An Android Dog's Tale (28 page)

Once the Corporation project began, however,
additional four-legged beasts occupied the planet, and sometimes
problems arose. An especially nearsighted or enthusiastic gond,
perhaps sensing hormones or some other clue, would occasionally
attempt to engage in natural acts with unnatural and unwilling
partners. Corporation biologists discovered that immature gonds
secreted a scent that adults did not, which males of the species
seemed to respect as a sign that they were not suitable companions
for romantic advances. The imported livestock lacked this
protection.

The one ram in the flock feinted a challenge
to the gond by lowering its head and stamping a foreleg. This only
seemed to encourage the gond. After all, it massed about the same
as the entire flock. A ram presented no threat, and the gond might
have even seen the display as the wooly ruminant’s equivalent of a
‘come hither’ look.

The sheep’s flocking instinct kept them
together, which would have been fine if a pack of wild dogs
threatened them. It failed to effectively address the danger posed
by a single gond with a horny gleam in its dull eyes plodding their
way. By ill luck or random chance, they ended up huddled in one end
of the fenced enclosure. A gate stood there, but it was closed, and
the gond had them cornered.

“Open the gate!” the old man yelled. “Let
them out.”

“But they’ll run away,” the boy protested.
“And the gond will just chase them anyway.”

“It can’t catch them in the open. Hurry! We
can worry about them later. Right now, we just have to get them out
of there.”

The barefooted boy ran to obey.

MO-126 thought he might be able to help. He
ran into the small pasture through the break in the fence, barking
and dodging around the gond to distract it. This might give the
boy, and the sheep, a little more time.

After running close enough to smell the
well-chewed grass on its breath, he managed to catch the gond’s
attention. It turned its wide, hairy head toward him, farted, and
stopped its slow advance on the cornered sheep. The android dog
noticed the boy fumbling with the gate latch. MO-126 backed away
slowly so that the gond could keep its eyes on him, otherwise, it
might forget he was there.

The boy finally got the gate open, and the
sheep ran for it. This was enough to distract the gond again. It
turned its attention to its fleeing connubial interest and began
following them through the open gate. The boy could do nothing to
stop it, and he didn’t attempt to. Instead, he tried, and failed,
to keep up with the sheep, which ran as a flock in a straight line
away from the pursuing gond.

MO-126 ran past the gond and the boy. He
could at least keep the sheep together and herd them back once the
two humans found a way to subdue the large and misguided
paramour.

After the sheep covered what he considered a
safe enough distance, he circled around them to get them to stop,
which he managed quite well, he thought. When he looked back to the
fenced pasture, he saw the old man hitting the gond with his staff.
The minor amount of pain he might be inflicting on its thick hide
was just to distract the animal. Gonds tended to follow the path of
least resistance, rather like water—or most people, for that
matter. With the sheep away from its nearsighted view, it
apparently decided that complying with the old man’s prompting was
the easiest thing to do, so it acquiesced and allowed itself to be
guided away.

The barefoot boy came huffing toward MO-126
and the flock he tended. The sheep by this time were taking an
interest in the nice fresh grass around them, which is, after all,
always greener on the other side of the fence. The android dog sat
near them, trying to look helpful, or at least not dangerous. He’d
let the stupid-looking kid make the first overture. And he was
stupid-looking. His upswept ears were a bit too big and stuck out
just enough to make his head, which was a little too small, appear
that it was about to take flight. His greenish eyes and blondish
hair were both unremarkable traits in the eastern half of the
continent, and two front teeth that any rodent would be proud of
protruded over his lower lip. The android dog observed hundreds of
people much like him over the years. They seldom amounted to much
and were destined to lead quiet, dull lives among others who were
much the same. He rather envied them at times.

“Um,” said the boy eloquently.

“Woof,” replied the android dog.

Some of the sheep turned their wooly
attention to him for a moment, saw he wasn’t moving or even looking
at them in a threatening way, and then went back to their grass
salads.

“Thanks for herding them away, Doggy. I need
to take them home now, if you don’t mind.”

“Woof,” MO-126 said again. He didn’t mind at
all, but the boy would probably need help. The android dog rose to
all four feet slowly so as not to frighten the skittish sheep or
the sheepish boy.

The stupid-looking kid spread his arms and
tried urging the sheep back toward their enclosure. They ignored
him, for the most part, seemingly reluctant to leave their new
found grazing spot. The android dog barked sharply and darted
toward them. This got them moving. Now, it was just a matter of
getting them to go in the right direction. This also provided few
problems, and soon the boy closed the gate behind them. The matter
of the broken fence was also being tended to. The old man returned
with a younger one, and they began making temporary repairs with
rope and tree branches. It wasn’t much of a fence, but it should
suffice to deter sheep. The gond stood complacently tethered to a
tree some distance away.

“Good job,” the man said to the
stupid-looking kid. “I thought getting them back might take all
day. Where did that sheepdog come from?”

“I don’t know,” the boy said. “He just
showed up.”

“Hmm. Well, if no one claims him, I’ll take
him. He seems useful.”

MO-126 considered the offer and rejected it
by taking a step closer to the boy, all the while glaring at the
old man and growling softly.

“Um, I think he wants to stay with me,
Gumper,” the boy said.

The old man eyed the android dog with a
bemused expression. “Yes, I see that. Well, just as well, but I’m
not going to pay you any more because you have a dog, hear? Same as
before, one copper coin a week for watching the sheep and doing odd
jobs.”

“That’s fine,” the boy agreed.

“Off you go now. You can come back tomorrow.
Bring the dog, if he’s still with you.”

The boy nodded and ran back to the main part
of the village. MO-126 went with him to the small hut he shared
with his grandmother, or an old woman he called ‘Granny,’ in any
case. The boy’s presumed grandmother called him Kolby. Only the two
of them lived in the small, four-room house. They never mentioned
any other family.

Kolby wanted to bring his new dog inside
that day, but his grandmother protested, so MO-126 stayed outside
and went with the boy the next morning to watch Gumper’s sheep. He
learned later that the old man was his grandmother’s cousin, and
the other man, Beaty, was Gumper’s son.

The next day proved much the same as the one
before, as did the day after that and the day after that for
several weeks. MO-126 was not quite sure why he stayed, but he
found the sameness of each day, the stability of the village, and
the simplicity of the people living here restful. Eventually,
Granny warmed to him and allowed him in the house. The rabbit he
brought them for dinner that night may have helped.

The string of days gradually became a velvet
chain of years that comfortably tied him to the first place he ever
truly thought of as home.

~*~

One early autumn day about a year later,
MO-126 and his boy walked in the woods along a small stream,
hunting for wild grapes, berries, or anything else edible to bring
home to supplement their sparse larder. A lone, elderly redfruit
tree stood above the thistles and brambles on a small hillock
nearby. A girl about the same age as Kolby was sitting in it.

“What are you doing, Laura?” he asked as
they angled near. The village was too small for anyone not to at
least recognize everyone else, and those of similar ages knew one
another by name.

Pale-blue eyes looked down on them through
long, straight hair and the branches of the tree.

“I’m investigating a mystery and you’re
interrupting me,” she said conversationally.

“What mystery?”

“I don’t wish to tell you.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll laugh.” It sounded more like a
prediction than a concern.

“Why? Is it funny?”

“No. But you’ll think it is, and I don’t
need the distraction.”

Kolby shrugged. “Well, Okay.” He turned to
walk away, paused and said, “Do you need help?”

She cocked a quizzical expression. “Why
would you want to help?”

MO-126 wondered much the same thing. There
was no doubt that Kolby was a nice boy, but he remained a bit young
to have much more than idle curiosity about girls. At this age, the
two genders tended to regard their opposites as little more than
annoying.

“I don’t know. Because you look like you’re
not having much luck by yourself, I guess.”

After a moment, she said, “I seriously doubt
you’ll be of much help, but do you have any idea how trees make
fruit?”

“You want to know why trees make fruit?”

“Not why. How? Why is easy.”

“Oh, right. The gods put the fruit on the
trees so people—”

Her heavy sigh stopped him. “Trees make
fruit to spread their seeds to grow more trees. What I don’t know
is how they do it.”

Something about the girl, her voice, her
appearance, or her attitude reminded the android dog of someone. He
searched back through his memory until he came to a spot about two
thousand years and two hundred kilometers away where he met a young
woman sitting on a beach with a bowl and a sliver of magnetic
stone. Paysha was older at the time than Laura was now, but equally
curious. There might even be some physical similarities. Perhaps
they were distantly related. It was not impossible.

“They do it slowly, I imagine,” Kolby
said.

“Of course they do it slowly, but….”

“I can help you watch, if you want,” he
said.

“No. There’s no point. I’ll have to figure
it out a different way. It obviously happens too slowly to see.
I’ll think about it later. Oh, and thank you for not laughing.”

“You didn’t say anything funny.”

She stared at his open, innocent face and
smiled. “Can you help me down?”

They spent the next hour gathering some of
the better looking fruit from the tree and berries from the bushes
around it. They spit the spoils evenly and went their separate
ways.

~*~

Two years later, Kolby remained a
stupid-looking kid, but he had pretty much grown into his teeth. He
was still short for his age and other children sometimes bullied
him because of his size, because of his looks, and because, even in
this poor village, he and his grandmother were poorer than most.
MO-126 wished he could do something about that, but here people
measured wealth in goats or sheep or acres of land, and Kolby and
his grandmother could claim none of these. He thought about trying
to find a wild goat or two and bring them back, but this would be
far too unlike normal dog behavior not to raise questions and, of
course, wild goats were wild. They could be difficult to deal with.
Most likely, any he brought back would simply end as a rather
tough, stringy dinner, which would not be a complete failure but
would not help them in the long run.

A possible solution presented itself from an
unlikely source. A strange little old man wearing a pastel yellow
robe with a rope tied around his waist as a kind of belt came to
the village one sunny afternoon. MO-126 recognized him. Well, not
him, personally, but he knew what he was. A Tsong monastery stood
about a day’s walk northwest of the village, and this man was
obviously a Tsong monk, although those he met before called
themselves Listeners. He knew there were also monks collectively
known as Counselors, Teachers, and Wise Ones. He was not sure if
these labels represented ranks, specializations, or duties, but he
was fairly sure the Wise Ones were nominally at the top of their
fuzzy hierarchical pyramid.

Humans like to pretend that they understand
the universe, so the cleverest among them invent all sorts of
things from physics to philosophy, reason to religion so that they
can believe they do. Tsong was a bit closer to the latter, but
unlike many, it was a fairly benign belief system. It made no
outrageous demands, did not claim to possess absolute Truth,
required no sacrifices of the more bloody variety, and, in its
purist form, it recognized no gods. It did have something they
called the Tune, or sometimes the Cosmic Tune, which was more a
name to describe the flow of natural events than it was a deity, as
far as the android dog could understand it, but they never
attempted to persecute those who did not dance to it.

The wrinkled visitor walked calmly to the
center of the village and simply stood there smiling while a small
crowd gathered around him as if expecting him to do a trick or
provide some other kind of entertainment. MO-126, Kolby and Gumper
were among them. The boy watched with rapt attention at seeing
someone new and a bit strange, and the android dog regarded him
with suspicion. The Listener’s gaze lingered uncomfortably on him a
couple times.

He willed himself to look more doglike, and
the Tsong Listener returned his attention to the people around
him.

“My name is Safron,” he eventually began. “I
come to you from the Tsong Monastery of Hill Flower.” He waved an
arm in a generally westward direction.