A Beautiful Friendship-ARC Read online

  But Climbs Quickly disagreed. He couldn’t fully explain why even to himself, yet he was convinced the two-legs were, in fact, people—of a sort, at least. They fascinated him, and he’d listened again and again to the song of the first two-legs and their egg, both in an effort to understand what it was they wanted and because even now that song carried overtones of something he thought he’d tasted from the two-legs he spied upon.

  Shadow Hider is wrong, he thought now. Blue Mountain Dancing’s scouts should have been less cautious.

  Yet even as he thought that, he knew he was being unreasonable. Perhaps those long-ago scouts might have approached the intruders, but before any of them had decided to do so, a death fang attempted to eat one of the two-legs.

  People didn’t like death fangs. The huge creatures looked much like vastly outsized People, but unlike People, they were far from clever. Not that anything their size really needed to be clever. Death fangs were the biggest, strongest, most deadly hunters in all the world. Unlike People, they often killed for the sheer pleasure of it, and they feared nothing that lived . . . except the People. They never passed up the opportunity to eat a single scout or hunter if they happened across one stupid enough to be caught on the ground, but even death fangs avoided the heart of any clan’s range. Individual size meant little when an entire clan swarmed down from the trees to attack.

  Yet the death fang who’d attacked one of the two-legs had discovered something new to fear. None of the watching People had ever heard anything like the ear shattering “Craaaack!” from the tubular thing the two-leg carried, but the charging death fang had suddenly somersaulted end-for-end, crashed to the ground, and lain still, with a bloody hole blown clear through it.

  Once they got over their immediate shock, the watching scouts had taken a fierce delight in the death fang’s fate. But anything that could kill a death fang with a single bark could certainly do the same thing to one of the People, and so the decision had been made to avoid the two-legs until the watchers learned more about them. Unfortunately, the scouts were still watching from hiding when, after perhaps a quarter-turning, the two-legs dismantled the strange, square living places in which they had dwelt, went back into their egg, and disappeared once more into the sky.

  All of that had been long, long ago, and Climbs Quickly deeply regretted that no more had been learned of them before they left.

  Shadow Hider said, almost as if he had been reading Climbs Quickly’s very thoughts, and not simply the emotions of his mind-glow.

  Climbs Quickly agreed, although he did not agree with everything the younger scout had just said. In fact, he believed it was most unfortunate that the death fang’s fate had frightened those long-ago People into avoiding closer contact. They were fortunate to retain a memory song from so long ago, however, especially when it was not one of the songs which had been important to the day-to-day lives of the People in all the weary turnings since it had first been sung.

  Yet that very song’s account only fueled Climbs Quickly’s frustrated, maddening curiosity about the two-legs. He’d listened again and again to that song, both in an effort to understand what it was they wanted and because even now that song carried overtones of something he thought he had tasted for the two-legs he spied upon.

  Unfortunately, the song had been worn smooth by too many singers before Sings Truly first sang it for Bright Water Clan. That often happened to older songs, or those which had been relayed for great distances, and this song was both ancient and from far away. Though its images remained clear and sharp, they had been subtly shaped and shadowed by all the singers who had come before Sings Truly. Climbs Quickly knew what the two-legs of the song had done, but he knew nothing about why they’d done it, and the interplay of so many singers’ minds had blurred any mind-glow the long-ago watchers might have tasted.

  Climbs Quickly had shared what he thought he’d picked up from “his” two-legs only with Sings Truly. It was his duty to report to the memory singers, and so he had. But he’d implored Sings Truly to keep his suspicions only in her own song for now, for some of the other scouts would have laughed uproariously at them, and they might well have strengthened Broken Tooth’s suspicion that Climbs Quickly was not the best choice for his present duties. Sings Truly hadn’t laughed, but neither had she rushed to agree with him, and he knew she longed to travel in person to the Blue Mountain Dancing or Fire Runs Fast Clan’s range to receive the original song directly from their senior singers and not relayed over such a vast distance from one singer to another.

  But that was out of the question. Singers were the core of any clan, the storehouse of memory and dispensers of wisdom. They were always female, and their loss could not be risked, whatever Sings Truly might want. Unless a clan was fortunate enough to have a surplus of singers, it must protect its potential supply of replacements by denying them more dangerous tasks. Climbs Quickly understood that, but he found its implications a bit harder to live with than the clan’s other scouts and hunters did. There could be disadvantages to being a memory singer’s brother when she chose to sulk over the freedoms her role denied her . . . and allowed him.

  He bleeked softly with laughter at that thought.

  Shadow Hider asked.

  Climbs Quickly replied.

  Shadow Hider said dryly, and Climbs Quickly laughed again.

  It was true that his sister had a formidable temper, and the entire clan still recalled the day a much younger Shadow Hider, but little removed from kittenhood, had accidentally dropped a flint knife. It had fallen perhaps a twelve of People’s lengths and embedded itself in a net-wood limb . . . perhaps a double hand’s width behind Sings Truly’s tail.

  It would not have been humorous if it had fallen any closer, of course. Short Tail had lost the last hand width of his tail to a not dissimilar accident, and it could have injured Sings Truly seriously, even killed her. Shadow Hider’s reaction most definitely had been humorous, however. Indeed, he’d received his name for the way he had vanished into the shadows when Sings Truly began her furious scold at the very top of a memory singer’s mind-voice!

  Climbs Quickly said now, feeling unusually fond of the other scout.

  Shadow Hider replied with feeling.

  Climbs Quickly agreed, stretching out on his belly with a sigh of pleasure. He folded his true-hands under his chin and settled himself for a long wait, and Shadow Hider settled down beside him.

  Scouts learned early to be patient. If they needed help with that lesson, there were teachers aplenty—from falls to hungry death fangs—to drive it home. Climbs Quickly had never needed such instruction, which, even more than his relationship to Sings Truly, was why he was second only to Short Tail as Bright Water Clan’s chief scout, despite his own relative youth.

  So now he waited, motionless in the warm sunlight, and watched the sharp-topped living place the two-legs had built in the center of the clearing.

  3

  “So why are you turning my shop into a mess thIS time?” Stephanie’s dad inquired politely, leaning against his basement workshop’s doorframe with a cup of coffee in one hand. His tone was one of weary resignation, but a l
augh lurked in its depths, and Stephanie looked over her shoulder at him with a smile.

  “I’ve been thinking about what Mom said about the celery thieves,” she replied.

  She opened one of his neatly labeled drawers and found the circuit chip she wanted. She also checked to make sure there was still at least one more t-chip in the drawer—one of the conditions for her free use of her father’s tools and supplies was that she help keep track of inventory and tell him when it was time to reorder items—then turned back to the chassis of the device she was building.

  “And that thinking led you to a conclusion which explains all this?” her father asked, raising an eyebrow and waving his coffee cup at the contraptions taking shape on the workbench.

  “Well,” Stephanie paused and turned around to face him fully, “ in a way. It all seemed pretty silly right at first, of course. I mean, celery?” She rolled her eyes, and Richard snorted a laugh. Celery wasn’t very high on Stephanie’s list of edible foods. She’d eat it under parental duress (and if there was nothing better around) but that was about it. “Besides, according to all the reports, only a head or two at a time was taking missing, and who’d go to all that bother to steal that teeny an amount, right?”

  “I can see where those thoughts might have occurred to you,” he conceded.

  It had been almost a full T-year since a mounting number of settlers had reported vanishing crops, but in the beginning, most people had been inclined to think it was some kind of hoax, especially since the only plant that was ever stolen was celery. And since, as Stephanie said, so few heads of celery were going missing each time the “thieves” struck.

  “The first thing I thought when Mom told me about it was that some zork-brain was probably stealing the stuff and hiding it somewhere—or just getting rid of it, for that matter—as some kind of joke,” Stephanie continued. “It wouldn’t be any dumber than some of the other stuff I’ve seen kids in Twin Forks pull. In fact, it’d be less dumb than a lot of it!”

  “You know,” her father said after a moment, “not all the kids in Twin Forks are idiots, Steph.”

  “I didn’t say they were,” Stephanie replied. There might have been just a hint of insincerity in her response. “They sure act that way sometimes, though, don’t they?”

  “Not all of them,” he said. “Still, I’ll grant you that some of them do. Like that young hoodlum Chang.”

  “Stan Chang?” Stephanie cocked her head, surprised at the noted genuine anger in her father’s tone. It was unusual for her mild-mannered parent, and so was the curtness of his nod. “What did he do this time?” she asked a bit cautiously.

  “He says he only meant it as a ‘joke,’ and that’s his father’s view of it, too,” her father said. “It wasn’t very funny for Ms. Steinman’s Rottweiler, though. He set up a booby trap that was ‘only’ supposed to dump a five liter bucket of cold water on whoever walked into it. I guess we’re all lucky it was Brutus and not another kid.”

  “How bad was it?” This time Stephanie’s tone was resigned, not cautious.

  “Let’s just say he’s not a very good carpenter, and the entire contraption collapsed when Brutus walked into it.” Her father shook his head, his expression more resigned and sad than angry this time. “The whole thing came down on him. It crushed his entire right foreleg and he was trapped for over forty-five minutes before we could get him out. I spent better than two hours putting it back together again, and I’m not sure he’s ever going to recover fully.”

  Stephanie nodded slowly. Her father cared—a lot—about his patients. Like he’d often said, they didn’t have voices, so they couldn’t explain what was wrong. And people couldn’t explain it to them, either. No wonder she’d heard so much anger in his voice.

  “I’ll bet he wasn’t real sorry about it, either, was he?” she said after a moment, and her father laughed harshly.

  “Not so you’d notice,” he agreed. “After all, Brutus is only an animal, right? And like Stan said, it’s not like he got killed, is it?”

  The two of them looked at one another for a moment, and Stephanie felt a warm surge of affection. It was so typical of her dad to take the dog’s side, and she wondered just how her father’s conversation with Stan’s father might have gone. Under the circumstances, she was pretty darned sure there’d been one, at any rate!

  Wish I could have been a fly on that wall, she thought with a mental smile. I bet the sparks were just crackling off Dad’s hair!

  “Well, I guess Stan’s just proved they can do things dumber than stealing celery,” she said out loud, winning an unwilling smile from her father. “But I did think at first that it was probably somebody stealing it because they thought it’d be funny to watch people run around in circles trying to figure out what was going on. Only then I did a search for every report about missing celery and plotted all of them on a map, and they’re spread so wide every kid on the planet would have to be in on it!”

  “You know,” her father said, “when your mom mentioned this to me, it never even occurred to me to think about mapping them to see how widespread it actually was.” He gave her a smile. “Of course, given my general all-around brilliance no doubt it would have occurred to me if I’d given the matter any serious thought.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Stephanie said, rolling her eyes.

  “It was a good notion, though,” he said more seriously. “That puzzle-solver side of you coming to the surface again, I see.”

  “I guess,” Stephanie agreed. “And you’re not the only one who hasn’t given it any ‘serious thought,’ either. It doesn’t look like most people have noticed it at all. In fact, I wouldn’t have if the farmers who’ve been losing the stuff weren’t part of Mom’s genegineering program.”

  Her lip curled, and her father tried to stifle his sigh.

  Her father nodded thoughtfully.

  Celery was one of the terrestrial plants which hadn’t adapted well to the local planetary environment, and Stephanie’s mom had taken over the project trying to do something about that. She’d had to restart it almost from zero, unfortunately, because the geneticist who’d originally started it had been one of victims of the Plague’s final resurgence. In the end, she’d come up with an entirely new approach that was in the field test stage now, and the farmers’ reports she was reading to assess its effectiveness were where she’d first heard about the mysterious thefts. None of the thefts had been very big, and they had been scattered pretty widely.

  “They do cluster, though,” Stephanie said, turning back to one of the contraptions on the workbench. “It’s like there are maybe four or five areas where the celery’s getting pinched, but there’s an awful lot of separation between those areas. And I’m not sure it really started as recently as people seem to think it did, either.”

  “No?” Richard raised his eyebrows.

  “People have had a lot on their minds, Daddy. First they were dealing with the Plague and just trying to stay alive, and since then everybody’s been crazy busy trying to put everything back together again. I wouldn’t be too surprised if a whole bunch of little, tiny ‘celery raids’ didn’t just go completely unnoticed in the middle of all that, especially if whoever it is was just snatching them out of the field. I think the only reason anyone’s noticed even now is that the stuff’s been disappearing out of greenhouses during the winter months. Who knows how much of it might’ve gotten snatched out of outdoor gardens during the summer without anyone even noticing?”

  “Point,” he acknowledged.

  “The thing is, though,” she went on, “that however recently it started, it’s not happening in just one place and nobody’s been able to catch whoever’s doing it.”

  “How hard have they tried?” he asked.

  “Wellll . . .”

  Stephanie looked up, forehead creased with thought as she considered the best way to answer her father’s question. To her way of thinking, there was a difference between “how hard” and “how effectively” (or �
�how intelligently,” for that matter). That wasn’t exactly what he’d asked, though, and she shrugged.

  “I think at first most people figured it was kids,” she said, “and it’s not like the amount of celery that’s being taken is really hurting anyone that much. I mean, it’s only celery, and it’s not like there’s a big market for stolen celery, right? So the truth is, no one put a whole lot of effort into it at first. Like I said, they’ve had other things to worry about.

  “But it looks like whoever—or whatever—is behind it is starting to take more of it, and I think at least some people are worried the thieves might start branching out into stuff besides celery. Besides, like Mom says, an awful lot of it seems to be being taken out of the experimental greenhouses. In fact it looks like most of the reported incidents—the ones where people have actually noticed the celery disappearing—are coming out of the experimental plots. And if that keeps up or spreads to some of the other experimental farms’ plots, it could screw up some of the long-term research projects. So in the last few T-months, people have been getting more serious about figuring out what’s going on and stopping it. Besides, it’s a challenge!”

  “Getting more serious?” her dad repeated, and she shrugged.

  “Well, they started out simple. Given where the celery’s been disappearing from, most people figure whatever’s taking it can’t be too big, since it would have to squeeze into some pretty narrow places. A couple of people suggested setting traps, but the Forestry Service knocked that one on the head in a hurry because of the Elysian Rule.”