Mirabile (29 page)

He looked so brokenhearted, I almost gave in. “No,” I said, as much to me as to him. “You’re tired. You need sleep.”

That brought out the stubborn in him. I should’ve known there’d be a lot of stubborn there, given the genes. I’ve got my share of stubborn too so I put it to work. “Never mess with delicate stuff when you’re tired. You can do it right in the morning—after you’ve had a good night’s rest and a good breakfast. And after you get those notes into ships’ files for me.”

“Reasonably stubborn,” he said. “That’s what Leo told me you were. Now I get it. As opposed to unreasonably stubborn. Okay. Sleep first, breakfast first…”He grinned all of Leo’s laugh lines and added, “After that, we’ll argue.”

“You’re on,” I said. I got to my feet. Couldn’t resist giving him a pat on the cheek. Definitely Leo’s kid—took it just in the spirit in which it was given. If he noticed I copped his flashlight so he’d have to settle for the night, he didn’t say a word.

Or maybe he remembered he didn’t need one. I didn’t bother to turn it on.

Outside, I took another deep breath, appreciating all over again. Somewhere out in the field, Mabob gronked enthusiastically. The cheerups were startled into momentary silence. Then they took up their chant with twice the energy they’d had before.

Occurred to me suddenly that I’d misled Leo earlier in the day. Well, it was easy enough to correct. I stopped along the walk and helped myself to a single “Aimee Vibert.” Its misty white petals were luminous in the nova light.

When I walked into the main house, Leo was alone in the common room. Guess the others had all gone off for their much-needed sleep—the ones that weren’t on duty in the barn with the bison, that is. “Hello again, Annie,” said Leo. “What have you done with Mabob?”

“Not a thing,” I said. “He’s outside terrorizing the cheerups. I assumed you turned him loose for a little exercise. Hope that means he’ll let us sleep tonight.”

“Somebody turned him loose but it wasn’t me. I don’t suppose he can get into too much trouble by himself.”

“Unless he goes back to terrorizing the bulls.”

“I doubt that,” Leo said. “You seem to have put the fear of God—or at least the fear of Annie—into him, on that and the gronking.”

“I’ll settle for the fear of Annie.” Damned if that man doesn’t always bring out smiles in me.

Content and smug, that’s me. Then I remembered what had been on my mind only a moment or so before.

“Leo, I misled you earlier—”

“Right down the garden path,” he said. “And there’s no getting rid of me now.”

“I refuse to bite. When we were talking about Earth-authentic cows…”

“That, what with the encrypted extra genes, nothing on Mirabile is
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Earth-authentic?” He held out his hand by way of demonstration. “I am.”

It was too good to resist. I laid the rose in his palm, all velvety white against the tawny brown.

“And so is ‘Aimee Vibert.’”

“Beautiful,” he said, looking from me to the rose and back again. Leo has the damndest priorities, and don’t think I don’t appreciate them!

“When the Mirabilan expedition left Earth, each of the expedition members got ten pounds weight allotment for ‘frivolous’ possessions.”

“I didn’t now that! No, wait—I guess I did but I never thought about it. That would account for the Earth-bound copy of the poems of W. B. Yeats that’s in my family.”

“That would account for it, all right. In Lalique’s family the ten pounds

‘frivolous’ were ten pounds of rose cuttings. Dunno how they did it but they kept the damn things alive the entire trip. And now they grow all over Haffenhaff.”

I brushed the edge of one perfect petal with my fingertip. “The thing is, because they were cuttings, they don’t have any hidden genes tucked away in them. What’s more: that’s a clone.

That’s what a rose grown from a cutting is. You hold in your hand not a descendant but an actual piece of the original plant that grew on Earth.”

That made him look down at the rose again.

“Smell it,” I said and, when he did, he smiled and so did I. “That’s what Earth smelled like,” I said.

Still holding the rose delicately in his huge hand, he pulled me close and inhaled deeply. “And like you,” he said. “Earth must have been one hell of a romantic world.”

Mabob woke us bright and early, gronking outside our window. Still, it was outside, not inside, so I could hardly complain— beyond the few obligatory curses, that is.

Leo woke enough to chuckle. “I do believe you’re mellowing, Annie. You didn’t throw anything at him.”

“If I’m mellowing either it’s a) because of you, or b) because I had enough extra hands on the team this year that I

didn’t have to help with lambing or calving.”

“I vote for ‘a,’” he said. “But, knowing you, more likely it’s ‘b.’ I’ve heard you snarling over those red dandelions.”

I snarled at the mere thought. I had at least two hundred more dandelion gene-reads waiting for me back at the lab. Not to mention any more that might have flowered red since I’d left.

Leo grinned. “See? Can’t be me. Let’s go look at the cane-brake.”

“Let’s. Anything but red dandelions.”

After breakfast, we headed out for the nearest stand of canes, Mabob tagging along behind—

and in front and to the side— wherever the spirit took him. What with the gronking and the rattling and the strutting and the preening and the occasional hunt for small edibles in the grass, it was clear he was having the time of his life.

We found the clearing Lalique and Jibril had cut in the canebrake and eased our way carefully into it. Mabob hung around long enough to make sure we were being careful, then wandered away to do some exploring of his own. Just as well. I wanted to watch the behavior of the animals in the brake, and having a predator the size of Mabob around would surely have given me a skewed view.

We spread a blanket (no need to sacrifice all of our comfort) and settled down to wait and watch. With Leo, waiting and watching is not just an art, it’s a full pleasure.

So hardship didn’t come into the job anywhere, except maybe for the lumps that were etching themselves into my butt.

If I’d correctly identified the cane I’d been looking at the day before, then the absorption process was spectacularly fast—the Earth-authentic bug had vanished but for a bit of wing tip.

First thing I learned, watching the wind whip the leaves around, was that the leaves didn’t stick to the canes. A light rain made it equally clear that the glue wasn’t water-solvent. Should’ve known that. If it had been, Lalique would have washed the calf down to free it. Still, if the leaves didn’t stick, then might be we could make a solvent out of them

.

Leo tapped my arm and pointed further into the brake. A fuzzwilly was building a nest—first time I’d ever seen one build on the ground. Fuzzwillies are strange even by Mirabilan standards.

They’re ninety percent fluff and, ordinarily, they “hatch”

their eggs by rolling them out of the nest to drop them on the ground and break them open. If you saw the thickness of the shells, you’d understand why. No way the baby fuzzwilly could make it through that shell on its own. Still, they lose a lot of young every year in the process.

Looked like the fuzzwillies were headed up an evolutionary dead end.

But there was one of them building her nest on the ground. Damn straight I was interested!

I was even more interested when the fuzzwilly brushed against one of the canes, got pulled up short, gave a little shiver that made it look like a dandelion head about to blow away and then walked away

, leaving only a long silky tuft of hair stuck to the cane.

Hair’s protein too—mine and the fuzzwilly’s. The cane could probably absorb nutrients just as well from the fuzzwilly’s hair as from the insects it caught. Even Mabob’s scale—

“Yike!” I said, startling the fuzzwilly back into the canebrake. “Up, Leo! Get up!

Out, out!”

We scurried out. I checked the grass, then sat and patted a bit beside me for Leo to share.

“What did I miss, Annie?”

“Same thing I missed.” I turned the blanket over. The underside looked like clothes moths had been at it. Sure enough, the lumps I’d been sitting on had been etching their way into my butt.

I made a rude gesture to indicate the canes. “I bet that’s not a stand of canes. I bet that’s all one cane—like Earth-authentic bamboo. The interconnecting runners may not be sticky, but they can digest whatever’s lying on them. So if they do catch something big, they can absorb it.”

“Pleasant thought,” said Leo. “For once, I’m glad we didn’t get carried away.”

“For once, so am I.” I grinned back at him. “I prefer a nice soft bed myself anyhow.” I went back to watching the canebrake. “Now I believe Lalique when she says the canes have been here only since the cattle have. I don’t know why, but it’s a good bet she’s right.”

“I don’t get it.”

“The fuzzwillies. They’re adapted to live in canes like these, not in trees. But when have you ever seen a fuzzwilly nest on the ground?”

“Never,” said Leo. His brows knit ferociously and then, like sun coming out, all the laugh lines came back. “Good lord! I get it! The fuzzwillies are mostly hair, so they don’t get stuck to the canes. They just shrug off the stuck hair and go on their merry way. Meanwhile, the sticky canes keep most of the predators away from their nests.”

Not Mabob, though. He had expendable scales, the way the fuzzwillies had expendable fuzz.

Made me wonder just how many Mirabilan critters would come apart in your hands. But for now it was the fuzzwillies that interested me most.

I said to Leo, “And…?”

“And? You mean there’s more?”

“Come on, Leo… Think of those damn thick-shelled eggs.”

His jaw dropped. “The canes—the canes digest enough of the shell so the baby fuzzwilly can break its own way out!”

“Bet you’re right. We’ll stop back about egg-rolling time and see if we can catch them in the act.”

Leo rubbed his shoulder. “Better here than somewhere in the woods, especially if you’re right.”

I had to raise an eyebrow at that. And at the shoulder he was rubbing.

He gave me a chuckle. “Egg-rolling time always brings back memories of sore shoulder. A mama fuzzwilly dropped her egg on me once. My shoulder didn’t so much as crack the egg, but I had a bruise the size of a fist for a week.” The chuckle got deeper. “I had to take a rock to the egg to crack out the baby for its mama. It was hardly her fault something soft walked under her tree at just the wrong moment.”

All I could do was smile at him. Damn but I love that man!

After a while, he said, “So tell me why you believe Lalique now.

“Oh, sorry. Look, I thought the fuzzwillies were going up an evolutionary dead end, what with shells so thick the babies can’t hatch. But if the shells originally co-adapted to life in a canebrake, then where have the canes been all this time that the fuzzwillies had to learn a new trick to ‘hatch’

their babies?”

“You’re saying the egg-dropping trick is the only thing that keeps the species going where there aren’t any canes for them to live in?”

“I’m saying that’s my best guess. Come on, let’s ask Lalique what egg-dropping time has been like since her family’s been on Haffenhaff.”

I collected a handful of leaves from widely spread canes; I also wanted to check my theory that the stand was all one cane. Leo hollered up Mabob and we started for the house.

We hadn’t gone more than a few yards when the ground started vibrating underfoot. I’d felt that before. “Stampede, Leo, headed our way. Grab Mabob—and watch your toes!”

Leo nodded, snatched up Mabob, and the two of us braced ourselves. Here they came, looked like the whole damn herd at once. And they were spooked, no doubt about it. There couldn’t have been a single loose thought in one of those tossing heads. From somewhere behind them, I heard one of Lalique’s kids bellowing, “Stampede! Watch your toes! Stampede!”

Two of the bulls, in lead of the panic retreat, of course, were bellowing even louder than the kid.

The challenge was too much for Mabob. He kicked his way out of Leo’s arms and charged the closest Guernsey, gronking at the top of his lungs. Then Leo was after him, bellowing at the top of his, which is pretty impressive.

If you can’t lick, join ’em. I charged after Leo and Mabob yelling at the top of my lungs.

I like to think that did it, but I suspect Mabob’s fevered gronks would have been sufficient. The herd panicked all over again, split right down the middle, and flowed around the three of us like the Omigolly around Haffenhaff.

The moment they passed by, I got a taste of what had set them off. More than a taste. I spat out a mouthful of the swarming horrors and swatted another hundred or so away from my eyes.

Damndest, most irritating—a huge cloud of the tiny insect-like natives swarmed after the herd.

Over the plaints of the cows and the whirring of the swarming horrors, I could hear Leo cursing inventively.

Gunnar skidded to a halt beside us, spat out a mouthful of his own and said, “You folks okay?”

We did a quick check. Leo’d gotten a bruised shin and I’d gotten my foot stepped on, but aside from that and the damn bugs in our faces we were fine.

Mabob loved every minute of it. (The swarming horrors didn’t seem to horrify him at all. In fact, they ignored him. Must’ve been the orange eyes that did it.) He was still gronking insults at the Guernseys long after they’d passed us by. If Leo had let go of him, he’d have chased them right
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into the Omigolly.

As it was, the herd came to a screeching halt just before the canebrake. The Guernseys weren’t so stupid after all. “Come on, Leo. I want a closer look.”

He spat a few dozen swarming horrors out of his mouth. “Sometimes, Annie, I don’t know why I go along with you.”

But he did, gave me a hand even as I hobbled into the thick of the swarming horrors. It was tough trying to look and keeping them out of your eyes at the same time, but little by little they stopped bothering us altogether.