Mirabile (12 page)

Then I went on to the note from Mike. As Susan had said, he and Selima were on their way.

Susan had forgotten to pass along the final message, which was that my courting present thought the jumping fish were great toys but showed not the slightest interest in eating them. As Mike said, our luck’s not that good this summer.

“How’s the shoulder this morning, Annie?” Leo looked like he’d been up and around for hours already.

“Stiff,” I said—and bless his sweet soul, he came right in to massage it—“I appreciate your courting gift all the more, now that I know what kind of fight you went through to catch it for me.

“All in the name of love,” he said, and I could feel his grin light up the room all around me even if I couldn’t see it. “What can I do for you today?”

“Join me on a long, probably useless, but definitely exhausting walk around the sheep fields.

Unless you could pick out the spot the Australian Guild grabbed the rex in the daylight?”

Probably too much to hope for.

“I can pick it out,” he said. “That big a scrabble left signs… and I know about where you were a few moments before.”

“What would I do without you?”

So we headed out. The route took us past the caged rexes. Some fifteen people were still standing about staring in at them—some tourist attraction, all right. Safe but scary, as Leo had said once in another context.

I wanted to see how they were faring myself, so I shoved through the crowd. One of the gawkers had a stick and was using it to poke at the baby rex through the bars of the cage. Just to rile it and make its mother charge him.

As I got there, the mother was just rebounding off the wire. I snatched the stick out of the bastard’s hand and slapped him a good one alongside the head with it.

“You like that?” I demanded.

“Hell, no!” he said.

“Then what makes you think that creature does?”

“I—” He looked sheepish for a moment, then defiant. “I just wanted to see them move around
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some. They weren’t doing anything.”

“Roos don’t do anything in this heat, either. That’s their way of conserving water, you damn fool. Who raised you?”

Stunned, he told me.

“Well, they ought to be ashamed of themselves. They damn sure didn’t teach you the sense god gave the rexes there.”

“Hey! You can’t talk about my raisers—

“Then you oughta stop doing stupid things that lead me to believe they raised you wrong.”

That did it. I watched him go all embarrassed.

“Sorry,” he said at last. “Everybody else was doing it.”

“Then prove to me that you’re a cut better. First, you get the rexes some water, so they can replace what they’ve lost. Then you get that damned Australian Guild to move this into the shade. Then you can stand here and make sure nobody else beats up on the rexes. Then I’ll revise my opinion of your raisers. Got that?”

“Yes, ma’am

!”

Yes, ma’am, and he’d do it, too. I was satisfied he’d keep them from being harassed further.

Then I got a chance to look at the rexes. The other joey was dragging a foot.

Hellfire and damnation, they’d broken its leg catching it. I roared at Leo, “Get Sangster and get her damned Australians down here right now!”

So we spent most of the afternoon coaxing the injured joey out of the cage so we could splint its leg. Zoos, just love ’em. Hope the guy that invented ’em wound up in a cage all his own—in the sun.

Sangster and her mates were apologetic but clearly had no intention of giving up their plan to catch any more rexes that turned up for their zoo. Oughta be a damned law to protect animals from people.

It was cooling toward evening when Leo and I finally set out to look for the spot I had in mind. Something was still niggling me about that, but the whole struggle with the rex had shoved it completely out of my head. I was hoping if I saw the spot again, the same thought might come back.

Leo found it for me in record time. Would have taken me twice as long. He stood in the middle of the spot where the first rex had been when that blinding light and stunning shot hit it all at once. “Now you see if you can reconstruct your position from that,” he said. “Just pretend I’m a kangaroo rex.”

“You haven’t got the jaw for it, Leo.” I cast about and made some good guesses.

They were good enough that I found bits of the broken cell sampler there. I flopped down next to the bits and glanced around. Nothing jogged my memory, so I closed my eyes and tried to see it again.

That worked: the roos (not the rexes) had been digging up plants just there. I hauled myself to my feet and went over to look.

The plants the roos had been grubbing up were still there, shriveled in the heat and utterly unrecognizable. Fine. I could still do a gene-read on them if I did it now.

“Okay,” I said. “Back to Janzen’s. You can make me a mint julep. If this is what I hope it is, we’ll toast Mirabile.”

What with one thing and another, I didn’t get my gene-read on the withered plants until after dinner. It was just what I expected it to be, so I put in a call to Mike out at Gogol. Mike and Selima couldn’t be found for me (aha!) but they’d left their EC run in my file.

“Susan!” I yelled and she came running. “You finish that EC check for me?”

She looked smug. “On file,” she said. “Did I beat Mike out?”

I cued up her file. “Mike’s was filed roughly the same time as yours but then he had extra hands—Selima was with him.”

“Oh,” said Susan. “Well, it’s only fair to say I had extra hands, too. Janzen helped me.” That made her look smugger and set off a second aha

!, which I did not voice, as much as I enjoyed it.

I read through Susan’s EC on Last Edges, then went to Mike’s from Gogol a second time, then pulled hard copy on both. “Gotcha,” I said, as the reports stacked up in the printer. “Mint juleps all around, Leo!”

I handed Susan the sheaf of reports and said, “Read ‘em. Then tell me how this EC differs from the EC at Gogol.” I leaned back in my chair, accepted the mint julep from Leo, and waited to see if Susan would see it, too.

After a while, Susan’s head came up. She stared at me and her mouth worked, but nothing came out. She handed the sheaf of papers to Janzen, went to the computer, and called up the EC we’d done on Gogol all those years ago, the first time the kangaroo rexes had reared their ugly little heads. She nodded to herself, then pulled hard copy on that, too.

She came back with it and added it to the pile Janzen was reading. Then she sat down and said,

“To kill the rexes, they have to kill the roos. But if they kill the roos, the sheep die.”

“What?” said Moustafa and tried to wrest the reports from Janzen, who didn’t cooperate. “I don’t see it, Susan. I don’t know how to read these things.”

She gave him a pitying look but explained: “There are only two significant differences between the EC here and the EC at Gogol. The first is that Gogol has no roos, or very few—they’re shot on sight. And the second is that Gogol is awash in lambkill.”

Moustafa made a stifled noise deep in his throat. Janzen said, “Does this mean I don’t have to give up my roo-tail soup?”

“It means,” I said, “that the roos eat the lambkill, which prevents your sheep from eating it. You may be willing to give up your roo-tail soup, but how many people in Last Edges are willing to give up their sheep—the way Sangster did after the roos were killed in Gogol?”

I raised my glass. “To Mirabile,” I said.

It was Janzen who rang the meeting bell. And what with the Australian Guilders and the Texan Guilders—all of whom were antsy to be back on the range rounding up kangaroo rexes—we had a much larger turnout than expected. There was a lot of jostling and more than one case of bad manners. I had to wonder if the Texan Guild went so far as to call each other out for gunfights, but apparently not, as nobody did.

When they finally all simmered down, I explained the situation to them. I guess I expected them to forgive the rexes on the spot. I should know better at my age.

Sangster said, “Of course

, the roos eat lambkill! They grub it out right down to the root—anybody could have told you that, for god’s sake!”

“You don’t get it,” Janzen shot back. “Kill the roos and the lambkill kills the sheep! That’s why you lost your flock at Gogol. D’you want the same thing to happen here? I sure as hell don’t!”

There was a good loud mutter of agreement from the crowd on that one. Sangster stamped her foot and yelled for attention. After a while she got it, but it was a lot more hostile than she was used to.

“Stabilize the roos, then,” she said. She glared at me. “You’ve done it before with domestic herds. You stabilized the sheep! Are you telling me you can’t do the same for our roos—or can’t you be bothered? Might mess up your beloved kangaroo rexes.”

I didn’t get a chance to answer. From the very back of the crowd came an agonized shout: “No, Annie! You can’t stabilize them! You don’t know what the rexes are chaining up to! I do! And you can’t stabilize the roos!”

I peered over heads and could just barely make out a mop of straight black hair and piercing black eyes. By this time I’d recognized Chie-Hoon’s voice, even though I’d never heard the kid quite so worked up about anything.

Before anybody’d had time to react to this, Chie-Hoon was standing on a chair, waving a banner-sized picture. I recognized it even from that distance: Chie-Hoon’s own reconstruction of the weirder of the two critters our rexes were chaining up to, the one with the jaws.

“Mates!” shouted Chie-Hoon, and had the instant attention of every Australian Guild member there. (When one of the locals made to object to this interruption from a nonresident, he was swiftly stifled by a menacing look from a guilder.) “D’ya recognize this?”

Chie-Hoon spread the picture wide and turned, slowly, on the chair to let every one of them have a good look.

“It’s a Tasmanian wolf,” said somebody—to which there was general agreement—then a swift reshuffling of the Australian Guild to get closer.

“Good on you, mate,” said Chie-Hoon. “That’s exactly right!

That’s what our rexes are chaining up to. It was extinct on Earth, but that doesn’t make it any the less

Earth-authentic. Speaking as a member of the Australian Guild, Annie, I won’t have you stabilizing the rexes. Save the Tasmanian wolf!”

With that, Chie-Hoon raised a fist, dramatically, then shouted a second time, “Save the Tasmanian wolf!”

And before I knew what was happening, pandemonium reigned. The entire Australian Guild was chanting, “Save the Tasmanian wolf!” as if their own lives depended on it, with Kelly Grafter Sangster herself leading the chant.

Twenty minutes later, they released the uninjured rex and its mother, with promises to release the other pair as soon as the joey’s leg had healed, and I was being threatened with dire consequences if I didn’t return Leo’s courting gift to the fields within the week.

“They won’t let me keep my present,” I said to Leo, grinning through my complaint.

“I know,” he said, grinning just as much. “But they’ll let you keep your kangaroo rexes. That’s what counts.”

“It was a great courting gift, Leo.”

“I know.”

“We’ll have to see about re-establishing the kangaroos at Gogol, too, before we lose the rest of the sheep there to the lambkill.”

“Don’t you ever think about anything but work, woman?”

“Occasionally. Call Loch Moose Lodge and book us a room for the week. I need a vacation.”

He started off to do just that. I had another thought. “Leo!”

“You’re not changing your mind.” That was an order.

“No, I’m not changing my mind. But it occurs to me that Chris always wanted to be a member of my team, if she could be the official cook. Tell her I’m bringing her a brace of fish.” It was those damned jumping fish I had in mind. “If she can find a way to cook them that’ll make them the hot item of the season, she’s on the team.”

He laughed. “You’ve just made Chris’s day.”

He turned to go again, but I caught him and gave him a good long kiss, just so he wouldn’t forget to book the room while he was at it. “You made my year, Leo.”

Now all I had to do was think of an appropriate courting present for him

. Which wasn’t going to be easy. What do you give a guy who gives you a kangaroo rex?

I’d think of something.

I could smell the hopfish bouillabaisse even before Chris set the tureen in the middle of the table. As a perfume, it’s right up there with molasses snaps and roses —though if I ever caught Chris cooking the roses I’d have her liver for dinner, however good it smelled

.

“Hopfish!” crowed Aklilu. He made his spoon jump across the table. “Hop!” he said. “Hop!

Hop! Hop!”

Chris snatched away his spoon. “Hop!” she said, landing it in the tureen. “You eat the hopfish, Aklilu, and help Mama Jason save the rice crop.” She ladled bouillabaisse all around, then pulled up a chair and joined us.

After a first mouthful, she leaned back and smiled, justifiably proud of her work. To Nikolai, she confided, “A dish this size only takes five hopfish, which isn’t nearly enough. Next time Mama Jason’s telling stories, get her to tell you how Mirabile evens things up with the hopfish.”

Aklilu banged his spoon against the edge of the table. “Story!”

he chanted. “Story! Story!”

Nikolai grinned. “I’ll second that,” he said.

“After dinner,” I said. “Some things deserve my undivided attention—and hopfish bouillabaisse is one of them.”

The Flowering Inferno

« ^ »

“Annie!” Leo’s voice was sharp enough to jab my quiet contemplation to hell and gone. “Fire at five o’clock!”

I hit the brakes, slammed the gear into hover and swung the nose of the craft around to five o’clock for a look. There was a glow on the horizon where there shouldn’t have been any.

Granddaddy Jason once told me that back on Earth there was always a glow on the horizon—light from the cities—but on Mirabile that kind of light meant only one thing: forest fire.