Blonde Bombshell (34 page)

52

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The warship teleported the director straight to his office in the main Institute building. Everyone else had gone home. He filed a brief record of what had happened — the improved version rather than the somewhat uncomfortable truth — and issued an order for the immediate decommissioning of the secret booster station in the W’rrgft peninsula. Then he drafted a memo to the Ruling Council, informing them that the noise crisis was over, explaining how the mistake had come about and tendering his resignation. He read it through three times, then sent it before he could change his mind.

Instead of teleporting home, he took a transit tube to the village and walked the rest of the way. The suns were just setting when he accessed his back door and let himself in. With a great cry of joy, Spot came bounding out of the kitchen to greet him, hindquarters wagging. A slave species, he thought.

Spot jumped up, planting his sticky artiodactylic paws on the director’s chest. “Down,” he snapped, but he couldn’t stop a smile hijacking his face. “Good boy,” he said, instinctively reaching into his pocket for a human treat. He found a small corner of shortbread, which he remembered having saved for later. It had come a long way, just as he had.

“Good boy,” he repeated, tossing the shortbread in the air. Spot jumped, both feet clean off the ground, and caught it gracefully in his mouth. It was his best trick.

“Did you miss me?” he asked. Spot wagged furiously. At times, he was sure Spot could understand every word he said.

A slave species: living evidence of a crime against a species gifted with latent sentience, with the potential to evolve into an advanced form of life; like us, the director thought, the children of Millie and Prince. Maybe evolution, like the universe itself, is curved, and must eventually loop back on itself to form a circle.

He went into the kitchen and opened a tin of Human Chunks, with real
gr’rrfl
gravy, for Spot’s dinner. After all, he told himself, it’s something of a privilege to have been
both:
dog and man, man and dog. If you’ve only ever been just one, how can you hope to understand? Briefly, he considered two rogue type-6 probes, currently completely out of control on a distant planet whose name would soon be erased from the Ostar planetary database. Of course, they’d been both too; he wondered if it’d prove useful to them in the long run, or whether they’d end up like everybody else. And then there were the two Ostar (he still wasn’t quite sure how they’d fitted in); they too shared this wonderful treasure of double-ended perspective, though he had a feeling that, if they could have chosen a special gift, on balance they’d have preferred socks.

Perspective. Even his temporary and uncomfortable ally, the PDF officer, had been given a taste of it. But he’d preferred to change the universe to suit him; he’d blotted out a whole planet, after all, causing it to cease to exist (at least as far as the Ostar were concerned, so it all came to the same thing in the end). It had been mission accomplished as far as he was concerned. The director thought about that, and decided he was in no position to argue. At least nobody had been killed, and that was a good thing.

Later, he took Spot for a walk in the twilight. He threw a stick, Spot chased after it and brought it back. A dog and his man together, as it was in the beginning.

The End

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