Balance Point Read Free Page B

scar tissue on his face where the kerosene rain had burned him. “If not for me, for the memory of my mother.”
    Invoking his dead mother, killed by humans, was a tactic he had learned from the humans. They used it to induce sympathy in another. Although neither party moved in any direction, it was called a guilt trip.
    Jazen expelled breath, indicating reluctant assent. The humans called it a sigh. “If I do, you’ll calm down?”
    The grezzen lay on his back, laced the claws of four limbs across his belly, then remained motionless, like an inanimate vegetable. “There. I am as calm as a cucumber.”
    “Cool. Cool as a cucumber.”
    “As you prefer.”
    Then Jazen raised the leaf again, drew a foreclaw across its surface, and spoke.
    “Turn in Tale of Tarnished Tycoon. Once the fourth richest man on Earth, and majority shareholder in its largest communications conglomerate, Bartram Cutler was serving the second year of a twenty-two-year sentence after conviction on criminal charges that remain sealed on national security grounds. That changed yesterday when Cutler’s name appeared on the outgoing administration’s list of midnight pardons—”
    The grezzen raised one foreclaw. “I came here only because you and Kit told me that Cutler would be restrained because of his misdeeds. You, and so I, have just learned that you said that which is not.”
    Jazen pointed a foreclaw at the grezzen. “We didn’t lie to you! Being wrong about the future’s not lying. Just because telepaths don’t know how to lie doesn’t mean you can’t understand the difference. You know humans by now.”
    The grezzen did indeed know humans, at least his humans, now. He did not know when, precisely, he had begun thinking of Jazen and Kit as “his.” Nor did he know when he, a being who lived his adult life, save for mating, apart from others of his kind, came to enjoy proximate interaction with these two frail creatures.
    Jazen made another tiny exhalation. “You think I like it? You felt my anger when John read it for me, didn’t you?”
    The grezzen nodded. “I did. However, I have left my home and come to this place in reliance upon what you said. I have remained here because of what you said. I have endured bland food and miserable climate and the poking and prodding of the nerds at The Barn.” He stroked his old scar tissue again. “To say nothing of the attempts to burn me alive.” The grezzen turned his mouth up at its corners. “Ha-ha.”
    Jazen’s tiny facial muscles mimicked the grezzen’s in response. “I was wrong. Your sense of humor’s improving. But remember, if you hadn’t come to Earth with us, Cutler would have killed half your cousins by now. Just like he killed your mother. And he would have enslaved the rest of you. He’s a bad human. Unfortunately, we have lots of those.”
    The grezzen raised and lowered his chin in a human nod. “And so I have been content to endure the nerds. But now Cutler is unrestrained. He killed my mother and now he is out there somewhere.” He raised up on his back two and stared toward the distant perimeter fence, invisible beyond the trees. “That should not continue.”
    Jazen’s small eyes widened and he raised both foreclaws and turned their inner surfaces toward the grezzen, as though he were pushing against a tree trunk. “Don’t even think about it!” He pointed with a foreclaw at the boundary which could not be seen from here. “Mort, you cross outside that fence and the villagers’ll go torches and pitchforks on you.”
    The grezzen stroked his face again, where the kerosene had burned him, then shook his head vertically to punctuate. “Yes. Villagers. I understand. Humans acting together are even more dangerous than a human acting alone.”
    “More powerful, yes. More dangerous? Not usually. Mostly, when humans act together, it’s to do something good. You like the London Symphony.”
    “I do. But the Yavi act together. The nerds who study me act