Mercedes Lackey - SKitty

“My heart bleeds,” Dick replied. “Any chance they can fight it?”

“Ha! Didn’t tell you who they got for their mouth­piece. Lan Ventris.”

Dick whistled. “ Somebody’s been looking out for them!”

“Terran Consul; she was the scout that made first contact. They wouldn’t have anybody else, adopted her into the ruling sept, keep her at the Palace. Nice lady, shared a beer or three with her. She likes these people, obviously, takes their welfare real personal. Now—you want the quick low-down on the invites?”

Dick leaned up against the bulkhead, arms folded, taking care not to disturb SKitty. “Say on.”

“One—” she held up a solemn finger. “Vena—that’s the Consul—says that these folk have a long martial tradition; they’re warriors, and admire warriors—but they admire honor and honesty even more. The trappings of primitivism are there, but it’s a veneer for considerable sophistication. So whoever goes needs to walk a line between pride and honorable behavior that will be a lot like the old Japanese courts of Terra. Two, they are very serious about religion—they give us a certain amount of leeway for being ignorant outlanders, but if you transgress too far, Vena’s not sure what the penalties may be. So you want to watch for signals, body-language from the priest-caste; that could warn you that you’re on dangerous ground. Three—and this is what may give us an edge over the other two—they are very big on their totem animals; the sept totems are actually an important part of sept pride and the religion. So the Cap’n intends to make you and Her Highness there part of the delegation. Vena says that the Lacu’un intend to issue three contracts, so we’re all gonna get one, but the folks that impress them the most will be getting first choice.”

If Dick hadn’t been leaning against the metal of the bulkhead he might well have staggered. As most junior on the crew, the likelihood that he was going to even go beyond the Fence had been staggeringly low—but that he would be included in the first trade delegation was mind-melting!

SKitty caroled her own excitement all the way back to his cabin, launching herself from his shoulder to land in her own little shock-bunk, bolted to the wall above his.

Dick began digging through his catch-all bin for his dress-insignia; the half-lidded topaz eye for CatsEye Company, the gold wings of the ship’s insignia that went beneath it, the three tiny stars signifying the three missions he’d been on so far. . . .

He caught flickers of SKitty’s private thoughts then; thoughts of pleasure, thoughts of nesting—

Nesting!

Oh no!

He spun around to meet her wide yellow eyes, to see her treading out her shock-bunk.

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.”