“It’ll make me look like an asshole,” Holloway said.
“Everyone thinks you’re an asshole anyway, Holloway,” Aubrey said. “No offense.”
“None taken,” Holloway said.
“Besides, for the amount of money we’re talking about, you can afford to be an asshole,” Aubrey said.
“Well, when you put it that way,” Holloway said.
“Mr. Holloway, this is a very serious offer,” Landon said. “There’s too much at stake here. This inquiry has to end with the judge ruling against our filing an SSR. Every other option is failure. You have the power to get the right ruling here for everyone.”
“Sure,” Holloway said. “And all I have to do is make Isabel look like a fool.”
“Not to put too fine a point on it, Holloway, but you’ve done that before, haven’t you?” Landon said, nodding at Bourne. “Mr. Bourne here tells us that you sold her out before during an inquiry. She said you taught your dog to blow things up. You called her a liar. You didn’t have a problem with it then, when the only thing at stake was your surveyor contract. Now that you have the potential to become one of the richest men in the universe, you might have some extra motivation.”
“I suppose I might,” Holloway said.
“Good,” Aubrey said. “Then we have a deal.”
“I have to emphasize, Mr. Holloway, that we were never here,” Landon said.
“Of course not,” Holloway said. “Only your cover man Bourne was here, and he just came out to see the animals.”
“We understand each other fully,” Landon said.
“Oh, we do,” Holloway said. “We really do.”
Chapter Fifteen
When his guests had left, Holloway reached over for his infopanel and punched up the feed from the security camera. If any of the three men who had been in the house had seen the camera, they didn’t note it, which was just as well since Holloway planned it that way. There was a reason he kept the hat on the camera stand.
For the first several minutes the video showed nothing but the skimmer with Joe DeLise in it, fiddling with the dash buttons and the key fob and generally looking bored. Holloway fast-forwarded through this and then slowed down the feed when something popped up on the hood of the skimmer. Holloway zoomed in; it was Pinto, the rambunctious fuzzy.
Pinto walked over to the windshield of the skimmer, clearly curious about the human inside. The human inside appeared to view the fuzzy sourly. Pinto pressed its little face against the glass to get a better look at DeLise. DeLise smacked the inside of the glass with his hand.
Pinto drew back, startled, but then seemed to realize that the human smacking the glass was not any sort of trouble for it. Pinto smooshed its face up to the glass again. DeLise smacked the glass again. This time Pinto didn’t move. DeLise smacked the glass a third time, and again. Holloway zoomed in on DeLise’s face; he was yelling. The skimmer was too far away to pick up the words, and the microphone had been muted in any event.
Holloway frowned at this. He’d had the security camera on DeLise, but having an audio record of what was said in the cabin would have been useful insurance. He must have accidentally hit the microphone’s mute button when he moved it to get a better angle on the outside. Nothing for it now.
Holloway zoomed out again to see Pinto, back away from the glass now, watching the yelling DeLise with interest, perhaps wondering why the human didn’t get out of the skimmer and try to catch it or hurt it. After a few minutes, after DeLise calmed down, the fuzzy moved up to the glass again. DeLise was resolutely ignoring the little creature.
Pinto turned around, squatted, and very deliberately rubbed its ass on the glass, right in front of DeLise’s face.
DeLise exploded into rage, leaning back into his seat to kick up at the windshield. Apparently only DeLise’s absolute certainty that Holloway would blow his head off with a shotgun kept him in the skimmer. Otherwise Pinto would have been dead meat at this point.
Holloway tracked back the video to watch this part again, a huge grin on his face.
Moving forward again, Pinto looked up, as if calling to someone or something. Sure enough, a minute later another fuzzy showed up on the hood of the skimmer: Grandpa. The two of them stood on the hood as if they were holding a conference on something, and then Pinto rubbed its butt on the windshield again, prompting another kick against the glass from DeLise.
Grandpa Fuzzy, clearly not impressed, whacked Pinto across the head and pulled the smaller fuzzy off the glass, then pushed it off the hood. Pinto took off for the nearest spikewood. Grandpa then turned and looked back at DeLise, walking up to the glass to do so. DeLise spat and fumed.
After several moments of this the fuzzy appeared to reach a decision, squatted, and rubbed its own ass against the glass. Then it slowly walked off the hood of the skimmer as if it were taking a Sunday stroll. Holloway laughed out loud, alarming Carl.
Holloway fast-forwarded past several minutes of DeLise doing nothing, then stopped again when the security guard’s three fellow travelers returned to the skimmer. At the sight of them, DeLise opened the front passenger door and risked taking a step out of the skimmer to stand up and start yelling at them as they approached. This was followed by a minute or two of DeLise gesticulating and pointing toward the spikewood Pinto and then Grandpa had climbed up when they departed. Aubrey and Landon briefly walked over to glance up at the spikewood, as if to look for the creatures. Then they returned to the skimmer and the vehicle lifted off, going out of frame several meters above Holloway’s platform.
Note to self: Give Pinto and Grandpa a beer the next time you see them, Holloway thought. He wouldn’t actually give them a beer; he tried giving a little to Papa and Mama Fuzzy once, just to see how they liked it, and they had both spit it out. Fuzzys liked water, preferably from the running faucet, which still fascinated them, and fruit juice. Every other liquid they gave a pass. But in this case, it would be the thought that counted. Anyone who didn’t like DeLise was all right by Holloway at this point, regardless of species.
Anyone, said a voice in his head that sounded suspiciously like Isabel.
Holloway shook it off. Yes, anyone, but that didn’t mean the fuzzys were sentient. Carl was someone, too, but that didn’t make him the equivalent of a human. It was entirely possible to think of an animal as a someone—as a person—without attributing to them the sort of brainpower that accompanies actual sentience.
Holloway glanced down at his dog, splayed out on the floor. “Hey, Carl,” he said. Carl’s eyebrows perked up; well, one of them did, anyway, giving the animal a rather unintentionally sardonic look.
“Carl, speak!” Holloway said. Carl did nothing but look at Holloway. Holloway never taught him the “speak” trick. The idea of having a dog intentionally bark its head off for no particular reason never appealed to him.
“Good dog, Carl,” he said. “Way to not speak.” Carl snuffled noncommittally and then closed his eyes to get back to sleep.
Carl was a good dog and good company and not a sentient creature in any standard that would matter to the Colonial Authority. Neither were chimpanzees or dolphins or squids or floaters or blue dawgs or wetsels or punchfish or any other number of creatures who were clearly more clever than the average animal species and yet still not quite there. In over two hundred worlds explored, only two creatures matched up to human sentience: the Urai and Negad, both of whom shared enough common examples of big-brained activities that it would have been impossible not to ascribe them the sentience humans had.
Well, no, not impossible, some pedantic part of his brain reminded him. In both cases, there was a substantial minority of the exploration and exploitation industry community who argued against their sentience. Both Uraill and Nega (formerly Zara III and BlueSky VI) were rich enough in resources that it was worth their time to take a stab at it, particularly in the case of the Negad, whose civilization at time of contact was roughly equivalent to the hunter-gatherer tribes of the North American continent around 10,000 B.C. Pointing out to E & E lawyers that by their standards they would deny sentience to some of their direct ancestors didn’t seem to bother them any. Lawyers are trained to disregard such irrelevancies. The Negad didn’t read, didn’t have cities, and only arguably had agriculture. Three strikes and they were out, as far as the E & Es and their lawyers were concerned.