THE KING’S DOGS
Phyllis Gotlieb
Galactic Federation City on Sol III stands on tundra under a dome; a solar-electrified, water-recycling, self-supporting civil-service city in a civil-service world. Aliens from hundreds of worlds hop, skim, or lurch in tanks along its huge white-flagstone avenues. On its eastern rim the MedPsych Annex is enclosed in force-fields and white-noise walls. The ESPs within love privacy, and so, even more, do the non-ESPs outside.
For half an hour every dawn and dusk two big red cats pace the hexagonal flags around MedPsych. Inevitably they fall into step, consciously break it, fall in and break. Prandra, the ESP of the two, knows that when Khreng has matched her pace their minds are joined, and neither wishes to share one mind all the time. Distant outworld cousins of the leopard, they are leopardsized, but their color is incongruously harsh against the white stones, among the green boxtrees in cement tubs. Khreng is bright crimson, Prandra as much darker as if his shadow had rested on her. Both are striped with narrow black chevrons peaking at the crown and falling along the flank to the hip, each stripe centered with a thin white line.
Around his neck Khreng wears a medal, a diplomat’s gold star. As the senior representative of Ungruwarkh on Sol III he has been made its ambassador. He knows he has been given the honor because Prandra is the ESP, but he does not care; he is the stronger and the tracker; Prandra does not care for any reason. They do not know completely what ambassadors do: they are aware that neither of them is very diplomatic. Prandra wears the ESP’s insigne on Sol III, a steel medallion engraved with a lightning bolt wound by a snake. It is sometimes called the Cracked Caduceus and other names; from her point of view it is a dog tag.
. . .
