Rep. Yariz shrugged his narrow shoulders.
“Why not take him as a Little Brother to Zerlix, your firstborn? The way your own Sire took me as your Little Brother? That way his loyalty would carry on to the next generation of your family and his place in the Clan would be assured.”
“Adopt him as a Little Brother?” The idea took Rep. Vizlar somewhat aback. “But he’s mammalian—a warm-blood,” he protested. “How could he fit into a Saurian family?”
“The Kindred are well able to bear the cold, as you see,” Rep. Yariz pointed out. “They do not quake and shiver as other breeds of mammalians do when they visit Saurous.” He nodded at the boy as proof.
It was true that he wasn’t shivering, though the temperature on Saurous, which was the fourth planet from the sun, was well below what most mammalians could stand, Rep. Vizlar thought. And he supposed the unsightly mop of black hair on the boy’s head could either be shaved or slicked back to make his skull appear properly smooth. Of course, there was the fact that he had tan skin instead of proper, sleek scales, but that could not be helped.
His mate, Res. Tizlah, might be a bit shocked to have a mammalian son added to her brood, but she had been expecting Vizlar to choose a Little Brother for their firstborn for some time. And she was a nurturing type of person—he often teased her that she was almost as emotional as a warm-blood. She would love the boy as her own, even if he was an ugly little mammalian.
“Well…” he said slowly, considering. “You say they’re loyal, these Kindred?”
“To the death,” Rep. Yariz promised. “Also, most males grow to be quite large and strong—even by our standards. He may not look it, but I believe the boy will make a formidable addition to your family and to our Clan when he grows up.”
Rep. Vizlar allowed his blaster to drop to his side. He trusted Rep. Yariz’s word. His Advisor had never given him bad advice, not even when they were boys together.
”All right,” he said at last. “Take the boy to the Memory Doctor at once. Tell him to put in a block that can never be broken—he can never remember this day. If he does…”
“He won’t,” Rep. Yariz said quickly. “I’ll be certain of it.”
“Very well.” Rep. Vizlar nodded. “Bring him to my residence as soon as the block is completed. I’ll tell Res. Tizlah to make up a cot for him and tomorrow we’ll introduce him to Zerlix as his new Little Brother. He’ll be pleased—he’s been begging for a playmate and of course his sisters can’t keep up with his rough ways.”
He shook his head, smiling fondly as he thought of his firstborn. Zerlix was stubborn and headstrong, but having a Little Brother to play with would surely settle him down. It would also help to mold him into a future leader for the Crimson Blades Clan. Yes, taking the mammalian child was a good decision.
He was sure of it.
1
“I don’t like sending you on your own, with no Protector.” Commander Sylvan frowned in apparent concern as he leaned across his desk. “It will be almost impossible to contact you—Avria Pentaura is beyond an especially thick section of the Blind, which is—”
“Excuse me, Commander, but I do know what the Blind is,” Bobbi interrupted. “A vast cloud of cosmic dust that separates the known universe from the unknown universe. And yes, I know that it scrambles signals and makes interstellar communication almost impossible sometimes.”
Dr. Roberta McClelland—Bobbi to her friends—was a Xeno-Cultural Anthropologist who had won an academic contract to work with the Kindred of the Mother Ship. It was a grant to study extraterrestrial life and cultures on different planets and she was itching to get on with her research. But first she had to convince the overprotective Head of the Kindred High Council to actually let her go and do the research.
Not that she disliked Commander Sylvan—he was gentlemanly and kind and intelligent and not at all condescending, like a lot of human men were when faced with a female scientist. But he was extremely protective of women, as all Kindred were, and he was proving to be difficult to convince.
“Look, the Orniths are a matrilineal society—they don’t trust males,” she explained to him now. “They only mate once a solar year—the rest of the time, the males are all banished from the tribe—forced to live in the wilderness away from the females. If I brought a male guard with me—especially a huge Kindred warrior—they would never warm up to me. All my research would be tainted because they wouldn’t be able to be themselves around me.”
“So you don’t just want to observe them…you want to live among them?” Commander Sylvan raised an eyebrow at her.