The cat thing edged closer and then oh-so-very-carefully reached out a hand toward Carl’s muzzle. Holloway surreptitiously put a little more pressure on Carl’s chest with one hand and tightened his grip on the leash with his other, ready if Carl overreacted.
The cat thing touched Carl’s muzzle, withdrew its hand slightly, and then touched it again, stroking it softly. It did this for several seconds. From the other side of Carl, his tail thumped lightly.
“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.