“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.
Counter-grav units were great for getting up and down, but none of the crew was particularly skilled in doing work while floating in mid-air. Besides, such activities did put a drain on the power sources. While those could be charged from the air-van, the broadcast power didn’t reach if one went out of range.
In addition to this gear, they’d packed a lot more field gear-including a selection of envelopes and boxes into which smaller samples could be put. This told Anders that, even if Dr. Whittaker said that most of their work would be in the nature of a photographic survey, he wasn’t about to risk losing some choice artifact.
So what happens if the site isn’t really abandoned? Anders thought. What if what the treecats have done is more like moving to winter quarters after summering somewhere else? When Mom and Dad close our cabin in the mountains for the winter, we leave all sorts of stuff behind. If someone took that, we’d figure they were stealing. Why shouldn’t the treecats feel the same?
Anders wanted to ask his dad about this ethical fine point, but he knew that Dr. Whittaker would simply brush it off by denying that he intended to take anything, so why did it matter? Dad knew perfectly well that once they were in the field, Anders wouldn’t embarrass him in front of his crew. Not embarrassing either of his parents-especially his mother, who, as a politician, lived in the public eye-was something Anders had been trained in since he started to walk and talk.
I’ll ask Dr. Nez, Anders thought. He likes questions like that. I guess that’s why he’s a cultural anthropologist, rather than an ethno-archeologist like Dad.
Dr. Whittaker chose to fly them himself. He departed in the direction of the first stand of picketwood they were scheduled to investigate, then, when they were far from any of the settlements, he dipped down below the tree line, punched up the map program, and entered the coordinates for the abandoned treecat settlement which Ranger Jedrusinski had shown them.
This looped them around back south, all the way to the south side of the Makara River, hundreds of kilometers from their assigned locations.
Even with the need to navigate around the trees, they made good time. As in many first-growth forests, the under story was relatively clear. Fire activity cleared away the snags, dead grasses, leaves, shrubs, and other low-level detritus, scarring the trunks of the more massive trees, but often stimulating growth. More flammable trees-like the near-pines from which Stephanie and Karl had rescued Right-Striped and Left-Striped-actually needed fire activity to clear away weaker trees and break the hulls on their seeds.
Still, Anders thought, looking up at the sky when the air-van passed through a small clearing, I’m glad to see it’s a nice day, not a trace of storm clouds in the sky.
Dr. Whittaker took them up a little higher when they arrived near the site so they could make certain no one else was around, but he was careful to stay below the elevation of some nearby crown oaks. These provided them with sufficient cover to survey the picketwood grove and its surroundings, since picketwood averaged between thirty-five and forty-five meters in height, while crown oak regularly reached eighty meters.
“There’s a nice landing spot over there,” Dr. Whittaker said. “Level and still relatively green, but far enough from the picketwood that our landing won’t hurt valuable artifacts.”
Dr. Calida Emberly had pulled out a pair of binoculars and was surveying the area. “I don’t see any signs of use,” she began. “Maybe we should take a closer look before landing.”
Dr. Whittaker shrugged. “Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth. You know, the Forestry Service’s fanatical interest in fire watch and control has gotten me thinking. How do treecats deal with forest fire? They certainly haven’t survived by waiting for Stephanie Harrington to come rescue them from burning trees.”
He laughed at his joke, politely echoed by Guyen and Iwamoto.
“Seriously,” Dad continued. “I think one of the ways we can judge whether or not treecats are intelligent would be to look for evidence of fire control features near their dwelling areas: cleared areas like this one could be just such evidence.”
On that triumphant note, he brought the air van down. The surface underfoot was thick with a springy vegetation. Dr. Emberly bent to clip a sample.
“It reminds me of wild portulaca,” she said. “I wonder if this also has a mat structure?”
Despite her silver-gray hair, her excitement made her seem girlish. Anders remembered how many new discoveries awaited science on Sphinx. Marjorie Harrington had mentioned that probably fewer than fifty percent of the plants had been typed: “And most of those we have identified fall into broad categories,” she’d said. “It will be decades, maybe centuries before we recognize sub-species and the environmental cues they evolved in response to.”