“We’ve just had our first recreational session,” he admitted.
The Councilman smiled. “And?”
“And it wasn’t as revolting as I thought it would be.”
Remeik laughed again. “My female hated it the first year or so. Kicked up a fuss like you would not believe every time she was ordered into position. My wife used to have to hold her down, otherwise she refused to stay put and would try to run from me. I’d spank and spank her, but it didn’t matter. She’d still try to run. Then she went through a phase where she acted like she didn’t care. Wasn’t happy, but didn’t want to admit she liked it. Nowadays, if I go more than a week without touching her, she becomes depressed and cries all day.”
“Mm,” Bach said noncommittally, but he smiled. She couldn’t deny that she liked at least parts of it, and he patted her hip, his long fingers trailing down around the curve of her buttock and just barely skimming the moist crevice between her soft thighs.
She shifted, snuggling closer and turning her head into his shoulder.
“So.” Remeik steepled his hands before him. “Now that you are a pet owner and have a vested interest in the species, I don’t suppose you’d be willing to do for me one last job?”
Bach shut the computer off. Lowering his head, he pressed a gentle kiss to Pani’s forehead, then carried her up to bed.
Chapter Eight
“Blue,” the tinny mechanical voice said as Pani pressed the wand over the electronic read-along book.
“Bl-oo,” she softly mangled, then shook her head once. She passed the wand over the color spot to hear it one more time.
“Blue,” the book said again.
Bach sat at his computer, sipping his coffee and watching surreptitiously. It took about six repetitions of a word for her to get it down well. He wasn’t complaining. He’d had her less than a month now and she already had a vocabulary of over a hundred words and growing. He’d bought six of those electronic books in an effort to help expand her vocabulary. She was proving to be a very quick learner. Frighteningly so, in fact.
“Red,” the book said, and she shifted restlessly on her play blanket.
“Rrr—” she purred softly.
It had taken more than ten repetitions for her to get the linguistic complexities of ‘yellow’
down pat, and earlier, numbers one through ten had proven especially difficult, although her meekly attempted, “Just one spank, Papa? Just one?” right before he paddled her bottom raw for throwing her breakfast on the floor, had almost made him laugh. Bach smiled now, just thinking of it. He set his cup down and softly clapped his hands to get her attention. When Pani looked up, he spread his hands.
Abandoning her book, she scrambled to her feet and came to him, throwing her arms around him as he scooped her up and hugged her tight. She squirmed, sucking a quick breath when he patted her bottom.
“Let’s get some lunch,” he said, and put her down again.
She reached the dining room ahead of him and climbed up into her highchair. He made up three cheese sandwiches, cutting off the crusts on one, since she refused to eat that part anyway. He gave her a crayon and a piece of paper to amuse herself with while she ate, and he brought the daily newspaper to the table for himself.
“Blue, yellow, r-r-red,” Pani recited in between bites, while he flipped his paper open to catch up on what the world of politics was up to these days.
“Papa?”
“Hm,” Bach skimmed an article on Councilman Remeik’s impending election to a senate seat.
She reached out to pat the corner of the top of his newspaper. He lowered it to look at her, arching a brow at her presumption. “Yes?”
“Pani how?”
His expression turned confused. “What?”
She patted the tray of her highchair. “How Pani?”
He lowered the paper. “How what?”
She held up the paper. She’d nearly covered it from top to bottom in writing. Every color, shape and number from her electronic book had been meticulously copied down in green wax crayon.
Bach forgot how to breathe. Any last stubbornly lingering assertions that humans were mere mimics fell to pieces right there in his dining room.
“How Pani?” she asked again, putting the paper down and holding out the crayon to him.
She wanted him to spell her name.
Damn. He’d gotten her the books to teach her how to speak, not write.
“Papa?”
He shouldn’t do this. He knew he shouldn’t. But Bach reached for the crayon and wrote it for her at the bottom of the page.
“How Papa?” she asked when he’d finished.
How could she possibly be writing? And why in the world was he encouraging it? He argued with himself the whole time he spelled it out beneath her name.
“More crayons?” she asked, and pointed to the rest of the box, which he’d left on his desk.
Against his better judgment, Bach got them for her and reluctantly placed them on the tray. Setting his paper aside, he watched her instead.
Pani flipped the page over to the blank back. She took the yellow crayon first and drew a big circle at one end. She then used the other colors to draw smaller circles of varying sizes in a line away from the yellow one. There were nine smaller circles total, the third one from the yellow was blue, the fourth red, and by the time she started to make a series of even smaller black circles around the multicolored nine, he realized what she was drawing. A solar system.
Damn.
She pointed to the blue circle. “Pani’s home.”
His stomach sank all the way to his feet.
Bach took the crayons and paper both away from her. The drawing he destroyed by lighting it on the stove. He watched it burn to cinders in the sink.
He had no idea what would happen if people found out that the creatures they were domesticating as pets were a species of people all on their own. Of course, if humans had been an equal race they’d have never allowed themselves to become domesticated in the first place. So they had to be a subspecies. His mind simply could not comprehend otherwise.
But even allowing her that much was dangerous. His own people weren’t exactly known for their tolerance where competition with others was concerned. Hell, they had a hard enough time just getting along with one another, much less another race. The human world would be viewed as another place for domination and colonization, just like last year’s Kadmier affair.
Dissolving that civilization, barely perched upon the brink of space exploration, into dust and ruin hadn’t been his peoples’ finest moment in time. But that’s what happens, he supposed, when power gets mistaken for superiority.
He washed the ashes down the drain, and marching back out to the dining room, he pointed to the floor.
“No more writing, and no more drawing,” he told her sternly. “This is Pani’s home. Get used to it.”
*
Bach awoke the next morning to find Pani’s sleep sack empty beside him and the bedroom door slightly ajar. He sat bolt upright, listening for the space of three panicked heartbeats; the house was totally quiet. Then he heard the whisper soft pattering of bare, five-toed feet down the hallway, and the toilet flushed.
Bach looked down at the sleep sack, with its open strings, which clever little fingers had somehow managed to untie, and his temper began to flare.
The soft pattering returned to his bedroom door. He quickly lay down, closed his eyes, and waited until he felt her slight weight shake the bed as she climbed in beside him. There was a pause in motion, and he could all but feel her leaning over to peer at him.
“Papa?” she whispered, and waited with bated breath for him to respond. He didn’t so much as twitch. Satisfied that he remained asleep, she crawled back off the mattress and padded quietly back out of the room.
Bach threw off the blankets and got out of bed.
He followed her silently downstairs, watching with mounting fury as she stopped in front of the door and looked up at the lock, well out of her reach. She could have used a stool to reach it. Had she tried, he’d have been across the room in a flash to yank her off and paddle her backside raw. But instead, Pani turned and trotted into the kitchen.
Skirting the shadows, he followed at a silent distance, doing little more than peeking in at her around the corner of the doorjamb, catching bare glimpses of her as she pushed a stool up to the cupboard and climbed onto it.
She pulled down a container of dried fruit, tried some of it, then put it back. Leaning over, she picked up an egg from the collection in a bowl by the refrigerator, then turned to look at the stove.
Bach felt his stomach drop to his toes. Twice in two days. This really had to stop. But the level of her intelligence was getting harder and harder to ignore. That she had got out of her sleep sack at all was startling enough, but even that could be explained away by clever little fingers and a pet with a penchant for escape. When she pushed her stool to the stove, got out a pan, and turned the knobs to light the cook flame, visions of his house burning down around him galvanized him into action.
Pani almost fell off her stool when he came through the door. He caught her about the waist, yanking her hard against him.
“No!” he snapped loudly, and slapped both her hands until she dropped the pan on the floor. “Pets do not play—” Use? Cook? Act like a person? “—with the stove!”
He sounded like an idiot and he knew it, but she wouldn’t be the first pet killed from severe kitchen burns. At the time, he’d discounted the stories as accidents—terrible, but freakish.
Once-in-a-lifetime incidents that closer supervision could have avoided. Seeing Pani preparing the cook for herself put a whole new prospective on the tales.
He shut the stove off and yanked the stool back into the middle of the floor. She began pleading when he grabbed a wooden spatula from the oven-side crock. Bracing one foot upon the seat of the chair, he threw her over his knee and blistered her backside as though possessed by a fury.
“I’d better not ever catch you in here without me again!”
She begged and kicked, her bottom bouncing under the fierce assault, her skin changing colors like a chameleon from pink to red to a brilliant shade of burgundy. White splotches appeared on the crowns of both cheeks, and still he spanked her, until those juddering nates were so hot they could have replaced the stove and Pani was incoherently draped over his thigh, too exhausted to do anything more than cry. Just to make sure he had her attention, he lay a final volley of smacks down the backs of her thighs.
The sharper sting on such a tender area made her howl and invigorated her struggles all over again, albeit only briefly.
“You do not get out of bed until Papa says you may! Bad, bad, bad girl!”
Each word was accompanied by a hardy smack and Pani’s forlorn sobs . He could have willingly continued spanking her for another twenty or thirty slaps, except that the spatula broke.
Pani continued to cry and to cry out. Her deeply burgundy bottom, splotched white and hard to the touch in places, squirmed over his knee as though still beneath the whuck of the kitchen tool.
He put his hand on her and simply held her bottom, feeling the heat of the scarlet cheeks.
The hardness that he felt when he squeezed each buttock in turn merely meant this punishment would be well remembered.
He pulled her upright in his lap, cradling her as he carried her out to the living room.
When he set her down in the corner, it was as if she couldn’t even more. She just cupped her backside in both hands, held herself, and cried. He had to turn her around so she faced the join of the walls.
Arms folded across his chest, legs akimbo, he watched over her to make sure she stayed where she was supposed to. He couldn’t trust her yet, that much was perfectly obvious. Every time he turned around, she was doing something she shouldn’t. Bach frowned, shaking his head once. And now he had to go back to town and get a better sleep sack.
*
The best part about being retired was getting to stay at home. The best part about being a retired agent was being able to hang on to some of the old contacts. He drove Pani into town. She had to kneel backwards on the seat the whole way, and even though he knew it wasn’t safe like that, he allowed it because she groaned so pitifully each time her bottom contacted the seat.
An old friend at Central measured Pani for a Disagreeable Coat—a heavy backwards fitting jacket, with extra long sleeves that ended in buckles instead of openings and which were fastened behind anyone objectionable or aggressive enough to warrant wearing one. This included Pani only because the store that sold the more complicated sleep sacks did not allow pets inside unless they were highly trained working animals for owners who could not manage without them. Pani was neither. She was just a spoiled and naughty little thing, who was quickly proving to be an intellectual challenge just to keep, much less to keep safe.
He left her blindfolded and kneeling on the passenger seat of his vehicle, buckled tightly into the coat, while he went shopping. He bought the most expensive sleep sack with the best fingerprint lock ever devised—Ekjek: excellent electronics company.
He also picked up a replacement wooden spatula. The head was wide and somewhat concave; the handle long and lethal. After tapping it into his palm several times, he took another six just like it. If breaking them across Pani’s bottom became a common place occurrence, he’d need a stockpile of these.
He bought some more diapers so she wouldn’t need to get out of bed at night and then, just because, or maybe because he wanted to bring her close to him again after such a fierce disciplinary session, he swung through the toy department. He found a puzzle box, some coloring books and an elementary level electronic read-along story. He wasn’t particularly happy about the idea of stimulating her reading abilities, but it was one of only a few things that Pani seemed to truly enjoy. So long as he didn’t tell anyone, so long as he kept it hidden and secret, what hard could it do?
He paid for his purchases and made his way back out to his vehicle. As he came around the back and opened the driver’s door, he noticed a spray of glass shards on the seat.