2
“Stephanie! Karl!”
Stephanie looked up when the deep voice called her name, then smiled as Oswald Morrow crossed the Sweet Onion’s lobby toward them. Her smile was a bit restrained, although it wasn’t because of anything Morrow had ever done. In fact, he was one of the most helpful and open-minded people she’d ever met where the treecats were concerned. But something about him put Lionheart ever so slightly on edge. Whatever it was, it clearly hadn’t set off her companion’s “Danger!” alert, but the trace of wariness—that was the only word she could think of—she sensed from Lionheart whenever Oswald was around bothered her. At the same time, she reminded herself conscientiously, despite her enormous faith in the treecat’s judgment, Lionheart was a treecat, whose understanding of humanity was probably at least as incomplete as humanity’s understanding of his species.
Well, maybe not that incomplete, she thought dryly as Oswald reached her, Karl, and her parents.
“Richard, Marjorie.” He held out his hand, shaking each of the elder Harringtons’ hands in turn, and then shook his head at the younger members of the party.
“I’ve been watching you on HD,” he said. “Sounds like your furry friends came through for you two again.”
He smiled at Lionheart and Survivor, riding on Stephanie’s and Karl’s shoulders. The Sweet Onion had become one of the Harringtons’ favorite dining spots, and not just because of how good its Old Earth Italian cuisine was. Salvatori Jackson, the owner, had made both treecats’ welcome, and highchairs were already waiting at what had become the Harringtons’ usual table.
“Will you join us?” her father asked.
“No, sorry. Joan and I are dining with friends, and I’m waiting for the rest of them to arrive. But am I going to see you guys at the Foundation next week?”
“We’re planning on it,” Stephanie replied. “The Earl’s invited us to address the members after the trial finally ends.”
“I know he’s really front and center on looking out for the ’cats,” Morrow said in a more serious tone. “For that matter, the entire Foundation’s backing them. There’s still so much uncertainty about them, though.”
“Tell me about it!” Stephanie rolled her eyes.
The Adair Foundation was dedicated to the preservation of the Star Kingdom’s native environment, which was always a ticklish proposition when humanity turned up and started changing things. Part of that was both inevitable and deliberate. Humanity had to make some changes to make an alien planet its home, and at least over the centuries, Homo sapiens had learned a lot about how to terraform planets with minimum damage to those planets’ existing ecosystems. Unfortunately, they’d learned a lot of that by making mistakes on other planets, and some of those mistakes had been spectacular. And some, like what had happened to the Amphors, had also been not simply deliberate but among the human race’s most shameful acts, in Stephanie’s opinion.
She would have been happier if she’d been able to believe that sort of action was behind her species now, but humans were still humans and probably always would be, as the current murder trial illustrated. That was the main reason she and her friends were so protective of the treecats. But even the best-intentioned human populations could unintentionally wreak havoc on the environments of the planets they’d colonized, and that was what the Adair Foundation was dedicated to preventing.
Stephanie approved of the Foundation. Highly.
“Well, you should have pretty good attendance,” Morrow said. “It’s the quarterly meeting of the Board, after all.”
“We’re all looking forward to it,” Richard said. “I could wish we hadn’t been brought to Landing by a murder trial, of course.”
“I know.” Morrow nodded sympathetically. “But from everything I’ve heard, your young people did us all proud again. Although—” he transferred his attention back to Stephanie and Karl and shook an admonishing finger “—I wish you two could manage to live just slightly less traumatic lives for, oh, a few T-months or so.”
“We’re working on it—honest!” Stephanie said with a grin.
“Well, work harder!” Morrow laughed, then looked across the lobby. “And there’s Joan! Maybe we’ll run into each other at the Foundation.”
He waved and headed off to meet his wife, and Stephanie smiled after him for a moment before she and Karl followed her parents into the side dining room.
* * *
“I ran into the Harringtons in the Sweet Onion last night,” Morrow said, and grimaced. “Yet another eating establishment letting the little beasties in.”
“That’s partly George’s doing,” Gwendolyn Adair replied, then shook her head. “Most of them are already legally required to allow service animals. Unfortunately, young Stephanie’s been visible enough to make the leap from that to treecats a relatively short one for most people. And that may actually not be a bad thing, you know. George has had the Foundation leaning on the Restaurant and Hoteliers Association to let them in ever since Karl and Stephanie were at the University, and he has enough influence he’d have gotten them in anyway, one way or another. At least this way they’re still in the category of service animals. Which, by the way, pisses him off. But it’s going to spread, especially on Sphinx, whatever we do, so there’s no point trying to stop it now.”
“Wonderful.” Morrow sipped moodily at his drink, then crossed to the ninetieth-floor window and stood gazing down on the streets of Landing. “Countess Frampton’s not happy about this steady erosion of her position, you know.”
“Of course I know,” Gwendolyn said with a snappishness she wouldn’t have let her noble cousin see. “But like I just said—” she gave him a pointed glance “—there’s not a lot we can do about that, and at least we’ve got Mulvaney on board to help push the ‘really smart animals’ narrative. That was a good catch on your part, by the way.”
Morrow nodded with a slight smile. It was his research that had unearthed the fact that one reason Clifford Mulvaney had accepted the invitation to the Star Kingdom was the spate of bad investments which had ruined him financially back home. He’d come primarily to get away from his creditors, without ever expecting he might find a way to actually help deal with them…until Gwendolyn and Countess Frampton suggested the possibility ever so subtly and through properly deniable intermediaries. He might not have liked the idea of selling his enviable reputation to bolster the anti-treecat effort, but he’d been more than desperate enough to do it anyway.
“I’m afraid that even with Mulvaney we’re fighting a losing battle on that front, too, though,” Gwendolyn continued sourly. “If Stephanie was just a bit less effective as their spokeswoman, it would help a lot. But the damned girl’s ‘cute as a button’—that’s dear Cousin George’s revolting simile, by the way—and smarter than she has any right to be. And then there’s the damned treecats themselves.” She sipped from her own glass. “Just between you and me, I’m coming to the conclusion that they really are empaths.”
“You are?” Morrow looked over his shoulder at her with a quick frown. “I don’t like the sound of that. And I thought you’d decided they weren’t?”
“What I said—and what Mulvaney said—was that there wasn’t any proof they are, and there still isn’t. Proof, I mean.” Gwendolyn scowled. “I’ve watched Lionheart’s body language, though, both in person and in recorded video, and it’s different when I’m around. I think he’s picking up on something.”
“Like what, specifically?”
“Presumably the fact that I’m not really a great admirer of his species,” Gwendolyn said in a poison-dry tone. “It’s fairly easy to fool George and the other directors—aside from Jefferson, of course—and I’m confident sweet little Stephanie and Karl haven’t figured out we’re actually working for the other side. But the furry little troublemaker’s obviously twigged to something none of the others can see.”
“Well, that’s unfortunate.” Morrow shook his head.
“Maybe,” Gwendolyn replied. “But I think it’s also proof that however sensitive they may be to emotions, they can’t read actual thoughts. For that matter, it’s probably another indication that any kind of meaningful communication between humans and treecats isn’t right around the corner.” Morrow cocked an eyebrow, and she shrugged. “If he could actually read my thoughts—and understand them—he’d be a lot more than just…edgy around me. And if he were able to communicate clearly to Stephanie, she’d be more skittish around me, too. Assuming she didn’t just shoot me.”
“That’s something,” he conceded.
“But we can’t count on Stephanie’s not beginning to wonder just what it is about me—and probably you, Ozzie—that Lionheart’s apparently picking up. She trusts him, trusts his judgment. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s putting it down to the fact that they only ever interact with us directly here on Manticore, in the ‘big city,’ outside his comfort zone back on Sphinx. But eventually, she’ll get past that.”
“And then?”
“She’s still technically a minor, so usually I wouldn’t be that worried. But she’s got too many friends in too many places, and she’s too damned smart.” Gwendolyn shook her head. “We need to move on this, Ozzie.”
“How?” Morrow asked, his tone a bit wary, and she grimaced.
“George is still wavering, but I think he’s inclined to support Hidalgo. I’m getting behind that and pushing as discreetly as I can, because that’s probably the best position we’ll have if the rest of it goes south on us. Angelique won’t like it, but with a little political finesse, we could steer the reservations away from the areas her options cover.”
Morrow nodded. Doctor Gary Hidalgo, one of the xeno-anthropologists who’d followed the Whitaker expedition to study the treecats, had come down strongly in favor of their sapience. He’d been unwilling to offer any guesstimates about where the ’cats placed on the sentience scale, although he’d acknowledged that their lack of any spoken form of communication argued for the lower third of the scale. He’d also pointed out, however, that despite that they clearly had significant social organization and were both competent and innovative in the use of their Paleolithic tools. He’d said as much in his report to the Interior Ministry, and also argued that the Star Kingdom had a moral responsibility to minimize the cultural contamination the treecats had already suffered and prevent any future contamination, which suggested setting aside reservations for them where they could continue their development without human intervention.
Cleonora Radzinsky, on the other hand, had strongly disputed Hidalgo’s conclusions about treecat intelligence. She pointed out that even Old Earth dolphins, who rated only a point-six-five on the sentience scale, used complex verbal communication, which treecats manifestly did not. Russell Darrolyn had supported her strongly, which had been even more telling. Although Radzinsky was regarded as one of the human-settled galaxy’s foremost specialists in non-human intelligence, Darrolyn’s specialization was communication studies.
“I’d prefer Radzinsky’s and Darrolyn’s interpretation, if we can’t just have them classified as animals and be done with it,” Gwendolyn continued. “At best, though, we’re probably going to find Stephanie and her friends pushing for protected species status for them. And if that happens, it’s only a short step from that point to having Hidalgo’s reservations as our best fallback. It’s not a good one, but if we get to that point, it may be the only one we have. That’s one reason I’ve been positioning Mulvaney to support it if and when the time comes.”
“The Countess really won’t like that,” Morrow said. “She already doesn’t want anything that supports the notion that they’re a truly intelligent species at all. I think she’s afraid any step in that direction—any official, legal step, at least—will open a door that can only swing wider as time passes. And unless I miss my guess, she’ll see the notion of ‘reservations’ as exactly that: a concession to their intelligence. And that could be a bad thing for all of us.”
Gwendolyn looked a question at him, and he shrugged.
“Look, I know I’m the cutout between you and her for most of this, and I’m generally okay with that. The farther apart—officially—we can keep you and her, the less likely your cousin is to figure out what’s going on, and that’s what they call a Good Thing. But it also means I’m the one more directly exposed to her unhappiness, and I can tell you that if she gets sufficiently unhappy, moderation’s likely to go out the window. She won’t care where the chips go as long as the tree gets cut down.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that if she decides we can’t get the job done she’s likely to get more directly involved herself. And outside political cajolery, she doesn’t do subtle very well. If she starts flailing around, looking for somebody more ‘effective’ than you and me, she’s likely to stub a toe, possibly in spectacular fashion.”
“Spectacular enough to splash on us, you mean?”
“It could happen.” Morrow nodded, his expression unhappy, and Gwendolyn’s frown deepened.
So far, aside from the muggers she’d hired to attack Stephanie and Lionheart on their first visit to Manticore—which, she admitted, had not turned out to be one of her better ideas—nothing she’d done about the treecats was technically illegal, and she was confident her links to the muggers were deeply enough buried no one would ever find them. But if an official investigatory eye were to be focused upon her, an embarrassing number of her other activities—the sort that carried prison sentences—might intrude into the light. Which didn’t even consider the impact it would have on her lucrative position as Cousin George’s right hand woman. For that matter, a forensic audit of the Foundation could have unhappy consequences.
“What was that word you used earlier?” she asked. “‘Unfortunate,’ I think you said. Just how close do you think she might be to getting more…proactive?”
“For now, she’s willing to go on playing the long game,” Morrow said. “It’s not like she ever really expected anything else. But I think she senses the way the wind is setting, and if she decides the long game is also the losing game, all bets are off. I just don’t know where that point’s likely to come.”
“So what we really need is a way to convince her that it’s not—not a losing strategy, I mean.”
“Excuse me, but isn’t that what we’ve been trying to do all along?” he observed a bit acidly.
“Of course it is. But so far, we’ve been looking at ways to, um, mitigate the problem, let’s say. How to deal with the consequences of the treecats’ existence.”
“‘Consequences,’” Morrow repeated slowly, and she nodded.
“Maybe we should consider something that looks beyond that. Sort of a Muriel Ubel sort of solution.”
Something cold seemed to settle briefly in Oswald Morrow’s stomach, but Gwendolyn only smiled at him, and her green eyes were bright.
“That might be—probably is—worth considering for some point in the future,” he said after a moment. “It’s not exactly something I’ve spent a lot of thought on, though. Or anything I think we want to be rushing into, for that matter.”
“Oh, trust me—I’m not going anywhere near a final solution to the treecat problem unless I’m confident it’ll work and that no one could trace it back to you or me,” she assured him. “But it’s definitely something we need to be thinking about, Ozzie. If it turns out we need it, we don’t want to be trying to put the pieces together on the fly. That’s how mistakes get made.”
“So for now we stick with the existing strategies?”
“Such as they are,” Gwendolyn agreed a bit sourly. Then she brightened. “Speaking of which, I have a meeting tomorrow that may give us a little more leverage, at least where the reservation strategy is involved.”
* * *
“Mr. Jones! Thank you for accepting my invitation,” Gwendolyn said, standing to offer her hand as her assistant ushered her long, lanky—and generally unprepossessing—guest into her office.
“How could I resist?” Nosey replied with a broad smile, and Gwendolyn revised her initial impression upward. It was a most engaging and infectious smile, the sort that was undoubtedly useful to someone with journalistic pretensions.
“Oh?” She cocked an eyebrow at him, and he shrugged.
“I’ve been a fan of the Adair Foundation for a long time, Ms. Adair. And my friends Stephanie and Karl have told me how helpful you’ve been to them. Even putting all of that aside, though, it’s my opinion that the story of the treecats can only grow going forward, especially back home on Sphinx. So anything the assistant director of the Adair Foundation—the most influential environmental preservation organization in the entire Star Kingdom—might have to say on the subject is obviously worth hearing.”
“Really?” Gwendolyn waved him into a chair and seated herself behind her desk once more. “That’s a very flattering description of the Foundation, but we’re scarcely alone in our concern for the environment. There’s the Donaldson Group, and Stephen Atkinson’s organization. And, truth to tell, Interior Minister Vasquez is fully on board.”
“I know.” Nosey nodded and settled into the indicated armchair. “There’s more than one voice speaking up, but Adair is the most influential—and best funded—of the lot.”
“That’s probably true,” Gwendolyn acknowledged gravely, leaning back in her own chair. “Still, it’s not as if anyone in an official position is about to sign off on any ‘slash and burn’ approaches to exploiting Manticore or Sphinx. Or even Gryphon! To be honest, that’s not really what we’re concerned about.”
“You’re concerned about private enterprise,” he said, and it was her turn to nod.
“Exactly!” she replied, putting approval for his ability to see where she was headed into her tone. “That horrible business you were involved in with Lyric Orgeson was bad enough, but then there was Muriel Ubel.” She shuddered.
“You’re right, Orgeson was pretty bad.” Nosey grimaced. “I guess I’d feel that way about anybody who had me beaten up and threatened to have me killed, but I was hardly the only person she was ready to hurt. On the other hand, she was mainly interested in stealing the recipe for baka bakari.” He grimaced again. “Somehow, I doubt a drug cartel’s likely to do as much damage as Ubel did!”
“No, it’s not. But it does rather tie into what most concerns the Foundation as a future threat not just to the treecats, but to any number of other species of flora and fauna that we don’t know anything more about—yet—than we knew about treecats before Stephanie encountered Lionheart the first time or about the possibility of baka bakari before Glynis Bonaventure started researching Sphinx’s fungi. There’s no way of telling what sort of other possibilities we’re going to discover, and I’m less concerned—the Foundation is less concerned—about what official agencies might do than we are about private citizens and private entities who recognize those possibilities when they arise. Not all of our citizens are as mindful of the wilderness as Stephanie and her parents—or you, judging from your articles, especially about the treecats. What Ubel did after her research went south and got loose was probably worse than the vast majority of other citizens of the Star Kingdom are likely to do. Very few of them would commit mass murder to cover up their mistakes or even their deliberate destruction of habitat! On the other hand, how many of them would have as much to lose as she did if anyone found out about what they’d done? Don’t fool yourself. There are plenty of people out there who are willing to exploit our planets however destructively they have to to accomplish whatever goals they may have.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Nosey said. “No, I know it’s true. If Orgeson had been able to produce the baka bakari she wanted by clearcutting entire hectares of Sphinx, she would’ve done it. And she wouldn’t have cared what she had to do to protect herself if anyone found out and objected to it.”
“Precisely.” Gwendolyn let her chair come upright. “That’s why the Foundation’s pursuing a multipronged policy. We’re very active in public education, which is one reason we’ll be providing private funding for the Forestry Service’s Explorers and other leadership programs, and that’s only one of the educational initiatives we’re backing. At the same time, our staff is in consultation with Ms. Vasquez and her analysts at Interior, as well as private analysts and environmentalists, to develop public policy as proactively as we can. We’d really prefer to have solutions we can offer even before the Star Kingdom at large becomes aware there’s a problem that needs solving.”
“That makes a lot of sense,” Nosey agreed.
“We’re looking at quite a lot of potential, long-term issues,” she told him. “For example, very few people are aware that it looks as if the hexapuma population is in significant decline.”
“Really?” Nosey blinked in surprise.
“It’s still hypothetical at the moment, but the research and the number of sightings both suggest that populations are shrinking. Some of that’s inevitable, given their territoriality and how large their ranges are. There are seldom as many apex predators as the general public assumes there must be, and something the size of a hexapuma needs a lot of prey animals. Which means that too often human homesteading and other activities encroach on their ranges. And, unfortunately for hexapumas, their territorial nature produces extraordinarily aggressive and dangerous behavior when that happens. That, in turn, results in a steady trickle of dead hexapumas killed in legitimate self-defense, which doesn’t even consider the number killed proactively to protect livestock…or by ‘big-game hunters’ right here in the Star Kingdom who want a hexapuma head in their trophy room.”
She grimaced and tipped her chair back again.
“Like I say, it’s hypothetical right now—no one has sufficiently hard numbers to know what’s really happening out in the bush. But we do know that when an apex predator’s removed from its habitat it sets off a trophic cascade that can be catastrophic.”
“A…trophic cascade?” Nosey repeated, and she frowned.
“Essentially, the loss of an apex predator sets off a chain of effects that move down through lower levels of the food chain, frequently with disastrous consequences. That happened a lot back on Old Earth, and on some of the older colony planets, as well. If you eliminate something like the Old Terran wolves that preyed on elk, for example, the elk herds explode in numbers and overgraze their habitat until they destroy it and literally starve. That’s bad enough for them, but the destruction has a catastrophic ‘ripple’ effect on everything else that lives in that habitat, and that doesn’t consider the fact that the predators help keep the herd healthy by culling the old, the infirm, and the sick. Without that, disease spreads much more easily, especially in a herd that’s already weakened by starvation and the loss of habitat. The best ‘solution’ they could come up with in many instances back on Old Earth was to replace the natural predators with human hunters to keep the elk population under control. Eventually, they reintroduced predators into many of the wilderness areas from which they’d been eliminated, but the damage was often extreme before they could accomplish that.”
“And you think the loss of the hexapumas could do that to Sphinx?”
“I’m sure the notion that something as dangerous as a hexapuma needs to be ‘protected’ seems…odd, especially to someone who has to worry about being eaten by one of them!” Gwendolyn chuckled. “And it’s not as if we’ve had time for the sort of long-term studies that could produce hard numbers to prove that’s happening. But it’s the sort of potential problem we try to look ahead for, because once the disaster’s already happened, it’s hard to undo it. We think it’s a lot smarter to keep it from happening in the first place, if we can.”
“Well, I certainly agree with that!” Nosey said. “And if you can throw any of those ‘hypothetical’ analyses my way, I think there are some people on Sphinx who probably need to be thinking about the same sort of problems.”
“Which is exactly why I wanted to have this talk with you,” Gwendolyn said. “Oh, not specifically about the hexapumas. Like I say, that’s a long-term problem that may never actually arise. But just as we’re supporting the Explorers, we’re always looking for additional educational opportunities. From your coverage of the treecats, both before and after the Orgeson incident, you seem like a logical avenue for us to pursue. It’s obvious you care deeply about them, and no close friend of Stephanie’s or Karl’s is going to do anything to harm them.”
“You can absolutely count on that,” Nosey said firmly. “I hadn’t realized how smart they really are until all of us got caught up in that baka bakari mess.”
“Really?” Gwendolyn asked as casually as she could.
“Before the three of us—and the Schardt-Cordovas and the rest of Stephanie’s friends—got involved with stopping Orgeson, I’d thought of the treecats as adorable, really smart animals. In fact, I was worried—still am, really—about how the ‘aren’t they adorable’ quotient could lead to situations in which they need to be protected from human exploitation. To be honest, I was worried about what people like Stephanie might be doing that was actually detrimental to ‘their’ treecats, but she and Karl—and Jessica, and Cordelia—set me straight at least on that. The thing is, the ’cats are even smarter than I’d thought they were, and they aren’t really ‘pets’ at all. It’s more like a…partnership.”
“I know some people, including Clifford Mulvaney, are comparing them to service animals,” Gwendolyn said, and Nosey shook his head a bit impatiently.
“I know they are, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Steph and the others haven’t trained their friends to do the things they do. They do them because they’re so darned smart. Doctor Mulvaney’s right that they don’t have any way to actually communicate with us, but I’m convinced that if they did, they’d have a lot more to say than, say, an Old Terran dolphin or one of the Beowulf gremlins.”
“You’d put them that high on the sentience scale?” Gwendolyn asked, watching his expression carefully, and he chuckled wryly.
“I’m not any sort of xeno-anthropologist, so I wouldn’t begin to know where to put them on the scale. I’m just saying they’re a lot smarter than a lot of people—most people—give them credit for even now.”
“It’s interesting you should say that,” Gwendolyn said. He looked a question at her, and she shrugged. “The Foundation hasn’t taken an official position on the level of their intelligence, but Earl Adair Hollow’s strongly inclined to agree with you, I think. And that poses a whole clutch of potential problems of its own. Among other things, there’s the question Doctor Hidalgo’s been raising for some time now. If they truly are the native sapient species of Sphinx, don’t we have a responsibility to protect them from additional cultural contamination? The last thing we should want to do would be to make them into…clients of humanity. A species which depends upon humans can so easily become lost and adrift. Broken, actually. Obviously, that hasn’t happened to Lionheart and the other ‘adoptees.’ Or, at least, if they’ve been damaged in any way, it’s certainly not evident to me!”
She smiled, watching Nosey’s expression as her carefully chosen words resonated with his own concerns over the possibility of the treecats’ “exploitation.”
“I may—we may—be worrying unduly,” she continued smoothly, “and, frankly, I hope we are. But if the treecats are ever formally recognized as the native sapients of Sphinx, we could be looking at all sorts of legal, even constitutional, complications. I know it’s early days to be concerned over that, but, as I’ve been saying, the Foundation takes the long view. The last thing any of us want is for the treecats to turn into the Star Kingdom’s Amphors, Mr. Jones.”
“Please, call me Nosey,” Nosey said, his expression more than a little unhappy. “Do you really think that could happen? I mean, after they’ve already gotten as much publicity and notice as they have?”
“I’m positive it would never happen as a result of government policy, the way it did in Barstool!” Gwendolyn said quickly. “But that’s where that ‘private enterprise’ angle comes in. I hate to say it, but there are always unscrupulous people who could care less what happens to any animal—or sapient—that gets in their way. I’m positive people like the Forestry Service would watch for that sort of thing like a shadow hawk but that doesn’t mean some of it wouldn’t happen anyway. And, again, there’s Doctor Hidalgo’s point.” She shook her head, her expression pensive. “The more interaction there is between humans and treecats, the more likely we are to put our foot wrong and…damage them in some way.”
“Steph would never let that happen,” Nosey said flatly—so flatly Gwendolyn’s eyes widened. “Neither would Karl or any of the others. For that matter, Doctor Harrington’s the only reason Lionheart, Survivor, and Athos are even alive! And there’s no way their relationship with their human partners is damaging them—trust me!”
“I do.” Gwendolyn nodded, trying to hide an edge of dismay at Nosey’s vehement defense of his friends. “And it may be that individual interactions between humans and ’cats—single humans and single ’cats—will prove highly beneficial to both partners. I’d say that seems to be the case with Lionheart and Stephanie, at least. I haven’t had as much opportunity to see Survivor and Karl, but I’d be extraordinarily surprised if it wasn’t the same in their case. But what’s good for individuals may not be good for an entire species, Nosey. Only a tiny number of treecats will ever form bonds with humans, if what’s happened so far is any indication. I know it seems that there’s been a veritable flood of them, but given how many treecats there must be on Sphinx and the steadily growing human population, it’s obviously not going to happen on any sort of widespread basis. Which means the ’cats still living ‘in the wild’ won’t have all of the advantages that come from bonding with a human, but could still suffer the damage that contact with a more advanced, more technological, and—let’s face it—encroaching human population might inflict. That’s what concerns me the most right now in terms of those long-term threats the Foundation keeps an eye out for.”
“I can see that,” Nosey said a little grudgingly, obviously still a bit defensive of his friends. “And, for that matter, I’m sure it’s one of the things Steph and Karl worry about.”
“Of course they do!” Gwendolyn nodded vigorously. “But I think we all need to be thinking a bit proactively about this, Nosey. I’m sure that sometime in the not-too-distant future, the Crown will move to grant the treecats protected species status as a bare minimum, and that will definitely be a step in the right direction. But I think it’s likely that, ultimately, we’ll need a greater degree of separation, a wider firebreak, between humans in general and treecats in general.”
“But how do we pull that off?” Nosey asked.
“Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it?” She shrugged slightly. “We don’t know enough yet about their populations or social organization to have any clear idea of just how much damage we may have already done…or might do in the future. Without that, it’s hard to see how we could protect them from it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t something we need to be thinking about as we learn more about them. And if they are, indeed, Sphinx’s native sapient species, then finding ways to protect them from current and near-future human encroachment should certainly be high on our list of future priorities, don’t you think?”
“I see what you mean.” Nosey frowned thoughtfully. “There are still a lot of ifs and maybes in that, though. I mean, like you say, we still don’t know enough about them to be making any kind of hard and fast decisions. For that matter, there are considerably less than a million humans on the entire planet at this point. We’re not likely to be overrunning their habitat any time real soon!”
“I know that.” Gwendolyn nodded. “And I’m not saying it’s something we’ll need to deal with tomorrow, or even the next day. But it will be something we need to consider, eventually, because the point of the exercise is to keep them safe, Nosey.”
“I understand. And it’s not like there’s always a neat, clean solution to complicated problems.” Nosey shook his head. “You’ve given me a lot to think about, Ms. Adair.”
“Gwendolyn, please,” Gwendolyn said with another smile. “Or just Gwen, if you’re comfortable with it. And I’m sure quite a lot of what I’ve been saying would have occurred to you eventually.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” Nosey told her with a grin. “But I will think about it.”
“Good! And stay in touch,” Gwendolyn said. “As I said, we are always looking for leadership channels of public education, and I’m sure the—” she smiled broadly “—‘Nose for News’ could be very useful in that respect on Sphinx!”