Fuzzy Nation

  “There it is,” Holloway said. “See, that’s not so bad.”

  Carl turned his head a bit, flicked out his tongue, and gave the cat thing a very wet slurp across the face. The creature backed up, sputtering indignantly, and tried to wipe off its face. Holloway laughed. Carl’s tail thumped more.

  The cat thing’s head snapped up suddenly, as if hearing something. Carl squirmed at the movement, but Holloway held him down. The cat thing opened its mouth and wheezed for a moment, as if having trouble catching its breath. It looked at Holloway, then at the door. It bolted and was out of the cabin and gone.

  After a minute, Holloway took the collar off Carl. The dog leapt up and raced out the door. Holloway stood and followed at a more leisurely rate.

  The dog had stopped at the edge of the platform, looking up into the foliage of one of the eastern spikewoods, tail wagging lazily. Holloway suspected their guest had made its way off the platform in that direction.

  Holloway called Carl to him, headed back into the cabin, and gave his dog a biscuit once the animal came through the door. “Good dog,” Holloway said. Carl thumped his tail and then lay down to focus on his treat.

  Holloway walked over to his desk, picked up the infopanel, and watched the video of their guest. By now he was sure that he had been the first human ever to see a creature like it; if someone else had found one, they’d almost certainly be pets by now, given their intelligence and friendliness. There’d already be breeders and pet shows and advertisements for Little Fuzzy Food, or whatever. Holloway felt fortunate his own strain of avarice didn’t run in that direction. Breeding pets was more work than he would want.

  Be that as it may, the find of a previously unknown mammal that large was significant. Not for Holloway, who would be hard-pressed to make any money off it, nor for ZaraCorp, whose own interest in the local flora and fauna was largely limited to when their remains turned into oily and exploitable sludge. But Holloway knew one person who would be very interested in this cat thing. Strange cat things were right up her alley.

  Holloway saved and closed the video file, and smiled. Yes, she would be very happy to see this video.

  The only real question was whether she’d be happy to see him.

  Chapter Five

  At any one time, there were perhaps 100,000 people on Zara XXIII. More accurately, 100,000 humans; there might be an occasional Urai or Negad, brought in by ZaraCorp in a minor, mid-level management capacity to show that the company was committed to sapient diversity in its hiring and staffing practices. But they rarely stayed long, and neither ZaraCorp nor its human employees did much to convince them to stay. Zara XXIII was a “man shop” all the way through.

  Sixty thousand of the people on Zara XXIII worked directly at the few hundred E & E camps, in crews ranging in number from fifteen to two thousand, depending on the size and complexity of the exploit site. The majority of these people were laborers—the men and some women who operated the mining or harvesting machinery, hauled the product off of mountains or out of mines or up from wells—and a few managers and supervisors. But each site also had its support roles, including cooks, IT, janitorial, medical teams, and “happy staff” of both sexes.

  These E & E camps dotted the planet from equator to poles; they sent raw materials to Aubreytown, the planet’s sole city, located on a high equatorial plateau to save the cost of a few miles of beanstalk construction. Aubreytown sent back supplies, relief crews, and coffins for some of those whom the relief crews were relieving. One could spend an entire life working at ZaraCorp E & E camps, and some did.

  Twenty thousand of the people on Zara XXIII worked the beanstalk in Aubreytown, taking the raw materials shipped in from the E & E camps and preparing them for transport, first up the beanstalk and then to the ships docked at the ’stalk shipping terminal, at geostationary distance from the planet. The ships represented the massive and inequitable transfer of raw material wealth from Zara XXIII to Earth—or would, if there were any native sapient species on the planet to recognize the inequity. There weren’t, so it was all good from the point of view of ZaraCorp and the Colonial Authority.

  Fifteen thousand people on Zara XXIII were contracted prospectors/surveyors, like Holloway. These contractors paid an annual franchise fee of several thousand credits to ZaraCorp and were given a territory to survey for the company. If they found anything exploitable, and ZaraCorp landed an E & E camp to exploit it, the contractor shared the wealth to the tune of one quarter of 1 percent of the gross market value of the materials extracted.

  If your territory included rich seams of sunstones, you could get wealthy, as Holloway was about to. If it included ores or rare woods, you could make a comfortable amount. If like most surveyors you worked a territory that included no raw materials in a high enough concentration for ZaraCorp to bother extracting, you’d go broke, fast. Most survey contractors lasted a year or two before they shipped earthside, flat busted. ZaraCorp required every contractor to prepay the return trip. Independent surveyors were not tolerated planetside.

  The remaining five thousand people were miscellaneous: construction and maintenance crews for Aubreytown buildings and structures. ZaraCorp executives and white collar staff stationed planetside to keep track of materials and profits, and support staff for said execs. A Colonial Authority Judge and her two clerks. A well-armed if not hugely well-trained security detail, whose primary job was to break up the fights in the Aubreytown bars (that is, when they were not the ones starting the fights themselves). The owners and staffs of Aubreytown’s sixteen bars, three restaurants, and one combination general store/brothel. The medical staff at Aubreytown’s twelve-bed hospital. And finally, the single and somewhat lonely clergyman operating the ecumenical chapel at the edge of Aubreytown, which ZaraCorp had placed next to the waste incinerator. There were no spouses who did not themselves have jobs. There were no children at all.

  The astute observer will have noticed that among the enumerated staff there were none engaging in pure science. This was by design. ZaraCorp’s charter was for exploration and exploitation; of the two of these, the company preferred to focus on the second whenever possible. Exploration was farmed out to the mostly hapless contract surveyors, on whom the company turned a profit regardless of whether they discovered anything useful or not. Trained scientists were not needed for this sort of exploration, merely people willing to set acoustical charges, take samples, and then feed the data into specialized machinery, which did all the hard work of science. Exploitation required engineers and other workers with expertise of a technical nature, not lab guys.

  Nevertheless ZaraCorp staffed three scientists at Zara XXIII, primarily to satisfy CEPA E & E charter requirements. They numbered one geologist, one biologist, and one despairing xenolinguist, who was supposed to be assigned to Uraill but through bureaucratic snafus had been sent to Zara XXIII instead. He was obliged to remain until the paperwork could be cleared up, a process that had now consumed two standard years and showed no sign of resolution. The xenolinguist, paid but useless, spent his time reading detective novels and drinking.

  Jack Holloway had met the xenolinguist once at a ZaraCorp function he’d been forced to attend. He learned from the somewhat lubricated man everything he’d ever possibly need to know about the phonological complexities of the various branches of the Urai language tree and how the Urai’s three ancillary tongues had an impact on each. He told his date for the function that after an hour of that, she had damn well better make it up to him. She had. She was the biologist.

  And the person whom Holloway was looking at now.

  Isabel Wangai didn’t see Holloway. She was staring down at her infopad as she stepped out of her office block, and he was across the street anyway, standing there with Carl on his leash. Carl had seen Isabel, and immediately his tail started thumping like mad. Holloway checked both ways down the street; there was nothing but foot traffic. He unhooked Carl from his leash, and the dog went bounding across the street to Isabel.
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  Isabel looked momentarily confused as a dog leapt at her, but when she recognized the animal she let out a cry of delight and knelt to receive her daily recommended allowance of canine face licking. She was playfully tugging on Carl’s ears as Holloway walked up.

  “He’s happy to see you,” Holloway said.

  “I’m happy to see him,” Isabel said, and kissed the dog on the nose.

  “Are you happy to see me?” Holloway asked.

  Isabel looked up at Holloway and smiled that smile of hers. “Of course I am,” she said. “How else would I get to see Carl?”

  “Cute,” Holloway said. “I’ll just be taking my dog now, then.”

  Isabel laughed, stood up, and gave Holloway a friendly peck on the cheek. “There,” she said. “All better.”

  “Thanks,” Holloway said.

  “You’re welcome,” Isabel said. She turned to the dog, clapped, and held her hands out. Carl jumped up and put his paws in her hands for a double-handshake. “Are you in town for a reason, or did you just travel six hundred klicks so I could see Carl?”

  “I have business with Chad Bourne,” Holloway said.

  “That should be fun,” Isabel said, glancing over at Holloway. “You two still antagonizing each other?”

  “We get along great now,” Holloway said.

  “Uh-huh,” Isabel said. “I’ve heard you lie enough to know you’re doing it now, Jack.”

  “Let me put it another way, then,” Holloway said, and drew out the sunstone he’d brought with him. “I’ve recently given him reason to get along with me.”

  Isabel saw the stone, released Carl from his double handshake, and then held out her hand to Holloway. He placed the stone in it. She held it up in the sunlight, letting the crystals inside it glimmer.

  “It’s big,” she said, finally.

  “Not as big as some of the others,” Holloway said.

  “Hmmm,” Isabel said, considering the stone again. She closed her hand around it and faced Holloway. “So you finally hit your big score.”

  “Looks like,” Holloway said. “The acoustic image has the sunstone seam a hundred meters wide, and the seam kept going past the image. And it’s more than four meters thick in places. It could be the mother lode of sunstone finds.”

  “Well, congratulations, then, Jack,” Isabel said. “It’s what you’ve always wanted.” She moved to return the stone, which was now glowing faintly in her hand.

  “It’s yours,” Holloway said. “A gift. By way of an apology.”

  Isabel arched an eyebrow, slightly. “An apology. Really. And for what are we apologizing today?” she asked.

  “You know,” Jack said, uncomfortably. “All of it.”

  “Right,” Isabel said.

  “I’m admitting I screwed up,” Holloway said.

  “You just can’t say how,” Isabel said. “That’s actually an important part of any apology, Jack.”

  Jack pointed at the sunstone. “Big rock,” he said.

  Isabel gave a small laugh at that and handed it back to him. Holloway took it reluctantly.

  “It’s worth a lot,” Holloway said. “If nothing else, you could sell it.”

  “And go crazy at the company store?” Isabel said.

  “Or the other part of that edifice,” Holloway said.

  “I think not,” Isabel said. “In either part. Anyway, if I were that motivated by money, I wouldn’t be a biologist. I’d do what you do.”

  “Ouch,” Holloway said.

  “Sorry,” Isabel said. “It’s a lovely sunstone. And I do appreciate the apology attempt. But I don’t think it suits me.”

  “The apology or the rock?” Holloway said.

  “Either,” Isabel said. “I’d like a better apology, when you can manage to say it. And you know how I feel about sunstones in general.”

  “The jellyfish are long past caring,” Holloway said.

  “Maybe,” Isabel said. “On the other hand, watching ZaraCorp take that hill you named after me and strip every single living thing off it because there might be some of these in it”—she pointed at the stone that was now in Holloway’s hand—“sort of killed the attraction for me.”

  “They didn’t do it just because of the sunstones,” Holloway said. “They wanted the rockwood, too.”

  Isabel stared at Holloway.

  “That was a joke,” Holloway said.

  “Really,” Isabel said, with that flatness in her voice Holloway had learned to dread, and ultimately, to hide from. “You’ve told better ones.”

  “I suppose I could get you another gift to make up for it,” Holloway said.

  “What, another rock? Thanks, no,” Isabel said. “I liked that you named a living hill for me, once upon a time. That was a thoughtful gift. A shame what happened to it.” She turned, bent to give Carl a kiss on the head, and headed off down the street.

  “There’s something else,” Holloway said.

  Isabel stopped and took a second before turning back to face Holloway. “Yes?” she said. Her tone indicated he’d already used up all his time with her for the day.

  Holloway fished out a data card from his pocket. “I got a visitor to the cabin a few days ago,” he said. “Some sort of creature. Something I hadn’t seen before. I don’t think anyone’s seen it before. I thought you might be interested.”

  She was, despite herself. “What kind of animal?” she asked.

  “I think you probably should just see the video for yourself,” Holloway said.

  “If it’s another lizard, ZaraCorp won’t care,” Isabel said. “Not unless it’s poisonous to humans or urinates pure petroleum.”

  “It’s not a lizard,” Holloway promised. “Is the company telling you what to research?”

  “Of course it is,” Isabel said. “More accurately, it’s telling me what not to research. Unfortunately, if I’m not cataloging lizards on this planet, I’m not doing much of anything else. I’m going to end up like Chen.” Chen was the xenolinguist.

  Holloway moved his head, motioning to the data card. “This will keep you busy,” he said. “I guarantee it.”

  Isabel looked at the card doubtfully but walked forward and extended her hand. “I’ll take a look at it,” she said, taking the card. “You’d better not be wasting my time, Jack.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “I’ve learned not to do that, at least.”

  “Good,” Isabel said. “It’s nice that you got something out of the relationship.”

  “It’s not currently much use to me on a day-to-day basis,” Holloway said. “Seeing that you’re in town all the time now.”

  “Well, life is like that sometimes,” Isabel said. “We learn things too late, and then we don’t get to use them.” She looked at Holloway.

  “I am sorry,” Holloway said.

  “I know,” Isabel said. “Thank you, Jack.” She gave him another peck on the cheek, friendly again, but no more than that. “And now I really do have to go. You’ve made me late for my lunch appointment.” She patted Carl again and walked off, hurrying.

  Holloway watched her go for a few minutes and then reached down and clicked the leash back on Carl’s collar. “I think that went well,” he said to Carl. “All things considered.”

  Carl looked up at Holloway with what he judged was a fair amount of dubiousness.

  “Oh, shut up,” Holloway said. “It wasn’t all my fault.”

  Carl and Holloway turned their eyes back down the street just in time to watch Isabel turn the corner and disappear.

  Chapter Six

  “You’re late,” Bourne said on the steps of ZaraCorp’s administrative building. Holloway came alone; he’d taken Carl back to the skimmer, gave him a zararaptor bone, and turned on the air circulator.

  “I was catching up with someone,” Holloway said.

  “Saw Isabel, did you,” Bourne said. “You two still antagonizing each other?”

  “Funny, she asked me the same question about you,” Holloway said.
r />   “I bet,” Bourne said. “You know, Jack, I’m not one for reading too much into things, but even I can see that when you name a hill for your girlfriend, and then you have that hill strip-mined down to rubble, it’s not a good sign for the relationship.”

  “There’s a reason I don’t come to you for advice about my love life,” Holloway said.

  “Fair enough,” Bourne said. “I hear she’s seeing someone new.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” Holloway said.

  “Yeah, one of the new administrative group that transferred planetside a few months ago,” Bourne said. “A lawyer. Assistant general counsel. If you and I had gone to court, he’d probably have been the one that would have gutted your claim like a fish.”

  “Sounds like a nice guy,” Holloway said.

  “Well, you know,” Bourne said. “The general consensus is that Isabel traded up.”

  “I thought we were late,” Holloway said, changing the subject.

  “You’re late,” Bourne said. “But I figured you’d be late, because that’s just the sort of antagonistic prick you are. So I told you to come twenty minutes earlier than I needed you here. We’re right on time. Now come on.” He walked up the steps.

  “This place is as lovely as ever,” Holloway said, once they were inside the building. On Earth, the Zarathustra Corporation’s headquarters in Dayton, Ohio, were considered to be one of the major architectural achievements of the last century. On Zara XXIII, light-years from the need for public relations and corporate gamesmanship, the local headquarters were a nondescript block of cheap and durable building components designed to house staff efficiently and without undue expense.

  “I love what you’ve done with the cubicles,” Holloway said. “I didn’t know you could still get fluorescent lights.”

  Bourne ignored this and kept walking, forcing Holloway to follow. “Listen, Jack,” he said, glancing back at his guest. “I know you and I have our problems, but if you can, I want you to behave yourself at this meeting.”