flowing robes made from a pale golden fabric that set off his dark skin and flowing black hair to perfection. He seemed momentarily shy about his attire until Christine and Jessica started gushing about how they wished Star Kingdom clothes were as elegant. Chet wore something less flashy, but still quite respectable.
The girls all looked pretty good, Anders thought. Trudy-predictably, he thought, although he’d only known her for something like an hour-wore a pink-and-lavender gown with both slit seams on the sides and a plunging neckline. She claimed it was an ancestral costume from Old Earth itself.
Christine and Stephanie both wore slacks and blouses, a simpler variation on the Star Kingdom tuxedo. The cummerbunds showed off trim waists and made an asset of their relative lack of busts. Jessica emerged arrayed in frothy layers of silk and taffeta in pale yellow and green touched with hints of white lace.
“It’s actually my mom’s,” she explained shyly. “Neo-Victorian was all the rage on our last planet.”
Talking about clothing inevitably led to discussion of birthday customs. Toby admitted that his culture didn’t even celebrate birthdays.
“We celebrate Saint’s Days instead. Mine is Saint Tobias.”
Christine, Chet, Karl, and Trudy all proved to have been born on Sphinx.
“My father was one of the first children born on Sphinx,” Trudy boasted. “For a while, his birthday was practically a planetary holiday.”
“There were problems with childbirth initially,” Scott MacDallan agreed. “The heavier gravity and air pressure made it difficult for women to carry to term. However, now, between nanotherapies and wider use of counter-gravity, more and more pregnancies are successful.”
Karl added. “I remember when Scott was delivering my little brother Lev. A treecat showed up at the door all beat up. Scott ended up going to the rescue.”
“And leaving your mother to suffer?” Trudy sounded genuinely shocked.
“It wasn’t quite like that,” Scott MacDallan said. He might have explained further, but Irina called to him from the house.
“Scott! We need a surgeon to carve the roast.”
Most of the adults seemed to take this as a summons to dinner but, perhaps because Stephanie stayed outside, perhaps because there was still finger food, the younger guests lingered near the appetizers.
Trudy took a step toward Stephanie, but her gaze rested on the males in the group.
“There’s an important Star Kingdom tradition we haven’t followed for our birthday girl’s special day,” Trudy said, her voice filled with teasing laughter. “She hasn’t had her spankings…”
Something in the way Trudy said “spankings” made Anders feel she’d said something a lot more risque. Maybe it was the way she winked at him when she said it.
“In my family,” Trudy continued, “the guys hold the birthday girl and then the girls give the whacks-one for each year. If she can take it without crying out, then she’ll be lucky all year.”
“My family doesn’t do that,” Christine protested.
Karl looked uncomfortable, so Anders was willing to bet that his family practiced some variation of the rite. Chet was shifting restlessly from foot to foot. Clearly, Trudy might be overselling her point, but she wasn’t flat-out lying.
“Well, you may have been born here,” Trudy said to Christine, “but your family is relatively new. Mine is tough, pioneer stock. We don’t have any use for wimps and pansies. I’m sure Stephanie doesn’t either. After all, she goes around slaying hexapumas with her bare hands, if we’re to believe the stories.”
Stephanie looked both angry and somehow trapped. Lionheart, pressed against her leg, his ears canted in concern. Anders could see that Stephanie didn’t want to be taken as anything less than tough, but the idea of being held down and hit on didn’t appeal either.
Trudy smiled silkily. “So, Stephanie. Are you up to showing you’re a real Sphinxian girl?”
At that moment, Dr. Richard came to the door. “Are you all waiting for individual invitations? Soup’s on!”
“Saved by the bell…” Trudy murmured softly. “But then our Stephanie is always getting saved, isn’t she? What a lucky girl.”
No one replied, but more than one pair of eyes strayed to where Lionheart, his scars and mutilations all too evident, testified to the price of Stephanie’s “luck.”
Anders noticed that Stephanie was the one who looked the longest.
As dinner progressed, Stephanie realized she was enjoying her birthday party more than she had thought possible. Yeah…Trudy was there, but so were Chet, Christine, Toby, and Karl. Jessica had surprised Stephanie by not sucking up to Trudy (who had already been there when Jessica arrived), but by making herself part of the general crowd. And, best of all, Anders was there.
The weather for hang gliding had been great. Her folks had given her one of their gifts early-a modified harness that made Lionheart’s flight experience safer, while at the same time allowing Stephanie to “trim” the treecat’s weight more efficiently.
She’d used it to pull off the spectacular dive that had gotten her around Trudy. She was still flushed by the exhilarating experience, enough that she just might have taken her “spanks” if Dad’s call to dinner hadn’t saved her the humiliation. Right then, she’d felt like she could take anything.
Or was it the hang gliding that had her so high? Stephanie tried not to make her interest too obvious, but Mom had seated Anders Whittaker across the table from her, just one seat over. He looked really, really good in the green-and-cream tunic and trousers he wore, but even more admirable-because he couldn’t help being hot-he was doing a great job holding his own in a conversation with a bunch of near strangers.
Stephanie had been given a great excuse to look at Anders a lot during the first course. This featured extra- long noodles in a sesame-oil sauce served over near-lettuce, a leafy plant native to Sphinx that tasted like Romaine lettuce with a light hint of onion. The taste combination was one of Stephanie’s favorites, but the extra- long noodles were a birthday tradition on the Harrington side of the family.
“You need to eat the noodles without cutting them,” Richard Harrington explained as he expertly demonstrated how to twirl them around paired chopsticks. “The long noodles are symbolic of long life, so you don’t want to cut the noodles in case you cut off your own life! We’ve provided a variety of tools, so give it a try.”
Everyone did, with lots of giggles and a few protests when a noodle seemed to develop a life of its own. Stephanie wished she was sitting next to Anders, so she could demonstrate, but watching him-he proved to be a dab hand with chopsticks-was nearly as good. He had great lips. She found herself wondering what they’d be like to kiss.
As the noodle plates were cleared away, Irina turned to Anders.
“Dr. Hobbard,” Irina said, “has already interviewed Scott and Stephanie, who are the only living humans to have been adopted by treecats. She took advantage of the proximity of the two treecats Richard kept here for rehab after that business with Bolgeo to collect even more information. What does your father hope to add?”
Stephanie thought a lesser person than Anders would have been offended by the aggressive note that underlay the question. Stephanie knew she probably would have been, since it implied that the xenoanthropological team had nothing new to offer.
Irina was a really sweet person, but she knew how wearing being continually cross-examined could be, and she was protective of both Scott and Fisher-and probably of Stephanie and Lionheart, too. Clearly, she saw the arrival of Dr. Whittaker as more trouble for her favorite people.
However, Anders didn’t show the least sign of being offended by the question. He began by telling a bit about each of the specialists his father had brought with him, going on to explain how each individual would contribute something new to human understanding of treecats.
“Dr. Hobbard,” Anders concluded, “has and had other responsibilities than the treecats. She’s Chair of the Anthropology Department at Landing University on Manticore, for one. Although she does have xenoanthropological experience, it would be too much to expect her also to be a linguistics expert like Ms. Guyen or a specialist in anthroarcheology like my dad.”
Trudy’s voice, polite as could be, added when Anders paused, “My dad says the fact that Dr. Hobbard is associated with Landing University makes her biased. He says that Dr. Hobbard has too much invested in wanting Sphinx-and that means the Star Kingdom-to be the place where another intelligent life-form is discovered. Dad says that one reason he agreed to an outside team being sent in was because he felt a team from another system
