Julia Ecklar - The Human Animal

She took a blood sample from a vein in his neck, a tissue scraping from the sores left by the restraining collar, and a membrane swab from his sinuses. Bad enough that she had to knock him out instead of taking the time to win his trust—at least she could hide whatever discomfort the scrapings caused among the damage inflicted by Nadder. It didn’t make much difference how much he ended up hating the black-marketeer. Rahel, on the other hand, still had to get home with the boy.

Running back to the jumpship’s lab with her samples divided between both hands, she slapped together a quick set of slides and fed them into the testing station. “Check the blood and mucal smears for antibodies, antigens, parasite residue, and possible infectious agents. I’ll need a vaccination set for him, plus medication for any diseases or parasites you find in his system.”

“Species of sample donor?” the AI asked.

“Homo sapiens.” She snapped closed the last set of slides and sent them after the others. “These are dermal and subdermal tissue samples from the same specimen. Get me a DNA spin and cross-match against the entire Noah’s Ark database. I want to know what breeding population his genetics are from, and an estimate on his age, if you can give me one. Log all of this under Feral Aral, Interface Acquisition #1.”

“OK.” The AI shuffled the slides into queue somewhere deep in its works. “Blood and mucal analysis complete. Results dispatched to screen two. I can display the requested genetic results in approximately ten hours sixteen minutes.”

“Sounds good.” It wasn’t like she wouldn’t still have the boy tomorrow. “Let me know as soon as you’ve got them.”

Scientific curiosity taken care of for the time, she assembled the vaccination set recommended by the AI and took it out to the boy. Toad had already flopped to the floor full length in order to groom between his toes. Pausing to ruffle the puppy’s ears—“Thanks for the help,”—Rahel administered the injection, squirted parasite medication between the boy’s teeth, then pulled the bucket over to start on the unpleasant task still before her.

If this boy had ever been bathed, it was so long ago as to not count anymore. Water ran off his chest in scattered beads, repelled by the oil and filth before it could even dampen his skin. Rahel swallowed her disgust and soaped the rag into a dripping, frothy cream between both hands. Draping the cloth across the boy’s arm for a moment produced somewhat better results, a patch of stained, pinkish skin appeared in response to her gentle scrubbing, and a smelly crust of dead cells and rancid sweat came off on the rag and turned it blackish. She dunked it into the bucket to rinse out the worst of the grime, then attacked the soap again before slathering rag and water all over the rest of his arm.

Little by little, the details of his previous life exposed themselves—like brush strokes on an ancient painting, previously hidden behind a lifetime of neglect. Scars like fine, white lace-work on his hands, his knees, the fronts of both narrow shins. Palms as rough and hard as dried leather, feet even harder and thicker than that, and not as much as an intact nail among them. Worn but sturdy teeth with no sign of breakage, misalignment, or dental caries. Long, startlingly dark eyelashes. Eyebrows the same tarnished gold as ginger honey, and fine, brittle hair that would probably be the same color once it grew back without the filth and tangles. She had to tell herself over and over again that even a bad haircut didn’t last forever before she could bring herself to shave his skull down to a pale fuzz.

Once she’d bathed him, dried him, and swabbed him head to toe with a topical insecticide, she cleaned and dressed the wounds around his neck and wrestled him into the overlarge T-shirt. The teal-and-white shift hung down around his knees. Combined with his new haircut, it made him look like an underage krishna monk with no fashion sense.

“Well, Spud, what do we do now?”

Toad looked up from mauling the power clippers, just in case the comment meant she was about to be played with or fed.

Rahel leaned over to relieve her of the shears, exchanging them for the closest legitimate chew toy at hand. “The way I see it,” she said, bouncing the toy against Toad’s nose until the puppy snapped and snorted with joy, “I’ve got two choices—lock him up in the shipping crate again, or give him free run of the jumpship.” She finally let Toad wrench the toy from her hand and proudly trot a few meters away. “Both of which options suck.”

In her heart, Rahel never liked putting animals in crates, even when she knew in her head why she had to do it. But her cargo now was a human, not a basilisk, or an oryx, or even a high-functioning bonobo—and for all their biologic composition, humans just weren’t like other animals. Assuming that spending every leg of a seven-gate trip in almost total isolation didn’t irreparably damage his psyche, he was still sure to suffer from whatever distorted visions his imagination fed him about what waited at the end of his confinement. Most animals had a better time of it if you left them in the dark and quiet, not stressing them with your presence. Human animals, however, could supply plenty of stress just with their own thinking if there wasn’t enough input to keep their overevolved brains occupied.

Which brought them to running around the ship at will. Suddenly, the boy’s kinship with the rest of Terra’s fauna seemed a lot closer than it had moments before. He may or may not be housebroken; Rahel had a four-month-old-puppy, so bathroom habits were the least of her worries. Jumpships contained a great deal of equipment, though. There were places he shouldn’t get into, buttons he shouldn’t push, compounds and instruments he shouldn’t touch. If he’d been a chinchilla, she wouldn’t have cared where he scampered. But this animal was a human—worse yet, a human boy. There wasn’t a door on this ship he couldn’t learn how to open, not a button or panel or storage bin he wouldn’t be able to reach. If she let him run loose, he’d very likely kill himself before they made it to the first gate. Where would all her concern for his freedom and comfort have gotten them then?

In the end, she carried him back to the lounge and tethered him to a table. He’d be able to reach every part of the room except the door, and the lounge offered both a carpet for soft walking and a grotesquely colored couch. She tossed all the extra blankets and pillows into the room at random. Maybe he’d want to make a bedding pile for himself. Maybe he’d want to hide behind the sofa. Giving him such harmless options was the only freedom she could grant.

She fastened the EV tether to the leg of a built-in table, then attached a soft-cuff bracelet to the boy’s wrist. Toad supervised with her head under Rahel’s armpit. Rahel made sure the cuff was tight enough not to chafe but not so tight as to feel like a punishment. Then she burned off the latch so that nothing short of a surgical laser could get the restraint off again. She didn’t know the boy well enough to estimate his intellect, but she’d seen orangutans fiddle their way out of soft-cuffs just like this one. She wasn’t taking any chances.

The boy came awake while she was checking the last of the cable connections. Crawling out from under the table, Rahel stood to find the boy squatting at the other end of the room, heels flat to the floor, hands linked in front of his shins. He didn’t look up at her, instead fixing his attention on the soft-cuff encircling his wrist. He picked at the edges, followed the curve until reaching the ball joint that connected the tether. Then he closed his hand around his wrist and sat, eyes downcast, face obscenely still.