Catalyst_ A Tale of the Barque Cats - Anne McCaffrey [82]
“Jubal, no,” the woman said. “I know you want to pet him, but decontaminating your suit will be easier than decontaminating you. If we do this smart, Captain Loloma may let us return to bring them more supplies. He might even agree to tow their vessel out of the way of the GG, somewhere we can find them again and check on them. But we can’t cause trouble.”
“No trouble,” my boy told her. “Sorry, Beulah, but if Chester can’t come with us, I’ll stay here with him and his friend. I’m not leaving him again.”
“You can’t do that!” the woman said. “You’d exhaust their oxygen and water supplies and there’s no food for you here.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want to go back where they treat anybody with four legs like they’re disposable. As valuable as Chessie is, they took her, and Hadley too. And it’s all a big lie!”
Mother? They were going to kill Mother? The whole situation, as I read it in Jubal’s mind, was wrong. Just wrong. My mother and our kind had worked in partnership with humans, and now were to be destroyed for no more than a convenient ruse to assure the dominance of one human over another.
“Come back, kitty!” the girl—Sosi, according to Jubal—cried. I looked away from Jubal’s face as Pshaw-Ra’s tail disappeared through the cat hatch.
CHAPTER 20
“Can’t you just release them when nobody’s looking?” Janina pleaded with Jared. He looked tired and as ill as the healthy animals in his charge were supposed to be. She knew he was under tremendous stress from the conflict between his duty and his inclinations. He and a vet tech were on duty that night in the central laboratory, where the Barque Cats as well as the dogs of some of the more prominent citizens were kept. The farm animals had gone to a separate facility, the house pets who were not valuable working animals to another. Jared broke security by meeting her outside the building again while the guard slept at his station.
Jared shook his head. “It would do no good. They’d only round them up again and maybe kill them on sight as health hazards to the general populace.” He ran a hand through his hair, which was in need of washing and cutting. “By the government’s definition, all of the animals in custody are contaminated by this terrible threat they’ve invented. They just haven’t decided how much of a threat it’s supposed to be. Every minute, I’m afraid some overly cautious pencil pusher will decide to destroy the animals just to be on the ‘safe’ side. I’m arguing against it and so are many others, because after all, so far no one has found anything to indicate the fairy dust effect is harmful to anyone.
“Of course, the more aggressively scientific among us want to sacrifice a few animals for further analysis, but I’ve been able to keep them from doing it since I’ve been here, so far, at least, and some of my colleagues have done the same thing at their new duty stations. I have a few allies here, but there are also some who are very eager to please the officials who started this mess. I can only hope that there are other officials who depend on their animals for a living or just love them and don’t want them threatened. Someone has to come to their senses and expose the rotten root of this madness and end it.”
Janina was silent, clinging to his arm, conveying her support through her touch.
After a long moment Jared added, “Chessie is fine. I think she exerts a calming influence on the other cats, in fact—at least when I’m around—because she knows me and trusts me. I talk to her and she rubs against the wire of her cage.”
“Cage?” Janina asked, her voice breaking to think of her beautiful, intelligent, resourceful friend caged.
“Banks and banks of them, I’m afraid,” Jared said. “I’m sorry, Jannie.”
They parted, and Janina walked away. The sidewalks had little traffic at this hour, since Galipolis theoretically had a proper night and day, though you could hardly tell with the sky so full