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A café lunch might have been more private, as it turned out. These horses were no more frightened than the others had been, and were also so nosy as to be intrusive. Janina and Jared sat together on a blanket, close enough to pass food and close enough that she could feel his body’s warmth radiating through the chill of the afternoon breeze.

“Janina, you’ve been a tremendous help,” he said, handing her a plate with some cheese and apple on it. “Did your Cat Person training include being a vet tech?”

“Not really,” she said. “Just certain things. Like birthings, treating wounds, emergency cat medicine, recognition of the usual cat maladies.”

“Not all of the cat handlers I’ve met seem nearly as well-versed in all of those areas as you are,” he said.

“What they gave us at the academy was a bit sketchy. I was lucky to be assigned such a wonderful cat to work with as soon as I’d finished the Cat Person elective in my schooling. And not all of the cabin boys and girls who care for a ship’s cat have even had the academy training I did. Some ships acquire a cat without having a properly trained Cat Person in the crew, just a youngster to feed the cat and change the commode. They don’t all know how to monitor the cat’s hunt and search activities properly, to do the most good for the ship. When I meet some of the untrained ones, I try to answer questions and make suggestions. Most of them at least do love their cat.”

“You’ve done remarkably well with the knowledge you have,” he told her.

She felt her skin growing warm from more than the sun’s heat. He had the most beautiful eyes, and they were totally focused on her.

“I study everything I can from the courses in the data banks, and take classes at our ports of call when we dock for more than a couple of days.”

“Excellent. Have you thought about later?”

“Later?”

“When Chessie—retires. She’s not a young cat, and all of these litters are taking a toll on her.”

Janina studied the grass intently for a moment or two while her eyes stopped swimming. She knew he didn’t mean actually retire. Chessie wouldn’t leave the Molly Daise until she died. Then, if the ship hadn’t retained one of her kittens for an understudy, they’d have to buy a kitten and assign a new Cat Person, someone young and small enough to follow the kitten into places where an adult couldn’t go. “I—I’d probably train my replacement,” she said. But the thought of trying to do that after Chessie passed—she didn’t know how she’d face it. She couldn’t bear the thought of being without Chessie. They’d been together since she was eight years old and Chessie fit into the palm of her hand.

“Will you return to your family on your home world?” he asked, pretending he hadn’t noticed her discomfort.

“I don’t have a family, not that I know of. My mother was killed in an accident when I was small. My father was away—no one ever told me exactly where—and has never returned. I haven’t been able to learn anything about him. I’m not really sure what I’ll do when Chessie—”

He cleared his throat, and this time he seemed a little nervous. “I actually had something I wanted to ask you about that,” he said.

She didn’t catch the rest of it. A brown and white muzzle intruded between them and lipped the apple off the plate, leaving a smear of sparkly slobber on the cheese.

Both of them bent over the plate. “Look,” she said, pointing, “that looks like what Chessie’s been coughing up.”

Jared was already fishing a specimen bag out of his inside pocket. Lifting the cheese slice with the edge of the disposable fork, he deposited it in the bag. He frowned. “This is very irregular, since a ship’s cat and a wild horse are hardly on the same diet and don’t even breathe the same air. I can’t think what they’d have in common that would produce this”—he waggled the bag at her before tucking it into his pocket—“in both species.”

Janina felt suddenly sick with apprehension. “You don’t suppose it’s some sort of alien plague, do you? Like those diseases that used to kill so many Terran animals before they developed vaccines?