“You do seem to be having a bit of a problem, Honor,” Emily Alexander-Harrington observed.
Her life-support chair was parked beside their daughter Katherine’s highchair while she supervised Katherine’s dinner. Which, Honor observed, seemed to be going somewhat more smoothly than their son’s. Emily couldn’t actually feed Katherine herself, given the fact that she had only limited use of one hand, but she smiled encouragingly at the toddler’s green peas-smeared face and got a huge answering smile in return.
Honor would have preferred to put that down to the fact that Emily had the home-court advantage. It was true that the weeks on end that Honor spent aboard Imperator limited the time she had with their children. There’d been times — more than she could count — when she’d bitterly resented that as Raoul and Katherine raced from babes-in-arms, to self-propelled quadrupeds, to shaky steps, to determined, hyper-velocity toddlers shrieking with laughter as they dodged around the nursery, playing keep away with nannies and treecats. She’d missed so much of that transformation, and she could never get it back again, and she knew it.
You’re not the only parent who’s ever been stuck aboard ship while her kids grew up without her, she reminded herself sternly. And you’re a heck of a lot luckier than most of those other parents were! You’re at least close enough to home that you can get there for visits every couple of weeks. And, she admitted, when you are here, you can actually taste their mind-glows. That’s something no other parent — no other two-leg parent, she corrected, glancing at Samantha and Nimitz — has ever been able to do. Something Emily can’t do. Or, really, something else she can’t do.
Her mood darkened briefly as she watched Sandra Thurston wipe the outer few centimeters of pea paste off Katherine’s chin. While Katherine appeared far more amenable to the evening’s menu, she still plied her own spoon with more enthusiasm than precision, although, to be fair, peas were less spectacular than the results she could achieve with Raoul’s favored “’paghetti.”
There was no trace of self-pity in Emily’s mind-glow as she watched Sandra do what she couldn’t, but that only made Honor more aware of her senior wife’s loss. And she seemed so tired again. It was almost —
She put that th0ught aside and returned her attention to Raoul.
“No ’paghetti,” she said firmly.
He sat back in his highchair, looking at her stubbornly with almond-shaped brown eyes very like the ones she saw in the mirror, and she tasted the developing mind behind them as it grappled with the problem. His ability to put sentences together lagged considerably behind his ability to comprehend what was said to him. According to the pediatricians, that was to be expected at his age. In fact, his spoken vocabulary was well ahead of the norm. He had at least a hundred words in his mental vault by now, and he was adding at least a half-dozen a day. And he did take a certain delight in using them to affirm his independence.
That, too, was right on the curve, she thought. Of course, some children were more stubborn than others. Raoul definitely fitted into that category. Undoubtedly the fault of his father’s genetic contribution.
"No ’paghetti?" he said after a moment.
"No ’paghetti," she confirmed in a no-nonsense, listen-to-your-mother tone.
He cocked his head, and she twitched internally as something . . . brushed at the corner of her mind. That wasn’t the right verb, but that was because there wasn’t a "right verb” for what she was experiencing, and her eyes widened. She’d thought she was sensing something once or twice before, but she’d never been certain, and each time she’d convinced herself she was imagining things. This time she couldn’t, and her eyes slid sideways to Sun Heart, the senior female of the half-dozen ’cats who’d immigrated to White Haven.
In many ways, Sun Heart was Lindsey Phillips’s co-nanny where both children were concerned. A “retired” elder of Bright Water Clan, she wasn’t a memory singer, like Samantha, but she was over a hundred T-years old and the mother of “hands of hands” — the vagueness of treecat arithmetic could be frustrating on occasion — of kittens of her own. Most of them were full adults now, which freed her to focus on the two-leg offspring of Death Fang’s Bane Clan, and she — and all of Bright Water’s ’cats took their responsibilities seriously. Although Sun Heart tended to spend her nights sleeping on the foot of Raoul’s bed, her mate, Bark Master, spent every night on Katherine’s to be sure both bases were covered.
Honor had never been able to decide all the reasons the treecats did that. Partly, she knew from her own ability to taste their mind-glows, it was because all of the ’cats loved the kids so deeply. And it was because they were determined that nothing would harm either of them. But there was something else going on, as well. Something she suspected not even the ’cats fully understood. There was a complex, subtle . . . flow between Raoul and his furry guardians. Katherine was a bright, sunny, incredibly smart little girl, but without that interwoven tapestry. Sun Heart had made it clear to all of the various parental two-legs that Raoul and Katherine were almost certain to be adopted when they were older, when their mind-glows had settled a bit. But there was more than that at play here, and she suddenly wondered how her own ability to taste the treecats’ mind-glows might have looked if she could have seen it from the outside.
Now Sun Heart met her questioning gaze — and the more pointed question of her emotions — with a calm, grass-green gaze. Then she flipped her ears in the equivalent of a shrug.
Lot of help that was, Honor thought dryly, and Sun Heart bleeked in soft laughter that was echoed from Nimitz and Samantha.
“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” she told the furrier members of the dinner party. “I think —”
“’ellery,” Raoul interrupted with the air of a high-level diplomat offering up a compromise solution.
“You need to eat more than just celery,” Honor responded. She wasn’t sure whether Raoul really liked celery or if his craving for it owed more to watching the treecats devour it.
Or, she thought, thinking about that subtle flow of mind-glows, maybe he actually . . . I don’t know . . . experiences whatever it is they get out of eating it. I’ve certainly tasted Mister Gobble Guts’s fondness for it!
Nimitz bleeked a harder laugh.
“The peas were only one thing you were trying to get down him,” Hamish pointed out. “Maybe you’ve got an opening wedge.”
“Bargaining creates a future position of weakness,” Honor replied darkly, regarding Raoul with calculating eyes.
“Honor, he’s not quite two. You’ve got decades to work on him.”
“Oh yes?” She turned to give him a withering glance. “Do you have any idea how hard it was for my mom to get back any ground she ever yielded to me?”
“I don’t have to. I know how hard it’s been for me and Emily!” He shook his head. “I’m just saying that sometimes a canny tactician settles for a partial victory rather than reinforcing failure.”
“You to do realize you’re feeding a child, not fighting a battle?” Emily asked. Then she paused, thought a moment, and shook her head. “Forget I said that.”
“Truer words were never spoken,” Honor said, returning her attention to Raoul.
“No peas, you get the celery, but you have to eat the mac-and-cheese and drink every drop of the milk,” she countered. “Deal?”
He pondered carefully, considering every aspect of the proposed compromise. She could tell that the “I’m-a-big-boy” corner of his mind wanted to lay down additional conditions. Fortunately, she had a hole card. The Meyerdahl genetic mods were hard-coded, which meant he’d inherited her metabolism. Debating what he was going to eat might turn into a tussle, but there was no doubt he was going to eat something. Keeping the Meyerdahl furnace stoked was a full-time occupation. So she sat back, arms folded, and waited him out. He wavered back and forth for a moment, then nodded.
“’eal,” he said firmly. “But ’ellery first!”
“Done,” she sighed, and reached out to remove a stalk of celery from Nimitz’ tray. The treecat bleeked indignantly, and she snorted. “You’re so darned amused by all this, you can provide the celery,” she told him.
Raoul didn’t care where it had come from. He grinned from ear to ear, grabbed his prize, and started to chew.
“Now, if only the Sollies were that easy,” Hamish said.
“The Sollies don’t have a clue about real stubbornness,” Honor informed him with crushing scorn.
