SKitty, he pled, Please don’t tell me you’re pregnant—
:Kittens,: she affirmed, very pleased with herself.
You swore to me that you weren’t in heat when I let you out to hunt!
She gave the equivalent of a mental shrug. :I lie.:
He sat heavily down on his own bunk, all his earlier excitement evaporated. BioTech shipscats were supposed to be sterile—about one in a hundred weren’t. And you had to sign an agreement with BioTech that you wouldn’t neuter yours if it proved out fertile; they wanted the kittens, wanted the results that came from outbreeding. Or you could sell the kittens to other ships yourself, or keep them; provided a BioTech station wasn’t within your ship’s current itinerary. But of course, only BioTech would take them before they were six months old and trained. . . .
That was the rub. Dick sighed. SKitty had already had one litter on him—only two, but it had seemed like twenty-two. There was this problem with kittens in a spaceship; there was a period of time between when they were mobile and when they were about four months old that they had exactly two neurons in those cute, fluffy little heads. One neuron to keep the body moving at warp speed, and one neuron to pick out the situation guaranteed to cause the most trouble.
Everyone in the crew was willing to play with them—but no one was willing to keep them out of trouble. And since SKitty was Dick’s responsibility, it was Dick who got to clean up the messes, and Dick who got to fish the little fluffbrains out of the bridge console, and Dick who got to have the anachronistic litter pan in his cabin until SKitty got her babies properly toilet trained.
Securing a litter pan for freefall was not something he had wanted to have to do again. Ever.
“How could you do this to me?” he asked SKitty reproachfully. She just curled her head over the edge of her bunk and trilled prettily.
He sighed. Too late to do anything about it now.
“ . . . and you can see the carvings adorn every flat surface,” Vena Ferducci, the small, darkhaired woman who was the Terran Consul, said, waving her hand gracefully at the walls. Dick wanted to stand and gawk; this was incredible!
The Fence was actually an opaque forcefield, and only one of the reasons the Companies wanted to trade with the Lacu’un.Though they did not have spaceflight, there were certain applications of forcefield technologies they did have that seemed to be beyond the Terran’s abilities. On the other side of the Fence was literally another world.
These people built to last, in limestone, alabaster, and marble, in the wealthy district, and in cast stone in the outer city. The streets were carefully poured sections of concrete, cleverly given stress-joints to avoid temperature-cracking, and kept clean enough to eat from by a small army of street-sweepers. No animals were allowed on the streets themselves, except for housetrained pets. The only vehicles permitted were single or double-being electric carts, that could move no faster than a man could walk. The Lacu’un dressed either in filmy, silken robes, or in more practical, shorter versions of the same garments. They were a handsome race, upright bipeds, skin tones in varying shades of browns and dark golds, faces vaguely avian, with a frill like an iguana’s running from the base of the neck to a point between and just above the eyes.
As Vena had pointed out, every wall within sight was heavily carved, the carvings all having to do with the Lacu’un religion.
Most of the carvings were depictions of various processions or ceremonies, and no two were exactly alike.
“That’s the Harvest-Gladness,” Vena said, pointing, as they walked, to one elaborate wall that ran for yards. “It’s particularly appropriate for Kla’dera; he made all his money in agriculture. Most Lacu’un try to have something carved that reflects on their gratitude for ‘favors granted.’ ”
“I think I can guess that one,” the Captain, Reginald Singh, said with a smile that showed startlingly white teeth in his dark face. The carving he nodded to was a series of panels; first a celebration involving a veritable kindergarten full of children, then those children—now sex-differentiated and seen to be all female—worshiping at the alter of a very fecund-looking Lacu’un female, and finally the now-maidens looking sweet and demure, each holding various religious objects.
Vena laughed, her brown eyes sparkling with amusement. “No, that one isn’t hard. There’s a saying, ‘as fertile as Gel’vadera’s wife.’ Every child was a female, too, that made it even better. Between the bride-prices he got for the ones that wanted to wed, and the officer’s price he got for the ones that went into the armed services, Gel’vadera was a rich man. His First Daughter owns the house now.”
“Ah—that brings up a question,” Captain Singh replied. “Would you explain exactly who and what we’ll be meeting? I read the briefing, but I still don’t quite understand who fits in where with the government.”
“It will help if you think of it as a kind of unholy mating of the British Parliamentary system and the medieval Japanese Shogunates,” Vena replied. “You’ll be meeting with the ‘king’—that’s the Lacu’ara—his consort, who has equal powers and represents the priesthood—that’s the Lacu’teveras—and his three advisors, who are elected. The advisors represent the military, the bureaucracy, and the economic sector. The military advisor is always female; all officers in the military are female, because the Lacu’un believe that females will not seek glory for themselves, and so will not issue reckless orders. The other two can be either sex. ‘Advisor’ is not altogether an accurate term to use for them; the Lacu’ara and Lacu’teveras rarely act counter to their advice.”
Dick was paying scant attention to this monologue; he’d already picked all this up from the faxes he’d called out of the local library after he’d read the briefing. He was more interested in the carvings, for there was something about them that puzzled him.
All of them featured strange little six-legged creatures scampering about under the feet of the carved Lacu’un. They were about the size of a large mouse, and seemed to Dick to be wearing very smug expressions . . . though of course, he was surely misinterpreting.
“Excuse me Consul,” he said, when Vena had finished explaining the intricacies of Lacu’un government to Captain Singh’s satisfaction. “I can’t help wondering what those little lizard-like things are.”
“Kreshta,” she said, “I would call them pests; you don’t see them out on the streets much, but they are the reason the streets are kept so clean. You’ll see them soon enough once we get inside. They’re like mice, only worse; fast as lightning—they’ll steal food right off your plate. The Lacu’un either can’t or won’t get rid of them, I can’t tell you which. When I asked about them once, my host just rolled his eyes heavenward and said what translates to ‘it’s the will of the gods.’ ”
“Insh’allah?” Captain Singh asked.
“Very like that, yes. I can’t tell if they tolerate the pests because it is the gods’ will that they must, or if they tolerate them because the gods favor the little monsters. Inside the Fence we have to close the government buildings down once a month, seal them up, and fumigate. We’re just lucky they don’t breed very fast.”