Koban Universe 1 (11 page)

The only outside playtime he had
at home was often spent alone, at their isolated gazelle ranch. He stayed cooped up in the “baby” box that ran the seventy five foot width of their house, extending thirty feet back. Anytime his mom or dad didn’t have the time to play with him, he was placed there to watch them work on the gazelle ranch. The enclosure was made of transparent and extremely tough flexible plastic, with side vent holes too small for him to pass through. That way his mom or dad could work outside in the feedlot or near the barn and still see him. The clear plastic curved up and twenty feet overhead, to attach to the back of the house, under the edge of the second floor roof.

It was a
stupid box! For babies! He was almost four, and he felt insulted, treated as if he was still a helpless infant. Their nearest neighbor’s house was a half mile away, and that single mom, “Aunt” Gretchen was always home alone (her husband had died fighting the Krall he had learned), but she had an empty-headed eighteen-month-old daughter that Ryan wasn’t allowed to Mind Tap. They knew he’d share more thoughts than her mother would want Ingrid to know about yet.

Ryan’s
dad was often off planet, also involved with something to do with the fight against the Krall, doing it on different worlds. Both of his parents blocked their thoughts about what happened there. Before he was born, his mother had also fought the Krall. It was unfair. He wouldn’t cry or be frightened, not as he’d been of unknown things when he was small.

His dad came home every month
or two for a couple of weeks, and then he left again. Ryan complained that there was nobody his age to play with when he was away from school on weekends. Two weeks ago, before his dad left again, he said he had a surprise coming for Ryan. The flash hints Ryan could catch came only when his mom and dad would be holding hands and smiling. He suspected they were sharing mind pictures and thoughts that they were keeping from him. He was no dummy. He would sneak up on them from behind the furniture, and suddenly reach out to touch their joined hands. He sometimes caught a glimpse of what thoughts they were sharing, and it wasn’t always boring stuff about other people, or things for the ranch or house.

A
week ago, he had briefly detected some of their hidden thoughts were about him, and was about something that would make him very happy. Only they had already exchanged the images of what it was, and he missed it before they shielded their thoughts and switched the topic to something else.

When he pestered them, they shared something
with him that wasn’t much of a surprise. His dad touched his hand and Mind Tapped him the supposedly great news, “
I’ve instructed Sam to raise your computer access level next week, and if you stay out of arguments at school, I’ll raise it every two months.
”

Ryan
was naturally interested in the expanded computer interface he would be able to get from Sam, the house Artificial Intelligence, but that was only an incremental boost in what he was allowed to learn from it already, and not full access. That was nothing new.

The real secret
surprise turned out to be the family addition. Two days ago, Kam came to live with them. To join their family “pride” as the ripper thought of them. Now that was truly a terrific surprise. It also gave him some new mental pictures and secrets to “trade” with his school friends. His dad had shipped out again yesterday, which Ryan had decided meant he had left on a spaceship not a large cityship, like the one he’d seen on the computer network about a water world colony.

He
had told Ryan, “
Help look after Kam for mom, and teach him the house rules. He isn’t allowed to hunt our gazelles. I’ll take you both out to watch a ripper hunt on the savanna when I get home. In another year you both can go on a hunting trip with me.
”

Ryan couldn’t wait to go hunting. Literally, he could not wait! He securely blocked those thoughts.

The new source of ripper Mind Taps had given him some
glitzy
images to share at school, because Kam knew about different things than did most kids, and he didn’t filter or block out anything
from Ryan.

“
Brother,
” offered Kam on his second day in his new home, “
I can share some images that could be like those you asked if I have seen.
” In milliseconds of mental contact, a kaleidoscope of thoughts and pictures were transferred.

Ryan
looked puzzled, but touched the cat’s neck frill and told him, “
Those are funny images for sure, and I don't know what the people were doing. Anyway, I think I can trade them at school for something we both would like to know. Thanks.
”

There were
secret things that his school friend Sanjay bragged that he knew about, which he wouldn’t share with anyone until they had something truly
snarkley
to give him in trade. Now Ryan had new currency.

A
t school, where all of his full Kobani friends were a couple of months younger than he was, he was better than any of them were at finding out things that their teachers or parents routinely hid from them. Hidden because they were
too young to know,
was the preposterous claim made by the adults
.

He
offered to share everything new that he learned with the others, unless they had absolutely nothing to trade in return. His new images had a price. As normally the richest source of shock value information for his classmates, he was the one that decided what was most valuable to trade. He personally wanted to know things about hunting. About how to hunt the sorts of animals outside the fenced homestead compounds, about the herd animals that lived on the savannas or browsed in the small groves of trees that dotted the area.

He wondered w
hat happened in a war that was so bad that it was never shared with kids. He was curious about all the many things that their parents kept hidden from them. The more secret, the more it whetted his appetite to find out. He thought this urge to hunt, and learn secrets, was connected to the dictionary meaning of his family name, Seeker.

Adult
’s mind pictures and blocked knowledge had become kid currency, and he was usually richer in that than his classmates were, because he was adept at
hunting down
the filtered adult level knowledge. He didn’t have that last name for nothing! He was a forty-two inch tall, fifty-three pound sleuth of truth (Koban weight, of course).

He liked
to walk up to an unsuspecting new adult, politely offer his hand to shake, and ask a leading Mind Tap question as he did so. Such as, “
Have you ever hunted a rhinolo?
” On another person, he might ask about seeing a whiteraptor, or shooting a moosetodon or yak. Their minds weren’t as instantly on guard as would be the case if he asked something like, “
Have you ever killed a Krall?
” He knew they would shield, because he’d tried asking things like that a time or two. When he did, the adult’s mind became a granite wall.

He acquired many
milder, but still restricted images from adults, which came easily into a person’s unprepared mind when he asked them less shocking questions. At least before their mental walls gradually went up for that inquisitive little boy. He mixed it up, by using Mind Tap conversation with oral questions in his little boy’s voice, to keep them off guard.

Simply
discovering that adults could hide their thoughts had been an awakening for him when he was only two and a half. After that realization, he practiced hiding his own thoughts, and learned through interaction with other Kobani children, how to block his thoughts from them while picking their open minds. Of course, at first they seldom knew anything of value that he didn’t already know.

His example, and success at learning new things, was
eventually noticed by the other kids, as well as by the adults with whom he regularly came into contact. Adults without the Mind Tap ability were his richest source, because they didn’t automatically guard their non-personal thoughts very well, and oral questions seemed to keep them distracted enough that they didn’t consciously apply mental blocking as quickly as did a full Kobani.

The kids called this sort of mental slip
ping
brain leaks.
His dad’s commander, Colonel Greeves, called them
brain farts.

He’d learned from his teachers that t
he mind structure, at least of every full Kobani, had developed amazing memory retention and instant data recovery. It was an unanticipated side effect of the ultrasonic mental maps of their surroundings they could construct, using gene changes for wolfbat ultrasonic hearing. The superb memory organizing ability didn’t seem amazing to him at all. Why would he
ever
choose to forget anything he’d learned? It seemed impossible to do, and stupid even to try.

In the first hour of playing with Kam, and sharing mind thoughts, he discovered the young ripper had a considerable repertoire of human images, for which it had no context, or understanding. Some images Ryan understood instantly
and explained to Kam, others he didn’t fully grasp, and a few completely mystified him. Kam was the repository for things he had seen in his former keeper’s home, learned from visitors that frilled the little cat, or that Kam acquired from the few mature female rippers he had frilled.

The little ripper’s
former caretaker had not felt any inhibition in allowing the cub to see her private activities. She’d be horrified if she knew what was being shared with kindergartners now. Ryan had seen both of his parents without clothing when he was so small he still slept in a crib. He’d never seen them do some of the things that the woman that cared for Kam had done. He was sure he would figure it out in time. These were images of several naked adults, which he could save for trading with the other kids when he understood what Kam had seen, and decided on their value. It didn’t
seem
like very valuable information, despite the level of secrecy displayed around children versus ripper cubs.

Kam was
most interested in Ryan’s knowledge of the savanna in general, in the part within the gazelle ranch’s fencing, and of the animals raised here to sell for their meat. There was also apparently a market for their teal colored, beautifully marked blue and white hides, and the long curved and sharply pointed black horns. That was something that defied explanation for Kam. That stuff wasn’t edible!

Ryan’s parents
, the neighbor woman Gretchen, who helped manage the ranch, and his teacher, Ms. Walters, all said the gazelles had been given the name of bluestreaks long ago, because they ran so fast.

Since
every herd animal on Koban ran fast, and many had shades of blue or teal on them, a color shared by Kam himself, that the name didn’t seem particularly unique to Ryan.

Once Kam was told
by mom and dad,
in no uncertain terms
, that he would not
be permitted to hunt, or even to terrorize the family’s moneymaking herd animals, his hunting interest shifted to outside the compound.

It was the
human-sized gazelle’s speed and agility, which had intrigued Kam when he arrived, and he was only half their adult size at an age of nine months. They were what he told Ryan was normally considered a prey animal by wild rippers. He desperately wanted to hunt and experience a prey’s death mentally via frilling, and then eat his fill of bloody fresh meat. However, his new mom and dad had impressed on him how much trouble he would be in if he killed the “pride’s” herd animals. Oh well, there was even larger and more challenging prey outside of the family territory, which were not pride owned animals.

He’d had his first taste of
raw meat after being weaned from simulated ripper milk, fortified with ground meat. It was mostly cubed bits of rhinolo meat, which both Kam and Ryan knew was far too large and dangerous an animal for Kam and him to hope to hunt for at least a couple of years. Besides, the waste of more tons of meat than they could possibly eat would be something adult rippers said was a terrible, unforgivable thing to do for the mere pleasure of a hunt.