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“Really?” Abbey was surprised. “No food or water? No special diet or anything?”
“Nothing but your feelings,” Gustobrav assured her. “You just need to spend a little while each day hugging and holding them and sending them positive emotions and they’ll be fine. And to be honest, it’s really hard not to feel positive around an Eye-pet—they’re so damn adorable,” he added.
Abbey smiled, she could hear in his voice how much he loved his job.
“I can definitely do that,” she assured him. “Er, do I get to choose a pet or will you choose one for me?”
“Neither,” Gustobrav told her. “The Eye-pet will choose you. Come—let’s go to the back and you can meet our latest mature litter. All of them are ready to be matched.”
28
ABBEY
The back room of the Royal Breeder’s area was filled with many different pens, each with its own litter of Eye-pets. Solon described the area quietly to her and Abbey thought again that it reminded her a little bit of a pet store.
“Now what we usually do is wait until a litter is a year old and ready to be parted from their mother,” Gustobrav explained to her. “That’s when we send word to parents who have a baby with the Inner Sight to bring in their child—when the child is six months to a year old. We put them down in the center of the pen and let the Eye-pet pups approach them. Inevitably, one of them will be a match with the child and will climb up onto his or her shoulder. Once that happens, the bonding begins and then the two of them will be together for life.”
“It sounds simple enough,” Abbey said. “But…what if none of them want me?”
“Oh, I doubt that will happen,” he told her. “The pet pups can sense a good person, which you seem to be. It’s more likely that I’ll have to break up a fight between two or three of them who want to bond with you.”
He led Abbey to one of the pens and had her sit on the floor, on a clean white cloth. Other than the cloth she was sitting on, the area looked like a uniformly gray blur to Abbey, probably because of the hay, which she could feel prickling her legs through the white cloth. (Solon had told her that there was gray hay everywhere which must be the bedding the Eye-pets lived in.)
“Now just sit very still. I’m going to open the gate and let the litter in with you,” Gustobrav told Abbey. “Don’t get upset if they climb up on you—that’s how they get to know you.”
“All right.” She nodded eagerly, though she couldn’t help thinking how different this was from getting a guide dog.
She’d answered so many questions when she applied for Major and he had been personally chosen for her by one of the breeders who thought that they would be a good fit for each other. Abbey hoped she could have the same kind of relationship she’d had with her dog with the new Eye-pet she was hopefully going to get. She hoped?—
“Here they come!” she heard Gustobrav say and suddenly she was surrounded by a lot of little pink and yellow blurs which were peeping and cheeping all around her. After a moment, she realized that they were saying words.
“Pretty-pretty! Pretty lady! Pretty-pretty” they peeped at her over and over.
“Oh! Are they talking to me?” Abbey asked.
She heard Solon rumble laughter.
“It seems they like what they see!”
“You have to excuse them—the pups don’t have many words yet,” the Royal Breeder told her. “They’ll gain more language as they grow older.”
“Oh—okay.” Abbey had to work hard to hold still. She didn’t want to scare the tiny animals.
Solon had described Chancellor Maprist’s Eye-pet as being very fuzzy all over with two arms, three legs, and several eyes growing on long stalks that stuck up on the top of his head. He’d also said the Eye-pet was about the size of a tennis ball. Abbey wondered if the baby Eye-pets or Eye-pet “pups” as the Royal Breeder had called them, might be even smaller. Say, the size of a golf ball, maybe?
Her fuzzy vision didn’t allow her to see details, so she didn’t know, but they certainly seemed tiny, clustered around her knees as she sat there, cross-legged on the white cloth.
Several of the little balls were already trying to climb up her skirt and into her lap—their pink and yellow fur was obvious against her dark green dress—when Abbey noticed a turquoise blur alone, some distance from her. The brilliant blue-green color was evident against the gray straw but it was just sitting there, not moving.
“Hey, what’s that one over there?” she asked, pointing at the brightly colored blur. “Is that an Eye-pet too?”
“Oh, that’s Spex,” The Royal Breeder said. “He’s what we call a loner—he’s been around for years but never matched with anyone. We just let him in with the new litters so that he can ingest some of the happy emotions being generated during a new matching. Otherwise he’d starve, poor fellow.”
“Spex?” Abbey felt her heart go out to the poor little Eye-pet. Holding out a hand in the direction of the turquoise blur, she called his name again. “Spex? Is that your name? Would you like to come say hello to me? I’m Abbey.”
For a moment, the turquoise blur didn’t move. Then, very tentatively, Abbey thought, it began to come towards her.
Ignoring the tiny pink and yellow pups that were still trying to climb up her skirt, she held her hand out patiently to the little creature.
