lot of death by then. It had never occurred to her for a moment to blame MacDallan, and as the weeks, and then the months, and finally the T-years had passed, she’d realized that what she’d come to feel for him was much too strong to call “friendship” any longer. Which was why the two of them were getting married in about six T-months. As far she was concerned, they could have tied the knot tomorrow, but he wanted his mother to be there for the wedding, and given the interstellar distances involved
. . .

She’d also discovered that for all his naturally warm, empathic personality, there was a darkness deep inside Scott MacDallan. A . . . melancholy, perhaps. He
felt
things, she thought. Felt them too deeply, sometimes. He
cared
—that was one of the things she loved about him, one of the things which had brought him to Sphinx in the first place—but sometimes he cared too much. Which was why he needed someone to give him a hard time, keep him focused on the here and now.

That was
her
job, she’d decided. So—

“Yeah, sure!” She rolled her eyes at him. “I can’t think of anything
I’d
rather do than stand up to my waist in ice-cold water for four or five hours at a time without hooking a single fish! I
love
nature!” She threw back her head and flung her arms wide. “Nothing
I
like more than freezing my behind off without catching a thing! Unless, maybe, it’s standing in the
rain
freezing my behind off without catching a thing.” She frowned thoughtfully, then nodded firmly. “Yes, now that I think about it, that’s probably even
more
fun. And if I could only get to cut a hole in the
ice
in the middle of a blizzard, then I’m sure—“

“All right. All right!” He laughed and threw one arm around her. “So, maybe actually catching something
is
a little more important than I might have implied.”

“Maybe, huh?” She regarded him skeptically. Then she shrugged. “Well, at least you don’t fling yourself bodily into the water the way Fisher does. No wonder he spends so much time sunning on warm rocks. He’s thawing out from all those swims of his!”

MacDallan laughed again, although she probably had a point. Fisher’s technique consisted of lying very still on an overhanging limb or shelf of rock, staring down into the water until he spotted a fish, then pouncing on his unsuspecting victim with all claws spread. MacDallan had watched him doing it and been deeply impressed by the treecat’s blinding speed and skill, but it was undeniably a wet, cold way to fish. A technique that probably did help explain why sun-warmed rocks were so high on his list of favorite things.

“Anyway,” Irina continued, waving one hand in the direction of her nephew, Karl Zivonik, “Karl and I have been loyally preparing provisions as our share of this expedition.”

Karl looked up and grinned from where he was cutting fresh lemons into wedges. The old-fashioned cast-iron skillet his mother had sent along sat ready by the fire, oiled and awaiting the salted fish fillets Irinia had dredged with flour and fresh-ground black pepper. The outsized bread pan at his elbow was filled with fresh, golden cornbread; he’d just taken the snap-on top off a huge bowl of coleslaw; and the plastic tumblers were waiting beside the thirty-liter thermos of tea.

The doctor felt his mouth watering as he smelled the mingled scents of woodsmoke and cornbread. Right off the top of his head, he couldn’t think of anything better than fresh-caught and fried fish, garnished with fresh-squeezed lemon juice, and Evelina Zivonik’s homemade cornbread and coleslaw. Especially not eaten outside with friends.

“Well, in that case, by all means, let’s eat!” he said.

* * *

Much later that evening, MacDallan and Irina sat in an old-fashioned glider on the veranda of Aleksandr and Evelina Zivonik’s sprawling farmhouse.

As the son of one of the colony’s first-shareholders, Aleksandr Zivonik was technically entitled under the new Constitution to call himself “Baron Zivonik.” One of these days, MacDallan thought, that title was probably going to have some genuine meaning. For the moment, it was simply an indication that the Zivoniks had been on Sphinx as long as anyone else. The steadily expanding farmhouse was additional evidence of that. He’d delivered Aleksandr’s youngest child in this house little more than a T-month ago, and its core was already fifty T-years old. He wondered how many more generations of hands were going to add on to it, how many more generations of children’s feet were going to run and play and work under its roof, in the fullness of time.

It was a soothing sort of thought, one that consoled the heart of someone who’d seen far too many people die of the Plague.

“Comfortable?” he asked quietly as Irina nestled her head down on his shoulder while he used one foot to move the glider gently back and forth.

“Oh, yes,” she murmured, looking up past the edge of the veranda’s roof at the stars beginning to creep shyly into the darkening cobalt blue of the sky. “I love this place,” she continued softly. “Hard to remember sometimes—like when it snows for fifteen T-months without a break. But then we get fifteen months of spring and another fifteen months of
this
.”

She swept one hand in a gesture at the near-pines and enormous crown oaks towering over the farmhouse and the night sky settling above them like clear, clean velvet, and MacDallan nodded.

“And don’t forget the surprises,” he said wryly. “I guess we should’ve remembered how little of the planet we’ve actually explored, but still—!”

“And the surprises,” she agreed. Then she sat up a bit, leaning back so she could look directly into his eyes. “
All
the surprises,” she added in an even softer voice.

MacDallan looked back at her. He knew what she meant. In fact, she was the only person on the planet he’d trusted with the full truth, and it hadn’t been easy even with her.

He’d spent most of his life hiding his “oddity.” He was lucky he hadn’t had as much of the “gift” as his grandmother had, but it had always been there, always threatening to rear its head, especially in moments of stress. And people still didn’t understand. In fact, he sometimes thought people were even less understanding about little personal “quirks” like that now than they’d been before the Diaspora carried humanity to the stars. The prejudice against “genies” could extend itself to almost anything someone found peculiar or different, whether or not the difference in question really had anything at all to do with actual genetic manipulation. And the fact that people who allowed themselves to be prejudiced that way were seldom exactly mental giants didn’t mean they couldn’t do a lot of damage.

But here on Sphinx, with Fisher and the other treecats, he’d finally found that his “oddity” truly was a
gift
. It still had its dark sides, of course, he thought, remembering the night—had it really been only three T-months ago?—when the treecats had proved to him they truly were telepaths. The night they’d made him see what one of
them
had seen, shown him the devastation one of his own kind had unleashed upon the forests of Sphinx, and begged him to do something about it.

He still had nightmares about that entire adventure. Nightmares about how close he’d come to dying . . . and of a treecat who
had
died to save his life. But more important than the nightmares, he knew—
knew
, beyond a shadow of a doubt—that the treecats were far more than anyone else, with one possible exception, had even begun to guess.

“You need to talk to her, you know,” Irina said. “She’s probably the only person on the planet who knows as much—if not more—about treecats than you do. And I think you can safely assume you can trust her. She and her parents certainly aren’t ever going to do
anything
that could hurt them, you know.”

“But she’s still only a kid, Irina,” MacDallan protested. “Only—what? Thirteen? Fourteen, now?” He shook his head. “This is an awful lot to dump on a kid that age.”

“That ‘kid’ single-handedly discovered that we share this planet with another sentient species,” Irina pointed out a bit tartly. “And in case you haven’t noticed it yet, Scott MacDallan, ‘kids’ tend to grow up pretty quick here on Sphinx. You’ve noticed my nieces and nephews, perhaps?”

“Point,” he acknowledged. “Definitely a point.”

“Well, what you may not be aware of is that Karl’s actually met Ms. Harrington. In a manner of speaking, at least.”

“Huh?” MacDallan blinked and looked at her sharply.

“That’s one of the things I love most about you,” Irina said dryly. “That wonderful vocabulary of yours, I mean.”

“Stop criticizing my vocabulary and tell me about Karl and young Harrington,” he said with a grin.

“It was when he went in to Twin Forks for that trip to the main ranger station Frank Lethbridge arranged for him last month. He didn’t actually talk to her, but she and a bunch of other kids around her age were hang gliding. Karl says they’re organizing a formal hang-gliding club, and he wishes we were closer. I think he’d really love to learn how to float around the sky himself. Anyway, they were flying around for at least a couple of hours, and he and Frank ended up going down to their landing field to watch. And it seems young Harrington had a bit of a set to with one of the other kids. Two of them, actually, if Karl got it right. One of them was a guy, quite a bit bigger than Harrington, and I think Karl figured he might have to take a hand if it got physical. But he says Harrington faced both of them down. ‘Kicked both of them right in the butt without ever actually laying a finger on them,’ I believe was his elegant summation of what happened.” She smiled and shook her head. “From the way he said it, I think he rather admires her.”

“Which wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that she’s not only about his own age but already has a treecat of her own, would it?” MacDallan asked with a chuckle.

“Oh, it might,” Irina conceded. “On the other hand, you know he’s got his head fairly well screwed on. I think his judgment’s usually pretty good.”

“You’re right about that,” MacDallan agreed, and frowned up at the stars—brighter now, as the sky continued to darken—for several minutes, then shook his head again.

“You’re probably right about the maturity quotient of Sphinxian teenagers,” he said. “On the other hand, if I talk to her and anyone finds out about it, they’re going to assume—correctly—that it was about the treecats. I mean, what
else
is anyone going to think when two of the three—really the
only
two, I guess, now that Erhardt and the Stray are dead—humans known to have adopted treecats get together for a little chat?”

“So?”

“So they’re going to wonder just why I wanted to talk to her. What have I discovered that I want to check with her? Or what has
she
discovered that she wants to share with
me
? And the people who wonder things like that are going to remember that whole BioNeering catastrophe. They’re going to be trying to put two and two together, and I’m afraid too many of them really will get ‘four’ this time. You know how much trouble I’m having with people like Hobbard, despite the fact that I’ve been stonewalling on this whole thing from the very beginning. You really think I want to bring that down on
her
, too?”

“Um.” Irina frowned.

He had a point, she reflected. Irina actually thought quite highly of Dr. Hobbard, but she was like a bloodhound on a particularly marvelous scent, and she obviously suspected that MacDallan was concealing something from her.

On the other hand, she was a lot better than some of the other “scientists” beginning to swarm around Sphinx (and one Dr. Scott MacDallan) to investigate the newly discovered species. She might suspect that MacDallan wasn’t telling her everything, but she seemed deeply and sincerely concerned with protecting the treecats, as well as studying them.