Balance Point Read Free Page A

No tiny mammaries pushed against its ventral integument, which was patterned in multiple colors. Its lower jaw was smudged, a recurring condition the humans called “five o’clock shadow” for incomprehensibly complex reasons. Male.
    The human extended one forelimb behind himself, with one digit extended, toward the smoke and the human shell the grezzen had trampled. “Not exactly a people person today, are we, Mort?” The human audibilized the thought, tiny mouth opening and closing as though eating, but the grezzen understood without the auditory cue.
    The grezzen also felt the human’s inner fear, of which the little biped gave no outward sign. The fear was understandable. The grezzen’s current intemperate rage created the very real apprehension that he might kill any human who came near him.
    The grezzen responded to the human without sound. “I have not eaten people in years. Ha-ha.”
    His response relaxed the human, as intended, and the little creature audibilized, “Not funny. Better. But your joke-telling skills need more work.”
    “I felt it was you, Jazen.”
    “You’ve made a mess here, Mort.”
    “You know why. I felt you communicate with John Buford.”
    Jazen tilted his head forward and back. The grezzen understood that this indicated agreement. Humans communicated by patterned sound, but also by body displays, much like prey animals did.
    Jazen raised a tiny white leaf in front of his eyes with one hand while he pointed at it with the other. “You eavesdropped on Buford while he was reading the news on his handheld. But Mort, when the news is bad, you can’t just kill the messenger.”
    The grezzen rocked back on his third legs, a pose humans used to communicate affront. “And I did not! John Buford tried to burn me with the fire stinger, so I removed it. That is all I did.”
    “All? You know what a hellcat costs?”
    The grezzen dropped back onto all six. Cost. Grezzen had no need for tools, much less a system by which to value them. Humans, however, valued the tools they communally created and shared, like the hellcat. Only by community and tools had a species so tiny and fragile survived. It was but one reason the little creatures fascinated him. “Perhaps I over-reacted.”
    Jazen swiveled his head, pointed his foreclaw at the vast expanse of spoiled and burned vegetation that surrounded them. “Ya think? And you scared John shitless.”
    “Such news would have upset any individual of normal intelligence and sensibility.”
    “John doesn’t know you have intelligence and sensibility! To him you’re just a big dog.”
    The grezzen extended his forelimb and pointed a claw at the leaf. “Read the rest for me. Of the news that John Buford was learning from the leaf.”
    Jazen crossed his forelimbs, shook his head. This indicated both displeasure and intransigence. “You’re a goddam telepath. Go find a mind that’s not pissed off at you and read it yourself.”
    “You know it does not work like that.”
    How it worked, in fact, was that Dead End’s entire grezzen population, the tiny apex atop that planet’s predation pyramid, were telepathically connected in real time, cousin-to-cousin, like ‘puters wired to a single server. Mort accessed his grandfather’s memories as easily as his own, and saw, heard and smelled what any other grezzen experienced whenever he chose.
    But with other species, Mort couldn’t rummage through individuals’ memory banks. He could only see, hear, feel, sense what any individual did, in the moment. As if that individual wore a head-cam with earpiece, and Mort could access the feed anytime he wished.
    Grezzen attacked and defended using sight and sound and smell when convenient. And fell back on their gift when they chose. Evolution had upgraded them from physically dominant predators to lords of their world.
    However, when eavesdropping on aliens in an alien world, Mort’s gift underperformed.
    “Jazen? Please?” The grezzen stroked the old