Chapter Three
“Mama!” Alex called. “Mama! Guess what?”
“What, sweetheart?” Shona asked. The house computer directed his shout to her office intercom speaker. “Wait, here I come.” It wasn’t too difficult to follow the sound of ringing footsteps on the hard parquet floor. The five-year-old came barreling down the long gallery toward her and jumped into her arms. Shona staggered backward. “You’re getting so big!”
“Mama, Tumi has a tiger! His name is Jamir. We had fun. He’s not soft at all, and he makes a noise like a purr. Tumi says it’s a growl, though.”
“Really?” Shona asked, amused. “Did you have fun with Tumi?” On another, more populous world, Finoa’s eight-year-old Tumi would be unlikely to play with a child so much younger, but Shona guessed that children here had little choice.
“Yeah! It was great! Tigers eat more than five kilos of meat a day, and sleep more than sixteen hours. Except he didn’t sleep when we watched him. He watched us back. It made me feel scared, the way his eyes are, but he let us pet him anyway. I wish we could have a tiger, too.”
“I see,” Shona said, sensing an unsubtle suggestion for a future birthday gift. “Well, why don’t you ask where his parents got it, and I’ll see if I can send away for one. What kind of power cell does he run on?”
Alex wriggled away from her with a disdainful look on his face. “Mama! He’s not a toy. He’s real.”
“Is he in a cage?”
“No! He’s in the garden.”
“Oh, honey, then how could he be real? There probably aren’t five hundred tigers left in the universe. He wouldn’t stay in a garden. They need miles and miles of space to roam, and they eat lots of meat. There isn’t that much livable land on this world, and this is the only inhabitable continent. It’s got to be an automaton of some kind.”
“No, he’s real. Tumi says he’s magic,” Alex insisted. “He keeps them from getting sick. It works, too. He never gets sick.”
Shona nodded. Finoa was using a little psychology on her son. She had used similar psychological tools with her own children. Jill had a fuzzy bunny toy named Escarole that could eat nightmares. Alex had declared that he was too tough for nightmares, and they had better not try and invade his dreams. He preferred his animals big and tough. Naturally he’d like a bigger, better fuzzy toy.
“Can I look up tigers on your console?” Alex pleaded. “Why are they striped when lions are plain?”
Alex in search of information could spout out questions faster than he could breathe. Shona tried to answer the first couple, then settled him down in front of her console to search the data out for himself. Once she had saved her data in her retina-scan-protected file cache, she logged him onto the console as a user and left him to it.
Little needed to be done, since the roboservers took care of cleaning Setve’s clinic. In her module, adjacent to the medical center, Shona washed out the rabbit and mice cages and put down fresh bedding for them. Moonglow and Marigold wriggled their noses as they sniffed the carrot tops and beet greens Shona had plucked for them in the garden.
Their purpose was to test food for safe consumption by humans, but they were enthusiastic eaters to begin with. The mice had chewed through the last fiber-core roll she’d saved for them from the plasheet printers. She found a chunk of soft pine in the woodpile and gave it to them with a smug feeling of doing something good for the environment.
“Have fun, guys. It’s organic!” She left them sniffing it closely with twitching noses and whiskers.
Alex still sat at the console board in the office, his tongue out as he concentrated.
“Mama, can I send Papa a message?” he asked.
“Of course, sweetheart.” She entered the address header for the Sibyl, and showed him how to find the icon when he wanted it. Hethyr had given her the frequency for the communications satellite that served Jardindor. The message would reach Gershom in a few weeks.
“Hi, Papa!” Alex said, waving at the video pickup embedded in the screen. “I’m fine and Jill is fine. We have a pool so I can swim every day. Oh, wait, you saw it,” he added, wrinkling his nose. “Why don’t we have a pool big enough? When there’s no gravity we can swim in the air.”
“Honey,” began Shona. Alex off on a tangent could fill whole disks. Alex grinned.
“Oh, yeah. Today I went to play with Tumi. He lives next door, except next door is far away. He has a real tiger. I petted him. He’s called Jamir. Tumi said I can feed him next time I come.”
After some prompting from his mother, Alex delivered more news of the family, and finished with, “We’re having fun but I miss you. Bye.”
* * *
“I know it’s silly,” Shona said, at the next Friday house party she attended, in the walnut-paneled sitting room of Laren and Bock’s gigantic thatched-roof, black-and-white house, “but Alex is a very truthful child. He keeps insisting that Tumi has a tiger in the garden. It isn’t like him.” Everyone seemed to be looking at her with an expression she couldn’t read. Shyly, she looked down at her punch cup. A child’s tale was too trivial to mention, she supposed.
“I achieved the Cow-Face Position this morning,” Baraba said, perhaps too brightly.
“Very good!” Angeta cheered. “Did it hurt?”
The carmine-haired woman shook her head. “No. Well, not the second time. You have to stretch religiously. It helped that I assumed the Stork Pose for a while before, controlling my breathing, and meditating on a mantra. I chose ‘su.’”
“A nice, calm sound,” Finoa agreed, turning to Shona. “We’ve been enjoying our visits with Chirwl. Do you find that having him with you stimulates or relaxes you?”
Shona thought about it for a moment. “More stimulating, I think. He does like to talk, and he challenges me constantly with his observations about why I do the things I do.”
“Do you think of him more as a pet or a companion?”
“Not a pet! He’s much more intelligent than any animal. Ottle intelligence is equal to or higher than humanity’s. As a non-technological race they are closer to basic survival than we are. They question and discuss everything, breaking every subject down to its component parts. They look at things in ways I never would. I think you could compare them to the ancient Greeks of Earth. If we taught them physics, and convinced them of the need for it, they’d probably be able to design interstellar transport that would knock your eyes out. One of the things I envy about Chirwl most, though, is that he can communicate with my cat and dog. I don’t know if he translates their speech, or if he’s just better at reading body language than I am.”
“Having pets is considered good for one, though, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely! Stroking an animal lowers your blood pressure. If you have to exercise a dog it means you need to go out. And having to care for another living being keeps you involved in life. I think it’s very beneficial.”
Finoa paused, then sat forward, her eyes fixed on Shona’s. “What about animal therapy?”
Shona frowned. She noticed how intently the others were listening, including people in groups adjacent to their little circle. “What do you mean? I’ve read research in which children with autism were allowed to interact with dolphins. Some of the studies impressed me greatly. A reasonable fraction of the children were able to achieve natural function, and others showed improvement, but no one has ever been able to determine how that improvement came about. Beyond that, I’ve heard of few other instances where animal therapy was efficacious. I’ve never prescribed it myself.”
Finoa settled back, her lips pressed together. “I see.”
All the others sat back as well. Shona felt she’d touched a nerve. She had gone over Setve’s records, but couldn’t recall seeing a notation for an autistic child. Maybe that information had been expunged before her arrival. Was Setve off-planet in search of a dolphin?
“Are the mountains inside the terraformed territory yet?” Shona asked, appealing plaintively to her neighbors. “I’ve never been on one, in atmosphere, that is.”
Bock gave a sour look to Finoa and came handsomely to her rescue. “What’s your fancy, darling? Laren and I have some very fine foothills, and we can give you a fabulous deal on an alp or two, though the monadnocks are out of stock.”
Shona giggled. “Anything. Setve’s property seems to be mostly forest. I haven’t reached the end of it yet.”
“Well, come over some early morning, and prepare to sweat. I love climbing. I’ll fit you out with equipment and show you. Oh! Am I boring you?” he asked, as Shona stifled an involuntary yawn.
“No,” Shona said, but she got to her feet. “I’m afraid we didn’t get much sleep. It’s taking a while for the children to adapt to the big house. I tried to get Jill to sleep in her own bed last night.”
“Not a success?” Dwan asked, sympathetically.
“Not a total failure,” Shona said. “But I want to start out tonight before she’s overtired. Good night. Bock, Laren, thank you for a lovely evening.”
Laren was on his feet. “It’s always a pleasure to see you.”
“Oh, can’t you leave the ottle?” Baraba said, from the ring of seats surrounding Chirwl’s “throne.” “We’re having such a wonderful discussion of plant hybridization.”
“I’m so sorry,” Shona said, gathering up the ottle in his backpack pouch. “Good night to you all.”
* * *
The Taylors withdrew with as much dignity as haste allowed. Laren accompanied her to the door and saw the cart rumble off into the twilight. He stalked back to the window seat. Finoa turned a blank face in his direction.
“I am very disappointed in our new doctor,” she said.
“Did you expect she would understand right away?” Laren asked. “You were much too hard on her.”
“What if she doesn’t understand at all? What if she never comes around to our way of thinking? If she never can accept it at all?”
“She could quit and leave in a huff.”
“And take the ottle with her,” Baraba said forlornly. The whole room knew she had spoken out of turn. Finoa glared her back into submission.
“And taking our privacy with her,” Robret pointed out. “That’s what’s important. Our way is the wise way. The best way!”
“Do you think she suspects anything?” Angeta asked.
“Certainly not,” Finoa said. “How could she?”
“She’s a good person,” Dwan said, coming to her friend’s defense. “And she’s very wise, too. I think she would understand how we believe if we just tell her the right way.”
“We may not have the leisure to do things our way. She’s not stupid. The boy has already seen—” Kely shut his mouth immediately when he realized he was criticizing Finoa’s own son.
“Tumi has always been strong willed.” Finoa’s tone was final. She was admitting the fault, but there was to be no further discussion on that point.
“No one wants to argue with you or Robret, but why?” Laren said with sudden bitterness. “Only six of us can be the chosen, but you’re stringing us all along. You want Shona to change her mind, you convince her.”
Finoa withdrew from him, seeming shocked and saddened. “I am sure that you must be wrong. I am only the guardian. I’m trying to do what is best for us all. I assure you that the chosen will be the best of us all.”
“Engage her,” Robret recommended. “Win her over. Find out what she thinks and what she knows. Then we can go on living our lives the way we like them.”