Treecat Wars Read Free Page B

not met with unanimous approval. Unfortunately, the two people who’d most strongly objected—Anders and Stephanie—hadn’t gotten a vote. And, in her more reasonable moments, Stephanie actually understood Doctor Emberly’s thinking. Sphinx truly could be an uncomfortable planet for people who hadn’t been genetically engineered for heavy-gravity environments, like the Harringtons, or grown up on its surface, like the Zivoniks, and Dacey Emberly, Calida’s mother, wasn’t a young woman. Not only that, but Dr. Whitaker had been adamant that Anders keep up his studies, and it was hard to deny that the planet Manticore’s educational opportunities were better than Sphinx’s.
    But none of that changed the fact that Manticore and Sphinx were almost ten light-minutes apart even at their closest approach and, at the moment, they were over twenty-five light-minutes from one another. That meant any real-time conversation between someone on Sphinx and someone on Manticore was impossible, since it took nearly a half hour for any lightspeed transmission to make the trip between them. Somehow, asking a question and then waiting an hour for an answer put a damper on lively discussions.
    Twenty-five light-minutes was a lot better than 400 light-years, but the communication delay had still limited Stephanie and Anders to letters and recorded vids. True, they could be sent back and forth a lot more quickly than they could have been transmitted between Kenichi and the Star Kingdom, but it just wasn’t the same as face-to-face conversation…and Stephanie had discovered that even the warmest letter was a poor substitute for kisses and cuddling. There were things she just couldn’t say, or explain, even in a personal vid. Not when she couldn’t see his expression or hear his voice when she said them. It was a lot better than having him go all the way home with his father, but in some ways it was actually worse.
    She’d been resigned to spending a whole half T-year pushing electronic mail back and forth, but she hadn’t counted on Dacey Emberly, the expedition’s painter and scientific illustrator. Dacey had decided that even if the entire team wasn’t permitted to study treecats , there was no reason she couldn’t be working on her portfolio of the rest of Sphinx. In addition, she’d discovered that Stephanie’s mother was also a painter, as well as at least as good a botanist as her daughter, Calida. Marjorie Harrington had cheerfully offered her services as tour guide and fellow artist and invited Calida to join them. The botanist in Calida had jumped at the chance to explore Sphinx’s plant life with a Sphinxian native who was not simply a fellow botanist but probably the planet’s best plant geneticist.
    There were times when Stephanie thought it was just possible her mother had extended the invitation because she’d realized how miserable it was for Stephanie and Anders to be in the same star system but on different planets. There were other times when she wasn’t so sure about that, but the result had been wonderful. For the last two months, both Doctors Emberly had been back in Twin Forks…which meant that Anders had been back on Sphinx, too.
    The day they’d returned from Manticore, her parents had invited them to a huge welcome back party, with all of Stephanie’s—and Anders’—friends in attendance. Stephanie would have preferred to have Anders to herself, but her parents did so love a party and, anyhow, she’d suddenly felt a little shy. They’d never actually declared themselves “a couple”—not like Chet and Christine—but even so, there was a lot of teasing.
    Later, they’d gotten some time by themselves. Soon they were over being shy and everything had been great.
    “Great,” Stephanie said to Lionheart, “except that now I’m going to be the one going away to Manticore! Three more entire months of nothing but letters …Can I do it? And even if Dr. Whitaker’s university lets him come