Mirabile (5 page)

The undergrowth around us stirred.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Leo level his rifle. Susan looked at him, worried. “He won’t shoot unless something goes wrong, kiddo,” I said as softly as I could and still be heard. “He promised me.”

Susan nodded. “Okay, Monster. You can call them out then.”

She needn’t have said it. That bellow already had. There were maybe a dozen of them, all alike, all of them painfully ugly. No, that’s the wrong way to put it—they were all laughably ugly.

The one she’d dubbed “Monster” edged closer to me. Nosy like the otters, too.

It whuffled at my hand. Damn if that head wasn’t purely herbivore. The teeth could give you a nasty nip from the looks of them, but it was deer family. The ugly branch of it anyhow.

A second one crawled into Leo’s lap. It was trying to make off with his belt buckle. Susan chucked at it and bribed it away with bread. “She’s such a thief. If you’re not careful, she’ll take anything that’s shiny. Like the otters, really.”

Yes, they were. The behavior was the same I’d seen from Susan’s otters—but now I understood why the otters had chased one of these away this afternoon. They were recognizably not otters, even if they thought they were

. Like humans, otters are very conservative about what they consider one of them.

Pretty soon the bread was gone. Monster hustled up the troops and headed them out, with one last look over his shoulder at us.

I popped him neatly with the snagger before Susan could raise a protest. He grunted and gnawed for a moment at his hip, the way a dog would for a flea, then he spotted the snagger moving away from him and pounced.

I had a tug of war on my hands. Susan got into the act and so did a handful of Monster’s fellow monsters.

Leo laughed. It was enough to startle them away. I fell over and Susan landed on top of me. She
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was giggling too, but she crawled over and got up, triumphant, with the sample in her hands.

“You didn’t need it, Mama Jason,” Susan said, “but I’ve decided to forgive you.

Monster thought it was a good game.” She giggled again and added impishly, “So did I.”

“Fine,” I said. “I hate to spoil the party, but it’s time we got back to the lodge.

We’re all going to feel like hell in the morning.”

Susan yawned. “I’s’pose so. They lose interest pretty fast once I run out of bread.”

“Susan, you row Leo back.”

“You’re not coming?” she said.

“Two boats,” I pointed out. Susan was sleepy enough that she didn’t ask why I wanted Leo in her boat. Leo blinked at me once, caught on, and climbed into the boat with his rifle across his knees.

By the time we reached the lodge, we were all pretty well knocked out. Jen gave us a big grin of relief to welcome us in. But two steps later we ran hard into Elly’s scowl, not to mention Chris’s, Ilanith’s, and a half dozens others.

“I found Jen sitting in the hall watching the clock,” Elly said. “She wouldn’t go to bed and she wouldn’t say why. Once I counted noses, I discovered the three of you were missing. So you

”—that was me, of course—“owe me the explanation you wouldn’t let her give me.”

“There’s something in the loch,” I said. “We got a sample and I’ll check it out tomorrow. Right now, we all need some sleep.”

“Liar,” said Chris. “Who’s hungry? Midnight snacks”—she glanced at the clock and corrected—“whatever, food’s waiting.”

Everybody obligingly trooped into the kitchen, lured by the smell of chowder. I followed, knowing this meant I wasn’t going to get off the hook without a full explanation. That meant no way of covering Susan’s tracks.

We settled down and dived ravenously into the chowder. Chris poured a box of crackers into a serving tray. “There’s no bread,” she said with finality, eying Susan to let us all know who was responsible for this woeful state of affairs.

Susan squirmed. “Next time I’ll take them crackers. They like your bread better, though.”

“If you’d asked

,” Chris said, “I’d have made a couple of extra loaves.”

“I wanted it to be a surprise from Mama Jason.” She looked around the table.

“You know how hard it is to think up a birthday present for her!” She pushed away from the table. “Wait! I’ll be right back. I’ll show you!”

I concentrated on the chowder. Birthday present, indeed! As if I needed some present other than the fact of those kids themselves. If Susan hadn’t opened her mouth, Elly would’ve assumed I taken her along with us, as Elly’d suggested earlier.

Glancing up, I saw Elly rest a sympathetic eye on me.

Well, I was off the hook, but Susan sure as hell wasn’t.

There was a clamor of footsteps on the stairs and Susan was back with a huge box, full to overspilling with papers and computer tapes. Chris shoved aside the pot of chowder to make space for them.

Susan pulled out her pocket computer and plugged it into the wall modem. “I did it right, Mama Jason. See if I didn’t.”

The photo album wasn’t regulation but as the first page was a very pretty hologram (I recognized Ilanith’s work) that spelled out “Happy Birthday, Mama Jason!” in imitation fireworks I could hardly complain. The second page was a holo of a mother otter and her pups. The pup in the foreground was deformed—the same way the creatures Susan had fed Chris’s bread to were.

“That’s Monster,” Susan said, thrusting a finger at the holo. She peeled a strip of tape from
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beneath the holo and fed it to the computer. “That’s his gene-read.” She glanced at Chris. “I lured his mother away with bread to get the cell sample. The otters love your bread too. I never used the fresh bread, Chris, only the stale stuff.”

Chris nodded. “I know. I thought it was all going to the otters, though.”

“More like ‘odders,’” Leo put in, grinning. “Two dees

.”

Susan giggled. “I like that. Let’s call ’em Odders, Mama Jason.”

“Your critters,” I said. “Naming it’s your privilege.”

“Odders is right,” Chris peered over my shoulder and said to Susan, “Why were you feeding Dragon’s Teeth?”

“He’s so ugly, he’s cute. The first ones got abandoned by their mothers.

She”—Susan tapped the holo again—“decided to keep hers. Got ostracized for it, too, Mama Jason.”

I nodded absently. That happened often enough. I was well into the gene-read Susan had done on her Monster. It was a good, thorough piece of work. I couldn’t have done better myself.

Purely herbivorous—and among the things you could guarantee it’d eat were water lilies and clogweed. That stopped me dead in my tracks. I looked up. “It eats clogweed!”

Susan dimpled. “It loves it! That’s why it likes Chris’s bread better than crackers.”

“Why you—” Chris, utterly outraged, stood up so suddenly Elly had to catch at her bowl to keep from slopping chowder on everything.

I laughed. “Down, Chris! She’s not insulting your bread! You use brandyflour in it—and brandyflour has almost the identical nutrients in it that clogweed has.”

“You mean I could use clogweed to make my bread?” The idea appealed to Chris. She sat down again and looked at Susan with full attention.

“No, you can’t,” Susan said. “It’s got a lot of things in it humans can’t eat.”

Leo said, “I’m not following again. Susan—?”

“Simply, Noisy. Clogweed’s a major nuisance. Mostly it’s taken care of by sheer heavy labor.

Around Torville, everybody goes down to the canals and the irrigation ditches once a month or so and pulls the clogweed out by hand. When I saw

Monster would eat clogweed, I figured he’d be worth keeping—if we could, that is.”

“Not bad,” said Ilanith. “I wondered why the intake valves had been so easy to clean lately.” She leaned over to look at Monster’s holo. “Two years old now, right?”

“Four,” said Susan. “Only one wouldn’t have made much difference. Mama Jason, I did a gene-read every year on them.

Those’re on the next pages. In case I missed something the first time.“

I saw that. The whole EC was there too, along with more holos and her search for matches with ships’ records. There were no matches, so the thing was either a Dragon’s Tooth or an intermediate. Just this year, she’d started a careful check for secondary and tertiary helices.

She saw how far I’d gotten in her records and said, apologetically, “There’s a secondary helix, but I didn’t have a clue where to look for a match in ships’ records, so I had to do it by brute force.”

I handed her the sample I’d gotten from Monster little over a half hour ago.

“Here, a fresh sample is always helpful.”

She took it, then looked up at me wildly. “You mean me? You want me to keep working on it?”

“You want me to work on my birthday present?” I might just as well have given her a present, the way she lit up.

I yawned—it was that or laugh. “I’m going to bed. But nobody’s to go down to the loch until
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Susan’s done with her gene-read.”

Elly frowned. “Annie? We’ve got to net tomorrow or Chris won’t have anything to cook.”

So there was no escaping it after all. “Take a holiday, Elly. There’s something in the loch that isn’t Susan’s clogweed-eaters. Leo and I will do a little looking around tomorrow—armed.”

“Oh, Mama Jason!” Susan looked distraught. “You don’t think Monster chained up to a real monster, do you?” Her eyes squinched up; she was close to tears.

“Hey!” I pulled her into a hug. For a moment I didn’t know what else to say, then I remembered the first time Mike had gotten a nasty alternative instead of what he wanted. “I’ll tell you just what I’ve said to Mike: sometimes you have to risk the bad to get the good.”

I pushed her a bit away to see if that had worked. Not really. “Listen, honey, do you know how Mike and I planned to spend our winter vacation this year?”

When she shook her head I knew I had her attention, no matter how distressed. I told her: “Cobbling together something that would eat clogweed. If all we have to do is stabilize your monsters, you’ve saved us years of work!”

I pulled her to me for another hug. “Best birthday present I’ve had in years!”

That, finally, brought a smile from her. It was a little wan, but it was there.

“So here’s the game plan. You load the sample tonight while it’s fresh, then get a good night’s sleep and do the gene-read tomorrow while you’re fresh. Leo and I will do a little tracking as soon as it’s light enough. Everybody else gets to sleep late.”

That did nothing to take the worry out of Elly’s or Chris’s eyes but I could see they’d both go along with it, though they were still concerned somebody might decide the kids should be evacuated. “Elly,” I said, “we’ll work something out, I promise.”

That eased the tension in her eyes somewhat, even though I hadn’t the vaguest idea what we’d work out. Still, a good night’s sleep—even a short one—was always guaranteed to help. With a few more hugs, I stumbled off to bed.

Morning came the way it usually did for me this time of year—much too early.

Leo, bless him, was up but quiet. The first thing I wanted was a good look at the otters’

playground. That was near enough to where I’d seen the creature that maybe we could find some tracks. This side of Loch Moose got its sunlight early if at all.

Luckily, the day was a good one and the scenery was enough to make you glad you had eyes and ears and a nose.

I stood for a moment trying to orient myself, then pointed. “Somewhere around here. I’m pretty sure that’s where I heard it.” We separated.

Something that big should have left visible evidence of its passing. The popcorn tree was my first break. Something had eaten all the lower leaves from it and done some desultory gnawing at its bark into the bargain. That was several days earlier, from the look of the wood, so I didn’t find any tracks to go with it.

Now, the popcorn tree’s native to Mirabile, so we were dealing with a creature that either didn’t have long to live or was a Dragon’s Tooth suited to the EC. Still, it was an herbivore, unless it was one of those exceptions that nibbled trees for some reason other than nourishment.

But it was big

! I might have discounted the height it could reach as something that stood on its hind feet and stretched, but this matched the glimpse I’d gotten by nova light.

Leo called and I went to see what he’d found. When I caught up with him, he was staring at the ground. “Annie, this thing weighs a ton!” He pointed.

Hoofprints sunk deep into the damp ground. He meant “ton” in the literal sense. I stooped for a closer look, then unshipped my backpack, and got out my gear. “Get me a little water, will you, Leo?” I handed him a folded container. “I want to make a plaster cast. Hey!” I added as an afterthought. “Keep your eyes open!”

He grinned. “Hard to miss something that size.”

“You have up to now,” I pointed out. I wasn’t being snide, just realistic. I’m happy to say he understood me.

I went back to examining the print. It was definitely not deer, though it looked related. The red deer survived by sticking to a strict diet of Earth-authentic, which meant I couldn’t draw any real conclusions from the similarities. I was still betting herbivore, though maybe it was just because I was hoping.

I was purely tired of things that bit or mangled or otherwise made my life miserable. Seemed to me it was about time the Dragon’s Teeth started to balance out and produce something useful.

By the time we mixed the plaster and slopped it into the print, I’d decided that I should be grateful for Susan’s clogweed-eaters and Leo’s pansies and not expect too much of our huge surprise package.

“Leo, I think it’s an herbivore. That doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous—you know what a stag can do—but it means I don’t want it shot on sight.”

“You wouldn’t want it shot on sight if it were a carnivore,” he said. “If I didn’t shoot the first beastly on sight, I’m not likely to shoot this without good reason.”

I fixed him with a look of pure disgust. The disgust was aimed at me, though. I knew the name Leonov Denness should have rung bells, but I’d gotten distracted by the nickname.

Back when he was Leonov