influence, not just on Trudy, but on the planet. I don’t like even breathing the same air as him.”
Stephanie nodded. “Stan’s come to practice high more than once. I don’t know why Mayor Sapristos doesn’t call him on it.”
“Because,” Jessica said with a cynicism that told Stephanie volumes about her life, “Stan is connected. Not only is his family friends with the Franchittis, but they have connections back on Manticore. If my dad smokes a little too much wonder weed and is late to work, then he gets his pay docked, but if Stan takes something a whole lot stronger, he’s going to have to crash his glider before Mayor Sapristos does anything. Part of being mayor is knowing how people expect to be treated.”
Stephanie wanted to disagree. After all, she liked Mayor Sapristos and he was one of her dad’s closer friends. But she couldn’t. In the four T-years she’d been living on Sphinx, she’d learned a lot about the social and political hierarchy. It would be nice if a relatively newly opened colony world was egalitarian, but so far as she could tell the truth was that such environments attracted the ambitious, and the ambitious often wanted recognition and power as much or more than they wanted new lands or a chance to discover.
“There’s my house,” Jessica said, pointing and bringing the air car in for a smooth landing. “And my mom coming out to meet us with some of the kids.”
Ms. Pherris proved to be a very nice lady. She invited Stephanie and Climbs Quickly in for a tumbler of a sweet-tart punch made with the flowers of a plant related to spike thorn. Stephanie loved it, but Climbs Quickly clearly would have preferred something else.
“I checked, and both flowers and fruit were listed as edible,” Ms. Pheriss said, “but too sour to be really enjoyable. Well, that sort of thing is a challenge to me and we have hedges of the stuff on the property.”
On the way home, Stephanie tapped out a quick message to her mom and dad, asking if Jessica could stay for dinner.
“She has a full license, so she’ll have no problem getting home.”
The reply was almost instantaneous. “Definitely!”
Dad didn’t make it back for dinner. The situation with the Lins’ capri-cows was still critical, so he was planning to camp out in the Vet Van while waiting to learn whether the medications he had given had worked.
Over dinner, Stephanie encouraged Jessica to talk about her mother’s interest in plants. As Stephanie had hoped, Marjorie Harrington, who had frequently bemoaned the fact that she had trouble getting assistants who were not either overqualified (and thus tried to run the show for her) or underqualified (and so ruined delicate experiments) was immediately interested.
“You say she’s working, though,” Mom said.
Jessica nodded. “In child care. The advantage is she doesn’t need to pay to leave the little ones anywhere. The job lets her keep them with her. That’s useful, since Nathan is still nursing.”
Mom looked thoughtful, and by the time Jessica had to leave-“I usually try to be home to help wash up the kids and stuff some of them to bed”-a plan was clearly in the works.
After seeing Jessica off, Stephanie went into the kitchen to help clean up.
“Thanks for letting Jessica come at such short notice, Mom.”
Marjorie hugged her. “I’m proud of you for taking initiative.”
Stephanie grinned. “I guess not all the kids here are total losses. Jessica is interesting. I bet she’d be almost up to my study levels if her family hadn’t had to move so much.”
Quickly, hoping she wasn’t betraying a confidence, Stephanie shared what Jessica had told her about her father and the Pheriss family’s many moves.
“Mom,” she concluded, “even if things don’t work out when you interview Ms. Pheriss, I was wondering. Jessica was really glad today to buy some ice potatoes you would have tossed on the compost. Could we, I mean, when you cull the greenhouse, could I take some of the stuff over to the Pheriss house?”
Marjorie Harrington nodded, but her expression was serious.
“Charity is a difficult matter, Steph. Sometimes it backfires-like my trying to be nice to that horrible Trudy.”
Stephanie nodded. “I understand. We might hurt the Pheriss’ feelings. Still, sometimes good comes out of even that sort of thing. I mean, if Trudy hadn’t come to the party and been such a know-it-all, I might not have found out that Jessica had a mind of her own. Even if she’d been friendly at the party, I would have thought it was just because she was a guest, but when she spoke out that way…”
“Good point. We won’t know unless we try, but let’s be cautious about how we go about it. It will be easy enough if Ms. Pherris works out as an assistant. I can just tell her to help herself-that there’s too much for three humans and one treecat.”
“Bleek!” protested Lionheart, although his comment could have been because Stephanie was pulling a casserole dish away before he’d completely scoured the cheese and meat sauce off the ceramic.
“Well, then,” Stephanie said. “I’ll just have to hope Ms. Pheriss is qualified.”
Snuggled under the covers that night, listening to the night noises through the open window, Stephanie watched Lionheart scamper out. She hoped he wasn’t too lonely for other treecats. Now that she was making human friends, it seemed even more important that her best friend not be deprived of similar companionship.
“You okay, Lionheart?” she called after him.
“Bleek,” he assured her, his warmth and affection flowing back to her stronger than any sound. “Bleek. Bleek. Bleek.”
She had to hope those sounds meant, “Yes. Absolutely and unquestionably, yes.” not, “I’m miserably lonely, but I’ll stick by you.”
Chapter Eight
When getting ready for the expedition to the abandoned treecat site, Anders made certain to pack his reader as well as several changes of socks. He had gone on some of his dad’s field trips before and usually he was allowed to help, but none of those trips had ever been as important as this one. For all he knew, his assisting might be considered a contamination of data or something.
But maybe not, he thought. Dacey Emberly is coming along, but then she’s on the books as an official scientific illustrator. Poor Peony Rose…I know she was counting on helping Virgil on this project, but her morning sickness is pretty bad.
He grinned, remembering the look of astonishment and delight that had lit Virgil Iwamoto’s bearded features when he’d announced to the team over dinner just a few nights ago that his wife’s recent bouts of illness were not some form of flu, as everyone had expected, but were because she was pregnant.
“Peony Rose didn’t renew her implant after we were married,” Virgil had explained shyly, “because we planned on starting a family. The med-tech told her that it would probably take months before her cycles re- established, especially with the stress of travel, but it seems her body had other ideas.”
Congratulations had gone around, but later Anders had heard his father grumbling that Peony Rose really could have chosen a better time, since he’d planned to make her a crew chief. Now, if they got permission to excavate a site, he’d probably need to hire someone local. Virgil couldn’t be expected to handle the lithics analysis- so crucial at this early stage when stone tools would be one of the most important means of judging the complexity of treecat culture-and also coordinate the laborers Dr. Whittaker hoped to hire.
Dad’s thinking weeks ahead, of course, Anders thought, but that’s like him. This project means more to him than anything.
John Qin, Kesia Guyen’s husband, hadn’t been coming on these jaunts. His interest in treecats was mostly because she was interested. His passion was interstellar trade. He’d been taking meeting after meeting since their arrival, trying both to get an idea of what the colonists of Sphinx needed and what the Star Kingdom would allow to be imported.
So it was a group of seven who got into the air van early that morning: Dr. Whittaker, Dr. Nez, Dr. Emberly, Dacey Emberly, Kesia Guyen, and Virgil Iwamoto. Since the ostensible reason for the trip was to visit a variety of picketwood groves north of Twin Forks, they had loaded up with ladders, slings, and other gear related to arboreal investigation.
