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SIX

<So this is the great meeting place,> Seeker of Dreams mused, and Leaf Stalker flipped his ears in agreement. They perched on the high, chalet-style roof of the brand new main administration block of the Forestry Service's HQ. A dozen more People perched with them, and Seeker of Dreams felt the welcome of their mind glows as they recognized the need which had brought him here. More than that, he felt their deep satisfaction with the bonds that same need had drawn them to establish.

<It is,> Leaf Stalker agreed, and turned to one of the others on the roof. <Greetings, Parsifal,> he said. <What are the humans so excited about?> 

Seeker of Dreams looked more closely at the one Leaf Stalker had called "Parsifal." The peculiar name had an odd taste in the Bright Water hunter's mind voice, and Seeker of Dreams felt a little thrill of excitement he knew was foolish as he realized that was because it had been intended as one of the two-le— As one of the human's mouth sounds. "Words," they called them, he reminded himself, trying to fit his mind voice around the sound and wondering how any creature could possibly make such strange noises as the humans did. But the name was more than a mere oddity, for it was the human custom to give new names to their friends after bonding. That was no doubt inevitable, for if the People could never make the sounds humans made, humans were equally incapable of tasting the names by which People called one another. Yet the acceptance of such human names was also of deep significance, for each was the formal acknowledgment of a person's acceptance of a bond which only death could dissolve.

<They are much excited, are they not?> the one called Parsifal agreed in a soft mind voice rich with tolerant amusement and affection. <My human has been carrying on almost since first light. She is one of the Guardians' hunters,> he added for Seeker of Dream's benefit. <Her special duty is to watch for evil doers and prevent them from acting against the law of the humans, or to hunt them down and punish them afterward if they do so anyway, and she is very good at it,> he said with a certain pride. <I believe that was the reason they summoned her so early.> 

<There is an evil doer here?> Seeker of Dreams asked in surprise, and Parsifal bleeked a laugh.

<There may be,> the older hunter said, <but that is not the reason for their excitement. Look there. Do you see the big black air car with the armed humans standing watch about it?> Seeker of Dreams recognized the human term—or one of the many (and often bewildering) human terms—for a flying egg and flirted his tail in agreement as he looked at the vehicle. <The one they call a "princess" came in that, and my human was summoned to be one of those who help to protect her.> 

<"Princess"?> Seeker of Dreams repeated carefully.

<It is a title of respect, like Chief Clan Elder, or Memory Singer,> Parsifal explained. <We—> his mental wave took in the others on the roof with him <—have been trying to understand it more completely, for there are odd things about it. For one, our humans regard this "princess" with great respect and treat her in all ways like the most senior of elders, yet she is little more than a well grown youngling. We have not been able to decide how one so young could be so important, yet there is no question that it is so. Also, Sylvester—> he nodded to one of the others, an older hunter sitting near the end of the roof line <—was close enough to taste her mind glow, and the taste of authority was strong in it. It was a very powerful mind glow,> Parsifal added in a mind voice of profound respect, <yet there is much pain in it for one so young.> 

"And this is the new boardroom," Lieutenant General MacClintock said as he opened the double doors and stepped aside to usher Adrienne through them before him.

She nodded and stepped into the large, richly carpeted room, and her entourage followed. It wasn't a very numerous entourage, as such things went. Since they were indoors and under cover, the bulk of Alvin Tudev's protection detail was actually outside the building, watching the perimeter. Only Tudev himself and four handpicked sergeants in plain clothes accompanied her. Well, them and Nassouah Haroun, two PR flacks, Lieutenant General MacClintock, three other senior Forestry Service officers, the new admin wing's chief engineer, and a two-person HD news team. And, of course, two treecats: MacClintock's Dunatis, and Colonel Marcy Alcerro's Musashi.

"We're quite proud of it," MacClintock went on, following her into the room's cool, quiet spaciousness. "We needed the space, but to be perfectly honest, we took the opportunity to provide ourselves with, um, comfortable quarters while we were at it."

"So I see," Adrienne agreed with a smile, surveying the chamber appreciatively. Then her eyes narrowed as she saw the life-size portrait hanging above the room's massive conference table. She walked across the carpet, trailed by her escort, and gazed raptly at the painting.

It was a spectacular work, executed in the neo-oils style. Its custom-engineered photo-reactive compounds had been blended with a master's hand, trained and stimulated to grow into exactly the image the artist had sought and then frozen forever under a coat of stabilizer at just the right instant. With the proper computer support, the same technology could have created a visual image with the precise accuracy of a hologram coupled with the solidity and "texture" no light sculpture could ever match. But this portrait had not been produced by a computer. It wasn't that perfect. What it was, she thought with a sense of awe, was a masterpiece—an interpretive masterpiece whose very imperfections were part of its magnificence, the proof it had been created by a human hand and mind and eye, and not by the uncaring perfection of electronics.

"That's an Akimoto, isn't it?" she asked quietly, and the SFS CO gave her another sharp look. She'd impressed him several times already with the breadth of her interests, and he supposed he should be getting used to it by now, but he wasn't.

"Yes. Yes, it is," he agreed. "But we didn't commission it, Your Highness," he added hastily. "Ms. Akimoto presented it to us as a gift."

It was Adrienne's turn to look at the lieutenant general in surprise. She knew why he'd offered the explanation. An original neo-oil by Tsukie Akimoto would have cost almost as much as the Forestry Service's entire new administration center.

"She presented it as a gift?" she repeated.

"Yes, Your Highness. She chose the subject, executed the work, and presented it to us with the single stipulation that it be displayed in our board's meeting chambers."

"But . . . why?" Adrienne asked, eyes back on the stunning portrait.

The woman in it was well past middle age. She had bright eyes and a mouth which looked like it smiled easily, yet she also radiated an aura of almost frightening energy and focused purpose. She was of slightly less than average height, with thick white hair, and she wore the green and brown of the SFS with a brigadier's two golden planets on her collar. She also wore the gold-bordered blue-and-white ribbon of the Order of Merit, and a cream-and-gray treecat sat proudly on her shoulder. The 'cat was larger than many, and badly scarred. The tip of its right ear was missing; the plushy fur on the right side of its face bore a pattern of white streaks, tracing the scars beneath; and its right foreleg had been amputated just below the shoulder. It sat on its person's right shoulder, its tail hanging down her back while its remaining true-hand rested on her head, and the artist had captured the love in both of her subjects' eyes with haunting fidelity.

"Because she wished to, Your Highness," MacClintock said quietly. "Perhaps you weren't aware that Ms. Akimoto was adopted by a 'cat herself some years ago?"

"What?" Adrienne looked at him, then shook her head. "No, I wasn't. I knew she was a Sphinxian, of course, but I don't believe her adoption could have been widely publicized without my hearing something about it."

"It wasn't—widely publicized, I mean," MacClintock told her. "Ms. Akimoto has always been something of a recluse. She seldom leaves her family freehold—they were First Shareholders, you know—and she hasn't been off-planet at all since her adoption." He smiled faintly. "Very few of us would consider taking our friends off-world without a very pressing reason, I'm afraid. Not that I don't suspect the little devils would love to go! But perhaps you've noticed we tend to be a little on the protective side?"

Adrienne nodded feelingly, and his smile became a grin.

"Well, they probably don't need quite as much protection as we insist they do, Your Highness. Physically, they're extremely tough, with the weaponry to look after themselves in most threat situations. Dunatis?"

The 'cat on his shoulder obligingly raised a long-fingered true-hand and spread it, unsheathing the four centimeter-long scimitars which armed it. He held them up for her to see, then bleeked cheerfully, and the ivory claws vanished as he retracted them.

"The problem," MacClintock went on more seriously, "is that they aren't well equipped to look after themselves in situations where the threat is neither immediate nor physical. The specific legal rights granted to them by the Constitution are fully enforced here on Sphinx. Off Sphinx, however, matters are much less clear."

"You're talking about the Treecat Rights Bill," Adrienne said flatly, and he nodded. His expression had become rather more wary as he heard her utterly uninflected tone, but he didn't back off.

"That's precisely what I was leading up to, Your Highness," he admitted. "We at SFS believe the Ninth Amendment was clearly intended to recognize the 'cats as sentient beings—with minor child legal status—on all three of the Star Kingdom's worlds. As I'm sure you're aware, however, certain political and economic interests have taken the position that our inability to measure their actual sentience with `demonstrable, replicable precision' means their sapience is no more than a legal fiction. Moreover, they argue that since the Ninth Amendment refers specifically to their status on Sphinx, it doesn't apply to their status on Manticore or Gryphon. It's nonsense, of course. Unfortunately, no one thought to test that aspect of the amendment—or its original supporting legislation—for over thirty T-years after ratification. The question simply didn't arise prior to then, even on the rare occasions when one of the 'cats went off-world. But then in 107 A.L., the Richtman Corporation tried to move in, and—"

"I remember, General," Adrienne said, cutting him off even more flatly than before, and Dunatis shifted on his shoulder as he sensed the Heir's emotions.

The Richtman Corporation had been a Manticoran front for Manpower Unlimited of Mesa. No one had known it at the time, for Richtman had hidden its connections to the Mesa System with care. And for good reason, given the vast bulk of humanity's attitude towards Manpower and its huge cloning and bio-engineering operations. Just over six hundred and fifty T-years had passed since Old Earth's "Final War" unleashed all the horrors of unrestricted genetic and biological modifications. The war had officially "ended" in 943 P.D. . . . but humanity had been well into the fifteenth century of the Diaspora before Old Earth truly recovered from its carnage, and most of humankind had learned a hideous lesson from the near-total destruction of its mother world.

The Mesa System had not. For all intents and purposes, Manpower Unlimited owned the star system outright, and if Beowulf's eugenicists were better trained and more skilled, Mesa's had far more . . . scope for their talents, for Mesa rejected the Beowulf Code's ban on casual manipulation of the human genotype. Manpower Unlimited cheerfully produced cloned slave labor, genetically-engineered "indentured servants," and even more deadly versions of the Final War's "super soldiers." Humanity being what it was, there were always buyers (clandestine ones, at least), and since Manpower was already a moral pariah, its directors saw no reason to retain any scruples whatsoever.

None of which would have mattered to the Star Kingdom if not for the fact that the treecats were empaths.

A few of the wilder, more speculative xenobiologists maintained that they were also telepaths, but that was a much more problematical claim, and no one had ever been able to produce any scientific evidence to support it. Their empathy, however, had been demonstrated too conclusively for any reputable scientist to dispute, and that was what made them of interest to Manpower Unlimited. Despite millennia of testing, no one had ever demonstrated anything like reliable, quantifiable, reproducible ESP in humans, or in any of the other handful of sentient species humanity had encountered. Until the treecats.

The mere possibility that the 'cats might be telepaths had sufficed to send Mesan agents creeping into the Star Kingdom to acquire samples. Empathy might have been enough by itself, but the economic implications of discovering how telepathy worked and how to genegineer it into humans were incalculable for something like Manpower Unlimited. Its operators had wanted test subjects and tissue donors, and no one could have had any illusions as to what would have happened to those subjects.

As far as anyone knew, none of the clandestine Mesan efforts had succeeded. Empaths were elusive quarry, and the Forestry Service had made protecting the 'cats against trappers its number one priority from the outset. But the potential prize had been great enough for Manpower to invest what was later determined to have been upwards of eight hundred million Manticoran dollars to create the Richtman Corporation for the purpose of lobbying to legalize the "humane, nonlethal capture" of treecats "for purposes of beneficial scientific examination and export to interstellar zoological institutes."

In addition to whatever had been spent creating the Richtman facade, an unknown (but undoubtedly enormous) investment had also flowed into various political hands through both registered lobbyists and also some very sub rosa channels indeed. It had been a massive effort, and while Manpower had never seen the hoped for return on its money, the Ninth Amendment and its enabling legislation had not emerged unscathed. Efforts to "amend" the legislation so as to emasculate it had failed, but the Richtman legal experts had launched a flank attack by pointing out that the Ninth Amendment was predicated on the definition of treecats as "sapient." Where, they demanded, was the proof of that sapience? After all, how intelligent did a creature which could sense the emotions of any possible testers have to be to counterfeit sapience?

The best testing techniques available had been brought to bear, by treecat partisans and their opponents alike, and the most anyone could honestly say was that results were inconclusive. Rather wildly so, in fact. Some tests insisted the 'cats were as intelligent as humans themselves; others insisted they were actually somewhat less intelligent than Old Earth's pre-genegineered dolphins had been. Oddly enough, they appeared to test better at problem-solving when no human testers were present, which seemed to stand the "empaths counterfeiting sentience" argument on its head. It was almost as if the 'cats had decided not to cooperate in certain instances, or even to deliberately prejudice the results, which was ridiculous, of course. But ridiculous or not, the salient point was that everyone was forced to agree the tests were inconsistent, and the anti-amendment forces insisted that inconsistent was simply another way of saying "valueless."

The 'cats' relatively small size was also pounced upon by Richtman's lawyers, who pointed out that no other known sentient species had such a low body mass, and no one could deny that 'cat brains were much smaller than human ones. Their supporters might argue that the enlarged nodes of nervous tissue found at each pelvis functioned as secondary brains of some sort, but that, too, had never been scientifically demonstrated.

Xenobiologists from all over explored space had been attracted to the Star Kingdom as the dispute heated up. The 'cats were only the twelfth nonhuman sentient species ever discovered (assuming they were sentient), and that was enough to bring scores of scientists flocking in to examine them. Unfortunately, the 'cats didn't appear to want to be examined, and "wild" 'cats tended to disappear whenever a new team of scientists set up shop in their neck of the picket woods. 'Cats who had adopted humans were more readily available . . . but they were also more readily protected. Besides, those who doubted their intelligence argued that 'cats who had adopted weren't suitable test subjects. After all, if they were telepaths as well as empaths, how could anyone know he was actually testing the 'cat and not simply the efficiency of its link to its human partner?

A certain percentage of out-system scientists had grown steadily more angry at the dearth of test subjects. They seemed to feel the Forestry Service ought to have netted "wild" 'cats and dragged them in for study purposes, if that was the only way to get them. The SFS certainly shouldn't have been protecting the elusive little creatures! It was probable that most of the scientists of that opinion had been completely legitimate, but at least some had been imported by Mesan interests to help muddy the water . . . and all of them had been doomed to disappointment when it came to changing the SFS's mind.

The result had been a blistering debate about what the treecats truly were, and the Gryphon planetary government (after some extraordinary infusions of secret "campaign contributions") had actually passed a planetary referendum calling upon the Crown to revoke their sapient status. The Constitution provided for referenda from the planetary parliaments as a grass-roots avenue for offering amendments, and the Gryphon act had been intended as the opening shot in such an effort. It had failed, but not without lending the debate a life of its own, exclusive of Richtman's efforts. For one thing, unscrupulous speculators had scented additional, potentially enormous profits. If the Ninth Amendment could be repealed and the 'cats stripped of their status as sentients, their claim to any of Sphinx's surface would also be overturned. Precisely what would happen to all that land—whether it would revert to the status of Crown land or be up for grabs by anyone with ready cash—was unclear, but if those same anyones with the ready cash could just take a hand in drafting the language that repealed the amendment. . . .

The battle had dragged out for years. Every vote indicated that a clear majority of Sphinxians were staunchly opposed to repeal, supported by a much thinner majority of those living on Manticore. Gryphon had consistently voted for repeal, but Gryphon was a special case where vote "managing" was a thriving industry run by the relatively small handful of powerful nobles who had secured a stranglehold upon its local economy. (Which, in no small part, helped explain why Queen Consort Solange, like most of Gryphon's yeomen freeholders, had seen the Crown and its central authority as their only real ally against the local aristocracy's depredations.)

In the end, an enterprising newsie, with the help of allies within the SFS, had managed to burrow through the maze of interlocking corporate identities behind the Richtman Corporation and discover the Mesan involvement, and the entire effort had come crashing down. But by that time the exact status of the 'cats had been thrown into considerable confusion, and the argument that the Ninth Amendment had been intended to protect them solely on Sphinx—which Adrienne, like MacClintock, considered not only bizarre but totally specious—had gained a toehold among certain mainstream legal scholars. The fact that the Star Kingdom had been in existence for barely a hundred and thirty T-years when the debate began hadn't helped. The original Constitution had already been extensively modified and reinterpreted (very creatively indeed, in some cases) as the Crown, the Lords, and the Commons worked out the real balance of power. Indeed, one reason the Ninth Amendment had taken so long to ratify in the first place had been that the document it was intended to modify had been in such a state of flux.

By now, almost fifty T-years later, the anti-'cat forces were in full retreat. Only the financial interests which wanted to get their claws into the lands reserved for the 'cats were still pushing the argument, and the Treecat Rights Bill had been introduced in the House of Commons by an unusual alliance of Liberals and Conservatives in an effort to put the entire matter to rest. Personally, Adrienne considered the bill unnecessary. Whatever its critics might claim, the Ninth Amendment's language was clear, specific, and certainly not ambiguous. It had taken the tortuously creative efforts of entire battalions of skilled legal sophists to find a way to misinterpret it, and even then ninety percent of the Star Kingdom's constitutional experts had rejected the argument as bogus. So what was needed, she thought grimly, was simply for the Crown to enforce the Ninth Amendment the way its framers had always intended.

Which was the reason for her flat tone and MacClintock's mix of deference, defensiveness, and obstinacy, because the Crown—in the person of King Roger II, who had come to hate the 'cats for reasons of his own—flatly refused to enforce it. In fact, his Solicitor General had actually been heard to say that perhaps the Gryphon interpretation might have a bit more merit than most constitutional scholars believed. Needless to say, that same Crown had also marshaled its efforts—and quite successfully—to stop the Treecat Rights Bill dead in the House of Lords. And even if it somehow eventually passed both Houses, it was extremely unlikely King Roger would even consider signing it into law . . . and even less likely that its supporters could ever muster the three-quarters majority required to override a royal veto.

"It is a pity Dame Stephanie wasn't alive to lead the defense of the amendment," Adrienne said after a long, tense moment, her tone an obvious bid to defuse the tension and shift the subject. "I doubt its attackers would have fared very well against her."

"I don't imagine they would have either, Your Highness," MacClintock agreed, accepting the change. The two of them turned to gaze at the portrait once more, and the lieutenant general smiled. "She and Lionheart would have turned them into hamburger; they'd certainly done it to tougher opposition than that!"

"Then the story about the hexapuma is true?"

"Yes, Your Highness. A lot of the details are uncertain—it's one of those things about which I wish the Harrington family would turn loose whatever documentation they have—but it happened."

"Unbelievable," Adrienne murmured, and MacClintock snorted.

"My advice is to not apply that word to anything you ever hear about Stephanie Harrington, Your Highness. Or not without checking it out very thoroughly ahead of time. She was the youngest person ever to discover an alien sentient species. She is also the only human ever to face a hexapuma armed only with a vibroblade belt knife and survive. She joined the Forestry Service—which, I regret to say, was no great shakes at the time; we were still a privately-funded, only semiofficial body—when she was just seventeen T-years old and almost single handedly reorganized it into a Crown agency which, by the end of her life, had become what I fondly believe to be one of the finest eco-management organizations in this sector of the galaxy. Not to mention, of course, being the first person ever adopted by a 'cat, for which I, at least, can only be grateful."

"She deserved more than an Order of Merit," Adrienne said, but he shook his head.

"What she may have deserved and what she wanted weren't the same thing, Your Highness. Several accounts insist she was offered a peerage when the Ninth Amendment passed. I don't know about that—the Harringtons may—but it's a matter of public record that she declined the Order of the Star Kingdom because, unlike the Order of Merit, the knighthood it conferred would have been hereditary, not simply a life title."

"She declined a peerage?" Adrienne blinked, and the lieutenant general shrugged.

"That's the tradition, and it would match what we know of her. Her family are yeomen, and proud of it. In fact, she was an only child who retained her maiden name when she married expressly because she was determined there would be a `Harrington of Harrington' but not a nobleman living on the Harrington freehold after her. And she found time to produce six children to be sure of that, despite everything else she was involved with! And two of them were adopted by 'cats, too. As a matter of fact, I believe the Harringtons have a higher percentage of adoptions than any other family on Sphinx."

"I still say she deserved more than the Order of Merit," Adrienne declared, then smiled. "On the other hand, I rather doubt that I would have pressed the point or argued with such a, ah, formidable person about it!"

"Which indicates great wisdom on your part, Your Highness," MacClintock told her. The two of them gazed at the portrait of Stephanie Harrington and her 'cat for several more moments in a silence which had once more become companionable. Then MacClintock cleared his throat and waved gracefully at the boardroom's door.

"And now, Your Highness, I believe that speech you didn't want to give is waiting for you."

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Framed