A Beautiful Friendship

On the forested world of Sphinx, a young Stephanie Harrington chafes against the limits her parents and the colony's laws put on her, until she stumbles across Climbs Quickly, a wary, curious member of an unknown native species. Their careful, dangerous first contact becomes the founding friendship between humans and treecats that will shape Manticoran society for centuries after. This novella tells the story later expanded into Weber's own young-adult novel of the same name.